Great jazz Moents #1

For the first instalment in a new series, John Fordham explains why Livery Stable Blues was the fanfare for a revolution

The world first heard about a strange new music called "jazz" in 1917. Although this hybrid of brass-band, street-strutting blues, African dance rhythms, mutated European classical forms, funeral marches and ragtime had been developing during the previous decade, it took that long for the recording technology of the day to catch up and capture its sound.

After only a few years of those first clattery and raucous jazz recordings hitting the streets, 'the jazz age' dawned and dancers started moving to a more urgent and ecstatic beat – a feeling quite different from the discreet and elegant European styles that had previously ruled the floors.

Over the next 50 weeks, I'm going to highlight landmark moments that were not only transitional points in the history of jazz, but in the history of modern music. There is no more engrossing story in the music of the 20th and early 21st centuries than that of jazz, an artform that has changed the way we move, speak and sing. Jazz has achieved so many things: it has borrowed from European classical music and helped reinvigorate it, it has provided the vital ingredients of rock'n'roll, it has broken barriers in instrumental technique, rehabilitated improvisation from the bad publicity the classical establishment had given it, and, in its way, helped global interracial understanding.

Regarding that last point, it's an irony – though perhaps an unsurprising one – that music derived from the traditions of African slaves should have been first recorded by a white band. But if the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made history more through luck than judgment, and if many better players from New Orleans' black community – Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong – were to find recognition later, the group nonetheless captured jazz's unruly energy and youthful eagerness.

Livery Stable Blues is one of the first hits from a group of enthusiasts whose sound had been informed by the New Orleans street-band musician Papa Jack Laine and Louis Armstrong's mentor, the cornetist Joe "King" Oliver. The track was recorded in February 1917, after the the band's slapstick comedy had thrilled crowds at New York"s Reisenweber's restaurant. The record sold over a million copies, and turned jazz into a national craze. Cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, pianist Henry Ragas and drummer Tony Sbarbaro have become footnotes in jazz history, and the sound they made seems rhythmically clunky and predictable today. But as the fanfare for a revolution (in a revolutionary year) Livery Stable Blues will never be forgotten.

from the Guardian UK Music Blog



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