Search - King Oliver :: King Oliver 1923 1926

Louis Armstrong once remarked, "Had it not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today." As these recordings attest, he was the greatest bandleader of his day, able to bring his groups to a perfect balance of the tight and the loose, to control and compose diverse elements into a successful whole. He may have been the greatest talent scout too, giving not just Armstrong but a host of other fine New Orleans musicians their first exposure. What is sometimes overlooked is his sheer greatness as a trumpeter, both for the brightness and grandeur of his open horn and for his innovative and masterful use of mutes and buckets to find other voices for the instrument. In that sense he fathered two quite different lines of jazz trumpeters, lines that persist today. This CD completes the documentation of the superb 1923 band with Armstrong and the Dodds brothers, begun on Jazz Chronological Classics' 1923, and begins the documentation of his 1926 Chicago recordings. Oliver was also a great blues player, and there's ample evidence of that here, from the stately "Riverside Blues" of 1923 to the witty muted play of "Jackass Blues" and "Wa Wa Wa," both from 1926. --Stuart Broomer