Creole Trombone

The definitive biography of the great band leader and New Orleans Jazz performer

Edward "Kid" Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans's top "hot" band. Ory's career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, "Muskrat Ramble," is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career. Drawing on oral history and Ory's unpublished autobiography, Creole Trombone is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory's personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of his most significant recordings.

A central criticism emerging from Black and Creole thinkers is that mainstream, white dominated, culture, consumes sounds and images of Creole and Black people in music, theater, and the white press, while ignoring critiques of the white consumption of black culture. Ironically, critiques of whiteness are found not only in black literature and media, but also within the blues, jazz, and spirituals that whites listened to, loved, collected, and archived. This book argues that whiteness is not only a visual orientation; it is a way of hearing. Inspired by formulations of the race and whiteness in the existential writings of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Lewis Gordon, Angela Davis, bell hooks and Sara Ahmed, T Storm Heter introduces the notion of the white sonic gaze. Through case studies and musical examples from the history of American jazz, the book builds a phenomenological archive to demonstrate the bad habits of ‘white listening’, drawing from black journalism, the autobiographies of Creole musicians, and the lyrics and sonic content of early jazz music emerging from New Orleans. Studying white listening orientations on the plantation, in vaudeville minstrel shows, and in cabarets, the book portrays six types of bad faith white listeners, including the white minstrel listener, the white savior listener, white hipster listener, and the white colorblind listener. Connecting critical race studies, music studies, philosophy of race and existentialism, this book is for students to learn how to critique the phenomenology of whiteness and practice decolonial listening.

During the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance music as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz appeared. In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, the author describes the music played by the Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the development of jazz. Caroline Vézina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge about the music on French plantations and the danses Créoles held in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses of cantiques provide new information about the process of their appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.

This is the first comprehensive study of the trombone in English. It covers the instrument, its repertoire, the way it has been played, and the social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts within which it has developed. The book explores the origins of the instrument, its invention in the fifteenth century, and its story up to modern times, also revealing hidden aspects of the trombone in different eras and countries. The book looks not only at the trombone within classical music but also at its place in jazz, popular music, popular religion, and light music. Trevor Herbert examines each century of the trombone's development and details the fundamental impact of jazz on the modern trombone. By the late twentieth century, he shows, jazz techniques had filtered into the performance idioms of almost all styles of music and transformed ideas about virtuosity and lyricism in trombone playing.

Modern low brass instruments—trombone, tuba, and euphonium—have legions of ancestors, cousins, and descendants in over five-hundred years of history. Prominent scholar and performer Douglas Yeo provides a unique, accessible reference guide that addresses a broad range of relevant topics and brings these instruments to life with clear explanations and the most up-to-date research. Brief biographies of many path-changing individuals highlight their influence on instrument development and use. The book’s inclusive scope also recognizes the work of diverse, influential artists whose important contributions to trombone and tuba history and development have not previously been acknowledged in other literature. Extensive illustrations by Lennie Peterson provide insight into many of the entries.

Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and cultural sources of New Orleans jazz, Charters provides a balanced assessment of the role played by all three of the city's musical lineages--African American, white, and Creole--in jazz's formative years. Charters also maps the inroads blazed by the city's Italian immigrant musicians, who left their own imprint on the emerging styles. The study is based on the author's own interviews, begun in the 1950s, on the extensive material gathered by the Oral History Project in New Orleans, on the recent scholarship of a new generation of writers, and on an exhaustive examination of related newspaper files from the jazz era. The book extends the study area of his earlier book Jazz: New Orleans, 1885-1957, and breaks new ground with its in-depth discussion of the earliest New Orleans recordings. A Trumpet around the Corner for the first time brings the story up to the present, describing the worldwide interest in the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the exciting resurgence of the brass bands of the last decades. The book discusses the renewed concern over New Orleans's musical heritage, which is at great risk after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters.

Now updated to 2020, this is an account of the development and output of the great young traditional jazz band Tuba Skinny, which is based in New Orleans. Many recommendations are included of videos to watch and recordings available for purchase.

The story of the first roughly half century of jazz is really the story of some of the greatest musicians of all time. Scott Joplin, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald all made tremendous contributions, influencing countless jazz musicians and singers. This work provides biographical sketches of the aforementioned artists and many others who made jazz so popular in the first half of the twentieth century. Biographies cover the pioneers of jazz in New Orleans in the late 1890s and early 1900s; the soloists who fueled the Jazz Age in the 1920s; the musicians and bandleaders of the big band and swing era of the late 1920s and early 1930s; and icons from the height of jazz's popularity on through the end of the war. A discography is provided for each artist.