Baby Dodds

Baby Dodds ranks among the earliest jazz drummers of real consequence, having been among the first to shift his patterns within a single performance. A clear illustration of that exploratory approach survives in the 1927 trio reading of “Wolverine Blues” that united him with Jelly Roll Morton and his brother Johnny. Dodds exerted a major influence on Gene Krupa. While still based in New Orleans he worked with Willie Hightower, Bunk Johnson, Oscar Celestin, and others, then spent 1918 aboard Fate Marable’s riverboat band. He traveled to San Francisco in 1922 to join King Oliver and moved to Chicago the next year. In addition to the sides he made with Oliver’s classic Creole Jazz Band, Dodds took part in important sessions led by Jelly Roll Morton and by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Seven. He stayed in Chicago for decades, maintaining steady work with Johnny Dodds until the clarinetist’s death in 1940. During the traditional jazz revival Baby appeared with Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Bunk Johnson, and Art Hodes, performed on the 1947 This Is Jazz radio broadcasts, and accompanied Mezz Mezzrow to Europe the following year. Between 1945 and 1946 he recorded the first unaccompanied drum solos. Although his health declined in the 1950s, Baby Dodds continued to play until two years before his death; his memoirs remain rewarding.