Kid Ory

Kid Ory ranked among the foremost trailblazers to emerge from New Orleans, an early trombonist who essentially established the tailgate approach by deploying his instrument to lay down rhythmic bass lines within the front line positioned behind the trumpet and clarinet. He also enjoyed the rare advantage of surviving the sparse decades that followed, enabling a substantial resurgence during the mid-1940s. After beginning on banjo he soon changed to trombone, and by 1911 he was fronting a well-regarded ensemble in New Orleans. The trumpeters who passed through his groups over the ensuing eight years included Mutt Carey, King Oliver and a youthful Louis Armstrong, while his clarinetists encompassed Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and Jimmie Noone. Ory relocated to California in 1919; two years later, or possibly the next, he cut the first two sides ever recorded by a Black New Orleans jazz band, issued under the name Spike’s Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra and titled “Ory’s Creole Trombone” and “Society Blues.” He shifted to Chicago in 1925, worked steadily alongside King Oliver and laid down numerous landmark tracks with Oliver, with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, with Jelly Roll Morton and with additional leaders. Widely regarded as the quintessential New Orleans trombonist of the 1920s, Ory saw “Muskrat Ramble” establish itself as a jazz standard; after 1930 he largely withdrew from music to operate a chicken ranch with his brother. Persuaded back into performance in 1942, he spent time in Barney Bigard’s ensemble before organizing his own unit. The group gained national exposure on Orson Welles’s radio broadcast in 1944, and the resulting attention allowed the band to gain a firm foothold just as the New Orleans revival reached its peak. Ory remained in peak form, his personnel featuring trumpeter Mutt Carey and, on clarinet, either Omer Simeon or Darnell Howard. He appeared in the 1946 motion picture New Orleans and later in The Benny Goodman Story while maintaining a steady schedule of engagements in Los Angeles. Following Mutt Carey’s departure in 1948, Ory employed trumpeters Teddy Buckner, Marty Marsala, Alvin Alcorn—the ideal fit for the ensemble—and Red Allen. His Dixieland outfits consistently delivered elevated musicianship and sustained intensity even while the leader maintained his deliberately rudimentary approach. The bands documented frequently, most prominently for Good Time Jazz, through 1960, at which point the seventy-three-year-old Ory began reducing his workload; he ceased performing altogether in 1966 and relocated to Hawaii.