Kid Ory's Creole Jazz Band
"Father of Dixieland Jazz."
La Place, LA born multi-instrumentalist, Edward Kid Ory ( born Dec 25 1886 - died Jan 23 1973) was active from a young age as a ragtime era musician. Ory kept a band going steadily from the 1890's through the start of the Depression and then afterwards, his career rose like a phoenix in the 1940's, with Ory prolifically recording and playing steadily as a highly regarded trombonist until his retirement at nearly age 80 in 1966.
In the early days, as early as age 7, Ory told tales of fashioning his own stringed instruments, such as violins and a banjo from a cigar box to play between innings at baseball games, house parties and country picnics, even before the turn of the 20th century. By 1907 he had started his own band out of Gretna LA, and was performing at bars in New Orleans. Ory soon figured out using abandoned houses, or renting out social halls where he could play and control the profit. His band wore suits and bowties,and played at all white Country Clubs, as well as the raucous dancehalls of black neighborhoods. Ory's entrepreneurial skills led him to a former plantation where he organized fish fry's with 5 cent sandwiches, and sold beer at 5 cents a glass. His band's employees who earned $17.50 a week in 1919, included at one time or another, not only Mutt Carey, King Oliver, but a jolly young orphaned replacement for Oliver named Louis Armstrong. Ory's many early clarinetists included Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, George Lewis and Jimmie Noone.
Ory continually struggled to find good pay for himself and even rented instruments to the many poor musicians in his own band who were just starting out, including that coronet-less waif Louis Armstrong. Armstrong apparently left Ory's band when he was offered almost twice Ory's weekly rate, as well as room & board, to play on steamboats along the river.
By 1919, Ory had himself decided to move of hot, humid & heavily segregated Louisiana, out west to California and in 1922 became the first black jazz band leader from the Crescent City to record a record, issued under the name of "Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra". They laid down the lively songs "Ory's Creole Trombone" and "Society Blues".
In California his group included Baby Dodds, Mutt Carey, Ed Garland, Johnny St. Cyr and Wade Whaley before Ory moved on to Chicago in 1925 to play with his old pal King Oliver's then hot group as well as others.
His later 1920's resume included a span with Louis Armstrong's Armstrong Hot Seven who recorded his credited composition "Muskrat Ramble" in 1926 which is a well known New Orleans style jazz standard. Ory also did stints with groups such as Louis Armstrongs Hot Five, King Oliver's Dixie Syncopators, Ma Rainey, Lil Armstrong, Dave Peyton, Leon Rene, Clarence Black, The Chicago Vagabonds, and Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers amongst others.
During the depression years Ory was inactive and operated a chicken ranch near LA with his brother. By the early 1940's he was coaxed out of premature retirement partly by radio host Orson Welles and to play with clarinetist Barney Bigard and trumpeter Bunk Johnson, as a Dixieland revival started. Ory soon revived his career, assuming leadership of a new group and playing regular gigs for the scenesters at Larry Potter's Jade Supper Club on Hollywood Blvd. in the glamor capital of Los Angeles,
He appeared in a few Hollywood films, including the Benny Goodman Story, and his band toured regularly for the next two decades, from 1943 on. Band members and sidemen throughout the 1940's & 50's recorded peak of their activity, as recorded by the Good Time Jazz label included Alvin Alcorn, George Probert, Don Ewell, Barney Kessel, Ed Garland, Minor Hall, Teddy Buckner, Pud Brown, Lloyd Glenn, Julian Davidson , Bob McCracken, Morty Corb, Phil Gomez, Cedric Haywood, Omer Simeon, Darnell Howard and Wellman Braud. He opened a nightclub called "On The Levee" in Los Angeles in 1954, and after a long successful stint at Club Hangover in San Francisco, he opened an "On the Levee" club on the waterfront in that city as well.
Not in the best of health, he mainly used his San Francisco nightclub as a home base, sometimes appearing at The Riverboat Club in Disneyland until he retired to Hawaii at nearly at age 80 in 1966 . Ory's last live performance was a 1971 slot at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. His tombstone in Culver City CA reads "Father of Dixieland Jazz."
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