One day in 1994, John McCusker was conducting his regular jazz tour when he came to Edward “Kid” Ory’s old home on Jackson Avenue. As he delivered his talk, he noticed something bothersome. “One of the guys in the tour was shaking his head,” McCusker recalls. “The representation I gave of Kid Ory was the one I had gotten from most of the books out there. Which is that yeah, Kid Ory was a guy that played in New Orleans but what was really important about him was that he had recorded with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton in the 1920s. And what this guy came back at me with was, ‘No, that’s not who Kid Ory was. Kid Ory was the hottest bandleader in New Orleans between 1910 and 1919 and it was out of his band that the first generation of future jazz stars arose. Louis Armstrong. King Oliver. Johnny Dodds. All those guys cut their teeth in Kid Ory’s bands.’”

Armstrong mentor, Edward "Kid" Ory later played trombone in the Hot Five.

“I was sorta peeved about this. So I went to Bruce Raeburn at the Tulane Jazz Archive and he sided with the guy on my tour! He said ‘Well, yeah, he’s absolutely right. Kid Ory’s probably the most overlooked figure in early New Orleans jazz.’”

That realization started McCusker on a nearly twenty-year quest of jazz historical discovery. This October, that journey reaches a climax with the publication of his Ory biography Creole Trombone by the University Press of Mississippi. The book’s looming publication prompted a seminar that McCusker will be delivering at Satchmo Summerfest on August 5th, on the subject of Ory’s influence on Louis Armstrong.

How important was that influence? “Immeasurable,” says McCusker. “It’s in Ory’s band that Louis comes into his own as a musician. He’s paid well. He’s got regular gigs… With Kid Ory’s band jazz crosses over from a ‘race’ music, which is what it was in [Buddy] Bolden’s period, into the music of the moment. Everybody’s playing it, everybody’s listening to it. All these sexy dances were coming along around 1914-1915: the “Turkey Trot,” the “Bunny Hug,” the “Grizzly Bear.” You can’t dance those to some uptight band. You’ve gotta have a hot band to play. And in that period, whether you were white or black, whether you were Irish or Italian, your goal was to hire the Kid Ory band. And that opened up the world to Armstrong.”

Yet all this might still leave one with the impression that the great trombonist’s proper role in history is that of just another disposable rung in the ladder of Louis Armstrong’s rise to fame. Nothing, in McCusker’s opinion, could be further from the truth. This gets at the heart of his qualms with the popular conception of jazz history, in which individualistic, charismatic geniuses like Armstrong are propelled toward inevitable fame and immortality by the sheer force of their personal talent. He sees an equally important role for figures like Ory, whose genius was not his musicianship (“There were greater trombone players, certainly,” McCusker says) but his higher-level conception of the music. “You can take it from any musician you ask,” he says. A great bunch of musicians does not necessarily make for a great band. But having an effective bandleader with a good musical concept—and a good business concept—makes all the difference in the world.”

“[Ory] knows what he wants his band to sound like, and he gets that sound from them. Whether he’s got top-of-the-line legendary musicians like King Oliver and Louie Armstrong or whether he’s got guys you haven’t heard of as much like Mutt Carey or Joe Darensbourg. Today people don’t talk about [Duke] Ellington as being necessarily the greatest pianist that ever lived. But he was a great bandleader. And he knew how to get the sound out of his band. Ory in his milieu is the same thing… it’s a disservice to history and to Kid Ory to think of him as merely a musician.”

Kid Ory biographer and Creole Trombone author John McCusker

Some facts of Ory’s life will already be familiar to fans of early jazz. He was raised on the Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana, then moved to New Orleans in his 20s where he established himself as a popular trombonist. Yet when McCusker first set out to learn about Kid Ory, he had some basics to sort out. “There was a controversy about his birthdate,” he says. “Since Ory came from LaPlace and my first posting as a Times-Picayune photographer was in the River Parish bureau, which is based in Laplace, it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what Catholic church Ory had gone to. So I wrote away to get his baptismal certificate and a week later, I get a copy in the mail, written in French.”

The writing of Creole Trombone involved a lot of original statistical research. McCusker found Ory in the census, dug up his property records in St. John the Baptist Parish and even found his name in New Orleans arrest records. In 2000, he tracked down Ory’s daughter Babette, whom Ory fathered at age 67. She handed him an artifact that would be a coup for any historian: Ory’s unfinished autobiography. “It sounds sexier than it is,” says McCusker. “It’s not a cohesive document by any means. It’s a bunch of loose pages that are collections of stories that Ory told about his life in New Orleans and in LaPlace and a little bit about what he did in Chicago and California.”

As he learned more and more about Ory, what surprised McCusker the most was the esteem in which the Ory band was held — its sheer popularity in this city during its heyday in the 1910s. “It becomes very clear that though there were many bands in New Orleans in the 1910s and everybody was making their own contributions to the mix, the Kid Ory band was without peer. They were immensely successful. When a debutante was having a ball on Saint Charles Avenue, she said, ‘Daddy, I’ve gotta have the Kid Ory band.’”

The history of jazz (and New Orleans music more generally) is littered with the names of misunderstood or underappreciated geniuses who languished in obscurity and died in poverty. Which is why Ory’s talent for the managerial and business aspects of the music are also worth noting. “Ory didn’t die in some hotel in the Delta, unknown and forgotten,” notes McCusker. “The guy retired to Diamondhead, in Hawaii. He knew his business. He knew his strengths and he played to them at all times.”

Anyone can listen to a mature Armstrong recording and appreciate the force of his musical conception. But it must have taken an unusually keen observer to recognize his potential when he was just one kid in a brass band made up of juvenile delinquents. “Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory meet for the first time at a Labor Day parade in 1913,” says McCusker. “Louis is playing with the Colored Waif’s Home and Kid Ory’s band is playing behind them. And Ory walks up to Armstrong and says, ‘Young man, you’re doing well on that horn and I think you’re gonna be pretty good some day.’ He was this keen spotter of talent early on… Ory embraced and nurtured that, and Louis never forgot it. And if you read the things that Louis says about Ory in his autobiography, that’s very clear.”

When Armstrong set about assembling the Hot Five (with whom he would create some of the most enduring jazz recordings ever), the group he put together ended up looking a lot like the Ory band. That, says McCusker, speaks to the lasting importance for Armstrong of Ory’s musical vision. “I think it’s very instructive that he chose Kid Ory and Johnny Dodds and Johnny St. Cyr, all people who had played in Ory’s band in New Orleans,” says McCusker. “For Louis’ money, if he’s gonna have a trombone player in his band he is just fine with Kid Ory being that trombone player.

“Louis and Kid Ory stayed in touch throughout their lives. In 1946, the film New Orleans brought the two of them together again… It was that experience of making the film and playing ensemble New Orleans-style jazz again that really pushed Louis to break up his big band and found the All Stars, to go back to playing in the small band format. And even as late as the late fifties, there are letters where Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s manager, writes to Ory and asks him to join Louis Armstrong’s All Stars. No matter how out of style Kid Ory was, Louis was still just fine with him. And he would have been very comfortable with him being a member of the All Stars.”

After twenty-six years as a photographer with the Times-Picayune, McCusker is among the unfortunate employees who will be departing from the paper in the fall. The TP has an interesting supporting role in the genesis of Creole Trombone. “The day before Katrina, I boxed up all my notes and hid them at the Times-Picayune, in the photo studio,” McCusker remembers. “And it’s a good thing I did because when the levee broke one hundred yards from my house I lost everything. The day after Katrina, the only things I owned in the world were my notes for the Kid Ory book.”

McCusker is guardedly sanguine about the prospects for his post-Picayune career. “You don’t fire 50 members of your newsroom and lose that vast institutional knowledge and still be the entity that you were before. You just don’t. But I’m taking this as a cue to pursue the things that I love, and one of them is researching New Orleans jazz and sharing my research in that history with other people. There’s nothing I get a gas out of more than that.”

KID ORY: THE PERMISSION NOT GIVEN

1 December 2010 — by Hank Cherry

[Updated]

Edward “Kid” Ory may not be as well known as the superstars of early jazz, players such as Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden, but Ory played with them all, and he left an indelible imprint on each of them, all the while helping to create the most dominant trombone sound of all.

Ory left New Orleans for Los Angeles in 1919. In the mid-1920s, he landed in Chicago with other venerable New Orleanian jazzbos including Armstrong, Joe “King” Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. Unlike the others, Ory called it quits when the Great Depression hit, retiring from music altogether. Only the New Orleans jazz revival of the ’40s brought the trombonist-turned-chicken-farmer back into the jazz fold.

Kid Ory with his daughter in 1958. Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Ory got his start as a kid in LaPlace, Louisiana, playing a cigar box banjo he made himself. “When I was 13, I formed a band,” Ory told historian Samuel Charters. “We had a homemade violin, bass viol, guitar, my banjo, played on a chair for drums.” After the teenaged band made the rounds, they had saved up some money for real instruments. Ory switched over to trombone. The jazz man of myths himself, Buddy Bolden, chanced upon the kid practicing his new instrument outside of his sister’s place in New Orleans. Bolden liked what Ory did with the instrument, even asking the kid to join up with him. Ory told Bolden he would need his sister’s permission, permission that was not granted. Ory scurried back to LaPlace to hone his chops. His band’s raw talent combined with Ory’s leadership and predatory sense about money meant that by the time he hit 21, Ory had enough cash to move to New Orleans.

The kid had a spectacular ear. He could hear a song once, and know it absolutely. He instinctively knew the role the trombone should play, developing a blowsy tone that both established rhythm and gave tunes that “Ory” spark, an immediately identifiable brassy glissando that managed to leave room for melodic harmonies of the trumpeters and clarinetists. Kid Ory’s growling style was often copied; most every bandleader in early jazz and ragtime utilized his brash syncopations and copped his arrangements.

Luckily for him, Ory had a studious mind. He learned to read music early after arriving in New Orleans. This ability came in handy when he was presented with the opportunity to record while in Los Angeles. He snatched the chance, making the first jazz recordings by an African-American jazz band in New Orleans under the name Spike’s Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra. It was the heart of the Jazz Age, and the trombone sound he perfected came to be known as tailgate trombone.

He dressed sharp and expected bandmates to do the same. He was quick-witted in business, painting his name on the side of a furniture cart. Ory hung a sign on his house, too: “Orchestra and band for hire.” Word got out, and his skills kept the audience paying.

Most of the jazz musicians of this era ended up playing the Storyville District, the legal Red Light district off Basin Street. A series of highly publicized murders starting in 1913 led to intensified federal scrutiny, which led to the closing of Storyville, which put the jazzers out of work.

When the Great Depression hit, it was the next cultural hurricane to lay waste to a New Orleans musical community and all but ended the Jazz Age. Many musicians’ spirits were broken, including King Oliver, who lost his band and life savings in one fell swoop and never fully recovered, dying in 1938. Others persevered and flourished. Edward “Kid” Ory went back west to help his brother run his chicken farm. He played no music publicly from 1933 until a decade later, when the jazz revival came calling. But he hit his stride right off, creating the Kid Ory Creole Jazz Band. Besides the recordings he did as a member of Armstrong’s Hot Five, it is the Creole Jazz Band’s output for which Ory is best known today. He was a nuanced arranger, and strong composer to boot, penning classics “Muskrat Ramble” and “Savoy Blues.”

Yet, Ory’s influence remains eclipsed by those with whom he worked: Sidney Bechet, the Dodds brothers, Armstrong, Oliver, Mutt Carey and Red Allen. Ory’s gift of rambunctious slide trombone, however, is as unique and lasting a contribution to jazz as that of any of those listed.

He continued to record and lead bands well into his 70s, but by the early 1960s his health was failing. Ory stopped performing and retired to Hawaii, where he died at the age of 87. His swooping trombone sound won’t soon be forgotten, even if you don’t remember his name.

Updated December 3, 2:15 p.m.

The text was revised to say that Ory’s band was the first African-American band in New Orleans to record, not the first African-American band; to omit the reference to his trombone sound spreading like wildfire; and to omit the reference to Jelly Roll Morton becoming a household name.

Also, one photo was wrongly identified as including Ory. It has been taken down.

“KID” ORY

01 August 2002 — by David Kunian

BORN: December 25, 1886, LaPlace, Louisiana

DIED: January 23, 1973, Honolulu, Hawaii

 

Within hours of turning 21, Laplace native Kid Ory took the train to New Orleans, where he immediately found musical employment in the Storyville district. Three weeks later, the King of the Tailgate Trombone sent for his band, which was an instant hit in New Orleans. When trumpeter Joe Oliver left the band, Ory gave teenager Louis Armstrong his first professional gig, after ordering young Satchmo to buy his first pair of long pants.

There are many ideas on how jazz started. Most of the theories have to do with Congo Square, leftover instruments from the Civil War, the meeting of Creoles, Africans and Italians, Buddy Bolden, and Storyville. However, integral to the genesis of jazz is the presence and music of Edward “Kid” Ory. Edward Ory formed his own pickup “spasm” band while a child in Laplace, Louisiana playing homemade instruments in the late 1800s. He was invited to play with Buddy Bolden, but his sister wouldn’t let him. He moved to New Orleans and played around Storyville. Then when Storyville closed in 1917, he lived in Chicago and Los Angeles. He recorded the first jazz songs performed by an African-American band. He defined the sound of the trombone with his “tailgating” style on Louis Armstrong’s Hot 5’s and Hot 7’s recordings. Then, after retiring for several years, his comeback in the 1940s helped spur the new fascination with Dixieland and traditional jazz as well as contribute terrific new music to an old genre.

Kid Ory was born Edward Ory on Christmas Day, 1886, in LaPlace, Louisiana. His was a well-to-do Creole family which spoke Parisian French. His father owned the Woodland Plantation, and none of his relatives were musicians. His first instruments were ones that he made himself, including a five-string banjo made from a tin bucket, thread, and fishing line, a guitar made from a cigar box, and a bass from a wooden soap box. Ory picked up the music bug early. In an oral history from 1957 now at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane, he said that he used to sneak away from his house to play for tips at the saloons in Laplace as well as hide under a bed at his friend’s house to hear bands practice. When jobs were scarce, Ory and his friends would have parties selling catfish and perch sandwiches for five cents apiece in empty houses and other places they could find. When he was 10, his father bought him his first instrument, a banjo. Ory would take that out to a bridge in Laplace and practice it in his spare time. At age 13 he started his first official band, the Woodland Band that continued to play picnics and parties. Ory said that he bought their uniforms from street peddlers.

 

STORYVILLE

By this time, Ory’s mother had died and his father was an invalid. He was taken care of by his sisters. He also had moved from banjo to guitar and was learning trombone. One of his formative experiences occurred when he was 14 and his sister took him to New Orleans to buy a new trombone. He had just bought a trombone from Werlein’s and was blowing it outside the store. A strong, brown-skinned man walked up to him and complimented him on his playing. This man then introduced himself as “King” Buddy Bolden and asked him if he wanted to join his band. Ory had to ask his sister who forbade him, saying that he had promised to stay at home until he was 21.

Ory obeyed his sister and stayed in Laplace until he came of age. Then, as he said, “I turned 21 at 4:30 in the morning and at 8:00 I was on that train to New Orleans.” This was 1907, when Storyville and other red light districts were hopping with booze, music, and sex. Ory first worked in a sawmill when he came to town, but soon found work in Storyville. His first job was at Pete Lala’s on the corner of Marais and Iberville (then called Customhouse). The bar was filled with hustlers and B-girls (women who got patrons to buy them drinks). The prostitutes who worked out of the cheap street level apartments called cribs nearby would come in for a break and end up taking tricks back down the street. Three weeks later he sent for his band from Laplace. When they arrived, he rented a wagon, painted his name on the side, and the band would ride around the city playing and advertising its gigs. This later became a popular way of getting one’s name out to the public, but Ory was the first one to do this. The band started getting gigs, and, as musician Pops Foster recalled, “took New Orleans by storm.” According to Foster, up until that point the Olympia was the best band in town, but Ory’s band was “smoother and more polished than the New Orleans bands. They had good readers in the band.”

Ory’s Woodland Band played all over town. They worked at such nightspots as the Globe Hall, Economy Hall, Funky Butt Hall, and the Palm Gardens. One place they played was Lincoln Park where the promoter Buddy Bottley would go up in a hot air balloon. Bottley gave Ory his nickname by calling him “Kid” Ory on a sign at the park. As an explanation, Bottley told Ory, “It’s what the girls call you. You’re the ‘Kid’ from now on.”

During the heady days of Storyville, Ory had many of New Orleans’ greatest musicians come through his band. Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds, Manuel Manetta, Ed “Montudi” Garland, Mutt Carey, and Joe “King” Oliver all shared a stage or parade route in Ory’s band. In fact, when Joe Oliver left the band, it gave Ory an opportunity to give a teenage musician from the Colored Waif’s Home his first job. Apparently Ory first saw Louis Armstrong blowing with the Home’s band in a parade. Ory waited for him and told Armstrong that when he got out he should look him up, and when he did, Ory hired him but not before first ordering Armstrong to buy his first pair of long pants.

While in New Orleans, Kid Ory perfected his style of playing that became known as the “tailgating style.” It was called that because when the band played on wagons going around town, the trombone player always sat on the tailgate of the wagon next to the bass player. It consisted of the trombone player blowing notes underneath the melodies of the trumpet and clarinet to add an extra rhythm to the song. Ory would do this and add vocal elements such as barks and shouts to his playing to complement the other parts. This way of playing would become ubiquitous as too many trombone players to count took Ory’s innovations and imitated them or used them in their own ways. His influence in this way cannot be overemphasized.

 

LOS ANGELES

Ory left New Orleans for California in 1919. Storyville had been closed, and Ory had a run-in with the owner of Pete Lala’s club. Ory had been promoting dances at Economy Hall, and the owner didn’t like the competition, so according to Ory, “he sent 50 cops to go to his dances and run the customers away.” Ory’s health also was poor, and he thought that it might improve with a different climate. Upon reaching Los Angeles, Ory and his band played on a wagon driving up and down Central Avenue, the main black club strip, to advertise his band’s services. People in L.A. had heard of him from folks in Louisiana, so he quickly found work. He sent for Armstrong, but Armstrong had already joined King Oliver’s band in Chicago. As Ory’s bandmate Alfred Williams tells it, “People went wild over the music.” Williams remembers Ory’s band played several different clubs, but had to keep moving because many of the clubs would get busted regularly for selling bootleg liquor or offending the police by allowing people of mixed race to dance together.

Ory’s band traveled up and down the coast for gigs in San Francisco and Oakland. During an engagement in Oakland, the Spike Brothers, who owned a club in Los Angeles where Ory had played, called Ory and asked him to come and record for their Sunshine Label in Santa Monica. This was 1921. Ory and his band made the trek to a small room in Santa Monica where they recorded six songs including “Ory’s Creole Trombone,”“Society Blues”and “Someday Sweetheart.”Ory recalled that they “made them all in one day. We made six sides so quickly that we did not know who was there, playing each tune just once. We got 15 or 20 dollars apiece and expenses for traveling.” Dirk Johnson played clarinet, and, according to Ory, “he patted his feet so loud that we had to put a pillow under his feet, and the pillow wouldn’t do, so we got a mattress.” These records became the first songs ever issued by a group of African-American musicians. A couple of years later, Ory and his band became the first African-American band to broadcast on the radio in 1923. These opportunities kept Ory in California despite periodic offers from King Oliver to come and join his band in Chicago. However, Ory couldn’t resist the request of Louis Armstrong to travel to Chicago and play on the Hot 5 sessions, so he moved east in 1925.

 

CHICAGO

Ory played on many of the Armstrong’s Hot 5 and Hot 7 sessions. Much has been written about these epoch recordings. It suffices to say that not only did they provide the blueprint from which jazz has been constructed due to their group improvisations and virtuoso soloists, but they are also one of the greatest artistic achievements in the history of Western culture. Ory’s tailgating style was featured in many of the tunes and in turn they influenced countless trombonists. Also, several of Ory’s compositions were recorded, including his most famous composition, “Muskrat Ramble,” and another version of “Ory’s Creole Trombone.”

Ory stayed in Chicago for several years. He not only made his fame playing with Armstrong, but he also played with Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers and King Oliver’s Savannah Syncopators. Chicago at that point was almost as wide open as Storyville had been. Ory recalls working the Savoy Ballroom, the Greystone Ballroom and assorted gangster joints where the two great syndicate rivals, Al Capone and Bugsy Moran, would come in at the same time and sit at opposite ends of the club.

As the Depression set in and tastes changed from hot New Orleans jazz to swing, Ory moved back to California. He found work harder and harder to find, so he finally retired in 1933. For the rest of decade he worked as a mail clerk and ran a chicken farm with his brother in Los Angeles. However, his reputation stayed alive as several swing bands recorded version of “Muskrat Ramble” and “Savoy Blues.”

As the Depression ended and the 1940s began, a renewed interest in New Orleans jazz arose. Trumpeter Bunk Johnson had been “rediscovered” and clarinetist George Lewis had started recording again. Kid Ory started playing some infrequent dates with Barney Bigard and after that some pick-up gigs playing bass because there was not a place for a trombone in the small combos of the day. In 1944 Orson Welles enlisted a writer/record shop owner named Marili Morden to find a genuine New Orleans band for his radio programs. Morden found several musicians in the Los Angeles area including Ory, Ed Garland, Jimmy Noone, Mutt Carey, and Armstrong drummer Zutty Singleton. Welles only anticipated that the band would broadcast for a week, but letters and phone calls from fans led to a three-month stay on the airwaves. Ory took over as the leader, called the band “Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band,” and recorded for the Crescent and Jazzman labels. These recordings proved to be immensely popular, fueling the rebirth of traditional New Orleans jazz that grew throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Ory kept the band together despite numerous personnel changes. His concert tours took him all over the U.S., England, and the European continent. He also appeared in several movies including New Orleans and The Benny Goodman Story. A career highlight occurred in 1957 with an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival.

 

FIXIN’ TO DIE

By the mid-1960s, Kid Ory’s age caught up with him, and he retired in 1966 and moved to Honolulu. He made a triumphant appearance back in New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1971. He was met at the airport by a brass band and he played at Municipal Auditorium. It was his first visit to the Crescent City since he left 52 years before. His return was a great success, and after it he returned to Hawaii, where he passed away at age 86 in 1973 of pneumonia and heart failure.

More recently, Kid Ory’s name has been in the news as his daughter, Babette, has filed a lawsuit against ’60s counter-culture hero Country Joe McDonald. Babette Ory maintains that McDonald’s ’60s anthem “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die-Rag” (“One, Two, Three, Four/What are we fighting for/Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn/Next stop is Vietnam”) is a direct and deliberate theft and copyright infringement of Ory’s “Muskrat Ramble.” As a favor, McDonald originally assigned the song’s publishing rights to Chris Strachwitz’s Music Company, a move that saved Strachwitz’s fledgling Arhoolie Records from bankruptcy. At the time of this article, the suit is still in the California court system. According to a 1960 interview with Ory, the larceny of his compositions was nothing new: “Nick LaRocca and those boys used to stand on the walkways out at Lake Pontchartrain and pick up everything we were doing. I saw them. They played a lot of old New Orleans tunes and put their names on ’em. Like ‘Tiger Rag.’”

Ory’s daughter is organizing a return of Ory’s body to New Orleans from Los Angeles for burial in either St. Louis Cemetery #1 or #3. She is planning this for the 2003 French Quarter Festival and the body will arrive aboard the same train car used to transport the remains of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to his funeral in 1945.