KidOry.com archive adds John McCusker as an editor

December 14, 2012 By CREOLE TROMBONE LEAVE A COMMENT

Jazz people are passionate folks, and many of them maintain websites with collected source material, treasures for both fans and researchers.

KidOry.com is one such site and has made John McCusker an editor. This is the definitive Internet collection of material on Kid Ory, from clippings from magazines and books about Ory’s life, work and influence, to a work-in-progress roster of musicians who worked with him, and photographs as well as magazine covers.

The material is organized by category as well as chronology. The site kidory.com (titled also “The Kid from Laplace) features record reviews, album sleeves, information about family members and even articles Ory himself wrote (translated from French into English).

Click here for a quick look at some of the magazine covers that featured Kid Ory.

Photo courtesy of kidory.com

A site such as kidory.com is hard work and a labor of love. Editors have been Sid Bailey, Christer Fellers, Louis Iosub, and now, John McCusker. John is honored to join this dedicated trio.

Sid Bailey’s Ory discography is legendary, and John says it was at his side throughout the research and writing of “Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz.” Christer Fellers gained notoriety as the trumpet player with the Imperial Band of Stockholm. Long an Ory fan, Christer invited Sid to Stockholm in 2004 and organized a lecture on Kid Ory to the Swedish Bunk Johnson Society.

Louis Iosub, who lives in Brittany, France, writes that he received his first Kid Ory record as a teenager in the 60s. Years later he found two Ory CDs in a bargain bin, an event that launched his effort to find every Ory recording and all the information on the pioneer and the men who played with him that he could. When Christer and Sid created kidory.com, Louis flooded them with so many questions they eventually made him an editor.

He describes himself as “just a music amateur with a very soft spot for Edward Kid Ory, whose music I have been listening to for the last 40-plus years without ever getting tired of it, but always taking pleasure and renewed energy out of it.”

Louis is now on the trail of Karl Ristenpart, a German conductor who was active in from the 1940s to the 1960s, and he is updating Ristenpart’s discography. “I am no real music researcher, but I like to know what I’m talking about, which leads me into researching, getting in touch with people in countries I’ll never visit, asking questions and getting answers, and gathering more and more information,” he wrote in an email exchange this week.

Sound like anyone we know?

Map of Laplace and St. John the Baptist Parish courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum Historical Map Collection, Mississippi River, Sheet No. 27.