In 1939, Jelly Roll Morton's New Orleans Jazzmen cut one of the earliest jazz tribute records, "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say." Cornetist Bolden may have been the first man to play jazz, but we can only guess how he sounded since he left no recorded legacy. In fact, not until long after Bolden's mental problems forced him to retire from music would jazz be committed to wax. Another legendary New Orleans horn man, Freddie Keppard, turned down an early offer from the Victor label, leaving the first jazz records to be made in 1917 by a group of five white Crescent City musicians who'd joined together in Chicago as the Original Dixieland Jass (soon changed to Jazz) Band.

The ODJB set off a national jazz craze with its often frantic polyphony, in the process introducing many jazz warhorses-to-be such as "Tiger Rag." Keppard, based in Chicago during the 20s, eventually made about two dozen sides (including a 1924 date for Gennett with Cook’s Dreamland Orchestra) that reveal him to be hard-driving but not-quite-swinging. The first recordings by a black jazz band from New Orleans occurred in Los Angeles in 1922, when Kid Ory’s group made six titles that feature the warm, relaxed cornet lead of Mutt Carey.

That same year saw the debut of perhaps the first really interesting jazz soloist to record: Leon Roppolo, clarinetist with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. This rollicking white group, working at the Friars’ Inn on South Wabash in downtown Chicago, traveled to Richmond in the late summer of ‘22 and turned out 8 sides for Gennett. As noted by writer Richard Sudhalter, Roppolo’s soaring chorus on “Tiger Rag” proved influential enough to be quoted (today they’d say “sampled”) by eminent black arranger Don Redman on a Victor session in 1928. A key figure in the development of big band swing, especially on the strength of his work for the Fletcher Henderson band, Redman would not be alone in drawing inspiration from the Gennett catalog.

The NORK returned to Richmond twice in 1923, the latter time in the distinguished company of pianist Jelly Roll Morton, for a landmark interracial session. On the same occasion, and again the following year, Gennett innovatively recorded and promoted Morton as a solo performer-composer. In an ad in the Chicago Defender October 20, 1923, Gennett presciently boasted, “Jelly Roll Morton makes the old piano talk.” Up until then, piano rolls provided genteel parlor entertainment, while jazz band records served up a bouncy beat for dancing. Now Gennett presented jazz as a means of individual artistic expression: when Jelly made that piano talk, the audience was expected to listen.

Richmond’s proximity to Chicago and Gennett’s open door policy enticed a stunning array of musical talent to travel south and record. The Windy City ruled as jazz capital of the universe in the early-to-mid 20s, with no working group surpassing King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. The band’s seminally swinging 1923 recordings for the label mark Louis Armstrong's debut (he takes a characteristically ebullient two-chorus solo on “Chimes Blues” on the band’s first date), in the company of some of the finest first-generation jazzmen--drummer Baby Dodds, his elder clarinetist brother Johnny, and Oliver himself, whose influence on jazz trumpet would be surpassed only by his protégé Armstrong. The pair's duet breaks continue to astonish despite the passage of 80 years and the persistence of 78 rpm surface noise. All three volumes of “Gennett Records Greatest Hits” feature examples of their dynamic interplay.

The band broke up around the time of its final session that year, but the members continued to record together through the decade. Armstrong's celebrated Hot Five and Hot Seven consisted mainly of Oliver sidemen. Johnny Dodds eventually recorded again with everyone from the Creole Band, and on one date together with his brother and Jelly Roll Morton formed one of the first great jazz trios on record. Oliver carried on with larger groups playing written arrangements, still managing to feature his majestic horn to good effect.

Louis left the band and then left Chicago to join Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra in New York, playing alongside and inspiring future tenor sax star Coleman Hawkins. He also recorded there with soprano sax virtuoso Sidney Bechet and blues singer Alberta Hunter, together as the Red Onion Jazz Babies for Gennett. Louis returned to Chicago in late 1925 to make his initial waxings as a leader with his Hot Five. The first performing band Armstrong fronted, his Stompers, had as its musical director innovative pianist Earl Fatha Hines. Clarinetist Jimmie Noone, Dodds' biggest rival in town, snagged Hines to kick off a series of utterly charming recordings with his Apex Club Orchestra in 1928. Hines went on to form his long-lived Grand Terrace Orchestra and influence countless pianists, including a young Bill “Count” Basie. Hines’ first recordings were made with Deppe’s Serenaders in Richmond in 1923, a rather fateful year for jazz recording and Gennett.

There were yet other new directions to take with jazz in the 20s, like that pursued by Iowan Bix Beiderbecke, who found inspiration in the ODJB's music. He became an instant hero to budding Midwestern jazz fans while still in his early 20s, offering them hope that a white kid could play authentic jazz too. Bix's understated cornet style hardly resembled the blues-drenched exuberance of Armstrong, but the two players recognized each other as peers. Not too surprisingly, Beiderbecke made his first recordings for Gennett in 1924 with the Wolverines, a spirited bunch named for Jelly Roll Morton's "Wolverine Blues". Beiderbecke went on to find a musical soul mate in C-Melody saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, the two achieving jazz immortality through their small group studio work, especially on the ballad "Singin' the Blues" (1927).

By this time some of the eager kids Bix had inspired a few years before were starting to mature and get noticed. In New York, Red Nichols combined Bix-influenced phrasing, exceptional reading ability, and business smarts to become one of the most successful players and contractors of the era. Though his name is not normally associated with Gennett, Nichols indeed began his recording career there, when the members of his early group the Syncopated Five each paid the company $25, receiving in turn 25 custom pressings of their decidedly stiff versions of “Chicago” and “Toot Toot Tootsie” in 1922.

Two years later, Red recorded “You’ll Never Get to Heaven with Those Eyes” in New York with George Olsen’s dance band for the Victor label, its arrangement highlighted by a note-for-note transcription of the cornet solo had Bix improvised on “Jazz Me Blues” at his first session in Richmond a mere 17 weeks earlier! Thanks to its availability on Gennett, the innovative playing of 21-year-old Bix was making waves in the Big Apple, months before the Wolverines themselves pulled into town.

Beiderbecke waxed his own “Davenport Blues”--a far-out sounding piece at the time, with its whole tone breaks--at the last session he’d do for Gennett in early 1925, including Tommy Dorsey in the lineup. Nichols bought the record and, according to writer Stephen M. Stroff, this led to his formulating a bold new recording policy: henceforth when working with small groups in the studio, Red would always attempt to sidestep the pop tunes of the day in favor of original compositions and jazz standards. It was a remarkably artistic choice for the well-connected, business-minded Nichols to make, and he went on to make the most of it, utilizing the cream of available musicians.

When Red recruited Frank Teschemacher (clarinet), Joe Sullivan (piano), Eddie Condon (banjo), and Gene Krupa (drums)--all associated with the rough-and-ready Chicago-based Austin High gang--for a 1928 session under the name of his regular trombonist Miff Mole, the choice of “Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble” seemed natural. The song, composed in 1917 by the New Orleans-born Spencer Williams, entered the jazz canon via the 1923 Gennett version by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the mutual appreciation of whose records had originally drawn together some of the Austin High players now present. Nichols, Mole, and the Chicagoans honor the structure of NORK’s treatment of the tune, while the intense enthusiasm of Teschemacher and mad beating of Krupa inspire Nichols and Mole to break away from the more cerebral “cool” approach they’d favored on countless records heretofore. Nichols tears into the last chorus invoking the immortal “Dippermouth Blues” solo King Oliver had first laid down at Gennett in ‘23.

This remake of “Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble” sold surprisingly well, prompting the recording of another Nichols version of the tune in 1930, by a 13-piece ensemble studded with ace trombonist Jack Teagarden and two future bandleaders of note, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. This time the King Oliver figure Nichols had worked into the final chorus is scored by Miller as a riff for the brass section, punctuating a catchy motif from a trumpet voiced over the reeds--in a flash, a sneak preview of both the driving swing style and distinctive section sonics the Goodman and Miller bands respectively would popularize to the nth degree later that decade.

As Red would later recount about this transitional period, “Jazz was becoming Swing.” It wasn’t restricted to Nichols’ elite circle in New York, of course. The well-established and extraordinary bands led by Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington (both of whom had passed through Gennett’s studios early on) figured big in the gradual onset of swing. They were followed by any number of “territory” bands scattered around the country, many of which made tracks for Gennett in Richmond, including an early (1929) lineup of the Detroit-based Casa Loma Orchestra, recording under the name of pianist Johnny Burris.

But the clarion call with which jazz begat swing, and swing became the thing, one could argue, sounded from Bunny Berigan’s trumpet riding atop Fletcher Henderson’s rolling chart for the Benny Goodman band’s “King Porter Stomp” (1935). This durable piece, which Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have written as early as 1902, and the first he recorded at his initial Gennett solo session, now a dozen years later became the hit that launched a thousand swing riffs. A slightly later version of “King Porter” by the Teddy Hill band would premier on record the trumpeter who in time would help take jazz even further beyond swing, Dizzy Gillespie.

Author: Frank Youngwerth, Chicago musician and writer

This article first appeared in the Starr-Gennett Foundation’s Newsletter, Volume II, Issue 2, Winter 2003.

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