King Oliver

King Oliver was the dominant cornet player in New Orleans before the great migration of jazz musicians to Chicago in the late 1910s, and the figure who brought New Orleans jazz to its first wide audience. He arrived in Chicago in 1918 and built the Creole Jazz Band into the city’s most celebrated Black ensemble, playing at the Lincoln Gardens on the South Side to audiences that mixed the Chicago Black community with white musicians who came to study and steal.

In 1922 Oliver sent for Louis Armstrong — then 21 and already the most promising cornet player in New Orleans — to join the Creole Jazz Band as second cornet. The 1923 Gennett recordings that band made were the first substantial documentation of New Orleans jazz in Chicago: “Dippermouth Blues,” “Chimes Blues,” “Canal Street Blues.” They are rough records — early acoustic recordings, primitive by later standards — but the ensemble sound, the collective improvisation, the interplay between Oliver’s lead and Armstrong’s counter-melodic responses can still be heard clearly.

Oliver was celebrated for his use of mutes to create vocal, wah-wah effects from his cornet — a technique that influenced Bubber Miley and Duke Ellington’s entire jungle sound. His career declined in the late 1920s partly due to severe gum disease; by the 1930s he was working as a janitor in Savannah. His influence persisted in every cornet and trumpet player who came after him.