Wolseley
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Australian Politics
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Sydney
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issuevoter wrote on Jan 1 st, 2017 at 9:25am: Well, its here, 2017, the centennary of many events, but musicologists will remember 1917 as the year the first commercial Jazz record was released. The Livery Stable Blues by The Original Dixieland Jass Band was an immediate successes, and ODJB went on to make a lot of records. Of course the name of the band was misleading; it was not original. They were white musicians who had played in integrated bands in New Orleans. They learned there chops from Afro-American musicians. The title of the first Jazz band would be more fitting for the bands of Buddy Bolden or Jelly Roll Morton, but like the Blues revival of the 1960s, ODJB brought Jazz into the mainstream, and thereby created a market for the work of Afro-American musicians. So, something very good came out of it. Livery Stable Blues is “Jass” in it rudimentary form, and when listening to it, one has to remember this was a time before electrical recording, when music was played into an accoustic horn and cut to a cylander or disc. Nonetheless, the music had a startling effect on most anyone who had not been down in the Storyville, the red light district of “Noo Orlins.” The dynamics of immediate improvs on the theme, and fills over held notes would eventually be absorbed Western popular music. New Orleans had a tradition of marching bands, and after the Civil War, the musicians began to fool around and show off in the street. They began to “Rag” the melodies in the 1890s, which is a genre ripe for improv. They also began to use flat 3, 5, and 7s, which became known as “Blue notes.” The synthesis turned up as entertainment in the brothels and saloons of Storyville which, ironically, were closed down in 1917, forcing musicians, and the girls, to move to places like Chicago and St Louis. The ODJB certainly have a significant place in the story of jazz, but they were not one of the great jazz bands other than in a historical sense. If you listen to recordings they made years apart of the same items, you will find that the supposedly improvised parts are practically the same in all the recordings. Their arrangements are rather repetitive and, after you have listened to several of their recordings, they all begin to sound the same. I used to have an LP of all their 1917-1920 recordings, but it went out when I thinned down my LP collection about four years ago. I have one only of their 78s, a rather commercial piece on a 12" English Columbia record, called Soudan (also known as Oriental Jass and Oriental Jazz), recorded during their visit to England in 1920. The other side is a dreadful thing called Me-Ow, by the London Dance Orchestra. I haven't listened to either side of this record for about 30 years.
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