King Oliver

• Born: December 19, 1885
• Birthplace: Aben, near Donaldsonville, Louisiana
• Died: April 10, 1938
• Place of death: Savannah, Georgia

Jazz musician

Trumpeter, bandleader, and composer, Oliver blended ragtime and blues to create jazz. In turn-of-the-century New Orleans, he was a frontline practitioner of polyphonic swing and of a “talking horn” technique that deeply influenced popular music.

Areas of achievement: Music: bandleading; Music: blues; Music: composition; Music: jazz; Music: swing

Early Life

According to his wife, Joseph Nathan Oliver grew up on the Salsburg sugar plantation near Donaldsonville, Louisiana, the son of a cook and an itinerant preacher. The city, once the state’s capital, regained prominence following Reconstruction in the sugar and rice markets. With its rising economy, it played host to numerous dance and brass bands, both white and African American.

Oliver had at least four half-sisters and several nieces, and although none played music, he stayed close to many of them throughout his life. By 1898, Oliver and his family had moved to New Orleans, when “Jim Crow” laws, which enforced segregation, were at their height. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which mandated “separate but equal” treatment for whites and African Americans, divided the races even more.

In the uptown district of New Orleans, Oliver heard the brass bands, which would spawn an abundance of early jazz musicians and give African Americans a social rallying point. In the first years of the twentieth century, he played in a youth band led by several professional African American player-teachers. It was likely that he began thinking as a “band man,” putting the sound of the group over that of any one player. Then during an excursion performance, Oliver got into a fight and was struck in the eye with a wheelbarrow handle. He came home with a prominent scar he would carry for life.

Life’s Work

In perhaps his first professional association, Oliver worked his way into the Eagle Band, originated by Buddy Bolden, legendary “first man of jazz.” Around 1910, he joined the Magnolia Band, which held forth in Storyville, New Orleans’s famed red-light “District”—considered a key jazz breeding ground.

Oliver married Estelle Dominique in 1911 and, soon after, led his own acclaimed group at Pete Lala’s Café, also in the District. He played with top orchestras, including the Onward Brass Band, the Olympia Band, and Kid Ory’s band. Around 1914, Oliver befriended and mentored a thirteen-year-old street boy, Louis “Dipper” Armstrong. In his later years, Armstrong (as “Satchmo”) cited Oliver as his greatest teacher.

In 1918, Oliver traveled to Chicago’s South Side, where he picked up ongoing gigs at two major dance venues, the Royal Gardens and the Dreamland Ballroom. In 1921, he took a band to California for a year, after which he returned to Chicago and assembled an all-star group, sending to New Orleans for Armstrong.

This group, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, became a standout in American jazz history. It performed at the Lincoln Gardens (the old Royal Gardens) from 1922 to 1924 and recorded the first substantive body of African American New Orleans jazz. In 1925, Oliver led a second band, the Dixie Syncopators, at Chicago’s Plantation Café. This group lasted until early 1927.

With the advent of radio, Oliver’s polyphonic jazz lost ground to the arranged, big band sound. Unluckily, he turned down a gig at Harlem’s Cotton Club—which instead went to the emerging Duke Ellington. However, it was Oliver’s talking horn that had indirectly influenced Ellington to develop his “jungle” sound during the Harlem Renaissance.

During the Great Depression, Oliver assembled a succession of bands to tour the midwestern and south-central states. However, his reputation had fallen away, so engagements were canceled and sidemen left him. His groups routinely met with racial confrontations. Nevertheless, colleagues reported that, until the end, Oliver could still play with power and originality.

In 1937, alone and penniless, Oliver landed in Savannah, Georgia. He died in poverty there the next year, while working as a pool hall janitor.

Significance

With his bluesy “talking” horn and ensemble-based band concept, Oliver helped lift jazz out of the New Orleans backwater and establish it nationally. His music inspired emergent players such as Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Eddie Condon, and Bubber Miley—and, through Miley, Duke Ellington. Goodman’s band still copied an Oliver horn solo ten years after he had recorded it. Oliver had a similar impact on Kansas City bands, including those of Benny Moten and, through him, Count Basie. Even today, when rock guitarists use “wah-wah” effects, they are imitating Oliver.

Bibliography

Dodds, Baby, and Larry Gara. The Baby Dodds Story. Alma, Mich.: Rebeats, 2002. Autobiography of an Oliver colleague, a rich memoir about King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band.

Foster, Pops, and Tom Stoddard. The Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005. Foster, a central musical figure in early New Orleans, grew up on a plantation near where Oliver lived and he played with Oliver in the Magnolia Band.

Ramsey, Frederick, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith. Jazzmen. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. Considered the first published book on jazz, this opus contains a narrative chapter on Oliver’s life.

Williams, Martin. Jazz Masters of New Orleans. New York: Da Capo Press, 1967. Former head of the Smithsonian’s jazz division, Williams was the first postwar writer to document Oliver’s career.

Wright, Laurie.“King” Oliver. Chigwell, Essex, England: Storyville, 1987. A definitive work on Oliver, featuring life narrative, detailed discography, sidemen reminiscences, and more.