Culture
JUNE 2021 38
IF THESE WALLS COULD
43
“THERE’S
TALK: THE
A WOODCOCK IN
KID ORY HOUSE
MY FLOWER GARDEN!”
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REMEMBERING
CYCLES & SEASONS DR. NEIL ODENWALD
SUNBURNS WORTH
REMEMBERING
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W
COLLECTIONS
The Kid Ory House
FROM JAZZ TO THE 1811 SLAVE REVOLT, LAPLACE’S NEW MUSEUM EXPLORES A BROAD SCOPE OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
I
Story and photos by Alexandra Kennon
f a poll were conducted asking people to name a great New Orleans Jazz musician from the genre’s early days, the same few names would likely arise repeatedly: Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino, King Oliver. Some with an affinity for jazz might throw out Buddy Bolden or Sidney Bechet. Kid Ory’s name might be an unexpected one, because besides his composition “Muskrat Ramble,” Ory’s contribution to the legacy of jazz is primarily remembered as that of a sideman. But according to John McCusker— Ory’s biographer and now the Founder/ Managing Director of the Kid Ory House Museum in LaPlace—to consider Ory’s contribution to jazz as only that of a trombone player on the 1920s records of 38
Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and King Oliver is to not give Ory his due credit. “The future jazz stars that are going to make recordings capturing the zeitgeist of the jazz age—their common musical experience is Kid Ory’s band,” McCusker told me following the Kid Ory House Museum’s grand opening on February 2, 2021. Before they rose to prominence, Louis Armstrong and three members of his famous Hot Five, King Oliver and much of his Creole Jazz Band, Johnny Dodds, and other influential early jazz artists all played in Kid Ory’s New Orleans band. “That’s kind of how Ory was: all of those folks, their common experience was Kid Ory and New Orleans,” McCusker said. He also credits Ory with being the link
J U N E 2 1 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
between Buddy Bolden—thought of as one of jazz’s earliest pioneers—and the “ultimate jazz man,” Louis Armstrong. Bolden was Ory’s first major influence, and Ory would later give Armstrong his first regular professional job playing in a New Orleans band. McCusker has spent a great deal of time and research mulling over such nuanced music history questions. He spent fifteen years working on his biography of Ory, Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz (2012), with admitted distractions along the way working full-time for the TimesPicayune and raising three children. His initial interest in New Orleans jazz was born in the early 1990s from a twopart series of articles he co-wrote for the Times-Picayune on its history, which
then led to him curating and leading “Cradle of Jazz” tours beginning in 1995, on which he linked the early pioneering musicians with the New Orleans sites at which they once lived and played. Early on, McCusker said his understanding of Ory was based on what could be found in most jazz history books, which merely touched on Ory’s role as a sideman with the likes of Armstrong and Morton. “But paradoxically, the fact that he’s known best as a sideman obscures what his really significant contribution was, which was developing the polyphonic band sound in New Orleans between 1910 and 1919,” McCusker said. McCusker believes that the kind of polyphonic improvisation born with jazz is emblematic of the United States’ motto: “E pluribus unum,” or, “out of
