Buddy Bolden Band

Frankie Dusen

Freddie "King" Keppard

Welcome fellow jazz aficionados! This is our inaugural column for the JazzElPaso Connection history page. We hope that through this effort your appreciation for and understanding of “jazz” will be greatly deepened.

Since this is the first article of this column, we thought it only fitting to look at some of the pioneers of jazz. So, if you’re ready….lets go back in time...

The art form that we now know as jazz was born in New Orleans around the year 1895. Jazz is the combination of three distinct types of music: ragtime, marching band, and blues. The thing that truly sets jazz apart from these earlier forms is the added ingredient of improvisation. Improvisation is where the artist breaks away from the written tune or structure of a composition, and both listener and artist are carried away by a flight of musical fantasy. It is this crucial element that makes jazz so popular to this day.

The first recognizable artist to practice this was a fellow named Buddy Bolden (1877-1931). Buddy is considered to be the first band leader (Buddy Bolden Band), to play the earliest form of improvised music that we now call jazz. He was considered the king of the coronet in New Orleans and has been remembered by his fellows as the finest horn player ever heard. His band started playing around 1895 in New Orleans in the red light district known as Storyville. They played at dances and parades and eventually became one of the most popular bands in the city. Buddy’s health deteriorated in 1907 (due in no small part to the wild life style of most of these early entrepreneurs) and the band was taken over by trombonist Frankie Dusen. The new band, renamed the Eagle Band, after the Eagle Saloon in the Storyville district of New Orleans, were a hot, hard drinking outfit, quite popular until 1917.

Freddie Keppard succeeded Buddy Bolden as king of the coronet playing in New Orleans around 1906. He was the leader of the Olympia Orchestra who played in marching bands and Storyville clubs. In 1914 he went to Los Angeles and his band became the Original Creole Orchestra. They toured the country from 1914 to 1918 giving northern audiences their first taste of authentic New Orleans jazz.

Source: www.redhotjazz.com