First Recording: Original Dixieland Jass Band

When jazz musicians finally connected with sound recording studios in a big way during the 1920s, jazz was quickly carried beyond clubs and ballrooms and into America's living rooms. Jazz's most creative players soon relied upon 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) records to document each new development in their style - preserving each new piece of music, making it available to music fans in the United States, and even overseas.

Heavily reliant upon improvisation, jazz could never be effectively captured or passed around via sheet music. But with the advent of records, the new music spread quickly as musicians heard what their peers elsewhere were playing.

So who made the first jazz recording? While African American musicians such as Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver laid the groundwork, the all - white Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB), made the first jazz record. The group formed in New Orleans, and after a stint in Chicago, opened at a popular restaurant in New York in 1916. Their performances in New York had an immediate effect on the music scene, so the Victor Talking Machine Company seized on their popularity and recorded the band in early 1917.

The ODJB recording of "Livery Stable Blues," was released and became a hit after two earlier jazzy songs were deemed too "hot" and suggestive. Inspired in New Orleans by King Oliver and other great African American players, the Original Dixieland Jass (the original spelling) Band put some solid jazz down for posterity, although it was neither the most powerful early jazz, nor the most proficient.

Led by cornetist Nick LaRocca, who claimed to be jazz's inventor (as did Jelly Roll Morton), this New Orleans band recorded several songs in New York beginning in February of 1917. LaRocca boasts - and even his choice of name "Original" for his band - may be offensive to those who know the music's African American heritage. These recordings should nevertheless be a part of every jazz fan's collection. Original Dixieland Jass Band, Vol. 1 and Vol.2 (Jazz Archive) are good starters.

The ODJB, making the first jazz record, delivered the music to the masses and fueled one of the major events in the 20th century American music. But to jazz's African American inventors, the oft - repeated phenomenon of white players capitalizing on black music summed up America's frustrating history of race relations.

Although recordings made by Louis Armstrong and King Oliver in the 1920s are, in may people's opinion, superior, LaRocca's band turned in some blistering performances. With horns wailing beneath LaRocca's sharp clarinet, and with tubas, percussion, and banjos setting the pace, his band raced through prime vintage jazz.

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