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*Famous Jazz Musicians*

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~Famous Musicians~ The following Music Pictures are of some well known musicians that had some kind of impact on music back then and now.
~Edward "Duke" Ellington~ Duke Ellington brought a level of style and sophistication to Jazz that it hadn't seen before. Although he was a gifted piano player, his orchestra was his principal instrument. Like Jelly Roll Morton before him, he considered himself to be a composer and arranger, rather than just a musician. Duke began playing music professionally in Washington, D.C. in 1917. His piano technique was influenced by stride piano players like James P. Johnson, and Willie "The Lion" Smith.
~Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton Jelly Roll Morton was was the first great composer and piano player of Jazz. He was a talented arranger who wrote special scores that took advantage of the three-minute limitations of the 78 rpm records.As a teenager Jelly Roll Morton worked in the whore houses of Storyville as a piano player. He was an important transitional figure between ragtime and jazz piano styles. He played on the West Coast from 1917 to 1922 and then moved to Chicago and where he hit his stride. Morton's 1923 and 1924 recordings of piano solos for the Gennett label were very popular and influential. He formed the band the Red Hot Peppers and made a series of classic records for Victor. The recordings he made in Chicago featured some of the best New Orleans sidemen like, Kid Ory, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr, and Baby Dodds.
	~Joe "King" Oliver~ Joe Oliver is one of the most important figures in early Jazz. When we use the phrase Hot Jazz, we are really referring to his style of collective improvisation (rather than solos). He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. Louis idolized him and called him Papa Joe. Oliver was blinded in one eye as a child, and often played while sitting in a chair, or leaning against the wall, with a derby hat tilted so that it hid his bad eye. Joe was famous for his using mutes, derbys, bottles, and cups to alter the sound of his cornet. He was able to get a wild array of sounds out of his horn with this arsenal of gizmos.
~Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong~ Louis Armstrong was the greatest of all Jazz musicians. Armstrong defined what it was to play Jazz. His amazing technical abilities, the joy and spontaneity, and amazingly quick, inventive musical mind still dominate Jazz to this day. Only Charlie Parker comes close to having as much influence on the history of Jazz as Louis Armstrong did. Like almost all early Jazz musicians, Louis was from New Orleans.
	~Edward "Kid" Ory~ Kid Ory was the greatest trombone player in the early years of Jazz. He originally played banjo, but then switched to trombone. Perhaps his banjo playing helped shape the "tailgate" style of playing he later developed on the trombone. In the "tailgate" style, the trombone plays a rhythmic line underneath the trumpets and cornets. From 1912 to 1919 he led one of the most popular bands in New Orleans. Ory's Band featured many of the great musicians who would go on to define the Hot Jazz style
~Johnny Dodds~ Johnny Dodds was one of the greatest clarinetist of the 1920's. Although both Jimmie Noone and Sidney Bechet had better technique, Dodds had a very soulful, bluesy style of playing that was often emotionally powerful. He was a master of the New Orleans' ensemble style of collective improvisation, he didn't have the flash of Louis Armstrong, but often provided the perfect enviroment for Armstrong to shine. He worked with most of the major Hot Jazz bands of the era. Dodds was in Kid Ory's band in New Orleans from 1912 to 1919.
	~ King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band~ King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was one of the best and most important bands in early Jazz. The Creole Jazz Band was made up of the cream of New Orleans Hot Jazz musicians, featuring Baby Dodds on drums, Honore Dutrey on trombone, Bill Johnson on bass, Louis Armstrong on second cornet, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Lil Hardin-Armstrong on piano, and the bands leader, King Oliver on cornet.
~Lillian Hardin-Armstrong~ Lil Hardin-Armstrong was the most prominent woman in early jazz. She played piano, composed, and arranged for most of the important Hot Bands from New Orleans. While working at a music store in Chicago, she was invited to play with Sugar Johnny's Creole Orchestra, from there she went to Freddie Keppard's Original Creole Orchestra, and then led her own band at the Dreamland Cafe at 3520 South State Street in Chicago. In 1921 she joined King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band where she meet Louis Armstrong. They were married in 1924. Lil was Louis Armstrong's second wife and she is generally credited with persuading Louis to be more ambitious, and leave King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.
	~Bunk Johnson~ Johnson was a pioneering Blues and Jazz guitarist, and banjoist. He started playing in cafes in New Orleans and in 1917 he traveled in Europe, playing in revues and briefly with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra. When he returned home to New Orleans in 1918 he discovered that his entire family had been killed by a flu epidemic except for one brother. He and his surviving brother, James "Steady Roll" Johnson moved to St. Louis in 1920 where Lonnie played with Charlie Creath's Jazz-O-Maniacs and with Fate Marable in their Mississippi riverboat bands.
~Jimmy Noone~ Jimmie Noone is considered one of the best clarinetists of the Twenties. His style differs from the other two great New Orleans clarinet players, Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet, because of his smoother, more romantic tone. Noone's style was a major influence on the Swing music of the Thirties and Forties. Growing up in New Orleans Jimmie took clarinet lessons from Lorenzo Tio, Jr. and Sidney Bechet (Bechet was 13 years old at the time). Noone went on to play with Freddie Keppard in the Olympia Band.
	~Freddie "King" Keppard~ Freddie Keppard was an important musican who succended Buddy Bolden as "king" of the cornet players in New Orleans. He started playing around 1906, leading the Olympia Orchestra and playing in marching bands, funerals, and Storyville clubs. He also played with the Eagle Band. In 1912 bass player Bill Johnson asked him to round up a group of musicians and come to Los Angeles with the promise of work. This band became know as the Original Creole Orchestra and from 1912 to 1918 it toured the country in vaudeville shows, and giving northern audiences their first taste of authetic New Orleans Jazz. Like so many New Orleans musicians, he settled in Chicago in the early 1920's. He worked with several bands in the city including, Doc Cook's Dreamland Orchestra, Erskine Tate, Ollie Powers and with Charles Elgar Creole Orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom.
~William "Bill" Johnson~ Bill Johnson was the brother in law of Jelly Roll Morton and one of the first band leaders to take the New Orleans style of Jazz outside of the city. In 1909 he was the leader of a band in California. In 1912 he sent for Freddie Keppard and several other New Orleans musicians and toured the country until 1918 on the Orpheum curcuit under the name of the Original Creole Orchestra. The band was very popular and no doubt introduced their Northern audiences to Jazz for the first time. Johnson was actually the one who got the gig at the Royal Garden in Chicago, but hired King Oliver to front the band, hence the Original Creole Orchestra eventually became King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, and Johnson continued to play bass in the band until the group broke up in 1923.
	~The Orginial Creole Orchestra~ The Original Creole Orchestra (aka Freddie Keppard's Original Creole Orchestra) was the first New Orleans Jazz band to tour outside of the South. In 1911 bass player Bill Johnson was living in Los Angeles and contacted his friend Freddie Keppard back in his home town of New Orleans.
~Buddy Petit~ Buddy Petit was, at the height of his powers, considered one of the greatest of the New Orleans cornet players. Although he never recorded, many of the second and third generations of Crescent City jazzman revered him and got there professional start in his many bands. Petit was born Joseph Crawford in 1895 in White Castle, a small town about one hundred miles west of New Orleans. His father died while he was still a young man and his mother decided to move to New Orleans around the turn of the century. Soon after arriving she married trombonist Joseph Petit. Buddie took his stepfather's surname and, to avoid confusion with Petit Sr, changed his first name to Buddie.