Joseph Nathan Oliver was an American jazz cornet player and bandleader who set a standard which formed the backbone of jazz.
Background
Joseph Oliver was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His early family history is wanting; his mother is known to have stayed at five different addresses in New Orleans in the period 1885-1900. Some were in the Garden District, suggesting that she may have lived and worked as servant in the homes of white families. A longer stay at one address, given as "Second between Saratoga and Franklin, " places the family as living close to the heart of the "uptown district, " a slum of dirt alleys running between unpainted, one- and two-story wooden dwellings. Oliver's half-sister, Victoria Davis Johnson, took charge of Joseph when their mother died in 1900. She later remembered that he was then somewhere between fifteen and sixteen years old; she could not name his father.
Education
Joseoh Oliver's early education was rudimentary; informal instruction in music probably began when he studied cornet parts as a member of a small children's brass band organized by one Walter Kenchen.
Career
Joseph Oliver's first regular employment was as butler to a white family in New Orleans, for whom he worked for nine years, starting when he was seventeen. Although the word "jazz" had not yet been applied to the music then being played by men of every racial strain in cosmopolitan New Orleans, it was as participant in the evolution of this music that Oliver acquired his formative musical experience. During the years from 1900 to 1918 he played with a number of marching brass bands, and about 1910 he began to play cornet in cabaret bands. Though slow to learn, he had by 1918 been vested with the unofficial title of "King" by consent of all who heard him in New Orleans.
The ten years beginning in 1918 were packed with Oliver's musical achievements as jazz musician and leader. From 1918 to 1921 he played as lead cornetist with two bands in Chicago's vigorous Negro community, recently swelled by the wholesale migration of laborers from the South during World War I. By January 1920 Oliver had recruited New Orleans musicians into a band of his own that played nightly at two South Side locations: the Dreamland dance hall and the Pekin cabaret. In 1921-22 "King Oliver's Jazz Band" toured in California. In 1922, with some changes of personnel, "King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band" returned to play at the Lincoln Gardens, Chicago. Star soloists of the group, besides Oliver, included his young New Orleans protégé Louis Armstrong as second cornet and Johnny Dodds, clarinet.
Recordings of this orchestra were among the first made by any Negro jazz band, and many "original issues" later came to command collectors' prices on the auction market. Oliver's role at this time is significant in jazz history because he introduced to wider audiences the rich lode of Negro music, comprising blues, spirituals, work songs, and ragtime, that had formed the backbone of jazz as it developed in New Orleans. Copyright arrangements (many worked out with help from his pianist, Lillian Hardin) and Oliver's own compositions total forty-nine. Among the best known may be mentioned his "High Society, " "Mournful Serenade, " "West End Blues, " "Snag It, " "Dixieland Blues, " "Doctor Jazz, " and "Dippermouth. " Significant too was the influence which the style of playing of Oliver's six-piece Creole Jazz Band exercised over a younger generation of aspiring jazz musicians. Its close-knit ensemble passages, contrasting with skillfully executed solos and knit together by a propulsive rhythm, set a standard which had not previously been known to northern musicians and which many strove to emulate in years that followed.
In 1924 Oliver lost some of his most talented musicians (Louis Armstrong among them), and his Creole Jazz Band never played again. Nevertheless, he enjoyed moderate success with a larger orchestra in Chicago. In 1927 he moved to New York, but none of his work recorded in the larger commercial studios during the period 1929-31 has much interest except to specialists. The financial crisis of 1929 affected his profession severely; and in 1935 pyorrhea weakened his teeth so that he could no longer play a cornet with vigor. After attempting to organize a band and tour the southern states he finally arrived, penniless and deserted by his musicians, at Savannah, Georgia, late in 1937. Here he lived out the remaining months of his life in shabby surroundings reminiscent of streets he had known as a boy in New Orleans. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and his body was shipped to New York City and buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, in a plot contributed by his half-sister Victoria.
Achievements
Joseph Oliver wrote forty-nine compositions. The best known: "High Society, " "Mournful Serenade, " "West End Blues, " "Snag It, " "Dixieland Blues, " "Doctor Jazz, " and "Dippermouth. "
Oliver was a major influence on numerous younger musicians, including Tommy Ladnier, Paul Mares, Muggsy Spanier, Johnny Wiggs, Frank Guarente and, the most famous of all, Louis Armstrong, who played for a long time in his band.
Oliver was inducted as a charter member of the Gennett Records Walk of Fame in Richmond, Indiana in 2007.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"No one in jazz, " wrote Louis Armstrong of Oliver in his book Satchmo (1955), "has created as much music as he has. "
Interests
Music & Bands
Oliver credited jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden as an early influence.
Connections
Joseph was married to Stella, but later they separated.
