At the Jazz Band Ball

By 1918, the word 'jazz' had replaced 'jass' on the record labels, reportedly because vandals kept scratching out the J on promotional posters to create a word that made the band's name considerably less appropriate for polite company. If that story is true — and with the ODJB, you never quite know — it means that jazz got its modern spelling because of a dirty joke. Which feels right, somehow.

At the Jazz Band Ball is the ODJB at their most polished, which is a relative term for a band that prided itself on sounding like a beautiful car wreck. The melody is actually memorable — you can hum it after one listen, which distinguishes it from their more chaotic recordings. LaRocca's cornet states the theme clearly, Eddie Edwards's trombone provides a low-end countermelody, and Shields dances around both of them on clarinet. It's the clearest example of the New Orleans collective improvisation style captured on an early recording.

The composition became a genuine standard — Bix Beiderbecke recorded it, as did dozens of other bands throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It's one of those tunes that every traditional jazz musician knows the way every blues guitarist knows the twelve-bar form. You learn it early, you play it forever, and you judge other musicians by what they do with it.

Here's what I find fascinating: the ODJB recorded this in New York, performing New Orleans music for a New York audience that had no frame of reference for what they were hearing. The band was essentially translating a regional folk music into a commercial product for a national market, and they did it so effectively that within two years, every city in America had bands trying to play 'jazz.' Most of them got it wrong, but that's how cultural movements start — imperfect copies that eventually develop their own authenticity.