Dippermouth Blues

Joe 'King' Oliver earned his title the old-fashioned way — he played so well that the previous king, Freddie Keppard, was forced into retirement by comparison. In the hierarchy of early New Orleans cornet players, Oliver sat at the top from roughly 1915 until his protégé, a kid named Louis Armstrong, surpassed him in the mid-1920s. Oliver handled this succession with grace in public and devastation in private, which is the only way a king handles being dethroned.

Dippermouth Blues — 'dippermouth' was Armstrong's childhood nickname, a reference to his enormous mouth — features Oliver's most famous recorded solo. Three choruses of muted cornet, played with a plunger mute that produces a vocal, wah-wah effect that no one had captured on record before. The solo was so definitive that musicians memorized it note for note. When Duke Ellington's trumpeter Bubber Miley developed the 'jungle sound' that defined Ellington's early orchestra, he was working directly from Oliver's Dippermouth solo. A three-chorus cornet break in a 1923 recording influenced the most important band of the 1930s. That's how jazz works — everything connects backward.

The Creole Jazz Band that recorded this at Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, was stacked: Oliver and Armstrong on cornets, Honore Dutrey on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Baby Dodds on drums, Lil Hardin on piano. Armstrong was twenty-two and still playing second cornet to his mentor, a position he accepted out of loyalty even though everyone in the room, including Oliver, knew the kid was already better. You can hear Armstrong bubbling underneath the ensemble, not quite contained, the way a pot simmers before it boils over.

Oliver's later years were tragic in the specific way that early jazz punished its pioneers. Bad dental work destroyed his embouchure. Bad business decisions cost him a residency at the Cotton Club — the slot went to Ellington instead, which changed music history. By the 1930s, Oliver was running a fruit stand in Savannah, Georgia, too proud to ask his famous former student for help. Armstrong sent money anyway. Oliver died in 1938, broke. The Dippermouth solo lives on, note for note, in every trumpet player who ever used a plunger mute.