Snake Rag

Snake Rag is the Creole Jazz Band at their most ferocious. The tempo is merciless, the ensemble playing is tight to the point of aggression, and the whole thing barrels forward with a momentum that suggests the band is being chased by something they'd rather not identify. At three minutes, it's a sprint. At the end, you're out of breath and you didn't even do anything.

The title evokes the snake dances that were part of New Orleans parade culture — sinuous, weaving processions through narrow streets that looked, from above, like a serpent moving through a maze. Oliver would have seen hundreds of these growing up in the Uptown neighborhood, and the rhythm of Snake Rag has that processional quality underneath the speed. It's march music played at double time, which is essentially what a lot of early jazz was — brass band tradition fed through an accelerator.

Johnny Dodds's clarinet is the star of this recording. His tone is reedy and intense, almost abrasive compared to the smoother New Orleans clarinetists who came before him. Dodds played with an urgency that bordered on desperation, as if every solo might be his last — and given the recording technology of 1923, where you got one take and the masters were fragile as eggshells, that feeling wasn't entirely irrational. What survives on Snake Rag is a clarinetist playing for his life, and it's electrifying.

The Gennett recording sessions that produced Snake Rag and the rest of Oliver's 1923 catalog were not prestigious gigs. The studio paid poorly, the acoustics were terrible, and the location — Richmond, Indiana — was a small factory town with no jazz scene to speak of. Oliver brought his band there because Gennett would record Black musicians when the major labels often wouldn't. The greatest New Orleans jazz band of its era made its most important recordings in a building that smelled like the piano factory next door. Art doesn't care about the venue.

Recording: King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (78 rpm, 1923). Public domain (US sound recording published 1923). Source: https://archive.org/details/1923-USA-Archives-1923-04-06-King-Olivers-Creole-Jazz-Band-Snake-Rag-