Customer Reviews

Ahead of its time - By: Richard, 19 Nov 2006
I've often wondered just what it must have sounded like the day the ODJB was first heardin England.Imagine the genteel drawing room with its Victrola for playing the new fangled 78s of ballad singers like John McCormack,Peter Dawson or Dame Clara Butt.Suddenly on goes a 78 by a new American band who the audience think is going to be some brass band playing a March.
The needle hits the record & the Sound of Hell opens up!!!
Yes it was Livery Stable Blues complete with farmyard impressions & what to the audience sounded like hideously discordant music or maybe the phonograph had broken down!

Shortly after the ODJB appearedin England to support a comedian called George Robey who is alleged to have said "either they go or I go"!

After this event though the floodgates opened & a mighty lot of black jazz appeared from the likes of Louis Armstrong & Jelly Roll Morton.

The ODJB had begun a tradition which still exists:the way the white man takes black music & is more succesful with it.
There was though a long way to go-jazz had to be watered downin order to become commercial & acceptable & again it was white men who did it-Benny Goodman had actually purchased arrangements from some black musician & launched his own career.However Goodman was the first to employ blacksin his bands eg Lionel Hampton

The ODJB music was still hard going for somein the 60s when the first reissues began because acoustic recordings were alien.However the band had recorded electricallyin the 30s.
These recordings are now Historic-the first jazz records. And being transferred onto CD with extra tracks stresses just how important when all musics are acceptable to people.
Yet the first ODJB things could still clear the supermarket!