[Dixielandjazz] King Oliver

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Ken Mathieson's reference to Oliver is very interesting. There is only one arranger listed as such by  Brian Rust in the Oliver section of his discography,  and that is the well-schooled Bostonian Benny Waters, who did important work with Charlie Johnson.  
New Orleans musicians seem to have had definite ideas about their music, very conservative at times, with Louis Armstrong and others somewhat frowned on for revisionism. 
One interesting thing is that when Oliver started recording in 1926 after a break following the end of the Creole Jazz band recordings, Luis Russell was in the band. Russell differed from a lot of New Orleans musicians in being highly schooled, a Panamanian who had followed up earlier studies by working in New Orleans and studying with Steve J. Lewis, who was possibly the greatest of the New Orleans pianists (but there's only a piano roll and some accompaniments and a few bars on the Piron orchestra recordings)
Russell seems to have cultivated something like the style audible on the Sam Morgan and Jones/ Collins recordings, jazzier than the Piron recordings and coming to a head with Russell's own classic recordings. 
I'm sure Russell had a great deal to do with the 1926 and immediately subsequent Oliver bands coming into their own,  and establishing a model to be followed, built on, emulated. Russell was with Oliver a lot of the time, but a lot of the musicians were New Orleans. 
In the first  Russell New York orchestra, however, Paul Barbarin was the only New Orleanian  --  even when the same band with Higgy and Charlie Holmes -- and Louis Metcalf on trumpet -- recorded as King Oliver's Dixie Syncopators without Oliver. 
I might speculate on whether Dave Nelson had the musical background needed to organise later Oliver bands to deliver or develop ideas provided by Oliver, or approved by Oliver, but there's surely a strong case for granting Luis Russell crucial importance, indeed treating the trajectory of his musical development as in some respects continuous with Oliver's. 

       
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