New Orleans Rhythm Kings - Cultural Context of NORK As A White Jazz Band

Cultural Context of NORK As A White Jazz Band

At its roots, New Orleans style Jazz (which influenced Chicago Jazz) represented an assimilation of Southern black traditions carried over from their African heritage mixed with white European traditions. The instrumentation was European (trumpets, trombones, etc.) while the melodic ideas and unconventional (at least, in the context of classical music) rhythms and musical forms were born from the Ring Shouts and country blues styles of the black slaves. The very first jazz bands were mostly black and played for black audiences, though the genre progressively got picked up by white audiences too. Many of the musicians were unable to read music but instead relied heavily on head arrangements (learning the arrangement by ear and then committing it to memory) and an ability to improvise. In many other cases the musicians could read music, but white audiences were so captivated by the improvisational ability that they were convinced was inherent in black musicians that the musicians would memorize the arrangement beforehand and appear to improvise to cater to the expectations of white audiences.

The New Orleans Rhythm Kings represents a contingent of white jazz bands that began to grow up from 1915 to the early 1920s. These bands, perhaps the best-known of which being the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, attempted to imitate the fast virtuosic style of their black counterparts. “The relatively small inner circles of acute jazz listeners in the 1920s recognized that black musicians played better, more mature, and more confident jazz”.

Despite a significant bias that only black musicians could play “real” jazz, white bands such as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) emerged and found great success, especially in their recordings. The song Livery Stable Blues by the ODJB in 1917 personified the vaudevillian style that white audiences sought in Jazz: choppy, comedic, almost poking fun at itself. Livery Stable Blues features soloists playing in such a way as to make their instruments sound like barn animals.

The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, however, brought a new flavor to recorded jazz. Though NORK and ODJB were not by any stretch of the imagination the first white jazz bands (there were many others that played around Chicago and New Orleans), they were some of the first to make recordings and one of the first white jazz bands that made mixed race recordings (Jelly Roll Morton was creole).