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the only kind of jazz worth troubling about, that the New Orleans Rhythm Kings had it all taped. I got over that, but there are days now when I wonder if I was right.’
    One of the major groups of jazz records, from the first stirrings of the music in recording studios, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings’ sessions still sound astonishingly lively and vital some 80 years later. The band recorded in Chicago but had come from New Orleans: Mares was already a disciple of King Oliver (who hadn’t yet recorded at the time of the first session here), Roppolo played fluent, blue clarinet, and even Brunies made more of the trombone – at that time an irresponsibly comical instrument in jazz terms – than most players of the day. The rhythms tend towards the chunky, exacerbated by the acoustic recording, but the band’s almost visionary drive is brought home to stunning effect on the likes of ‘Bugle Call Blues’ (from their very first session, in August 1922), the relentlessly swinging ‘Tiger Rag’ and the knockabout ‘That’s A Plenty’. On two later sessions they took the opportunity to have Jelly Roll Morton sit in, and his partnership with Roppolo on ‘Clarinet Marmalade’ and ‘Mr Jelly Lord’ – something of a sketch for Morton’s own later version – invigorates the whole band. ‘London Blues’ and ‘Milenberg Joys’ find Morton more or less taking over the band in terms of conception. The final session they made, early in 1925, is slightly less impressive because of Brunies’s absence, and there are moments of weakness elsewhere in the original records: the use of saxes sometimes swamps the initiative, Mares isn’t always sure of himself, and the beats are occasionally unhelpfully overdriven. But this is still extraordinarily far-sighted and powerful music for its time, with a band of young white players building on black precepts the way that, say, Nick LaRocca of the ODJB refused to acknowledge.
    This superb Retrieval edition collects all of the original masters, 12 alternative takes and the reunion session of 1935, where Mares convened a gang of contemporary Chicagoans to play alongside himself and Pecora, the results of which are surprisingly strong. In excellent sound from top-quality originals, this is the NORK as they should be heard.
    KID ORY
    Born Edward Ory, 25 December 1886, LaPlace, Louisiana; died 23 January 1973, Honolulu, Hawaii
    Trombone, voice
    Ory’s Creole Trombone
    ASV CD AJA 5148
    Ory; Thomas ‘Mutt’ Carey, George Mitchell, Joe ‘King’ Oliver, Bob Shoffner (c); Louis Armstrong (c, v); Johnny Dodds, Dink Johnson, Omer Simeon (cl); Stump Evans, Albert Nicholas, Billy Paige (cl, as, ss); Darnell Howard (cl, as); Barney Bigard (cl, ts, ss); Joe Clarke (as); Lil Hardin Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Luis Russell, Fred Washington (p); Bud Scott, Johnny St Cyr (bj); Ed Garland, John Lindsey (b); Bert Cobb (bb); Paul Barbarin, Ben Borders, Andrew Hilaire (d). June 1922–June 1944.
    George E. Lewis, listening to Kid Ory in a ‘blindfold test’ (2008): ‘There’s someone who’s deliberately playing in an archaic style, but doing so very subtly and very well, as if he’s trying to recover some primitive essence, or perhaps because he’s aware that he’s expected to sound “New Orleans”.’
    Composer of ‘Muskrat Ramble’ and an innovative player who made much use of mutes, slurs and other devices, Kid Ory invented the ‘tailgate’ style. Ironically, he spent much of his life away from Louisiana, going to California for his health just after the First World War, where he recorded the first-ever sides by an all-black group, ‘Ory’s Creole Trombone’ and ‘Society Blues’, in 1922 (or possibly they recorded before that) and going under the charming name of Spike’s Seven Pods Of Pepper Orchestra. For some purists, these – collected on this ASV compilation – and not the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s earlier discs mark the real start of jazz