Jazz great died broke, largely forgotten 70 years ago in Savannah
By RUSS BYNUM - Associated Press Writer --
SAVANNAH, Ga. --Blind in one eye and missing most of his teeth, the man selling fruits and vegetables from a corner produce stand was just another anonymous, black street vendor struggling to earn rent during the Depression.
A decade before, things had been different for Joe Oliver. He had worn fine suits, fed himself well, even earned a bit of fame. But he'd been stranded in Savannah for months, ever since his bus broke down. He took odd jobs because, without teeth, he couldn't play his horn.
Nobody seemed to remember him, except for Louis Armstrong.
Armstrong was the most famous jazz musician in the world when he arrived in Savannah to play a dance in August 1937. He was stunned to find Oliver there, broke and selling produce. To Armstrong, Oliver had been "Papa Joe" - the mentor who gave young Louis his first cornet in New Orleans, and later summoned him to Chicago to play and record with his band.
The music world had known him as King Oliver, a trumpet-blowing trailblazer whose jazz recordings helped transform American music in the 1920s. But the penniless "King" had stopped playing after he got stuck in Savannah. When he finally left, it was in a cheap casket.
Oliver died 70 years ago on April 10, 1938, of a cerebral hemorrhage in his room at a Savannah boarding house. Like too many black artists of his era, Oliver's final days passed with almost no recognition of his achievements - and failed to foreshadow his future regard as a key innovator in bringing jazz to the American mainstream.
"King Oliver is sort of a paradox," said Julius "Boo" Hornstein, a local psychotherapist, jazz enthusiast and author of a book on jazz in Savannah. "So little has been done for him, yet he remains so prominent in American music."
Born in 1885 on a Louisiana plantation and blind in one eye from a childhood accident, Joe Oliver migrated as a youth to New Orleans. He learned to play the cornet - similar to the trumpet but with a warmer, mellower tone - and formed his own band by 1915. Oliver became one of the hottest acts in New Orleans' Storyville red-light district.
Oliver's music brought new excitement to jazz by injecting more blues influences, looser rhythms and a greater emphasis on improvisation. He was also the first player known to color the sound of his horn with mutes.
By 1923, Oliver had moved his Creole Jazz Band to Chicago and made his first recordings. "Dippermouth Blues" and "Canal Street Blues" became some of the first jazz records by black musicians to reach a wide audience. They were also the first recordings to feature Oliver's young protege - Louis Armstrong.
"King Oliver is really the premise from which Louis Armstrong derives," said Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans. "On 'Dippermouth Blues' you start to hear the first steps of solo improvisation. Of course, Armstrong's the one who took that ball and ran with it. But Oliver was really the first."
Armstrong left Oliver's band in 1924. By the time he reunited with his mentor in Savannah in 1937, Armstrong was a star who had made numerous recordings under his own name, traveled to Europe and landed roles in several films.
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