Jazz Library - King Oliver

Joe "King" Oliver was the most celebrated cornettist to come out of New Orleans in the early days of jazz. In this programme, bandleader and pianist Keith Nichols joins Alyn Shipton to select the highlights of Oliver's recording career, which spanned 1923 to 1931. His first discs featured the young Louis Armstrong and he went on to be a pioneer of big bands, as well as a specialist in muted blues playing. For Laurie Wright's 1987 biography of King Oliver, Keith Nichols - who teaches jazz at the Royal Academy of music - analysed every one of Oliver's many recordings, attempting to identify exactly who was playing what - especially on the records from the early days of acoustic recording when few notes were taken at the time, and the musicians themselves quickly forgot what sessions they had played on. So part of this programme is detective work, identifying King Oliver's playing in a variety of contexts. The rest is an exhilarating tour through early jazz: from raunchy blues vocals to close harmony singing; Louis Armstrong's first solos on disc; and Oliver's talking trumpet, an effect he perfected with his mastery of mutes, before his decline into rural obscurity and an early grave in 1938.