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Edward Ory was born in 1886 in Woodland Plantation, near LaPlace, Louisiana. He played on home made instruments as a child and become a banjo player and band leader in LaPlace when he was a teenager. At 21 years of age Ory moved to New Olreans, where he switched to the trombone. Ory is credited with developing the “tailgate” style of trombone, in which the trombone plays a counter melody to the cornets, clarinet or saxophone. Generally the rombone’s melodic line is a response line, starting after, or halfway through a line played by the lead instrument(s).

Ory led a band in New Orleans, which included at various times King Oliver, a young Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and Jimmie Noone. He moved to California, where he formed a band Kid Ory’s Creole Orchestra in in 1919. He came to Chicago and played in bands led by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Ory retired from performing during the Great Depression and ran a chicken farm. He returned, however, in 1943 and revived Kid Ory’s Creole Orchestra in. Ory appeared in the 1947 United Artists film New Orleans along with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.

Here is a concert film from the La Pleyel concert hall in Paris in 1959. Ory is accompanied by Henry Red Allen on trumpet, Bobby McCracken on clarinet, Cedric Heywood on piano, William Girsback playing bass and Alton Redd on drums.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first recordings of New Orleans jazz in 1917. The band was formed in Chicago by former members of some of Papa Jack Lain’s popular racially integrated bands in New Orleans. By 1917 they were working in New York and were recorded by Victor. The ODJB booked themselves as the “originators of jazz,” an understandable controversial claim and one that the band members themselves, with the exception of trumpeter Nick LaRocca, who clung to the title later in life, recognized to be merely publicity.

The band went through several names, starting in Chicago in 1916 as Steins Dixie Jass Band under the leadership of drummer Johnny Stein. They later changed the spelling to jazz, possible due to the sexual connotations of the term jass in turn of the century New Orleans slang. In that sense, perhaps they were the originators of jazz, having given it it’s name. Jimmy Durante became the band’s pianist for a while in the early 1920s and later became their bandleader, calling the band Jimmy Durante’s Jazz Band.

Membership in the band changed often. This 1917 78 rpm Victor recording is accompanied by a photo of the band, then made up of drummer Tony Sbarbaro, trombonist Eddie Edwards, cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields and pianist Henry Ragas.

This is a segment from a 1947 film “New Orleans.” Louis Armstrong plays himself, as does Kid Ory, in this fictionalized story of the birth of Jazz. Billie Holiday is a maid in a Storyville “club.” Her duties seem to include singing with the band, which is a good thing. There are several great musical moments in this film. It’s available on DVD, so put it in your NetFlix cue.