Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

Abstract

In his 2005 book Pioneers of Jazz, Lawrence Gushee traces the development of the Creole Band, the early touring group that helped disseminate what would eventually become known as jazz outside of New Orleans. For Gushee, the Creole Band was a critical link between the early twentiethcentury New Orleans scene and the later recording groups of the post1917 era. As he recounts in vivid detail, it was largely through the Vaudeville stage, and through an identification as a novelty band, that the group would achieve notoriety. Yet the overall sense from Gushee’s study is that the Creole Band represented something different, distinct from Vaudeville or novelty. In short, they became “pioneers of jazz.” This idea is made clear in an epigraph for the introduction, in which Jelly Roll Morton asserts in a 1938 interview that the band “really played jazz, not just novelty and show stuff.”1 Morton’s quote is telling, as is Gushee’s placement of the passage as the very first words in his text, reinforcing the idea that the Creole Band is squarely within the realm of jazz. Jazz historiography has long been occupied with categorizing the style in relation to and, perhaps more importantly, as distinct from other forms of early twentiethcentury popular music. Within this discourse, the