(b ?New Orleans, 11 May 1885; d Savannah, GA, 8/10 April 1938). American jazz cornettist and bandleader. He is said to have begun to study music as a trombonist, and from about 1907 he played in brass bands, dance bands and various small black American groups in New Orleans bars and cabarets. In 1918 he moved to Chicago (at which time he may have acquired his nickname), and in 1920 he began to lead his own band. After taking it to California in 1921, he returned to Chicago and started an engagement at Lincoln Gardens as King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (June 1922). This group was joined a month later by the 22-year-old Louis Armstrong as second cornettist. Oliver began recording in April 1923. Many young white jazz musicians had the opportunity to hear him then, either on recordings or live at Lincoln Gardens.
In February 1925 Oliver’s reorganized band began a two-year engagement at the Plantation Cafe in Chicago, as the Dixie Syncopators. The group disbanded soon after a brief but successful engagement (from May 1927) at the Savoy Ballroom in New York, where Oliver remained. From 1930 to 1936 he toured widely, chiefly in the Midwest and upper South, with various ten- to 12-piece bands; he himself seldom performed during this period and he made no further recordings after April 1931. He spent the final months of his life retired from music in Savannah.
Like other early New Orleans cornettists, Oliver played in a clipped melodic style with relatively four-square rhythm (contrasting with the deliberate irregularity of the younger Armstrong and his imitators) and had a repertory of expressive deviations of rhythm and pitch, some verging on theatrical novelty effects and others derived from blues vocal style. He frequently used timbre modifiers of various sorts, and was especially renowned for his wa-wa effects, as in his famous three-chorus solo on Dipper Mouth Blues (1923, Gen.), which was learnt by rote by many trumpeters of the 1920s and 30s and which, as Sugar Foot Stomp, became a jazz standard. As a soloist he may best be heard in a number of blues accompaniments, notably with Sippie Wallace.
In contrast to his near-contemporaries Freddie Keppard and Bunk Johnson, Oliver integrated his playing superbly with his ensemble, and was an excellent leader; the Creole Jazz Band may have been successful largely because of the discipline he imposed on his musicians. Indeed, of the earlier New Orleans cornettists, only Oliver was extensively recorded in the 1920s with an outstanding ensemble, and the revival of New Orleans style, which began shortly after his death, owed much to the rediscovery of his early three dozen Creole Band recordings, which were internationally known by the 1940s. Among the best of these are Chimes Blues (1923, Gen.) and Snake Rag (1923, OK). After 1924 the quality of his recordings declined, partly because of recurrent tooth and gum ailments and partly because his style was at odds with that of his younger sidemen; but with a good band he was capable of coherent and energetic playing even as late as 1930. Almost all of his recorded performances have been reissued.
F. Ramsey: ‘King Oliver’, Jazzmen, ed. F. Ramsey and C.E. Smith (New York, 1939/R)
R. Blesh: Shining Trumpets: a History of Jazz (New York, 1946, enlarged 2/1958/R)
E. Souchon: ‘King Oliver: a Very Personal Memoir’, Jazz Review, iii/4 (1960), 6–11; repr. in Jazz Panorama, ed. M. Williams (New York, 1962/R), 21–30
M. Williams: King Oliver (London, 1960); repr. in Kings of Jazz, ed. S. Green (South Brunswick, NJ, 1978), 241–72
L. Gushee: ‘King Oliver’, Jazz Panorama, ed. M. Williams (New York and London, 1962/R)
G. Schuller: Early Jazz: its Roots and Musical Development (New York, 1968)
L.O. Koch: ‘Structural Aspects of King Oliver’s 1923 Okeh Recordings’, JJS, iii/2 (1976), 36–46
W. Balliett: ‘For the Comfort of the People’, Improvising: Sixteen Jazz Musicians and their Art (New York, 1977), 21–31
J.L. Collier: Louis Armstrong: an American Genius (New York, 1983; as Louis Armstrong: a Biography, London, 1984)
B. Bigard: With Louis and the Duke, ed. B. Martyn (London, 1985)
L. Wright and others: Walter C. Allen & Brian A.L. Rust’s ‘King’ Oliver (Chigwell, 1987) [completely rev. version of Allen and Rust: King Joe Oliver (Belleville, NJ, 1955)]
LAWRENCE GUSHEE