(b La Place, LA, 25 Dec c1890; d Honolulu, 23 Jan 1973).American jazz trombonist and bandleader. Between 1912 and 1919 he led one of the most prominent bands in New Orleans. He then moved to California, where he also led a group; in Los Angeles in 1922, as Spikes’ Seven Pots of Pepper, it became the first of the black New Orleans-style jazz bands to issue a recording, Ory’s Creole Trombone/Society Blues (Nordskog). In 1925 Ory went to Chicago, where he participated in some of the period’s most important jazz recording sessions, with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, the New Orleans Wanderers and King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators. He returned to Los Angeles in 1930 and in 1933 abandoned music to work on a poultry farm and in a railway post office; in 1942, however, he resumed playing, and in 1944 regained prominence through his performances on Orson Welles’s radio broadcasts. He then toured extensively with his band until 1966, when he retired to Hawaii. Ory’s playing was highly rhythmic; he made full use of slurs and glissandos in the early tailgate trombone style, of which he was the most famous exponent, and was also notable for his use of mutes. He composed the well-known Muskrat Ramble (1926, OK).
M. Ertegun: ‘Just Playing Music I Love, Says Kid Ory’, Down Beat, xviii/16 (1951), 2
Giltrap and Dixon: Kid Ory (London, c1958)
G. Marne: ‘The Kid Ory Story’, International Musician, lxiii/6 (1964), 18–19, 30 only
J.J. Lucas: ‘Kid Ory’, Jazz Journal, xviii/1 (1965), 6–8
M. Williams: ‘The Kid’, Jazz Masters of New Orleans (New York, 1967/R), 205–21
A. Hubner: ‘Kid Ory’, Selections from the Gutter: Jazz Portraits from the ‘The Jazz Record’, ed. A. Hodes and C. Hansen (Berkeley, CA, 1977) 112–15
B. Bigard: With Louis and the Duke (London, 1985)
J. Darensbourg: Telling it Like it is, ed. P. Vacher (London, 1987; Baton Rouge, LA, 1987, as Jazz Odyssey: the Autobiography of Joe Darensbourg)
Oral history material in LNT
JOSÉ HOSIASSON