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The Original Dixieland Jass Band
Original promotional poster for the first ever jazz record
THE ORIGINAL DIXIELAND JASS BAND
Original promotional poster for the first ever jazz record, the Dixieland Jass Band – One Step and Livery Stable Blues – Fox Trot by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, New Victor Records, 1917.
Recorded on 26 February 1917 by the Victor Talking Machine Company in New York City, the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s Dixieland Jass Band One Step, with its B-side Livery Stable Blues, has historically been recognised as the first jazz recording ever commercially released. Although these five white musicians from New Orleans, led by cornetist Nick LaRocca, were certainly not the “creators of jazz” that they later claimed to be, their lively, syncopated recording, states jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, ‘changed popular music overnight’. Writing for the Smithsonian Magazine, John Edward Hasse asserts that ‘The band’s social-cultural importance surpassed its music: signalling a break from ragtime, it introduced the word jazz to many people [by late 1917 the spelling of the band’s name had changed from Jass to Jazz]; popularized the music to widespread audiences; by performing in England in 1919, helped jazz go international; and deeply influenced a generation of young musicians, from Louis Armstrong (who liked its recordings) to young white Midwesterners such as cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and clarinetist Benny Goodman.’
The Victor Talking Machine Company enclosed the following letter when the poster was issued to Victor Dealers in April 1917: ‘The Jass Band is its own best advertisement to people who have heard it but for those who have not, we have had the enclosed poster prepared… The Jass Band is a novelty. It is the newest and the noisiest thing in the cabarets.’ We are aware of the existence of only one other copy of the poster, held in the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, New Orleans. Hasse, Smithsonian, 24 February 2017. Morgenstern cited by Myers, WSJ, 21 February 2012.
Lithograph in colours, 835 x 530 mm, archivally backed on paper, conservation framed (860 x 550 mm); accompanied by a facsimile typed letter from Victor Talking Machine Company to Victor Dealers, Camden, N.J., 10 April 1917.