Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz

8. 1919–1925: California

[ 134 ] chapter 8 1919–1925 CALIFORNIA Edward and Elizabeth Ory stepped off the train in August 1919 into a Los Angeles already brimming with transplants from Louisiana. Ads in California’s black newspapers like the California Eagle and Western Outlook carried notices and ads for the Louisiana Commercial Association, the Creole Human Hair Company, and the Louisiana Creole Club. There were even groups that celebrated Mardi Gras with formal balls. Many African Americans from the South pulled up stakes and moved to California around the same time Ory did. Why Los Angeles ? During a short visit somewhere between 1908 and 1910, Jelly Roll Morton had found that not much was happening musically in California except in Oxnard, which he called “a very fast-stepping town.”1 Ory’s move may have had less to do with music and more to do with a massive exodus of people from the South to the country’s major population centers. Ory’s move, and those of Oliver , Armstrong, and many other musicians in the so-called “New Orleans musical diaspora,” were all part of the Great Migration of 1915–29, when southern blacks moved to major urban areas, particularly Chicago and New York but also Los Angeles. The reasons included education and employment opportunities, and a chance to escape Jim Crow. Set against the background of the Great Migration, the travels of New Orleans jazzmen “takes on epic proportions at times, in the sense that it is the embodiment of the story of the AfricanAmerican people at that time, moving relentlessly from place to california [ 135 ] place, trying to make a new life—trying to find a voice for a tradition that began on the shores of west Africa with the slave trade and arrived in the twentieth century with a migration that was itself an odyssey.”2 Their new communities did not always greet the new arrivals with open arms. Restrictive neighborhood covenants, social discrimination , and segregated facilities were all familiar relics from the South that were very much in evidence in California when Ory arrived. Darker-skinned women were refused service at clothing stores, and some restaurants insisted blacks use the back entrance . In 1920 a third of “employed males worked as janitors, porters, waiters, or house servants. Los Angeles did not have as many industrial jobs as northeastern cities, and blacks were largely relegated to the position of laborer.” “Blacks were virtually absent from retail trade and non-professional white-collar jobs—the largest area of employment in the city. In 1920 Los Angeles had 11,341 salesmen, 28 of whom were black.”3 By the 1920s African Americans had expanded into previously white areas, most notably the Central Avenue area, where “older residents in [this] community moved southward, displacing over half of the white residents and leaving their old houses to the new arrivals.” Ory and his wife settled in this neighborhood, living first at 1533 E. 21 Street in 1920, then at 919 E. 32 Street by 1922. They later bought a house a block off Central Avenue at 1001 E. 33 Street, which they owned until the forties.4 Soon after his arrival, Ory ran into a man named Pops Saunders who offered him a job cooking for transit workers. Ory had often worked jobs outside of music in New Orleans, so it was not unusual that he would seek employment. Los Angeles was in the throes of a transit strike, which was threatening to shut down the city, and the company had hired replacement workers to keep the buses and streetcars moving. The workers were being housed for their safety, and Saunders was looking for someone to feed them. Ory, as anyone who knew him would confirm, was a celebrated [ 136 ] – cook who in later years included recipes in the liner notes of his records. He was something of a rube when it came to organized labor, though knew he would be viewed as a strike-breaker. Still, he agreed to the job. He [Saunders] was quite a politician here at that time and he was looking for men to work. They were having a big strike in Los Angeles and were looking for cooks, waiters and dishwashers plus pantry boys and everyone that belongs in a kitchen unit. He said to me, “Young man, you’re all dressed up there. Are you looking for a job?” I said, “No, not exactly, I...