The story of Kid Ory is similar to that of many other veteran New Orleans jazzmen who dropped out of jazz in the depression years, and then returned during the foties on the crest of the New Orleans jazz revival, to develop completely new careers.

Ory is well known, of course, as one of the pioneer trombonists and member of the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven in 1925-27. (For original recording of these groups, see Columbia CL 851 and 852.) It was Ory who gave Louis Armstrong, then 17 years old, his first professional job, as a replacement for his idol, King Oliver. After the closing down of Storyville, the dordelo district of New Orleans (where the best job for musicians were to be found), Ory left for the west coast, and it was California tht he returned in 1929 after Oliver sent for him in Chicago in 1925. There wasn't much work for a New Orleans trombonist in the thirties, and Ory spent a decade out in the mucis business, conducting a successful chicken farm with his brother. The end of the depression found him drifting back into music, and the big change took place in 1944 when Orson Wells produced a variety radio show in Hollywood and asked Marili Morden, owner of the Jazz Man Record Shop, to round up some down-to-earth jazzmen for the program. She went to Ory, who lined up the rest of the men. The broadcast were so successful that the band quickly found permanent employment in a Hollywood night club. Ory has had a band ever since, with a steady following throughout the country, although most of its engagements have been in Hollywood and San Francisco.

The musicians who made up the original Mercury Wonder Show group were the same as those who appear on the first side of this long-playing record, except that Jimmie Noone (who died in April 1944) played clarinet in place of Barney Bigard and Zutty Singleton was the original drummer.

All are graduates of the early New Orleans jazz school. Guitarist Bud Scott and bassist Ed Garland share with Ory the distinction of having played both in Armstrong's and Oliver's bands. Mutt Carey, who with Ory and Garland had made the first recording by a Negro band in the New Orleans style (in 1921 in Los Angeles), did not record again for 23 years; in fact, he had given up playing some years before Ory did, and was working as a Pullman porter when Ory began assembling his band for the Welles programs. (The Santa Fe arranged his schedule so he could make the first few shows, and then the band landed a regular club job.)

Buster Wilson, ragtime pianist in the Jelly Roll Morton tradition, and drummer Minor Hall, younger brother of the better known Fred "Tubby" Hall, were virually unknown until the Ory band brought them on the national jazz scene, but both had served a long apprenticeship in New Orleans music. Barney Bigard, of course, had played clarinet continuously since leaving New Orleans in the twenties, and had acquired a solid international reputation durning his 17-year tenure with Duke Ellington, though few people had known that he had played with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, among other New Orleans jazz greats, before joining the Duke.

This band's repertoire is a fairly thorough cross section if the basic ingredients of New Orleans jazz. Tiger Rag recalls the parade bands of early New Orleans, which took a French quadrille and turned into a piece of music that has been kicked aroung from raftime to the symphony hall, and comes out here as a jazz stomp. Bucket Got A Hole in It is a traditional honky-tonk piece which has been handed down from one jazz generation to another, under a number of titles, most of them unprintable. This title refers to a beer bucket..."and we can't get no beer."

Eh, La Bas and Creole Bo Bo are simple folk song types of the sort contributed by the city's Creole population to the melting pot of New Orleans jazz. (The former is credited to DeDe Pierce, who can still be heard plaing his cornet at Lutjen's, with his wife Billie at the piano. The piano is so out of tune it's impossible to tell if DeDe is on pitch, and Billie has to say who you are because DeDe' sight is gone.) Sung by Ory in French patois, Eh, La Bas tell about his cousins who love to ear pork and rabbit gumbo till they're sick. Creole Bo Bo is about a little boy whose exasperated mama and papa take down his culottes and apply a slipper despite his protests: "Ay, ya-ay, I Love you both" (followed by "Ay, ya-ay, you're hurting me!")

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