Freddie Keppard (sometimes rendered as Freddy Keppard; February 27, 1890 – July 15, 1933) was an American jazz cornetist who once held the title of "King" in the New Orleans jazz scene. This title was previously held by Buddy Bolden and succeeded by Joe Oliver.
Early life and career in New Orleans
Keppard (pronounced in the French fashion, with relatively even accentuation and a silent d) was born in the Creole of Color community of downtown New Orleans, Louisiana.
Born in 1890, Keppard was Buddy Bolden's junior by thirteen years and Louis Armstrong's senior by eleven years. Keppard's father, Louis Keppard Sr., had been a New Orleans man and had worked as a cook in the Vieux Carré until his early death. His mother, Emily (Peterson) Keppard, was from St. James parish. His older brother, Louis, was his elder by two years and also became a professional musician later in life. The first tune they learned to play together was called "Just Because She Made Dem Goo-Goo Eyes", a tune by Hughie Cannon and popular New Orleans minstrel show star John Queen, published in 1900.
Keppard was raised on Villere Street in New Orleans in a home environment filled with music. His mother first started him on the violin, while his brother Louis first played guitar. When he was still a young boy, he and Louis, who by then had become an aspiring guitarist, would disguise their age from police by putting on long pants before going to Basin Street to shine shoes for a nickel a shine, hoping to get in on the music scene and get advice or even tutelage from their favorite musicians in the District while shoe-shining.
As such, Keppard did not receive any formal musical training and may have been a non-reader who, instead of reading arrangements, most likely learned all of his parts by ear and used his powerful and imaginative abilities to improvise parts that were even better.
Freddie played violin, mandolin, and accordion before switching to cornet. By the time he was ten years old, Freddie had already learned to play mandolin and was performing in a duo with Louis around their neighborhood. He did not begin playing cornet until he was sixteen.
This is most likely because, according to Louis Keppard, one strategy available to aspiring string players in those days was to switch to brass instruments in order to get more job opportunities with brass bands in parades. The Keppards' mother apparently "didn't think much of this music" until she saw them in their band uniforms, at which point Louis recalled that she became very proud.
As Freddie and Louis grew older, both brothers became band leaders in their own right and became part of the competitive New Orleans jazz scene. Freddie Keppard organized the Olympia Orchestra around 1905. This band featured Alphonse Picou on clarinet. As a Creole band, the Olympia Orchestra would have been expected to play a wide repertoire for a variety of gigs, and therefore could play "legitimate" enough to get society jobs, yet "hot" enough to get jobs at the uptown jazz halls a few years later. Louis Keppard led the Magnolia Orchestra, which became the regular band at Huntz's and Nagel's cabaret on Iberville in the District. The Magnolia Orchestra included Joe Oliver on cornet, who would later succeed Keppard's title as "King" by winning a "cutting contest" against him.
After playing with the Olympia Orchestra, Freddie Keppard joined Frankie Dusen's Eagle Band, taking the place recently vacated by Buddy Bolden. Soon after Bolden was off the music scene, Keppard was proclaimed "King Keppard" as the city's top horn player (see: jazz royalty). This was mostly because he kept Buddy's style, which was popular but had not been recorded. Indeed, many contemporaries have testified that Keppard's playing style was the closest to Bolden's that can be found in the history of jazz recordings and can be considered a more musical and sophisticated extension of Bolden's style: rugged and forceful, clipped and more staccato, and rhythmically closer to ragtime than later New Orleans jazz.
Sometime in either late 1911 or early 1912, bassist Bill Johnson, who had been making his career in Los Angeles, California since 1909, started the initiative to organize an "Original Creole Ragtime Band" to play the New Orleans style across the country. He invited players from his hometown of New Orleans, including Freddie Keppard, to join him in this enterprise. After Keppard accepted his invitation to play cornet for this band, Johnson managed to get Eddie Vinson on trombone, George Baquet on clarinet, Norwood Williams on guitar, Jimmy Palao on violin, and later Dink Johnson on drums. This group went on the Orpheum Theatre circuit out of San Francisco in 1913 as the "Original Creole Orchestra".
In the following years, the band would tour Chicago and New York. In their 1915 performance at the Winter Garden, for a show entitled Town Topics, the group was billed as "That Creole Band." Thus, Freddie Keppard was among the first musicians as well as the first cornetist to take the New Orleans ensemble style outside of the city.
In 1914, Keppard's band performed in Canada, at the Pantages Playhouse Theatres in Winnipeg, the first ever jazz performance outside the United States. This was the beginning of jazz as an international art form, although the name jazz was still a couple years in the future, the band performing as a ragtime band at the time.
Keppard, who signed one photograph of himself with a caption describing himself as the "star cornetist" of the "Creole Ragtime Band," probably considered himself the star of the Original Creole Orchestra. Although he was the youngest member of the band, he is perhaps the most well-known of all of its members and is more often mentioned in histories of jazz. This is most likely because he was one of the few members to make surviving recordings. Because of his relative fame compared to the other band members, many assume that the Creole Band was led by Keppard. There is, however, no evidence that Keppard played any major role in the organization of the band (planning tours and events, choosing songs for the repertoire, signing contracts, etc.). As such, Bill Johnson was most likely the leader of the group.
From 1915 to 1917, the Original Creole Orchestra (sometimes also rendered as the "Original Creole Band") landed jobs at Loew's Orpheum, Lexington Opera House, and the Columbia Theater, as well as a return performance to the Winter Garden. Newspaper reviewers in New York commented on the "rather ragged selection" of the band's repertoire as well as the "comedy effect of the clarinet," a testament to the American public's unfamiliarity with the "hot" style of New Orleans. During the band's time on the east coast, other personnel who came to play in the Original Creole Orchestra included Bab Frank on piccolo and Big Eye Louis Nelson (De Lisle) on clarinet.
The Original Creole Orchestra, after touring the Vaudeville circuit, gave other parts of the USA a first taste of the music that was not yet known as "jazz". While playing a successful engagement in New York City in 1915, the band was offered a chance to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company. This would probably have been the first jazz recording. An often repeated story says that Keppard didn't want to record because then everyone else could "steal his stuff." This fear, however, was not too far-fetched if we think forward to the Alligators in Chicago taking King Olivers' material, such as in the case of the recording of Oliver's "Eccentric" by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Another well known story is that he was so worried about being copied that he sometimes played with a handkerchief over his hand to conceal his fingering. Keppard's famous tendency to hide his fingerings during performances, however, was most likely a publicity stunt intended only to amuse the crowd. After all, a real musician would steal by ear and not by eye. In any case, the recording company offered him a $25 flat fee to make a record (a fairly standard rate for non-star performers at the time), far less than he was earning on the Vaudeville circuit. His retort to this offer, according to Lawrence Gushee, was: "Twenty-Five dollars? I drink that much gin in a day!" The reminiscences of the other members of the Creole Orchestra reveal that another factor was that the Victor representative had asked them to make a "test recording" without pay. The band balked, fearing it was a ploy to have them make records without being paid. Another popular rumor which traveled through some of the New York jazz circles for some time also suggested that Keppard had refused to record because he had been afraid of being cheated by the record company and had demanded the same fees as that of the Victor Company's highest paid and best-selling artist of the time, Enrico Caruso.