Freddie Keppard: The Cornet King Before Armstrong

The Cornet King Before Armstrong

Freddie Keppard was born on February 27, 1890, in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the first two decades of the twentieth century — before Louis Armstrong rose to international fame — Freddie Keppard was widely considered the best cornet player in New Orleans. That distinction, in that city, at that moment in musical history, made him one of the most important musicians in the world.

Keppard led the Olympia Orchestra, one of the top brass bands in New Orleans, and later formed the Original Creole Orchestra, which toured the vaudeville circuit across the United States from 1912 to 1918. The Original Creole Orchestra brought New Orleans jazz to audiences who had never heard anything like it — wild, improvisational, and electrifying. They were among the first bands to take the New Orleans sound on the road.

The Legend of the Refused Recording

The most famous story about Freddie Keppard — which may or may not be true — is that he was offered the chance to make the first jazz recording before the Original Dixieland Jass Band did so in 1917. According to legend, Keppard refused, saying he didn't want other musicians to steal his sound. Whether the story is accurate or apocryphal, it captures something real about the competitive culture of early New Orleans jazz: your sound was your livelihood, and recordings were a new and uncertain technology.

Keppard did eventually record in the 1920s, but by then, Armstrong had already eclipsed him. Keppard's recordings, while historically valuable, don't capture the power that contemporaries described. Trumpeter Mutt Carey said Keppard could fill a city block with his sound without a microphone.

The One Who Came First

Freddie Keppard died on July 15, 1933, at forty-three, ravaged by tuberculosis and alcoholism. He was the king before Armstrong was crowned, the musician who took New Orleans jazz to the rest of America, and possibly the man who could have made the first jazz recording and chose not to. History remembers Armstrong, and rightly so. But without Keppard blazing the trail, the path might not have existed.