Johnny Dodds: The Clarinetist Who Helped Build the Jazz Age

The Clarinetist Who Helped Build the Jazz Age

In the pantheon of early New Orleans jazz, the horn players get most of the glory. But Johnny Dodds, born in 1892 in the city that invented the music, made a case that the clarinet was just as essential to the sound—and his playing on some of the most important recordings in jazz history proved it beyond any argument.

Dodds came from a musical family. His father and uncle played violin, and the young Dodds gravitated to the clarinet around 1909, studying with Lorenzo Tio Jr. and Charlie McCurdy—two of the great Creole music teachers who trained half the woodwind players in New Orleans. What Dodds developed under their tutelage was a sound that combined technical polish with a deep, gritty blues feeling that set him apart from the more refined Creole clarinet tradition.

He worked his way through the New Orleans band circuit, playing with Kid Ory's band and then joining King Oliver's outfit before making the trek north to Chicago that so many New Orleans musicians made in the late 1910s. It was in Chicago that Dodds became a legend.

The recordings tell the story. Dodds played on some of the most consequential sessions in jazz: Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, which essentially defined what jazz could be. Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers sessions, which captured the New Orleans sound at its most sophisticated. And his own recordings as leader of the Black Bottom Stompers, which showcased his clarinet in all its moaning, crying, blue-note glory.

What made Dodds special was that funky quality in his playing—a rawness that his contemporaries and even his rivals acknowledged. Benny Goodman, who would later become the most famous clarinetist in the world, admitted that Dodds achieved a finer tone than any of his competitors. Coming from Goodman, that was the equivalent of a coronation.

Dodds was described as a prime architect of the Jazz Age, and the description fits. His clarinet wove through those early recordings like a thread that held everything together—sometimes leading, sometimes commenting, always adding a layer of emotional depth that the music needed. In the collective improvisation style of New Orleans jazz, the clarinet was the voice that filled the spaces between the trumpet and the trombone, and nobody filled those spaces better than Johnny Dodds.

He died young, at forty-eight, of a stroke in Chicago in 1940. The DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame inducted him in 1987, decades after his death—a belated recognition of a musician who helped build the sound that changed the world. Every jazz clarinetist who came after him owed something to the kid from New Orleans who learned his craft from the Creole masters and turned it into something that could break your heart.