Dominic James "Nick" La Rocca (April 11, 1889 in New Orleans, Louisiana – February 22, 1961 in New Orleans) was an early jazz cornetist and trumpeter and the leader of the Original Dixieland Jass Band. According to La Rocca himself, he was "The Creator of Jazz", "The Christopher Columbus of Music", and "The most lied about person in history since Jesus Christ".
Background
La Rocca was the son of poor Sicilian-American immigrants. His father was Girolamo LaRocca of Salaparuta, Sicily and his mother was Vita DeNina of Poggioreale, Sicily. Young Nick was attracted to the music of the brass bands in New Orleans and covertly taught himself to play cornet against the wishes of his father who hoped his son would go into a more prestigious profession. La Rocca at first worked as an electrician, playing music on the side.
From around 1910 through 1916 he was a regular member of Papa Jack Laine's bands. While not considered as one of the most virtuosic or creative of the Laine players, he was well regarded for playing a solid lead with a strong lip which allowed him to play long parades without let up or to play several gigs in a row on the same day.
In 1916 he was chosen as a last-minute replacement for Frank Christian in Johnny Stein's band to play a job up in Chicago, Illinois. This band became the famous Original Dixieland Jass Band, making the first commercially issued jazz recordings in New York City in 1917. These recordings were hits and made the band into celebrities.
Soon other New Orleans musicians began following the O.D.J.B.'s path, arriving in New York to play jazz. La Rocca was uneasy about competition. Frank Christian recalled that La Rocca offered him $200 and a return railway ticket to go back home. After a band featuring New Orleans musicians Alcide Nunez, Tom Brown, and Ragbaby Stevens won a battle of the bands against the O.D.J.B., drummer Ragbaby found his drum heads all mysteriously slashed.
The band gave La Rocca the nickname "Joe Blade", and published a song called "Joe Blade, Sharp as a Tack".
La Rocca led this band on tours of England and the United States into the early 1920s, when he suffered a nervous breakdown. He returned to New Orleans and retired from music, going into the construction and contracting business. His chair in the band was taken by Henry Levine, a teenaged trumpeter devoted to traditional jazz stylings; Levine later led one of the house bands on NBC's radio series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street.
In 1936 Nick LaRocca reunited the O.D.J.B. for a successful tour and more recordings. La Rocca proclaimed that he and his band were the inventors of the now nationally popular swing music. Personality conflicts broke up the band again the following year, and La Rocca again retired from music.
In the 1950s he started writing numerous vehement letters to newspapers, radio, and television shows, stating that he was the true and sole inventor of jazz music, and that those who claimed that the music had Negro origins were part of a Communist conspiracy.[citation needed]
When Tulane University established their Archive of New Orleans Jazz in 1958, La Rocca donated his large collection of papers related to the O.D.J.B. to Tulane, after adding numerous glosses in the margins, often very insulting to his fellow musicians, and occasionally modifying documents to make them more in line with his own version of history.
At the same time, he worked with writer H.O. Brunn on the book The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (sometimes sarcastically nicknamed by jazz historians as "The Gospel according to Nick La Rocca"). While Brunn toned down some of La Rocca's most extreme rhetoric, the book still presents a curious tale of La Rocca growing up in a New Orleans apparently devoid of African Americans where he founded the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1908 (8 years before anyone else recalls it existing). The book is dismissive even of the other members of the O.D.J.B.; it is perhaps kindest to clarinetist Larry Shields who was already dead at the time, but still it claims that Shields, unlike La Rocca, was not an essential member of the band.
Those trying to assess La Rocca's contributions to jazz are sometimes perhaps as much hindered as helped by La Rocca's own statements. A small few (mostly in England) have taken La Rocca on his word, while a much larger segment of jazz historians have simply dismissed him out of hand. La Rocca may have inadvertently done much damage to his own reputation, especially in some of his statements which are unusually racist even when compared to interviews with other white southerners born in the late 19th century, and his dismissal if not outright insults of his fellow white musicians.
If few of his contemporaries had anything kind to say about La Rocca, it should be remembered that they were very aware of how he had little kind to say about them. La Rocca's statements in his later life were made when he was not completely well. A balanced assessment may be to regard LaRocca as an important figure in taking jazz from a regional style to international popularity, the leader of the most influential jazz band of the period from 1917 to 1921, a good player in a very early jazz style on records such as "Clarinet Marmalade", and unfortunately his own worst enemy with his bragging in his old age. La Rocca's playing and recordings were an important early influence on such later jazz trumpeters as Red Nichols, Bix Beiderbecke and Phil Napoleon. Other information about Nick La Rocca and his biographer are in a Salvatore Mugno's novel: "Il biografo di Nick La Rocca. Come entrare nelle storie del jazz", Besa Editrice, Nardò (Lecce), Italia, 2005.
Legacy
Nick LaRocca's 1917 composition "Tiger Rag" is on of the most important and influential jazz standards of the twentieth century. There were 136 cover versions of LaRocaa's copyrighted composition "Tiger Rag" by 1942 alone.
Among the artists who have recorded "Tiger Rag" are Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Orchestra, Bix Beiderbecke and Bob Crosby.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band is now regarded as one of the seminal groups in the formation and development of modern jazz. The ODJB compositions have been covered by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Joe Jackson. The influence and enduring impact of the ODJB in the history and development of modern jazz are undeniable.
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