Born on Christmas Day 1886 on Louisiana’s Woodland Plantation into a French-speaking Black Creole family, Kid Ory built homemade instruments, stayed home until his 21st birthday to honor family obligations, and then moved to New Orleans in 1910 to lead the city’s premier band. This episode explains how a banjo player’s rhythmic instincts produced the ‘tailgate’ trombone style and why Buddy Bolden wanted to hire him before Ory’s older sister said no.

We follow the bands that employed King Oliver, Mutt Carey, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, and a young Louis Armstrong, his 1919 move to Los Angeles, and the 1922 recordings he pressed and sold himself under his own label. Then come the Chicago years with Jelly Roll Morton and the Hot Five, his rejected request for lessons from Chicago Symphony trombonists, the Depression-era chicken farm, and the Orson Welles radio broadcast that launched his 1940s revival.

• How the banjo shaped Ory’s rhythmic approach to the trombone and the glissando
• Why he paid for his own record pressings in 1922 and sold them from a Los Angeles music store
• Muskrat Ramble, the Hot Five sessions, and mentoring Benny Goodman and Charles Mingus
• Serving as pallbearer at Jelly Roll Morton’s funeral during his years away from music
• Crescent Records, the San Francisco club On the Levee, and retirement to Hawaii in 1966