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The Original Creole Band, led by Creole trumpeter Freddie Keppard
(1889),
was one of the New Orleans bands that never recorded for fear of being copied, but was
nonetheless influential in exporting the sound of New Orleans to Los Angeles
(1911), where they were lured by bassist Bill Johnson,
New York (1915) and Chicago (where in 1918 Johnson engineer the
mutation of the band sans Keppard into King Oliver's
orchestra).
Keppard had been raised in Creole bands (that prevailed downtown), but, after
Bolden's death, became the archetype of "hot jazz", the style of black musicians (who ruled uptown).
Johnson himself popularized the swinging four beats per bar of jazz bass that made the two beats per bar of ragtime bass obsolete.
Bill Johnson transplanted jazz into the West Coast, and may be
responsible for exporting the very name of the new music because
"jass" was the term used around San Francisco for any kind of black music.
The first group to use the term "jazz" in their name was
the So Different Jazz Band led by pianist Sid LeProtti in San Francisco
around 1914, seven years after Johnson had first performed there with his
pre-Keppard band.
Keppard died in 1933.
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