Original Dixieland Jass Band was a tribute to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who were featured on the cover. When the New Orleans Jazz style swept New York by storm in 1917 with the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Jimmy Durante was part of the audience at Reisenweber's Cafe on Columbus Circle when ODJB played that venue. Durante was very impressed with the band and invited them to play at a club called the Alamo in Harlem where Jimmy played piano. Durante had his friend, Johnny Stein (the previous drummer and leader of the group), assemble a group of like-minded New Orleans
Jazz the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it. In 1944, jazz impresario Norman Granz organized the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles, which helped make a star of Nat "King" Cole and Les Paul. In 1946, he founded Clef, discovering Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in 1949 and merging Clef with his new label Verve in 1956, which advanced the career of Ella Fitzgerald. By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was