Earl Fuller

Earl Bunn Fuller (March 7, 1885 – August 19, 1947) was a pioneering American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, composer and instrumentalist.

Practically nothing is known of his musical education, but he was proficient on several instruments; photos of his jazz band show him seated at the piano, whereas he also is credited with playing trumpet and trombone in his Novelty Orchestra; other accounts identify him as a drummer.

Fuller was hired, in 1913,[4] as musical director of Rector's Restaurant on Broadway in Manhattan's theater district; since about 1912 it was already established as a place where famous personalities from the New York Stage rubbed shoulders with politicians and other prominent New Yorkers.

[5] Fuller's Novelty Orchestra's star attraction was xylophonist Teddy Brown, then just a teenager and later destined for far greater fame in Britain.

[11] However, the Victor ledgers show Fuller as pianist, at least on sides made for that company; Cutting did play with the Famous Jazz Band in live engagements, however.

In his autobiography, Lewis recalled that by mid-1919 he was being offered outrageous sums of money by Florenz Ziegfeld to play the Roof Garden of the New Amsterdam Theater.

When he died of a heart attack in Morrow, Ohio, on August 19, 1947, Earl Fuller was working as a real estate agent in nearby Lebanon.

However, there are listeners who are attracted to the "crude sort of excitement" that Schuller also alludes to, and overall their recordings are more violent and chaotic sounding than even the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

The one inescapable factor of Earl Fuller's legacy is that he played a major role in popularizing jazz in New York City; Ted Lewis' "clown band" may have been one of the first groups to play something that could be regarded as instrumental jazz in New York, and by incorporating their act into his high-profile show at Rector's, Fuller exposed the new sound to the very clientele that would take to it most ardently.

Moreover, like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Fuller's groups were among the first artists to record pieces that have become standards, such as W. C. Handy's Beale Street Blues.

Fuller is also credited as a director and/or manager on some Pathé recordings by Joseph Samuels' Orchestra, but his connection to these items remains uncertain.