Kid Thomas

KID THOMAS VALENTINE d1987. American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. In the early 1920s, he gained a reputation as a hot trumpet man. Starting in 1926 he led his own band, for decades based in the New Orleans suburb of Algiers Louisiana. The band was long popular with local dancers. He had perhaps the city's longest lasting old-style traditional jazz dance band. Unlike many other musicians, he was unaffected by the influence of Louis Armstrong and later developments of jazz, continuing to play in his distinctive hot, bluesy, sometimes percussive style known as "New Orleans Jazz". He was always open to playing the popular tunes of the day (even into the rock & roll era) as he thought any good dance bandleader should do, but he played everything in a style of a New Orleans dance hall of the early 1920s. He started attracting a wider following with his first recordings in the 1950s. His band played regularly at Preservation Hall from the 1960s through the 1980s. He died in New Orleans aged 91 on June 16th 1987