Louis Nelson Delisle

"Big Eye" Louis Nelson Delisle (28 January 1885 – 20 August 1949) was an early dixieland jazz clarinetist. He also played string bass, banjo, and accordion professionally on occasion.

Nelson Delisle was born and spent most of his life in New Orleans, Louisiana.

He studied clarinet with the elder Lorenzo Tio, and was working professionally in Storyville music venues by the age of 15. He developed an early style of hot playing in the earliest days of jazz, and was an important influence on such later New Orleans jazz clarinetists as Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone.

In his early career "Big Eye" often played a C clarinet, as opposed to the more common B♭; the C was also used by other New Orleans clarinetists of the era, such as Alcide Nunez.

In the 1917, he joined the reconstituted Original Creole Orchestra that included Freddie Keppard and Bill Johnson. The band had disbanded in Boston in the spring of that year but was reassembled in New York in the fall of the same year. Big Eye replaced clarinetist George Baquet, who had toured with the group in vaudeville. After a short while, Big Eye was replaced by Jimmie Noone.^[1] Nelson was the regular clarinetist with the Jones & Collins Astoria Hot Eight but did not play on their 1929 recording sessions.

He made his only recordings in his later years in the 1940s, by which time he was often in poor health and from contemporary accounts past his playing prime, but still capable of producing some beautiful phrases; the recordings are available on compact disc on American Music Records. Nelson Delisle's playing is more blues influenced and fluid compared to the more stattico and raggy playing of older New Orleans clarinetist Alphonse Picou.

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• Photograph [1]