~1910 Tonk Cornet

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Harry B. Jay (1860 – 1926) was a cornetist who performed with John Philip Sousa’s Band before founding his own brass-instrument firm around 1910. His instruments were hand-built in limited numbers and reflect Chicago’s emergence as a hub of American instrument manufacture in the years before World War I.

According to the University of Colorado dissertation Louis Armstrong and the Development of Modern Trumpet Style (2015), Armstrong played a later “Columbia” trumpet-cornet  hybrid from roughly 1922 to 1925, beginning with his arrival in Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. 

The advertisement to the right, as well as my 1916 example below, predate that design, illustrating the earlier generation of Harry B. Jay’s traditional Chicago-built cornets.