The "Oliver River Gess Band" (whose name is a humorous pun on a local stream, alluding to the river tradition of the boat orchestras of the southern States, in the age when the spelling of the word "jazz" was not yet codified) was formed in Cuneo – a small city in North-West Italy near the French border - in 1991, performing during the first three years of activity as "King Oliver’s Jazz Keepers".

Its purpose was in fact from the start a programmatic one:
the divulgation and live performance of early New Orleans jazz, and in particular of the recordings of the legendary Joe "King" Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band.

This work required an accurate and laborious recovery of the original arrangements, realized through patient transcriptions from scarcely audible sources, a particular feature of the orchestra which gained general esteem from the very early concert performances.

During its first 10 years of existence, the band has appeared in several major European jazz festivals (such as the Saint Raphaël Jazz Festival in France from 1993 to 1999, the prestigious and well-known New Orleans Jazz Ascona in Switzerland in 1994 and from 1998 to 2003, the Tarragona Dixieland Festival held in Spain in 2000, and the Italian festivals of Cagliari, Turin and Brunico (2000-2001), drawing the attention of a long time trad-jazz devotee as the musician and showman Lino Patruno – who joined the band in live performances and invited it to play at the festival organized by himself in the small Republic of San Marino (1999).

The Oliver River Gess Band has partecipated in music shows, radio broadcasts and stage productions with live music performances; the present line-up is reinforced by a reed section, extending the band horizons to the large orchestras of the Swing Era including Ellington and Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators, and since 1996 has been supported by a cultural association by the same name, aiming at the preservation and spreading of early traditional jazz.