Friday, October 30, 2009
The Second Line, 1923
Wendell Hall, It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'.
Belle Baker with the Virginians, Jubilee Blues.
I.J. Hochman & the Jewish Orchestra, Rusishe Sher (Russian Sher).
Fiddlin' John Carson, The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Gonna Crow.
Piron's New Orleans Orchestra, West Indies Blues.
Darius Milhaud, La Création du Monde: Premier Tableau.
Jesse Crump, Mr. Crump Rag.
Q. Roscoe Snowden, Misery Blues.
Ollie Powers' Harmony Syncopators, Play That Thing.
Thomas Morris Past Jazz Masters, Original Charleston Strut.
The Georgians, Snakes Hips.
Hitch's Happy Harmonists, Cruel Woman.
Charlie Straight's Rendezvous Orchestra, Henpecked Blues.
Jean Sibelius, Symphony No. 6 in D Minor: allegro molto moderato.
Once the band starts, everybody starts swaying from one side of the street to the other, especially those who drop in and follow the ones who have been to the funeral. These people are known as "the second line" and they may be anyone passing along the street who wants to hear the music. The spirit hits them and they follow.
Louis Armstrong, quoted in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.
"It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'," Wendell Hall's two-million-seller of 1923, is arguably a rock & roll record, at least in spirit. It's got the whole bag: yodels, howls, whines and sneers, riffs, death, puns, general nonsense, bad attitudes, jokes about animals, jokes about sewers, barefoot girls. Everybody from Bob Dylan on down has stolen from it:
Saw a sign in a hardware store:
"Boy wanted, 16 years,"
Now that's too long to wait for a boy,
It brings eyes to my tears
Hall was a red-headed ukulele player from Kansas. He was a song plugger, a vaudeville rambler, a radio man (even got married on the air). "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'" was the first national radio hit, mainly because Hall traveled cross-country in the summer of 1923, playing at over 35 radio stations, touting his record and his sheet music. To plug the latter, Hall, brilliantly and shamelessly, would keep adding verses to the song (reaching 100 at one point) and then reprint the sheet music with his new lines--in this way, he sold over 10 million copies (& many of the verses were wholly plundered from "traditional" folk songs, often by black musicians). He died in 1969, having never come close to that success again. Then again, few could have.
Initially recorded ca. spring 1923; there were several versions cut that year, with varying lyrics, released as Gennett 5271, Edison 51261, and Victor 19171. Hall cut sequel discs in 1924 and 1933. One 1923 cut is in this archive.
Alice Reighly, president of the Anti-Flirt Club, 27 February 1923 (Shorpy). Fourth rule of Anti-Flirt Club: "Don't go out with men you don't know--they may be married, and you may be in for a hair-pulling match."
Bella Becker was born in New York City in 1893: she was singing on the street by the time she was eight and working in a dress factory by age nine (her exact contemporaries were the girls killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire). She escaped to the stage, changed her name to Belle Baker, and became a vaudeville star, to the point where she could call up Irving Berlin and complain that there wasn't "a Belle Baker song" in a new revue (so Berlin drummed up "Blue Skies" for her to debut).
"Jubilee Blues," which Baker cut with the Virginians, is a stage number that swings about as well as the "official" blues being recorded by the likes of Mamie Smith. The Virginians were a spin-off of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra run by Ross Gorman. Recorded 27 August 1923 and released as Victor 19135-B; on Tin Pan Alley Blues.
And I.J. Hochman's Jewish Orchestra offer a version of the "Russian Sher" on disc. A sher is a "scissors dance," basically a type of square dance popular among Eastern European and Russian Jews in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. As with much early klezmer, the melody is carried by fiddle and clarinet, bass by tuba, rhythm by trombones. It's the Yiddish blues, straight from the shetl. This was one of Hochman's rare instrumental cuts--he was mainly an accompanist to singers like Jenny Goldstein. Recorded in December 1922 and released as OKeh 14059 c/w "Kamenetzer Bulgar."(On Klezmer 1910-1942.)
Harold Lloyd, social climber
Fiddlin' is like salvation--free and without price.
Attributed to Fiddlin' John Carson.
Fiddlin' John Carson, born in Fannin County, Georgia, three years after the Civil War ended, was a wildcat fiddler, a one-man song and dance band, a storyteller, a professional hayseed, "a defiler of tradition" (Allen Lowe) who kept 19th Century music alive. He was one of the first professional "hillbilly" musicians to record. A track from his first session, "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Gonna Crow," is a fine example of his sound--both archaic, with the music broken up by Carson's barn dance calls, and modern (the occasional dissonance when he plays "double stops," holding down two strings at once).
You may recall this story: In 1913, a 14-year-old girl named Mary Phagan was killed at her workplace, an Atlanta pencil factory. Her supervisor, a Northern Jewish man named Leo Frank, was convicted of the murder, mainly due to testimony by janitor Jim Conley (who likely was the real killer--he had been found washing stains off his shirt and he had given a series of contradictory statements). Georgia Gov. John Slaton eventually commuted Frank's death sentence.
So Fiddlin' John Carson wrote "The Ballad of Little Mary Phagan," a story of a poor girl murdered by cruel Leo Frank. He sang it at every Frank-related protest rally in a 30-mile radius of Marietta, which were many. After Frank's sentence was commuted, Carson changed the lyric to suggest that a "New York bank" had paid Gov. Slaton off.
One August day in 1915, an armed mob hauled Frank out of prison, drove him 175 miles to Marietta and lynched him. "For audacity and efficiency, it was unparalleled in southern history," C. Vann Woodward later wrote of the Frank lynching. All the day long, while Frank's corpse hung from an oak tree, Carson stood in front of the Marietta courthouse, playing his "Little Mary Phagan" over and over again, while the assembled crowd "cheered and applauded him lustily," according to a contemporary newspaper account.
Carson cut records throughout the '20s and died a happy old man in 1949.
Recorded in Atlanta ca. 14 June 1923 and released as OKeh 4890 c/w "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane."
"Take from the dresser of deal,/Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet/On which she embroidered fantails once/And spread it so as to cover her face"
Armand Piron was Clarence Williams' business partner and a musician in his own right--a violin player, bandleader, songwriter (he composed "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" although Louis Armstrong later complained that he'd been ripped off).
Piron thought "West Indies Blues" by Spencer and Clarence Williams and Edgar Dowell, was a sure-seller, and so recorded three versions of it over a few weeks: this one was cut on 21 December 1923 and released as Columbia 14007-D; on Archive of American Popular Music.
Opening day, Yankees Stadium, April 1923.
The composer Darius Milhaud, visiting the United States for the first time in early 1923, became entranced by jazz, which he heard straight from the source: the Capitol Palace in Harlem, where James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith and the young Duke Ellington were playing nightly. (He may have heard Bessie Smith sing as well, as she was in town during his visit and Milhaud describes having heard "a Negress whose grating voice seemed to come from the depths of the centuries.") Milhaud was already convinced that "animated rhythms," in his words, would be the future of music, and in 1919 had composed a ballet about Carnival filled with Brazilian-influenced rhythms.
Now Milhaud tried to incorporate jazz stylings into classical ballet, arranging an orchestra of what he hoped would be 18 soloists, including a double-bass and a brass section of alto saxophone, trombone, trumpet and French horn. La Création du Monde, in which impressionist jazz serves as the soundtrack to the world's formation, had a scenario, by the poet Blaise Cendrars, allegedly derived from African folklore, which means, in part, having dancers depict "trees uprooting themselves and impregnating the ground with their fruit."
Here's the first tableau (there are five in all, along with an overture), "the chaos before creation," which opens with a violin soloing over a throbbing beat that's very reminiscent of Rite of Spring. When clarinet and trumpet slide in soon afterward, it sounds a bit like an early draft of "Rhapsody in Blue."
La Création du Monde debuted in Paris on 25 October 1923 with "African" sets by Léger. This recording is conducted by Kent Nagano and performed by the Orchestre de l'Opera de Lyon.
Warren C. Huddleston interviewed the pianist Jesse Crump in the fall of 1951, when Crump was still making a living playing around the country. At the time he was in Muncie, Indiana, about to head out to San Francisco. Huddleston tracked down Crump at home, and played him some of his oldest records, including the solo track "Mr. Crump Rag." Crump listened, his eyes closed. "That tune goes a long ways back," he said. In 1923, Crump had been playing at the Golden West Cafe in Indianapolis, and soon afterward he'd meet Ida Cox, who he married, and Jelly Roll Morton, who he rivaled.
Crump once mentioned he was billed as "The Man Who Plays With a Thousand Bands," which meant he accompanied a jukebox. Huddleston went out to see Crump play in Muncie that night. What he heard was pure American music:
[Crump] was playing solo piano at a local spot...blues, boogie, hillbilly, bop. All the request stuff. The bar was next to the railroad yards, and Jesse's piano was forced to compete with switch engines and the constant clash of shuttling freight cars.
"Mr. Crump Rag" was cut on 20 July 1923 but was only released at the time by Gennett as a private pressing; on the awkwardly-titled Male Blues of the '20s.
Who was the mysterious Q. Roscoe Snowden? A black pianist who recorded in the early '20s, mainly as an accompanist for blues singers, he made a pair of solo tracks in 1923 that show a well-developed sense of swing.
"Misery Blues" was recorded in New York in October 1923 and released c/w "Deep Sea Blues" as OKeh 8119; on Piano Blues Vol. 4.
Calvin Coolidge meets the press
Testaments of five lost dance bands:
Ollie Powers, a mysterious figure who may have been a drummer in Chicago, formed something of a knock-off version of King Oliver's band in 1923. But for a knock-off, it was made of pretty quality material including the cornetist Tommy Ladnier and the clarnetist Jimmie Noone (and briefly Louis Armstrong, en route to New York).
"Play That Thing," a hot stomping track, was recorded in September 1923 and released as Puritan 11263/Claxtonola 40263 (Puritan was a Paramount subsidiary, Claxtonola a short-lived Iowa City label that mainly reissued Paramount and Gennett discs). On Chicago Rhythm-Apex Blues.
The cornetist Thomas Morris had been playing jazz in New York since the early '10s, and by the mid-'20s was something of a linchpin of the New York scene, playing with Fats Waller and Mamie Smith, among others. Morris' playing is often used as an example of "classic" early jazz trumpet before the emergence of Louis Armstrong. Morris eventually gave up music, first working as a redcap in Grand Central Station and later joining Father Divine's Universal Peace Mission Movement, changing his name to Brother Pierre and considering the aforementioned Father to be the second coming of Christ. When Sidney Bechet saw him on the street, Morris introduced himself as "St. Peter," much to Bechet's amusement.
The sparkling "Original Charleston Strut," which is enough divinity for me, was cut in February 1923 and released as OKeh 8055 c/w "E Flat Blues No. 2"; on Thomas Morris 1923-1927.
The Georgians were another Paul Whiteman Orchestra spin-off, led by the violinist Paul Specht and dominated by the trumpeter Frank Guarente. "Snakes Hips" was recorded 15 March 1923 and released as Columbia A3864 c/w "Farewell Blues"; on Jazz in Britain.
Gance, La Roue.
Hitch's Happy Harmonists, led by Curtis Hitch, were an early jazz territory band, mainly covering southern Indiana: emblematic of the sort of new "white" jazz brewing up in Indiana during the '20s, they played with Hoagy Carmichael (who recorded "Washboard Blues" with them) and fell entirely under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke's Wolverines, to the point where some Harmonists records sound interchangeable with Wolverines ones.
Their "Cruel Woman" was cut in Richmond, Indiana, on 19 September 1923 and released as Gennett 5286 c/w "Home Brew Blues."
And Charlie Straight, a journeyman Midwestern pianist and bandleader, had formed a nine-man outfit in 1923 that seemed dedicated to pushing ragtime conventions into freer jazz forms. Straight's orchestra at this time was Lee Riley (c), Holmes Coltman (tb), Al Kvale (cl,as), Ray Puttnam (cl,ts), Julian Davidson (bjo), George Hookham (bb), Don Morgan (d). The swinging "Henpecked Blues" was recorded in Chicago in June 1923 and released as Paramount 20244; on Chicago Rhythm.
Brancusi, Bird In Space.
As he no doubt would have preferred, Jean Sibelius seems utterly removed from any other musician or composer in this collection. Born in Finland in 1865, he would become both the soul and the embodiment of an independent Finland, to the point where an image of Sibelius' head was printed on the hundred-markka note (before Finland converted to the euro). He began much in the way of other "nationalist" composers of the late 19th Century like Bartok--digging through national myths and folk songs and composing tone poems. By 1910, much of his efforts had turned to writing symphonies, a form he once described as "a confession of faith at different stages of one's life."
The sixth symphony always reminds me of the scent of the first snow.
Jean Sibelius, 1943.
The Sixth Symphony in D Minor is a bit neglected compared with titanic works like Sibelius' Fourth and Fifth, but its wintry beauty is astonishing. Here's the first movement, which begins with oboe and flute quietly responding to a gorgeous phrase on strings (much of the opening is in the Dorian mode, aligning the work with the mode often used by folk musicians and, in the words of Alex Ross, "with antique modes underpinning the harmony, it's as if the composer were trying to flee into a mythic past").
The symphony was debuted in Helsinki on 19 February 1923; this recording was conducted by Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker.
Next: New People
Lately in Bowieland: karma, curry, pixiephones, Pancho.
|
Wendell Hall, It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'.
Belle Baker with the Virginians, Jubilee Blues.
I.J. Hochman & the Jewish Orchestra, Rusishe Sher (Russian Sher).
Fiddlin' John Carson, The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Gonna Crow.
Piron's New Orleans Orchestra, West Indies Blues.
Darius Milhaud, La Création du Monde: Premier Tableau.
Jesse Crump, Mr. Crump Rag.
Q. Roscoe Snowden, Misery Blues.
Ollie Powers' Harmony Syncopators, Play That Thing.
Thomas Morris Past Jazz Masters, Original Charleston Strut.
The Georgians, Snakes Hips.
Hitch's Happy Harmonists, Cruel Woman.
Charlie Straight's Rendezvous Orchestra, Henpecked Blues.
Jean Sibelius, Symphony No. 6 in D Minor: allegro molto moderato.
Once the band starts, everybody starts swaying from one side of the street to the other, especially those who drop in and follow the ones who have been to the funeral. These people are known as "the second line" and they may be anyone passing along the street who wants to hear the music. The spirit hits them and they follow.
Louis Armstrong, quoted in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.
"It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'," Wendell Hall's two-million-seller of 1923, is arguably a rock & roll record, at least in spirit. It's got the whole bag: yodels, howls, whines and sneers, riffs, death, puns, general nonsense, bad attitudes, jokes about animals, jokes about sewers, barefoot girls. Everybody from Bob Dylan on down has stolen from it:
Saw a sign in a hardware store:
"Boy wanted, 16 years,"
Now that's too long to wait for a boy,
It brings eyes to my tears
Hall was a red-headed ukulele player from Kansas. He was a song plugger, a vaudeville rambler, a radio man (even got married on the air). "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'" was the first national radio hit, mainly because Hall traveled cross-country in the summer of 1923, playing at over 35 radio stations, touting his record and his sheet music. To plug the latter, Hall, brilliantly and shamelessly, would keep adding verses to the song (reaching 100 at one point) and then reprint the sheet music with his new lines--in this way, he sold over 10 million copies (& many of the verses were wholly plundered from "traditional" folk songs, often by black musicians). He died in 1969, having never come close to that success again. Then again, few could have.
Initially recorded ca. spring 1923; there were several versions cut that year, with varying lyrics, released as Gennett 5271, Edison 51261, and Victor 19171. Hall cut sequel discs in 1924 and 1933. One 1923 cut is in this archive.
Alice Reighly, president of the Anti-Flirt Club, 27 February 1923 (Shorpy). Fourth rule of Anti-Flirt Club: "Don't go out with men you don't know--they may be married, and you may be in for a hair-pulling match."
Bella Becker was born in New York City in 1893: she was singing on the street by the time she was eight and working in a dress factory by age nine (her exact contemporaries were the girls killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire). She escaped to the stage, changed her name to Belle Baker, and became a vaudeville star, to the point where she could call up Irving Berlin and complain that there wasn't "a Belle Baker song" in a new revue (so Berlin drummed up "Blue Skies" for her to debut).
"Jubilee Blues," which Baker cut with the Virginians, is a stage number that swings about as well as the "official" blues being recorded by the likes of Mamie Smith. The Virginians were a spin-off of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra run by Ross Gorman. Recorded 27 August 1923 and released as Victor 19135-B; on Tin Pan Alley Blues.
And I.J. Hochman's Jewish Orchestra offer a version of the "Russian Sher" on disc. A sher is a "scissors dance," basically a type of square dance popular among Eastern European and Russian Jews in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. As with much early klezmer, the melody is carried by fiddle and clarinet, bass by tuba, rhythm by trombones. It's the Yiddish blues, straight from the shetl. This was one of Hochman's rare instrumental cuts--he was mainly an accompanist to singers like Jenny Goldstein. Recorded in December 1922 and released as OKeh 14059 c/w "Kamenetzer Bulgar."(On Klezmer 1910-1942.)
Harold Lloyd, social climber
Fiddlin' is like salvation--free and without price.
Attributed to Fiddlin' John Carson.
Fiddlin' John Carson, born in Fannin County, Georgia, three years after the Civil War ended, was a wildcat fiddler, a one-man song and dance band, a storyteller, a professional hayseed, "a defiler of tradition" (Allen Lowe) who kept 19th Century music alive. He was one of the first professional "hillbilly" musicians to record. A track from his first session, "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Gonna Crow," is a fine example of his sound--both archaic, with the music broken up by Carson's barn dance calls, and modern (the occasional dissonance when he plays "double stops," holding down two strings at once).
You may recall this story: In 1913, a 14-year-old girl named Mary Phagan was killed at her workplace, an Atlanta pencil factory. Her supervisor, a Northern Jewish man named Leo Frank, was convicted of the murder, mainly due to testimony by janitor Jim Conley (who likely was the real killer--he had been found washing stains off his shirt and he had given a series of contradictory statements). Georgia Gov. John Slaton eventually commuted Frank's death sentence.
So Fiddlin' John Carson wrote "The Ballad of Little Mary Phagan," a story of a poor girl murdered by cruel Leo Frank. He sang it at every Frank-related protest rally in a 30-mile radius of Marietta, which were many. After Frank's sentence was commuted, Carson changed the lyric to suggest that a "New York bank" had paid Gov. Slaton off.
One August day in 1915, an armed mob hauled Frank out of prison, drove him 175 miles to Marietta and lynched him. "For audacity and efficiency, it was unparalleled in southern history," C. Vann Woodward later wrote of the Frank lynching. All the day long, while Frank's corpse hung from an oak tree, Carson stood in front of the Marietta courthouse, playing his "Little Mary Phagan" over and over again, while the assembled crowd "cheered and applauded him lustily," according to a contemporary newspaper account.
Carson cut records throughout the '20s and died a happy old man in 1949.
Recorded in Atlanta ca. 14 June 1923 and released as OKeh 4890 c/w "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane."
"Take from the dresser of deal,/Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet/On which she embroidered fantails once/And spread it so as to cover her face"
Armand Piron was Clarence Williams' business partner and a musician in his own right--a violin player, bandleader, songwriter (he composed "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" although Louis Armstrong later complained that he'd been ripped off).
Piron thought "West Indies Blues" by Spencer and Clarence Williams and Edgar Dowell, was a sure-seller, and so recorded three versions of it over a few weeks: this one was cut on 21 December 1923 and released as Columbia 14007-D; on Archive of American Popular Music.
Opening day, Yankees Stadium, April 1923.
The composer Darius Milhaud, visiting the United States for the first time in early 1923, became entranced by jazz, which he heard straight from the source: the Capitol Palace in Harlem, where James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith and the young Duke Ellington were playing nightly. (He may have heard Bessie Smith sing as well, as she was in town during his visit and Milhaud describes having heard "a Negress whose grating voice seemed to come from the depths of the centuries.") Milhaud was already convinced that "animated rhythms," in his words, would be the future of music, and in 1919 had composed a ballet about Carnival filled with Brazilian-influenced rhythms.
Now Milhaud tried to incorporate jazz stylings into classical ballet, arranging an orchestra of what he hoped would be 18 soloists, including a double-bass and a brass section of alto saxophone, trombone, trumpet and French horn. La Création du Monde, in which impressionist jazz serves as the soundtrack to the world's formation, had a scenario, by the poet Blaise Cendrars, allegedly derived from African folklore, which means, in part, having dancers depict "trees uprooting themselves and impregnating the ground with their fruit."
Here's the first tableau (there are five in all, along with an overture), "the chaos before creation," which opens with a violin soloing over a throbbing beat that's very reminiscent of Rite of Spring. When clarinet and trumpet slide in soon afterward, it sounds a bit like an early draft of "Rhapsody in Blue."
La Création du Monde debuted in Paris on 25 October 1923 with "African" sets by Léger. This recording is conducted by Kent Nagano and performed by the Orchestre de l'Opera de Lyon.
Warren C. Huddleston interviewed the pianist Jesse Crump in the fall of 1951, when Crump was still making a living playing around the country. At the time he was in Muncie, Indiana, about to head out to San Francisco. Huddleston tracked down Crump at home, and played him some of his oldest records, including the solo track "Mr. Crump Rag." Crump listened, his eyes closed. "That tune goes a long ways back," he said. In 1923, Crump had been playing at the Golden West Cafe in Indianapolis, and soon afterward he'd meet Ida Cox, who he married, and Jelly Roll Morton, who he rivaled.
Crump once mentioned he was billed as "The Man Who Plays With a Thousand Bands," which meant he accompanied a jukebox. Huddleston went out to see Crump play in Muncie that night. What he heard was pure American music:
[Crump] was playing solo piano at a local spot...blues, boogie, hillbilly, bop. All the request stuff. The bar was next to the railroad yards, and Jesse's piano was forced to compete with switch engines and the constant clash of shuttling freight cars.
"Mr. Crump Rag" was cut on 20 July 1923 but was only released at the time by Gennett as a private pressing; on the awkwardly-titled Male Blues of the '20s.
Who was the mysterious Q. Roscoe Snowden? A black pianist who recorded in the early '20s, mainly as an accompanist for blues singers, he made a pair of solo tracks in 1923 that show a well-developed sense of swing.
"Misery Blues" was recorded in New York in October 1923 and released c/w "Deep Sea Blues" as OKeh 8119; on Piano Blues Vol. 4.
Calvin Coolidge meets the press
Testaments of five lost dance bands:
Ollie Powers, a mysterious figure who may have been a drummer in Chicago, formed something of a knock-off version of King Oliver's band in 1923. But for a knock-off, it was made of pretty quality material including the cornetist Tommy Ladnier and the clarnetist Jimmie Noone (and briefly Louis Armstrong, en route to New York).
"Play That Thing," a hot stomping track, was recorded in September 1923 and released as Puritan 11263/Claxtonola 40263 (Puritan was a Paramount subsidiary, Claxtonola a short-lived Iowa City label that mainly reissued Paramount and Gennett discs). On Chicago Rhythm-Apex Blues.
The cornetist Thomas Morris had been playing jazz in New York since the early '10s, and by the mid-'20s was something of a linchpin of the New York scene, playing with Fats Waller and Mamie Smith, among others. Morris' playing is often used as an example of "classic" early jazz trumpet before the emergence of Louis Armstrong. Morris eventually gave up music, first working as a redcap in Grand Central Station and later joining Father Divine's Universal Peace Mission Movement, changing his name to Brother Pierre and considering the aforementioned Father to be the second coming of Christ. When Sidney Bechet saw him on the street, Morris introduced himself as "St. Peter," much to Bechet's amusement.
The sparkling "Original Charleston Strut," which is enough divinity for me, was cut in February 1923 and released as OKeh 8055 c/w "E Flat Blues No. 2"; on Thomas Morris 1923-1927.
The Georgians were another Paul Whiteman Orchestra spin-off, led by the violinist Paul Specht and dominated by the trumpeter Frank Guarente. "Snakes Hips" was recorded 15 March 1923 and released as Columbia A3864 c/w "Farewell Blues"; on Jazz in Britain.
Gance, La Roue.
Hitch's Happy Harmonists, led by Curtis Hitch, were an early jazz territory band, mainly covering southern Indiana: emblematic of the sort of new "white" jazz brewing up in Indiana during the '20s, they played with Hoagy Carmichael (who recorded "Washboard Blues" with them) and fell entirely under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke's Wolverines, to the point where some Harmonists records sound interchangeable with Wolverines ones.
Their "Cruel Woman" was cut in Richmond, Indiana, on 19 September 1923 and released as Gennett 5286 c/w "Home Brew Blues."
And Charlie Straight, a journeyman Midwestern pianist and bandleader, had formed a nine-man outfit in 1923 that seemed dedicated to pushing ragtime conventions into freer jazz forms. Straight's orchestra at this time was Lee Riley (c), Holmes Coltman (tb), Al Kvale (cl,as), Ray Puttnam (cl,ts), Julian Davidson (bjo), George Hookham (bb), Don Morgan (d). The swinging "Henpecked Blues" was recorded in Chicago in June 1923 and released as Paramount 20244; on Chicago Rhythm.
Brancusi, Bird In Space.
As he no doubt would have preferred, Jean Sibelius seems utterly removed from any other musician or composer in this collection. Born in Finland in 1865, he would become both the soul and the embodiment of an independent Finland, to the point where an image of Sibelius' head was printed on the hundred-markka note (before Finland converted to the euro). He began much in the way of other "nationalist" composers of the late 19th Century like Bartok--digging through national myths and folk songs and composing tone poems. By 1910, much of his efforts had turned to writing symphonies, a form he once described as "a confession of faith at different stages of one's life."
The sixth symphony always reminds me of the scent of the first snow.
Jean Sibelius, 1943.
The Sixth Symphony in D Minor is a bit neglected compared with titanic works like Sibelius' Fourth and Fifth, but its wintry beauty is astonishing. Here's the first movement, which begins with oboe and flute quietly responding to a gorgeous phrase on strings (much of the opening is in the Dorian mode, aligning the work with the mode often used by folk musicians and, in the words of Alex Ross, "with antique modes underpinning the harmony, it's as if the composer were trying to flee into a mythic past").
The symphony was debuted in Helsinki on 19 February 1923; this recording was conducted by Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker.
Next: New People
Lately in Bowieland: karma, curry, pixiephones, Pancho.
Friday, October 16, 2009
A Weary Anniversary
Ronnie Lane, Anniversary.
Count Basie, Jive At Five.
Willie Brown, Future Blues.
They were wheeling wheeling in each other's arms heedless at the far end where they had drawn up one of the white blinds. Above a rather low ceiling five great chandeliers swept one after the other almost to the waxed parquet floor reflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single sparkle of a distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.
Henry Green, Loving, 1945.
Today marks the fifth anniversary of Locust St. I don't know who, if anyone, has been reading this thing since 2004 but if so, here's to your perseverance and good taste.
This blog will very likely be over and done a year from now. It's time, you know? A new decade coming. I'm getting older, you're getting older, your children are getting older. But I do hope to wind it down with some measure of grace, or at least a few more good tunes.
It's a wistful day but a fine one. I started this when I was living in New York and was married: now I'm neither. I called it Locust St. because that's what I looked at every morning from my desk, and the name's become, over the years, a symbol of a passed life. So you could say the title grew into itself.
Happy autumn,
C.O.
|
Ronnie Lane, Anniversary.
Count Basie, Jive At Five.
Willie Brown, Future Blues.
They were wheeling wheeling in each other's arms heedless at the far end where they had drawn up one of the white blinds. Above a rather low ceiling five great chandeliers swept one after the other almost to the waxed parquet floor reflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single sparkle of a distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.
Henry Green, Loving, 1945.
Today marks the fifth anniversary of Locust St. I don't know who, if anyone, has been reading this thing since 2004 but if so, here's to your perseverance and good taste.
This blog will very likely be over and done a year from now. It's time, you know? A new decade coming. I'm getting older, you're getting older, your children are getting older. But I do hope to wind it down with some measure of grace, or at least a few more good tunes.
It's a wistful day but a fine one. I started this when I was living in New York and was married: now I'm neither. I called it Locust St. because that's what I looked at every morning from my desk, and the name's become, over the years, a symbol of a passed life. So you could say the title grew into itself.
Happy autumn,
C.O.
Friday, October 02, 2009
The Imperial Roman Jazz, 1923
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Chimes Blues.
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Snake Rag.
Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Joys.
Jelly Roll Morton, Wolverine Blues.
Clarence Williams' Blue Five, Kansas City Man Blues.
Mamie Smith and the Harlem Trio, Lady Luck Blues.
James P. Johnson, Scouting Around.
Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, The Dicty Blues.
Bessie Smith, Jail House Blues.
Bessie Smith, Cemetery Blues.
Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Elephant's Wobble.
Ada Brown with Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Ill Natured Blues.
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Working Man Blues.
When Caesar did the Chicago
He was a graceful child,
Those sacred chickens
Just raised the dickens
The Vestal Virgins went wild.
Whenever the Nervii got nervy
He gave them an awful razz
They shook in their shoes
with the Consular Blues
The Imperial Roman jazz.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Porcelain and Pink" (collected in Tales of the Jazz Age, 1923).
The harvest of a dozen days in 1923, year of wonders:
April 5, Richmond, Indiana:
"Chimes Blues," one of the tracks recorded by Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in their initial session, has the band's new trumpeter's debut solo on disc. The track serves as a historical processional: it opens with classic New Orleans polyphony, thins to a string of spotlit players (Johnny Dodds' clarinet, Lil Hardin's piano chimes) and then Louis Armstrong, with his two-chorus self-introduction, brings the future with him.
With Baby Dodds (d), Honore Dutrey on trombone and Bill Johnson on banjo. Released as Gennett 5135 c/w "Froggie Moore"; on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
June 22, Chicago:
Oliver's band both embodied New Orleans (its records are the summation of three decades of New Orleans jazz playing) and looked beyond it. After all, Oliver's group in 1923 was a Chicago dance band. As Allen Lowe wrote, Oliver's band were not traditionalists so much as a pack of dedicated modernists, looking to make commercial records by raiding choice pieces from the past and arranging them in new shapes.
Tracks like "Snake Rag" and "Jazzin' Babies Blues," the former recorded on this date, document the collective Oliver sound at its peak, in which a four-horn ensemble seemed like one hydra-headed player. "Snake Rag" is tight and relentless: listen to the chutes-and-ladders hornplay of Oliver and Armstrong, followed by Dutrey's retorts on trombone.
Released as OKeh 4933 (an earlier version was cut in April for Gennett) c/w "High Society Rag"; on Archive of American Pop.
July 17, Richmond, Ind.:
Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was born in 1890 but he always claimed he'd arrived a few years before. His rejiggered birthyear (1885, sometimes) was convenient because he then could argue that he had invented jazz by himself, sometime around 1902, when he was actually only about 12.
Whatever age he was, Morton left New Orleans in 1907 and would never come back. He became a pimp, a pool shark, a roving gambler, a whorehouse pianist, a brutal cutting contest pro, a night club impresario, a comedian. He was in Tulsa, Chicago, Los Angeles, Gulfport, Mississippi. He met James P. Johnson in New York, W.C. Handy in Memphis. He asked Handy's group to play a blues, to which Handy replied that "the blues couldn't be played by a band." A proposition Morton would dedicate himself to disproving. Bunk Johnson recalled seeing Morton in Columbus, at the Great Southern Hotel, "playing waltzes and rags for the white people."
And somewhere on the road during these years Morton wrote some of the 20th Century's greatest works for solo piano: "New Orleans Blues (or Joys)," "The Pearls," "King Porter Stomp," "Jelly Roll Blues," "Wolverines."
Morton said he'd always been a jazz player. There was a precise difference: ragtime was a dialect, jazz was a language. No, better still, ragtime was a sect, jazz a religion. Ragtime had its standards and restrictions; jazz had to have nuance and variety, contrast--melodically, rhythmically--and the ability to move, to think with your hands. (Of course, Morton was greatly indebted to ragtime, having sent Scott Joplin compositions for review (possibly "King Porter Stomp"), and works like "Grandpa's Spells" are basically tricked-up rags.)
In 1923, he returned to Chicago and began making records. Among the first were six solo piano tracks, including, on this date, "New Orleans Joys." "Joys" isn't dramatic: there are no pounded chords, no vaults across the keyboard. In true American style, it's built upon ratifying the separation of powers--Morton's right hand plays independent of his left (sometimes in different tempos), so he keeps the beat while simultaneously improvising and developing melodies. Morton becomes a self-contained jazz band of one: playing melodies, advancing harmonies, providing the rhythm.
"New Orleans Joys" was released as Gennett 5486; on 1923/1924.
July 18, Richmond, Ind.:
The next day, Morton recorded "Wolverine Blues." Morton's original title was "Wolverines," and he always resented that a publisher renamed it--"it's not a blues," he said, which is true enough. It's something of a mutated rag, which Morton smooths out to make a canvas for a series of improvisations. The middle section, with its chiming block chords, suspends the piece in midair for the duration of a long held breath.
"Wolverine Blues" was released as Gennett 5289; on 1923-1924.
July 30, New York:
Bechet (rear) with Benny Peyton's Jazz Kings, 1920
In 1918 a conductor named Ernest Ansermet wrote a piece in a Swiss music magazine, Revue Romande, about a musician he had noticed on a recent tour. Ansermet had just conducted the world premiere of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, a piece experimenting with jazz sounds, and here he had found the real thing. "...An extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet. I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius." It was the 20-year-old Sidney Bechet, playing in Europe at the time with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra.
By 1923, Bechet was back in the U.S. (he'd been deported from the U.K. for assault) and had begun replacing his clarinet with the soprano saxophone, which provided a wider, richer tone and greater ease of use. He continued to work in ensembles but he wasn't cut out for the background. Where Louis Armstrong, his only real rival in the early '20s, could still work as part of a machine (as heard in the Oliver band), Bechet could only be singular. He stood out for his piercing tone and his intense vibrato as well as his musical intelligence; his solos were filled with chords built of wide intervals, yet he could loop them together into a single smooth line.
"Wild Cat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues," recorded on this date, are Bechet's first extant appearances on record (on soprano sax). Already the band, led by Clarence Williams, seems like the supporting act. With Thomas Morris (co), John Mayfield (tb), Williams (p) and Buddy Christian (d).
Released as OKeh 4925; on Young Sidney Bechet.
August 5, New York:
It looks on paper like the collision of two primal forces: Bechet looking to make his name and Mamie Smith aiming to keep her crown as queen of the blues. It winds up as a workable partnership. Bechet has a less cluttered stage (he's joined by just Clarence Williams on piano and Buddy Christian on banjo), giving him room for a beauty of a solo that opens with a run of long, gorgeous notes. And Smith basks in the glow, draws down her own heat. In the '50s, Bechet recalled this track as being one of his favorite performances.
Released as OKeh 4926-B c/w "Kansas City Man Blues"; on Mamie Smith Vol. 3.
August 8, New York:
Amidst the debuts and revolutions, James P. Johnson quietly kept drafting the basics of jazz piano. By 1923, with tracks like "Scouting Around," he had developed an ebullient style of syncopation, the sound of a happy internal conversation.
Released as OKeh 4937; out of print at the moment.
August 9, New York:
Fletcher Henderson had debuted his new jazz band early in the summer of '23 at New York's Club Alabam, which was in the Nora Bayes Theatre on West 44th St. The Club had been looking for a band to back its new "Negro floor show" and Henderson's group won the audition (Henderson was appointed leader in part because he was a college graduate).
The Henderson Orchestra's debut recording, "The Dicty Blues," was a Henderson original arranged by Don Redman, who plays clarinet. The 18-year old Coleman Hawkins has his inaugural solo on tenor saxophone, one that suggests the makings of a thousand more to come--as Gunther Schuller noted, from the start Hawkins seemed as though he intended to cover the ranges of three saxophones (alto, tenor and baritone) with just a tenor sax. Here, Hawkins pushes the limits of the tenor sax's upper range, as if looking to supplant Redman's clarinet midway through his own song.
With Henderson on piano, Elmer Chambers (tp), Teddy Nixon (tb), Charlie Dixon (banjo) and possibly Billy Fowler (baritone sax). Released as Vocalion B-14654; on A Study in Frustration.
September 21, New York:
Bessie Smith's "Jail House Blues" starts with what seems like a basic opening line:
Thirty days in jail
with my back turned to the wall
She turns it into blues poetry, centering her force upon a few words, each of which she catches, elongates, drags upward or downward (the repeat of "turned to the wall," for instance, Smith uses to fill out the two bars where normally a trumpet or piano would've come in---she stretches the phrase into a long moan).
So it actually should read:
Thirty DAYS
in JAIL
with my BACK
TURNED
to the
WALL
TURRRRNED
to the
WALLLLL
It's only the first verse. With Irving Johns on piano. Released as Columbia 4001; on Complete Recordings.
September 26, New York:
A week later, Smith returned to the studio to cut "Cemetery Blues" and "Graveyard Dream Blues": death dreams, solitary trips to hell, hot graveyard sex.
Jimmy Jones is the pianist. Released as Columbia 13001; on Complete Recordings.
@ late September or early October, St. Louis:
The pianist Bennie Moten may not seem worthy of our pantheon here--his is the most obscure name. But Moten is an underrated bandleader, his group's style emblematic of the emerging Southwestern jazz scene. Much of his band would form the heart of the Count Basie Orchestra in the mid-'30s.
"Elephant's Wobble," one of Moten's first-recorded tracks, is raw and country, chawbacon jazz. There's nothing like the rhythmic sophistication of Oliver's or even Henderson's ensembles here, just a thick, steady stomp and a swaggering three-man horn section playing mainly simple "head" arrangements well (with future Cab Calloway star Lammar Wright on trumpet playing the carnivalesque main theme).
At the same session, Moten's band backed the fine, forgotten blues singer Ada Brown, his band providing a brew of ragtime and blues to match Brown's vocal on "Ill Natured Blues"
With Thamon Hayes (tb), Woody Walder (cl, sax), Sam Tall (banjo), Willie Hall (d). "Elephant's Wobble" (often called "Elephant Wobble", I don't know which is correct) was released as OKeh 8100 (on 1923-1927) and Brown's "Ill Natured Blues" as OKeh 8123 (OKeh Sessions).
October 5, Richmond, Ind.:
"Working Man Blues" partially marks the end of the classic King Oliver lineup. It's one of the last chances for Oliver to outshine his apprentice Armstrong, and as the performance builds to a close, Oliver moves directly up to the microphone and hits, mainly on the second beat, with a flurry of three-note bursts.
In six months' time, Armstrong would leave the group; a few months later, he headed for New York.
Released as Gennett 5275 c/w "Zulu's Ball" (the band also cut a version for OKeh later in October that's almost as good); on The Complete Set.
Top: Marathon dancers, Washington DC, 20 April 1923 (Library of Congress collection).
Sources: Much credit and insight owed to Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz.
Next: The Second Line
Lately in Bowieland: Murder, drugs, dreams, monks, gnomes.
|
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Chimes Blues.
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Snake Rag.
Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Joys.
Jelly Roll Morton, Wolverine Blues.
Clarence Williams' Blue Five, Kansas City Man Blues.
Mamie Smith and the Harlem Trio, Lady Luck Blues.
James P. Johnson, Scouting Around.
Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, The Dicty Blues.
Bessie Smith, Jail House Blues.
Bessie Smith, Cemetery Blues.
Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Elephant's Wobble.
Ada Brown with Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Ill Natured Blues.
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Working Man Blues.
When Caesar did the Chicago
He was a graceful child,
Those sacred chickens
Just raised the dickens
The Vestal Virgins went wild.
Whenever the Nervii got nervy
He gave them an awful razz
They shook in their shoes
with the Consular Blues
The Imperial Roman jazz.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Porcelain and Pink" (collected in Tales of the Jazz Age, 1923).
The harvest of a dozen days in 1923, year of wonders:
April 5, Richmond, Indiana:
"Chimes Blues," one of the tracks recorded by Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in their initial session, has the band's new trumpeter's debut solo on disc. The track serves as a historical processional: it opens with classic New Orleans polyphony, thins to a string of spotlit players (Johnny Dodds' clarinet, Lil Hardin's piano chimes) and then Louis Armstrong, with his two-chorus self-introduction, brings the future with him.
With Baby Dodds (d), Honore Dutrey on trombone and Bill Johnson on banjo. Released as Gennett 5135 c/w "Froggie Moore"; on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
June 22, Chicago:
Oliver's band both embodied New Orleans (its records are the summation of three decades of New Orleans jazz playing) and looked beyond it. After all, Oliver's group in 1923 was a Chicago dance band. As Allen Lowe wrote, Oliver's band were not traditionalists so much as a pack of dedicated modernists, looking to make commercial records by raiding choice pieces from the past and arranging them in new shapes.
Tracks like "Snake Rag" and "Jazzin' Babies Blues," the former recorded on this date, document the collective Oliver sound at its peak, in which a four-horn ensemble seemed like one hydra-headed player. "Snake Rag" is tight and relentless: listen to the chutes-and-ladders hornplay of Oliver and Armstrong, followed by Dutrey's retorts on trombone.
Released as OKeh 4933 (an earlier version was cut in April for Gennett) c/w "High Society Rag"; on Archive of American Pop.
July 17, Richmond, Ind.:
Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was born in 1890 but he always claimed he'd arrived a few years before. His rejiggered birthyear (1885, sometimes) was convenient because he then could argue that he had invented jazz by himself, sometime around 1902, when he was actually only about 12.
Whatever age he was, Morton left New Orleans in 1907 and would never come back. He became a pimp, a pool shark, a roving gambler, a whorehouse pianist, a brutal cutting contest pro, a night club impresario, a comedian. He was in Tulsa, Chicago, Los Angeles, Gulfport, Mississippi. He met James P. Johnson in New York, W.C. Handy in Memphis. He asked Handy's group to play a blues, to which Handy replied that "the blues couldn't be played by a band." A proposition Morton would dedicate himself to disproving. Bunk Johnson recalled seeing Morton in Columbus, at the Great Southern Hotel, "playing waltzes and rags for the white people."
And somewhere on the road during these years Morton wrote some of the 20th Century's greatest works for solo piano: "New Orleans Blues (or Joys)," "The Pearls," "King Porter Stomp," "Jelly Roll Blues," "Wolverines."
Morton said he'd always been a jazz player. There was a precise difference: ragtime was a dialect, jazz was a language. No, better still, ragtime was a sect, jazz a religion. Ragtime had its standards and restrictions; jazz had to have nuance and variety, contrast--melodically, rhythmically--and the ability to move, to think with your hands. (Of course, Morton was greatly indebted to ragtime, having sent Scott Joplin compositions for review (possibly "King Porter Stomp"), and works like "Grandpa's Spells" are basically tricked-up rags.)
In 1923, he returned to Chicago and began making records. Among the first were six solo piano tracks, including, on this date, "New Orleans Joys." "Joys" isn't dramatic: there are no pounded chords, no vaults across the keyboard. In true American style, it's built upon ratifying the separation of powers--Morton's right hand plays independent of his left (sometimes in different tempos), so he keeps the beat while simultaneously improvising and developing melodies. Morton becomes a self-contained jazz band of one: playing melodies, advancing harmonies, providing the rhythm.
"New Orleans Joys" was released as Gennett 5486; on 1923/1924.
July 18, Richmond, Ind.:
The next day, Morton recorded "Wolverine Blues." Morton's original title was "Wolverines," and he always resented that a publisher renamed it--"it's not a blues," he said, which is true enough. It's something of a mutated rag, which Morton smooths out to make a canvas for a series of improvisations. The middle section, with its chiming block chords, suspends the piece in midair for the duration of a long held breath.
"Wolverine Blues" was released as Gennett 5289; on 1923-1924.
July 30, New York:
Bechet (rear) with Benny Peyton's Jazz Kings, 1920
In 1918 a conductor named Ernest Ansermet wrote a piece in a Swiss music magazine, Revue Romande, about a musician he had noticed on a recent tour. Ansermet had just conducted the world premiere of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, a piece experimenting with jazz sounds, and here he had found the real thing. "...An extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet. I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius." It was the 20-year-old Sidney Bechet, playing in Europe at the time with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra.
By 1923, Bechet was back in the U.S. (he'd been deported from the U.K. for assault) and had begun replacing his clarinet with the soprano saxophone, which provided a wider, richer tone and greater ease of use. He continued to work in ensembles but he wasn't cut out for the background. Where Louis Armstrong, his only real rival in the early '20s, could still work as part of a machine (as heard in the Oliver band), Bechet could only be singular. He stood out for his piercing tone and his intense vibrato as well as his musical intelligence; his solos were filled with chords built of wide intervals, yet he could loop them together into a single smooth line.
"Wild Cat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues," recorded on this date, are Bechet's first extant appearances on record (on soprano sax). Already the band, led by Clarence Williams, seems like the supporting act. With Thomas Morris (co), John Mayfield (tb), Williams (p) and Buddy Christian (d).
Released as OKeh 4925; on Young Sidney Bechet.
August 5, New York:
It looks on paper like the collision of two primal forces: Bechet looking to make his name and Mamie Smith aiming to keep her crown as queen of the blues. It winds up as a workable partnership. Bechet has a less cluttered stage (he's joined by just Clarence Williams on piano and Buddy Christian on banjo), giving him room for a beauty of a solo that opens with a run of long, gorgeous notes. And Smith basks in the glow, draws down her own heat. In the '50s, Bechet recalled this track as being one of his favorite performances.
Released as OKeh 4926-B c/w "Kansas City Man Blues"; on Mamie Smith Vol. 3.
August 8, New York:
Amidst the debuts and revolutions, James P. Johnson quietly kept drafting the basics of jazz piano. By 1923, with tracks like "Scouting Around," he had developed an ebullient style of syncopation, the sound of a happy internal conversation.
Released as OKeh 4937; out of print at the moment.
August 9, New York:
Fletcher Henderson had debuted his new jazz band early in the summer of '23 at New York's Club Alabam, which was in the Nora Bayes Theatre on West 44th St. The Club had been looking for a band to back its new "Negro floor show" and Henderson's group won the audition (Henderson was appointed leader in part because he was a college graduate).
The Henderson Orchestra's debut recording, "The Dicty Blues," was a Henderson original arranged by Don Redman, who plays clarinet. The 18-year old Coleman Hawkins has his inaugural solo on tenor saxophone, one that suggests the makings of a thousand more to come--as Gunther Schuller noted, from the start Hawkins seemed as though he intended to cover the ranges of three saxophones (alto, tenor and baritone) with just a tenor sax. Here, Hawkins pushes the limits of the tenor sax's upper range, as if looking to supplant Redman's clarinet midway through his own song.
With Henderson on piano, Elmer Chambers (tp), Teddy Nixon (tb), Charlie Dixon (banjo) and possibly Billy Fowler (baritone sax). Released as Vocalion B-14654; on A Study in Frustration.
September 21, New York:
Bessie Smith's "Jail House Blues" starts with what seems like a basic opening line:
Thirty days in jail
with my back turned to the wall
She turns it into blues poetry, centering her force upon a few words, each of which she catches, elongates, drags upward or downward (the repeat of "turned to the wall," for instance, Smith uses to fill out the two bars where normally a trumpet or piano would've come in---she stretches the phrase into a long moan).
So it actually should read:
Thirty DAYS
in JAIL
with my BACK
TURNED
to the
WALL
TURRRRNED
to the
WALLLLL
It's only the first verse. With Irving Johns on piano. Released as Columbia 4001; on Complete Recordings.
September 26, New York:
A week later, Smith returned to the studio to cut "Cemetery Blues" and "Graveyard Dream Blues": death dreams, solitary trips to hell, hot graveyard sex.
Jimmy Jones is the pianist. Released as Columbia 13001; on Complete Recordings.
@ late September or early October, St. Louis:
The pianist Bennie Moten may not seem worthy of our pantheon here--his is the most obscure name. But Moten is an underrated bandleader, his group's style emblematic of the emerging Southwestern jazz scene. Much of his band would form the heart of the Count Basie Orchestra in the mid-'30s.
"Elephant's Wobble," one of Moten's first-recorded tracks, is raw and country, chawbacon jazz. There's nothing like the rhythmic sophistication of Oliver's or even Henderson's ensembles here, just a thick, steady stomp and a swaggering three-man horn section playing mainly simple "head" arrangements well (with future Cab Calloway star Lammar Wright on trumpet playing the carnivalesque main theme).
At the same session, Moten's band backed the fine, forgotten blues singer Ada Brown, his band providing a brew of ragtime and blues to match Brown's vocal on "Ill Natured Blues"
With Thamon Hayes (tb), Woody Walder (cl, sax), Sam Tall (banjo), Willie Hall (d). "Elephant's Wobble" (often called "Elephant Wobble", I don't know which is correct) was released as OKeh 8100 (on 1923-1927) and Brown's "Ill Natured Blues" as OKeh 8123 (OKeh Sessions).
October 5, Richmond, Ind.:
"Working Man Blues" partially marks the end of the classic King Oliver lineup. It's one of the last chances for Oliver to outshine his apprentice Armstrong, and as the performance builds to a close, Oliver moves directly up to the microphone and hits, mainly on the second beat, with a flurry of three-note bursts.
In six months' time, Armstrong would leave the group; a few months later, he headed for New York.
Released as Gennett 5275 c/w "Zulu's Ball" (the band also cut a version for OKeh later in October that's almost as good); on The Complete Set.
Top: Marathon dancers, Washington DC, 20 April 1923 (Library of Congress collection).
Sources: Much credit and insight owed to Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz.
Next: The Second Line
Lately in Bowieland: Murder, drugs, dreams, monks, gnomes.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Decade: 2 (2002-2003)
the unknown bomber, Baghdad, 2003
Ivor Cutler, Once a Fortnight.
The Mekons, Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem.
The New Pornographers, The Laws Have Changed.
Auguries and imprecations: Ivor Cutler, the last eccentric: recorded in 2002, dead in 2006; Mekons on OOOH!, their best LP of the decade, 2002; New Pornographers on 2003's Electric Version ("What you have already lost, consider as totally lost").
Roberto Bolaño, near his death in July 2003
Matthew Shipp, Almighty Fortress Is Our God.
Jason Moran, Planet Rock.
Brad Mehldau Trio, Paranoid Android.
Jazz piano, 21st Century style: Matthew Shipp breaking down Martin Luther on the nearly-out-of-print Songs (recorded 18 November 2001, rel. 2002); Jason Moran speaking to Afrika Bambaataa (recorded 12 April 2002; on Modernistic); Brad Mehldau infatuated with Radiohead, on Largo, 2002.
D'Angelo schools Willis and Bodie
Mr. Lif, Live From the Plantation.
People Under the Stairs, The Dig.
Talib Kweli, Get By.
Scarface, On My Block.
The Blind Boys of Alabama, Way Down In the Hole.
I step into my work place with my work face: Mr. Lif on I Phantom; People Under the Stairs on OST; Talib Kweli on Quality; Scarface on The Fix; and finally, the best version of Tom Waits' "Down In the Hole," The Wire's theme song (soundtrack). All '02.
Jennifer Pastor, Stills from 'The Perfect Ride,' 2003.
Cassandra Wilson, You Gotta Move.
Norah Jones, Seven Years.
Neko Case, I Wish I Was the Moon.
Laura Cantrell, Rain Boy.
Voices: Wilson on Belly of the Sun (2002); Jones, whose backlash seems to be finally over, on her first album; Case's should-be standard is on '02's Blacklisted and Cantrell's version of Bruce Brakefield's "Rain Boy" was recorded at the late John Peel's studio in 2003 and is available on her website.
Christian Holstad, Mount Rushmore, 2003.
Richard Thompson, So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo.
Orchestra Baobab, Bul Ma Miin.
The Clientele, The Violet Hour.
Ekkehard Ehlers, Plays John Cassavetes 2.
Tall Dwarfs, Cascade.
Travels, time, stasis: Thompson's version of Orazio Vecchi's "So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo," "elliptically smutty" Renaissance pop, is from his 1000 Years of Popular Music; Orchestra Baobob, from Senegal, on 2002's Specialist In All Styles; The Clientele, title track of their fine 2003 LP; Ehlers on Plays, 2002 (fine use of the Beatles' "Good Night"); Dwarfs on The Sky Above, The Mud Below (2003).
Jonathan Monk, Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before, 2003.
The Exploding Hearts, Modern Kicks.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Ballad of the Sin Eater.
Supergrass, Grace.
Rock & roll, straight up: the Exploding Hearts (horribly, 3/4ths of the band was killed in an auto accident in 2003) on Guitar Romantic; Leo's ode to his early band is on 2003's Hearts of Oak; Supergrass is on 2002's Life on Other Planets.
Medasyn with Lady Sovereign, Shystie, Frost P and Zuz Rock, The Battle.
N.E.R.D., Run to The Sun.
War, peace: The world meets one Louise Harman, AKA Lady Sovereign, all of 17 years old ("none of your words can 'urt me fool/none of your comebacks mean fook all!"), on Medasyn's 12" single "The Battle," 2003; N.E.R.D. on 2002's In Search Of.
Michaël Borremans, The German (Part 2), 2002.
Imperial Teen, Ivanka.
Dean and Britta, Night Nurse.
Pinmonkey, Fly.
The Essex Green, The Late Great Cassiopia.
Pop: "Ivanka" leads off Imperial Teen's On; Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, the handsomest couple in rock music, start their first solo record L'Avventura (2003) with "Night Nurse"; Pinmonkey turns Sugar Ray's "Fly" into the bluegrass tune it apparently was always meant to be, on 2002's Pinmonkey; Essex Green on The Long Goodbye, 2003.
Ginuwine, Hell Yeah.
Drive-By Truckers, Marry Me.
OutKast, The Way You Move.
David Bowie, Baby Loves That Way.
Original Sinners, Whiskey For Supper.
Lust, gluttony, matrimony, general decadence: Ginuwine's 2003 single is on Hits; Drive-By Truckers' "Marry Me" on Decoration Day, 2003; OutKast on Speakerboxxx/Love Below; Bowie recorded this remake of his 1965 mod single for a stillborn, unreleased LP Toy, and eventually released the track on the "Everyone Says 'Hi'" EP in 2002; Exene Cervenka's Original Sinners rip through "Whiskey For Supper" on their first s/t record, 2002.
"MISSION-The primary mission of the Department is to--(A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States;(B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism;(C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States..."
Guided By Voices, The Best of Jill Hives.
Belle and Sebastian, I'm a Cuckoo.
Realities, rock and roll: "The Best of Jill Hives," the last great Guided by Voices song, sums up the GBV experience: greatest hits for a world that no longer needed them; "I'm a Cuckoo" is, in part, the story of the breakup of Isobel Campbell and Stuart Murdoch, the death of one band (the original Belle and Sebastian) and the start of another one; it's the sad liberation that comes when you realize your old dreams are over and done, and the sense of gratitude you have to the past, regardless of its pain. It was that sort of decade.
On Earthquake Glue and Dear Catastrophe Waitress, both 2003.
Liam Lynch, United States of Whatever.
Charlie Haden, America the Beautiful.
America!!!: Whatever, beautiful.
|
the unknown bomber, Baghdad, 2003
Ivor Cutler, Once a Fortnight.
The Mekons, Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem.
The New Pornographers, The Laws Have Changed.
Auguries and imprecations: Ivor Cutler, the last eccentric: recorded in 2002, dead in 2006; Mekons on OOOH!, their best LP of the decade, 2002; New Pornographers on 2003's Electric Version ("What you have already lost, consider as totally lost").
Roberto Bolaño, near his death in July 2003
Matthew Shipp, Almighty Fortress Is Our God.
Jason Moran, Planet Rock.
Brad Mehldau Trio, Paranoid Android.
Jazz piano, 21st Century style: Matthew Shipp breaking down Martin Luther on the nearly-out-of-print Songs (recorded 18 November 2001, rel. 2002); Jason Moran speaking to Afrika Bambaataa (recorded 12 April 2002; on Modernistic); Brad Mehldau infatuated with Radiohead, on Largo, 2002.
D'Angelo schools Willis and Bodie
Mr. Lif, Live From the Plantation.
People Under the Stairs, The Dig.
Talib Kweli, Get By.
Scarface, On My Block.
The Blind Boys of Alabama, Way Down In the Hole.
I step into my work place with my work face: Mr. Lif on I Phantom; People Under the Stairs on OST; Talib Kweli on Quality; Scarface on The Fix; and finally, the best version of Tom Waits' "Down In the Hole," The Wire's theme song (soundtrack). All '02.
Jennifer Pastor, Stills from 'The Perfect Ride,' 2003.
Cassandra Wilson, You Gotta Move.
Norah Jones, Seven Years.
Neko Case, I Wish I Was the Moon.
Laura Cantrell, Rain Boy.
Voices: Wilson on Belly of the Sun (2002); Jones, whose backlash seems to be finally over, on her first album; Case's should-be standard is on '02's Blacklisted and Cantrell's version of Bruce Brakefield's "Rain Boy" was recorded at the late John Peel's studio in 2003 and is available on her website.
Christian Holstad, Mount Rushmore, 2003.
Richard Thompson, So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo.
Orchestra Baobab, Bul Ma Miin.
The Clientele, The Violet Hour.
Ekkehard Ehlers, Plays John Cassavetes 2.
Tall Dwarfs, Cascade.
Travels, time, stasis: Thompson's version of Orazio Vecchi's "So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo," "elliptically smutty" Renaissance pop, is from his 1000 Years of Popular Music; Orchestra Baobob, from Senegal, on 2002's Specialist In All Styles; The Clientele, title track of their fine 2003 LP; Ehlers on Plays, 2002 (fine use of the Beatles' "Good Night"); Dwarfs on The Sky Above, The Mud Below (2003).
Jonathan Monk, Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before, 2003.
The Exploding Hearts, Modern Kicks.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Ballad of the Sin Eater.
Supergrass, Grace.
Rock & roll, straight up: the Exploding Hearts (horribly, 3/4ths of the band was killed in an auto accident in 2003) on Guitar Romantic; Leo's ode to his early band is on 2003's Hearts of Oak; Supergrass is on 2002's Life on Other Planets.
Medasyn with Lady Sovereign, Shystie, Frost P and Zuz Rock, The Battle.
N.E.R.D., Run to The Sun.
War, peace: The world meets one Louise Harman, AKA Lady Sovereign, all of 17 years old ("none of your words can 'urt me fool/none of your comebacks mean fook all!"), on Medasyn's 12" single "The Battle," 2003; N.E.R.D. on 2002's In Search Of.
Michaël Borremans, The German (Part 2), 2002.
Imperial Teen, Ivanka.
Dean and Britta, Night Nurse.
Pinmonkey, Fly.
The Essex Green, The Late Great Cassiopia.
Pop: "Ivanka" leads off Imperial Teen's On; Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, the handsomest couple in rock music, start their first solo record L'Avventura (2003) with "Night Nurse"; Pinmonkey turns Sugar Ray's "Fly" into the bluegrass tune it apparently was always meant to be, on 2002's Pinmonkey; Essex Green on The Long Goodbye, 2003.
Ginuwine, Hell Yeah.
Drive-By Truckers, Marry Me.
OutKast, The Way You Move.
David Bowie, Baby Loves That Way.
Original Sinners, Whiskey For Supper.
Lust, gluttony, matrimony, general decadence: Ginuwine's 2003 single is on Hits; Drive-By Truckers' "Marry Me" on Decoration Day, 2003; OutKast on Speakerboxxx/Love Below; Bowie recorded this remake of his 1965 mod single for a stillborn, unreleased LP Toy, and eventually released the track on the "Everyone Says 'Hi'" EP in 2002; Exene Cervenka's Original Sinners rip through "Whiskey For Supper" on their first s/t record, 2002.
"MISSION-The primary mission of the Department is to--(A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States;(B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism;(C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States..."
Guided By Voices, The Best of Jill Hives.
Belle and Sebastian, I'm a Cuckoo.
Realities, rock and roll: "The Best of Jill Hives," the last great Guided by Voices song, sums up the GBV experience: greatest hits for a world that no longer needed them; "I'm a Cuckoo" is, in part, the story of the breakup of Isobel Campbell and Stuart Murdoch, the death of one band (the original Belle and Sebastian) and the start of another one; it's the sad liberation that comes when you realize your old dreams are over and done, and the sense of gratitude you have to the past, regardless of its pain. It was that sort of decade.
On Earthquake Glue and Dear Catastrophe Waitress, both 2003.
Liam Lynch, United States of Whatever.
Charlie Haden, America the Beautiful.
America!!!: Whatever, beautiful.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The Beneficent Spider, 1922
Marcel Proust on his deathbed (photo by Man Ray).
Lizzie Miles, She Walked Right Up and Took My Man Away.
Paul Hindemith, Suite '1922': Ragtime.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Recuerdo.
George Antheil, Airplane Sonata (As Fast As Possible).
Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra, Society Blues.
Husk O'Hare's Super Orchestra of Chicago, San.
Friars Society Orchestra, Tiger Rag.
Trixie Smith and the Jazz Masters, My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll).
According to Ezra Pound, the Christian era ended on October 30, 1921, when James Joyce wrote the final words of Ulysses. Actually, Pound had proclaimed the end of the Christian era at least once before, but this time he was serious enough to propose a new calendar in which 1922 became Year 1 of a new era...
This dramatic advent of a new literature was at least part of what Willa Cather had in mind when she complained, "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
Michael North, Reading 1922.
Steiner, Lollipop.
Lizzie Miles was born on Bourbon Street as the 19th Century was packing up; she sang for King Oliver, Kid Ory and Fats Waller, plugged songs for Clarence Williams, toured with fly-by-night circuses, medicine shows and vaudeville productions (including one the boxer Jack Johnson arranged), played and cut records in Chicago, New York and Europe. She was a rolling stone, an embodiment of black music and culture in the first third of the past century.
One of her first records, "She Walked Right Up and Took My Man Away," is more stagy and pop-oriented than the blues recordings of Mamie Smith and (starting in the following year) of Bessie Smith, but there's still a grit in Miles' singing, in the way she charges ahead of the beat, and her power's undeniable.
Recorded 24 February 1922 and released as OKeh 8031; on Complete Recorded Works Vol. 1.
Dali, Cabaret
In 1940, the German composer Paul Hindemith (then living in Switzerland in exile--Goebbels had denounced him as an "atonal noisemaker," plus Hindemith's wife was Jewish) wrote to a friend that he didn't want to reprint what he called "that awful Suite '1922'", adding that "it depresses an old man rather seriously to see that the sins of his youth impress the people more than his better creations." A lament that many older men likely have said in their time.
But back when Hindemith was a sinning youth, an ambitious working-class kid from Hanau who played violin in dance bands and thumped a bass drum in a military band during WWI, works like Suite '1922' showcased his brashness, irreverence and raw energy. As Alex Ross wrote, "the archetypal Hindemith piece takes the form of a fast, furious off-kilter march, with fanfares in multiple tonalities and bass lines bent off course. The music is intense, but it does not take itself particularly seriously."
Suite '1922' For Piano, mainly composed in its title year, was Hindemith's attempt to parody and upend the new types of pop music surfacing in Europe during the postwar years--ragtime, foxtrots, jazz, blues. It's a five-part suite, with movements entitled "Shimmy," "Boston" and the closing section "Ragtime" in which the performer is instructed to "look at the piano as a percussion instrument and act accordingly."
The "Ragtime" movement of Suite '1922', op. 26, is performed here by Jan Marcol on Jazz Inspired Popular Music.
Prince Hirohito and Empress Teimei take the air with Edward, Prince of Wales
Interlude: The Class of 1922
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms...
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: V. "What the Thunder Said."
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: I dolores.
Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
James Joyce, Ulysses: "overture" to the musical "Sirens" chapter.
Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.
Each house needs to be composed as a symphony, with variations on a few themes.
Rudolph Schindler, the Kings Road House, Hollywood.
The future of the world lies in the vibration of its people. The environment of the machine has already become a spiritual thing...For the great mass of us the war has killed illusion and sentimentality...Hence the birth of the Music-Mechanists.
George Antheil, Second "Airplane" Sonata, (here performed by Marthanne Verbit).
In other words, there is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality. Let us call them the imponderabilia of actual life. Here belongs such things as the routine of a man's working day, the details of his care of the body...the tone of conversational life around the village fires, the existence of strong friendships or hostilities, and of passing sympathies and dislikes between people, the subtle yet unmistakable manner in which personal vanities and ambitions are reflected in the behaviour of the individual and in the emotional reactions of those who surround him...
Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Recuerdo," collected in A Few Figs From Thistles.
The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board. It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews lodging in the same boarding–house, the dandy, the major, the horse–dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of the pier.
But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought the young man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady’s skirt; the grey one will do—above the pink silk stockings. It changes; drapes her ankles—the nineties; then it amplifies—the seventies; now it’s burnished red and stretched above a crinoline—the sixties; a tiny black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting there? Yes—she’s still on the pier. The silk now is sprigged with roses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There’s no pier beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the turnpike road, but there’s no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! Let’s to the museum. Cannon–balls; arrow–heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman camp on Dods Hill—see the little ticket with the faded writing on it.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room.
Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra was the first black New Orleans jazz group to record, albeit in Los Angeles. The trombonist Ory had wound up in California on doctor's orders (he was told a dry climate would help him). He soon assembled Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band (sometimes called Ory's Brown-Skinned Babies) and was playing around the state.
Benjamin "Reb" Spikes and Johnny Spikes were Okie brothers who ran a theater in Muskogee (in 1911, they hired Jelly Roll Morton for a time). By the end of the '10s they had moved to LA, opened the only record store in the city that sold records by black musicians (Reb Spikes later recalled how "wealthy Hollywood people would drive up in long limousines and send their chauffeurs in to ask for “dirty records'") and soon were running jazz shows and looking to cut their own records.
The Spikeses asked Ory and his band to cut four sides for their start-up label, Sunshine. Everyone was green when it came to recording--Ory showed up at the session in a tuxedo, figuring that's what you wore on such occasions; the Spikeses later lost some of their masters when the wax melted during a long drive across the desert.
These first Ory sides aren't the typical frenetic wailing-and-honking New Orleans jazz as popularized by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, but rather are smooth, precise templates: documents of a vibrant and maturing music. Recorded July 1921 (?)* and released (as both the Sunshine Orchestra and Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra) as Sunshine 3003 and Nordskog 3009 c/w "Ory's Creole Trombone"; on Kid Ory & His Creole Jazz Band.
* While many jazz histories and discographies have the date of the first Ory recordings as June 1922, this article by Floyd Levin states otherwise--that it was a year earlier. The source is Robert Nordskog, son of Arne Nordskog, who engineered the recordings.
Perret, Study for Tower Blocks for Paris.
Husk O'Hare was a promoter and a hustler as much as he was a bandleader. He grew up in Chicago's West Side (his real name was Anderson O'Hare, but as he was a chubby guy, "Husk" soon stuck), served in the Army during the war and by 1920 was working with another promoter, Sol Weisner, to try to corner the growing Chicago jazz market. At their peak, O'Hare and Weisner were booking as many as 42 different bands at once. O'Hare had a taste for self-promotion (most notably in the large flashing sign he had installed on the roof of his Monroe St. office), and soon started running his own bands--Husk O'Hare's Campus Serenaders, Husk O'Hare and His Greatest Band or, as featured here, Husk O'Hare's Super Orchestra of Chicago.
His main requirement for his players was that they be young and willing to work often and cheap. Many jazz players grew to resent O'Hare, who had a habit of being named bandleader of sessions he had only booked (The New Orleans Rhythm Kings formed out of a group of disgruntled O'Hare players (see below)) but O'Hare wasn't a fraud--he had a legitimate taste for jazz, and likely was the person who sold Gennett Records on taking on the King Oliver band and its new trumpeter, Louis Armstrong. (Much of this information is from Charles A. Sengstock's That Toddlin' Town.)
Tracks like O'Hare's "San" show jazz arranging coming into its own--rather than the set constrictions of ragtime, there's a smoother, logical flow to the arrangement, with an extended written section broken up by possibly improvised jazz breaks. Recorded December 1922 and released as Gennett 5009-A; on Ragtime to Jazz 2.
O'Hare wound up credited as an arranger on the Friars Society Orchestra recording of "Tiger Rag," though O'Hare apparently was nowhere near the studio at the time. Friars Orchestra would soon change its name to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and become one of the essential jazz bands of the early '20s--its members included the Sicilian clarinet player Leon Roppolo, who would sometimes hurl his clarinet against the wall during a gig when he got in a temper.
Recorded 30 August 1922 and released as Gennett 4968; on New Orleans Rhythm Kings 1922-1923.
Strand, Double Akeley, New York.
Finally, a signpost for a future destination: Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)." Recorded ca. September 1922 and released as Black Swan 14127; on Trixie Smith Vol. 1.
Lately in Bowieland: DB leaves home, digs everything, gets class conscious, grows sad and old.
|
Marcel Proust on his deathbed (photo by Man Ray).
Lizzie Miles, She Walked Right Up and Took My Man Away.
Paul Hindemith, Suite '1922': Ragtime.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Recuerdo.
George Antheil, Airplane Sonata (As Fast As Possible).
Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra, Society Blues.
Husk O'Hare's Super Orchestra of Chicago, San.
Friars Society Orchestra, Tiger Rag.
Trixie Smith and the Jazz Masters, My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll).
According to Ezra Pound, the Christian era ended on October 30, 1921, when James Joyce wrote the final words of Ulysses. Actually, Pound had proclaimed the end of the Christian era at least once before, but this time he was serious enough to propose a new calendar in which 1922 became Year 1 of a new era...
This dramatic advent of a new literature was at least part of what Willa Cather had in mind when she complained, "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
Michael North, Reading 1922.
Steiner, Lollipop.
Lizzie Miles was born on Bourbon Street as the 19th Century was packing up; she sang for King Oliver, Kid Ory and Fats Waller, plugged songs for Clarence Williams, toured with fly-by-night circuses, medicine shows and vaudeville productions (including one the boxer Jack Johnson arranged), played and cut records in Chicago, New York and Europe. She was a rolling stone, an embodiment of black music and culture in the first third of the past century.
One of her first records, "She Walked Right Up and Took My Man Away," is more stagy and pop-oriented than the blues recordings of Mamie Smith and (starting in the following year) of Bessie Smith, but there's still a grit in Miles' singing, in the way she charges ahead of the beat, and her power's undeniable.
Recorded 24 February 1922 and released as OKeh 8031; on Complete Recorded Works Vol. 1.
Dali, Cabaret
In 1940, the German composer Paul Hindemith (then living in Switzerland in exile--Goebbels had denounced him as an "atonal noisemaker," plus Hindemith's wife was Jewish) wrote to a friend that he didn't want to reprint what he called "that awful Suite '1922'", adding that "it depresses an old man rather seriously to see that the sins of his youth impress the people more than his better creations." A lament that many older men likely have said in their time.
But back when Hindemith was a sinning youth, an ambitious working-class kid from Hanau who played violin in dance bands and thumped a bass drum in a military band during WWI, works like Suite '1922' showcased his brashness, irreverence and raw energy. As Alex Ross wrote, "the archetypal Hindemith piece takes the form of a fast, furious off-kilter march, with fanfares in multiple tonalities and bass lines bent off course. The music is intense, but it does not take itself particularly seriously."
Suite '1922' For Piano, mainly composed in its title year, was Hindemith's attempt to parody and upend the new types of pop music surfacing in Europe during the postwar years--ragtime, foxtrots, jazz, blues. It's a five-part suite, with movements entitled "Shimmy," "Boston" and the closing section "Ragtime" in which the performer is instructed to "look at the piano as a percussion instrument and act accordingly."
The "Ragtime" movement of Suite '1922', op. 26, is performed here by Jan Marcol on Jazz Inspired Popular Music.
Prince Hirohito and Empress Teimei take the air with Edward, Prince of Wales
Interlude: The Class of 1922
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms...
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: V. "What the Thunder Said."
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: I dolores.
Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
James Joyce, Ulysses: "overture" to the musical "Sirens" chapter.
Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.
Each house needs to be composed as a symphony, with variations on a few themes.
Rudolph Schindler, the Kings Road House, Hollywood.
The future of the world lies in the vibration of its people. The environment of the machine has already become a spiritual thing...For the great mass of us the war has killed illusion and sentimentality...Hence the birth of the Music-Mechanists.
George Antheil, Second "Airplane" Sonata, (here performed by Marthanne Verbit).
In other words, there is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality. Let us call them the imponderabilia of actual life. Here belongs such things as the routine of a man's working day, the details of his care of the body...the tone of conversational life around the village fires, the existence of strong friendships or hostilities, and of passing sympathies and dislikes between people, the subtle yet unmistakable manner in which personal vanities and ambitions are reflected in the behaviour of the individual and in the emotional reactions of those who surround him...
Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Recuerdo," collected in A Few Figs From Thistles.
The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board. It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews lodging in the same boarding–house, the dandy, the major, the horse–dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of the pier.
But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought the young man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady’s skirt; the grey one will do—above the pink silk stockings. It changes; drapes her ankles—the nineties; then it amplifies—the seventies; now it’s burnished red and stretched above a crinoline—the sixties; a tiny black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting there? Yes—she’s still on the pier. The silk now is sprigged with roses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There’s no pier beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the turnpike road, but there’s no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! Let’s to the museum. Cannon–balls; arrow–heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman camp on Dods Hill—see the little ticket with the faded writing on it.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room.
Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra was the first black New Orleans jazz group to record, albeit in Los Angeles. The trombonist Ory had wound up in California on doctor's orders (he was told a dry climate would help him). He soon assembled Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band (sometimes called Ory's Brown-Skinned Babies) and was playing around the state.
Benjamin "Reb" Spikes and Johnny Spikes were Okie brothers who ran a theater in Muskogee (in 1911, they hired Jelly Roll Morton for a time). By the end of the '10s they had moved to LA, opened the only record store in the city that sold records by black musicians (Reb Spikes later recalled how "wealthy Hollywood people would drive up in long limousines and send their chauffeurs in to ask for “dirty records'") and soon were running jazz shows and looking to cut their own records.
The Spikeses asked Ory and his band to cut four sides for their start-up label, Sunshine. Everyone was green when it came to recording--Ory showed up at the session in a tuxedo, figuring that's what you wore on such occasions; the Spikeses later lost some of their masters when the wax melted during a long drive across the desert.
These first Ory sides aren't the typical frenetic wailing-and-honking New Orleans jazz as popularized by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, but rather are smooth, precise templates: documents of a vibrant and maturing music. Recorded July 1921 (?)* and released (as both the Sunshine Orchestra and Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra) as Sunshine 3003 and Nordskog 3009 c/w "Ory's Creole Trombone"; on Kid Ory & His Creole Jazz Band.
* While many jazz histories and discographies have the date of the first Ory recordings as June 1922, this article by Floyd Levin states otherwise--that it was a year earlier. The source is Robert Nordskog, son of Arne Nordskog, who engineered the recordings.
Perret, Study for Tower Blocks for Paris.
Husk O'Hare was a promoter and a hustler as much as he was a bandleader. He grew up in Chicago's West Side (his real name was Anderson O'Hare, but as he was a chubby guy, "Husk" soon stuck), served in the Army during the war and by 1920 was working with another promoter, Sol Weisner, to try to corner the growing Chicago jazz market. At their peak, O'Hare and Weisner were booking as many as 42 different bands at once. O'Hare had a taste for self-promotion (most notably in the large flashing sign he had installed on the roof of his Monroe St. office), and soon started running his own bands--Husk O'Hare's Campus Serenaders, Husk O'Hare and His Greatest Band or, as featured here, Husk O'Hare's Super Orchestra of Chicago.
His main requirement for his players was that they be young and willing to work often and cheap. Many jazz players grew to resent O'Hare, who had a habit of being named bandleader of sessions he had only booked (The New Orleans Rhythm Kings formed out of a group of disgruntled O'Hare players (see below)) but O'Hare wasn't a fraud--he had a legitimate taste for jazz, and likely was the person who sold Gennett Records on taking on the King Oliver band and its new trumpeter, Louis Armstrong. (Much of this information is from Charles A. Sengstock's That Toddlin' Town.)
Tracks like O'Hare's "San" show jazz arranging coming into its own--rather than the set constrictions of ragtime, there's a smoother, logical flow to the arrangement, with an extended written section broken up by possibly improvised jazz breaks. Recorded December 1922 and released as Gennett 5009-A; on Ragtime to Jazz 2.
O'Hare wound up credited as an arranger on the Friars Society Orchestra recording of "Tiger Rag," though O'Hare apparently was nowhere near the studio at the time. Friars Orchestra would soon change its name to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and become one of the essential jazz bands of the early '20s--its members included the Sicilian clarinet player Leon Roppolo, who would sometimes hurl his clarinet against the wall during a gig when he got in a temper.
Recorded 30 August 1922 and released as Gennett 4968; on New Orleans Rhythm Kings 1922-1923.
Strand, Double Akeley, New York.
Finally, a signpost for a future destination: Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)." Recorded ca. September 1922 and released as Black Swan 14127; on Trixie Smith Vol. 1.
Lately in Bowieland: DB leaves home, digs everything, gets class conscious, grows sad and old.
Monday, August 17, 2009
1922: The Morning the Fiddlers Came
Eck Robertson and Henry C. Gilliland, Arkansas Traveler.
Eck Robertson, Sallie Gooden.
Eck Robertson, Ragtime Annie.
The talent manager at the Victor Talking Machine Co. sits in the office of his colleague who runs publishing. He often comes in here when his colleague is out, mainly to hide from his own prospects. He drinks a cup of coffee as he sits in the spare chair and looks out at the chalky June morning over New York.
His secretary, all bobbed hair and ankle-strapped shoes, pokes in to tell him the first tryouts of the day are in his office. They're a real pair, she says. You've gotta see 'em. Sure I've got to, he says. They're from Texas, so they say, she adds. Wonderful, he says.
He watches her go, which is always a highlight of his day, and wonders again why he got into this line. The desperate who stream into his office, all wanting to make records. The six-rabbi singing group. The ashy man who could play ragtime piano with his toes. The pair of old women who sounded like lowing cattle. The man who claimed his dog could howl an aria from La Bohème (the dog, likely imaginary, also could count, he said). The Croat who struck his child across the face with a riding crop when the kid got nerves and botched a note.
He's stalled enough, so he gets up and walks to his office. He takes a piece of paper off his secretary's desk, just a typed list of distributor names, to use as part of one of his standard ploys. He strides through the doorway, staring at the paper as though it was his last will and testament, and slams himself down behind his desk. The two men jump to their feet as he walks in. He doesn't look at them. He keeps staring at the paper, now just blurring the words together by squinting. Sometimes they can't take the tension and just bolt out of the office: that's always nice. He hears rheumy breathing, the rustle and clank as they shift their weight. At last he looks up.
Each holds a fiddle case, each is in costume. One's in pearl-studded cowboy gear with some sort of lurid purple silk shirt, the other's in a full-dress Confederate Army uniform. He really is a Civil War veteran, it turns out. His name's Henry Gilliland. Later, a recording engineer makes small talk with him, asks him what he thinks of New York. It's fine enough, sir, Gilliland says, but you should've seen Atlanta before your General Sherman got done with it.
The other fiddler, Eck Robertson, is wiry, speaks with the rapid patter of a confidence man. He's a stage pro, he says, and so's his wife, and so's his children. The manager worries that this brood is waiting for a cue to pour into his office, but no, it's just Eck and Henry up in New York, just wanting to make a record.
So the manager folds his arms, leans back, makes his choice. He stares at Robertson and says: "Young man, get your fiddle out and start off on a tune. I can tell that quick (a sharp finger snap) whether I could use you or not." The Texan unpacks his fiddle, tunes it by plucking two strings and twisting a knob, brings his bow down in an arc.
Halfway through "Sallie Gooden," as Robertson reels out line after line at breakneck speed, to the point where his fingers seem to have become fluid, the scout just smiles, throws up his hands, surrenders. "By Ned, that's fine!" he laughs. "Come back tomorrow at nine o'clock and we'll make a test record."
Alexander Campbell "Eck" Robertson was born in 1887 and grew up near Amarillo, Texas. He was the son and grandson of fiddlers (his father had put down the bow to become a preacher) and by age 16 he was playing fiddle in medicine shows that worked Indian territories. He married a childhood friend, Jeanetta Levy, and performed with her on stage; when each of their 10 children grew old enough they joined the troupe. When he wasn't on the road, Robertson worked as a piano tuner and played in fiddling contests throughout Texas (he was a brutal competitor--throwing his bow in the air, catching it and swooping down to the strings, not having missed a beat, or sticking a wooden match under one of his strings so he could bow three strings at once).
Robertson had met Gilliland at a Confederate veteran's reunion in Richmond (though they may have crossed paths before) and the two decided they wanted to make a record. A friend of Gilliland's in New York who did legal work for Victor got them the audition.
At the Victor sessions, Robertson and Gilliland first cut a few fiddle duets, including "Arkansas Traveler," and then Robertson returned alone (it seems pretty clear that Victor regarded him as the greater talent) the following day to cut tracks backed by a session pianist as well as make two solo fiddle recordings, "Sallie Gooden" and "Ragtime Annie."
"Sallie Gooden," the song that won Robertson his record contract and that would be his first-issued Victor disc, is Robertson performing at a master level. The song "Sallie Gooden" typically has two melodic strains--Robertson plays 13 different variations in the course of three minutes. This is hard Texas hillbilly barn-dance jazz, grooved onto wax. "He sawed off everything from syncopated runs and blue notes to single-string/double-string harmonies and clusters of quicksilver grace notes with a horn-like timbre" (Bill Friskics-Warren, in Heartaches By the Number).
For a while some music historians believed "Ragtime Annie" was derived from a Native American dance tune and was as old as the United States, but more recently a consensus has pegged the song as a modern piece, ca. 1900, possibly derived from a ragtime piano tune "Raggedy Ann Rag."
From Ceolas: There is often some confusion among fiddlers whether to play the tune in two or three parts, and both are correct depending on regional taste. Eck Robertson's version was in three parts (the third part changes key to G major) as are many older Southwest versions, and some insist this form was once more common that the two-part version often heard in more recent times...Little Dixie, Missouri, fiddler Howard Marshall says that local speculation is that the third part was inserted to relieve a square dance fiddler from the stress of keeping the main part of the tune going through a long set.
Denouements: Gilliland died two years later; Robertson, despite setting the template for generations of country musicians, recorded only sporadically in the years afterward, though he lived until 1975; Victor merged with RCA in 1929 and became one of the major country labels of the 20th Century, home of everyone from Dolly Parton to Hank Snow to Willie Nelson.
Discography: "Arkansas Traveler," recorded on 30 June 1922, and "Gooden" (1 July 1922) were released as the two sides of Victor 18956 (not until spring 1923, as Victor had no clue how to sell records to rural Southern markets); "Annie," recorded on 1 July 1922, was released as Victor 19149; in this archive, this one and this one. They're all collected on Old-Time Texas Fiddler.
Disclaimer: Were these really the first-ever country records? No. Len Spencer and Charles D'Almaine cut "Arkansas Traveler" as early as 1902, Don Richardson started cutting solo fiddle records in 1914 (including "Arkansas Traveler" in 1916), and even the Victor Military Band did a 1920 version of the fiddler staple "Soldier's Joy." The main difference was that these were studio pros, based mainly in New York (Richardson had been born in North Carolina, but moved to NYC in 1910 and worked for a decade with a variety of studio orchestras). So perhaps Robertson and Gilliland had a rural mojo that the earlier players lacked, perhaps not. Nick Tosches has argued these pre-Robertson records were often "stylized adulterations of a music that the record companies felt was not commercial in its real state...not too different from the way record companies treated black music before 1920."
Descriptions (sources): The Encyclopedia Of Country Music; Bill Malone, liner notes to The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music LP set; Allen Lowe, American Pop; David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren, Heartaches By the Number; Tosches, Country; this site reproduces the liner notes of County LP 202, Eck Robertson, Famous Cowboy Fiddler. Everything in the above post is true or ought to be.
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Eck Robertson and Henry C. Gilliland, Arkansas Traveler.
Eck Robertson, Sallie Gooden.
Eck Robertson, Ragtime Annie.
The talent manager at the Victor Talking Machine Co. sits in the office of his colleague who runs publishing. He often comes in here when his colleague is out, mainly to hide from his own prospects. He drinks a cup of coffee as he sits in the spare chair and looks out at the chalky June morning over New York.
His secretary, all bobbed hair and ankle-strapped shoes, pokes in to tell him the first tryouts of the day are in his office. They're a real pair, she says. You've gotta see 'em. Sure I've got to, he says. They're from Texas, so they say, she adds. Wonderful, he says.
He watches her go, which is always a highlight of his day, and wonders again why he got into this line. The desperate who stream into his office, all wanting to make records. The six-rabbi singing group. The ashy man who could play ragtime piano with his toes. The pair of old women who sounded like lowing cattle. The man who claimed his dog could howl an aria from La Bohème (the dog, likely imaginary, also could count, he said). The Croat who struck his child across the face with a riding crop when the kid got nerves and botched a note.
He's stalled enough, so he gets up and walks to his office. He takes a piece of paper off his secretary's desk, just a typed list of distributor names, to use as part of one of his standard ploys. He strides through the doorway, staring at the paper as though it was his last will and testament, and slams himself down behind his desk. The two men jump to their feet as he walks in. He doesn't look at them. He keeps staring at the paper, now just blurring the words together by squinting. Sometimes they can't take the tension and just bolt out of the office: that's always nice. He hears rheumy breathing, the rustle and clank as they shift their weight. At last he looks up.
Each holds a fiddle case, each is in costume. One's in pearl-studded cowboy gear with some sort of lurid purple silk shirt, the other's in a full-dress Confederate Army uniform. He really is a Civil War veteran, it turns out. His name's Henry Gilliland. Later, a recording engineer makes small talk with him, asks him what he thinks of New York. It's fine enough, sir, Gilliland says, but you should've seen Atlanta before your General Sherman got done with it.
The other fiddler, Eck Robertson, is wiry, speaks with the rapid patter of a confidence man. He's a stage pro, he says, and so's his wife, and so's his children. The manager worries that this brood is waiting for a cue to pour into his office, but no, it's just Eck and Henry up in New York, just wanting to make a record.
So the manager folds his arms, leans back, makes his choice. He stares at Robertson and says: "Young man, get your fiddle out and start off on a tune. I can tell that quick (a sharp finger snap) whether I could use you or not." The Texan unpacks his fiddle, tunes it by plucking two strings and twisting a knob, brings his bow down in an arc.
Halfway through "Sallie Gooden," as Robertson reels out line after line at breakneck speed, to the point where his fingers seem to have become fluid, the scout just smiles, throws up his hands, surrenders. "By Ned, that's fine!" he laughs. "Come back tomorrow at nine o'clock and we'll make a test record."
Alexander Campbell "Eck" Robertson was born in 1887 and grew up near Amarillo, Texas. He was the son and grandson of fiddlers (his father had put down the bow to become a preacher) and by age 16 he was playing fiddle in medicine shows that worked Indian territories. He married a childhood friend, Jeanetta Levy, and performed with her on stage; when each of their 10 children grew old enough they joined the troupe. When he wasn't on the road, Robertson worked as a piano tuner and played in fiddling contests throughout Texas (he was a brutal competitor--throwing his bow in the air, catching it and swooping down to the strings, not having missed a beat, or sticking a wooden match under one of his strings so he could bow three strings at once).
Robertson had met Gilliland at a Confederate veteran's reunion in Richmond (though they may have crossed paths before) and the two decided they wanted to make a record. A friend of Gilliland's in New York who did legal work for Victor got them the audition.
At the Victor sessions, Robertson and Gilliland first cut a few fiddle duets, including "Arkansas Traveler," and then Robertson returned alone (it seems pretty clear that Victor regarded him as the greater talent) the following day to cut tracks backed by a session pianist as well as make two solo fiddle recordings, "Sallie Gooden" and "Ragtime Annie."
"Sallie Gooden," the song that won Robertson his record contract and that would be his first-issued Victor disc, is Robertson performing at a master level. The song "Sallie Gooden" typically has two melodic strains--Robertson plays 13 different variations in the course of three minutes. This is hard Texas hillbilly barn-dance jazz, grooved onto wax. "He sawed off everything from syncopated runs and blue notes to single-string/double-string harmonies and clusters of quicksilver grace notes with a horn-like timbre" (Bill Friskics-Warren, in Heartaches By the Number).
For a while some music historians believed "Ragtime Annie" was derived from a Native American dance tune and was as old as the United States, but more recently a consensus has pegged the song as a modern piece, ca. 1900, possibly derived from a ragtime piano tune "Raggedy Ann Rag."
From Ceolas: There is often some confusion among fiddlers whether to play the tune in two or three parts, and both are correct depending on regional taste. Eck Robertson's version was in three parts (the third part changes key to G major) as are many older Southwest versions, and some insist this form was once more common that the two-part version often heard in more recent times...Little Dixie, Missouri, fiddler Howard Marshall says that local speculation is that the third part was inserted to relieve a square dance fiddler from the stress of keeping the main part of the tune going through a long set.
Denouements: Gilliland died two years later; Robertson, despite setting the template for generations of country musicians, recorded only sporadically in the years afterward, though he lived until 1975; Victor merged with RCA in 1929 and became one of the major country labels of the 20th Century, home of everyone from Dolly Parton to Hank Snow to Willie Nelson.
Discography: "Arkansas Traveler," recorded on 30 June 1922, and "Gooden" (1 July 1922) were released as the two sides of Victor 18956 (not until spring 1923, as Victor had no clue how to sell records to rural Southern markets); "Annie," recorded on 1 July 1922, was released as Victor 19149; in this archive, this one and this one. They're all collected on Old-Time Texas Fiddler.
Disclaimer: Were these really the first-ever country records? No. Len Spencer and Charles D'Almaine cut "Arkansas Traveler" as early as 1902, Don Richardson started cutting solo fiddle records in 1914 (including "Arkansas Traveler" in 1916), and even the Victor Military Band did a 1920 version of the fiddler staple "Soldier's Joy." The main difference was that these were studio pros, based mainly in New York (Richardson had been born in North Carolina, but moved to NYC in 1910 and worked for a decade with a variety of studio orchestras). So perhaps Robertson and Gilliland had a rural mojo that the earlier players lacked, perhaps not. Nick Tosches has argued these pre-Robertson records were often "stylized adulterations of a music that the record companies felt was not commercial in its real state...not too different from the way record companies treated black music before 1920."
Descriptions (sources): The Encyclopedia Of Country Music; Bill Malone, liner notes to The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music LP set; Allen Lowe, American Pop; David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren, Heartaches By the Number; Tosches, Country; this site reproduces the liner notes of County LP 202, Eck Robertson, Famous Cowboy Fiddler. Everything in the above post is true or ought to be.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Les Vacances
August is going to be a very quiet month here, as I need time to recharge, sleep, legitimately work and plan some lengthy (as ever) posts coming up for the fall. So stay cool and relax and have a drink on me.
If you're starved for music-related writing, you might like the Bowie song-by-song blog, which I started as a lark and will keep going until I'm tired of it.
Happy August. It's always been a good month, I've found.
Top: People On Sunday, 1929.
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August is going to be a very quiet month here, as I need time to recharge, sleep, legitimately work and plan some lengthy (as ever) posts coming up for the fall. So stay cool and relax and have a drink on me.
If you're starved for music-related writing, you might like the Bowie song-by-song blog, which I started as a lark and will keep going until I'm tired of it.
Happy August. It's always been a good month, I've found.
Top: People On Sunday, 1929.
