The record changer (Jan-Dec 1949)

16 GEORGE A YAK! AN BUCKLIN MOON PAUL BACON records noted The All Star Stompers Shim-me-she-wabble Swinging Down the Lane Avalon St. Louis Blues I Never Knew I Could Love Anybody Can't We Be Friends For this third album from the This Is Jazz show Rudi Blesh has chosen to give us six more sides by the All Star Stompers, which is all right by me for I still have a certain nostalgia for those Saturday afternoons at two thirty. In fact Bob Aurthur's program notes recalled it so vividly that after I read them and stacked the records on the old Magna vox I could almost see (and hear) Colonel Blesh's shirt of many colors, which was often seven degrees hotter than the music, and his chin whiskers quivering in time to Baby Dodds' wood blocks. Actually, with no disrespect to these records, I think that M. Aurthur's prose is the better performance. By this time all of the pundits have argued out the last nuances of the band that, save for small changes in personnel, was on the show from the opening to the closing session. With much of what has been said I agree. No, the band did not play traditional New Orleans style, but to those who said that it played Dixieland I can only add, thankfully, that this was even further off the mark. There were others who claimed that with Wild Bill in the band it sounded pure Chicago, yet even on it's one or two off days it never could be mistaken for the barefoot boy' in the French, Shriner & Urner shoes, in whose saloon Mr. Davison holds forth nightly. Let's leave it at that — this was a band neither for the traditionalists nor the extremists. Yet I don't think that calling it a hybrid is the answer either, or at least the whole answer. I think the band was striving towards something, namely an attempt to bring jazz up to the present without getting off onto any of the tangents so many other groups have taken. It held to the past but never so rigidly as to be tagged as sounding almost like so-and-so did in 1922 and though it did some things which made a few of us, myself included, chew our fingernails, it was an attempt to assimilate them into a bigger wholeness. I'm not at all sure they were wholly successful always, or even half of the time for that matter, but when it happened something pretty damned good was usually the result. In this album there seems to me less of this than there was in the first one, though all of the records are good. However, the surprise to me in the whole batch was Can't We Be Friends, which I put on the turntable expecting pretty much a Wild Bill "showcase" treatment. Instead what came out was the kind of thing that seems to me the proof of the pudding, a wonderfully satisfying record and one that shows clearly what can be done with even the most banal pop tune every now and then. As I have said all the numbers in this album are uniformly good. Some of the other pop tunes here don't get into me the way that the one I just mentioned did, and there are really only three jazz standby's and one of these, Avalon, less so than the others. I have heard numbers on the broadcasts that I thought were better than some of these but the selection here is certainly catholic. And although not inspired, these records won't just sit around on your shelves. I think you'll play the hell out them. I said in introducing the first album that I doubted that these records would ever be thought of in the same terms of greatness as the early Jelly's, the best of the Louis Hot Fives, The Dodds' or the Oliver's. Having a little time behind me and a lot more playings I'm even more sure of that than ever. Yet it seems to me that the chances are that they may be pioneering in somewhat the same manner ; for to me they point the only possible way out of our present dilemma. Whether or not we make it, your guess is as good as mine. (Circle S-15, $3.93) (B. M.) Turk Murphy's Bay City Stompers Kansas City Man Blues Shake That Thing Brother Lowdown Yellow Dog Blues This" gang draws largely from the Lu Watters band, with Burton Bales on piano, Mordecai on banjo, and Scobey, Murphy, and Helm on the front line. Their quality is — not too surprisingly — pretty much that of the Watters band, without as much brassiness and volume. Sounds pretty good, too. The standout side of the lot is Murphy's original, Brother Lowdown. The Watters gang has always shown a striking ability to come through with fine originals in the traditional vein — something no other jazz band of the last twenty-five years has done nearly so well. Right there is one of the secrets of the Watters band for my dough ; the boys have been criticized for playing too loud, too straight, and God knows what-all, but they played stuff that nobody else had the musicianship and guts to tackle, including original material. Yes, I've heard it said many times that Bunk Johnson would complain bitterly that he had to play the same old numbers over and over again because the guys in his band couldn't learn new ones, but I strongly doubt if any band in the jazz field ever could have produced as many consistently excellent originals as the Watters crew has done. turk murphy Turk Murphy, beyond doubt, is the most important sideman Lou has had, not only for his fine writing but also for his gutty trombone playing, which set the tone of the band more surely than anyone else's individual sound. On his own here, Turk has produced a record date that stands up well alongside all his previous work, and gives his fans a fine chance to hear him with a smaller group than has heretofore been possible. The only distressing note is Harry Mordecai's banjo alongside Burt Bales on Shake That Thing and especially Brother Lowdown, in which I must say he's either out of tune, playing wrong chords, or plunking some "gone" inversions. Can someone set me straight? — I just don't get it. But everything else is in the proper groove. Bob Helm's clarinet was never better, and Burt Bales sounds better than ever. I think these are Burt's first commercial records, although he's been heard a good deal around town and on air-shot discs of the wartime Watters band and Bunk Johnson's San Francisco band. I seem to remember him playing a lot like Fats Waller in his living room, but here he's got more of Buster Wilson's equally two-fisted style. Hearing these records makes me realize that Bob Scobey's horn has been playing lead on more Watters record than I realized. He's even better here than on his trilon sides. As