The record changer (Jan-Dec 1954)

M think of some euphonious trombone and bass men? Zue Robertson seems too mild. On piano, the most compelling seems to be the somewhat modern Dodo Mamarosa. I can hear him now, jamming our "Name" tunes with our "Name" musicians — East Coast Trot and The Gouge of Armour Ave. For those not in the know, this latter selection was first recorded by Fletcher Henderson on Vocalion 14859. And as long as we are playing these rainy day parlor house games, let's nominate as Uncle Rumdrop's Ritual Recording of Sentimental Sounds of Yesterday, Chick Bullock's (another "Name") Ace in the Hole. Very much in the Guy Lombardo vein, this San Francisco workingman's song always brings me a sense of warm security. The jazzier versions tend to'make me happy and devil-do. While scouting around the New York joy bands, we note that The Metropole, Broadway and 48th Street, is featuring the music of Jimmy McPartland and Red Allen. With McP. is George Wettling, Big Chief Russell Moore, and Bud Freeman. Cozy Cole, Herb Fleming, and Buster Bailey are among the Allen mop mopers. Jimmy Ryan's has the Wilbur DeParis band back and all is well again. Sidney DeP. manages some tuba blowing in between his trumpet chores. ExMorton banjoist Lee Blair replaced Eddie Gibbs for a brief period with DeP. He still has it and we hope some record company is willing to give for it. Trombonist Sonny Helmer, formerly with Red Nichols and Rosy McHargue, sat in with the Red Onion band at Ryan's recently. His gymnastics made everyone merry. The Riviera, Seventh Ave. and 10th Street, continues its miscellaneous and often good jam session on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and holiday evenings. Pianist Frank Gillis directs the pot boiling. Nicks, Condon's, the Central Plaza, and the Stuyvesant Casino go on as ever with the hot music. With the closing of Childs Paramount, the Central Plaza has the Conrad Janis band back in harness, that is, if you can harness a herd of buffalo. The Dixieland Rhythm Kings brought their refreshing sound to the Plaza on their way to Boston's Savoy. Those Rhythm Kings are truly rhythm kings. New York's Harlem is still the place for much genuine hot music. The quasi-spasm bands move about from joint to joint with unpredictable rapidity. Rumor has it that the Red Onion Jazz Band may become the standard fare at the Stuyvesant Casino. And now . . . answers to the Quiz-MaRizz — 1. Muskrat Ramble. 2. Muskrat Ramble again. 3. Sister Kate. 4. The Armstrong solo on the Red Onion Jazz Babies' Terrible Blues. 5. Galemouth and Mad Dog respectively. Do What has another traditional title that cannot be printed. 6. B. Morton — a trombonist; B. Moten — a late pianist and leader of a hot Kansas City orchestra of the '20s; F. Morton — a pool shark, fancy dresser, and talented pianist and band leader (deceased). 7. Three squares-a-day. 8. We don't know, but someone should. (Continued from PagelO) most. There were also a few Concert Versions, 12" Style, such as Stormy Weather (20122), backed by a Gold Diggers of 1933 Medley; Good News (20063), Of Thee I Sing (20103) and Laugh Parade (20103), although some of these were simple medleys. Not to be outdistanced by the Lang-Venuti small jazz combo, Lyman formed Lyman's Sharps and Flats and turned out commendable hot sessions of San/ Weary Weasel (3964) and Jazz Holiday/ Some Rainy Day (4155). During the mid6000 period when Brunswick was, beyond compare, the worst electrical recording ever heard, Lyman did a few more hot jazz standbys: Farewell Blues/ 12th St. Rag (6314), High Society (6325), St. Louis Blues/Weary Blues (6637) and Milenberg Joys (6325), some of which, you will see, are the same titles, but different recordings, than earlier releases, which were recorded much, much better. Superbly played waltzes of this period featured We Will Always Be Sweethearts (6284), Where the Blue of the Night (6224) and When the Rest of the Crowd Goes Home (6224). Early Decca boasted the Abe Lyman Orchestra on its lists, but for the most part, except a tasteful waltz or two like Seventh Heaven (1226) the band did not quite have the over-all excellence it had had on Brunswick, and its best on De was perhaps the California Album featuring Tony Martin and the songs California Here I Come, Rose Room, Avalon, Home in Pasadena, Golden Gate and San Francisco. (De-2433-5). Subsequently the orchestra moved over to Blue Bird, where they showed to much better advantage on hits of the day and some standards including After I Say I'm Sorry, Then I'll Be Happy, Sweet Little You, To You Sweetheart Aloha, Comin' Round the Mountain, Walkin' Cane, Oh How I Hate to Get Up, etc., Prisoner's Song and some more distinguished waltzes, among them That Naughty Waltz, Falling In Love With Someone, Roses of Picardy and Maria Elena. Lyman's vocalists were usually accomplished singers who afterwards became famous soloists, beginning with Charles Kaley and continuing on with Frank Sylvano, Frank Parrish, Harlan Lattimore and Dale Evans. Incidentally, it was the Lyman band that Charlie Chaplin guest-conducted when he recorded his own two compositions, Sing a Song and With You Dear in Bombay (Br. 2912), both sides having a full-chorus violin solo by Chaplin. The last Lyman recordings I know of were made about 1945: Rum and CocaCola (Co 36775) and an album of beautifully interpreted waltzes such as Charmaine, Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland, Down by the Old Mill Stream, Jeannine, Valse Huguette and La Golondrina. Since so many other bands are being reissued, many of them out of all proportion to their actual musical "worth, why not an LP of some of the Lyman Brunswicks? . . . piano and the voice (Continued from Page 3 ) really comfortable companion is still the single human voice of the blues singer (note how cramped the piano of Art Hodes, white but usually in the Negro blues tradition, sounds in so many of his records with instrumental groups). The piano's place is taken, then — in terms of significant musical development — from, roughly, the year 1910 by the instrumentalized voice. This itself had been some years in evolving, but by the time of Keppard's Creole Band it had achieved its main characteristic: "hot" intonation. It would be many years (the process is still going on) before white instrumentalists would be able to duplicate this intonation. It was the Negro's reciprocal gift for what he had learned from white piano. Thus, jazz falls between the two extremes of the mathematically-precise architectonic possibilities of the piano keyboard and the "hot," actually human but also humanly imprecise, possibilities of the voice. It is always leaning one way or the other — in the '20s, the period of classic jazz, it leaned toward the voice. In the '30s, the heyday of arranged swing, it leaned toward the keyboard. In the '40s, the pressures implicit in the swing situation caused a crack, or dissociation, in the jazz sensibility. The undisciplined "jam session," founded in the '30s as relief from the arranged band, degenerated or progressed — take your choice — into the kind of thing typified by "Jazz at the Philharmonic : " a thing once called — and still fittingly, I think, bop. The arranged band itself (the keyboard influence) again degenerated or progressed into the thing best typified by Kenton: a thing called progressive jazz. It was a little hard to distinguish in 1946 — when I talked to my pianist friend — between bop and progressive. Innured as we both were to the swing tradition, we were more inclined to be listening to what Kenton and Boyd Raeburn were doing; but my friend had also noted the growing influence of the piano, as presided over by Thelonius Monk, in the Gillespie camp. It is by way of Monk, generally — and, before him, Tatum — that Peterson, Brubeck, and Tristano have appeared; with the latter two (white) straining every effort along the byway with which the name Kenton is synonymous. But this is not jazz, and should not be called jazz, regardless of the amount of well-meaning improvisation entailed. It is not jazz because it relies almost solely on keyboard potential — on the mathematical, the white, element in jazz. It disregards those earlier fusions of racial inheritance and experience revealed in the classic jazz of the '20s. And its quest is futile, I think: ,it can only lead into the ebb tide of late 19th and early 20th century music of the concert hall, the momentum of which is already gone, with leading European composers in a Gebrauchsmusik frame of mind reaching far back into their own cultural pasts for the kind of "new" ideas (for example, those of Scarlatti and even Machaut) to be found, by analogy, in our own classic, or traditional, jazz — where we, if we are to be culturally honest, must take them as best we may. /