The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (12 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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Page xviii
Several other people played special parts in the evolution of this book. I'd like to thank Stanley Crouch for fifteen years of great conversation and enduring friendship. Peter Keepnews provided me with invaluable leads at record companies, as well as much moral support. Dan Morgenstern, now the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, was kind enough to publish my juvenilia in
Down Beat
while I was still in high school, encouraging me to think I might have something to say about this music.
I'd also like to thank Albert Murray for all his reading lists and for the insights contained in what is still the best book about jazz music,
Stomping the Blues
(Da Capo Press). Thanks, too, to the writers and commentators on the music, whose work I've admired and learned from through the years: Stanley Dance, Leonard Feather, Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler, Ed Beach, Whitney Balliett, Ralph Ellison, Martin Williams, David Himmelstein, and Hsio Wen Shih (wherever he may be). And, for various kindnesses, thanks to Lorraine Gordon, Norman Mailer, George Wein, Jeff Rosen, Stew Bernstein, Ross and Sally Keegan, Hank O'Neal, Jack Meltzer, Leonard Kunstadt, Red Metzger, Carl Kendziora, Bob Altschuler, and Wendy Cunningham.
Lastly, I would like to thank the many musicians, alive and deceased, who have spent time talking, hanging out, and sometimes playing music with me; I could never list them all, but I could never leave out Milt Hinton, Buddy Tate, Dicky Wells, Rudy Powell, Mary Lou Williams, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Jo Jones, Budd Johnson, Barry Harris, Wynton Marsalis, Jimmy Owens, Chris White, Warren Smith, Ernie Wilkins, Jaki Byard, Bennie Morton, Roy Eldridge, Lonnie Hillyer, Jay McShann, Al Hibbler, Bernard Addison, Ruby Braff, Jerry Dodgion, Eddie Jefferson, Billy Mitchell, Clifford Jordan, Walter Davis, Jr., Marcus Roberts, Walter Booker, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Jimmy Rowles, and especially my piano teacher, the late Sanford Gold. To them I owe more than I could put into words.
 
Page 1
ENSEMBLES
 
Page 3
Many Voices
In a jazz group, as in any community, certain roles need to be filled. Someone has to play the melody (if there's a melody), someone has to keep time, someone has to suggest the harmonic context. Often these jobs overlap. In jazz, each instrumentalist has to understand his or her role in the group well enough so that he or she can improvise on it and not just follow directions. Playing in a jazz group involves both responsibility and freedom; freedom consists of understanding your responsibility well enough to act independently and still make the needed contribution to the group. As such, a jazz performance is a working model of a democracy.
Of course, the notion of who fills what role in the ensemble changes with time, as it does in any community. And the way the community supports individual voices, accompanies, so to speak, a soloist, also changes. This section looks at the changes in these attitudes.
In the earliest jazz bands on record, the approach to the ensemble was polyphonic, or many-voiced. Each melody instrument - typically one or two trumpets, a trombone, and a clarinet - played its own melody, or line, in an ongoing counterpoint, sometimes worked out, often improvised. Sometimes the instruments all played different lines; sometimes they doubled up together for a while.
The so-called rhythm instruments - usually a piano, banjo or guitar, drums, and a string bass or tuba - hammered out the underlying rhythm. At the same time, they spelled out the harmonic underpinning - the piano and guitar playing chords, the bass or tuba hitting the appropriate low notes.
 
Page 4
This instrumentation, except for the piano, was derived from that of the typical New Orleans marching band. These bands played most often for parades and were an integral part of the life of the community; their music was indispensable for weddings, funerals, and holiday festivities. Their repertoire consisted of spirituals, marching tunes, ragtime tunes, light opera, blues, French and Spanish songs, and just about everything else.
These bands evolved a way of playing that delegated the melody to the trumpet, the instrument that was simultaneously most powerful and most flexible, the one that could be heard above the others at a fairground or in a noisy street parade. The trombone, lower-pitched and less agile, played long, held harmony notes and simple answering phrases. The clarinet and saxophone, considered more fluid but possessed of less volume, played more notes, embroidering around the melody work of the trumpets. In the course of playing this way, depending on the occasion, the musicians would make variations in their parts. But New Orleans trumpeters learned to play a melody straight, or they didn't eat regularly.
This same instrumentation, more or less, was employed in dance halls and other good-time places, and there the fare was raunchier and designed specifically for dancing. It's hard today to know what this music actually sounded like; by the time most of the earliest musicians got a chance to record they had already heard and been influenced by performers in later styles, by bands such as those led by King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and, later, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis.
Out of the rhythmic and melodic gumbo created from the marching and honky-tonk bands, a first era of classic jazz materialized. It didn't emphasize solos, as we think of them; the emphasis was on group interplay and rhythmic coherence. The first jazz records were, in fact, made in 1917 by a white band from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Their early records, available as
Original Dixieland Jazz Band: The 75th Anniversary
(RCA/Bluebird 61098-2-RB), are full of energy and fun, if a little thin musically. They were, however, a commercial sensation, and for several years record companies recorded all kinds of nonjazz syncopated dance music under the name of jazz. It wasn't until the early 1920s that bands that could deliver the genuine article began recording.
You can find and enjoy the whole range of approaches to small-band polyphony in the recordings of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers; both bands were led by men from New Orleans. The Creole Jazz Band records are, by and large, primitively recorded, but they contain fantastic music once you get used to the sound. It takes some concen-
 
Page 5
trating at first to hear what's going on, but the fire, the assurance, and the excitement of the band belong to a style that is at its peak.
The Morton records are a little less wild sounding at first, a little more orchestrated in a more refined manner, but they are as exciting in their own way, and they are easier to listen to. They also feature the piano of the leader, who was, in many respects, one of the most interesting figures in the history of jazz.
King Oliver
Joe "King" Oliver was one of the most famous cornet (a smaller version of the trumpet in common use in the early days of jazz) players in New Orleans, where the title "King" is not bestowed lightly. He was a strong leader, and some of New Orleans's best musicians played under him - clarinetist Johnny Dodds and his brother, drummer Baby Dodds, clarinetist Jimmie Noone, and others. Oliver left New Orleans for Chicago in 1918 to play as a sideman for a couple of years before organizing what would be called the Creole Jazz Band. The first incarnation of the Creole Jazz Band spent a year in California before returning to Chicago in 1922, where they were joined by Oliver's protégé from New Orleans, Louis Armstrong.
Armstrong joined them in July 1922, but the band didn't record until April 1923. So the band that finally recorded the first truly classic jazz records had time to get its signals straight. The band's very first recordings, made for a small company called Gennett, showed the power and inventiveness of the band, as well as its flexibility. They are available on
Louis Armstrong and King Oliver
(Milestone MCD-47017-2). Gennett, by the way, was responsible for many of the most important early jazz records. Its primitive recording studio was located next to the railroad tracks in Richmond, Indiana, and whenever a train was scheduled to go by, the musicians had to stop recording. Although the sound on the Gennetts is extremely low fidelity, the music is worth any effort.
The first tune, "Just Gone," is New Orleans polyphony all the way, with the two cornets playing the lead, or melody, the clarinet playing embroidery around this line, and the trombone playing held harmony notes and sometimes simple countermelodies. The piano and banjo players and drummer Baby Dodds, who plays woodblocks throughout the Gennetts, hammer out the tempo and the chords. As the performance goes on, the cornets begin making variations on the melody; the performance is a two-and-a-half-minute jam. The drive that Oliver and Armstrong generated together, the bite of the two cornets, which you can hear as they come in after Johnny Dodds's clarinet solo on "Canal Street Blues," gave a lesson to everyone who listened
 
Page 6
and formed the basis for the distribution of roles in the early swing big bands, in which most often the trumpet section carried the lead, the reeds played a countermelody, or embroidery, and the trombones played harmony and simple counterrhythms.
Listen to Oliver's solos and breaks on "Mandy Lee Blues" and "Dippermouth Blues." This onomatopoeically named wa-wa style, achieved by manipulating the rubber part of a standard bathroom plunger over the opening in the bell of the horn, was a way of imitating vocal tone and increasing the horn's expressiveness. It influenced Armstrong heavily, especially in his accompaniments to blues singers (listen to Armstrong answering and commenting on Bessie Smith's singing on "Reckless Blues" and "You've Been a Good Old Wagon" on
Bessie Smith/The Collection
[Columbia CK 44441]). This style was refined and extended by the brass section of Duke Ellington's orchestra; today, Wynton Marsalis continues this tradition. An example of his plunger playing can be heard on the title track of his album
The Majesty of the Blues
(Columbia CK 45091,) which also includes a stylized re-creation of a New Orleans funeral.
Oliver's solo on "Dippermouth Blues" (Dippermouth, or Dipper, was one of Armstrong's early nicknames, before the famous Satchmo) became the standard solo to play on the tune, which was transposed for big band by Don Redman and renamed "Sugar Foot Stomp." But in these recordings, generally, the concern with solos is subordinated to the ensemble. And the sheer flat-out drive that the group as a whole could generate, especially on a tune like "Snake Rag," was hard to believe and even today does not sound dated.
Breaks
"Snake Rag" incorporates another basic compositional technique of jazz: the break, a moment in which the rhythm section stops playing and an instrument or, in this case, instruments (Oliver's and Armstrong's cornets) play alone but in tempo. It is a test of skill, equilibrium, and presence of mind; think of it as the moment when a ski jumper takes off from the end of the ramp or an Olympic diver leaves the diving board for an intricately executed series of moves. Except in a jazz break, more often than not, the moves are improvised rather than carefully worked out in advance.
Most of the giants of jazz have been masters of the break. Louis Armstrong certainly was; his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are full of stunning breaks, especially "Wild Man Blues," a slow, minor-key number recorded four years after the Oliver records, in which Armstrong takes break after break of phenomenal intensity (available on
The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Volume 2
[Columbia CK 44253]).
 
Page 7
Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist whose graceful, inventive solos with the Count Basie band changed musicians' conception of melody, was also a master of this device; his 1939 solo on "Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" (on
The Essential Count Basie, Volume 2
[Columbia CK 40835]) begins with a break using only one note, repeated and accented, like a bull stamping the ground before charging, and his solo on his own composition "Tickle Toe," on the same set, also begins with a startling break. His masterpiece "Lester Leaps In" (also on
The Essential Count Basie, Volume 2
) contains a chorus consisting of one break after another in which the rhythm section is silent except for a chord on the first beat of every other measure; this kind of series of breaks, where the soloist plays basically over suspended time, is called stop-time. Armstrong does it, too, on his "Potato Head Blues" solo (on
The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Volume 2
). For a more recent example of stop-time, listen to Sonny Rollins's tenor solo on I Know That You Know" on Dizzy Gillespie's
Sonny Side Up
(Verve 825 674-2).
Charlie Parker, the alto saxophone genius who revolutionized the music yet again and was originally a disciple of Lester Young's, also recorded some classic breaks, the most famous of which was on his 1946 "A Night in Tunisia." The originally issued version (on
The Legendary Dial Masters, Volume 1
[Stash ST-CD-231]) is fantastic, but on a previous take he took a break that was so great it quickly became a legend among musicians and fans alike; it was issued by itself, fading up just before the break and fading out just afterward, and is included on
The Legendary Dial Masters, Volume 2
(Stash ST-CD-25). He also plays perfect breaks on both takes of "Victory Ball," recorded in 1949 with an all-star band including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and available on
The Metronome All-Star Bands
(RCA/Bluebird 7636-2-RB). And for just one example of John Coltrane's aptitude for breaks, listen to "Liberia" on
Coltrane's Sound
(Atlantic 1419-2). The point is that the break is a basic compositional element of jazz music, and it can be found in the work of musicians of every period of jazz. In any case, the Creole Jazz Band's version of "Snake Rag" is studded with two-cornet breaks by Oliver and Armstrong, which caused a sensation in Chicago and are still sly, fresh, and exhilarating.
More Oliver
"Froggie Moore" is a fine band reading of a piano rag composed by Jelly Roll Morton. You can hear the composer's solo version of the same tune, recorded eight months later (also for Gennett), on
Jelly Roll Morton 1923/24
(Milestone MCD-47018-2).
Another of the Gennetts, "Weather Bird," is an Armstrong composition, which he recorded five years later as a duet with pianist Earl Hines (available

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