The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (13 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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on
Louis Armstrong, Volume 4: Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
[Columbia CK 45142]). Listening to the Creole Jazz Band version and the Armstrong/Hines duet back to back, there is much to learn about ensemble playing.
As great as the drive is in the band version, that of the duet is probably greater, with Armstrong abstracting the cornet parts of the original and Hines gamboling percussively and fluently around Armstrong's lead, sometimes like the clarinet, sometimes like the trombone, sometimes head-to-head like another trumpet (his style used to be called trumpet-style piano). At the end they trade a series of breaks. The duet makes an interesting contrast with a duet between Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton on Mortons' ''King Porter Stomp" (like so many New Orleans/Chicago standards, this later became a staple for many swing big bands, as arranged by Fletcher Henderson), also included on the Armstrong/Oliver Milestone set.
Both duets show that an irresistible pulse can be generated without drums and even without a rhythm section. On the Creole Jazz Band Gennetts, the rhythm is spelled out more by Lil Armstrong's piano and Bill Johnson's banjo than by drummer Baby Dodds, who plays woodblocks, instead of a regular trap drum set, in such a manner as to make them almost a part of the front-line counterpoint. Later musicians such as Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman would explore this approach, in which the so-called rhythm instruments would play an almost melodic role in the music as opposed to a strictly timekeeping one (see, for example, "Folk Forms No. 1" on
Mingus Presents Mingus
[Candid CD 90051]).
The recordings the Oliver band made for Columbia and OKeh are currently very hard to find; many of the same qualities present in the Gennetts are to be found here, too, usually with marginally better sound. Baby Dodds plays the snare drum on the OKehs, rather than woodblocks. The prize OKehs include "Buddy's Habit," which resembles pianist James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout," and "Tears," which has some startling Armstrong breaks, one of which he later used on his recording of "Potato Head Blues." "High Society Rag," with its echoes of New Orleans street parades, employed a clarinet solo (devised by New Orleans clarinet master Alphonse Picou) that has been used in every performance of the tune to this day. Charlie Parker liked to quote it and did so, in fact, in his epochal "Ko Ko" (available on
Original Bird - The Best of Bird on Savoy
[Savoy ZDS 1208]). And then there is "I Ain't Gonna Tell Nobody," maybe the most exciting Creole Jazz Band performance, where the two cornets leap and dance around each other, a real time in the sun, a moment of glory.
Oliver never again made recordings as important or influential as the Creole Jazz Band sides; in fact, by a year or two after their release, the style
 
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they represented was already considered old-fashioned by most younger musicians. He did, however, make an excellent series of recordings beginning in 1926, some of the best of which are available as
King Oliver and His Dixie Syncopators: Sugar Foot Stomp
(Decca/GRPGRD-616). The band has the Creole Jazz Band's instrumentation but with three saxophone players (who doubled on clarinet) in most cases, rather than a lone clarinetist; the music still sounds like New Orleans music in some ways, but it reflects the larger-band sound that was then becoming the cutting edge of the music, as orchestrated by Fletcher Henderson and his ace arranger, Don Redman (often using tunes borrowed from the repertoire of Oliver himself). The recordings are very successful, musically, from the eerie moods on "Snag It," "Jackass Blues" (two more that were adapted by Henderson), and "Showboat Shuffle," to the great drive of ''Deep Henderson" (no relation to Fletcher) and "Wa-Wa-Wa."
A handsome-looking reissue entitled
King Oliver: The New York Sessions 1929-1930
(RCA/Bluebird 9903-2-RB) is nonetheless disappointing musically, presenting Oliver in a steep technical decline in musical settings that lack the sting of the Dixie Syncopators sides. This set is mainly worth having for historical interest and for a few solos by New Orleans trumpeter Henry "Red" Allen. An RCA/Bluebird compilation called
Great Trumpets: Classic Jazz to Swing
(6753-2-RB) supposedly presents Oliver trying to re-create Louis Armstrong's opening cadenza to "West End Blues," an Oliver composition that Armstrong made his own the previous year. The trumpeter on this track, however, is not Oliver but Louis Metcalf, a very active New York trumpeter of the time. The misattribution is yet another irony in the career of a true giant of the music whose fate it was not to profit from the advances made by others on foundations he had laid down. Oliver died in poverty in 1938.
Jelly Roll Morton
The recordings of Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers occupy as important a place in the history of jazz as Oliver's. The Peppers were not a working band, as Oliver's band was, but rather a group with shifting personnel and instrumentation, brought together beginning in 1926 only for recording purposes. Morton was the first real jazz composer. Oliver wrote many tunes - "Someday Sweetheart," "West End Blues," and plenty of others - but Morton was a composer: he clearly heard the shape of an entire, varied performance in his mind, and the Peppers recordings are all full aesthetic statements made within the three-minute limit of the standard 10-inch 78-rpm records of the time.
Partly this may have been because of Morton's training as a pianist. Trained pianists learn to carry rhythm, melody, and accompaniment all at the same
 
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time; in a sense they are taught to function as an entire orchestra. And any pianist who is trained learns how to approach the treatment of entire compositions. It's no coincidence that most of jazz's preeminent composer-arrangers have been pianists. One exception to this "rule" is Charles Mingus, a bass player (although, in fact, he made several recordings playing piano), who, for all his worship of Duke Ellington, in many ways more closely resembled Morton, personally as well as musically. Mingus recorded tributes to Morton on his albums
Mingus Ah Um
(Columbia CK 40648) and
Blues and Roots
(Atlantic 1305-2), the latter one of the best jazz albums ever made.
There is a greater range of mood available in these Morton performances than in Oliver's. There is also a greater variety of instrumental approach. Instead of giving every instrument a different line, there is a more intricate, premeditated attempt to vary the group sound; the performances are more carefully shaped and paced. This is not to say that there is anything haphazard about Oliver's, only that there is more of a single organizing consciousness behind Morton's.
But along with that, perhaps paradoxically, perhaps not, comes more space for solo statements, albeit solos often composed in advance. In the version of musical democracy that Morton was working out, there was more space for flamboyant individuals (of which Morton was one of the prime examples in the history of a music full of individualists). Morton was working toward a place where the individual's voice would become part of a carefully orchestrated whole; the tension between the soloist's statement, the ensemble's commentary, and the composer's direction was part of the sound. This attitude was the basis of early big-band jazz and found its best expression in the work of jazz's greatest composer, Duke Ellington, who even at the time of these recordings was starting to work out his own grand notion of the balance between individual liberty and group meaning.
You can hear Morton's best early recordings on
The Pearls
(RCA/Bluebird 6588-2-RB). Most of these performances begin with New Orleans - style ensembles, with the trumpet or cornet playing the lead, the clarinet playing a fluid embroidery around that, and the trombone playing harmony notes. Because the recording quality is much better than that of the Oliver records, you can sort out the various instruments more easily. Morton uses the full panoply of devices that Oliver used, including breaks, stop-time choruses, and group polyphony, but there is more variety in the routining, more ingenuity in combining instruments, as in the haunting clarinet harmony with wailing trombone at the end of "Dead Man Blues." There is also more dramatic contrast between sections of the pieces.
Another crucial difference is that, on many of these tracks, Morton uses a
 
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string, or upright, bass - rather than a tuba - to fill in the harmonic underpinnings of the music and also to make the rhythm more flexible. On "Black Bottom Stomp," for example, the bass plays the customary New Orleans street-parade two beats per measure, on the first and third beats of each measure, as a tuba might have. But at certain points, the bass begins playing on all four beats of each measure, imparting a different, more runaway kind of rhythmic drive, more like the forward movement of a train or a car on a highway than the stop-and-go strut of paraders making their way down a street on a hot day. (On Mingus's "My Jelly Roll Soul" on
Blues and Roots
[Atlantic 1305-2], Mingus alternates between a two-four and a four-four feeling in his own bass playing; it's worth comparing it to "Black Bottom Stomp'' for a lesson in the nature of swing.)
But on most of the tunes, Morton uses the more typical two-beat approach. You can learn something about the way his piano style relates to his arranging style by comparing the 1928 band version of "Kansas City Stomps" with his solo version, recorded for Gennett in 1923 (available on
Jelly Roll Morton 1923/24
[Milestone MCD-47018-2]). If you listen closely to the solo version (and you have to listen closely, because the sound is primitive), you can hear that Morton's left hand is playing a bass/chord, bass/chord pattern most of the time, which was characteristic of most ragtime pieces and of stride piano (to hear the stride style clearly, listen to the piano solos "Handful of Keys" and "Carolina Shout" as played by Fats Waller on the album
The Joint Is Jumpin'
[RCA/Bluebird 6288-2-RB]).
On the band version of "Kansas City Stomps," the left-hand way of keeping the beat is delegated to the tuba and drums: the tuba plays the bass note, and drummer Tommy Benford hits his snare drum with brushes on what would be the chord beat. On "Georgia Swing," the banjo takes over the part played by the snare drum. On "Kansas City Stomps," which has a beautiful, dancing, swinging feeling, you can hear both the tuba and the trombone play the occasional melodic punctuations that Morton's left hand interjects on his solo version. "The Pearls," "Grandpa's Spells," "Wolverine Blues," and "Mr. Jelly Lord" also make instructive comparisons to the piano solo versions.
Morton's piano is a constant presence on these recordings, commenting, underlining, embroidering, and propelling the ensemble, not to mention taking some fine solos. On "Sidewalk Blues," listen to the way Morton improvises gorgeous filigrees underneath the closely harmonized trio section for trumpet, clarinet, and trombone. The first time through this section, by the way, a break is actually taken by an automobile horn - a real novelty in 1926. Morton often used humorous effects like the car horn and comic dialogues; it was part of Morton's understanding of himself as an entertainer, not just as an artist.
 
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Jelly Roll Morton had no trouble swinging from low comedy to high art. You can see this, too, on "Dead Man Blues," which begins with a parody of a New Orleans funeral march, probably the first on record, and then opens, like a flower, into a lilting, swinging blues with a melancholy overtone.
Riffs
Morton also used riffs imaginatively, an essential ingredient in jazz. A riff is a repeated phrase usually used to give momentum, encourage forward movement, or set a groove. At the end of "Georgia Swing," for example, the little figure the trumpet and clarinet play is a riff. Riffs often focus the rhythmic feeling of a particular number. The riff is derived from the repeated patterns of call-and-response that developed in the African-American church, not only in the singing but in the way a preacher uses repeated phrasings, varied slightly, for emphasis. Louis Armstrong organizes his famous solo on "S.O.L. Blues" (available on
The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Volume 3
[Columbia CK 44422]) around a riff pattern that could have been translated directly from the rhythms of a sanctified preacher.
Riffs are an integral part of the three versions of Morton's own "King Porter Stomp," recorded by Fletcher Henderson and available together on
A Study in Frustration: The Fletcher Henderson Story
(Columbia/Legacy C3K 57596). The tune became a standard of the swing-era dance band. In fact, the entire third disc of this three-disc set is a kind of graduate seminar in riffs, especially the apocalyptic "Yeah Man!," in which the brass and reed sections engage in thrilling call-and-response. Perhaps even more exciting is ''Toby" by Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra (featuring some wild stride piano by a young Count Basie), available on
Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra (1929-1932): Basie Beginnings
(RCA/Bluebird 9768-2-RB).
Riffs were the meat and potatoes of the big swing dance bands of the 1930s, but small groups used them to their own advantage as well; listen, for just one example, to "Swing Is Here" by Gene Krupa's Swing Band, recorded in 1936 by a small group including trumpeter Roy Eldridge, tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, and Benny Goodman on clarinet (available on the collection
Swing Is Here: Small Band Swing 1935-1939
[RCA/Bluebird 2180-2-RB]). At the end, they use a series of rapid-fire riffs to create tension and ease it at the same time. Soloists, too, could use riffs to generate propulsion; as tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins enters his solo on "Crazy Rhythm" (available on
Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter in Paris
[DRG/Swing CDSW 8403]), he sets up a repeated phrase that provides an exciting momentum.
The so-called bebop players of the 1940s were less interested in riffs than they were in long, intricate melodic lines that didn't repeat, but they used riffs

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