WED., OCTOBER 18, 2006
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From the Vaults: Early Jazz Classics
by Kevin Whitehead
One of the many paradoxes surrounding jazz is that we know more about its origins now than folks did 70 years ago, when the music was just a few decades old. A handful of recent books have helped fill in the picture, like Lawrence Gushee's Pioneers of Jazz (about the extensive vaudeville tours by the unrecorded Creole Band in the 1910s), Tim Brooks' deep survey of early black recording artists, Lost Sounds, Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music (which has much to say about early New Orleans) and David Wondrich's too-breezy but wide-ranging Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924.
Jazz evolved out of blues, rags, brass-band music and Cuban rhythms around 1900 in New Orleans, when raucously loud cornetist Buddy Bolden stomped the competition, summoning crowds to his outdoor gigs with powerful blasts of his horn. (Indoor gigs too — he'd blow out an open window.) The music didn't officially debut on record until 1917, when the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band had a two-sided hit with "Dixie Jass Band One-Step" and "Livery Stable Blues." Yes, the ODJB were imitators, no, they don't improvise, and yes, blockhead leader Nick LaRocca tried to write blacks out of early-jazz history, but if you can get past all that, the sides are stunning compared to other period recordings, and hold up remarkably well. Here, for the first time on record, we hear the typical New Orleans front line — cornet batting out the lead melody, clarinet skating over the top of the harmonies, trombone sweeping up the rear and sliding up on the next chord change. The African-American musicians from New Orleans who'd toured as the Creole Band might have beat them onto record, visiting New York the previous year. But cornetist Freddie Keppard is said to have spurned the opportunity, because the money wasn't right, or out of worry other bands would steal their stuff.
Even so, a few African-American outfits that did record before 1917 showed how wafer-thin the line between late ragtime and early jazz could be. New York bandleader James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra is the prime example, and clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman is way overdue for reassessment. (There's nothing by either at eMusic, but if you Google around, you may turn up some streaming audio.) And take, please, the little-known Versatile Four, a two-banjo/piano/drums vaudeville quartet resident in London in 1916, when they waxed their version of Sweatman's "Down Home Rag," whittled down from James Reese Europe's 1913 arrangement. You need to hear V4's version for the astonishing hot drumming of Charlie Johnson, using a small kit centered on snare drum. His energy and headlong momentum and the excitement he generates anticipate later, more overtly modern trapsters — even as he reveals jazz drumming's roots in military rudiments.
W. C. Handy, long disparaged for taking the presumptuous mantle "Father of the Blues" (more like "Father of the Blues Copyright") made a brace of recordings between 1917 — post-ODJB, with a pickup band — and 1923. The best of Handy's long-elusive 78s include his own "Ole Miss Rag" from 1917, and "Yellow Dog Blues" and the immortal "St. Louis Blues" from 1922, all made before King Oliver, Louis Armstrong or Handy's nemesis Jelly Roll Morton had recorded a note. Handy's records have their mostly straitlaced charms, but give it up to guitarist Danny Barker's classic putdown: You only had to hear Handy play the blues to know he didn't invent them.
Our mental picture of what pre-1917 jazz sounded like involves a lot of working backwards from later recordings. (Eighty years ago, as now, artists' first records included pieces they'd been honing for years.) In a previous column I mentioned the piano solos Morton cut in 1923 and '24, which, taken together, chart his progress from ragtime into jazz.
The earliest New Orleans pioneers didn't use the word jazz; they called their music ragtime, and played band versions of Scott Joplin piano rags alongside the blues. The Creole Band's reluctant Freddie Keppard finally recorded in the '20s, and some New Orleans old-timers said he came closest in sound and feel to the legendary Bolden, whose schizophrenia wiped him off the scene in 1907. Keppard's driving, herky-jerk syncopations on 1926's "Stockyard Strut" may be the closest glimpse we get of Bolden's band style. May be — but we don't really know.
There have been other contenders for Bolden, Jr. status. The New Orleans revival of the '40s championed then-recently rediscovered Bunk Johnson, that rare showbiz figure to add years to his age to get over. Johnson claimed to have played second cornet with Bolden in 1895, when Bunk was in fact six years old. (You get the flavor of his testimony from the track "Bunk Johnson Talking Records.") Supporters treated him with the awe we might reserve for a successfully-thawed caveman, and revered his '40s recordings as glimpses at the holy grail. Of course, every period recreation is rife with anachronisms, smacking of the time in which it was made as well as the time it evokes: think Robin Hood movies. But Bunk's takes on "Dusty Rag," "Those Draftin' Blues," "Franklin Street Blues" and the New Orleans standby "High Society" do catch something of the spirit of jazz way, way back when (even if Bolden used rhythm guitar, not banjo).
In my mind's ear, when I picture the first African-American horn bands inching toward jazz, I'm reminded of two aged, depleted groups Frederic Ramsey recorded in western Alabama in 1954, for Folkways' Music from the South, Vol. 1: Country Brass Bands. The small Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band (tracks 1-9) and Lapsey Band can be crude and stumbling, but they've got that jazz singing-horn thing down.
Other recorded evidence helps illuminate the musical environment jazz erupted within. The spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers pointed back to the 19th-century African-American hymnbook's creative borrowings from European harmony. (Start here.) The United States Marine Band, who'd played rags at the White House, recorded Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1906. But even a decade earlier, musicians drawn from John Philip Sousa's thundering concert band cut some pre-disc cylinders, including his "Washington Post March." (You know it as the Monty Python theme.) But hear Sousa's 1896 "The Thunderer March," with its lead trumpets, supportive trombones, and piccolos winging arpeggios over the top, to hear what set the style for jostling New Orleans horns in the first place.
Jazz evolved out of blues, rags, brass-band music and Cuban rhythms around 1900 in New Orleans, when raucously loud cornetist Buddy Bolden stomped the competition, summoning crowds to his outdoor gigs with powerful blasts of his horn. (Indoor gigs too — he'd blow out an open window.) The music didn't officially debut on record until 1917, when the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band had a two-sided hit with "Dixie Jass Band One-Step" and "Livery Stable Blues." Yes, the ODJB were imitators, no, they don't improvise, and yes, blockhead leader Nick LaRocca tried to write blacks out of early-jazz history, but if you can get past all that, the sides are stunning compared to other period recordings, and hold up remarkably well. Here, for the first time on record, we hear the typical New Orleans front line — cornet batting out the lead melody, clarinet skating over the top of the harmonies, trombone sweeping up the rear and sliding up on the next chord change. The African-American musicians from New Orleans who'd toured as the Creole Band might have beat them onto record, visiting New York the previous year. But cornetist Freddie Keppard is said to have spurned the opportunity, because the money wasn't right, or out of worry other bands would steal their stuff.
Even so, a few African-American outfits that did record before 1917 showed how wafer-thin the line between late ragtime and early jazz could be. New York bandleader James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra is the prime example, and clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman is way overdue for reassessment. (There's nothing by either at eMusic, but if you Google around, you may turn up some streaming audio.) And take, please, the little-known Versatile Four, a two-banjo/piano/drums vaudeville quartet resident in London in 1916, when they waxed their version of Sweatman's "Down Home Rag," whittled down from James Reese Europe's 1913 arrangement. You need to hear V4's version for the astonishing hot drumming of Charlie Johnson, using a small kit centered on snare drum. His energy and headlong momentum and the excitement he generates anticipate later, more overtly modern trapsters — even as he reveals jazz drumming's roots in military rudiments.
W. C. Handy, long disparaged for taking the presumptuous mantle "Father of the Blues" (more like "Father of the Blues Copyright") made a brace of recordings between 1917 — post-ODJB, with a pickup band — and 1923. The best of Handy's long-elusive 78s include his own "Ole Miss Rag" from 1917, and "Yellow Dog Blues" and the immortal "St. Louis Blues" from 1922, all made before King Oliver, Louis Armstrong or Handy's nemesis Jelly Roll Morton had recorded a note. Handy's records have their mostly straitlaced charms, but give it up to guitarist Danny Barker's classic putdown: You only had to hear Handy play the blues to know he didn't invent them.
Our mental picture of what pre-1917 jazz sounded like involves a lot of working backwards from later recordings. (Eighty years ago, as now, artists' first records included pieces they'd been honing for years.) In a previous column I mentioned the piano solos Morton cut in 1923 and '24, which, taken together, chart his progress from ragtime into jazz.
The earliest New Orleans pioneers didn't use the word jazz; they called their music ragtime, and played band versions of Scott Joplin piano rags alongside the blues. The Creole Band's reluctant Freddie Keppard finally recorded in the '20s, and some New Orleans old-timers said he came closest in sound and feel to the legendary Bolden, whose schizophrenia wiped him off the scene in 1907. Keppard's driving, herky-jerk syncopations on 1926's "Stockyard Strut" may be the closest glimpse we get of Bolden's band style. May be — but we don't really know.
There have been other contenders for Bolden, Jr. status. The New Orleans revival of the '40s championed then-recently rediscovered Bunk Johnson, that rare showbiz figure to add years to his age to get over. Johnson claimed to have played second cornet with Bolden in 1895, when Bunk was in fact six years old. (You get the flavor of his testimony from the track "Bunk Johnson Talking Records.") Supporters treated him with the awe we might reserve for a successfully-thawed caveman, and revered his '40s recordings as glimpses at the holy grail. Of course, every period recreation is rife with anachronisms, smacking of the time in which it was made as well as the time it evokes: think Robin Hood movies. But Bunk's takes on "Dusty Rag," "Those Draftin' Blues," "Franklin Street Blues" and the New Orleans standby "High Society" do catch something of the spirit of jazz way, way back when (even if Bolden used rhythm guitar, not banjo).
In my mind's ear, when I picture the first African-American horn bands inching toward jazz, I'm reminded of two aged, depleted groups Frederic Ramsey recorded in western Alabama in 1954, for Folkways' Music from the South, Vol. 1: Country Brass Bands. The small Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band (tracks 1-9) and Lapsey Band can be crude and stumbling, but they've got that jazz singing-horn thing down.
Other recorded evidence helps illuminate the musical environment jazz erupted within. The spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers pointed back to the 19th-century African-American hymnbook's creative borrowings from European harmony. (Start here.) The United States Marine Band, who'd played rags at the White House, recorded Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1906. But even a decade earlier, musicians drawn from John Philip Sousa's thundering concert band cut some pre-disc cylinders, including his "Washington Post March." (You know it as the Monty Python theme.) But hear Sousa's 1896 "The Thunderer March," with its lead trumpets, supportive trombones, and piccolos winging arpeggios over the top, to hear what set the style for jostling New Orleans horns in the first place.
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