Gazpacho: September 2010

The following is a mock radio script for a show about the early jazz of New Orleans...

(a picture of a brass band playing on Bourbon Street, taken in July2010)

After performing at the 1970 Isle Of Wight music festival in front of a crowd larger than the one that had been at Woodstock, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was asked what his performance had been entitled. In typical Miles fashion, he said “Call It Anything.” I doubt that Miles ever cared what the music was called, he was too busy playing it. Jazz has always been like that, even before it was jazz. It can be easy to get hung up on certain recording dates, certain stylistic trends, and the tendency of jazz historians in the past has been to unfairly isolate jazz from all the music being made in its age, and the age that preceded it. The following selections are meant to help a new listener, (and maybe the older ones too) hear what jazz really sounded like before all of the elements that formed the foundation of the music had congealed into something far greater than the sum of its parts. With that in mind, not all of the selections date from the earliest recorded period and many of the names most associated with that era, the Twenties, are not present. However, in their place are recordings that I hope will demonstrate how fundamental a role the blues has played in shaping early jazz, as well as examples of musical styles that are the most frequently overlooked when studying the birth of what is commonly accepted as jazz. Then again, maybe it isn’t all jazz, but so what…you can call it anything.

Louis Armstrong

I suppose that Louis Armstrong, after long nights playing the hottest trumpet in town, making eyes at sweaty dancers, and walking his way through the sensory overloaded streets of New Orleans, had occasion to take a day off in the West End district along the shore of Lake Pontchatrain. Though it was his mentor, King Oliver, who composed the walk-along blues, only Louis Armstrong could pull off the first complete jazz masterpiece, and how fitting a tune for the slow drag of the Big Easy where jazz, back when Louis was still a kid, was just music.

From 1928, West End Blues featuring Earl Hines on piano, Jimmy Strong on clarinet, Zutty Singleton on drums, Fred Robinson on trombone, and Mancy Carr on banjo.

Nowadays, you’re most likely to come across a kazoo at a kid’s party but circa 1927, they were a popular choice in the many jug bands, hokum groups, and other thrown-together spasm ensembles. In fact, many of the earliest jazz bands were often trying to imitate the kiddie junk bands in New Orleans. It is possible that The Memphis Jug Band featuring Memphis Minnie on vocals was a more “refined” example, but there is no doubt how closely their slow blues, complete with a swinging kazoo and a guitar chugging along with a tango rag stomp pattern, resembles the jazz recordings of its day, including what we heard from Louis Armstrong.

From Harry Smith’s Anthology of Folk Music, recorded in 1927, “Bob Lee Junior Blues” by the Memphis Jug Band featuring Memphis Minnie

One doesn’t usually think of the fife as a particularly “bluesy” instrument, but played by someone like Napolian Strickland, it is easy to hear what the blues must’ve sounded like as played in Congo Square since the days of the slave trade. Fife and drum groups were more prominent in Mississippi, but one can hear the sound of New Orleans brass bands, and get a good idea where many of those African syncopations were hiding out before they made their way into jazz.

Taken from a live recording in 1969 at the Memphis Blues Festival, Napolian Strickland’s “Back Water Rising.”

If any early jazz and blues artist can be seen as a direct pre-cursor of today’s hip hop, Tampa Red is it. Known as the “Guitar Wizard,” he found popularity with his racy songs, many of which, including his biggest hit entitled “Tight Like That,” were co-written with Thomas Dorsey. While Dorsey would later drop his secular act for a Holier calling, writing the gospel staple, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” Tampa Red just kept on with the raunchy stuff like “Sho’ Is Hot.” His music is noteworthy for a discussion of early jazz because he represents an artist that turned his more refined musicianship to the sounds of hokum, creating a commercially successful hybrid of blues, Podunk humor, and ragtime, in short a recipe for jazz that would soon be tweaked into the boogie woogie R&B of Louis Jordan, all setting the stage for the more popular off-shoots of jazz, including rock & roll.

From 1929, here’s Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band with “Sho’ Is Hot.”

While Tampa Red’s Hokum group was a pleasant imitation, much like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was when compared with a group like King Oliver’s, Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers were a genuine jug band and their hit “Walk Right In” with its near walking bass line provided by the jug, and the flutter tonguing effects by the kazoo, shows how the pre-jazz era was filled with music that seems to incorporate elements from many sources but was all about having fun and capturing those good times on a record for all to play over & over. No wonder the Rooftop Singers and Dr. Hook were able to re-record the song forty years later and have a hit. Gus himself was a banjo player and while the banjo has come to be more associated with Steve Martin or Deliverance, it was in the method Gus used it that it would give way to the guitar in jazz bands, comping the chords along crisply to give the music a forward momentum, what would soon be called “swing.”

"Walk Right In" by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers

John Lomax once described Rich Amerson as a “liar by constant practice, a drunkard whenever possible, ragged, dirty, unkept – Rich was at the time one of the most interesting people I have ever met. His vivid recollections of his life as a roundabout, a section hand, a farmer, a preacher, a mule skinner, a well-digger, a minstrel – his ability to relive these experiences and dramatically recount them – what difference did it make if he had never learned to write his name? Somewhere deep down in this raw collop of nature lived a spark of genius.” In the liner notes to a collection of songs and stories by Amerson penned in 1941, Lomax went on to remark that he has “an inborn genius for melody.” Amerson was born in 1893, was a strawberry picker in rural Alabama, and his acapella blues singing, often arching into a gorgeously human falsetto, is probably the finest example of recorded pre-modern blues.

Recorded in 1961 by Nathaniel Reed in the home of Rich Amerson, here is “Black Woman.”

(Rich Amerson)

Jelly Roll Morton was every bit the character a name like his brings to the imagination. He started playing Ragtime and blues and what was surely the latent ingredients of jazz in all but name at the age of 14 in a New Orleans house of ill repute, if you know what I mean…No wonder he was one of the first people to claim the invention of jazz, stating later that he’d been playing jazz since 1902, even going as far as claiming that Buddy Bolden had been a Ragtime player, not, as is commonly accepted, the First jazz player…Listening to his funky, Latinesque take on a more improvisatory brand of Ragtime all these years later, it is easy to forget how quickly the contributions of the original jazz innovators were overlooked due to changing tastes and, especially racism. Jelly Roll Morton was once the victim of a stabbing inflicted during a gig in Washington DC. Because the whites-only hospital he was taken to was so slow to treat him, his wounds never healed properly and he died a few months later, in 1941 already considered old-fashioned.

Jelly Roll Morton, alone at the piano, from 1923, here is “New Orleans Joys”

I have had the distinct pleasure of sauntering up the streets of the French Quarter during the late afternoon during the hottest days of July and down the shadow-filled cross streets where sunlight has made beautiful patterns on the pink walls as it passes through the elaborately ornate balcony railings and if I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the crying clarinet of Sidney Bechet still wandering like a ghost who will never tire of playing the blues. Bechet is most often remembered as being the first jazz artist to make extensive use of the soprano saxophone, but it was as the hottest, most vocal clarinetist in New Orleans, that he built his epic reputation. Some fans of early jazz even contend that his virtuosic playing was a serious rival of Louis Armstrong’s. What is not in doubt is that Sidney Bechet had an incredible ear for melody and a deeply sensuous tone, full of the passion found in the deep blues. The following rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” written in 1935 and recorded by Bechet in 1938, is fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, the opening bars of the tune sound like a slow rural blues, but with Bechet’s entrance on soprano saxophone, and the gorgeous folk-like quality of Gershwin’s chord progression, traces of influence from the klezmer and Italian music that were common in New Orleans can be detected. After all, Bechet was from a wealthy Creole family, and, perhaps more so than some of his peers in the jazz community, he was a “cultured” musician, one who could read music, and later moved to Paris.

With Meade Lux Lewis on piano, Sid Catlett on drums, Johnny Williams on bass, and the exceptional Teddy Bunn on guitar, here is Sidney Bechet, “Summertime,” one of the indisputable masterpieces in the history of jazz, perhaps the pinnacle of the New Orleans style.

Much to the chagrin of many early jazz artists, it was the all-white “Original Dixieland Jass Band” that lays claim to the first so-called jazz recording, “Livery Stable Blues” from 1917. While it is, at best, mildly cute, at its worst, complete with barnyard animal noises, it is a great example of how the “idea” of jazz was quickly hijacked by mediocre imitators who lacked any of the true feel for blues but had the right skin color to gain in popularity overnight with a cheap knockoff. That pattern of black innovation, white imitation, and the disparity between the financial rewards of making music that was in great demand was to continue for decades, and, inevitably, it has often had a very negative effect on the racial prejudices of musicians themselves. However, it was Bix Beiderbecke, born on March 10^th, 1903 in Davenport, Iowa who would take his cues from black artists and forge the first original white voice in jazz, utilizing his sophisticated ear for the harmony of Debussy along with a knack for patient melodic soloing in the trumpet’s mid range since he lacked the outright virtuosity of his idol, Louis Armstrong. Though he never recorded with the black artists he so admired, his natural feeling for the blues and unique use of a mellower approach, endeared him to younger players, both white and black. It was Eddie Condon who famously said that the sound of Beiderbecke’s cornet was “like a girl saying yes.” His smoother approach to jazz in the New Orleans style would go on to be a great influence on saxophonist Lester Young, who in turn is probably the person who first popularized the word “cool” the way it continues to be used today which is just, well…very cool indeed.

Bix was also an outstanding jazz pianist, and his recording of “In A Mist” should definitely be heard by anyone that thinks jazz of the Twenties was somehow primitive…Here’s one of his finest group performances on cornet, from 1925, Bix Beiderbecke and his Rhythm Jugglers with “Davenport Blues.”

Clarinetist George Lewis, born in 1900, was an active performer in the early days of jazz in his native New Orleans, but it was much later, from the 1940s through the Sixties, that he is best remembered for leading his own band, one that was highly praised for remaining faithful to the older style of playing. He was also a member of the Eureka Brass Band, one of several surviving funeral bands. While it is the hot, after-funeral portion featuring funky second-line drumming and wild soloing, that is more commonly heard when discussing the brass bands of New Orleans, in truth, the slow blues dirge processional best exemplifies a style of playing that has changed very little since the earliest days that African Americans had access to brass instruments on which they learned to play lilting spirituals. To this day, “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” is a staple of all New Orleans-style brass bands. The tune itself was probably written in the Thirties, but it was first recorded in 1941, and the following recording by George Lewis and the Eureka Brass Band comes from 1943. It is important to note that such funeral dirges were almost impossible to record with even decent fidelity during the Twenties because of the extreme distortion that would have resulted from the inability of the technology at that time to capture the sonic range and volume of a brass band with its booming Sousaphone and pounding bass drum.

Slow and sad, listen to the way all the instruments work together to let the melody breathe like a soulful singer while commenting in short motifs and in harmony with one another on this rendition of “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” by George Lewis and The Eureka Brass Band from 1943.

Bessie Smith was the daughter of a preacher who became one of the greatest blues singers of all time, recorded with Louis Armstrong, and even made an appearance on film in Dudley Murphy’s “St. Louis Blues” in 1929. Coming after Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith was one of several female blues artists, including Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace, and Alberta Hunter, whose commercial success and, (I suspect) a fair dose of sexism, has often caused their contributions to early jazz to be marginalized, or relegated to some silly sub-category like “classic female blues.” Truth be told, they were all tremendously talented and probably far ahead of their time in terms of exactly how they sounded compared with the finest singers that were to come.

The following tune is noteworthy because it is often thought to have been written in response to the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, but was, in fact, recorded several months before the actual flood. I have often thought that Bob Dylan’s lyrical obsession with floods and New Orleans seemed unexplainably prophetic, but maybe he, like Bessie, just knew the subject makes for good blues. Along with the perfect accompaniment of master stride pianist James P. Johnson, whose light touch seems to mimic the rhythm of rain fall, here is “Back Water Blues” by Bessie Smith.

Many years after the heyday of early jazz in New Orleans, saxophonist Albert Ayler would emerge in New York during the mid-Sixties playing a radical brand of free jazz that often sounded like it had abandoned all the trappings of bebop for a return to the simple march-like melodies, collective improvisation, and slow spirituals of the music’s earliest days. His tone, with its gaping vibrato, his use of folk melodies that were singable, sounding like something a Salvation Army Band might play, and the wild energy-music portions of his performances, something like an atonal version of a New Orleans funeral band, all led many to quickly dismiss his music as “anti-jazz.” However, many musicians, including John Coltrane, recognized his approach as a fascinating and valid form of exploring some of the forgotten components of early jazz. I have included the following performance of “Our Prayer” from the recent “Holy Ghost” box set released by Revenant Records and featuring Albert’s brother Donald Ayler on trumpet, Michael Samson on violin, Bill Folwell on bass and Beaver Harris on drums, to illustrate how closely related Ayler’s modern music was to its early New Orleans predecessors. When compared with the earlier rendition of “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” as well the saxophone tone of Sidney Bechet, it should be obvious that Ayler was certainly connected to the tradition of early jazz, albeit through his own unique approach.

The recording was done live while on a European tour in late 1966, and, until the release of the box set in 2004, was previously unavailable. The box set, along with an acclaimed documentary called “My Name Is Albert Ayler” which was released in 2005, have led to a resurgence of interest in his work.

In recent years, the early styles of jazz and pre-jazz have been critically reevaluated, and several prominent modern-day jazz artists have devoted entire albums to exploring the music in greater detail. The most noted of these, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, has often managed to alienate his fellow jazz musicians by insisting on certain limitations per the definition of what should and should not be considered jazz. While Wynton is undeniably one of the finest jazz artists in the music’s history, his narrowing of what can be defined as jazz has only served to tarnish the inclusive legacy of early jazz. In contrast, a recent recording by New Orleans pianist and composer Allen Toussaint, featuring the talents of guitarist Marc Ribot, does a greater justice to the sound of early jazz while emphasizing the immensity of its influence on many disparate genres of music. Toussaint himself is a living example of his city’s rich musical legacy, and his pedigree as both a jazz pianist and a composer speaks to his deep understanding of how the sound of the blues, the rhythms of New Orleans, and the preeminence of melody can produce a personal style of music that will surely outlast many of the intellectual exercises which lack his intimately authentic approach, at one moment light and swinging, at the next full of funk and the definition of danceable. Guitarist Ribot, choice accompanist for artists as diverse as Tom Waits andElvis Costello, is a thoroughly unique musician who has developed an idiosyncratic style of playing that owes as much to the early blues of Son House as to Albert Ayler. When heard in the context of playing with Allen Toussaint on standards from the repertoire of early New Orleans jazz, his unpredictable and off-centered approach to playing the guitar sounds remarkably appropriate, further suggesting a very real link between the uninhibited musicians of the early Twenties and the most modern players in the world today. And finally, trumpeter Nicholas Payton does an outstanding job of demonstrating how the example of the great Louis Armstrong continues to light the way ahead while still offering an incredible challenge to any would-be soul that dares tackle this music called jazz. As Miles Davis said, “you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played.”

Released this year, 2010, from the album “The Bright Mississippi,” here is Allen Toussaint with “West End Blues.”

Gazpacho

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Ain't Nobody Got Nothing On New Orleans

Monday, September 6, 2010

Call It Anything

Sunday, September 5, 2010

The Basement Tapes

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