Friedrich Nietzschesaid that Wagnerian opera expressed “the sublime, the profound and the overwhelming.” Yet he wasn’t giving out compliments.
For Nietzsche, Wagner’s music represented the decadence of their time as well as the composer’s ego, two things that ticked Nietzsche off so much that he devoted The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner to roasting his former friend and now musical Napoleon. Readers may not agree that Wagner refused or was unable to write a melody or that he distrusted beauty, yet Nietzsche’s descriptions of Wagner’s big orchestra, big effects and big, superheated emotions are hard to dispute.
There’s a sense of girth to Wagner’s works that just isn’t found in the music of earlier composers. No matter how busy the counterpoint or terrifying the scene, Bach and Mozart never let their textures grow too thick or their sentiments turn too raw. Their music glows while, for Nietzsche, Wagner’s music “sweats.” For Nietzsche, the artist’s sweat, the residue of their own subjectivity and anything that draws too much attention to the artist’s efforts made sublimity, profundity and the overwhelming seem like noisy, smelly passengers on a very bad tour of European culture and its future.
I don’t have the research materials needed to ascertain whether or not Nietzsche had heard of Galuppi, but he may have liked the Venetian opera composer’s own three descriptors of good music. “Charm, clarity and good harmony” might sound a little too modest for the philosopher who gave the world “will to power,” but Nietzsche might have respected Galuppi’s honesty and self-awareness (possibly even his modesty). Instead of self-absorbed display, a compulsion towards bombastic realism and a cleverly complex technique, Galuppi opted for lightness, directness, transparency, stylization, respect for form and tradition, rhythmic flow and a good dose of humor.
Early music, whether it’s a Baroque suite or a hot dance chart, isn’t limited to those values but it thrives on them. Depending on one’s taste, the music is “balanced” or “small” enough so that all the moving parts are audible, and valuable. The structure and scope of the music are not (yet) so big or so codified that they make anyone feel trapped by them. Practitioners, if they’re not inventing the forms, see them as springboards rather than shackles. Necessity plays an important role, for example with instrumentation, venue and material, leading to invention that wouldn’t be possible with unlimited resources. Musicians treat their craft (rather than “calling” or “mission”) seriously but take themselves slightly less seriously. Early music is usually also commissioned by a patron or danced to by audiences. It’s usually not the undiluted expression of an “artist.”
It’s hard to imagine Galuppi, or for that matter Vivaldi or King Oliver, calling themselves “artists” or penning the kind of long, personal treatises written by Wagner. It’s harder still to picture any of them pouring their pure, undiluted tears onto the stage. Can anyone imagine Jabbo Smith or Handel using music to show how they felt, rather than crafting something that made the listener feel a certain way?
Wagner’s personal beliefs are an open book courtesy of his music. The same goes for Charles Mingus. Haydn would have never gotten away with or even wanted to be so candid in his music. Could we even imagine Don Redman composing a secular oratorio to honor one of his political heroes, or Hot Lips Page playing his trumpet to protest anything? Mozart, who created some of the most touching, powerful experiences in sound, never felt the need to confess, let alone scream or cry. Neither did Louis Armstrong. No matter what they expressed, there was always style and play in their work. They didn’t seem to want to be gods in the act of creation. They continue to succeed as musicians inviting all of us into their (to borrow a term Albert Murray liked) recreation.
Nietzsche looked for certain artistic qualities in music but didn’t find them in contemporary sounds. He found the past much more rewarding. In other words, Nietzsche was an early music fan.
Despite, or perhaps due to, being one of the most in-demand guitarists of the swing era, Dick McDonough rarely had the opportunity to lead his own record sessions. When he did get a chance to direct an ensemble in the mid thirties, he had the ears and connections to select some of the best jazz musicians in New York City. Record company ARC had the studio and cash, so they supplied the music and oversight.
After an impeccably played but soporific inaugural session of sweet music and waltzes on June 4, 1936, the company seemed to start hearing this group’s potential at their next session on June 23. Bunny Berigan’s melody statements on trumpet, Claude Thornhill’s piano solos and Artie Shaw’s clarinet obbligatos spice up Tin Pan Alley soft-serve like “Summer Holiday” and “I’m Grateful To You.” All three players are used in the same way, even at the same time in both arrangements, hinting at some A&R calculation of what a little musical individuality might do for sales. Things continue to loosen up on “Dear Old Southland” with a characteristically smart, swinging solo by Shaw and some brightly harmonized ensembles. “Way Down Yonder In New Orleans” swings even harder and leaves even more room for improvisation.
By August 4, 1936 and with slightly different personnel, those highly organized, jazz-flavored dance band arrangements have been replaced by open-ended jazz charts that are also very danceable. Dick McDonough and His Orchestra finally get a chance to stretch out on four tunes (“Dardanella, It Ain’t Right, Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea” and “In A Sentimental Mood“):
Berigan lives up to the accolades of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and generations of musicians and fans devastated by his early death. His tone is blistering yet relentlessly warm. He swaggers into “Dardanella” and “It Ain’t Right” and adds a plaintive element to Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood.” Toots Mondello, best known for his section work with the big bands of Benny Goodman and others, is ( I believe) the confident, joyous clarinetist on these tracks, and (definitely) the rhapsodic alto sax voice on “In A Sentimental Mood.” Adrian Rollini’s bass saxophone, freed from its role in the rhythm section of so many twenties bands, is now even wittier and more flexible. His vibraphone also adds another color to the band. Drummer Cozy Cole is prominent throughout, adding a popping feel that’s part Jazz Age and part Swing Era to “Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea” (just listen to his splash cymbal at the end of the first chorus). Vocalist Buddy Clark clearly listened to Louis Armstrong and absorbed what he heard; Clark clips and elongates his phrases while never sounding like some commercial concession.
The once absurdly busy and now woefully forgotten tenor saxophonist Larry Binyon gets in some husky solos, with pianist Sammy Prager and bassist Paul Prince rounding out the ensemble. McDonough’s solos are spare both musically and literally. Maybe he wanted to give his colleagues extra room, making him a modest and/or smart leader as well as a tasteful guitarist. Judging by the energy on these sides, all the players were happy just to breathe.
Too bad that the very next day, as though hung over from too much improvisation and swing, the label was back to serving sedate tempos and sugary, occasionally mind-numbing words (why would a songwriter think that “color scheme” is a suitable lyric for anything other than a paint shop jingle?). On this session and McDonough’s remaining ones, the beat bounces more than swings and most of the tunes are generically pleasant. They’re also much more tightly arranged. Even Clark slides back into the role of legato pop singer.
It would be hard for a band like this to make a “bad” record, even an uninspired one. There are still beautiful, at times creative touches to find over the course of McDonough’s twelve sessions for ARC. He would in turn never lead another record session on this or any other label. It’s difficult to say whether McDonough was discouraged by his experience as a leader or simply too busy to care. He just did what he could, when he could.
Photo from Timeless CD CBC 1-090 courtesy of @onlyapaprmoon
Like most early jazz drummers, Stan King was not well served by technology. He first appeared on hundreds of sessions with the California Ramblers, including the band’s numerous offshoots for different labels, starting in the early twenties. Acoustic recording techniques at that time limited the equipment that drummers could use, and the technology wasn’t kind to what remained of the kit. King does manage to burst out of the Five Birmingham Babies (a.k.a. the California Ramblers) on “Arkansas” and bang out some springy drum rudiments on Ray Kitchingham’s banjo:
Unfortunately, outbursts like this one were rare. King didn’t use the standard acoustically sanctioned percussion (like cymbals and blocks) as much as his contemporaries Zutty Singleton, Baby Dodds, and Chauncey Morehouse. So despite all the records, it’s hard to hear what or how King was playing early on his career. Either way, it got him plenty of work! He must have been doing something worth hearing.
Based on slightly later recordings, it involved plenty of snare drum. Jazz drumming now often tends to emphasize metal as the primary beat maker. Yet as “Broken Idol” with the Ramblers shows, King could move a band with “just” drum skins. It’s a pity he was so skilled with what amounted to kryptonite for most recording engineers of the twenties:
Aside from a few cymbal crashes, the “exotic” blocks, and tom-toms, King’s main rhythmic medium here is his snare and bass drum. He keeps up a simple but buoyant bounce alongside Tommy Felline’s banjo and then steps out behind Pete Pumiglio’s red hot alto sax solo. The brushes are pure momentum, more than compensating for Ward Lay’s slightly ponderous tuba. There’s none of the military-style heft that so many historians associate with prewar, snare-centric jazz drumming.
King’s work with Frank Trumbauer’s orchestra demonstrates his light but propulsive touch on drum heads while never drawing too much attention to the wheels moving the band. “Futuristic Rhythm” includes a head-bobbing rhythm in the first chorus and percolating accompaniment to the leader’s vocal and cymbals behind Bix Beiderbecke:
King’s airtight press rolls and last chorus backbeat on “I Like That” (a.k.a. “Loved One“) are simple, impeccably timed, and very effective:
Listening to King nearly 60 years later, renowned drummer Mel Lewis pointed to King’s “clean” style with definite praise. A crisp, precise, and utterly unobtrusive approach defines King’s style more than any part of the drum set. He was above all an ensemble player who rarely soloed but always made sure that the band was “well fed” (to paraphrase bass sage Walter Page describing the role of the rhythm section).
With the Charleston Chasers, King leaves most of the rhythmic heavy lifting on “Loveable and Sweet” and “Red Hair and Freckles” (what were these guys thinking about on this session?) to pianist Arthur Schutt and bassist Joe Tarto:
Dancers and jazz aficionados may not be listening for King’s sizzling brushes and tapping rims or how his drums click in with Tarto’s bass to produce a deliciously buzzy sonority or for his simple but firm beat. Listening to those touches reveals how subtly King could color and catalyze a band. It also points to an attention to detail and a knack for musical nuance that might not be heard could be felt. For example, while many drummers use press rolls, and King relied on them throughout his career, the way that he loosens his press rolls up behind Tommy Dorsey’s trumpet solo on “Hot Heels” with Eddie Lang makes a difference:
Audio wizard, historian, and trombonist David Sagerrecalls an “old-time drummer” he met at a gig in California “who nearly shouted when he said, ‘Stan King had the best press roll in the business!’” King’s press rolls with none other than Louis Armstrong on Seger Ellis’ “S’Posin” might not impress on their own, but Armstrong scholar Ricky Riccardiexplains that “Armstrong liked loud, emphatic drumming, and he obviously dug what King was putting down.”
[Listen to “S’Posin” via Riccardi’s outstanding blog here, and subscribe while you’re at it.]
According to Richard Sudhalter, King didn’t read music. His “natural drive and quick ear” were enough to make him one of the most in-demand drummers in New York during the twenties and thirties, performing with Paul Whiteman, Jean Goldkette, the Boswell Sisters, Ben Selvin, the Dorsey Brothers, and Benny Goodman among others. A session directed by bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini finds King with the cream of the New York jazz crop at that time on standards such as” Sugar” and “Davenport Blues”:
On “Somebody Loves Me,” King lays out behind George Van Eps’s solo, which allows the guitar to get heard and changes up the ensemble texture, but digs in behind Goodman’s clarinet and Arthur Rollini’s tenor saxophone while easing back behind trumpeter Mannie Klein and trombonist Jack Teagarden. It’s a model of sensitive, rhythmic jazz drumming (or “dance band” drumming, depending on one’s preferred pigeonhole):
King could also turn up the heat on his own. On “The Man From The South” with Rube Bloom, he locks in with Adrian Rollini, tossing out fast snappy fills and bearing down just a little harder behind Goodman before making room for Rollini’s solo:
On “Here Comes Emily Brown”—again with the Charleston Chasers but without Joe Tarto’s booming slap bass—King add a sizzle to his shuffle behind Tommy Dorsey’s trombone while his cowbell accents practically kick Benny Goodman from behind. Fills and backbeat on the out chorus also boot the ensemble:
King even gets some spotlight in a call and response episode with the ensemble on “Freeze and Melt” with Lang:
Occasionally, King would get away from a steady beat and toss out unexpected accents and syncopations, for example early on his career behind Bobby Davis’ alto solo on “That Certain Party” with the Goofus Five (a.k.a. the California Ramblers):
or his offbeat rim “bombs” behind Jimmy Dorsey’s alto on “You’re Lucky To Me”:
Yet it’s all within the context of the band. Record after record shows King to be a clean, precise, utterly musical drummer. His preferred instrumentation may have limited his recorded legacy, and his unflashy style may have hindered his historical one. Singer Helen Ward, speaking about King’s tenure with Benny Goodman’s band, said “we called him strictly a society type of musician. Everything he played was ‘boom-cha, boom-cha.’ There was no fire there.” Goodman described King as “merely adequate.”
The entry for King in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes “an exceptionally good dance band drummer with meticulous time [whose] jazz work always left something to be desired. Listening to, for example, Goodman’s recordings in late 1934 will reveal how King’s playing never lifts the band in the way Gene Krupa did when he took over as drummer…” John Chilton describes Louis Armstrong’s “I’m Putting All My Eggs In One Basket” as a “typical example of [King’s] somewhat foursquare playing:
King isn’t Krupa, Dodds, Sid Catlett (or for that matter Elvin Jones), but it’s easy to imagine any of those players taking the same approach that King does given the thin material, flimsy arrangement, and the fact that this is really Armstrong’s show. Riccardi astutely points out King’s “tasty” accents during Armstrong’s opening trumpet chorus and the fact that “relaxation is the key” here. There’s a difference between playing stiffly and playing appropriately, a difference King was more than experienced enough to understand.
In the stylistic wake of louder, better-recorded, and busier drummers, it is easy to overlook someone like King, who performed an essential role seamlessly and without drawing attention to his work. What some overlook, others celebrated. Drummer Chauncey Morehouse would praise King for his solid time years after his colleague’s death. When Morehouse led his own date playing his patented N’Goma drums, he chose King to handle traps duty. Fud Livingstonthought King was “the world’s greatest drummer!” Saxophonist and historian Loren Schoenberg noted how King continued to get work despite his well-known status as a “fall-down drunk.” It didn’t seem to matter: King got the job done.
Jazz historian Scott Yanow, who credited King for his “fresh” sound, explains that King’s alcoholism finally did get the best of him. King eventually took a low-key job with former California Ramblers sideman Chauncey Grey before fading from attention and passing away in 1949. King made his last recordings ten year earlier, with pianist (and fellow victim of alcoholism) Bob Zurke. “I’ve Found A New Baby” wasn’t the last thing King recorded but it provides explosive closure:
Fud Livingston’s arrangement gives King and the rest of the band plenty of room. King is a force of nature, crisp and light as always but distinctly forward in the mix, perhaps the influence of what Krupa and Chick Webb were bringing to the table at the time. King still remains his own man, with press rolls in first chorus and rim shots and backbeats egging on Zurke’s contrapuntal flurries and Sterling Bose’s trumpet. At a time when most drummers were emphasizing cymbals and a steady horizontal flow, King stuck to skins and a charging but tight vertical feel. He had something unique to contribute and put the needs of the band first. That certainly sounds like a jazz drummer, or maybe a just a good band drummer, but definitely a drummer worth hiring and hearing.
Keep laughing at trouble, because the alternative is far less pleasant.
All kidding aside, my sincere apologies for that earlier comparison. Here’s a pretty hot number from the man who brought us “the sweetest music this side of Heaven”:
George Gowans, wherever you are, sorry for that for that comparison with Congress.
Here are some powerful musical and cultural insights from Noble Sissle, excerpted from a 1964 radio interview (transcribed in Record Research, issue 61, and generously reprinted on Ken McPherson’s excellent blog):
During the last [world] war, which was a long stretch, people didn’t stop to think what happened to the young boys of eighteen and nineteen. Before the war, when every thing [sic] was peaceful, all those boys thought about was baseball, basketball, football and the sportsmanship we know here in America. When you take these boys and make killers out of them for five years and then bring them back to society, for at least five years they are in a state of shock. Nothing appealed to them and above all they didn’t want any regimentation. After all, when you sing and dance, there is melody and rhythm. In the bop era, they didn’t want any melody and they didn’t want any rhythm…
Now then, what happened? The four and five year old kids who weren’t disturbed by the war still had that soulful, spiritual glow which is inborn in America. It hadn’t been damaged in them. When they came along and the bands played with no rhythm and the beat was gone and there was no melody, what did they do? They wrote their own songs and their lyrics were amateurish, of course. They weren’t Cole Porters and their melodies were built on one chord and sounded the same. But, bless their hearts, they brought the rhythm and the beat back to American expression of emotionalism.
As you know, it is the rhythm of America that has thrilled the hearts of people throughout the world. You will notice that the trend has changed: as these kids get old they want more rhythm, more melody and lyrics with more sense to them. I heard Ray Charles the other night with such a fine orchestral backing that Frank Sinatra or any other good singer would have sounded great in front of this musical setting. When that group of kids gets old enough, they will be dancing and the beat will come back. It shows what power there is to the American rhythm and our beat. I call it the Freedom Beat.
Sissle may not detect a melody or beat in modern jazz, but even bop’s most spirited advocates would agree with his description of a rebellion against regimentation, as well as the idea of a musical style reflecting its times. At the same time Sissle is refreshingly aware and even complimentary of present-day singers. Ultimately his “bless their hearts” isn’t meant to be condescending; he cares about music and he cares about people. He’s just happy the two still have something to say to one another.
Reason and passion, order and chaos, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Buster Bailey on the left speaker and Edmond Hall on the right:
Hall is all about consistent tension, like a winemaker wringing every drop of juice out of the same dark, intense grape. From his lines behind the introductory ensemble to his opening salvo with Bailey, he never relaxes that acrid tone or those spiky lines.
Bailey follows Hall with a clever epigram, feigning a simple “cool” to Hall’s “hot” but soon moving onto more controlled but equally cutting displays. Bailey crafts his phrases, putting more space between them but tightly packing a few key ones. He lets Hall have the lead in terms of volume and phrasing for their duet, fashioning a beautiful counterpoint to Hall’s wail. Yet for the closing ensemble, Bailey asserts himself over and against Hall with an incisive repetition. The victor may be up for debate but neither player loses.
Producer Ozzie Cadena may not have had an aesthetic smack down in mind when he assembled two different front lines to joust over this ODJB staple. Of course neither clarinetist is a perfect archetype for Nietzsche’s poles. Bailey never completely sheds instinct and abandon, and Hall doesn’t lack logic and clarity. It’s just a matter of degrees and balance. Everything in moderation.
Detail from “Apollo and Marsyas,” Hans Thoma (1888)
Precisely how Joe Tarto’s tuba became Cliff Edwards’ backing on “My Best Girl” isn’t certain. Barring some unknown corner of twenties pop or avant-garde polka, vocal with tuba accompaniment has never been a very popular format:
Still, it’s easy to believe this partnership developed through the strength of Tarto’s musicianship. His big, dark tone pads all those octaves between him and “Ukulele Ike” without ever overpowering the singer. Things never turn thin or lopsided. The bassist’s steady beat also provides Edwards with a firm footing, which he in turn uses as a springboard as well as a foil for his own vocals and “effin’.” Edwards just sounds better with something solid to push against. Most soloists do. The musicians who play “between the beats” get plenty of attention in jazz history, but they all needed a beat to play between in the first place! Respect the beat, respect the beat makers.
Full drum kits were rarely heard on records made before 1927. Only the most skilled (and confident) audio engineers were able to compensate so that a low frequency “boom” wouldn’t throw off the recording. Drummers were left to work with cymbals, blocks and anything else they were permitted to bring into the studio.
Adding in the already difficult sonics of many early records and the fact that drummers rarely soloed during the twenties, listening to jazz drums on recordings from this period may seem like an arduous, even fruitless exercise. It’s not quite like a needle in a haystack: instead, the needle has been chopped into several pieces, with only a few of the pieces actually getting mixed into the hay, while the haystack itself is kept in a very dark barn.
Smaller kits, smaller technological resources and smaller role notwithstanding, the best twenties jazz drummers produced imaginative sounds and perhaps most importantly in jazz, a lot of rhythm. As Dr. Lewis Porter points out, early jazz drummers were not just timekeepers. Mark C. Gridley notes that they actually had a very high level of interaction with the rest of the band, something usually associated with much later styles. Drummer, bandleader and percussion historian Josh Duffee describes traditional jazz drumming as “an art form that tests how musical a drummer can be with limited and very unique instruments.” It turns out that these needles were actually crafted by talented, imaginative needle makers, and it’s time to start digging.
For my own survey of this art form, I’m starting with Chauncey Morehouse. He’s the most familiar to me, and probably to even occasional early jazz listeners. Anyone who has taken a Jazz 101 course has heard Morehouse’s cymbal backbeat on Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer’s seminal “Singin’ the Blues.” His collaborations with “Bix” and “Tram” in the Jean Goldkette orchestra and on numerous studio dates with the famous duo make him one of the most frequently encountered drummers of the twenties. It’s a little trickier to hear his drums but feeling them is no problem, for example on Morehouse’s own composition “Three Blind Mice” with a Trumbauer-led group:
Morehouse doesn’t play all the way through (at least not audibly), yet when he does it’s simply but confidently. Cymbal syncopations such as those in the second chorus kick things forward like a riding crop. He also clearly enjoys supporting and interacting with Beiderbecke during the cornetist’s solo. His approach is different than the Jones/Webb/Krupa via Dodds and Singleton style that would influence the course of jazz. He punctuates and pushes the beat rather than rides it. John Petters chides Morehouse and his contemporary Vic Berton for their “cumbersome choked cymbal beats, which served only to break up the rhythm, instead of laying it down,” yet he judges these drummers according to a later standard, like criticizing the ancient Greek playwrights for not writing any novels. Morehouse is simply his own man rhythmically.
At the same time Morehouse plays with the creativity and sensitivity associated with the best drummers of any era. He varies his patterns, listens to his band mates, fills in between phrases, sets up ensemble hits and lays out when needed to allow instrumental balance as well as textural contrast. The six sides Morehouse made with Bix Beiderbecke and His Gang (a.k.a. the New Orleans Lucky Seven) highlight his taste as well as his resourcefulness with the limited instrumentation available to drummers at that time. In addition to his cymbals popping behind soloists, Morehouse orchestrates the beat using woodblocks and a brassy cowbell on “At The Jazz Band Ball”:
On “Goose Pimples,” Morehouse taps the melody under Beiderbecke’s lead, fashioning a harmony in rhythm and becoming as much of a partner in the collective improvisation as any of the horns:
His rapid-fire “click-clack” perfectly captures the tense, madcap energy of “Original Dixieland One-Step” with a Red Nichols group:
Morehouse’s earliest records with the Georgians may be the best illustration of his doing a lot with very little. The “band within a band” of the Paul Specht dance orchestra, their acoustically recorded performances and dense (but driving) polyphony make it difficult to hear the drums. Yet Morehouse is there for all forty-six sides, the sense of time that earned him lifelong praise palpably, if not always audibly, moving the ensemble. His wood and temple blocks cut through for an especially dynamic impact on “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “Chicago” and “You’ve Got To See Mama Every Night,” and his playing is half underpinning, half counterpoint on “I’m Sitting Pretty In A Pretty Little City”:
Plenty of soggy Dixieland ensembles have made woodblocks, cowbells, drum rims, and washboards sound corny, yet for Morehouse and his contemporaries, these things were instruments rather than novelties. Morehouse knew how to add color as well as rhythm using equipment that most drummers would now classify under “auxiliary percussion.” “Margie,” once again with Nichols, contains a range of percussive timbres, from wire brush backbeat in the opening ensemble through cymbals behind the mellophone and woodblock “bombs” behind the clarinet, to the panoply of sounds heard during the final chorus:
Less lucid but just as effective, Morehouse’s percussion helps the unpromisingly titled “Add A Little Wiggle” with a Nat Shilkret’s All Star Orchestra pick up considerable heat. It is difficult to hear what he’s doing behind the full ensemble but it clearly works, and his cymbals step out to dialog with the soloists:
Shilkret’s “Chloe” stays pretty commercial and tame, until Miff Mole’s trombone solo and the ensuing hot small group burst out of the orchestra. Morehouse also bears down, this time on drum skins as well as cymbals:
By the time Morehouse recorded his composition “Harlem Twist” with Red Nichols and His Orchestra, there’s a lot more snare and bass drum in his playing. They add plenty “thwack” but without any sense of military-style heft. Morehouse continues to lift and converse with the rest of the band:
Morehouse’s skins on “Bessie Couldn’t Help It” with Hoagy Carmichael’s band are slightly louder and he uses more regularly recurring beats. That may be a sign of changing styles, or technology catching up with the way Morehouse had been playing on a full kit from the beginning. Either way he remains his same effective but subtle self:
Morehouse’s taste, as well as his time and punch, might have been one of the reasons he ended up performing what some consider the first recorded jazz drum solo while he was still a young man playing with The Georgians, on “Land of Cotton Blues”:
It’s not a Chicago-style explosion, and it’s even further removed from an Elvin Jones odyssey. Morehouse’s solo is short, sweet and spurring. Mel Lewis’ description of the “tap dances” that early jazz drummers spontaneously composed comes to mind. At a time when engineers were wary of drummers and audiences didn’t see them as soloists, Morehouse surprised everyone.
c/o impulsebrass.com
Lewis doesn’t mention Morehouse in a discussion of jazz drummers he delivered on radio several years ago. A part from his association with better-known musicians such as Beiderbecke, Morehouse’s name doesn’t come up very often in jazz histories. He was obviously well respected but is rarely listed as an actual influence on any players. Yet it’s that lack of influence that makes his work so unique. There are no stylistic links with later drummers to make his approach sound basic or cliché, no ideas he originated that have become so commonplace as to seem unremarkable. Morehouse played rhythm and did it in his own way, and he made the band sound better along the way. That has to count for something in jazz.
Jazz writer Warren Vaché describes Morehouse joining an impromptu jam session at a New Jersey Jazz Society picnic, drumming with just two spoons on a plastic beverage tray and bringing the house down. He also recalls Morehouse’s joyous playing with a reconstituted Jean Goldkette orchestra concert sponsored by the New York Jazz Repertory Company. Despite the loss of one leg, the drummer left an impression on Vaché over twenty years later. The man really could make rhythm any time and with anything!
In honor of Bob Crosby‘s birthday, here’s a side that’s probably not as familiar as “South Rampart Street Parade,” “Big Noise from Winnetka” or other tunes usually associated with his band:
At a time when most big bands were taking their cues from Harlem, Bob Crosby and His Orchestra found inspiration by looking a little further back to Chicago and New Orleans. The band was fairly popular during the swing era despite (or maybe because of) their allegiances to earlier repertoire and styles, yet this side is an intriguing hybrid. The tune was written by Jimmy McHugh for a New York revue and primarily associated with Duke Ellington. The arrangement includes riff choruses, which were more prevalent in charts by Crosby’s more “modern” contemporaries, as well as a lowdown, killer-diller feel vaguely reminiscent of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Goodman’s famous recording had been released a little over a year earlier. The Crosby band might have been trying to cash in on the continued success of similar numbers.
Whatever influences were at work, Crosby’s ensemble keeps its identity with deliciously reedy textures, a powerful but warm trumpet section and the outstanding rhythm team of bassist/arranger Bob Haggart and drummer Ray Bauduc laying down a beat that’s nothing like Goodman, Basie or any of their contemporaries. Solos from Warren Smith’s blistering trombone and Bob Zurke’s labyrinthine piano, as well as a typically liquid reflection from clarinetist Irving Fazola and criminally underrated tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller wailing away also make this an utterly Crosbyesque performance. Perhaps most importantly, it swings like crazy!
There’s too much here for me to capture in any cogent fashion. Enjoy the music.
The copy of Jazz Gentry: Aristocrats of the Music World on loan from the library of a prestigious music school doesn’t even have a crease across its spine. Every page is crisp, they all rest perfectly flat on top of one another and all of their corners are still sharpened into a prickly point. There’s also no evidence of fingers, or for that matter sunlight or lamplight, blemishing Bobby Hackett’s earnest face on the cover. The virgin stamp card at the back seems redundant; it’s immediately obvious that this book has never been picked up off the shelf, let alone left the building.
Apparently in the fourteen years since it was published, Warren Vaché’s collection of interviews and insights from dozens of prewar jazz musicians hasn’t sparked the interest of any of the students attending this renowned institution. To be fair, most of the musicians that Vaché interviewed weren’t associated with any styles taught in a classroom. They had already faded from jazz’s collective memory by the time he first wrote these pieces for various magazines in the seventies. Yet the musicians themselves were still around. Now esoteric pursuits with names like “Chauncey, Challis, Cork” and “Doc” were still people with brains to pick and memories to mine.
It would be easy to assume that Vaché’s subjects played too many melodies or too few amplifiers to attract contemporary music students. Yet that’s an assumption based on generalization and laziness. History is a hard sell for a lot of people, regardless of age, taste or how many Coltrane tunes they have memorized. Many of the current descriptions of prewar jazz, or lack thereof, haven’t helped matters.
So instead of lecturing on the importance of Bix Beiderbecke or opining on Vic Dickenson‘s singular sense of humor on the trombone, I’ll just offer that young musicians are missing out on stories like this one:
The [Vincent] Lopez orchestra went on tour, and when Joe [Tarto] learned they would play the Mosque Theater in his hometown Newark, he sent word to his mother so she could come see him perform-something she had never been able to do before…Joe had a featured spot on the program doing a slap bass chorus on “Milenberg Joys.” As a finale, and to add a little showmanship while in the spotlight, he got into the habit of kicking the bass into a spin. All the kicking had finally worn a hole into the back of the bass, and between shows at the Mosque a stray alley cat found the hole and crawled in. Nobody was more surprised than Joe during the next rendition of “Milenberg Joys” when the frightened cat began screaming and trying to claw his way out through the F holes of the fiddle. For a moment he thought a ghost had taken up residence in the old bass, but like a real trouper he kept on thumping away right up to the finale. But when he launched the customary kick, the hole in the bass opened up and released the cat, which took off for the pit musicians, knocking over music stands and winding up in the lap of the pianist. The audience howled, thinking it was all part of the act, but the SPCA didn’t think it was funny. Joe had a hard time convincing the humane society representative that the cat wasn’t part of the performance.
Tuba player, bassist, arranger and composer Joe Tarto was about seventy-one years old when he told this story to Vaché, and it is heartwarming to picture him as a young, green musician, excited by the chance to perform for his mother and encountering some harmless bas luck (and also to know that even back then, a diligent member of the SPCA was on hand to look out for that poor animal’s welfare). The image of the Lopez band opening up a chart and letting a rhythm instrument solo is also telling. Bass solos are still relatively rare, so in 1925 this must have seemed postmodern. While a bass is now more likely to walk rather than slap, the bottom line remains musicians making music. Not “commercial music, “serious music,” “art” or “entertainment” but music they enjoy. Reading Vache’s book is less a matter of respecting one’s elders than simply conversing with a colleague. Don’t get hung up on labels like “dead” or “alive,” just get to a library!
Friedrich Nietzsche said that Wagnerian opera expressed “the sublime, the profound and the overwhelming.” Yet he wasn’t giving out compliments.
I don’t have the research materials needed to ascertain whether or not Nietzsche had heard of Galuppi, but he may have liked the Venetian opera composer’s own three descriptors of good music. “Charm, clarity and good harmony” might sound a little too modest for the philosopher who gave the world “will to power,” but Nietzsche might have respected Galuppi’s honesty and self-awareness (possibly even his modesty). Instead of self-absorbed display, a compulsion towards bombastic realism and a cleverly complex technique, Galuppi opted for lightness, directness, transparency, stylization, respect for form and tradition, rhythmic flow and a good dose of humor.
The Pop of Yestercentury 