The Pop of Yestercentury

Jazz’s social cachet is powerful enough to reincarnate yestercentury’s pop ephemera as today’s history and art. King Oliver thought he was just making dance music but today’s cultural guardians know better. Dancing to “Harlem Air Shaft” is usually an afterthought when Ellington’s composition comes up in academic dissertations.

Purists assume that actual dance music, on the other hand, is meant for oblivion: produced rather than created, intended for undiscriminating mass audiences and containing little-to-no improvisation, they will dig through all that pop pap just to find the jazz, be it a whole record, an eight-bar hot solo or an intriguing chord substitution. For seekers of authenticity, Bunny Berigan’s solo with Fred Rich’s orchestra on a sugary love song must feel like Beef Wellington:

Berigan is, of course, brilliant on his own terms: warm, fulsome tone, phrasing that makes an event out of a Tin Pan Alley tune, just enough variation to make it Berigan’s own and rich, lyrical high notes that would be the envy of even the staunchest modernist. Rich’s band, locked into an arrangement and dainty rhythms, is merely the commercial backdrop one puts up with to get to Berigan’s jazz. Hip listeners know to skip past it.

It might be difficult to make a case for Rich’s orchestra for its jazz content, but a group of twenty or so players not just reading a chart but performing it with good intonation, tight blend and unified phrasing, all with perhaps minimum rehearsal (maybe even sight-reading it) is in itself spectacular. If that ability can be taken for granted, it is a monument to the musicians, not antiquated circumstance.

As for what Rich’s musicians are playing, their simple but beautiful harmonic cushion is what makes Berigan’s flights pop and sweep into grandeur. The tightly muted trumpets leading into Berigan’s vocal add a brief but effective “sweet” contrast to Berigan’s hot opening cadenza and closing solo/coda. Adrian Rollini’s bass saxophone bottoming out the parts is a subtle but powerful touch. For a moment it sounds like someone is doubling bassoon. These are not the justly-celebrated rich, dark colors of an Ellington voicing but a lighter instrumental as well as emotional hue, another approach to musical texture, perhaps not thesis-worthy or even groundbreaking, but novel and imaginative on record. It is not improvised, perhaps not “jazz,” but analyses that stop there leave out a lot of musical content.

I was all set to write about Kaiser Marshall as yet another ubiquitous presence on jazz recordings from the twenties, one more well-respected musician now left with surprisingly little discussion of his style amidst biographical and discographical minutia. Fletcher Henderson’s drummer, someone occupying such an important historical and musical role, consigned to the annals rather than lauded in the academy and on the web, etc.

It was a fine soapbox but it grew shorter the more I researched Marshall.

Marshall did start his career with Henderson during the dark ages of recorded percussion. Acoustically recorded drummers made due with what audio engineers allowed into the studio and don’t always have the literal recorded presence to generate the same amount of discourse as later, better-recorded percussion. Yet musicologist Jeffrey Magee references Marshall’s spare cymbal hits at length in his book The Uncrowned King Of Swing, not as creative compromises but concise, rhythmic and often witty accents crucial to the arrangement. He singles out “Jiminy Gee” and “Jealous” as two important early examples of Marshall’s contribution to the band:


Decades of scratching my head while reading standard jazz histories, many of which throw a lot of music from history out to forge music history, make books like Magee’s a blessing. It’s not just a case of a credentialed authority validating my own taste (nice as that is), but learning what makes the music distinct from a musical as well as a historical perspective. Whenever a critic, a historian, a scholar or another commentator dismisses a performance out-of-hand, they’re not only leaving something or someone out of the conversation, they’re foreclosing education. How much more is out there for our ears and minds?

Nicholas D. Ball wrote an incredibly detailed musical biography of Marshall in the “Heroes” section of his blog. Ball hears shades of rhythm and timbre that belie the supposedly monochromatic surfaces of 78s. Among several other choice cuts by Marshall with Henderson, Ball highlights “Dicty Blues” from the band’s acoustically recorded days:

He also points out the electrically recorded, ultra modernistic and tortuously orchestrated “Whiteman Stomp”:

“Whiteman Stomp” is usually written off as an over-arranged, pretentious noble failure, so it is vindicating to hear a smart, passionate musician mention it (even in passing) as a serious musical example.

Anyone in front of this lit screen is hereby gently harangued to check out Ball’s post (as well as the dozen or so others devoted to Ball’s other idols). The same goes for Magee’s book, which treats all of the Henderson band’s music and musicians as sincere creative experiences, rather than cherry-picking the recordings that led to the music now canonized as “Jazz” with that capitalized first initial.

Correcting the record, or at least giving it the benefit of the doubt, opens up a lot of new-to-you music as well as hitherto unexplored aspects of the canon. Jazz blogger Michael Steinman takes an example of Marshall playing a bit too loud on “Knockin’ A Jug” as an opportunity to appreciate the drummer behind a full kit:

Steinman singles out Marshall’s sense of time, the variety of his percussive timbres behind different soloists and, above all, the sheer lift and joy of his “simple yet very intense” approach. The reader should check out this post for its appreciation of this performance, well-known to jazz listeners but worth re-appreciating from behind Steinman’s lens. Ditto for his blog‘s loving tribute to hot jazz on record and live from the twenty-first century.

In that same post, and maybe most tellingly, jazz drummer Hal Smith leaves a comment with nothing but praise for Marshall. Mr. Smith, like Mr. Ball, is out there making this music happen, taking Marshall and many other musicians that academia and book publishers don’t have time for quite seriously. It is literally just about the music for its practitioners.

I’ll end this gratefully failed cry of outrage with two of my favorite Marshall sides. First, “St.Louis Shuffle”:

Marshall is a real ensemble drummer who doesn’t draw attention to himself but invites appreciation. His cymbals sound beautiful and pop at just right the moments between and behind the band. His hits are the pinstripes on a designer suit.

Quite literally, lastly there is “Kaiser’s Last Break,” eponymously named by Sidney Bechet after Marshall’s untimely passing:

As if the band knew that opportunities to savor Marshall’s playing were now at a premium, Marshall gets two four-bar solos, syncopated gunshots that proudly march as well as swing, perhaps a callback to Marshall’s formative years.

Thank goodness for Ball, Magee, Steinman and Smith, and so much for my soapbox. Kaiser Marshall sounds better up there anyway.

The above photograph of Kaiser Marshall was found online here.

“Charleston Crazy,” by the Fletcher Henderson band before Louis Armstrong entered its ranks, is the type of performance that would likely be described by later commentators as “choppy” or “cluttered:”

A bass saxophone roars a two-beat bass line under deliciously nasal trumpets, the steady pulse continuously interrupted by exclamations of the Charleston beat as though the band is obsessed or literally “crazy” with the syncopated rhythm. It’s a musical tug-of-war, an ensemble at odds with itself. Even the textures never seem to settle in, fluctuating between smooth saxes, wah-wah trumpet and so many brief breaks. Post-bop hearing aids tell us that the chart is so concerned with ensemble tricks that it never lets the rhythm settle into a steady groove. This music would be unsuited for the soloist, the sine qua non of jazz codified years after this record stopped being pressed, let alone listened to with any regularity.

The subjects and discourses that coalesced into the term “jazz history,” including this recording, are at most little over a century old. Jazz is a baby compared to other historical subjects. Jazz history, however, moves fast. For its purposes, I might as well be looking at cave drawings with The Guggenheim only a block away. According to most jazz histories, Henderson’s band of musically proficient, well-educated, confident, popularly acclaimed and musically well-respected young men were pretty much wasting their time until Armstrong entered the group, first to mocking skepticism, even classist derision, then to awe-filled embrace. There was simply no other way to play, leaving his section mates Howard Scott and Elmer Chambers out-of-date before jazz had even begun its proper history.

Jazz has, of course, changed considerably since this performance was put to shellac in 1923. In addition to introducing the improvising soloist as its centerpiece and in turn completely redefining the scope and possibilities of solo improvisation, jazz has expanded its rhythmic and harmonic vocabulary, created its own melodic language, pushed dissonance to startling boundaries, experimented with meter and form, incorporated myriad influences from a globe’s worth of musical genres and raised standards of musicianship to incredible heights. Henderson’s three-minute number suffers by comparison: its chord changes likely hopelessly bare for generations of musicians nursed on Bird heads, its rhythm clunky and static beside the polyrhythmic careening expected just to get into Berklee.

It is easy to fall into the trap of calling these changes “progress,” but that term implies a destination, an ideal, an eventual completion of some higher goal. A practitioner of music may have some ultimate goal in mind. Maybe they want it to break musical conventions or challenge artistic standards. Perhaps they want their work to change minds, hearts, policies or Billboard charts. Yet while the music may be directed towards goals that go beyond the sound of itself, the sounds themselves can never be made more complete or brought to some conclusion. Otherwise, every single artistic work would need to be experienced as an unanswered question, an endlessly incomplete experiment constantly missing something until the next step. If you’re writing a dissertation or a New York Times column, this may be fine, but imagine if the rest of us had to listen this way?

So I can’t help treating “Charleston Crazy” as an end in itself. Ditto for the pre-Armstrong Henderson band. I keep coming back to this by turns dicty and artfully dirty nonet, with its trumpeters clearly inspired by jazz coelacanth Johnny Dunn in all of their clipped, chattering, squawking and tensely syncopated glory. Ditto the young Coleman Hawkins and his ponderous, jerky arpeggiations. Jazz historians describe the Hawkins from this period as precocious yet in need of a catalyst to become a full-fledged soloist. These records would later on embarrass Hawkins himself, but I always thought that it was unfair of that older player to belittle the work of this young musician, even if they were the same person. Howard Scott has proven more interesting to me as a musical as well as aesthetic subject than Dizzy Gillespie (who would’ve turned 101 this year) and Dixieland chord progressions much more satisfying than most multi-tonal explorations tracing their inspiration back to John Coltrane (a spring chicken at 92). Of course, I try to appreciate everything. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I said I actually did not “like” a piece of music. It is just a matter of what I purchase for my record shelf.

Crypto moldy-figgism? The fig never asked not to be an apple, and none of us are safe from mold. Either way, I suppose I could just ignore all of the discourse, like what I like, pursue what I want, “the music is all that matters,” etc. Except it is hard not to wonder why no one is writing books about that music, why the most well-respected authorities barely go near the stuff, why the things you like seem to fly in the face of the very standards established to define the world they belong to. Am I crazy? Do I have odd or bad taste? Are they the same thing? Also, who wrote the book of taste, and what was in it for them? When the team you’re rooting for never makes the playoffs, even the best of us may start to yell at the referees.

Newspaper clipping images are excerpted from T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s, a film by Robert Philipson.