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Jun 11 2023
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The Original Memphis Five: Some Ideas About Their Music and Importance

Here’s a modified draft of liner notes I submitted some time ago for a reissue of the Original Memphis Five’s recordings. This essay is longer and more subjective in tone than I now aim for in my writing, but I know a few readers also enjoy their music, so I decided to share the draft in case anyone might want some thoughts on this band. You can also skip my verbiage and head straight for a lot of great music (though many of the recordings listed here were unavailable online)!

from Zefren Anderson at YouTube

Historical information below is from Ralph Wondraschek’s landmark, incredibly thorough research into the OM5, which he published in multiple parts for VJM.

How many orchestral combinations, ten times the size of this quintette of exceptionally capable musicians, can boast that they are making records for eleven different concerns, and are scheduled for weekly appearances in three different dance palaces?
—The Metronome Orchestra Monthly, December 1922

In their heyday, the Original Memphis Five (OM5) made hundreds of records and earned plenty of press coverage. And they’ve enjoyed a decent number of reissues on LP and CD. Yet even with an extensive historical and discographical legacy, it seems like early jazz specialists and hot music aficionados are the only listeners interested in this band.

Musicologist Gunther Schuller devotes one brief (and far from complimentary) paragraph to the OM5 in his landmark analysis Early Jazz. Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords gives the group considered musical appraisal (rather than measuring it against more well-known contemporaries). Liner notes by Mark Berresford and Hans Eekhoff for OM5 compilations on the Frog, Retrieval, and Timeless labels also give the OM5 its creative as well as historical due. And several articles in periodicals for record collectors and jazz aficionados do the same. The OM5 also gets plenty of attention on various online social media boards aimed at such specialists.

Still, Smithsonian anthologies and PBS documentaries don’t bother with the band. Most jazz history textbooks omit the OM5. It’s safe to assume many university jazz courses do the same. Miff Mole gets an occasional mention for the influence of his groundbreaking trombone technique, but typically in passing before the story moves on to Jack Teagarden.

Works of jazz history only have so much room, so they tend to include what the authors deem “historic” but not necessarily all of music history. Jazz blogger Michael Steinman analogizes a Biblical progression along the lines of “Oliver begat Armstrong, who begat Roy Eldridge, who begat Dizzy Gillespie, etc.” This approach generates a tidy sequence that explains the music familiar to most listeners today. Yet it offers a narrow picture of the music as it was performed and experienced in its time. Learners are left with an endless history of the avant-garde that emphasizes innovation above all else.

Bands like the OM5 get overshadowed in a form of jazz history that only catalogs the key musicians and events that took the music to new levels. These narratives—overtly or by omission—sometimes relegate the OM5’s music to a well-crafted dance artifact of its time, perhaps beyond reproach but not groundbreaking enough to make it into jazz hagiography. But, as Sudhalter notes, “no band was more universally popular [and] admired on musical grounds” in the early 20s than the OM5. They must have done something special.

The Price of Being Prodigious

Even the most vehement OM5 detractor has to admire the sheer consistency of energy and polish across the OM5’s many recordings. It’s hard to hear the group having a bad day, missing notes, playing sloppily, or performing with anything less than total commitment.

Yet craftsmanship that impresses audiences or even fellow artists doesn’t always win over music historians. Comments along the lines of “X is no Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Mozart, etc.” make for convenient critical copy: superficially discriminating, self-pleasingly flip, versatile enough to use in academic articles or conversation at cocktail parties, and still saying little about either the idol or the supposed also-ran.

The sheer size of the OM5’s discography makes assessment difficult. For some, it even makes the group’s creative credentials suspect. In his liner notes for Retrieval’s reissue CD of the OM5’s complete instrumental sides recorded for the Pathe label (RTR 79044), Mark Berresford points to the unfortunate and unfair dismissal of the OM5 as “slick manipulators of a jaundiced, racist recording industry system, churning out a production line of anemic, soulless records.” The suggestion that this band actually introduced a unique musical style that set it apart from predecessors and contemporaries rarely enters the mainstream jazz discourse.

More Than ODJB Imitators

The OM5 was one of the groups that arose in the wake of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB)’s immense popularity during the 20s. Passing mention of these “fabulous fives” often implies they were all simply trying to seize upon the ODJB’s commercial success through outright, and at times exaggerated, imitation.

The ODJB, the OM5, and similar groups shared instrumentation of cornet/trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, and drums. They all played fast and furious instrumentals full of wild collective ensembles. OM5 pianist Frank Signorelli and clarinetist Jimmy Lytell even became regular members of the ODJB:  Signorelli from April 11, 1921, to February 10, 1922, and Lytell from January 14, 1922, to February 10, 1922. ODJB leader Nick LaRocca even accused Signorelli of stealing the ODJB’s arrangements.

Decades later, the OM5 is occasionally mentioned as a  transitional step between the ODJB’s more aggressive (yet nonetheless infectious) rag-a-jazz and the looser, bluesier southern and southwestern bands that began recording more often during the 20s. In academic jazz histories, when they’re even mentioned, the OM5 is portrayed as a stylistic placeholder that held people’s attention until they heard “authentic” jazz (whatever that meant at any given moment to each writer). 

More than a mere copy or variation of the ODJB, the OM5 expanded upon the ODJB’s approach with a different melodic sensibility and a more measured though still exciting ensemble interplay (and in much better sound due to advances in recording technology, specifically on the Victor and Brunswick labels). The OM5 smoothed out the ragtime-derived phrasing of the ODJB while adding a distinctly New York accent and pushy momentum that was always melodic. “Sob Sister Sadie” surges forward as though the lady can barely catch her breath, but the parts still link together naturally without sounding forced. The OM5’s unity of concept and instrumental clarity never let things spill over into excess.

Hot Lyricism

It is also much easier to pick out a tune on OM5 sides, partially because of better sound on certain labels but largely due to Phil Napoleon’s clear, confident lead. Hundreds of sides demonstrate the cornetist’s powerful but always focused drive, his perfect rhythmic placement, and his sheer beauty of tone—especially on acoustic recordings.

Paradoxically, Napoleon’s sturdy style—a clear melody that doesn’t sacrifice thematic invention or sheer drive—may have allowed later commentators to take him for granted as jazz trumpeters began playing higher and faster. But at the height of the OM5’s popularity, that style must have been advantageous for powerful record companies and music publishers eager to get the actual song heard by as many listeners as possible.

All bands recorded pop tunes, but the OM5, as Napoleon told Sudhalter, “learned them as fast as they published ‘em.” In the OM5’s hands, popular songs are both recognizable and personalized. The now well-known melody of “Everybody Loves My Baby” gets its turn as-is through Lytell’s slurring middle register before Napoleon plays squawking variations on the bridge a la Earl Oliver and Tom Morris. Napoleon’s crisp, relatively unadorned chorus of “How Come You Do Me Like You Do?” still sounds deeply personal.

The sheer frequency of OM5 sessions shows that it was meeting public demand for melody and rhythm while maintaining its own musical style. That style also jettisoned the novelty effects that were so profitable for their contemporaries. Far from Schuller’s assessment of the OM5 as being another group “seduced…away from jazz towards commercial dance or slapstick music,” the OM5’s discography has few instances of barnyard onomatopoeia, kazoo solos, and other gimmicks (and this writer makes no negative value judgments about bands using them). Resisting the fad for novelty wasn’t unique; the Georgians, for example, also avoided these effects on record. But selling so many records without novelty effects set the OM5 apart.

A Five-Piece Orchestra

As a regular gigging band and an active recording group, the OM5 developed a rapport that allowed them to develop and adhere to their musical ideas while sharpening their already impressive musicianship. It’s no small wonder the OM5 always sounds so cohesive.

The verse on “Static Strut,” played with Lytell and Napoleon in tight upper-register unison, is so flawlessly executed that it comes across as a section in a larger band with the agility of a small group.

“Cuddle Up Blues” is just one example of the group’s pinpoint dynamic contrasts.

When the band dips down in volume on “I Never Miss The Sunshine” for Brunswick, the parts remain transparent and swinging: Lytell plays counterpoint in his lower register under Napoleon’s soft muted lead while Miff Mole plays a near-whispering bass line on trombone. At a time when jazz was popularly heard as unrelentingly loud, the OM5 played with a wide dynamic range demonstrating taste as well as attention to detail.

Arrangement undoubtedly played a large part in the band’s consistently unified sound. The use of arrangement/memorization was common at the time. It wouldn’t become a death sentence for authenticity as a jazz player until writers introduced more doctrinaire definitions decades later.

Multiple versions of the hot OM5 original “Great White Way Blues” for the Arto, Banner, Brunswick, Edison, Gennett, and Pathe labels may not yield startling differences in improvisation. Still, they display crack musicianship and a sense of constant spontaneity.

The OM5’s consistent energy level throughout hundreds of sides and engagement with predetermined musical roles may even be all the more remarkable given their intense work schedule.

Regardless of the level of arrangement, the OM5’s credentials as an outright hot band and their unashamedly danceable aesthetic are clear. “Laughin’ Cryin’ Blues” struts from the outset with Napoleon’s lead and witty breaks plus drummer Jack Roth’s rims clicking away in the background. “I’ve Got A Song For Sale” shows a lighter side of the OM5, still danceable but perhaps intended for softer steps.

John Cali’s percussive banjo joins the group on the Brunswick recording of “You Tell Her, I Stutter” to create one of the OM5’s most uninhibited sides. On “‘Taint Nobody’s Biz-Ness If I Do” on Pathe and “If Your Man Is Like My Man,” the band dirties up their otherwise clean timbres, adds a deliberate drag, and inserts inflections as carefully placed musical devices rather than stock effects. On “Evil Minded Blues,” Napoleon plays double-time runs that sound similar to those of the Memphis-born, pre-Armstrong New York jazz trumpet virtuoso Johnny Dunn but with fewer blue notes. The OM5 comes across as unified, even cultivated, even on earthier material.

Authentic To Themselves

The OM5’s tight, well-crafted sound has led some commentators to fault them for a lack of visceral drive or raw emotion. Compared with New Orleans bands recording at the time—such as King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band or even Freddie Keppard’s ragtime-tinged recordings—the OM5’s phrasing sounds more even with more defined articulation and less vocally-inflected timbres. For example, it makes the OM5’s “That Da-Da Strain” seem willfully tense. The Dixieland warhorse comes at modern listeners with a motor energy that now seems to fly in the face of most New Orleans and Chicago-style renditions.

Like fellow New Yorkers such as the California Ramblers and the pre-Armstrong Fletcher Henderson orchestra, the OM5 pushed (rather than rode) the beat with sharp syncopation, adding decidedly instrumental embellishments and insisting on pinpoint note placement. Jazz teleologists are free to sketch a hierarchy of styles. On record, the music is just a different approach to jazz. And in hindsight, the OM5’s style may even be refreshingly unrelaxed. Its two-beat style on “Down By The River” has a more confident, swaggering feel next to the Henderson band’s steady four on its recording of the same tune.

OM5 members likely heard New Orleanians visiting New York City, including Freddie Keppard and Sidney Bechet at Coney Island. Phil Napoleon briefly studied with King Oliver as a young runaway in New Orleans. Trombonist Charles Panely (aka “Panelli”) had played with New Orleanians in the Louisiana Five. Miff Mole even sat in with New Orleans trumpet legend King Oliver’s band in Chicago between February 23 and March 5, 1920.

Yet Lytell, Mole, Napoleon, Panely, Roth, and pianist Frank Signorelli were all native New Yorkers. Garvin Bushell notes in his autobiography that “there wasn’t an eastern [i.e., New York, east coast, non-southern] performer who could really play the blues. We later absorbed it from the southern musicians we heard, but it wasn’t the original with us.” For the OM5, the blues and other folk musical traditions would have been incidental rather than formative. And while many New Orleans musicians trained in the outdoor New Orleans brass band tradition—a unique and popular idiom of the Crescent City—New Yorkers like the OM5 would have been more familiar with the range of theater and dance music popular in the Big Apple.

Why would five musicians sound like musicians from the South? Nearly a century later, do we still need to fault them for sounding like themselves?

Of course, musicians from all regions and communities adapt and learn from various influences. But it’s no surprise that the OM5’s rendition of “Tin Roof Blues” differs from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (NORK)’s haunting original performance of the tune from just a few months earlier. The NORK is clearly indebted to groups such as King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. The OM5’s recording instead plays to the band’s unique strengths: tight interplay, crisp accents, and clean, often breathlessly executed musical statements that are as affecting in their own fashion.

The Sum of Incredible Parts

Comparing Napoleon’s open, almost concert-like lead against NORK cornetist Paul Mares’s big round wail or King Oliver’s raspy, muted declarations, it’s easy to fall into stereotypes about conservatory training versus folk traditions, staid and proper northeast versus the earthy South, etc. Or we can look at mere differences of musical priorities and matters of degree when it comes to rhythm, ensemble color, thematic variation, and other musical elements.

Lytell’s clarinet parts are less incisive than the high-flying descant lines of New Orleanians such as Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone. His scoops and smears add a different color to the overall sound. Lytell sometimes fills in the harmony from the top instead of creating independent lines decorating over the lead, for example, on “Snake Hips.”

“Red Hot Mamma” for Emerson demonstrates Lytell’s knack for sneaking slick little asides into breaks or between the briefest pauses. For keen insights into Lytell’s musicianship, check out Phil Melick’s liner notes for Jazz Oracle’s reissue of Lytell’s complete trio recordings.

With his superlative technique, Miff Mole could incorporate the tailgate style of the New Orleans trombonists as just one role in an ensemble. On sides like “Chicago,” Mole’s elegantly swinging lines jell with the ensemble with the inevitability of polyphonic chant. His advanced technique and imagination also allow him to range under, over, and around the ensemble beyond the trombone’s traditional role in the three-person frontline, for example, on “Steppin’ Out.”

Panely’s style comes across as more pared down compared with Mole’s. He emphasizes chord tones rather than linear lines and acts as more of a ground bass. Far from being simpler, any arranger would have been proud to pen the ensemble lines Panely lays down on “No One Knows What It’s All About” and “Duck’s Quack.”

On the New York Scene

Listening to the OM5 within the context of its fellow New York City bands brings their musical style into even sharper focus. For example, just as the OM5 is compared with the ODJB, the Original Indiana Five (OI5) is often compared with the OM5. Perhaps trying to avoid sounding like an OM5 imitator, OI5 clarinetist Nick Vitalo doubled on alto saxophone—something Lytell rarely did on record. Proportionately, far more OI5 sides include a banjo. Yet the OI5 did not display the same effortless technical facility (how many bands could?) or balance of instrumental voices.

On “St. Louis Gal,” as just one example, the OM5’s parts lock in with each other and generate momentum and interest inside the ensemble. On the same tune, the OI5’s horns duplicate notes more often, playing in more of a loose heterophonic style than a polyphonic one. The OI5 rhythm section is also more of an accompaniment rather than an interactive part of the front line. As another example, pianist Harry Ford, banjoist Tony Colucci, and drummer/leader Tom Morton mark the beat more deliberately than either the OM5 or NORK on “Tin Roof Blues.”

The Georgians, Paul Specht’s band-within-a-band, were one of the more overtly jazz-oriented groups of the time. Leader and cornetist Frank Guarente was a King Oliver disciple, pianist Arthur Schutt was already translating the spontaneity of jazz into written arrangements, and drummer Chauncey Morehouse could spur and color a band with even the sparest of studio-sanctioned kits. The Georgians’ and OM5’s recordings of “You Tell Her, I Stutter” demonstrate different but equally valid hot sensibilities: the Georgians’ slightly denser instrumental sections versus the OM5’s more transparent ensembles, the OM5’s brighter edge against the Georgians’ richer voicings, Guarente inserting classically-oriented touches amidst dirty, muted lines while Napoleon plays bel canto even in his folksiest outbursts.

Coming out of Memphis and playing with blues composer WC Handy, cornetist Johnny Dunn was bound to apply more blues inflection than Napoleon. Yet overall, Dunn’s records have a more aggressive, military-influenced feel than those of the OM5. Even the OM5’s tense sound on Dunn’s “Four O’Clock Blues” comes across as more playful next to the slightly ponderous but more spacious approach by the composer’s Original Jazz Hounds. And Dunn’s group was also already incorporating a moaning sax section.

A Constant Quintet

The OM5’s loyalty to the five-person jazz band format and eschewal of the saxophone would become a stylistic hallmark (and perhaps a reason for other bands eventually outpacing it in historical hindsight). The Georgians included a sax section with players doubling other reed instruments. Fletcher Henderson was already synonymous with separate brass and sax sections, setting the stage for an orchestral concept of jazz that would change the course of jazz. Since its inception, the California Ramblers, perhaps the most popular New York band of the 20s, exploited the use of the saxophone in sections, solos, and even its rhythm section via leader and bass saxophone virtuoso Adrian Rollini. Even the Ramblers’ myriad small group spin-offs usually included one or two saxophonists alongside a cornetist rather than the standard three-person front line of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet.

As Wondraschek explains, “after the ODJB’s departure for England in March 1919, the saxophone became more and more regarded as an indispensable part of any jazz band. Nevertheless, the OM5 stuck to their instrumentation and managed to become popular without the use of a saxophone. The OM5 were the torchbearers against the then omnipresent trend of increasing the size of the jazz and dance bands.”

The OM5’s Tennessee Ten sides for Victor did include a two-sax section, and some of its Cotton Pickers sides include one saxophone. While the saxes add a contrasting texture, the core OM5 remains the most musically interesting and exciting part: Lytell’s clarinet answers the saxes on “‘Taint Nobody’s Biz-Ness If I Do” and Napoleon’s magnificent embellished lead on “I Never Miss The Sunshine” becomes all the more rhythmically interesting against the straighter saxes. The effect is so pronounced on “Waitin’ For The Evenin’ Mail” that it borders on parody. Trends aside, the five-person lineup could still give those tentets some competition.

The OM5 also proved downright ingenious within the five-person format. Their arrangements did not always rely on New Orleans-style polyphony with a cornet lead, trombone counterlines, and clarinet obbligato. Napoleon cleverly uses contrasting open and muted horn, as in “A Man Never Knows.” He sounds like two different players when he plays the bridge with a muted squawk on “Take Me.” The lead also gets passed around to other instruments, resulting in such novel effects as a brass duet on “Lovey Came Back,” call and response between the front line and the piano on “Papa Blues,” low register clarinet melody with muted trumpet obbligato on “Hot ‘N Cold” and trombone lead with the trumpet playing the melody as an obbligato underneath it on “Cuddle Up Blues.”

Like most bands on record at the time, the OM5 was primarily ensemble-based, so a full chorus of total solo improvisation radically departing from the melody was rare. Passing along the lead allowed for subtle variation, making the theme one’s own without necessarily transforming it or resorting to harmonic refashioning. In this regard, the OM5 resembled other New York-based bands such as Lem Fowler’s Washboard Wonders, emphasizing melodic embellishment rather than a complete reinvention of the tune. This ensemble variety puts the OM5 miles away from King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, with its leader’s documented rigid division of roles and even register between instruments.

One of the OM5’s favorite musical effects was a break in collective improvisation in the middle of the record for the front line to part ways for a single horn over Signorelli’s accompaniment. Nearly all OM5 records include such a chorus, often with Napoleon keeping the lead but now using a mute for added contrast. These horn and piano choruses add further textural and timbral variety as well as another way to share the lead. They could be heard as an embryonic attempt at contrasting a soloist with the full band, an effect that would become the hallmark of swing-era big bands.

Syncopated harmonized breaks for the entire front line as on “Buzz Mirandy,” “Chicago,” “Loose Feet,” and “My Sweetie Went Away” are another favorite OM5 device that points to later section writing that aimed at sounding like a soloist. Ensemble hits on sides such as “No One Knows What It’s All About” or the harmonized patterns between the trombone lead on “Runnin’ Wild” also anticipate swing big band arrangements. The brass riffs behind Lytell’s clarinet on “I’m Going South” separate instrumental families, an essential sound in Don Redman’s pioneering big band charts.

Brief spotlights for drums also spring up with an unusual regularity for the time. “Gypsy Blues” shows the instant rise that Jack Roth’s drums provide by being strategically deployed rather than relentlessly forward in the mix. “Lonesome Mama Blues” demonstrates Roth’s emphasis on syncopated accents rather than steady beats. “Memphis Glide” shows off his variations on cymbals. Jazz age drummers have suffered the most because of technology, with what little equipment they could bring into the studio at the mercy of recording engineers.

Signorelli is now typically mentioned for playing with Bix Beiderbecke, but his work with the OM5 and frequent features with the group show why he got to play with some of the greatest names in jazz. He plays in a florid, stomping style, often simultaneously accompanying and ornamenting the other instruments. The OM5’s “Farewell Blues” comes off as the most intense version of the tune from this period. Granted, it’s faster than recordings by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings or The Georgians, but the hot factor is primarily due to Signorelli’s pumping left hand and treble fills. His accompaniment for the vocal on “That Red Head Gal” seamlessly underscores the sung melody while bursting into carefree asides. Signorelli seems to have never forgotten his ragtime roots, often relying on bright textures and crisp articulation that add a steady sense of tension and release (even as late as 1955 on an album of duets with drummer George Wettling).

Room For More

Of course, more seasoned ears may simply hear all of this music as a well-crafted artifact of its time, which itself might be enough to earn the OM5 some musical kudos. The OM5 had its own signature sound rooted in creative and impressive musicianship. Other musicians would forever change the course of jazz, but, at the very least, the OM5’s music can now be heard as a fascinating alternative, another unique sound of the historical “scene” rather than a vestigial part weeded out through some form of jazz evolution. Unlike jazz history textbooks, record shelves have room for all kinds of music.

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Aug 10 2014
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Kuhn’s History Of Jazz

kuhncoverThomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions argues that natural science operates according to, and periodically discards, paradigms unique to a historical and material setting. For Kuhn, the information contained in a chemistry textbook doesn’t represent the objective accretion of truth; it’s a work of its time determined as much by external contingencies and human “idiosyncrasies” as by research and experimentation. In other words, science is constructed, not necessarily discovered, and definitely not already out there waiting for scientists to reveal it.

This complex (even when stripped down to three sentences by a sub-amateur) claim may sound like an odd fit for empirical investigation but might be useful for artistic ones. Kuhn’s idea of a “paradigm,” the “models from which spring particular coherent traditions,” is already standard in a variety of disciplines. When Scott DeVeaux, in “Constructing The Jazz Tradition,” asserts “from textbook to textbook, there is a substantive agreement on the defining features of each style, pantheon of great innovators and canon of recorded masterpieces,” he is essentially describing a paradigm. The way that DeVeaux and other jazz scholars, such as Kenneth E. Prouty, discuss The Smithsonian Collection of Jazz, it may be the first downloadable paradigm.

The word “music” appears only once in Kuhn’s essay. He doesn’t even mention jazz. “Science” is, of course, used many times. “History” is mentioned nearly as often. If Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn can shed some light on the current state of jazz, then perhaps Kuhn can illuminate its past.

Contents
1. The Structure Of Jazz Revolutions
2. Hearing Inside Bubbles
3. The Jazz Of History

The Structure Of Jazz Revolutions

Unsurprisingly, Kuhn also frequently references “revolution.” According to Kuhn, revolutions occur when “existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created,” and they can overtake governments as well as scientific paradigms. Defining “institutions” in a broader sense, for example, as the stylistic and professional practices that a working musician operates within, or replacing “institutions” with “big band arrangements, chordal improvisation, the American popular songbook” or a similar idea, and Kuhn’s scientific or political “problem” could easily be a musical “issue.”

For example, jazz historians have documented the issue of improvisation within swing big bands in the forties. At that time, in that musical setting, musicians who excelled at or enjoyed ensemble work could thrive while aspiring soloists lacked the same opportunities. From its beginnings, jazz has increasingly relied upon rhythmic displacement, paraphrase, variation, and other aspects of improvisation. Jazz also entered American popular music as it coalesced into a recognizable idiom. Yet as Ted Gioia points out in The Imperfect Art, improvisation “has never been the public’s cup of tea, and since [Louis] Armstrong, improvisation has slowly come to dominate jazz.”

Kuhn comes close to describing musicians chafing under what they felt as constraints during the big band era and the feelings that led to musical revolution. When he describes how “individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it,” replace “political” with “big band” or “studio” and you can practically hear Roy Eldridge’s high notes, Art Tatum’s dense runs, or Dizzy Gillespie playing “Chinese music” when Cab Calloway wasn’t around. There was bound to be tension between jazz and popular music, but the consequences of that tension were never written in stone.

Kuhn explains that “as in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.” Within the jazz community of the forties, the needs of a specific group of musicians, those who identified “jazz” primarily with solo improvisation as well as greater harmonic and rhythmic complexity (rather than melodic refinement, collective participation or danceability), were not being met. The bop revolution was not just a rejection of prevailing norms but also a redefinition of “jazz.” For these players, jazz could/should be a vehicle for the soloist, exploring sophisticated technical and musical ideas, playing for listeners and not dancers (perhaps more admirable when it was actually in front of an empty room). That thing caught on, while ensemble conceptions of jazz or ones that eschew progressive harmonic or rhythmic ideas are still often associated with musical archaism or popular concession.

Ted Gioia, writing in The Imperfect Art, summed up the culmination of the forties young lions’ stance on improvisation in 1988:
Yet improvisation, if not restricted to jazz, is nonetheless essential to it. [Jelly Roll] Morton’s music, as well as that of other early jazz masters-Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet and their contemporaries-reflects its central role. More than any of these artists’ compositional or technical innovations, improvisation remains today the most distinctive element of a jazz performance-so much that a jazz instrumentalist is evaluated almost entirely on his ability as a soloist.
To most of the jazz community, Gioia’s description no doubt still sounds like a teleological end. Decades of not only experiencing jazz from a specific lens but looking back on its past through that lens can make the music of Fletcher Henderson’s pre-Armstrong orchestra, the Original Memphis Five, the John Kirby Sextet, and others sound frustratingly different rather than refreshingly unique. Contemporary musicians playing in that style may receive praise, but rarely without a sense that they are a niche rather than part of the jazz mainstream. Did Steve Greenlee’s review of The Fat Babies’ new album in JazzTimes have to begin with a reference to “museums”? Is that the only band that draws inspiration from earlier sources?

Kuhn’s description of revolutionary-era societies “divided into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one” is a fair description of the stylistic tug of war in the postwar jazz community (and maybe now). Yet the “old” camp was not simply defending the status quo or taking a reactionary stance. It found great expressive potential in those older/other idioms. If those practitioners ever saw their music as a commercial compromise, that just aligned with their goal of reaching as broad an audience as possible. Reading Thomas Brothers’s explanation that “Natty Dominique believed that all New Orleans musicians were entertainers first” alongside Garvin Bushell noting how Johnny and Baby Dodds both “regarded themselves as artists,” Gioia’s description of “an artistic force freed from the confining bonds of mass appeal” begins to sound subjective, maybe over-determined.

Decades of the soloist-centered, artist-centered concept of jazz as the mostly undisputed norm disguise the fact that it resulted from what one part of the jazz community wanted, aided by extra-musical forces. Kuhn suggests that to understand any revolution one must “examine not only the impact of nature and logic but also the technologically persuasive argument.” In the case of jazz during the forties, calling anything “modern” and therefore defining it in opposition to “traditional, old guard” or just “old” is still a persuasive device. Younger players describing the older New Orleans style as “nursery rhymes,” rebranding jazz musicians as artists rather than entertainers, and the inclusion of social and political themes in the music allowed one musical framing to ascend based on more than pitches and rhythms people heard.

The idea of something other than music shaping the course of music is not groundbreaking. Kuhn noting that “an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given…community” sounds a lot like Marc Myers’s point that “events unrelated to the music or the artists have influenced the emergence and direction of major jazz styles.” Kuhn’s point may have shocked scientists in 1962, but not historians in 2014. Replace “scientific” with “musical,” and Kuhn might as well be describing innovations in recording technology, the musicians’ strikes of the forties, or other factors now clearly articulated by Myers in his Why Jazz Happened.

Yet beyond those parallels, the arbitrary nature of any change makes it harder to take its results for granted. For example, the fall of the three-minute jazz recording may have been a technological inevitability but not a musical one. Plenty of jazz musicians of the LP era kept their performances under five minutes. There were (and remain) alternatives to the dozen-chorus model of jazz improvisation. Yet the effects of this technological event are now treated as the raison d’être of jazz and viewed as a step in “freeing” jazz musicians to express themselves. Today’s listeners can not only hear chorus after chorus of improvisation from their musical idols but expect as much if the music is categorized “jazz.”

MichelangeloCreationOfSunAndMoonFromSistineChapelDiscussing the effects of “writing history backward,” Kuhn describes the tendency to “refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as a contribution to the statement and solution of the text’s paradigm problems.” Swap “musician” for scientist and “style, genre” or even “listeners” or “critics” for “problems” makes Kuhn’s description resemble the great man, X begat Y model of so many jazz histories. Critics listen to King Oliver to hear what Louis Armstrong learned from him, and historians pick out parts of Don Redman arrangements that dovetail with contemporary understanding of a jazz big band. Vestigial ideas such as Oliver’s novelty effects or Redman’s clarinet trios and creative musicians who didn’t found a school of influence are either ignored or classified as “not jazz.”

When John McDonough describes Earl Hines’s late twenties band in terms of “thin saxophone voicings and an arthritic two-beat, banjo-tuba rhythm section that trapped soloists (Hines included) in a vocabulary of quarter notes” before its “breakthrough” incorporation of string bass in 1932, McDonough evaluates his subject according to a standard that had not yet been established in its own context. According to this analytical model, early jazz is only worthwhile according to its resemblance to what we recognize in the present day. It’s the equivalent of criticizing Michelangelo’s works because of their religious emphasis and suggesting that he should have done more protest art.

This model overlooks the fact that early jazz musicians were, in Kuhn’s words, not “working upon the same set of fixed problems [i.e. musical concepts] and in the same set of fixed canons” as contemporary jazz musicians. Tubas and three-part sax sections may or may not have been economic or acoustic compromises in their own time. Yet rather than understanding what the early Hines band made possible with those supposed compromises, this critical position tries to locate the point at which the band started to get it “right” by present standards. If this model were applied to discussions of the modern piano’s place in European classical music or pre- versus post-electrically amplified guitar, it would generate a very sleek but one-sided picture of the topic.

Hearing Inside Bubbles

If this type of analysis were limited to jazz critics and textbook writers, it might seem like an academic problem. Yet Kuhn also hints at what musicians play—or don’t play—and what audiences get to hear. Musicians learning on the job and those enrolled in professional music schools draw on a shared set of musical practices and role models. The jazz student “joins men who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models.” That’s why there are certain expectations for what a gigging jazz musician is expected to do on a bandstand.  Yet “subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals.”

Young jazz players still diligently practice Bird heads and “Giant Steps,” and many explore R&B, hip-hop, world and other genres. Yet the ones practicing tailgate trombone or Coleman Hawkins’s “Stampede” solo are fewer and far between. How much exposure do students at The New School receive to Jelly Roll Morton or Fud Livingston’s works? How many Berklee students play in ensembles for ragtime, classic blues, New Orleans collective improvisation, Chicago style, hot dance or any of the other prewar, so-called “Dixieland” idioms? The “decade-defined periods” and “logical, flowing developmental narrative” that Kenneth E. Prouty critiques in his “Towards Jazz’s ‘Official’ History: The Debates And Discourses Of Jazz History’s ‘Textbooks’” allow a neat package that leaves out a lot of nuance.

bubblechamberimageKuhn even offers some comments about scientists’ work that sound uncannily like many criticisms leveled at contemporary jazz:
No longer will his researches [read one’s own pick of “improvisations, compositions” or “gigs”] be …addressed…to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of this field. Instead…addressed only to professional colleagues, the men whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the papers [read “hear all of the notes, understand the harmonic sophistication or complex meters”].

The phrase “music for musicians” can seem like a cliché in jazz discussions, but it’s hard to ignore given the specific background and training needed to perform many types of contemporary jazz. Kuhn describes how a scientific diagram can seem like a jumble of lines to a layperson even as a scientist sees a perfectly clear elucidation of some familiar principle. “Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist’s world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does.” In jazz, how much of the music’s physics should a listener have to study to recognize it as music?

The Jazz of History

Whether he intended to or not, Kuhn offers an alternative that might serve music historians, studentsm and listeners well. Instead of the accretion model that merely discards older paradigms, Kuhn praises historians who evaluate paradigms within their own framework and understand the needs that those concepts were responding to:
Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group, i.e. his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors…they insist upon studying the opinions of that group and other similar ones from the viewpoint-usually very different from that of modern science-that gives those opinions the maximum internal coherence…
Musical analogs to this approach are easy to imagine, but returning to the earlier example of improvisation, its reduced role in many pieces of earlier jazz may now seem like shortchanging the soloist. Eight-bar hot solos in the midst of countless dance band records cause many listeners to imagine frustrated musicians wishing for more room and to wonder what their idols might have sounded like if they were “really” allowed to perform. The idea that improvisation was an ingredient rather than the substance of jazz at that time and that jazz musicians found value in written parts as well as ad-libbed won’t change contemporary tastes, but it might shift understanding. The question stops being whether Phil Napoleon or Buster Bailey could do what Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker did, but whether they ever thought to do it or even wanted to.

Assuming that, as Kuhn does, “earlier generations pursued their own problems with their own instruments and own canons,” in other words, treating the past like an end rather than a step, history can seem like its own unique bundle of possibilities. Surprisingly, it begins to resemble Kuhn’s description of a post-revolutionary viewpoint, where one is “transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.” Drug companies or rocket scientists might not want to conduct research using past theories, but Kuhn’s approach could be incredibly rewarding for open-minded jazz lovers.

For one last game of wordplay, see Kuhn’s characterization of Robert Boyle:
He was a leader of a scientific revolution that, by changing the relation of “element” to chemical manipulation and chemical theory, transformed the notion into a tool quite different from it had been before and transformed both chemistry and the chemist’s word…”
Try changing “Boyle” to “Armstrong,” “element” to “improvisation,” “scientific” to “musical” and anything related to chemistry with a term related to jazz. Perhaps a silly exercise but one that yields an accurate statement. Unlike science, in jazz there is no need to choose between pre- and post-Armstrong, Parker, Coltrane, Davis, Payton, Iyer, etc. paradigms. You can’t get anything “wrong” in the sense of turning a chemical into a poison rather than a medicine or something literally blowing up. It really is just music.

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May 17 2014
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Lester, Bobby And The Story Of Improvisation

LesterYoungCareOfRicoReedsBlogspotLester Young’s description of how Frank Trumbauer “always told a little story” through his music is the type of quietly stated but philosophically explosive idea that was bound to change everything.

Young was probably not the first person to use the term “story.” He was certainly not the first musician to conceive of a jazz solo as a coherent narrative implying something beyond notes and rhythms (though his words, like his music, perfectly express that concept). Whenever the metaphor first appeared or whoever first began “telling stories,” before Young, Trumbauer and maybe even Louis Armstrong, the idea has not only stuck but has become synonymous with jazz improvisation.

Solos are often described in terms of their “beginning, climax” and “conclusion.” Even the most diehard free jazz player will mention a desire to “communicate” with the listener. Describing a musician as “just playing notes” often means that their playing lacks something crucial. It’s a popular way to dismiss players or entire styles, indicating that whatever else “jazz” means, it is about “saying something.” What young Lester Young described as a new possibility now seems like the only way to play jazz.

The analogy between a jazz solo and a story has also inspired enough thought and ink to fill books such as Sven Bjerstedt’s Storytelling In Jazz Improvisation. The Swedish scholar considers and dissects this metaphor using sources ranging from hermeneutic philosopher George Gadamer to the contemporary Swedish jazz scene, across more than three-hundred meticulously cited and often dense (but not impenetrable) pages. Even if you don’t have the inclination to read or the time to finish it, the mere existence of Bjerstedt’s book illustrates the ubiquity and impact of the storytelling metaphor.

Ironically, while reading Bjerstedt’s thesis I wasn’t thinking about Young, Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker or even Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and other players considered “storytellers.” Instead, I could not stop playing Bobby Davis’s music.

Bobby Davis never led his own date and practically vanished from disographical and historical records after the early thirties, passing away fairly young in 1949. Yet he was prominent as both a soloist and an ensemble player with the California Ramblers in all their pseudonymous glory during the twenties. Eugene Chadbourne’s All Music Guide entry on Davis describes “a brilliant multi-instrumentalist” and Richard Sudhalter credits Davis’s “bright-toned and upbeat” clarinet and alto saxophone at several points in his landmark Lost Chords. Hundreds of sides feature Davis playing an intense, personal style that I would never describe as telling a story.

Instead, Davis’s solos careen every which way except straightforward. He plays in the arpeggio-rooted manner of many pre-swing reed players but his “saw tooth” lines are especially jagged, for example on “Wang Wang Blues”:

It’s not Davis’s tone, which is actually quite smooth if occasionally (and delightfully) nasal, adding that spiky atmosphere. Nor is it his frequent recourse to broken chords; Davis keeps returning to the top of a new phrase before letting the last one finish, like starting down a new stairway before getting to the bottom of another. If you had to make a literary analogy, it might be to some William S. Burroughs cut and paste outing, but if anything Davis conjures an M.C. Escher landscape reimagined by John Held.

This overtly “vertical” style is now written off as amateurish and unimaginative, yet taken on its own terms it generates plenty of energy and frenzied charm. Jazz is now often praised for its ability to move hearts and minds, yet listening to Davis on “Hot Henry” with the Little Ramblers or his two solos on “Alabamy Bound” with the Goofus Five, it’s worth reassessing the music’s power to move bodies:

Even when Davis hews closer to the melody, frequently on the first chorus of records such as “Tomorrow Morning,” he launches into ecstatic asides that don’t just decorate the theme but collide with it sideways:

His licks, though harmonically correct and rhythmically in step, sometimes sound completely unrelated to the melody. His breaks are just that, splintering off from the line, as for example on “She Loves Me” with the Varsity Eight:

On “Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night,” with the Five Birmingham Babies, he’s wobbly and angular all at once, a funhouse distortion of the melody that comes teasingly close to throwing out the theme altogether:

Even on the relaxed, relatively straight-laced “Deep Sea Blues” with the same group, there remains a sense of disconnected phrasing:

Many soloists are praised for their “seamless” legato, and Sudhalter points to Trumbauer’s occasional influence on Davis. Yet for the most part Davis indulges in seams, sudden twists and turns that may seem superfluous, or can be heard as exercises in disconnection, a reveling in choppiness and unpredictability. Davis ups the ante on a slightly faster version of “Deep Sea Blues” with the Goofus Five, chopping the melody to pieces with some angular ornamentation (and a few wrong notes):

Davis builds a peculiar, very powerful tension between the written melody and his interpretation of it. This is not the warm, well-wrought approach of Louis Armstrong, who could take his own paring down of a song and make it fit the tune like a glove, or the flurrying personalizations of Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Parker, with those long, twisting runs between phrases that sound like part of the sheet music. It’s also not the wide-open, relentlessly individualistic flights on blank canvas of many free or avant-garde players. There’s an eschewal of story at work in Davis’s playing, that of both the composer and the performer.

If Davis sounds scattered, it was probably by design. Variety was paramount for pre-Armstrong jazz musicians. Brian Harker cites trumpeter Louis Panico’s advice that “never more than two measures of similarity be used” and to incorporate a “new idea about every other measure.” Panico, writing in 1923, describes an approach still prevalent during the mid to late twenties, even as a young trumpeter from New Orleans (perhaps among others) offered an alternative. As opposed to this “patchwork” aesthetic, Harker explains the revolution that was/is Louis Armstrong:

[Armstrong] rejected the prevailing standard of novelty that encouraged a rambling, disjointed rhetoric in order to provide a more or less constant sense of the unexpected. In its place he substituted a structural conception that later musicians would identify with telling a story.

VaristyEightCareOf78recordsDOTwordpressHarker’s elegant summary, also cited by Bjerstedt, places two concepts of a jazz solo next to one another. It’s easy to hear terms such as “rambling” and “disjointed” as pejoratives but worth remembering that we’re hearing those terms long after the other concept won out. It’s no small wonder that the storytelling model of a jazz solo seems like a stretch when applied to Bobby Davis’s music. Instead of coherence, Davis emphasizes variety. Instead of narrative, he works in collage. In place of allusion, he provides non sequitur. Rather than telling a story or drawing a portrait, at most Davis provides a few Rorschach blurs.

Either the moldy fig or the contrarian in me (perhaps one and the same) couldn’t stop thinking about Davis’s music while reading Bjerstedt’s thesis. That music comes from before the storytelling model as well as later rejections of it. It’s completely removed from what most jazz musicians and listeners have taken for granted over several decades. There are now several options for Davis’s music, or that of Panico, Don Murray, Buster Bailey, Bill Moore, Woody Walder and others: reduce it to a nostalgic experience, write it off as a misstep on the way to some supposed jazz teleology or explore it as some vestigial limb of jazz.  Personally, I just hear another approach to playing a jazz solo.

I also hear a refreshing lack of pretense in Davis’s playing. I don’t hear a storyteller, a spontaneous composer, a sensitive artist or a pensive experimenter.  There is no story or deep sentiment at work, just pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre and other sounds, left to their own devices, freed from encumbrances such as  dramatic arc and emotional expression, exploding in real time over a danceable beat, never reminding me of anything else, not needing to reference anything but themselves and never taking themselves too seriously. It’s just another way of doing things, even if it doesn’t make a good story.

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Apr 25 2013
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Finding Bill Moore

Bill Moore. The name seems like a pun on itself, a homophone inviting literally “more” to be said about it while resisting that urge through its own frequency. The number of birth certificates, census records, coroners’ reports, and gravestones for “William Moore” or “Bill Moore” makes it a daunting prospect when it comes to research. I’m interested in the trumpeter Bill Moore, but there are several players with that name, playing different instruments and kicking up more hay around my desired needle.

Irving Brodsky - Piano Left to Right: Ray Kitchingham, Stan King, Bill Moore and Adrian Rollini
Irving Brodsky – Piano
Left to Right: Ray Kitchingham, Stan King, Bill Moore and Adrian Rollini

What I’ve found (so far, based on admittedly perfunctory research) says little and repeats it often: that Moore worked with the California Ramblers in all of their pseudonymous forms as well as with Ben Bernie, Jack Pettis, and many other bandleaders. His unique position as a Black musician playing in white bands also comes up frequently. Howard Rye, quoting Albert McCarthy’s The Dance Band Era in Names and Numbers magazine, explains that “One of the regular personnel [of the California Ramblers] in the mid-20s was trumpeter Bill Moore, a light-skinned Black who ‘passed.'” Discographies confirm that he played with a variety of bands through the Swing Era, with a 1950 Billboard review praising his “Armstrong-inspired” trumpet. There’s not much more to learn about the man, even less when it comes to the musician. Bill Moore is very hard to find.

The sound of Moore’s trumpet during the twenties takes us past the realm of historical ciphers and gigging sidemen. At that time, Moore was a distinctly pre-Armstrong player. His tone is far removed from the rich, brassy sound now virtually synonymous with “jazz trumpet.” It’s narrower and more piercing, like a needle rather than a sword, well suited to tying an ensemble together rather than cutting its own path.

Even through the haze of acoustic records, Moore’s trumpet has a buzzy edge to it, different than the cool quality of his contemporary Red Nichols, the broad, warm tone of Paul Mares or Johnny Dunn’s crisp flourishes.

Moore also frequent played with a mute. Brass players often point out how mutes can be used to hide intonation problems (with King Oliver a favorite example) but the possibility of expressive choice is worth considering in Moore’s case. Moore’s pinched sound was put to good use on a series of sessions throughout the late twenties.

Moore also chatters rather than blasts, maybe to hide an uneven tone, maybe to show off fast fingers. Either way, he lets this brash instrument—seemingly designed for sweeping bursts—speak in tight, concentrated patterns.

Armstrong experimented with what Brian Harker called a clarinet-like approach early on in his career. Nichols used clever, clipped lines throughout his long career. Jabbo Smith and Roy Eldridge frequently employed double-time with the boppers later adding their own phrasing and harmonic ideas.

Moore’s chattering is based on a pre-Armstrong aesthetic that emphasized contrast and variety over continuity and flow. It’s also more of an ornament, as Moore sticks closer to the melody than many modern jazz musicians care to—while Moore knows how to have fun with even the silliest tune, rather than simply throw it out. The emphasis on contrast, paraphrase, and mutes indicates that Moore might have been listening to “novelty” trumpeter Louis Panico.

Listening to Moore reveals more than session dates and personnel listings. It points to influences, musical choices, textures, and his own stylistic vocabulary. In other words, there’s a distinct musical voice at work. Neither a genius granted immortality nor a hack deserving complete neglect, after generations of brash, brassy trumpeters in the Armstrong mode, Moore’s style might seem like a wholly new experience (even if it originated decades before most readers were born).

from The Reading Eagle, November 7, 1929
from The Reading Eagle, November 7, 1929

Jazz purists might dismiss Moore based on his different sense of swing, comparatively restrained improvisational approach, or some other interesting but ultimately illogical bit of teleology. Given his post-ragtime, pre-Armstrong soundscape, criticizing Moore (and his contemporaries) for not sounding like later players is like chastising Renaissance paintings for having too many religious references. Rather than admiring the work in its historical context or apart from the critic’s context, everything is measured against one stylistic endpoint with all “great” works leading up to or issuing from it.

Not that many even take the time to dismiss Moore based on his playing.  As is often the case with the earliest chapters of music history, discussion beyond the session cards and matrix numbers and right to the sound of the music appears infrequently. Maybe reacting to the music itself seems too subjective. Maybe now that Moore and his colleagues are no longer around, maybe the only thing left to do is ensure an accurate record of the past. Hopefully, when the record is complete, we’ll remember why it was assembled in the first place.

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