Tag Archives: Original Memphis Five

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 2018
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A Jack Roth Playlist

om5

Original Memphis Five, 1923: left to right: Frank Signorelli, Phil Napoleon, Jimmy Lytell, Charles Panelli, Jack Roth. Photo courtesy of redhotjazz.com.

Jack Roth may have ended up with the most thankless job in jazz history.

Lord’s discography lists the drummer on nearly two-hundred record sessions, most of them with either the Original Memphis Five or members of that band. The OM5 left behind a mammoth discography that makes it difficult to cherry-pick Roth’s contributions, and the band is often neglected (or outright disparaged) in most academic jazz histories. Roth was also active on records at a time when technology could be difficult (or downright cruel) when recording percussion. Jack Roth’s drumming simply gets buried in it all.

Still, there he is on “Lonesome Mamma Blues,” immediately turning up the heat when his woodblocks enter the last chorus:

Drummers like Roth punctuated the ensemble, weaving under as well as into the band. This interactive approach would fall out of favor during the swing era (and in some ways was reincarnated in the post-bop era) but in its heyday created both contrapuntal variety and visceral drive. In this case, Roth adds texture and syncopated accents. Drummers from this era have been accused of “break[ing] up the rhythm instead of laying it down” yet, if anything, Roth gives the band some well-placed shoves. The rhythm is just fine in his hands.

Rather than laying down a beat in the sense of a steady groove, Roth’s ricocheting blocks on “Chicago” keeps the ground pulse and act as another line in the ensemble:

Roth’s playing and that of Anton Lada, Chauncey Morehouse, Tony Sbarbaro and other jazz drummers from the early twenties has elements of ragtime drumming and its derivation from marches. Variations on drum rudiments and the harder, tapping timbre of woodblocks, cowbells and rims could cut through a whole horn section. Roth’s “rat-a-tat-tat” works with the ensemble but doesn’t necessarily blend into it like the “chin-chank-a-ding” of later cymbal-based styles.

Close listening also reveals Roth achieving different colors by varying his kit, throwing in a tom-tom backbeat on “31st Street Blues” for the Emerson label or looking ahead to the swing era with riff-like backgrounds on the last chorus of “Big Boy” for the Plaza company. It’s no accident that Roth’s contributions are often stored up until the closing moments of the OM5’s three-minute musical smorgasbords. Perhaps the best example of the way the OM5 would deploy Roth’s drums at key points is “Gypsy Blues” on Arto, one of the OM5’s earliest sides.

Letting the percussion loose for the finale is at least as old as Rossini’s bass drum outbursts. Nonetheless, the difference is immediate upon Roth’s entry. Features for actually turn on multiple OM5 sides such as “Papa Blues, That Red Head Gal” and “Runnin’ Wild”:



A drummer getting solos on record during the twenties might perk up historians’ ears but, nearly a century after these records were produced, Roth might sound like he’s just playing a drum beat. Modern listeners are used to hearing drum beats (some of them even taking for granted the skill and feeling needed to play one well).

On its own terms, as music in the moment, the band frames Roth’s swishing cymbals as an event in itself, a pause in the phalanx of horns to highlight one of their own and build up tension before the ride-out. Count Basie knew the power of such simple pauses when his brass and saxes parted ways to let Walter Page’s walking bass get some spotlight. Many rhythm section players take pride in being felt rather than heard, but these brief rhythm section solos are like little peeks under the hood of the car: it’s refreshing to hear the engine purring underneath everything else. Buried underneath history, discography and the vagaries of shellac, it’s still possible to hear Jack Roth tapping, clacking, clicking and booming in true hot percussion style. Who needs a ride cymbal?

As for the man behind the drums, cursory internet research indicates Roth was born in 1898 and passed away in 1980. Between those dates, he played with and became close to Jimmy Durante, continuing to play drums for the singer/comedian and clowning around onstage with Durante long after he stopped drumming for the OM5. Roth even got to star in a motion picture, flexing his dramatic range in the part of a bandleader. It is likely Roth himself jumping up from the drums and yelling (with an accent that makes this writer homesick) behind Durante in this clip:

For more on the OM5, please check out Ralph Wondrasachek’s incredibly well-researched and extraordinarily detailed coverage for Vintage Jazz Mart magazine.

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Mar 18 2014
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In Search Of Rag-A-Jazz

MamieSmithJazzHoundsCareOfRedhotjazzDotCom

Another Corner Of The Hothouse

Jazz loves hybrids, though some blends get more sunlight than others. A web search for “raga jazz” turns up pages of results showing the cross-pollination between jazz and Indian classical music. Yet a search for the union of ragtime and jazz known as “rag-a-jazz” just generates more results for raga jazz. Google won’t even ask if you meant rag-a-jazz.

So, what are web crawlers missing out on? One example is a watershed moment in American pop and a million seller for Paul Whiteman, his recording of “Wang Wang Blues”:

It keeps the syncopation and staccato attack of ragtime but has its own popping sense of tension and release, as well as a humor that is not just ragged but downright raucous; just listen to Buster Johnson’s trombone or how clarinetist Gus Mueller slices and slurs into each chorus. How do we describe this music, teasingly similar yet ultimately unlike ragtime or most of the jazz discussed in history books and played in swanky clubs? How would we find other examples of this sound?

Unsurprisingly, musicians, historians and open-eared listeners prove far more illuminating than search engines. Reed player and contemporary rag-a-jazz performer Dan Levinson defines rag-a-jazz as “a hybrid style of dance music that existed briefly from the mid teens through the early twenties, while ragtime was evolving into jazz” and which “still held onto many characteristics of ragtime in terms of syncopation, song forms and even the way eighth notes were played.”

The OM5, Left to Right: Phil Napoleon on trumpet, Frank Signorelli on piano, Jimmy Lytell on clarinet, Miff Mole on trombone (with Charles Panelli subbing in the above clips) and Jack Roth on drums.

Early jazz bandleader Vince Giordano describes the “baby steps of jazz,” with “elements of both jazz and ragtime” as well as “early syncopation but still a little bit of ragtime feel.” Giordano explains that rag-a-jazz surfaced around the time of Scott Joplin’s death and the end of the ragtime era, continuing through a period when “jazz was just taking shape and many orchestra leaders weren’t sure which way to go.” Levinson also mentions the “betwixt-and-between state of ragtime and jazz [that is] no longer quite ragtime.”

Rag-a-jazz conductor and multi-instrumentalist Matt Tolentino notes “ragtime still managed to hang on as a powerful musical force. Ragtime had a strong presence that more or less drove popular music in America from about 1895 to about 1917, so even though the general public had grown tired of it, they couldn’t escape it. The syncopation that ragtime had introduced was what America was used to listening to, and even though it wanted to say it was through with ragtime, such a night and day change in listening would be impossible.”

For rag-a-jazz drummer and bandleader Nick Ball, rag-a- jazz is “…the original ‘Rosetta Stone’ of music that is stylistically in the cracks, where one clearly defined idiom was merging into another or being strongly influenced by a parallel one from elsewhere in the world.” Ball also calls rag-a-jazz “the oldest of these transitional subgenres to have been documented on record in anything like enough detail for us to understand the process of its birth and its demise…a subgenre which lasted less than a decade, subsequently almost hidden in the long shadows cast by its parent, pure ragtime, and its child, pure jazz.”

More than a historical note, the music grouped under the term “rag-a-jazz” (or in search engine syntax, “‘rag-a-jazz’ -raga jazz”) is an example of fusion from decades before anyone plugged into an amplifier. It’s also an example of musical ideas that some would dismiss as wrong turns, many more would forget and others, thankfully, hear as another musical universe.

The Avant-Garde ODJB

Levinson points to what many consider the first jazz record as a prime example of rag-a-jazz, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues”:

Speaking about the “musical revolution” of the ODJB’s earliest records, collector and historian Mark Berresford explains “what the ODJB had done was to simplify and deformalize ragtime to its barest state and, once stripped of its hallmarks, rebuild it into a clearly defined polyphonic structure, placing greater emphasis on maintaining impetus and excitement.”  Many history books draw attention to the ODJB’s frantic tempos, barnyard onomatopoeia and madcap spirit, which would have surprised (and possibly irritated) ragtime composers/performers. Yet even the ODJB’s later, more subdued sides display a distinct swagger a part from the lilt of ragtime:

Berresford also explains that “…as musicians’ ability to improvise grew, so their reliance on the structures of ragtime declined.” While ragtime players incorporated improvisation into their performances, it would obviously come to have a much larger role in jazz. Garvin Bushell, an ear-witness to these developments, summarizes his first attempts at playing jazz as “study[ing] rags on piano and omit[ting] the melodic pattern, just improvising on the harmonic pattern.”

Besides musical vocabulary and written notation, song forms themselves began to change. Early jazz maintained multi-strain structures until the swing era of the thirties, but Berresford notes how bands such as the ODJB would use a simpler configuration of fewer strains than formal ragtime. “What the ODJB’s performance lacks in form,” Berresford explains, “more than makes up for in dynamics, excitement and rhythmic drive, using devices such as solo breaks and the three-voice lead to signal its departure from the formality of ragtime.”

Skins And Cymbals

Berresford sums up rag-a-jazz’ musical characteristics as “a strong two-beat feel with predominantly ensemble playing, often heavy drum patterns and frequently fast tempos.” A two-beat feel in jazz is familiar to even occasional attendees at a Dixieland brunch, and contemporary jazz festivalgoers are no strangers to fast tempos. Yet rag-a-jazz’s constant collective interplay can sound strange to contemporary jazz lovers.

There is an unspoken, occasionally questioned but nonetheless powerful definition of jazz as ‘the’ idiom of an improvising soloist. In rag-a-jazz and in a pre-Louis Armstrong soundscape more generally, musicians don’t take turns soloing. Other than occasional short breaks, the emphasis is on ensemble interplay, balance and in some cases competition.

Rag-a-jazz represents a different concept of jazz, as ensemble music, a concept expressed in the unrecorded New Orleans parade bands of its earliest years, in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, in groups led by Miles Davis during seventies and in those led by today’s jazz musicians such as Vijay Iyer and Robert Glasper. The best bands simply know how to play as bands, regardless of era. There is no sense of musical or expressive limitation while listening to the Original Memphis Five’s parts lock and slide into one another, even though no one player get so much as a half-chorus to themselves:

Decades of smooth, swinging cymbals can also make the syncopated, staccato beats of snares, rims, woodblocks and cowbells sound strange. “March-like” is the description and death sentence often thrown around for this style of drumming. Rag-a-jazz drummers were often influenced by marching band techniques as well as the ragtime drumming inspired by those techniques. All influences apparently not being equal, many jazz writers imply that marches are an inferior inspiration next to Afro-Cuban rhythms, hip-hop or other sources.

Drummer Hal Smith, on the other hand, talks about Tony Sbarbaro and other rag-a-jazz drummers as merely having their own distinct, often challenging approach a part from but just as valid as that of Zutty Singleton or Jo Jones (or for that matter, Elvin Jones or Terri Lyne Carrington). Nick Ball praises the prominent drums of Louis Mitchell, Anton Lada, Benny Peyton and others as “thrilling, riotous, imaginative, highly individualistic, incredibly technically proficient and, for the time, very well-recorded.”

For other listeners, this style may be vaguely familiar from some of the hippest names in jazz drumming. Jazz educator Mark Gridley explains:

The earliest jazz drummers often devised lines of activity bearing rhythmic and melodic contours that were distinctly different from the contours of lines being contributed by their fellow musicians. The practice of playing an independent line of activity was suppressed in swing [during the thirties]…It enjoyed a resurgence, however, in bop [during the forties]…This independent line of activity…provides a layer of boiling sounds that increases the excitement of the combo performance. The use of this activity continued through the fifties and sixties [and] has been an accepted practice for all modern drummers of the seventies and eighties…The rhythms used by the modern drummers were not those of ragtime, but the spirit in which they played is analogous to the conception shown by the earliest drummers.

Jazz scholar Dr. Lewis Porter debunks the myth of early jazz drummers as mere timekeepers while also drawing attention to their intricate fills and contrapuntal playing. Porter describes Sbarbaro “going crazy” in the best sense of the term. Whatever these drummers gained from ragtime or military music, it worked for them, their colleagues and anyone who wanted to listen.

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Dance Music And Duple Feel

In some ways rag-a-jazz’s most radical difference from the ragtime that preceded it and the postwar jazz that is now lingua franca was that listening was a secondary activity. Rag-a-jazz, as well as most prewar styles of jazz, was above all intended for dancing. Ragtime had its own signature lilt but the new “jass” music really moved bodies.

Traditional jazz musician and writer Chris Tyle reminds that at the time, records were labeled “fox trot, tango, waltz, etc.” for a reason; “Original Dixieland One Step” was just that, a one-step. He also points to the symbiotic influence between music and dancing and the need to ask, “did music change because the dancing changed, or vice-versa?”

Rag-a-jazz musicians (and later on New Orleans via Chicago and big band swing players) had to serve a very practical purpose. Besides the need to get dancers out on the floor, Tyle also points to the material conditions that not only shaped the music but also made it so varied. The size of the venue or a record label’s budget determined band size and repertoire. In some ways this practical basis allows for far more variety than the wide-open plains of art music.

Ball explains that as a style, rag-a-jazz “was so brief that no kind of standardization had time to be established, virtually no two ensembles had the same or even similar instrumentation and every band seemed to have approached the music completely different to each other in terms of image, repertoire, performance practice; no individual’s singing or playing style became familiar enough to become cliché.” It’s why this era includes such fascinating combinations as the Louisiana Five, with Yellow Nunez playing lead on clarinet without a trumpet in sight:

or novel sounds such as the Whiteway Jazz Band’s arrangement of “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives To Me,” where the saxophone plays the melody and the trumpet plays obbligato around it, a touch of role reversal in a traditional jazz setting (listen here or below):

How Do You Like Your Eighth Notes?

While simultaneously departing from ragtime, part of this music’s unique excitement and sound has to do with the musicians phrasing in eight, a holdover from ragtime’s pianistic basis. Similar to fingers flying across the keyboard, the notes fly out of these groups in a jittery “rat-tat-tat-tat” that is agitatedly exciting and a world a part from jazz’s later, more vocally-conceived lines.

Vince Giordano mentions the ODJB and vaudeville artists of the early twenties as just a few examples of a bass part playing two-to-the-bar, just like in ragtime, while horns phrase in eight like the right hand of a ragtime pianist. Later on in the twenties, some jazz bands would keep the two-beat bass but without the ragtime “tinge” of the earlier bands.

Giordano raises phrasing in eight as a key part of rag-a-jazz, stressing the eight feel with his own sidemen when they perform this repertoire. As a few other examples of this feel, he cites The Virginians’ “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” in a Ferde Grofe arrangement:

Lillyn Brown’s early recording of the jazz warhorse “Jazz Me Blues,” especially its vocal and trumpet:

the instrumental asides of Mamie Smith’s “I Want A Jazzy Kiss,” especially its chattering wood blocks:

and Mamie Smith’s “Sax-O-Phoney Blues”:

On “Sax-O-Phoney Blues,” the staccato syncopations, chains of eighth notes and reedy arrangement sound very much like orchestral ragtime. The growling trumpet and Smith’s vocal speak to something broader, in terms of phrasing as well as spirit.

Levinson emphasizes that the eighth notes in rag-a-jazz “don’t ‘swing’ the way eighth notes do in most form of jazz,” and are instead “played ‘straight’ or ‘even,’ the way eighth notes are played in ragtime, classical music and every other style of music.” Those even eighth notes can make a huge impact on today’s jazz lovers. Decades of uneven eighth notes as well as post-Armstrong phrasing can make this music sound like it’s simply not jazz. Yet taken on its own terms and without comparison to other rhythmic concepts, it is just another approach to the tradition. Jazz has become a very big tent but its own backyard still has much to offer.

They Always Call It “Music”

The word “jazz” itself also seems to distinguish the new style from ragtime, not just musically but in terms of personal identity. In chronological and cultural terms, Giordano sums up this shift well:

You’re just getting out of World War I, which was such a horrific event, and I think young people just said, ‘We’re going to have a good time,’ and the music really reflects that.

What could be more personal, more joyful and more representative of jazz than a love song to the saxophone?

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Transitional period, stylistic amalgam, generational signifier, offshoot of ragtime, jazz unlike any before or since and expression of peacetime ecstasy: labels are never airtight but “rag-a-jazz” has come to encompass all of these things. Most musicians and collectors agree that Leonard Kunstadt originated the term in its current usage. Depending on the source, Kunstadt either began using it in the pages of Record Research magazine, which he founded in 1955 and continued to edit and publish, in Jazz: A History of the New York Scene, published in 1962 and coauthored by Kunstadt and Samuel Charters, or at some later point in the seventies.

The phrase does appear much earlier in the name Southern Rag-A-Jazz Band. Yet this London-based band (by way of Nebraska) used it for catchy marketing rather than stylistic labeling. Obviously the musicians themselves were just playing music that came naturally to them. It’s hard to imagine that they understood what they were doing as an offshoot or development.

Garvin Bushell actually saw no distinction between ragtime and jazz. He proudly declares that, as a young pianist, “my knowledge of ragtime assured me I would not have any trouble [playing] jazz. Since there was very little difference between the two, I knew I could master it.” His comments about the repertoire and approach of his earliest bands are also revealing:

As I recall, we also had copies of “Maple Leaf Rag,  Way Down Yonder In The Corn Field, ‘The Whistler And His Dog,” and “Give My Regards To Broadway.” Although poorly reproduced, these records contained the foundation of the jazz that was to come, particularly “Maple Leaf Rag.” I make this statement with no fear of contradiction. Ragtime, as it was called then, had the technical essence that was later required in jazz. While ragtime was always played in the moderate or fast ‘two’ tempo, jazz merely slowed it down to a fast or medium ‘four’ … We’d usually have eight or nine guys: trumpet, trombone, clarinet, saxophone, piano, banjo, tuba and drums. Maybe a violin or a bandolin (half banjo, half violin). Since there weren’t dance arrangements then for saxophones and trumpets, the pieces we rehearsed were mostly pit orchestrations. We’d pull out one clarinet part, one sax part, and on like that. The piano player had a part, as a rule, and the bass player faked. In fact, most everybody faked, since none of us could read that well. The style was very much what you hear on the early records-we called it “ragtime jazz.”

At the time and like any time before and since, musicians were simply drawing upon what was around them, what historian Richard Sudhalter called “the rich fermentation of American popular music between 1917 and 1923.” That doesn’t make latter-day commentary and analysis superfluous; in fact, hindsight lets us appreciate and understand the wide variety of music offered by history. iPods can store Phil Napoleon’s trumpet right alongside Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong’s horns.

Play “Ricky-Tick” For Me

Giordano explains that by 1923 or 1924, the rag-a-jazz style began to fade as musicians and audiences absorbed the New Orleans via Chicago “stomp” style and its quarter note feel. Berresford also notes that “the 1923 date is seen by many as the seminal date by which jazz had thrown off all the shackles of its ragtime antecedents and strode forth into the world in its own right – it is no coincidence that 1923 saw the first recordings by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (with a young second cornetist named Louis Armstrong), Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, whilst Coleman Hawkins had made his first, faltering records with Mamie Smith the year before and Bix Beiderbecke was to appear on records just a year later.”

As one example of this change, Chris Tyle points out the difference between Kid Ory’s first recording of his “Ory’s Creole Trombone”:

and his later performance with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five:

Compared to Louis Armstrong’s “legato” phrasing and the rhythm section’s regular beat, the earlier record is “choppier.” Ory plays his breaks more clipped and cornetist Mutt Carey’s “punchier” attack is reminiscent of Freddie Keppard, one of the few New Orleans trumpets to came out of the older, ragtime based tradition.

louis armstrong“Choppy” may sound like a criticism while “smooth” is the preferred descriptor, but only from one  perspective. The smoother attack and more swinging flow of these groups wasn’t a matter of inventing jazz as we know it, but a different set of influences and musical ideas. Exactly when, where, how and why those musical priorities changed remains a hotly debated topic, but it was clearly not a matter of some artistic teleology. As Nick Ball says, “jazz didn’t actually burst fully-formed from the mind of Louis Armstrong in 1923, as many books and films imply.”

The influence of these New Orleans bands and eventually King Oliver’s second trumpeter on young musicians cannot be overstated. By 1928, Boston-born trumpeter Max Kaminsky knew which musicians spoke to him:

The crush roll of the Chicago drummers [such as George Wettling] was unheard of back East, where they were still playing oom-pah and ricky-tick, breaking up the rhythm into choppy syncopations instead of keeping a steady beat you could play against…That nervous, ragged, ricky-tick beat of the white dance bands of the twenties was one of the factors that had been at the bottom of my confusion when I listened to my records back home in Boston, trying so desperately to unravel the puzzle of jazz. None of the white musicians I heard on them could keep time. None of the early white popular bands had really understood the beat yet…of playing the melody simply and purely without all the little flutings and corny licks that were regarded as “hot” in those days.

“Oom-pah, ricky-tick, choppy syncopations, nervous” and above all “ragged” are just loaded descriptions for the music that preceded the Oliver/Armstrong hegemony. For players like Kaminsky and later historians, Armstrong and the Chicago sound were not just another way to play jazz; they were the only way to play.

Southern Rag-a-Jazz BandWay Off The Record

The tendency to dismiss so much pre-war and especially pre-Armstrong jazz hasn’t helped the historical record or modern outlets of this style. To some commentators, the term “pre-Armstrong jazz” itself is a contradiction.

Ideally, all source material would be treated equally. A fusion would be a fusion would be a fusion. Yet instead of another interesting example of cross-pollination, most major jazz trades treat rag-a-jazz, and several other styles of early jazz, with the knowing silence reserved for “old music.”

It could just be a matter of age: raga jazz, for example, surfaced during the sixties, while rag-a-jazz had its heyday in the late teens and early twenties (never mind that ragtime itself is a baby compared to the raga tradition). Gabor Szabo is much closer than Earl Fuller in terms of stylistic generations as well as human ones.

Earl Fuller's Famous Jazz Band , 1917: Harry Raderman, Ted Lewis, John Lucas, Earl Fuller, Walter Kahn.

Earl Fuller’s Famous Jazz Band, 1917: Harry Raderman, Ted Lewis, John Lucas, Earl Fuller, Walter Kahn.

Maybe it’s the intangible but powerful factor of “coolness.” Ragtime is made in America, historically distant but geographically and culturally local. It doesn’t have the same connotation of open-mindedness associated with most brands of “world music.” Ragtime is also close enough to the classical conservatory, and therefore Europe, to make it seem old-fashioned and staid (never mind that, as Berresford, Tyle and others explain, ragtime itself is a rich and varied idiom that is not limited to what’s printed on sheet music). Small wonder that, as Sudhalter says, “standard jazz histories usually represent [American popular music between the years 1917 and 1923] as little more than organized disorder, the vaudeville clatter of the ‘nut jazz’ craze set in motion by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their legions of imitators…”

Once An Era But Still A Style

EchoesInTheWaxLike any musical era, these years included their share of “clatter” but they also featured musicians drawing upon a variety of influences, listening to and absorbing a range of styles and making music that doesn’t sound like anything else. It also continues to enthrall today’s musicians and audiences.  Rag-a-jazz, and its distance from even the towering presence of Louis Armstrong as well as more modern styles of jazz, may even seem like a breath of fresh air.

Vince Giordano frequently arranges rag-a-jazz numbers such as “Wang Wang Blues” for his big band, the Nighthawks, to the delight of dancers at live gigs and viewers of the acclaimed television series Boardwalk Empire. Chris Tyle enjoys playing the style with numerous groups, including his own Silver Leaf Jazz Band; their Freddie Keppard tribute album actually highlights the cornetist’s ragtime influences.  Nick Ball declares that rag-a-jazz “just keeps pulling [me] more and more strongly. I love that it’s rude and it’s louche and it has pretensions of elegance, you can dance to it and you can sit and listen to it too.” Matt Tolentino and his Singapore Slingers look at rag-a-jazz “not [as] a forgotten artifact or a museum piece” but as “music that appeals to all generations, young and old alike.”

Trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso and trombonist David Sager, two contemporary musicians who play rag-a-jazz as well as many other genres, both cite its unique challenges. Kellso says that “all that ensemble blowing, with little or no rest can be painful” but also explains, with a chuckle, that it “adds character.” Sager describes rag-a-jazz as “some of the most technically demanding stuff [he has] ever attempted.” So much for the assumption that jazz reached its technical zenith with bop.

nighthawks

Both Kellso and Sager play with Dan Levinson’s Roof Garden Jass Band, which Levinson founded in 1987 and has since released three albums of rag-a-jazz. Levinson’s context for the music applies equally well for 1920 or 2014:

Just imagine the liveliness of all these guys who were playing a kind of music nobody had ever heard before. We hear the music today, and might sometimes think it’s rather tame in comparison to some of what we’ve heard since. But think about what people were used to listening to at that time: here comes these guys from New Orleans by way of Chicago, and just blew the roof off.

Wilbur Sweatman and His Acme Syncopators, 1923: Maceo Jefferson, Ralph Esudero, Duke Ellington, Wilbur Sweatman, Flo Dade, Sonny Greer, Ian Anderson, Otto Hardwick.


Wilbur Sweatman and His Acme Syncopators, 1923: Maceo Jefferson, Ralph Esudero, Duke Ellington, Wilbur Sweatman, Flo Dade, Sonny Greer, Ian Anderson, Otto Hardwick.

“Blowing the roof off” will never be a historical concept, and people are obviously playing and listening to this music. Is it even fair to call “rag-a-jazz” a historical period when it continues to make these kinds of sounds?

***

From the writer: I would like to personally thank Nick Ball, Mark Berresford, Vince Giordano, Dan Levinson, Hal Smith, Michael Steinman, Matt Tolentino and Chris Tyle for taking the time to share their insights about this topic with me. In the most literal sense of this often-used expression, the above piece would simply not have been possible without their help.

I also invite readers to please share their comments, insights, disagreements and suggestions for further reading about this topic. This piece is intended as an introduction to anyone who is interested in rag-a-jazz, so if you found it useful, I also ask that you please share this article and get the word out about this music and its advocates. Thank you!

Finally, and more importantly, here are a few more examples of this music:

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Aug 15 2013
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My Favorite “Ain’t Misbehavin'”

Tom Lord’s Jazz Discography lists over one thousand recordings of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Pretty good for a song that Ted Gioia explains is ”not quite as important a part of the jazz repertoire nowadays as it once was.”

It is true that beboppers, post-boppers, free-jazzers, fusionites and other modernists never really cozied up to the Fats Waller standard. That still leaves a who’s-who of prewar and prewar-influenced jazz musicians to give it a shot. Yet even with Louis Armstrong’s magisterial interpretations, the composer’s own performances and pianists from Jelly Roll Morton and Art Tatum through Dick Hyman and Jeff Barnhart to choose from, I keep coming back to the Charleston Chasers’ “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

In fact the the Original Memphis Five working under an alias that Columbia records used for several bands, the Charleston Chasers waxed their version at the height of the song’s popularity. Waller had written “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for the revue Hot Chocolates, where it soon became a feature for Louis Armstrong and eventually the most famous part of the show. The Chasers recorded the tune about a year later, and just a few weeks before Armstrong made his own recording (skip ahead to 0:48 in the following clip to hear the music):

This arrangement never entirely settles, and that’s what makes it so interesting. The Chasers’ two-beat amble has its own magnetic energy, but their rhythm is a little overly delineated. Phil Napoleon’s trumpet is typically crisp yet slightly tense: his high notes during the introduction sound forced while the turnaround notes in the first chorus are hesitant. There’s a carefulness to the Chasers’ playing, the sound of a band feeling their way through a brand new composition.

NapoleonThey’re also figuring out what to “do” with this new song,  adding some highly original touches to make it their own. The Chasers feature a standard front line of trumpet, trombone and clarinet, but clarinetist Jimmy Dorsey lays low during the ensembles to let Napoleon and his frequent OM5 partner Miff Mole fashion brass duets. Napoleon and Mole were already seasoned jazz musicians, developing in tandem with the music from its earliest roots in ragtime. The pair displays a refreshingly harder-edged sound and play busier, punchier lines than most of their New Orleans colleagues. Napoleon and Mole even switch roles following the vocal, with muted trumpet decorating the trombone’s burry lead.  Eva Taylor’s vocal is charming but Arthur Schutt’s elegant accompaniment behind her is the real find.  His classical allusions also turn the minor chords of the bridge into miniature Rachmaninoff preludes. Joe Tarto’s bass keeps snapping throughout while Dorsey’s whinnies add a humorous symmetry to the whole thing.

This performance is a departure from the jamming and stride theatrics now typically associated with “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” It’s also far removed from the weight of history and sense of familiarity attached to even the most relaxed renditions of this song. This was only the fourth recording in the history of Waller’s iconic tune. If it shows its age, that age offers a completely unique experience.

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Jul 17 2013
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Jimmy Lytell Gets Some Spotlight

Clarinetist Jimmy Lytell is best known for his recordings with the Original Memphis Five, followed by a lengthy career as a studio staff musician. Canadian company Jazz Oracle now collects all twenty-five recordings that Lytell made with just piano and guitar/banjo for the Pathe label between 1926 and 1928. This format was popular throughout the twenties, with clarinetists such as Buster Bailey, Benny Goodman, Johnny Dodds and Boyd Senter (!) getting the opportunity to put their sound and style front and center. Since Lytell’s legacy is predominantly ensemble-based, this disc sheds some welcome light on his abilities as a soloist.

Speaking about these recordings in his landmark Lost Chords, Richard Sudhalter described Lytell’s playing as “curiously inert rhythmically.” He added that Lytell’s “phrasing is quite foursquare, [with] tidy patterns that always conform to the two and four-bar phrases of the songs and invariably land on the downbeat of a bar…There are moments when the ear longs for a subordinate clause, alternation of phrase lengths, anything asymmetrical.” Lytell may have had a limited rhythmic comfort zone, but his playing within those boundaries is assured and consistently joyful. He displays a bright, distinct tone that occasionally resembles a reedy alto saxophone, as for example on “Old Folks.” There are also plenty of the trademarks smears recognizable from the OM5 sides. He also frequently punches out repeated notes, resulting in a declaratory sound unusual for the instrument at this time, while numbers such as “Davenport Blues” and “Pardon The Glove” include several well-executed saw tooth patterns and finger-busting runs.

bdw8069This release is also a veritable twenties dance band songbook, including numbers such as “Messin’ Around,” “Stockholm Stomp” and “Missouri Squabble.” It’s illuminating to hear these tunes outside of more intricate big band charts of the time, and they pick up plenty of heat without the extra instrumentation (especially both takes of “Zulu Wail”). Jazz guitar pioneer Eddie Lang appears on several tracks, along with the energetic Dick McDonough, OM5 pianist Frank Signorelli and composer Rube Bloom.

Jazz Oracle’s engineering is typically beautiful, and this disc is worth purchasing for Phil Melick’s liner notes alone: they’re a model of how to blend history, discography and biography into a narrative rather than a list. Lytell may or may not make it into the pantheon of “great” jazz clarinetists yet this release reveals a musician who had taste as well as technique.

Unfortunately I can’t find any YouTube clips from this disc, but here’s Lytell backing the sweet-toned Annette Hanshaw:

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Mar 01 2012
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Phil Napoleon: To Jazz Or…

Swing, blues and a completely fresh improvisation at every performance: three common (for some essential) descriptors of “jazz” that were only beginning to take root at the height of Phil Napoleon’s career. Sounds from New Orleans and the Midwest territories were not as widespread when Napoleon was blowing trumpet for the Original Memphis Five. Louis Armstrong’ rhythmic and solo innovations were still to come, and jazz remained a collective experience with strong influences from ragtime. Yet even beyond his musical and historical surroundings, Napoleon always had other priorities.

Those priorities included a brilliant yet inviting tone, given to clipped articulation and rhythmically tense phrasing. That tone usually supported a powerful, balanced lead, but could also supply spare, neatly organized “hot” patterns. “How Come You Do Me Like You Do” features Napoleon’s direct ensemble lead as well as his witty muted obbligato behind Jimmy Lytell’s clarinet:

Richard M. Sudhalter explained, “The Memphis Five appear to have ‘routined’ their arrangements in advance and in detail…A routine on one number doesn’t change from take to take.” This stick-with-what-works ethic makes sense the more one hears (and feels) Napoleon’s overriding concern for balance and blend. If Napoleon knows exactly what he’s going to play next on “He May Be Your Man,” and if the rhythm is more sway than swing, he still conveys spontaneity alongside restraint. He even adds subtle sardonic color to Lem Fowler’s naughty little tune [just follow the arrow to listen]:

He May Be Your Man

The chamber intimacy of these recordings combined with Napoleon’s clean, resilient sound betrays his background as a classically trained player. Even at his most unbuttoned, for example on a later date with Miff Mole, his “Dixieland” sound is perfectly centered, and he executes a tortuous muted passage (in tight harmony with Mole’s trombone!) neatly and convincingly:

Throughout his career, Napoleon never completely absorbed the loose rhythms and bluesy rhetoric of Louis Armstrong, or the coaxing warmth and harmonic palette of Bix Beiderbecke. It’s probably one reason why Napoleon has had a modest presence in most “jazz” histories. Here he is leading a group of other Jazz Age stars, instantly recognizable and dependable as always. Napoleon remained his own man, something even Armstrong and Beiderbecke could have related to:

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