Monday, July 06, 2009
Normalcy, 1921
Southern Negro Quartette, I'll Be Good But I'll Be Lonesome.
Al Bernard, Frankie and Johnny.
Luigi and Antonio Russolo, Corale.
"Anonymous Jazz Band," Muscle Shoals Blues.
Sissle's Sizzling Syncopaters, Long Gone.
Lanin's Southern Serenaders, Shake It and Break It.
Ladd's Black Aces, Aunt Hagar's Children's Blues.
Mary Stafford, Strut Miss Lizzie.
Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds (with Johnny Dunn), Old Time Blues.
...[W]e must strive for normalcy to reach stability. All the penalties will not be light, nor evenly distributed. There is no way of making them so. There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh. It is the oldest lesson of civilization. I would like government to do all it can to mitigate; then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved. No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system.
President Warren G. Harding, inaugural address, 4 March 1921.
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
H.L. Mencken, on Warren G. Harding's inaugural address.
The King and Carter Jazzing Orchestra, Houston, January 1921.
The Southern Negro Quartette's "I'll Be Good But I'll Be Lonesome" is a head-on collision of styles. Nick Tosches aptly described the "stylistic schizophrenia" of the Quartette's 1921 records: call it a looser type of barbershop quartet singing, or early scatting, or a group burlesque of Al Jolson, or an ancestor to the Mills Brothers and The Coasters, or a taste of the hybrid that barely was: black country music.
Recorded ca. July 1921 and released as Columbia 3489 c/w "He Took It Away From Me"; on The Earliest Negro Vocal Groups Vol. 3 (an excellent compilation, which includes most of the Quartette's best tracks, like "Anticipatin' Blues" and "Sweet Mama.")
Dali, Voyeur.
While the folk ballad "Frankie and Johnny"(or "Frankie and Albert") dates to the 1890s or earlier, the first American recording of the song was the minstrel singer Al Bernard's 1921 Brunswick disc.
Much of the "canonized" lyric of "Frankie and Johnny" is based on an 1899 St. Louis murder case in which a 22-year-old African-American dancer named Frankie Baker killed her lover/pimp Albert (or Allen) Britt, allegedly over Britt's cheating. Bill Edwards:"When the stabbing was changed in legend to shooting is unclear, but early versions of the lyrics changed Al Britt to Albert, an easily explainable modification. However by 1912, with "Johnny" doing this and that in so many songs of that time (and possibly in some way related to the use of the term john as a prostitute's customer), Albert became Johnny, and both he and Frankie soon became legendary."
Frankie Baker was acquitted of all murder charges. She was working as a domestic in Omaha when Bernard's record came out; she subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon, and over the years she tried, in vain, to prevent films based on the case from being made (like She Done Him Wrong, with Mae West), while countless jazz, country and blues recordings of "Frankie" circulated. She died in a mental institution in 1952, unwillingly immortalized.
Recorded ca. May 1921 and released as Brunswick 2107 c/w "Memphis Blues"; on the now out-of-print That Devilin' Tune Vol. 1.
The Bohemian life: Charles Seeger, Constance de Clyver Edson and their children (2-year-old Pete is in Charles' lap), May 1921.
The Futurist Movement was heavy on painters and theoreticians and light on musicians. So the Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo said he would create Futurist music himself, using intonarumori--essentially, primitive white noise machines. There even were specific types: uluatori (howling machines), rombatori (rumbling machines), sibilatori (hissing machines), etc. None of them survived World War II. (From Daniel Albright's Modernism and Music.)
There is, however, one extant recording of the intonarumori, "Corale," composed in 1921 by Antonio Russolo, Luigi's brother, and recorded three years later. It is a piece of conventional orchestral music under which the intonarumori burble, groan and hiss: the result mainly conveys the sense of hearing a radio broadcast suffering from interference.
For Italy, the future was about to arrive at last. The leader of the Italian Futurists, Marinetti, had founded the Futurist Political Party in 1918, and a year later merged it with another new party--Benito Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista; on Musica Futurista.
Detail from Stettheimer's Spring Sale at Bendel's.
In late 1921, Chicago's Marsh Laboratories, which would be the first American studio to produce electrical recordings, issued a test pressing on its own Autograph label. This was a jazz band recording of George W. Thomas' "Muscle Shoals Blues," credited to no one.
Eighty-eight years later, we still have no idea who played on this record. The most likely candidates are some members of Bennie Moten's Orchestra, but there is no conclusive evidence and there likely never will be. In our perpetual Google search of an era, when seemingly everything is known about anyone under the sun, it is a fine thing to have a record that still remains a mystery.
Recorded ca. fall 1921 and cut as Autograph 30, a test pressing (never released); on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 2.
The Red Army takes Kronstadt, March 1921.
Noble Sissle, James Reese Europe's singer during Europe's 1919 tour, had inherited much of the band after Europe's murder. Sissle soon downsized, assembling a small group dubbed "Sissle's Sizzling Syncopators" that consisted mainly of Europe band veterans, including trumpet player Frank de Droite. Sissle's longtime collaborator Eubie Blake played piano.
The eight sides the sextet cut for Emerson in early 1921 were a showcase for contemporary black composers--along with Blake/Sissle originals like "Boll Weevil Blues," the Syncopators took on Spencer Williams, Clarence Williams and W.C. Handy (including what may be the first recording of Handy's "Careless Love" as well as his "Long Gone," the latter featured here).
Emerson signed Sissle to an exclusive contract just as Sissle and Blake started work on their revolutionary show Shuffle Along, which would be the first African-American-composed Broadway musical. So the Syncopators, whose records hint at the type of jazz chamber music later perfected by the likes of Duke Ellington, were left in the realm of the potential.
Recorded 18 March 1921 and released as Emerson 10365 c/w "Low Down Blues."
Sheeler and Strand, Manhatta.
Jimmy Durante, remembered today as a TV personality and the narrator of Frosty the Snowman, began as a jazz pianist. Durante was of the first generation of musicians to make a living out of playing jazz, in part by shuttling between NYC studios, playing the same piece three times in a day for three different labels.
Much of this hustle was due to the Russian-born bandleader Sam Lanin, who had become the intermediary between record labels and the growing pool of studio jazz players. So if a label wanted someone to record a new Broadway hit, they would call Lanin, who would quickly throw together a studio group and get the track cut in a couple days. And he'd being doing the same thing for another label at the same time.
So a session player like Durante was working in dozens of "jazz groups" simultaneously. Take the sextet "Lanin's Southern Serenaders," which featured Durante on piano and Phil Napoleon on trumpet, and "Ladd's Black Aces," which was pretty much the same group. Both Lanin's and Ladd's groups cut the exact same tracks, in nearly identical versions, within a few days in August 1921 for a series of different labels.
Lanin's Southern Serenaders' "Shake It and Break It" was released as Regal 9134/Emerson 10439, while Ladd's Black Aces' "Aunt Hagar's Children's Blues" was released as Gennett 4762/Star 9150. Or you could listen to Ladd's "Shake It and Break It" and Lanin's' "Aunt Hagar" and split the difference.; on Stomp and Swerve and Complete Ladd's Black Aces.
Munch, The Wave.
Mamie Smith's success led record labels to look for copycats or comparable singers, but since almost no label had any access to the Southern blues circuit (and singers like the young Bessie Smith), they first nabbed any black vaudeville singers they could find. One of these was Mary Stafford, whose first record was a take of "Crazy Blues" that's nearly as strong as Smith's hit version. The legend is that a Columbia Records exec heard Stafford singing "Crazy Blues" in a New York cabaret one night, and got her into the studio to sing it the following morning.
Overall, Stafford drew a poor hand in her career, only cutting only 14 sides in her life (including the debut recording of "Royal Garden Blues"). Columbia seemed disappointed in her, dropping her contract after six records, and Stafford's engineers and producers don't appear to have quite known what they wanted--some of her records are hot jazz band recordings in which Stafford's voice is a drowned-out afterthought, while others are thin, vocal-heavy stage weepies poorly translated to disc.
Here's one of the better ones: her version of Creamer and Layton's "Strut Miss Lizzie," recorded ca. May 1921 and released as Columbia 3418; on Document's exhaustive (and exhausting) multi-disc compilation of female blues singers in alphabetical order--this is from Volume 13, "R-S."
Johnny Dunn's first spotlit moment came in his performance on Smith's "Crazy Blues"--a moaning, wailing counterpart to Smith's vocal. Soon enough Dunn was getting work on his own, leading various editions of Smith's "Jazz Hounds" in 1921. Their records provide a decent snapshot of where jazz stood in the days just before Louis Armstrong left New Orleans to head north.
Dunn's "Old Time Blues" was cut on 1 February 1921 and released as OKeh 4296 c/w "That Thing Called Love"; on From Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 3.
Top photo: Miss Mary Eurana Ward christens the SS Eurana, which she sponsored, on 16 July 1921, Camden, NJ.
Next: Songmasonry
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Southern Negro Quartette, I'll Be Good But I'll Be Lonesome.
Al Bernard, Frankie and Johnny.
Luigi and Antonio Russolo, Corale.
"Anonymous Jazz Band," Muscle Shoals Blues.
Sissle's Sizzling Syncopaters, Long Gone.
Lanin's Southern Serenaders, Shake It and Break It.
Ladd's Black Aces, Aunt Hagar's Children's Blues.
Mary Stafford, Strut Miss Lizzie.
Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds (with Johnny Dunn), Old Time Blues.
...[W]e must strive for normalcy to reach stability. All the penalties will not be light, nor evenly distributed. There is no way of making them so. There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh. It is the oldest lesson of civilization. I would like government to do all it can to mitigate; then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved. No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system.
President Warren G. Harding, inaugural address, 4 March 1921.
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
H.L. Mencken, on Warren G. Harding's inaugural address.
The King and Carter Jazzing Orchestra, Houston, January 1921.
The Southern Negro Quartette's "I'll Be Good But I'll Be Lonesome" is a head-on collision of styles. Nick Tosches aptly described the "stylistic schizophrenia" of the Quartette's 1921 records: call it a looser type of barbershop quartet singing, or early scatting, or a group burlesque of Al Jolson, or an ancestor to the Mills Brothers and The Coasters, or a taste of the hybrid that barely was: black country music.
Recorded ca. July 1921 and released as Columbia 3489 c/w "He Took It Away From Me"; on The Earliest Negro Vocal Groups Vol. 3 (an excellent compilation, which includes most of the Quartette's best tracks, like "Anticipatin' Blues" and "Sweet Mama.")
Dali, Voyeur.
While the folk ballad "Frankie and Johnny"(or "Frankie and Albert") dates to the 1890s or earlier, the first American recording of the song was the minstrel singer Al Bernard's 1921 Brunswick disc.
Much of the "canonized" lyric of "Frankie and Johnny" is based on an 1899 St. Louis murder case in which a 22-year-old African-American dancer named Frankie Baker killed her lover/pimp Albert (or Allen) Britt, allegedly over Britt's cheating. Bill Edwards:"When the stabbing was changed in legend to shooting is unclear, but early versions of the lyrics changed Al Britt to Albert, an easily explainable modification. However by 1912, with "Johnny" doing this and that in so many songs of that time (and possibly in some way related to the use of the term john as a prostitute's customer), Albert became Johnny, and both he and Frankie soon became legendary."
Frankie Baker was acquitted of all murder charges. She was working as a domestic in Omaha when Bernard's record came out; she subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon, and over the years she tried, in vain, to prevent films based on the case from being made (like She Done Him Wrong, with Mae West), while countless jazz, country and blues recordings of "Frankie" circulated. She died in a mental institution in 1952, unwillingly immortalized.
Recorded ca. May 1921 and released as Brunswick 2107 c/w "Memphis Blues"; on the now out-of-print That Devilin' Tune Vol. 1.
The Bohemian life: Charles Seeger, Constance de Clyver Edson and their children (2-year-old Pete is in Charles' lap), May 1921.
The Futurist Movement was heavy on painters and theoreticians and light on musicians. So the Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo said he would create Futurist music himself, using intonarumori--essentially, primitive white noise machines. There even were specific types: uluatori (howling machines), rombatori (rumbling machines), sibilatori (hissing machines), etc. None of them survived World War II. (From Daniel Albright's Modernism and Music.)
There is, however, one extant recording of the intonarumori, "Corale," composed in 1921 by Antonio Russolo, Luigi's brother, and recorded three years later. It is a piece of conventional orchestral music under which the intonarumori burble, groan and hiss: the result mainly conveys the sense of hearing a radio broadcast suffering from interference.
For Italy, the future was about to arrive at last. The leader of the Italian Futurists, Marinetti, had founded the Futurist Political Party in 1918, and a year later merged it with another new party--Benito Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista; on Musica Futurista.
Detail from Stettheimer's Spring Sale at Bendel's.
In late 1921, Chicago's Marsh Laboratories, which would be the first American studio to produce electrical recordings, issued a test pressing on its own Autograph label. This was a jazz band recording of George W. Thomas' "Muscle Shoals Blues," credited to no one.
Eighty-eight years later, we still have no idea who played on this record. The most likely candidates are some members of Bennie Moten's Orchestra, but there is no conclusive evidence and there likely never will be. In our perpetual Google search of an era, when seemingly everything is known about anyone under the sun, it is a fine thing to have a record that still remains a mystery.
Recorded ca. fall 1921 and cut as Autograph 30, a test pressing (never released); on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 2.
The Red Army takes Kronstadt, March 1921.
Noble Sissle, James Reese Europe's singer during Europe's 1919 tour, had inherited much of the band after Europe's murder. Sissle soon downsized, assembling a small group dubbed "Sissle's Sizzling Syncopators" that consisted mainly of Europe band veterans, including trumpet player Frank de Droite. Sissle's longtime collaborator Eubie Blake played piano.
The eight sides the sextet cut for Emerson in early 1921 were a showcase for contemporary black composers--along with Blake/Sissle originals like "Boll Weevil Blues," the Syncopators took on Spencer Williams, Clarence Williams and W.C. Handy (including what may be the first recording of Handy's "Careless Love" as well as his "Long Gone," the latter featured here).
Emerson signed Sissle to an exclusive contract just as Sissle and Blake started work on their revolutionary show Shuffle Along, which would be the first African-American-composed Broadway musical. So the Syncopators, whose records hint at the type of jazz chamber music later perfected by the likes of Duke Ellington, were left in the realm of the potential.
Recorded 18 March 1921 and released as Emerson 10365 c/w "Low Down Blues."
Sheeler and Strand, Manhatta.
Jimmy Durante, remembered today as a TV personality and the narrator of Frosty the Snowman, began as a jazz pianist. Durante was of the first generation of musicians to make a living out of playing jazz, in part by shuttling between NYC studios, playing the same piece three times in a day for three different labels.
Much of this hustle was due to the Russian-born bandleader Sam Lanin, who had become the intermediary between record labels and the growing pool of studio jazz players. So if a label wanted someone to record a new Broadway hit, they would call Lanin, who would quickly throw together a studio group and get the track cut in a couple days. And he'd being doing the same thing for another label at the same time.
So a session player like Durante was working in dozens of "jazz groups" simultaneously. Take the sextet "Lanin's Southern Serenaders," which featured Durante on piano and Phil Napoleon on trumpet, and "Ladd's Black Aces," which was pretty much the same group. Both Lanin's and Ladd's groups cut the exact same tracks, in nearly identical versions, within a few days in August 1921 for a series of different labels.
Lanin's Southern Serenaders' "Shake It and Break It" was released as Regal 9134/Emerson 10439, while Ladd's Black Aces' "Aunt Hagar's Children's Blues" was released as Gennett 4762/Star 9150. Or you could listen to Ladd's "Shake It and Break It" and Lanin's' "Aunt Hagar" and split the difference.; on Stomp and Swerve and Complete Ladd's Black Aces.
Munch, The Wave.
Mamie Smith's success led record labels to look for copycats or comparable singers, but since almost no label had any access to the Southern blues circuit (and singers like the young Bessie Smith), they first nabbed any black vaudeville singers they could find. One of these was Mary Stafford, whose first record was a take of "Crazy Blues" that's nearly as strong as Smith's hit version. The legend is that a Columbia Records exec heard Stafford singing "Crazy Blues" in a New York cabaret one night, and got her into the studio to sing it the following morning.
Overall, Stafford drew a poor hand in her career, only cutting only 14 sides in her life (including the debut recording of "Royal Garden Blues"). Columbia seemed disappointed in her, dropping her contract after six records, and Stafford's engineers and producers don't appear to have quite known what they wanted--some of her records are hot jazz band recordings in which Stafford's voice is a drowned-out afterthought, while others are thin, vocal-heavy stage weepies poorly translated to disc.
Here's one of the better ones: her version of Creamer and Layton's "Strut Miss Lizzie," recorded ca. May 1921 and released as Columbia 3418; on Document's exhaustive (and exhausting) multi-disc compilation of female blues singers in alphabetical order--this is from Volume 13, "R-S."
Johnny Dunn's first spotlit moment came in his performance on Smith's "Crazy Blues"--a moaning, wailing counterpart to Smith's vocal. Soon enough Dunn was getting work on his own, leading various editions of Smith's "Jazz Hounds" in 1921. Their records provide a decent snapshot of where jazz stood in the days just before Louis Armstrong left New Orleans to head north.
Dunn's "Old Time Blues" was cut on 1 February 1921 and released as OKeh 4296 c/w "That Thing Called Love"; on From Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 3.
Top photo: Miss Mary Eurana Ward christens the SS Eurana, which she sponsored, on 16 July 1921, Camden, NJ.
Next: Songmasonry
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Body and Soul Flu
James Moody, Body and Soul (1949).
Serge Chaloff, Body and Soul (1956).
Billie Holiday, Body and Soul (1957).
Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond, Body and Soul (1957).
Benny Carter, Body and Soul (1961).
Art Pepper, Body and Soul (1989).
We're guest-starring at Ted Barron's Boogie Woogie Flu (which you should be reading anyhow) with a long ramble on "Body and Soul." Here are a few versions that didn't make the cut.
Moody (1949-1950); Chaloff (Boston Blow-Up); Holiday (Body and Soul); Desmond/Mulligan (Blues In Time); Carter (Further Definitions); Pepper (Art of the Ballad).
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James Moody, Body and Soul (1949).
Serge Chaloff, Body and Soul (1956).
Billie Holiday, Body and Soul (1957).
Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond, Body and Soul (1957).
Benny Carter, Body and Soul (1961).
Art Pepper, Body and Soul (1989).
We're guest-starring at Ted Barron's Boogie Woogie Flu (which you should be reading anyhow) with a long ramble on "Body and Soul." Here are a few versions that didn't make the cut.
Moody (1949-1950); Chaloff (Boston Blow-Up); Holiday (Body and Soul); Desmond/Mulligan (Blues In Time); Carter (Further Definitions); Pepper (Art of the Ballad).
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Michael Jackson, 1958-2009
The Jackson Five, The Love You Save.
The Jackson Five, 2-4-6-8.
Michael Jackson, Farewell My Summer Love.
Michael Jackson, Get On the Floor.
Michael Jackson, Billie Jean (demo).
Michael Jackson, Baby Be Mine.
The Minutemen, Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing.
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush."
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The Jackson Five, The Love You Save.
The Jackson Five, 2-4-6-8.
Michael Jackson, Farewell My Summer Love.
Michael Jackson, Get On the Floor.
Michael Jackson, Billie Jean (demo).
Michael Jackson, Baby Be Mine.
The Minutemen, Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing.
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush."
Thursday, June 18, 2009
1921: An Aria of Canaries
Eubie Blake, Sounds of Africa.
Eubie Blake, Ma! (He's Making Eyes At Me).
Zez Confrey, Poor Buttermilk.
Frank Banta, Wild Cherry Rag.
James P. Johnson, Harlem Strut.
James P. Johnson, Carolina Shout.
James P. Johnson, Keep Off the Grass.
Fletcher Henderson, Unknown Blues.
Fats Waller, Birmingham Blues.
Pianists in jazz, like canaries in a mineshaft, are messengers of change.
Allen Lowe.
The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did. Only lately have they caught up.
James P. Johnson.
When I began my work, jazz was a stunt.
Duke Ellington.
The border between ragtime and jazz piano playing is shadowy, porous and heavily-traveled, and making any boundary claim--jazz piano playing begins here--ping!--as if a pin is pressed into a map--is a foolhardy enterprise. But fools we are, so: in 1921, over a series of records cut by a handful of pianists, ragtime piano transmuted into jazz.
In part this is because of who was making records in 1921, the year the master James P. Johnson and the neophyte Fletcher Henderson both made their solo debuts. But even the novelty players, the jokemen and keyboard tumblers, felt something in the air.
Solo piano recordings can seem like outposts in unmapped territories. Their flexibility and cheapness (requiring little arranging and minimal production) means innovation can sometimes get captured on the fly. But certainly, these 1921 recordings were foremost meant to sell--Brunswick and OKeh and the new African-American-owned label Black Swan were not in the business of funding lab experiments; these records are hardly avant garde. Still, something is moving in them.
Consider them a set of mirrors, reflecting light and shadow, sometimes from a forgotten, lost world, sometimes from one just coalescing.
Eubie Blake had played ragtime since his childhood and in 1921 he cut a record, "Sounds of Africa," that's pure hybrid--it's a ragtime piece dating to the turn of the century that Blake plays with a jazzman's style. Lowe, in his That Devilin' Tune, writes of the "burrowing power" of "Sounds of Africa," and there is a relentless push, a shake and a swerve, in Blake's performance here.
Blake always called it his "Charleston Rag." It was one of his oldest pieces--he wrote it in Baltimore when he was 15 and playing piano in a neighborhood bordello. (He would wait until his parents were asleep, then creep out of the house, change into a pair of long pants he rented from a poolhall owner, and play at the whorehouse until dawn.)
The composer Will Marion Cook heard Blake playing "Charleston Rag" in 1906, and said Blake needed to publish it. Cook, always doing his part to uplift black music, rechristened it "Sounds of Africa" and took Blake to see Curt Schindler, the manager of the song publisher G. Schirmer. Schindler loved the rag and offered $100 for it, but rescinded his offer after the notorious hothead Cook yelled at him. The argument, as recalled by Blake, is worth recounting in full:
Schindler says, "I see you go from a G flat to an E flat without any preparation or modulation." Now he don't mean nothin' at all. He bought the tune. He's just curious. Then suddenly Cook gets very indignant. "How dare you criticize Mr. Blake! What do you know about genuine African music? That's genuine African music!" He's lyin' now.
It would be another 11 years before Blake cut the rag as a piano roll, and 15 until it was at last recorded. (From David A. Jasen and Gordon Gene Jones' Black Bottom Stomp and Norman Weinstein's A Night in Tunisia, where the Blake quote is found.)
Eubie Blake makes Noble Sissle dance like a marionette
Compare the 1917 piano roll of "Charleston Rag" and the 1921 record, under its re-assumed alias "Sounds of Africa," and you'll hear the change, one beyond just the difference between the waxwork piano roll and the flesh-and-blood recording. The rag's been heavily seasoned, likely by years of piano cutting contests that Blake played in Harlem.
These contests were a brutal business. Any aspiring pianist had to take on a set of masters, including Luckey Roberts, whose hands were so large they could span a fourteenth (two dozen keys or more) on the keyboard, or Willie "The Lion" Smith, who would stand over a challenger while he played, smoking a cigar and talking trash all the while (if Smith noticed the player had a weak left hand, Smith would gibe "When did you break your left arm?"), or the mysterious player known only as "Seminole" whose ambidextrous powers left Count Basie battered ("he had a left hand like everybody else had a right hand...And he dethroned me. Took my crown!", Basie told Albert Murray).
Here Blake would arrive wearing a raccoon coat and derby, carrying a cane, and saving "his best effects for the piano, where he would lift his hands high...sometimes conducting with one, while continuing to pound the keys with the other" (Ted Gioia). He played "Charleston Rag" relentlessly, and some of the innovation (take how Blake will suddenly shift the standard syncopated ragtime rhythm to a non-syncopated beat), looseness and verve of those battles can be heard, if murkily, in the '21 recording.
Recorded in July 1921 and released as several cylinders and discs: Columbia C3L33, Emerson 10434, Symphanola 4360 and Paramount 14004; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 2. "Ma! (He's Making Eyes At Me)," a Broadway staple that Blake churns into another wonderful ragtime/jazz fusion (listen to how he vamps up the melody towards the end) was cut in September 1921 and released as Emerson 10450.
Poor Zez Confrey doesn't fit into any of the fashionable pigeonholes of "jazz." He didn't come up the river from New Orleans, didn't jam on 52nd Street, wasn't a junkie, etc. Or if he was I never heard of it.
Dick Wellstood.
Zez Confrey was a "novelty ragtime" pianist of the early '20s, best known for "Kitten on the Keys," his attempt to replicate the sound he heard one night of his cat walking on his piano keyboard. As per his instructions, pianists playing "Kitten" were advised to "scramble up the octaves in the part which is supposed to sound like a cat bouncing down the keyboard. In other words, make a fist...otherwise it won't sound real."
In the same year, Confrey recorded another novelty, "Poor Buttermilk," which is more in the vein of Blake's "Sounds of Africa"--a prototype ragtime/jazz recording. It has a rhythmic density and a sense of moodiness: its "B" section (starting at :30 in) is one of the thornier pieces in the ragtime canon, a shower of "augmented triads descending in intervals of a minor third" (David Jasen). The stride pianist Dick Wellstood was a fan, writing that "Poor Buttermilk" should be played "slowly and sweetly by a choir of drunken soprano saxophonists."
And Frank Banta's "Wild Cherry Rag," from the same year, also has something of jazz sensibility in Banta's fleetness and solid rhythmic sense--the song is a bit of a musty oldie, but Banta swings pretty well.
"Buttermilk" was recorded sometime between April and July 1921 and released as Brunswick 2112 c/w "You Tell Em Ivories"; on Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era Vol. 4. Banta's "Wild Cherry Rag" was recorded in August 1921 and released as Gennett 4735; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 4.
James P. Johnson, brooking no challengers, 1921.
A disciple of Scott Joplin and the mentor of Fats Waller, James P. Johnson is a suspension bridge between ragtime and jazz--he was a ragtime innovator, one of the pioneers of stride jazz piano, and he lived long enough to hear the likes of Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk take his style and mutate it beyond even his imaginings.
The critic Stanley Dance once described Johnson's piano style as being orchestral: "full, round, big widespread chords and tenths; a heavy bass moving against the right hand." Johnson as a child had studied Rachmaninoff and by his early teens was playing ragtime in bars and brothels and in vaudeville theaters. By the mid-'10s he was in New York, churning out hundreds of piano rolls while working at longshoreman dives in the Jungle, the pre-urban-renewal Upper West Side slum.
Johnson's first records seem intended to quietly shatter ragtime's constitution. "Harlem Strut," his debut solo track, is on paper a standard ragtime number in 2/4, but Johnson's relaxed, smooth playing conveys a sense of new, looser sense of time.
And the tracks he cut for OKeh in late '21, "Carolina Shout" (which became a textbook for Waller and Ellington) and "Keep Off the Grass," further show Johnson's innovative rhythmic sense: his ability to balance the "bell-like clarity of his right hand" (Lowe) with his steady, stride-playing left. In the opening bars of "Carolina Shout," Johnson's right hand keeps the same, steady rhythm while his left keeps changing gears, shifting into a 3-3-2 beat pattern, among others. It's a trick he pulls again towards the end of the "Grass", when Johnson's left plays 3-2-3 and his right 3-3-2.
"Harlem Strut" was recorded in August 1921 and released as Black Swan 2026; "Carolina Shout" was recorded 18 October 1921, "Keep Off the Grass" ca. November 1921, and both released as OKeh 4495. On Carolina Shout and the out-of-print Harlem Stride Piano.
Heir apparent: Fats Waller opens an engagement
Finally, two epilogues: Fletcher Henderson, who would be the decade's finest and most unheralded bandleader, started as a pianist trying to key his way out of ragtime's constraints. His "Unknown Blues" is a fairly standard ragtime composition that Henderson makes dance with a deft lightness in his playing.
Recorded ca. August 1921 (there's some dispute as to this, but I'm going by Ross Laird's sessionography) and released as Black Swan 2026; on 1921-1923.
And finally: the 18-year-old Thomas "Fats" Waller's first-ever recording, 1922's "Birmingham Blues." Waller worshiped James P. Johnson so much that Waller even moved into the man's house for a time. The romping "Birmingham" is the first of his many acts of homage.
Recorded either on 21 October 1922 or in December of that year, and released as OKeh 4757 c/w "Muscle Shoals Blues"; on the highly-recommended Handful of Keys.
Top photo: George Gershwin's hands, ca. 1929.
PS: Yes, "an aria of canaries" is allegedly the collective noun for canaries, according to the New Zealand bird and birding pages. I'm also fond of "a deck of cardinals."
Next: Normalcy, really. But first, I'm on a small vacation.
|
Eubie Blake, Sounds of Africa.
Eubie Blake, Ma! (He's Making Eyes At Me).
Zez Confrey, Poor Buttermilk.
Frank Banta, Wild Cherry Rag.
James P. Johnson, Harlem Strut.
James P. Johnson, Carolina Shout.
James P. Johnson, Keep Off the Grass.
Fletcher Henderson, Unknown Blues.
Fats Waller, Birmingham Blues.
Pianists in jazz, like canaries in a mineshaft, are messengers of change.
Allen Lowe.
The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did. Only lately have they caught up.
James P. Johnson.
When I began my work, jazz was a stunt.
Duke Ellington.
The border between ragtime and jazz piano playing is shadowy, porous and heavily-traveled, and making any boundary claim--jazz piano playing begins here--ping!--as if a pin is pressed into a map--is a foolhardy enterprise. But fools we are, so: in 1921, over a series of records cut by a handful of pianists, ragtime piano transmuted into jazz.
In part this is because of who was making records in 1921, the year the master James P. Johnson and the neophyte Fletcher Henderson both made their solo debuts. But even the novelty players, the jokemen and keyboard tumblers, felt something in the air.
Solo piano recordings can seem like outposts in unmapped territories. Their flexibility and cheapness (requiring little arranging and minimal production) means innovation can sometimes get captured on the fly. But certainly, these 1921 recordings were foremost meant to sell--Brunswick and OKeh and the new African-American-owned label Black Swan were not in the business of funding lab experiments; these records are hardly avant garde. Still, something is moving in them.
Consider them a set of mirrors, reflecting light and shadow, sometimes from a forgotten, lost world, sometimes from one just coalescing.
Eubie Blake had played ragtime since his childhood and in 1921 he cut a record, "Sounds of Africa," that's pure hybrid--it's a ragtime piece dating to the turn of the century that Blake plays with a jazzman's style. Lowe, in his That Devilin' Tune, writes of the "burrowing power" of "Sounds of Africa," and there is a relentless push, a shake and a swerve, in Blake's performance here.
Blake always called it his "Charleston Rag." It was one of his oldest pieces--he wrote it in Baltimore when he was 15 and playing piano in a neighborhood bordello. (He would wait until his parents were asleep, then creep out of the house, change into a pair of long pants he rented from a poolhall owner, and play at the whorehouse until dawn.)
The composer Will Marion Cook heard Blake playing "Charleston Rag" in 1906, and said Blake needed to publish it. Cook, always doing his part to uplift black music, rechristened it "Sounds of Africa" and took Blake to see Curt Schindler, the manager of the song publisher G. Schirmer. Schindler loved the rag and offered $100 for it, but rescinded his offer after the notorious hothead Cook yelled at him. The argument, as recalled by Blake, is worth recounting in full:
Schindler says, "I see you go from a G flat to an E flat without any preparation or modulation." Now he don't mean nothin' at all. He bought the tune. He's just curious. Then suddenly Cook gets very indignant. "How dare you criticize Mr. Blake! What do you know about genuine African music? That's genuine African music!" He's lyin' now.
It would be another 11 years before Blake cut the rag as a piano roll, and 15 until it was at last recorded. (From David A. Jasen and Gordon Gene Jones' Black Bottom Stomp and Norman Weinstein's A Night in Tunisia, where the Blake quote is found.)
Eubie Blake makes Noble Sissle dance like a marionette
Compare the 1917 piano roll of "Charleston Rag" and the 1921 record, under its re-assumed alias "Sounds of Africa," and you'll hear the change, one beyond just the difference between the waxwork piano roll and the flesh-and-blood recording. The rag's been heavily seasoned, likely by years of piano cutting contests that Blake played in Harlem.
These contests were a brutal business. Any aspiring pianist had to take on a set of masters, including Luckey Roberts, whose hands were so large they could span a fourteenth (two dozen keys or more) on the keyboard, or Willie "The Lion" Smith, who would stand over a challenger while he played, smoking a cigar and talking trash all the while (if Smith noticed the player had a weak left hand, Smith would gibe "When did you break your left arm?"), or the mysterious player known only as "Seminole" whose ambidextrous powers left Count Basie battered ("he had a left hand like everybody else had a right hand...And he dethroned me. Took my crown!", Basie told Albert Murray).
Here Blake would arrive wearing a raccoon coat and derby, carrying a cane, and saving "his best effects for the piano, where he would lift his hands high...sometimes conducting with one, while continuing to pound the keys with the other" (Ted Gioia). He played "Charleston Rag" relentlessly, and some of the innovation (take how Blake will suddenly shift the standard syncopated ragtime rhythm to a non-syncopated beat), looseness and verve of those battles can be heard, if murkily, in the '21 recording.
Recorded in July 1921 and released as several cylinders and discs: Columbia C3L33, Emerson 10434, Symphanola 4360 and Paramount 14004; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 2. "Ma! (He's Making Eyes At Me)," a Broadway staple that Blake churns into another wonderful ragtime/jazz fusion (listen to how he vamps up the melody towards the end) was cut in September 1921 and released as Emerson 10450.
Poor Zez Confrey doesn't fit into any of the fashionable pigeonholes of "jazz." He didn't come up the river from New Orleans, didn't jam on 52nd Street, wasn't a junkie, etc. Or if he was I never heard of it.
Dick Wellstood.
Zez Confrey was a "novelty ragtime" pianist of the early '20s, best known for "Kitten on the Keys," his attempt to replicate the sound he heard one night of his cat walking on his piano keyboard. As per his instructions, pianists playing "Kitten" were advised to "scramble up the octaves in the part which is supposed to sound like a cat bouncing down the keyboard. In other words, make a fist...otherwise it won't sound real."
In the same year, Confrey recorded another novelty, "Poor Buttermilk," which is more in the vein of Blake's "Sounds of Africa"--a prototype ragtime/jazz recording. It has a rhythmic density and a sense of moodiness: its "B" section (starting at :30 in) is one of the thornier pieces in the ragtime canon, a shower of "augmented triads descending in intervals of a minor third" (David Jasen). The stride pianist Dick Wellstood was a fan, writing that "Poor Buttermilk" should be played "slowly and sweetly by a choir of drunken soprano saxophonists."
And Frank Banta's "Wild Cherry Rag," from the same year, also has something of jazz sensibility in Banta's fleetness and solid rhythmic sense--the song is a bit of a musty oldie, but Banta swings pretty well.
"Buttermilk" was recorded sometime between April and July 1921 and released as Brunswick 2112 c/w "You Tell Em Ivories"; on Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era Vol. 4. Banta's "Wild Cherry Rag" was recorded in August 1921 and released as Gennett 4735; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 4.
James P. Johnson, brooking no challengers, 1921.
A disciple of Scott Joplin and the mentor of Fats Waller, James P. Johnson is a suspension bridge between ragtime and jazz--he was a ragtime innovator, one of the pioneers of stride jazz piano, and he lived long enough to hear the likes of Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk take his style and mutate it beyond even his imaginings.
The critic Stanley Dance once described Johnson's piano style as being orchestral: "full, round, big widespread chords and tenths; a heavy bass moving against the right hand." Johnson as a child had studied Rachmaninoff and by his early teens was playing ragtime in bars and brothels and in vaudeville theaters. By the mid-'10s he was in New York, churning out hundreds of piano rolls while working at longshoreman dives in the Jungle, the pre-urban-renewal Upper West Side slum.
Johnson's first records seem intended to quietly shatter ragtime's constitution. "Harlem Strut," his debut solo track, is on paper a standard ragtime number in 2/4, but Johnson's relaxed, smooth playing conveys a sense of new, looser sense of time.
And the tracks he cut for OKeh in late '21, "Carolina Shout" (which became a textbook for Waller and Ellington) and "Keep Off the Grass," further show Johnson's innovative rhythmic sense: his ability to balance the "bell-like clarity of his right hand" (Lowe) with his steady, stride-playing left. In the opening bars of "Carolina Shout," Johnson's right hand keeps the same, steady rhythm while his left keeps changing gears, shifting into a 3-3-2 beat pattern, among others. It's a trick he pulls again towards the end of the "Grass", when Johnson's left plays 3-2-3 and his right 3-3-2.
"Harlem Strut" was recorded in August 1921 and released as Black Swan 2026; "Carolina Shout" was recorded 18 October 1921, "Keep Off the Grass" ca. November 1921, and both released as OKeh 4495. On Carolina Shout and the out-of-print Harlem Stride Piano.
Heir apparent: Fats Waller opens an engagement
Finally, two epilogues: Fletcher Henderson, who would be the decade's finest and most unheralded bandleader, started as a pianist trying to key his way out of ragtime's constraints. His "Unknown Blues" is a fairly standard ragtime composition that Henderson makes dance with a deft lightness in his playing.
Recorded ca. August 1921 (there's some dispute as to this, but I'm going by Ross Laird's sessionography) and released as Black Swan 2026; on 1921-1923.
And finally: the 18-year-old Thomas "Fats" Waller's first-ever recording, 1922's "Birmingham Blues." Waller worshiped James P. Johnson so much that Waller even moved into the man's house for a time. The romping "Birmingham" is the first of his many acts of homage.
Recorded either on 21 October 1922 or in December of that year, and released as OKeh 4757 c/w "Muscle Shoals Blues"; on the highly-recommended Handful of Keys.
Top photo: George Gershwin's hands, ca. 1929.
PS: Yes, "an aria of canaries" is allegedly the collective noun for canaries, according to the New Zealand bird and birding pages. I'm also fond of "a deck of cardinals."
Next: Normalcy, really. But first, I'm on a small vacation.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Paradise Is Just a Curse, 1920
Maurice Burkhart, It's the Smart Little Feller Who Stocked Up His Cellar That's Getting the Beautiful Girls.
Van and Schenck, All the Boys Love Mary.
Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, Crazy Blues.
Louisiana Five, Weeping Willow Blues.
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, Wang Wang Blues.
Frank Crumit, My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle.
Isham Jones and His Rainbo Orchestra, When Shadows Fall I Hear You Calling.
Isham Jones and His Rainbo Orchestra, Wait'll You See.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (excerpt).
Charles Ives, Piano Sonata No. 2: The Alcotts.
Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which went into effect on 16 January 1920. Go raise a glass to unintended consequences.
Last call (for 13 years), 15 January 1920, Chicago.
Prohibition-era dating tips blossomed in the record shops and on the stage. The key point, emphasized variously, was that regardless of how old or homely you were, if you had access to booze, your prospects were solid.
Viz.: Maurice Burkhart's "It's the Smart Little Feller Who Stocked Up His Cellar..." (Edison Blue Amberol 3961/Edison Record 7039) or Van & Schenck's "All the Boys Love Mary" (because her old man's a bootlegger) (Columbia A2942).
Annual Bathing Girl Parade, Balboa Beach, Calif., June 1920 (See Shorpy for the entire photo)
See, she was the first of all of us...Mamie's the one that paved the way over there. Then we came behind her.
Victoria Spivey.
One Tuesday in New York City in August 1920, on West 45th Street, Mamie Smith and a pickup studio group dubbed the Jazz Hounds cut "Crazy Blues," a record now freighted with history. It may be the first "true" jazz vocal record, or the first proper blues; its performer was the first African-American female singer on record, and its success at last convinced record companies that black artists could sell. It's little surprise the record is in museum display cases. Stamped by the epochal, "Crazy Blues" still retains a bite despite its ninety years and its near-deification--it's the spiritual ancestor to everyone from Robert Johnson to Slick Rick:
I'm gonna do like a Chinaman
Go and get some hop,
Get myself a gun
And shoot myself a cop.
I ain't had nothing but bad news,
Now I got the crazy blues.
It's as though threads running through the first two decades of the 20th Century were at once tied in a tailor's knot: the seasoning of the vaudeville stage, the ambitions (and frustrations) of black composers, the growth (post-Little Wonder) of independent record companies, the influx of black Southerners into Northern cities, the influence and the disciples of the late James Reese Europe.
Mamie the First: the blues' original monarch
Our players: Perry "Mule" Bradford was a jobbing songwriter and pianist, a former minstrel show performer, who in the late 1910s was trying to convince a record company to use his blues compositions and to hire a singer he represented named Mamie Smith. He was known in the record industry as a "striver," his nickname owed to his perseverance:
I'd schemed and used up all of my bag of tricks to get that date; had greased my neck with goose grease every morning, so it would become easy to bow and scrape to some recording managers. But none of them would listen to my tale o' woe, even though I displayed my teeth to them with a perpetually-lasting watermelon grin. (Bradford, recalling the first Mamie Smith session, in his autobiography Born With the Blues.)
Mamie Smith, who was born in Cincinnati and who made her name in Harlem, was an imposing woman with costly tastes (at her peak, she allegedly owned two apartment houses and wore a $3,000 cape, trimmed with ostrich feathers, while on stage). Smith was not a blues singer by trade, as she never worked the medicine shows where Ma Rainey, for instance, had cut her teeth. Smith was more akin to Nora Bayes, Sophie Tucker or Ethel Waters: a sharp vaudeville pro, adept in a variety of styles, including the blues.
Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely in One Week.
Bradford got an audience with Otto Heinemann, who ran the fledgling OKeh label ("OKeh" is Otto K. E. Heinemann's initials), and his recording director, Fred Hager. They liked Bradford's songs but wanted Sophie Tucker to sing them. Tucker, however, claimed a contractual obligation, so OKeh agreed to give Smith a shot.
Smith's first record (and the first-ever solo black female vocal on disc) was the rather staid "That Thing Called Love," in which Smith was backed by OKeh's house band, the all-white Rega Orchestra. It sold well enough, so OKeh asked Smith to cut some more sides. Bradford had a popular song called "Harlem Blues," which Smith was singing on stage at the time. Before the session, he rewrote it and renamed it "Crazy Blues."
Höch, Pretty Maiden.
For the "Crazy Blues" session, Bradford somehow convinced OKeh to use his own band, one Bradford had pieced together (in part from James Reese Europe's Hellfighters) that consisted entirely of African-American players, including the master pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith, the sparkplug cornet player Johnny Dunn, and Dope Andrews on trombone. According to Bradford, Hager, supervising the session, got nervous and asked him to be sure the band played "sweet" and "light". One can imagine Bradford nodding fervently, and once Hager was out of the room, turning to the band with his trademark grin and counting off. (That said, Bradford certainly embellished this story--it's hard to imagine pros like Hager or his engineer, Ralph Peer, getting hoodwinked into recording hot jazz.)
Bradford described the session years later: As we hit the introduction and Mamie started singing, it gave me a lifetime thrill to hear Johnny Dunn's cornet moaning those dreaming blues and Dope Andrews making some down-home slides on his trombone...Man, it was too much for me.
Some critics have argued that "Crazy Blues" isn't really jazz (and is more a dressed-up show tune) but in any case it's masterful: Dunn, one of the first "individualist" horn players (he's something like the dress rehearsal for King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, playing with presence and a clear, distinct tone) sings above Andrews' swaying trombone, Ernest Elliot (clarinet) and Leroy Parker (fiddle) create an eerie wailing high end, while "The Lion"'s piano grounds Mamie's vocal.
"Crazy Blues" was released in November, and in its first month sold 75,000 copies at $1 a pop (so inflation-adjusted, the record earned roughly $700,000 in one month--OKeh soon cleared a million bucks off of it). Bradford later claimed that Pullman porters bought the record by the dozens and resold them at double the price to rural Southerners along their train routes. Alberta Hunter recalled what it was like after the disc hit: "You couldn't walk down the street in a colored neighborhood and not hear that record. It was everywhere."
The cornerstone: "Crazy Blues" was recorded in New York on 10 August 1920 and released as OKeh 4169-A, c/w a lesser Bradford composition, "It’s Right Here For You (If You Don’t Get It ‘Taint No Fault O’ Mine)". On Crazy Blues.
Mamie Smith’s and "Crazy Blues"' history is derived from many sources: Bradford's Born With the Blues, Chris Albertson's Bessie, Adam Gussow's Seems Like Murder Here, Giles Oakley's The Devil's Music, David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve, Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt's Jazz: A History of the New York Scene.
Bonus trivia note: Perry Bradford helped invent rock & roll too, writing Little Richard's "Keep a-Knockin'".
Sheeler, Church Street El.
Here's another dose of prime early New Orleans jazz from the Louisiana Five, dominated by "Yellow" Nuñez's clarinet. The Five's records of the period seem to be funeral rites for ragtime--Nuñez and his crew tumbling the music into its next incarnation.
"Weeping Willow Blues," recorded January 1920, was released as Emerson 10172; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 2.
Paul Whiteman was the mustached, moon-faced regent of jazz in the 1920s: his features seem crafted for Art Deco caricature. He was a Denver-born classical violinist who cast his lot with pop music, moving to San Fransisco, forming a dance band and trying to outplay Art Hickman. In 1920 Whiteman brought his orchestra to New York, contracted with Victor Records and became a centrifugal point of popular music. He hired Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti, Bing Crosby and Mildred Bailey, commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, and had 28 #1 records in the '20s alone. He was castigated, years later, for being called "the king of jazz," a usurper in the era of the young Armstrong and Ellington, though from many accounts he was a humble man who was embarrassed by the hype. He is one of those figures, like Al Jolson, fated to be inescapable in his own time and a half-memory in subsequent years.
"Wang Wang Blues," the first major Whiteman hit, was recorded on 9 August 1920 and released as Victor 18694-B. On King of Jazz.
Isham Jones, another top '20s bandleader, came from Saginaw, Michigan. The son of an Arkansas fiddler, Jones first worked in a coal mine, driving blind mules (and playing a fiddle while he drove them). He crept into show business by degrees, struggling for a decade to make a name as a songwriter, and playing in a few Chicago dance bands, where he learned saxophone to get gigs.
By 1920, Jones and his Rainbo Orchestra (so-called because they played at the Rainbo Gardens on North Clark Street) had become one of Chicago's top jazz bands. Jones' biggest hits were watered-down "society" jazz records (though he wrote some jazz standards, like "It Had to Be You"), but as Allen Lowe has pointed out, the first edition of Jones' Orchestra (1920-21, or basically, the recordings he made before his first #1 hit, "Wabash Blues") had a "sense of swinging musical inevitability informed by a true sense of jazz and its possibilities."
Jones' popularity waned during the Depression, a dip worsened by his ill-considered decision to switch record labels. In 1935 Jones hired a young clarinet player named Woody Herman for a Decca session, and, retiring a few years later, he bequeathed his band to Herman, a final donation to posterity.
Two of Jones' best tracks, "When Shadows Fall I Hear You Calling" and "Wait'll You See," were recorded in Chicago on 1 June 1920, and were released as Brunswick 5018; unavailable on CD at present.
William Hope, Seance, ca. 1920 (National Media Museum).
Alquist: Sterility, Helena, is man's last achievement.
Helena: Oh, Alquist, tell me why, why?
Alquist: You think I know?
Helena: (quietly) Why have women stopped having children?
Alquist: Because there's no need for them. Because we've entered into paradise. Do you understand what I mean?
Helena: No.
Alquist: Because there's no need for anyone to work, no need for pain. No-one needs to do anything, anything at all except enjoy himself. This paradise, it's just a curse! (jumping up) Helena, there's nothing more terrible than giving everyone Heaven on Earth!
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).
Another version of paradise (coarser, but more lively) can be found in Frank Crumit's "My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle." (This is one of the earliest public appearances of the word "bimbo," which initially was not sex-specific.)
Grosz, Republican Automatons.
Two American artists, abroad and at home:
Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," published in 1920, begins as a scathing autobiographical poem, in which Pound castigates himself and his earlier works ("For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry"), and then spins outward, cursing the world, which is nothing but a vale of philistinism ("a tawdry cheapness/shall reign throughout our days") and, foretelling Pound's later obsessions, of "usury age-old and age-thick." It is a world of cheap plaster reproductions and tinny distractions (pianolas, among other things), with the recent war having burned up the last of the crop:
There died a myriad
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
This is an abridged version, read by Pound in Washington, DC, in 1958. On Poetry on Record. More Pound recordings (including a 1939 rendition of "Mauberley") here.
Charles Ives' publication of his Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord Mass. 1840-1860") in the same year marked a quiet coming-out party for Ives, who had spent much of his life as an insurance agent while writing and endlessly revising his silent music, compositions that existed only as private, incomplete scores that were hardly, if ever, performed.
Ives suffered a heart attack at age 44, in 1918; it seems to have convinced him at last to start finalizing and publishing his compositions. During his convalescence, he wrote out the complete "Concord" Sonata as well as his Essays Before a Sonata, which were basically Ives' program notes for his work.
Each of the Sonata's four movements are Ives' tribute to a particular New England transcendentalist--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and, in the third movement featured here, Amos and Louisa May Alcott. Ives, in his essay , describes the teacher Amos Alcott as "frequently whip[ping] himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God was pained when his children of the earth were bad" while his daughter Louisa May, the author of Little Women, "leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care to admit."
Ives, throughout the Sonata, samples the most well-known motif in classical music--the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth--encasing it, along with excerpts from hymns like "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," in what he called "the human faith melody." As Geoffrey Block wrote, Ives' use of Beethoven is both a tribute and a toppling ("Ives intended not only to praise Caesar but bury him in an avalanche of new sounds").
As with most of Ives' works, he composed the Second Sonata over decades (in this case, roughly 1904 to 1915, and he kept revising it after its publication) and it wasn't performed until years after its completion. The first documented performance on record was by Katherine Heyman, in Paris in 1928, on a radio broadcast from the Sorbonne. The version of the Sonata's third movement included here is performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Next: Normalcy
|
Maurice Burkhart, It's the Smart Little Feller Who Stocked Up His Cellar That's Getting the Beautiful Girls.
Van and Schenck, All the Boys Love Mary.
Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, Crazy Blues.
Louisiana Five, Weeping Willow Blues.
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, Wang Wang Blues.
Frank Crumit, My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle.
Isham Jones and His Rainbo Orchestra, When Shadows Fall I Hear You Calling.
Isham Jones and His Rainbo Orchestra, Wait'll You See.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (excerpt).
Charles Ives, Piano Sonata No. 2: The Alcotts.
Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which went into effect on 16 January 1920. Go raise a glass to unintended consequences.
Last call (for 13 years), 15 January 1920, Chicago.
Prohibition-era dating tips blossomed in the record shops and on the stage. The key point, emphasized variously, was that regardless of how old or homely you were, if you had access to booze, your prospects were solid.
Viz.: Maurice Burkhart's "It's the Smart Little Feller Who Stocked Up His Cellar..." (Edison Blue Amberol 3961/Edison Record 7039) or Van & Schenck's "All the Boys Love Mary" (because her old man's a bootlegger) (Columbia A2942).
Annual Bathing Girl Parade, Balboa Beach, Calif., June 1920 (See Shorpy for the entire photo)
See, she was the first of all of us...Mamie's the one that paved the way over there. Then we came behind her.
Victoria Spivey.
One Tuesday in New York City in August 1920, on West 45th Street, Mamie Smith and a pickup studio group dubbed the Jazz Hounds cut "Crazy Blues," a record now freighted with history. It may be the first "true" jazz vocal record, or the first proper blues; its performer was the first African-American female singer on record, and its success at last convinced record companies that black artists could sell. It's little surprise the record is in museum display cases. Stamped by the epochal, "Crazy Blues" still retains a bite despite its ninety years and its near-deification--it's the spiritual ancestor to everyone from Robert Johnson to Slick Rick:
I'm gonna do like a Chinaman
Go and get some hop,
Get myself a gun
And shoot myself a cop.
I ain't had nothing but bad news,
Now I got the crazy blues.
It's as though threads running through the first two decades of the 20th Century were at once tied in a tailor's knot: the seasoning of the vaudeville stage, the ambitions (and frustrations) of black composers, the growth (post-Little Wonder) of independent record companies, the influx of black Southerners into Northern cities, the influence and the disciples of the late James Reese Europe.
Mamie the First: the blues' original monarch
Our players: Perry "Mule" Bradford was a jobbing songwriter and pianist, a former minstrel show performer, who in the late 1910s was trying to convince a record company to use his blues compositions and to hire a singer he represented named Mamie Smith. He was known in the record industry as a "striver," his nickname owed to his perseverance:
I'd schemed and used up all of my bag of tricks to get that date; had greased my neck with goose grease every morning, so it would become easy to bow and scrape to some recording managers. But none of them would listen to my tale o' woe, even though I displayed my teeth to them with a perpetually-lasting watermelon grin. (Bradford, recalling the first Mamie Smith session, in his autobiography Born With the Blues.)
Mamie Smith, who was born in Cincinnati and who made her name in Harlem, was an imposing woman with costly tastes (at her peak, she allegedly owned two apartment houses and wore a $3,000 cape, trimmed with ostrich feathers, while on stage). Smith was not a blues singer by trade, as she never worked the medicine shows where Ma Rainey, for instance, had cut her teeth. Smith was more akin to Nora Bayes, Sophie Tucker or Ethel Waters: a sharp vaudeville pro, adept in a variety of styles, including the blues.
Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely in One Week.
Bradford got an audience with Otto Heinemann, who ran the fledgling OKeh label ("OKeh" is Otto K. E. Heinemann's initials), and his recording director, Fred Hager. They liked Bradford's songs but wanted Sophie Tucker to sing them. Tucker, however, claimed a contractual obligation, so OKeh agreed to give Smith a shot.
Smith's first record (and the first-ever solo black female vocal on disc) was the rather staid "That Thing Called Love," in which Smith was backed by OKeh's house band, the all-white Rega Orchestra. It sold well enough, so OKeh asked Smith to cut some more sides. Bradford had a popular song called "Harlem Blues," which Smith was singing on stage at the time. Before the session, he rewrote it and renamed it "Crazy Blues."
Höch, Pretty Maiden.
For the "Crazy Blues" session, Bradford somehow convinced OKeh to use his own band, one Bradford had pieced together (in part from James Reese Europe's Hellfighters) that consisted entirely of African-American players, including the master pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith, the sparkplug cornet player Johnny Dunn, and Dope Andrews on trombone. According to Bradford, Hager, supervising the session, got nervous and asked him to be sure the band played "sweet" and "light". One can imagine Bradford nodding fervently, and once Hager was out of the room, turning to the band with his trademark grin and counting off. (That said, Bradford certainly embellished this story--it's hard to imagine pros like Hager or his engineer, Ralph Peer, getting hoodwinked into recording hot jazz.)
Bradford described the session years later: As we hit the introduction and Mamie started singing, it gave me a lifetime thrill to hear Johnny Dunn's cornet moaning those dreaming blues and Dope Andrews making some down-home slides on his trombone...Man, it was too much for me.
Some critics have argued that "Crazy Blues" isn't really jazz (and is more a dressed-up show tune) but in any case it's masterful: Dunn, one of the first "individualist" horn players (he's something like the dress rehearsal for King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, playing with presence and a clear, distinct tone) sings above Andrews' swaying trombone, Ernest Elliot (clarinet) and Leroy Parker (fiddle) create an eerie wailing high end, while "The Lion"'s piano grounds Mamie's vocal.
"Crazy Blues" was released in November, and in its first month sold 75,000 copies at $1 a pop (so inflation-adjusted, the record earned roughly $700,000 in one month--OKeh soon cleared a million bucks off of it). Bradford later claimed that Pullman porters bought the record by the dozens and resold them at double the price to rural Southerners along their train routes. Alberta Hunter recalled what it was like after the disc hit: "You couldn't walk down the street in a colored neighborhood and not hear that record. It was everywhere."
The cornerstone: "Crazy Blues" was recorded in New York on 10 August 1920 and released as OKeh 4169-A, c/w a lesser Bradford composition, "It’s Right Here For You (If You Don’t Get It ‘Taint No Fault O’ Mine)". On Crazy Blues.
Mamie Smith’s and "Crazy Blues"' history is derived from many sources: Bradford's Born With the Blues, Chris Albertson's Bessie, Adam Gussow's Seems Like Murder Here, Giles Oakley's The Devil's Music, David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve, Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt's Jazz: A History of the New York Scene.
Bonus trivia note: Perry Bradford helped invent rock & roll too, writing Little Richard's "Keep a-Knockin'".
Sheeler, Church Street El.
Here's another dose of prime early New Orleans jazz from the Louisiana Five, dominated by "Yellow" Nuñez's clarinet. The Five's records of the period seem to be funeral rites for ragtime--Nuñez and his crew tumbling the music into its next incarnation.
"Weeping Willow Blues," recorded January 1920, was released as Emerson 10172; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 2.
Paul Whiteman was the mustached, moon-faced regent of jazz in the 1920s: his features seem crafted for Art Deco caricature. He was a Denver-born classical violinist who cast his lot with pop music, moving to San Fransisco, forming a dance band and trying to outplay Art Hickman. In 1920 Whiteman brought his orchestra to New York, contracted with Victor Records and became a centrifugal point of popular music. He hired Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti, Bing Crosby and Mildred Bailey, commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, and had 28 #1 records in the '20s alone. He was castigated, years later, for being called "the king of jazz," a usurper in the era of the young Armstrong and Ellington, though from many accounts he was a humble man who was embarrassed by the hype. He is one of those figures, like Al Jolson, fated to be inescapable in his own time and a half-memory in subsequent years.
"Wang Wang Blues," the first major Whiteman hit, was recorded on 9 August 1920 and released as Victor 18694-B. On King of Jazz.
Isham Jones, another top '20s bandleader, came from Saginaw, Michigan. The son of an Arkansas fiddler, Jones first worked in a coal mine, driving blind mules (and playing a fiddle while he drove them). He crept into show business by degrees, struggling for a decade to make a name as a songwriter, and playing in a few Chicago dance bands, where he learned saxophone to get gigs.
By 1920, Jones and his Rainbo Orchestra (so-called because they played at the Rainbo Gardens on North Clark Street) had become one of Chicago's top jazz bands. Jones' biggest hits were watered-down "society" jazz records (though he wrote some jazz standards, like "It Had to Be You"), but as Allen Lowe has pointed out, the first edition of Jones' Orchestra (1920-21, or basically, the recordings he made before his first #1 hit, "Wabash Blues") had a "sense of swinging musical inevitability informed by a true sense of jazz and its possibilities."
Jones' popularity waned during the Depression, a dip worsened by his ill-considered decision to switch record labels. In 1935 Jones hired a young clarinet player named Woody Herman for a Decca session, and, retiring a few years later, he bequeathed his band to Herman, a final donation to posterity.
Two of Jones' best tracks, "When Shadows Fall I Hear You Calling" and "Wait'll You See," were recorded in Chicago on 1 June 1920, and were released as Brunswick 5018; unavailable on CD at present.
William Hope, Seance, ca. 1920 (National Media Museum).
Alquist: Sterility, Helena, is man's last achievement.
Helena: Oh, Alquist, tell me why, why?
Alquist: You think I know?
Helena: (quietly) Why have women stopped having children?
Alquist: Because there's no need for them. Because we've entered into paradise. Do you understand what I mean?
Helena: No.
Alquist: Because there's no need for anyone to work, no need for pain. No-one needs to do anything, anything at all except enjoy himself. This paradise, it's just a curse! (jumping up) Helena, there's nothing more terrible than giving everyone Heaven on Earth!
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).
Another version of paradise (coarser, but more lively) can be found in Frank Crumit's "My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle." (This is one of the earliest public appearances of the word "bimbo," which initially was not sex-specific.)
Grosz, Republican Automatons.
Two American artists, abroad and at home:
Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," published in 1920, begins as a scathing autobiographical poem, in which Pound castigates himself and his earlier works ("For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry"), and then spins outward, cursing the world, which is nothing but a vale of philistinism ("a tawdry cheapness/shall reign throughout our days") and, foretelling Pound's later obsessions, of "usury age-old and age-thick." It is a world of cheap plaster reproductions and tinny distractions (pianolas, among other things), with the recent war having burned up the last of the crop:
There died a myriad
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
This is an abridged version, read by Pound in Washington, DC, in 1958. On Poetry on Record. More Pound recordings (including a 1939 rendition of "Mauberley") here.
Charles Ives' publication of his Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord Mass. 1840-1860") in the same year marked a quiet coming-out party for Ives, who had spent much of his life as an insurance agent while writing and endlessly revising his silent music, compositions that existed only as private, incomplete scores that were hardly, if ever, performed.
Ives suffered a heart attack at age 44, in 1918; it seems to have convinced him at last to start finalizing and publishing his compositions. During his convalescence, he wrote out the complete "Concord" Sonata as well as his Essays Before a Sonata, which were basically Ives' program notes for his work.
Each of the Sonata's four movements are Ives' tribute to a particular New England transcendentalist--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and, in the third movement featured here, Amos and Louisa May Alcott. Ives, in his essay , describes the teacher Amos Alcott as "frequently whip[ping] himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God was pained when his children of the earth were bad" while his daughter Louisa May, the author of Little Women, "leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care to admit."
Ives, throughout the Sonata, samples the most well-known motif in classical music--the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth--encasing it, along with excerpts from hymns like "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," in what he called "the human faith melody." As Geoffrey Block wrote, Ives' use of Beethoven is both a tribute and a toppling ("Ives intended not only to praise Caesar but bury him in an avalanche of new sounds").
As with most of Ives' works, he composed the Second Sonata over decades (in this case, roughly 1904 to 1915, and he kept revising it after its publication) and it wasn't performed until years after its completion. The first documented performance on record was by Katherine Heyman, in Paris in 1928, on a radio broadcast from the Sorbonne. The version of the Sonata's third movement included here is performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Next: Normalcy
Monday, June 01, 2009
Everything Dies
Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City.
Fats Domino, Detroit City Blues.
Sonny Boy Williamson, Pontiac Blues.
Peppermint Harris, Cadillac Funeral.
General Motors Corp., the century-old automaker battered by the economic downturn, mounting debt and management problems, filed for bankruptcy Monday as part of an Obama administration plan to shrink the automaker to a sustainable size and give a majority ownership stake to the federal government.
It is the largest industrial bankruptcy in U.S. history and the fourth-largest overall and comes as smaller rival Chrysler won approval to sell most of its assets to Italy's Fiat, moving Chrysler closer to its goal of a quick exit from court protection.
The government will end up with a 60 percent ownership stake and an unprecedented role in reshaping the auto industry.
NPR, 1 June 2009.
He had a '38 Chevy. We piled into that and took off for parts unknown. "Where we going?" I asked. The buddy did the explaining...Rickey always had three or four dollars in his pocket and was happy-go-lucky about things. He always said, "that's right man, there you go--dah you go, dah you go!" And he went. He drove seventy miles an hour in the old heap, and we went to Madera beyond Fresno to see some farmers about manure.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road.
In America nobody pays attention to [the writer]. He has no part in our ideology and our politics...In my country, instead of asking the artist what makes children commit suicide, they go the chairman of General Motors and ask him.
William Faulkner, speaking in Nagano City, Japan, 1955.
You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), "The Wire," 2003.
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Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City.
Fats Domino, Detroit City Blues.
Sonny Boy Williamson, Pontiac Blues.
Peppermint Harris, Cadillac Funeral.
General Motors Corp., the century-old automaker battered by the economic downturn, mounting debt and management problems, filed for bankruptcy Monday as part of an Obama administration plan to shrink the automaker to a sustainable size and give a majority ownership stake to the federal government.
It is the largest industrial bankruptcy in U.S. history and the fourth-largest overall and comes as smaller rival Chrysler won approval to sell most of its assets to Italy's Fiat, moving Chrysler closer to its goal of a quick exit from court protection.
The government will end up with a 60 percent ownership stake and an unprecedented role in reshaping the auto industry.
NPR, 1 June 2009.
He had a '38 Chevy. We piled into that and took off for parts unknown. "Where we going?" I asked. The buddy did the explaining...Rickey always had three or four dollars in his pocket and was happy-go-lucky about things. He always said, "that's right man, there you go--dah you go, dah you go!" And he went. He drove seventy miles an hour in the old heap, and we went to Madera beyond Fresno to see some farmers about manure.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road.
In America nobody pays attention to [the writer]. He has no part in our ideology and our politics...In my country, instead of asking the artist what makes children commit suicide, they go the chairman of General Motors and ask him.
William Faulkner, speaking in Nagano City, Japan, 1955.
You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), "The Wire," 2003.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Broken Blossoms: 1919
IWW headquarters after Palmer raid, NYC, 15 November 1919.
Edward Elgar, Cello Concerto: 2nd Movement.
Al Bernard with the Kansas Jazz Boys, Bluin' the Blues.
Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, Kansas City Blues.
All Star Trio, Shimmee Town.
Louisiana Five, Clarinet Squawk.
Nora Bayes, Just Like a Gypsy.
Art Hickman's Orchestra, Rose Room.
Art Hickman's Orchestra, On the Streets of Cairo.
Premier Quartet, Dixie Is Dixie Once More.
Jim Europe's 369th Infantry Jazz Band, Memphis Blues.
Jim Europe's Four Harmony Kings, One More Ribber to Cross.
We ask you insistently to give us more frequent, definite information on the following. What measures have you taken to fight the bourgeois executioners; have councils of workers and servants been formed in the different sections of the city; have the workers been armed; have the bourgeoisie been disarmed; has use been made of the stocks of clothing and other items for immediate and extensive aid to the workers, and especially to the farm laborers and small peasants; have the capitalist factories and wealth in Munich and the capitalist farms in its environs been confiscated; have mortgage and rent payments by small peasants been canceled; have the wages of farm laborers and unskilled workers been doubled or trebled; have all paper stocks and all printing-presses been confiscated so as to enable popular leaflets and newspapers to be printed for the masses;...
Has the six-hour working day with two or three-hour instruction in state administration been introduced; have the bourgeoisie in Munich been made to give up surplus housing so that workers may be immediately moved into comfortable flats; have you taken over all the banks; have you taken hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; have you introduced higher rations for the workers than for the bourgeoisie; have all the workers been mobilized for defense and for ideological propaganda in the neighboring villages?
The most urgent and most extensive implementation of these and similar measures, coupled with the initiative of workers’, farm laborers’ and—-acting apart from them—-small peasants’ councils, should strengthen your position. An emergency tax must be levied on the bourgeoisie, and an actual improvement effected in the condition of the workers, farm laborers and small peasants at once and at all costs.
With sincere greetings and wishes of success.
Letter from Vladimir Lenin to the leaders of the Soviet Republic of Bavaria, 27 April 1919 (see interlude below).
Sir Edward Elgar, eminent Edwardian composer of the "Enigma Variations" and "Pomp and Circumstance Marches," was broken by the war. He had composed little since 1914, writing to a friend that "I cannot do any real work with the awful shadow over us." Finally in 1918, after having his tonsils removed (at age 61) and enduring severe pain for days on end, he sketched what would become the opening theme of a concerto for cello and orchestra. In the spring and summer of the following year, working in his Sussex cottage, using an old upright Steinway piano, Elgar finished the concerto. "A real large work, and I think good and alive," he wrote upon its completion. It was his last masterwork, a staggeringly beautiful piece of music.
Many critics have heard in the concerto a requiem, not just for the millions killed during the war but for the end of a way of life--the death of the pastoral, of the golden age of classical music, the Empire, the 19th Century, what you will. The first movement begins with a lament on the cello, followed by the opening theme. The second movement, included here, is considered lighter in tone, but there is darkness visible as well--in the cello's fleeting, darting melodic line, bowed and then plucked; in the nearly modernist severity of the arrangement. When the release comes, midway through the movement, it has the sense of someone desperately reviving a faded memory, convincing themselves they were once young or free.
Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, op. 85, premiered in London on 27 October 1919. The 1965 recording sampled here is the essential interpretation: the 20-year-old Jacqueline du Pré, playing the Davidov Stradivarius, with Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra. (Du Pré and Barbirolli's recording basically canonized the Elgar Concerto, which had been ignored and dismissed in the '30s and '40s, its reputation having never recovered from poor reviews of the debut concert). (And here are the third and fourth movements of the du Pré/Daniel Barenboim concert shown earlier.)
James Joyce in Zurich, 1919.
Al Bernard, along with Emmett Miller (who we'll be meeting fairly soon), was the last of the great blackface minstrel singers.
Bernard, born in New Orleans in 1888, came to New York City in a traveling minstrel show after the end of WWI and wound up staying there, spending the '20s in vaudeville, on the radio and making records (sometimes duets with Ernest Hare, in which Bernard sang like a woman). He was known as "The Boy From Dixie," and while his often-racist music discredited him with later generations, Bernard proved to be a link between minstrelsy, blues and Western swing.
El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge.
Bernard had a talent for singing jazz and blues and cut a number of records in those emerging styles, including three 1921 sides with the fading Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The excellent (if lyrically offensive, natch) "Bluin' the Blues," which Bernard recorded with an unknown studio group dubbed the "Kansas Jazz Boys," was written by the ODJB's pianist, Henry Ragas, who was a casualty of the Spanish Flu epidemic in early 1919.
Recorded ca. June 1919 and released as Gennett 4544, c/w "Everyone Wants a Key to My Cellar"; on Ragtime to Jazz.
Wilbur Sweatman's take on "Kansas City Blues" finds Sweatman once again crafting an advanced form of jazz that wouldn't reach the masses until at least the mid-'20s. Sweatman's clarinet work here seems designed to set the bar for his successors Sidney Bechet and Johnny Dodds.
Recorded 24 March 1919 and released as Columbia A2768; on Jazzin' Straight Thru Paradise.
Women protesting during the Egyptian Revolution, Cairo, 1919.
The All-Star Trio (saxophonist Wheeler Wadsworth, pianist Victor Arden and xylophonist George Hamilton Green) were a popular dance band in the late teens and early '20s; their odd instrumental line-up (a sort of first-draft version of the Modern Jazz Quartet) shows how the standard "jazz band" composition had yet to solidify.
The Trio's "Shimmee Town," a tune from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, was recorded in New York on 31 July 1919 and released as Edison 50590-L/Edison 3871; find here.
Before the band broke up: Kamenev, Lenin and Trotsky at the 8th Party Congress
The Louisiana Five (clarinetist Alcide "Yellow" Nuñez, pianist Joe Cawley, trombonist Charlie Panelli, banjoist Karl Berger and drummer Anton Lada) was a New Orleans-based group, the top rival to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Nuñez had played with the ODJB in 1916, although relations had soured by the time he formed the Five (in part because Nuñez tried to copyright "Livery Stable Blues" without informing the rest of the ODJB).
"Clarinet Squawk," one of the Five's better recordings, is aptly named, as Nuñez's high and shrill clarinet (serving as the lead melodic instrument, as there is no cornet) dominates the track. A son of the New Orleans parade bands, Nuñez is more an embellisher than an improviser, his spotlit performance here as much the product of technology (acoustic recording favored trebly instruments like the clarinet) as it is of design.
As "Squawk"'s original disc jacket copy reads: "It sure does squawk but musically so, if you like cyclonic jazz, played by a quintet which has steeped its musical interpretive qualities in a concentrated essence of contortive jungle music." (from Tim Gracyk.)
Recorded 12 September 1919 and released as Edison 50609-R; in this archive.
Soldier, policemen during the Chicago race riot, Douglas (South Side), July 1919.
I thought I was done with Nora Bayes in this survey, but as there seems to still be a demand for Ms. Bayes (according to the comments box), here's a fine 1919 disc, one of her biggest hits.
Recorded 11 September 1919 and released as Columbia A-6138, c/w "In Your Arms"; in this archive.
Interlude: scenes from the mayfly countries
The Bavarian Soviet Republic (April-May 1919)
The Hungarian Soviet Republic (March-August 1919)
The Slovak Soviet Republic (16 June-7 July 1919)
Beckmann, The Night.
One of the drummer and pianist Art Hickman's first gigs was heading a dance band that entertained the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals, a minor league baseball team that one day would have the young Joe DiMaggio on its roster, while the Seals were training in Sonoma, Calif. (A March 1913 San Francisco Bulletin article about the Seals and Hickman's band is the earliest-found print appearance of the word "jazz".)
Hickman, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1928, was blunt about where he had learned his trade: from black honky-tonks along the Barbary Coast that he had frequented as a delivery boy for Western Union. "There was music. Negroes playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music! There is where all jazz originated."
Hickman, however, wasn't playing hot, dirty jazz in the late '10s, but rather streamlined, smoothed-down "society" jazz, cooked for mass consumption. He and his band headlined at the Rose Room, in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel (which would provide the title to his most famous composition). In 1919, Columbia Records gave him a contract and sent a private Pullman car to take Hickman and his band cross-country. It was a far cry from the dive bars of the Barbary Coast.
Ernst, Aquis Submersus.
So the Art Hickman Orchestra were refiners and society jazzmen, but they could swing and improvise and often had unusual and intricate arrangements. For example, the Hickman Orchestra often had the lead melody carried by a pair of saxophonists, Clyde Doerr and Bert Ralton, at a time when the saxophone was mainly considered something of a circus novelty.
The band cut a string of records for Columbia in the fall of 1919, generally "exotic" pieces like "The Streets of Cairo" (which heats up a bit in the opening section when the drummer tries to start something) or prime dance-hall pop like "Rose Room," which features Doerr and Ralton smoothly improvising over a steady beat, as well as an impressive piano solo by Frank Ellis.
One can credibly claim that Hickman is the godfather of mainstream jazz--without him, there is no Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller. Hickman wouldn't consider it a compliment, as he seemed to consider jazz to be beneath him. "Jazz is merely noise, a product of the honky-tonks, and has no place in a refined atmosphere. I have tried to develop an orchestra that charges every pulse with energy without stooping to the skillet beating, sleigh bell ringing contraptions and physical gyrations of a padded cell," he told Talking Machine World in 1920.
In an Examiner interview from the same period, he said: "People [in New York] thought who had not heard my band. . .that I was a jazz band leader. They expected me to stand before them with a shrieking clarionet and perhaps a plug hat askew on my head shaking like a negro with the ague. New York has been surfeited with jazz. Jazz died on the Pacific Coast six months ago..." Ah yes, jazz was dead by 1920. (Much of this information is from Bruce Vermazen's piece, linked to at the start of the Hickman section.)
Hickman grew tired of touring and of New York, and in the early '20s returned to the West Coast, where he played (along with a Florida stint) until his death a decade later. He left his throne up for the taking, and an ambitious Denver bandleader named Paul Whiteman, who had run a dance band in a rival San Francisco hotel during Hickman's Rose Room tenure, prepared to move.
"Rose Room," recorded 19 September 1919, was released as Columbia A2858; "On the Streets of Cairo" was recorded the day before and released as Columbia A2811. Both are on The San Francisco Sound.
Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess in Griffith's Broken Blossoms
Two homecomings. Somewhere in the South, a returning regiment parades through the center of town, the paradegoers wearing their Sunday finery, the soldiers showing off the dances they picked up (among other things) in France. Everyone's elated, and most of all, order is restored, especially in the racial hierarchy. Dixie is Dixie once more, the singers affirm, a fervent wish backed by a quiet threat.
(Recorded by the studio group the Premier Quartet, also known as the American Quartet, including Billy Murray, ca. June 1919 in New York and released as OKeh 1226-B; find here.)
Pechstein, cover of An Alle Künstler.
Another homecoming up north: The 369th Infantry Regiment, an all-black regiment (known as the "Harlem Hellfighters") is just back from France. Led by James Reese Europe, the 369th's jazz band makes a tour of Eastern cities, causing a sensation whenever it rolls into town.
Europe, along with being a bandleader, had become an impresario, something of the black equivalent of Florenz Ziegfeld. Europe's shows were now stage revues, complete with spirituals, jazz, comedy bits, classical performances and sentimental weepies, performed by an array of acts. (One, the Four Harmony Kings, served as Europe's vocal quartet, and recorded for Pathé as "Lt. Jim Europe's Four Harmony Kings".)
Sen. Morris Sheppard meets a tall cowboy (Shorpy).
On May 9, 1919, Europe had two shows at Boston's Mechanic's Hall, with an encore performance for Gov. Calvin Coolidge on the State House steps set for the following day. Europe was fighting a bad cold but managed to get the matinee show over well enough. (Al Jolson was in the audience.) There was trouble, however, with his drummer, Herbert Wright. Wright, an ill-tempered, mentally-unstable dwarf, had a habit of disrupting shows by laughing and walking about on stage. During the evening performance, Europe noticed Wright acting up and, during an intermission, called Wright into his dressing room to admonish him.
Wright, feeling disrespected (especially after he was hustled out of the dressing room when the tenor Roland Hayes stopped in to pay his respects to Europe), snapped. He pulled out a pocket knife and charged back into the dressing room, saying he was going to kill Europe. Europe picked up a chair to keep Wright at bay, but then, for a reason his friends never understood, relaxed and put the chair down. Wright threw himself over the chair and stabbed Europe in the neck. Europe died in the hospital a few hours later; Wright later got ten years in prison.
So it was that the life of the most renowned and ambitious African-American bandleader of his generation ended in an absurd backstage murder. They buried Europe in Arlington Cemetery, with the rest of the heroes.
Europe's take on "Memphis Blues" (he finally recorded W.C. Handy's blues anthem, two months before Europe died) was cut on 7 March 1919 and released as both Pathé Frere 22085 and Perfect 14111-B. And the Four Harmony Kings' "One More Ribber to Cross," recorded the day before Europe was killed, served as his epitaph. It was released as Pathé 22187. Find on 369th Infantry Band and Earliest Negro Vocal Groups Vol. 2.
Farewells: A number of fine blogs have called it a day recently, including Five Bucks on By-Tor and Setting the Woods On Fire. Most of all, a very sad goodbye to my friend Amy's Shake Your Fist. And read just three things!
Next: Paradise Is Just a Curse
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IWW headquarters after Palmer raid, NYC, 15 November 1919.
Edward Elgar, Cello Concerto: 2nd Movement.
Al Bernard with the Kansas Jazz Boys, Bluin' the Blues.
Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, Kansas City Blues.
All Star Trio, Shimmee Town.
Louisiana Five, Clarinet Squawk.
Nora Bayes, Just Like a Gypsy.
Art Hickman's Orchestra, Rose Room.
Art Hickman's Orchestra, On the Streets of Cairo.
Premier Quartet, Dixie Is Dixie Once More.
Jim Europe's 369th Infantry Jazz Band, Memphis Blues.
Jim Europe's Four Harmony Kings, One More Ribber to Cross.
We ask you insistently to give us more frequent, definite information on the following. What measures have you taken to fight the bourgeois executioners; have councils of workers and servants been formed in the different sections of the city; have the workers been armed; have the bourgeoisie been disarmed; has use been made of the stocks of clothing and other items for immediate and extensive aid to the workers, and especially to the farm laborers and small peasants; have the capitalist factories and wealth in Munich and the capitalist farms in its environs been confiscated; have mortgage and rent payments by small peasants been canceled; have the wages of farm laborers and unskilled workers been doubled or trebled; have all paper stocks and all printing-presses been confiscated so as to enable popular leaflets and newspapers to be printed for the masses;...
Has the six-hour working day with two or three-hour instruction in state administration been introduced; have the bourgeoisie in Munich been made to give up surplus housing so that workers may be immediately moved into comfortable flats; have you taken over all the banks; have you taken hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; have you introduced higher rations for the workers than for the bourgeoisie; have all the workers been mobilized for defense and for ideological propaganda in the neighboring villages?
The most urgent and most extensive implementation of these and similar measures, coupled with the initiative of workers’, farm laborers’ and—-acting apart from them—-small peasants’ councils, should strengthen your position. An emergency tax must be levied on the bourgeoisie, and an actual improvement effected in the condition of the workers, farm laborers and small peasants at once and at all costs.
With sincere greetings and wishes of success.
Letter from Vladimir Lenin to the leaders of the Soviet Republic of Bavaria, 27 April 1919 (see interlude below).
Sir Edward Elgar, eminent Edwardian composer of the "Enigma Variations" and "Pomp and Circumstance Marches," was broken by the war. He had composed little since 1914, writing to a friend that "I cannot do any real work with the awful shadow over us." Finally in 1918, after having his tonsils removed (at age 61) and enduring severe pain for days on end, he sketched what would become the opening theme of a concerto for cello and orchestra. In the spring and summer of the following year, working in his Sussex cottage, using an old upright Steinway piano, Elgar finished the concerto. "A real large work, and I think good and alive," he wrote upon its completion. It was his last masterwork, a staggeringly beautiful piece of music.
Many critics have heard in the concerto a requiem, not just for the millions killed during the war but for the end of a way of life--the death of the pastoral, of the golden age of classical music, the Empire, the 19th Century, what you will. The first movement begins with a lament on the cello, followed by the opening theme. The second movement, included here, is considered lighter in tone, but there is darkness visible as well--in the cello's fleeting, darting melodic line, bowed and then plucked; in the nearly modernist severity of the arrangement. When the release comes, midway through the movement, it has the sense of someone desperately reviving a faded memory, convincing themselves they were once young or free.
Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, op. 85, premiered in London on 27 October 1919. The 1965 recording sampled here is the essential interpretation: the 20-year-old Jacqueline du Pré, playing the Davidov Stradivarius, with Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra. (Du Pré and Barbirolli's recording basically canonized the Elgar Concerto, which had been ignored and dismissed in the '30s and '40s, its reputation having never recovered from poor reviews of the debut concert). (And here are the third and fourth movements of the du Pré/Daniel Barenboim concert shown earlier.)
James Joyce in Zurich, 1919.
Al Bernard, along with Emmett Miller (who we'll be meeting fairly soon), was the last of the great blackface minstrel singers.
Bernard, born in New Orleans in 1888, came to New York City in a traveling minstrel show after the end of WWI and wound up staying there, spending the '20s in vaudeville, on the radio and making records (sometimes duets with Ernest Hare, in which Bernard sang like a woman). He was known as "The Boy From Dixie," and while his often-racist music discredited him with later generations, Bernard proved to be a link between minstrelsy, blues and Western swing.
El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge.
Bernard had a talent for singing jazz and blues and cut a number of records in those emerging styles, including three 1921 sides with the fading Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The excellent (if lyrically offensive, natch) "Bluin' the Blues," which Bernard recorded with an unknown studio group dubbed the "Kansas Jazz Boys," was written by the ODJB's pianist, Henry Ragas, who was a casualty of the Spanish Flu epidemic in early 1919.
Recorded ca. June 1919 and released as Gennett 4544, c/w "Everyone Wants a Key to My Cellar"; on Ragtime to Jazz.
Wilbur Sweatman's take on "Kansas City Blues" finds Sweatman once again crafting an advanced form of jazz that wouldn't reach the masses until at least the mid-'20s. Sweatman's clarinet work here seems designed to set the bar for his successors Sidney Bechet and Johnny Dodds.
Recorded 24 March 1919 and released as Columbia A2768; on Jazzin' Straight Thru Paradise.
Women protesting during the Egyptian Revolution, Cairo, 1919.
The All-Star Trio (saxophonist Wheeler Wadsworth, pianist Victor Arden and xylophonist George Hamilton Green) were a popular dance band in the late teens and early '20s; their odd instrumental line-up (a sort of first-draft version of the Modern Jazz Quartet) shows how the standard "jazz band" composition had yet to solidify.
The Trio's "Shimmee Town," a tune from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, was recorded in New York on 31 July 1919 and released as Edison 50590-L/Edison 3871; find here.
Before the band broke up: Kamenev, Lenin and Trotsky at the 8th Party Congress
The Louisiana Five (clarinetist Alcide "Yellow" Nuñez, pianist Joe Cawley, trombonist Charlie Panelli, banjoist Karl Berger and drummer Anton Lada) was a New Orleans-based group, the top rival to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Nuñez had played with the ODJB in 1916, although relations had soured by the time he formed the Five (in part because Nuñez tried to copyright "Livery Stable Blues" without informing the rest of the ODJB).
"Clarinet Squawk," one of the Five's better recordings, is aptly named, as Nuñez's high and shrill clarinet (serving as the lead melodic instrument, as there is no cornet) dominates the track. A son of the New Orleans parade bands, Nuñez is more an embellisher than an improviser, his spotlit performance here as much the product of technology (acoustic recording favored trebly instruments like the clarinet) as it is of design.
As "Squawk"'s original disc jacket copy reads: "It sure does squawk but musically so, if you like cyclonic jazz, played by a quintet which has steeped its musical interpretive qualities in a concentrated essence of contortive jungle music." (from Tim Gracyk.)
Recorded 12 September 1919 and released as Edison 50609-R; in this archive.
Soldier, policemen during the Chicago race riot, Douglas (South Side), July 1919.
I thought I was done with Nora Bayes in this survey, but as there seems to still be a demand for Ms. Bayes (according to the comments box), here's a fine 1919 disc, one of her biggest hits.
Recorded 11 September 1919 and released as Columbia A-6138, c/w "In Your Arms"; in this archive.
Interlude: scenes from the mayfly countries
The Bavarian Soviet Republic (April-May 1919)
The Hungarian Soviet Republic (March-August 1919)
The Slovak Soviet Republic (16 June-7 July 1919)
Beckmann, The Night.
One of the drummer and pianist Art Hickman's first gigs was heading a dance band that entertained the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals, a minor league baseball team that one day would have the young Joe DiMaggio on its roster, while the Seals were training in Sonoma, Calif. (A March 1913 San Francisco Bulletin article about the Seals and Hickman's band is the earliest-found print appearance of the word "jazz".)
Hickman, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1928, was blunt about where he had learned his trade: from black honky-tonks along the Barbary Coast that he had frequented as a delivery boy for Western Union. "There was music. Negroes playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music! There is where all jazz originated."
Hickman, however, wasn't playing hot, dirty jazz in the late '10s, but rather streamlined, smoothed-down "society" jazz, cooked for mass consumption. He and his band headlined at the Rose Room, in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel (which would provide the title to his most famous composition). In 1919, Columbia Records gave him a contract and sent a private Pullman car to take Hickman and his band cross-country. It was a far cry from the dive bars of the Barbary Coast.
Ernst, Aquis Submersus.
So the Art Hickman Orchestra were refiners and society jazzmen, but they could swing and improvise and often had unusual and intricate arrangements. For example, the Hickman Orchestra often had the lead melody carried by a pair of saxophonists, Clyde Doerr and Bert Ralton, at a time when the saxophone was mainly considered something of a circus novelty.
The band cut a string of records for Columbia in the fall of 1919, generally "exotic" pieces like "The Streets of Cairo" (which heats up a bit in the opening section when the drummer tries to start something) or prime dance-hall pop like "Rose Room," which features Doerr and Ralton smoothly improvising over a steady beat, as well as an impressive piano solo by Frank Ellis.
One can credibly claim that Hickman is the godfather of mainstream jazz--without him, there is no Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller. Hickman wouldn't consider it a compliment, as he seemed to consider jazz to be beneath him. "Jazz is merely noise, a product of the honky-tonks, and has no place in a refined atmosphere. I have tried to develop an orchestra that charges every pulse with energy without stooping to the skillet beating, sleigh bell ringing contraptions and physical gyrations of a padded cell," he told Talking Machine World in 1920.
In an Examiner interview from the same period, he said: "People [in New York] thought who had not heard my band. . .that I was a jazz band leader. They expected me to stand before them with a shrieking clarionet and perhaps a plug hat askew on my head shaking like a negro with the ague. New York has been surfeited with jazz. Jazz died on the Pacific Coast six months ago..." Ah yes, jazz was dead by 1920. (Much of this information is from Bruce Vermazen's piece, linked to at the start of the Hickman section.)
Hickman grew tired of touring and of New York, and in the early '20s returned to the West Coast, where he played (along with a Florida stint) until his death a decade later. He left his throne up for the taking, and an ambitious Denver bandleader named Paul Whiteman, who had run a dance band in a rival San Francisco hotel during Hickman's Rose Room tenure, prepared to move.
"Rose Room," recorded 19 September 1919, was released as Columbia A2858; "On the Streets of Cairo" was recorded the day before and released as Columbia A2811. Both are on The San Francisco Sound.
Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess in Griffith's Broken Blossoms
Two homecomings. Somewhere in the South, a returning regiment parades through the center of town, the paradegoers wearing their Sunday finery, the soldiers showing off the dances they picked up (among other things) in France. Everyone's elated, and most of all, order is restored, especially in the racial hierarchy. Dixie is Dixie once more, the singers affirm, a fervent wish backed by a quiet threat.
(Recorded by the studio group the Premier Quartet, also known as the American Quartet, including Billy Murray, ca. June 1919 in New York and released as OKeh 1226-B; find here.)
Pechstein, cover of An Alle Künstler.
Another homecoming up north: The 369th Infantry Regiment, an all-black regiment (known as the "Harlem Hellfighters") is just back from France. Led by James Reese Europe, the 369th's jazz band makes a tour of Eastern cities, causing a sensation whenever it rolls into town.
Europe, along with being a bandleader, had become an impresario, something of the black equivalent of Florenz Ziegfeld. Europe's shows were now stage revues, complete with spirituals, jazz, comedy bits, classical performances and sentimental weepies, performed by an array of acts. (One, the Four Harmony Kings, served as Europe's vocal quartet, and recorded for Pathé as "Lt. Jim Europe's Four Harmony Kings".)
Sen. Morris Sheppard meets a tall cowboy (Shorpy).
On May 9, 1919, Europe had two shows at Boston's Mechanic's Hall, with an encore performance for Gov. Calvin Coolidge on the State House steps set for the following day. Europe was fighting a bad cold but managed to get the matinee show over well enough. (Al Jolson was in the audience.) There was trouble, however, with his drummer, Herbert Wright. Wright, an ill-tempered, mentally-unstable dwarf, had a habit of disrupting shows by laughing and walking about on stage. During the evening performance, Europe noticed Wright acting up and, during an intermission, called Wright into his dressing room to admonish him.
Wright, feeling disrespected (especially after he was hustled out of the dressing room when the tenor Roland Hayes stopped in to pay his respects to Europe), snapped. He pulled out a pocket knife and charged back into the dressing room, saying he was going to kill Europe. Europe picked up a chair to keep Wright at bay, but then, for a reason his friends never understood, relaxed and put the chair down. Wright threw himself over the chair and stabbed Europe in the neck. Europe died in the hospital a few hours later; Wright later got ten years in prison.
So it was that the life of the most renowned and ambitious African-American bandleader of his generation ended in an absurd backstage murder. They buried Europe in Arlington Cemetery, with the rest of the heroes.
Europe's take on "Memphis Blues" (he finally recorded W.C. Handy's blues anthem, two months before Europe died) was cut on 7 March 1919 and released as both Pathé Frere 22085 and Perfect 14111-B. And the Four Harmony Kings' "One More Ribber to Cross," recorded the day before Europe was killed, served as his epitaph. It was released as Pathé 22187. Find on 369th Infantry Band and Earliest Negro Vocal Groups Vol. 2.
Farewells: A number of fine blogs have called it a day recently, including Five Bucks on By-Tor and Setting the Woods On Fire. Most of all, a very sad goodbye to my friend Amy's Shake Your Fist. And read just three things!
Next: Paradise Is Just a Curse
