The History of Jazz (18 page)

Teagarden displayed a sensitivity to the blues that few white players of his generation could match. On his 1929 recording with Louis Armstrong, “Knockin’ a Jug,” Teagarden initiates the proceedings with two heartfelt blues choruses that transcend the trombone—indeed, his solo lines here are more akin to the vocal work of a Bessie Smith than to either the urbane stylings of Mole or the tailgate tradition of Ory. The rhythm section (guitarist Eddie Lang, pianist Joe Sullivan, drummer Kaiser Marshall) offer admirable assistance, establishing an exemplary slow tempo that is as relaxed and uncluttered as any recorded performance from this period. In various other recordings from the early 1930s—“Basin Street Blues,” “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” “Stars Fell on Alabama”—Teagarden showed that his approach to singing was very much akin to his trombone stylings. Although he was capable of virtuosic displays, Teagarden was most at home delivering carefree, behind-the-beat phrases. When he was singing, the lazy, after-hours quality to his delivery—incorporating elements of song, patter, and idle conversation—proved endearing to audiences, especially in the context of a jazz world that was only just discovering the potential of understatement. Teagarden was equally deft in simplifying the written melody as in ornamenting it. In this regard, his work reflected an ongoing evolution in American popular singing. Jack Teagarden, Bing Crosby, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong—each was distilling, in a somewhat different way, a new, more personalized style of vocalizing. This was music taken out of the concert hall, made more intimate, and adapted to the demands of the new mass-market technologies (microphones, recordings, broadcasts), as well as to the modern sensibility and tastes that these inventions helped to form. Music could now be consumed on an individual basis, one listener at a time, often in the privacy of the home, enabling Teagarden and these other innovators—who offered a down-to-earth, direct, and nontheatrical delivery, wholly purged of the grand style—to rise to fame by responding to the needs of this changed environment.

Red Norvo, who arrived on the New York scene toward the close of this period, presents an especially acute challenge to jazz historians. His various musical associations flew in the face of stylistic categories and conventions—perhaps ultimately to the detriment of his career. How else can we explain why this illustrious jazz veteran remained all but forgotten in the years leading up to his death in 1999, while other survivors of his generation were receiving honorary degrees and various accolades, and were venerated as important elder statesmen of jazz? Certainly one would struggle to find another jazz musician who had made his presence felt in so many different ways as Norvo. During his early New York years he worked with Paul Whiteman and did much to legitimize the role of the xylophone in jazz. His recordings of “In a Mist” and “Dance of the Octopus” from 1933 are shimmering, ethereal performances that reveal his acute comprehension of the harmonic implications of Beiderbecke’s legacy. “Blues in E Flat” from 1934 finds Norvo playing at top form in a stellar integrated band under his leadership that also included Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Bunny Berigan, and Chu Berry. Equally praiseworthy are Norvo’s recordings from the late 1930s of the sophisticated, albeit unconventional, arrangements of Eddie Sauter, with their foreshadowing of cool jazz techniques.

A number of sides from this period feature Norvo in the company of his wife, vocalist Mildred Bailey, whose lithe phrasing and expressive delivery put her at the forefront of the white female jazz singers of her day. Their collaborations capture a range of emotional stances, from delicate reserve to brash assertiveness, but in general tend toward an exuberance that might serve as a virtual mirror image of the moody introspection found in the Billie Holiday/Lester Young efforts of this same period. Even an ostensibly melancholy song such as Bailey’s trademark “Rockin’ Chair” conveys a soft fineness of feeling that is more endearing than somber. Bailey’s career was all too short. She and Norvo got a divorce in 1945, and soon after the singer cut back her performances due to diabetes and other ailments, aggravated by her excessive weight. Bailey increasingly passed her time on a farm she owned in upstate New York, far away from the entertainment world, before her death from a heart attack in 1951 at the age of forty-four.

In the 1940s, Norvo played both sides of the swing-or-bop controversy, serving as a member of Benny Goodman’s sextet, but also hiring Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for a leader date that produced some of the most influential early bop sides. In the late 1940s, Norvo continued to expand his horizons, working with Woody Herman and Billie Holiday, and in the 1950s blazed ahead with a blistering trio that found him playing vibraphone alongside guitarist Tal Farlow and bassist Charles Mingus. At the close of the decade he joined Frank Sinatra on a tour of Australia, supporting the megastar in the context of a quintet that seemed to elicit some of the singer’s jazziest work of the era. In later years, Norvo tended to return to swing settings in the company of Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, and other masters of the genre. Jazz history books have poorly served this master of many idioms; their rigid categorizations apparently incapable of dealing with his chameleon career. Yet Norvo’s skill in navigating across artificial stylistic and racial barriers merits both praise and emulation.

For a time in the 1920s, saxophonist Frank Trumbauer enjoyed an influence and reputation that even surpassed that of his frequent collaborator Bix Beiderbecke. Beiderbecke eventually came to take center stage in accounts of this body of music, yet this posthumous transformation should not blind us to Trumbauer’s compelling achievements. Two years older than the cornetist, Tram (as he came to be known) was born in Carbondale, Illinois, on May 30, 1901. Musical studies began early for him—like Beiderbecke, he showed signs of being a child prodigy—but his career as a professional saxophonist started late, not taking off in earnest until he completed a stint in the military. After joining forces in 1925, the two musicians became a package deal for bandleaders. They entered the Goldkette band at virtually the same time—Trumbauer later claimed that Beiderbecke’s employment was a condition he set for taking the gig—and moved to the Whiteman band in tandem, starting at the same Indianapolis performance. The duo also worked together in a St. Louis-based band, as well as served an overlapping and all-too-brief stint in an exceptional all-star group that also featured Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, and Adrian Rollini.

But this close companionship belied deep differences. The contrast began with their physical appearance: photos show a Laurel-and-Hardy composite, the lanky Trumbauer, partly of American Indian descent, standing tall with bemused expression next to the cherubic Beiderbecke, with his clean-faced Teutonic bearing. In social settings, the difference was even more pronounced: Trumbauer, taciturn almost to an extreme, was mostly a silent partner to Bix, who enjoyed his status as an articulate commentator on both highbrow and lowbrow culture of the 1920s—with words to spare on everything from Proust (“no good in translation,” was his alleged verdict) to P. G. Wodehouse (“he could quote long passages,” recalls an associate), with early twentieth-century classical music standing out as an almost obsessive interest. Even in their chosen profession, the two went different ways: Beiderbecke, the unschooled player, was devoted to music, and one can hardly imagine him pursuing any other livelihood; while Trumbauer, although the more formally trained of the two—his proficiency extended to the piano, trombone, cornet, violin, bassoon, and flute, with the saxophone being something of an afterthought—betrayed an ambivalent commitment to the jazz life; he later served as a test pilot in World War II and eventually abandoned music for aeronautics. But perhaps most decisive were their differences not in vocation but in avocation: outside music, Beiderbecke’s fatal passion was for alcohol, the forbidden fermented fruit of Prohibition, while Trumbauer drank little, and after a gig promptly returned home to his wife and child—with the result that he outlived his younger collaborator by a full quarter-century.

In their music, though, both players shared an aesthetic—one that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can call cool jazz, but which at the time was uncharted territory. The lyrical strain in jazz, the focus on attaining a clarity of musical expression, the achievement of an Arcadian purity of sound—these milestones in the evolution of jazz can trace their heritage, at least in part, back to such compelling BeiderbeckeTrumbauer collaborations as “Singin’ the Blues” and “I’m Comin’ Virginia.” Beiderbecke cared little for the taxonomy of tone alteration—the various mutes, vibrato effects, and note-bending acrobatics that were tricks of the trade for most earlier jazz cornetists; Trumbauer, for his part, refined a clean, light tone that was worlds apart from the earthier reed work of Bechet and Hawkins.

Beiderbecke’s life story reads like a novel (and later inspired one: Dorothy Baker’s 1938
Young Man with a Horn
, which built on old clichés and created a few new ones) and continues to fascinate with its gripping combination of tragic and romantic elements. Not so Trumbauer’s biography. Movie scripts are not written about teetotaling jazz musicians who quit the band to take a day job. Yet, at the time, Tram’s virtuosic and expressive saxophone work certainly cast a spell over other musicians. “As to sax players, it was Frankie Trumbauer,” writes clarinetist Joe Darensbourg in his memoirs. “When those Bix records came out, that was the greatest thing to hit the music scene. Trumbauer’s solo on ‘Singin’ the Blues’ was one of the few tunes I ever copied off anybody.”
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Referring to a different recording, “I’ll Never Miss the Sunshine,” Michael Brooks recalls that Trumbauer’s solo was “as much a yardstick to young reedmen as the Charlie Parker Dials, twenty-five years later.” “At that time,” Budd Johnson would later tell interviewer Michael Zwerin, “Frankie Trumbauer was the baddest cat around.”
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But the ultimate tribute to Trumbauer came from Lester Young, who adopted Tram’s silky phrasing as the foundation for his own moving— and vastly influential—style of saxophone playing. “Trumbauer was my idol,” Young explained to Nat Hentoff in a 1956 interview. “When I had just started to play, I used to buy all his records. I imagine I can still play all those solos off the record. He played the C melody saxophone. I tried to get the sound of the C melody on the tenor. That’s why I don’t sound like other people. Trumbauer always told a little story.”
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In essence, these “little stories” offered an alternative to the harmonically oriented, arpeggio-based style characteristic of so many earlier jazz reed players. Trumbauer’s horn lines were less vertical, less built on spelling chords and inserting predictable patterns; they moved more ethereally, fashioned from an assortment of melodic phrases—some syncopated, others anticipating the velvety, less articulated style of Young—dosed with a leavening of unexpected, almost exotic (given the era) intervals. “I’ll Never Miss the Sunshine,” recorded only ten weeks after Louis Armstrong and King Oliver’s debut session, could be considered the first milestone of cool jazz, and Trumbauer’s “San” from nine months later is an impressive display of this artist’s ingeniuity and versatility in constructing sax lines. On occasion, Tram’s solos (for example, on “Trumbology” from 1927) rely too much on novelty effects reminiscent of vaudeville entertainers such as Rudy Wiedoeft. But his technical mastery of the horn was never in doubt, and his finest efforts rank among the most important jazz recordings of the era.

Beiderbecke and Trumbauer reached their peak on heartfelt performances such as “Singin’ the Blues” and “I’m Comin’ Virginia,” both recorded in 1927, which went a long way toward establishing the ballad tradition in jazz. True, earlier hot musicians had often played slow blues, but the ambiance of such performances was much different from the purer, more fragile melodicism of these inspired BeiderbeckeTrumbauer collaborations. It was almost as if, before these sides, the hot and the sweet were thought to be mutually exclusive, not to be joined, except in some fanciful chimera not found in reality. But far from being opposites, these two currents, the lyric and the intense, blend seamlessly on these late vintages of the Jazz Age. Especially on “I’m Comin’ Virginia,” the 2/4 bounce so prevalent on most earlier jazz recordings gives way to a smooth 4/4 ballad tempo, helped along admirably by Eddie Lang’s subtle guitar textures. Yet the achievements of the rhythm section are overshadowed by the pungent solos by Beiderbecke and Trumbauer, with their artful balance of emotion and logic. Above all, the essence of Beiderbecke’s conception of jazz stands out in relief on these performances; the substitution chords implicit in his solos—superimposed diminished chords, augmented chords, dominant ninth chords—are incorporated with such ease that it is easy to overlook the hard harmonic edge to Bix’s melodicism. Instead, the technical aspects are submerged in the free play of his musical creativity.

During this same period, both Beiderbecke and Trumbauer worked with a number of other bandleaders, notably Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. Later commentators have sometimes lamented these associations, asserting that the commercial music played by such ensembles compromised the jazz skills of the two soloists. Goldkette, certainly, was anything but a jazz player. Born in France, he studied piano in Greece and Russia before emigrating to the United States. In his new setting, Goldkette embraced the American dream with a vengeance, showing talents as a businessman and booking agent that increasingly eclipsed his reputation as a concert pianist. Yet if Goldkette was a better impresario than player, his bands were all the stronger for these nonmusical skills. In addition to Bix and Tram, the Goldkette group also featured, at one time or another, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, the Dorsey Brothers, Red Nichols, Miff Mole, Don Murray, Steve Brown, and arranger Bill Challis—an impressive lineup by any standard. Goldkette’s modest ambitions—primarily aimed, it seems, at producing inoffensive commercial music—were what limited his achievements, not any lack of firepower on the bandstand. The Goldkette orchestra was clearly capable of playing at a much higher level than its recordings indicate. How else can we explain Rex Stewart’s account of a 1926 battle of the bands between Fletcher Henderson’s group (in which Stewart served as cornetist) with Goldkette’s orchestra? “This proved to be a most humiliating experience for us, since, after all, we were supposed to be the world’s greatest dance orchestra,” Stewart later wrote. “The facts were that we simply could not compete with Jean Goldkette’s Victor Recording Orchestra. Their arrangements were too imaginative, their rhythm too strong.” “Fletcher was the King up there, had Hawk and all them guys and Goldkette’s band washed them away,” adds Sonny Greer. “Man, that was the sensation of New York. … Goldkette’s band was something else.”
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The surviving recordings contain only hints—in an occasional choice solo or well-arranged ensemble part—of what Stewart describes as “the first original white swing band in history.”