The Penguin Jazz Guide (12 page)

Piano, arranger

Lovie Austin 1924–1926

Classics 756

Austin; Shirley Clay, Natty Dominique, Tommy Ladnier, Bob Shoffner (c); Jimmy Cobb (c, tb); Kid Ory (tb); Johnny Dodds, Jimmy O’Bryant (cl); Eustern Woodfork (bj); W. E. Burton (d); Ford & Ford, Edmonia Henderson, Priscilla Stewart, Henry ‘Rubberlegs’ Williams (v). September 1924–August 1926.

Mary Lou Williams said (1975):
‘She was a great example of a woman making it in a tough world. I looked her up one time in Chicago and just seeing her helped me, seeing how she handled herself.’

Austin was an extraordinary figure whose status as one of the first women to make a contribution to jazz remains undervalued. She had a formal classical training, which stood her in good stead for the job of house pianist at Paramount in the early ’20s. She started out in vaudeville but formed her own recording band in 1924, called the Blues Serenaders. All of their surviving work was once available on a fine Fountain LP, but this Classics CD has the bonus of sides made with vaudeville figures like Ford & Ford (‘Skeeg-a-Lee Blues’) and other vocalists of the period.

Though it will sound primitive to modern ears, Austin’s music was a sophisticated variation on the barrelhouse style of the period. Many of the ‘originals’ betray their origins in earlier vernacular tunes – ‘Peepin’ Blues’ is strangely familiar – but there was nothing generic or formulaic about Austin’s approach, and it comfortably brought in elements of ragtime (‘Frog Tongue Stomp’) or island rhythms (‘Rampart Street Blues’). The other great virtue of the collection is the presence of some of the great names of early jazz. Two of the earliest sides are by the trio of Austin, Tommy Ladnier and the short-lived Jimmy O’Bryant, performing a densely plaited counterpoint that seems amazingly advanced for its time. The quartet and quintet sides are harsher, with Burton’s clumping beat on what sounds like a military side-drum little more than a distraction, but the simple metres and stop-time passages have a rough poetry about them that is good enough for the music to transcend the typically poor Paramount recording. Austin was not an improviser herself but her piano parts are a driving and integral part of music that consistently betrays her skills as an arranger and composer. Her songs were covered by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter, with whom she recorded late in life and to whom she voluntarily gave co-credit, a gesture Hunter never forgot.

Along with Lil Hardin Armstrong and Mary Lou Williams (who acknowledged her as an important influence), Austin was a key figure of her time and an unmissable presence. She sat cross-legged at the piano, with a cigarette perpetually burning between her lips. Her Stutz Bearcat sedan was fitted with
faux
-leopardskin upholstery. At the end of the decade she settled in Chicago and scarcely recorded again until 1961, when she was persuaded to accompany Hunter with a latter-day Blues Serenaders: a moment of living jazz history.

RED NICHOLS

Born Ernest Loring Nichols, 8 May 1905, Ogden, Utah; died 28 June 1965, Las Vegas, Nevada

Cornet, trumpet

The Red Heads Complete 1925–1927

Classics 1267

Nichols; Brad Gowans, Wingy Manone, Leo McConville (t); Miff Mole (tb); Bobby Davis, Fred Morrow, Jimmy Dorsey (cl, as); Arthur Schutt, Bill Haid (p); Eddie Lang, Dick McDonough (g); Vic Berton (d). November 1925–September 1927.

Cornetist Alex Welsh said (1982):
‘Apparently, he always gave his father credit for instilling the discipline to stick at everything on his own terms. He gets a funny press, but Red was a major star and his playing is phenomenal, so bright and alert. I think it’s a model career, in some ways.’

Nichols’s posterity labours under the burden of Danny Kaye’s big screen portrayal of the trumpeter as a loveable eccentric and relaxed, overindulgent parent. The hokum of ‘The Music Goes Round And Around’ didn’t do him any favours, either. Red’s own training was in his father’s brass band, and it seemed to stand him in good stead through his life. Unlike the sentimental portrait of the film, Nichols was a tough-skinned professional who insisted on a minimum of musical integrity and moved on briskly, as he did from the Casa Loma Orchestra, when his own musical needs were not observed. His precise, lightly dancing work on either cornet or trumpet might seem to glance off the best of Beiderbecke’s playing, and the scrupulous ensembles and pallid timbre of The Five Pennies or whatever he chose to call a group on its day in the studios now seem less appealing. But it is unique jazz and, in its truce between cool expression and hot dance music, surprisingly enjoyable when taken a few tracks at a time.

Nichols went out under a whole range of names – The (Six) Hottentots, The Original Memphis Five, The Arkansas Travelers, The Five Pennies most famously – and recorded prolifically. Of the compilations, there is a good survey on Retrieval of the work with Miff Mole but, even if it is a more specialist choice, this Red Heads disc is probably the best track for track. It collects all of Nichols’s sessions under this name for Pathé, and on titles such as ‘Get A Load Of This’, ‘Plenty Off Center’ and ‘Trumpet Sobs’ the line-up is down to three or four players – chamber-jazz of an unusually sparse sort, giving the young leader clear space to lead and improvise in. Pathé’s thin recording wasn’t helpful, but the music – lean, dancing and strikingly different from what was going on under either Armstrong or Beiderbecke in a similar period – exerts its own pale fascination. It’s also as well to remember that, when he made the earliest sides here, Nichols hadn’t even turned 21.

WILLIE ‘THE LION’ SMITH

Born William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Betholoff Smith, 25 November 1897, Goshen, New York; died 18 April 1973, New York City

Piano

Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith 1925–1937

Classics 662

Smith; Dave Nelson, Frankie Newton (t); June Clark, Jabbo Smith, Ed Allen (c); Jimmy Harrison (tb); Buster Bailey (cl, ss, as); Cecil Scott, Herschel Brassfield (cl); Prince Robinson, Robert Carroll (ts); Edgar Sampson (as, vn); Pete Brown (as); Buddy Christian, Gus Horsley (bj); Jimmy McLin (g); Bill Benford, Harry Hull (tba); Ellsworth Reynolds, John Kirby (b); O’Neil Spencer (d, v); Eric Henry (d); Willie Williams (wbd); Perry Bradford (v). November 1925–September 1937.

Humphrey Lyttelton said (1993):
‘He came on
Jazz 625
[television programme] in around 1966. Here was this man who had been present at the beginnings of stride piano, working in New York before the First World War, sat at the piano with his “doiby” on his head and a cigar jutting up from his jaw, cheerfully belligerent, full of stories.’

A founder-member of the New York stride pianists, Smith served in the First World War, then haunted the toughest New York clubs. He led occasional bands, toured, and became a self-appointed living historian and raconteur in his old age. He wrote ‘Echoes Of Spring’. An unrivalled raconteur, Willie Smith came into his own when an old man, reminiscing from the keyboard, but these more youthful sessions stand up very well and are surprisingly little-known.

The disc opens with two of his few appearances on record in the ’20s; each of the pair of sessions is by a pick-up group, both with Jimmy Harrison and one with Jabbo Smith in the front line. Typical small-group Harlem jazz of the period, with Perry Bradford shouting the odds on two titles. The remainder is devoted to sessions by Smith’s Cubs, an excellent outfit: with Ed Allen, Cecil Scott and Willie Williams on washboard on the first eight titles, they can’t help but sound like a Clarence Williams group, but the next three sessions include Dave Nelson (sounding better than he ever did on the King Oliver Victor records), Buster Bailey, Pete Brown and Frankie Newton, effecting a bridge between older hot music and the sharper small-band swing of the late ’30s. Smith plays a lot of dextrous piano – he also has a 1934 solo, ‘Finger Buster’, a typical parlour show-off piece of the day – and the music has a wonderful lilt and sprightliness.

FLETCHER HENDERSON

Born 18 December 1897, Cuthbert, Georgia; died 29 December 1952, New York City

Arranger, bandleader

The Harmony & Vocalion Sessions: Volumes 1 & 2

Timeless CBC 1-064 / 1-069

Henderson; Bobby Stark, Louis Armstrong, Elmer Chambers, Howard Scott, Joe Smith, Tommy Ladnier, Russell Smith, Rex Stewart, Cootie Williams (t, c); Jimmy Harrison (tb, v); Charlie Green, Claude Jones, Benny Morton (tb); Jerome Pasquall, Buster Bailey, Benny Carter, Harvey Boone (cl, as); Don Redman (cl, as, gfs); Coleman Hawkins (cl, Cmel, ts, bsx); Fats Waller (p, org); Charlie Dixon, Clarence Holiday (bj, g); Ralph Escuderp, John Kirby, June Cole (bb, b); Kaiser Marshall, Walter Thompson (d); Lois Deppe, Billy Jones, Andy Razaf, Evelyn Thompson (v). 1925–September 1928.

Sun Ra said (1986):
‘I pursue the sound of Fletcher Henderson. Not just his arrangements of notes on paper – anyone can do that – but the sound of that orchestra, which transcends anything that can be written down. He was a millionaire and beyond everyday concerns; that voice is the voice of a man who is able to consider another realm.’

Henderson arrived in New York in 1920, seeking scientific work but ending up as an A&R man in the fledgling black record industry. He accompanied blues singers and began leading an orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom, recruiting Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. A car crash in 1928 dissipated his energy, but he continued to write and arrange and run occasional bands. His influence was immense, not just for his writing, which only now is being properly appreciated again (partly through the stewardship and advocacy of Sun Ra during his earthly life), but as a fosterer of talent. Henderson drifted into bandleading after casually working for the Black Swan record label, and his first records as a leader are
routine dance music. The arrival of Louis Armstrong – whom Henderson first heard in New Orleans at the turn of the decade – galvanized the band and, eventually, every musician in New York, but he already had Don Redman and Coleman Hawkins working for him prior to Armstrong’s arrival, and there are many good records before Louis’s first session of October 1924.

By the mid-’20s Henderson was leading the most consistently interesting big band around. That doesn’t mean all the records are of equal calibre; the title of a famous retrospective – ‘A Study In Frustration’ – gives some idea of the inconsistencies and problems of a band that apparently never sounded as good on record as in person. Even so, Redman was coming into his own, and his scores assumed a quality which no other orchestral arranger was matching in 1926–7. ‘The Stampede’, ‘The Chant’, ‘Henderson Stomp’, the remarkable ‘Tozo’ and, above all, the truly astonishing ‘Whiteman Stomp’ find him using the colours of reeds and brass to complex yet swinging ends. Luckily Henderson had the players who could make the scores happen. Though Armstrong had departed, Hawkins, Ladnier, Joe Smith, Jimmy Harrison and Buster Bailey all had the stature of major soloists as well as good section-players. The brass sections were the best any band in New York could boast – the softer focus of Smith contrasting with the bluesy attack of Ladnier, the rasp of Rex Stewart, the lithe lines of Harrison – and the group had Hawkins (loyal enough to stay for ten years), the man who created jazz saxophone. Henderson’s own playing was capable rather than outstanding, and the rhythm section lumbered a bit, though string bass and guitar lightened up the feel from 1928 onwards. It took Henderson time to attain consistency; in 1925 he was still making sides like ‘Pensacola’ (for Columbia), which starts with a duet between Hawkins and Redman on bass sax and goofus! But there weren’t many vocals, and this let the band drive through their three-minute allocation without interruption. If Henderson never figured out the best use of that time-span (unlike Ellington, his most serious rival among New York’s black bands), his players made sure that something interesting happened on almost every record.

Some tracks made under the name The Dixie Stompers were made for Harmony, which continued to use acoustic recording even after most other companies had switched over to the electric process in 1925, and some may find these a little archaic in timbre.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG
^&

Born 4 August 1901, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 6 July 1971, New York City

Trumpet, cornet

Complete Hot Five And Hot Seven Recordings: Volumes 1–3

Columbia CK 86999 / 87010 / 87011

Armstrong; Bill Wilson (c); Homer Hobson (t); Kid Ory, Honoré Dutrey, John Thomas, Fred Robinson, Jack Teagarden (tb); Johnny Dodds, Don Redman (cl, as); Bert Curry, Crawford Wetherington (as); Jimmy Strong (cl, ts); Boyd Atkins (cl, ss, as); Happy Caldwell, Albert Washington (ts); Lil Hardin Armstrong, Earl Hines, Joe Sullivan (p); Johnny St Cyr (bj); Mancy Cara (bj, v); Lonnie Johnson, Eddie Lang (g); Rip Bassett, Dave Wilborn (bj, g); Carroll Dickerson (vn); Pete Briggs (bb); Baby Dodds, Tubby Hall, Kaiser Marshall, Zutty Singleton (d); Butterbeans & Susie, May Alix (v). November 1926–December 1928.

Trumpeter Digby Fairweather says:
‘Louis Armstrong has been rightly called “The Shakespeare of Jazz”. And even if – to less tempered ears – his musical surroundings on the Hot Five and Seven recordings may sound archaic, the ecstatic outpourings of his horn are arguably the most spontaneously creative and profound jazz improvisation on record.’

For some, the story goes no further than this, and has no need to. Louis Armstrong – universally revered as ‘Pops’, never ‘Satchmo’ – was the first great soloist in jazz and had by 1930 laid down a body of music, albeit crudely documented by modern standards, which has not been surpassed to this day for precision, urgency and emotional freight. He learned to play cornet as a young teenager in a waifs’ home. Buddy Bolden was still alive – and would be until 1931 – but he was also in an institution, the State Insane Asylum at Jackson, where he had been committed for alcohol-induced psychosis and dementia. By 1919, young Armstrong was a formidable player and he began recording with King Oliver in 1923 before going to New York to join the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. He began recording under his own name in Chicago, 1925, with the Hot Five and Hot Seven for OKeh Records. By the end of the ’20s, he was a great soloist, influencing everyone in jazz, shifting the emphasis from group playing to solo improvising and creating a new vocal style that is almost as influential as his trumpet-playing.