[Dixielandjazz] Re: The Revival

[Stephen Barbone]

> "Brian Towers" <towers at allstream.net> wrote (polite snip)
> I agree that traditional styled jazz has always been there and always been
> played in the USA and Europe.  However it was a revival of INTEREST in
> the1940's and 1950's - yes a revival of interest whereby the kids adopted as
> popular music.  In the U.K. trad' jazz numbers were reaching the top of the
> hit parade -  tunes like "Midnight In Moscow" "Stranger On the Shore"  "Bad
> Penny Blues" etc were the singles being bought in great quantities and
> numbered among the top of the pops.  Many of the kids buying "hip hop or
> rap" today would have been buying Humph, Barber,Bilk or Ball in those days .
> This is what I personally mean by "Revival"
> At weekends teenagers would camp out in tents or sleep rough in country
> estates like Beaulieu, to attend festivals with headliners like "Acker Bilk"
> , "Chris Barber",  Kenny Ball". We even had riots!
> This is what I mean by "REVIVAL"  It became a cult, almost, which embraced
> the way one dressed, the way one spoke, the way one danced or jived etc.
> Even the BBC featured it and you could hear featured in places like the
> Albert Hall or the Festival Hall.    The 1940's and 1950's was the time of
> jazz revival because, all of a sudden  the "man in the street" , the average
> Joe or Judy, knew what it was and could even name a trad' band  -this was an
> amazing happening.  It was a REVIVAL for jazz.    The young generation found
> traditional jazz, besides being intellectually stimulating and rich in
> historic interest,  was also fun, lively, had a melody and you could dance
> to it.  For them it was new and exciting.
> Swing music and the big bands of the 1930's had become "ho hum" to them and
> the new pseudo-intellectual music under the mystical title of bebop was just
> an irritating and pretentious noise - totally incomprehensible to the vast
> majority.
> There was always good jazz in the UK - in the 1920's and the 1930's and in
> the war years..  Players like trombonist George Chisholm or saxists like
> Freddy Gardener, pro's playing populasr music in dance bands for a living,
> knew how to rip off the hot stuff we call Dixieland, when they played in
> small groups for their own pleasure.   The masses were into swing and
> dancing was the popular thing.  The true jazz was there and kept alive by a
> smallish group of devotee fans, musicians, collectors, rhythm clubs etc but
> it was not big time, just a tiny dedicated minority.   It swept the world as
> popular music in the1950's, having had its re-birth of popular interest in
> the 1940's, thanks to the likes of Bunk Johnson, Turk Murphy, George Webb,
> Humphrey Lyttleton, Sidney Bechet, Graham Bell, Claude Luter, Kid Ory,
> George Lewis etc who showed a new generation that jazz could be fun and
> entertaining - great days!
>
>
> P.S. Does the jazz of Fats Waller; 1920's Ellington, Benny Moten, Earl
> Hines, Art Tatum, James P Johnson, or the ragtime of Joplin, Lamb, Scott etc
> etc   all fall under your umbrella term of dixieland?   Using the term
> "dixieland" to embrace all the old jazz is a bit daft, as well as confusing,
> in my opinion but then all the old DJML members will know that already!
> The great trail blazer himself - Turk Murphy,  fervently denied that his
> music was "dixieland" and I believe he was the first to coin the expression
> 'trad?

Hi brian & List Mates:

Enjoyed your post.

In answer to the "PS" No, that is obviously not Dixieland. Forgive me for not adding "polyphonic counterpoint"
in my broad definition of Dixieland. I made an assumption that "early jazz form" was self explanatory when
coupled with Buddy Bolden. Sorry.

We never experienced the Dixieland riots, Dixieland Jazz Festivals and such in the USA that you describe as
happening in the UK. No need for them. The music was an everyday occurrence. And, "Dixieland" as you and I
define it now, was never adopted by the kids in the USA as "popular music" during the so called revival
period. It must have been different in the UK which ' spawned British Trad. British kids may have had to
revive jazz, and gone bonkers over it, but American kids always had Dixieland so there was nothing to revive
except an obscure style or two. Then too, Britishers may have really not gotten into Dixieland jazz until say
1940 and up. So in that sense, there was a New Orleans Jazz revival in the UK, as there was a Banjo/Tuba-King
Oliver "style" revival here.

My point is simply that in the US, Dixieland was popular in jazz settings, and the Universities from its very
beginnings to the years of the beginning of the so called revival. The Condon gang, as well as Bechet,
Napoleon, Mole, all the Pee Wee's, Haggart, Lawson and a great number of others were making a living playing
Dixieland. This was at the time, Bunk was still looking for his teeth and George Lewis was loading ships
somewhere. When Bunk and Lewis came upon the scene, it was because the music was already there and they were
living examples of it's beginnings. So their genre of "New Orleans Jazz" got revived. (Bechet had always been
there, as had Louis Armstrong)

Every aspiring US jazz musician from the 1900 through the 1950s learned how to play Dixieland, before anything
else. No mystery, no big discovery, no overblown intellectualizing about the complexity of this relatively
simple jazz form. They learned it because it was popular as jazz goes, and a way to earn a living.
Bob Wilber learned it from Bechet starting about 1947, but his was not a "revivalist" band. And Bob Wilber was
already trying to expand his musical horizon a decade later when he declaimed that the Condon formula was too
restricting, after several recording sessions with Condon's gang.

The kids who embraced the music did so because they came of drinking age and the clubs had Dixieland Bands. Or
they heard it on the numerous radio stations that were always playing some form of Dixieland. With us, at that
age in NYC, there was no revival, just the discovery that there was some good jazz out there called Dixieland,
or New Orleans Jazz, as well as swing and progressive jazz. And it was where you took your date prior to
chatting her up. The clubs featuring Dixieland had that naughty aura of Booze, Sex, The Mob, Prohibition etc.,
so how could we resist?

Our Dixieland jazz festivals did not start until the 1970s or so when the aging kids who heard the music in
the 40s and 50s realized that it was no longer in the clubs. The only way to hear it was to get a festival
going. However they were already middle aged, and now the average age of the festival goer is dead. So we need
to find a "revival" again.

Except, perhaps in the eastern USA where Dixieland thrives in numerous public settings, though not quite like
it did from the 1930s through the 1950s. And now in Spain where millions saw/heard the Canal Street Jazz Band
courtesy of our esteemed list mate Kash.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone