[Dixielandjazz] Bix's Tone and WSJ Article about Kid Ory and the Archeophone Records.

[Steve Barbone]

Speaking of Bix's tone and what we are missing. No doubt it is important to
realize we are listening to 75+ year old recording technology. In other
words, compared to what was played, it sucks big time. So we can't expect to
"hear" what Eddie Condon heard live, or what Jack Tracy Spoke of, or what
Louis Armstrong himself heard live.

That problem is not only tone, but overall performance since what they
recorded is not what they performed in live situations. Proof? Read the
George Wettling quote in the article.

About Bix, read the very last paragraph of this WSJ article about what
Archeophone did for Kid Ory. Yes indeed, I hope Dave Sager and the folks at
Archeophone rescue some Bix from what we now hear via primitive recording
technology.

This article was sent to me by TOM WIGGANS and I think he meant to post it,
but all I saw was a blank message on the DJML so I post it again.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Wall Street Journal King Oliver in the Groove(s)
By NAT HENTOFF July 25, 2007


When I was in my teens, reading about the storied sites of early jazz, I
envied the Chicagoans of the 1920s who were hip enough to spend nights at
the Lincoln Gardens café where King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was in
residence, recently joined by Oliver's young New Orleans protégé, Louis
Armstrong. But the few recordings I could find sounded as if time had worn
the music down and dim, including the clicks and scratches of those used
early discs.

Now, however, in a remarkable feat of sound restoration, "King Oliver/Off
the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Re-Recordings" (archeophone.com,
also at Amazon.com) makes it very clear to me why among the regulars in the
audience back then were the young white jazz apprentices who -- according to
Lil Hardin (the pianist in the band) -- thronged to hear King Oliver's
Creole Jazz Band whenever they played in Chicago:

"They'd line up 10 deep in front of the stand -- Muggsy Spanier, Dave Tough,
George Wettling -- listening intently. Then they'd talk to Joe Oliver and
Louis." (Also among them were Eddie Condon and 14-year-old Benny Goodman.)

Drummer George Wettling described the excitement in the club in "Hear Me
Talkin' to Ya, Dover," a book published in 1955 that I co-edited with Nat
Shapiro: "Joe would stand there, fingering his horn with his right hand and
working his mute with his left, and how they would rock the place! Unless
you were lucky enough [to be there], you can't imagine what swing they got."

Now we can. David Sager (a recorded sound technician at the Library of
Congress) and Doug Benson (a teacher and recording engineer at Montgomery
College in Rockville, Md.) created their Off the Record label last year to
bring King Oliver's Creole Band back to life. Working on rare original
recordings supplied by collectors, Mr. Benson, writes his partner, "began to
capture onto the digital domain clean, smooth transfers of the discs, using
a wide array of styli." The actual music was deep in the original grooves --
though until now poorly reissued and reproduced. The 1923 sounds had to be
excavated.

While there were distinctive soloists in the band -- clarinetist Johnny
Dodds, trombonist Honore Dutrey and, of course, the leader and the newcomer
from New Orleans who would eventually swing the world -- this was
essentially a dance band.

In his exceptionally instructive notes, Mr. Sager explains: "That the Oliver
band's sound was replete with marvelous invention, and a superior 'hot'
sound, was the added premium. The principle, however, was rhythm."

Joe Oliver never had to announce the next number. As trombonist Preston
Jackson recalled, "He would play two or three bars, stomp twice, and
everybody would start playing, sharing with the dancers the good time they
were having."

"After they would knock everybody out with about forty minutes of 'High
Society,'" Wettling said, "Joe would look down at me, wink, and then say,
'Hotter than a forty-five.'"

Years later, I would hear from musicians who had been at the Lincoln Gardens
about the always startling, simultaneous "hot breaks" Armstrong and Oliver
played. (A "break" is when the rhythm section stops and one or more horns
electrify the audience for a couple of measures.)

Among the 37 numbers in the two-disc set, these legendary "breaks" can be
heard on "Snake Rag," "Weatherbird Rags," "The Southern Stomps," and "I
Ain't Gonna Tell Nobody."

Energized by joining the players and dancers at Lincoln Gardens, I
remembered a night long ago at Preservation Hall in New Orleans where, in
another "hot" dance band, trombonist Jim Robinson lifted me into joy. What
Oliver and Armstrong brought from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to the
rest of the planet, exemplified how Robinson also felt about his New Orleans
birthright: "I enjoy playing for people that are happy. If everyone is in a
frisky spirit, the spirit gets into me and I can make my trombone sing. If
my music makes people happy, I will try to do more. It gives me a warm heart
and that gets into my music." Oliver and Armstrong felt the same way.

Since the members of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band were driven by the
desire to keep the dancers and themselves happy, hearing them as they were
at Lincoln Gardens provides a keener understanding that this music began in
the intersecting rhythms of the musicians and the dancers' pleasure.

And in all the different forms jazz has taken since, when it ain't got
somewhere that makes-you-want-to-move swing, it may impress some critics
with its cutting-edge adventurousness, but it's not likely to make anyone
shout -- as King Oliver's banjoist, Bill Johnson, did one night at Lincoln
Gardens -- "Oh play that thing!"

In his deeply researched article on King Oliver in the Summer 2007 issue of
the invaluable American Legacy: The Magazine of African-American Life and
Culture, Peter Gerler notes that after Lincoln Gardens was destroyed in a
fire on Christmas Eve, 1924, Joe Oliver brought a new band, the Dixieland
Syncopaters, into the Plantation Café, which like Lincoln Gardens "was a
'black-and-tan' club, where crowds of blacks and whites mingled, danced, and
enjoyed the music of top black bands." A Variety review of the new King
Oliver band exclaimed: "If you haven't heard Oliver and his boys, you
haven't heard real jazz. . . . You dance calmly for a while, trying to fight
it, and then you succumb completely."

Now that Messrs. Sager and Benson have brought us inside the Lincoln
Gardens, their coming attractions on their Off the Record label include 1922
recordings by Kid Ory, the New Orleans king of the "tailgate trombone"; long
unavailable sessions by Clarence Williams's Blue Five (with Louis Armstrong
and Sidney Bechet); and the classic Bix Beiderbecke sides on the Gennett
label. There are more to come.

Messrs. Benson and Sager have been friends since junior high school, where
both played in the trombone section of the school band. Mr. Benson also
plays bass and piano, and is a composer and arranger. They have now parlayed
their lifelong enthusiasm for this music into a permanent sound library of
historic jazz performances freshly retrieved from inside the original
grooves.

With regard to what's ahead on their label, Mr. Sager says eagerly: "It will
be interesting to see what technology enables us to do in the coming years."
I yearn to listen to Bix Beiderbecke directly, so I can hear what Louis
Armstrong heard: "You take a man with a pure tone like Bix's and no matter
how loud the other fellows may be blowing, that pure tone will cut through
it all."