[Dixielandjazz] Dixieland illdefined

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

There are two uses of the word 'Dixieland', the first and more correct one refers properly to a line from ODJB to Condon and through, based really on a European-American appropriation of New Orleans music Oliver and Armstrong and Bechet et cetera;

the other one is secure as standing on ice wearing rollerskates, and slithers to the rhythmic freedom of Sam Morgan and indeed Luis Russell (and all jazz grew out of Bill Johnson, Pops Foster, Wellman Braud, Al Morgan  - as Milt Hinton remembered) and as far as those amateur bands which have established the metronomic mediocrity of unholy performances of 'the Saints' (and a too small unimaginative repertoire).  You can draw distinctions within that,  but I remember  a highly intelligent letter in response to an intelligent New York Review of Books review of Ken Burns. The letter was highly intelligent but uninformed, since it listed as 'Dixieland' the Albert Ammons band sides on Commodore.  With Lips Page on trumpet, and Ammons's association with Pete Johnson over the previous few years, this was if anything Kansas City Jazz.  To be able to distinguish between different rhythmic conceptions is simply to listen, to be able to listen. 
I like Condon, I also like Frank Melrose, whose band performances on the recent Delmark issue alternate between Condonish Chicago jazz (which might be called Dixieland) and something fairly close to the Frankie Newton/ Pete Brown recordings of the late 1930s.  I don't suggest there's any priority  in finding a name for  the latter,  or for anything, but it is annoying when the term Dixieland gets flung around promiscuously, and when from sheer failure to listen the bass-driven fluidity of New Orleans jazz (in 1920s bands which commonly used saxophones)  gets lost  in the rhythmically straighter thing rightly associated with Condon.  
One of the nice salvage jobs in jazz can be heard on the Storyville label's issues of New York bands taped around 1950, with veteran big band musicians joining 'Dixieland' bands because there was little other work. Listen to Benny Waters when he replaced Bob Wilber with Jimmy Archey, or Eddie Barefield with Lips Page. All this wonderful variety fertilising the Condon genre. It was also wonderful when these guys got back to playing other things too. 
The interest in 'Dixieland' which these 1950 sessions represents began around 1940, and in his autobiography interestingly enough Dickie Wells dated his first encounter with anything like Dixieland to 1940 and that revival. He never heard it where he grew up, he was already a major soloist by about 1933, and probably the genre was too alien to his rhythmic conception for him ever to have fitted in. 

I forget who it was who mentioned Charlie Parker to one of his schoolmates, to be told 'my father has some records by him. A Dixieland alto saxophonist wasn't he?' 

       
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