[Dixielandjazz] Jimmy Cleveland, JJJ, Louis Metcalf

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Cleveland was indeed one of a number of neglected trombonists.
 I shall have a listen to some of his records this weekend.
One of the problems caused by be-bop was of handling the 
harmonics of the instrument. On tenor, Charlie Rouse is 
Hawkins less some harmonics. On trombone, well, there was 
Trummy Young, and various things he did as an Armstrong All-
Star came from his efforts to play bop by going in the very 
opposite direction from that taken finally by J J Johnson: 
I say "finally" because as Humphrey Lyttelton observed long 
ago the earliest JJ recordings are in a style like young 
Dickie Wells. Some early JJ phrases do bring to mind a man
in a white coat playing medical plumbing. I heard a comment 
similar to that forty years ago, from a guy who said how 
much better JJ sounded in the healthy environs of a Horace 
Silver date. 

One reason why the OKOM of this site's mainline supporters 
doesn't get played much may have to do with the experience
of a then very young New York jazzfan I was talking to 
more than thirty years ago. 
He asked whether I knew anything about Louis Metcalf, and I 
did and I'd still like a copy of the Metcalf record Victoria
Spivey organised around that time. But when I expressed
enthusiasm for Metcalf they guy told me he had been badly
frustrated in his efforts to hear older jazz, simply because
while it was maybe a good idea to sell good OKOM to people
of a somewhat older generation, it was definitely toxic to
use terms belonging to OKOM  to sell sheer nostalgia to 
folks of a certain vintage. The poor guy had tried to attend
not exactly contemporary-style gigs, but they were full of 
old pop, too many of them. 
Like one or two Preservation Hall recordings I've reviewed.