[Dixielandjazz] Stock arrangements and recordings

[Mattias Hallin]

15 jan 2008 kl. 22.10 skrev eupher dude:
> But, to get to the question--Were the "stocks" the creation of some  
> publishing house lackey, working off the original published sheets,  
> or were they based on the recordings by whomever popularized the  
> tune, or were they the charts used in the recording?


 From the mid 1980's until the mid 1990's, I played in a ten-piece,  
20s-style big band, that mainly relied on stocks for what we played,  
and my distinct idea is that these were arrangements written either  
in-house, or by freelancers, for the music publishing houses in order  
to make arrangements of the songs of the day easily and  
inexepensively available to bands that had no arrangers of their own,  
or didn't want to go to the trouble and/or expense of writing their  
own arrangements.

As an aside, I can heartilly recommend anyone interested in these  
aspects of OKOM to have a look at the book "Arranging for the Modern  
Dance Orchestra", written and published in 1926 by Arthur Lange, who  
was one of the most prolific (and creative) stock arrangers of the  
day. I have a photo copy myself, made from a copy that I managed to  
get on an international inter-library loan from the library at the  
University of Oregon. I dare say they still have it, if anyone'd be  
interested and able to arrange an inter-library loan... According to  
the lending card at the back, it had only been out once, in 1963,  
before I borrowed it (although they might have moved to registering  
loans on the computer in the meantime, instead of stamping a card at  
the back of the book...).

Anyway, my further quite distinct impression is that there were a  
plethora of stocks of different kinds available back then, some  
intended to be more jazzy or arty, others more strictly intended for  
society dancing, but that their relation to recordings almost always  
were stocks first, recordings later, i.e. they were normally not  
transcriptions from recordings. There may well have been exceptions  
when it comes to certain very successful records, but unless there  
are very clear indications for this, I would generally say that if a  
stock ressembles a recording, it will be because the recording was  
more or less based on that stock, and not the other way around. Let's  
not forget that if you had band that played original arrangements by  
a band member or a staff arranger, you would not have been likely to  
want to for all purposes give away what amounted to your original  
sound in the first place.

My tuppenc'orth, for what its 'orth...

/Mattias

---
Mattias Hallin · Brussels · Belgium · <cmhallin at algonet.se>

"Oh bury me thar! With my battered git-tar!
A-screamin' my heart out fer yew!"