[Dixielandjazz] Small big band

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

A very long time ago I went with a friend, who is now a member of Ken Mathieson's CJO, to hear Ram Ramirez play a solo engagement in Edinburgh. Ram was one of the major 1930s pianists, too little known and under-recorded as a performer, but he swung, and had a mighty harmonic awareness. 
My friend, who had hardly heard Ram's name before the gig, turned to me in amazement at one point and said, "this is the smallest big band I have ever heard."

Definitions are only the chords and tempo of linguistic meaning, it's all a matter of making oneself understood in whichever context. If you are seriously concerned with having precedents for the use of a specific term, and demand them intelligently, you are probably trying to construe a text in a dead language, like ancient Greek. 



       
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