[Dixielandjazz] Repertoire

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

When Dick Hyman started attending European festivals, so he said, one surprise was the repertoire of 'trad' musicians.  As in the case of the Humphrey Lyttelton recordings so lavishly and rightly praised on this site lately, the other and often much junior Europeans had gone a-listening to the masses of tunes by Clarence Williams and others,  and had built a repertoire not blinker-bound into the Sainted Alexander Bagtime Command.   
There are of course people who can still pay and whose money can be very useful and who want to hear traddie chestnuts as an echo of daze beyond recall. If you can find more recent tunes which have a good enough structure,  rather than successive bars with no more melody than a pedal point and dead and meaningless without words, you might do better to listen to some too long obscure music, or read some yellowing scores, and try to make good music which might surprise and appeal.
Of course the bass problem wasn't so much due to Walter Page as to the extrapolation of walking bass into playing patterns which might as well be played on bass guitar.  My friend the late Francis Cowan had serious reservations against the overpowering linear rather than rhythmic trend in bass-playing, a bouncelessness which can afflict almost any good music.  He was very proud of the glowing tribute paid him by the late Fred Hunt, a remarkable pianist on one of whose last gigs Francis played.  
I did like it when Milt Hinton repeated the priority of time. A bassist needs that, (timing). Once you have that, it's a secondary matter to find where to put your fingers.

       
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