[Dixielandjazz] Hines Broadcasts and Lorenzo Tio

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

As far as I remember, Jay McShann on a BBC broadcast maybe thirty years ago reminisced about listening to Hines broadcasts when he was relatively young, I think still in Oklahoma, under his bedcovers to avoid disturbing the rest of the family. I do have a couple of tracks from a Grand Terrace Broadcast of 1936, as well as two of the several from August 1938. No Simeon or Howard, but egad! Budd Johnson soloing on alto! He doesn't sound like Hodges or Carter or Smith, more as if Charlie Parker had been one of his disciples. 
 
Of course Shetland fiddle music is said to have been inspired by the guitar-playing of Peerie Wille Johnson, who developed an improved form of accompaniment under the influence of Eddie Lang recordings heard on short-wave radio across the Atlantic. The memorial compilation of Peerie Willie's scattered recordings might interest members of this group, for while he didn't jazz up Shetland fiddle performances most of these recordings are jazz, and some of a high order matching the man's latterday guru status.

http://www.musicscotland.com/acatalog/MusicScotland_Peerie_Willie_Johnson___Willie_s_World_6816.html
 
Anyway, broadcasts could be heard at long distances. 
A radio enthusiast uncle of mine used to listen to Berlin Philharmonic concerts through the 1930s a few hundred yards from the present site of a supermarket Ken and I frequent. 
 
I've actually published comments suggesting the neglect of Bechet's influence pre-Armstrong, and maybe on Armstrong, since Bechet was one of the leading cornetists in New Orleans and the Clarence Williams Blue Five recordings include at least one example of the one man completing a phrase begun by the other. 
>From reading Johnny Chilton I came to the conclusion that Bechet was responsible for a great deal of the expansion of clarinet playing among Dodds and Noone et al, such that each of the latter specialised in some of the things Bechet did, with a number of exclusions as the condition of each man's singularity. -- and somewhere Tio.
I only recently discovered the marvel that is Kim Cusack, whose hero is Darnell Howard. Unlike Darnell, however, Maestro Cusack seems not to have been a ragtime then jazz violinist, and there are no traces of the sometime violinish intonation Darnell produced, also on the sourish and soupy side of Jimmy Noone. 
There may be some fiddle influence in some of the phrasing, just as there is cello in the sometime cellist Coleman Hawkins, astonishingly so in his "Think Deep" in the 1950s. Hawkins was also an Armstrong man, just listen to the recordings with Buck Washington or Stanley Black in the early 1930s -- and perhaps Hawkins was unimpressive on the Jack Purvis recordings because at the time he and the trumpeter Purvis phrased so very similarly.
But what about the influence of Tio on Parker via Lester Young? And the suggestion that jazz history has been confused by starting with Armstrong rather than starting with Bechet and regarding Armstrong as -- not a next stage in a kind of Progress which should not be considered in any discussion of art -- but an individual branch. There was a lot of so to speak non-Armstrong jazz, Milt Hinton's preference of Jabbo Smith above Louis, and Roy Eldridge's slowness to appreciate Louis qua Louis, are part of that. Roy might well have been influenced by elements of Louis incorporated in the playing of colleagues.
 
And what debt might there be to Tio's presence when the Piron band came to New York as in a real sense a very early predecessor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Brazilian etc. arrivals? What had Tio's presence there to do with an almost juvenile virtuosity on clarinet and high reeds which enthused Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Carter -- and perhaps through intermediaries Charlie Holmes? Holmes certainly had an exceptional affinity with Luis Russell, and of course there's the band of Holmes's contemporaries and neighbours which worked so well with Bunk Johnson. 
Back to Budd Johnson, who in 1944 could phrase remarkably closely like Lester Young, but also switch into a more Armstrong-Hawkins mode. I have a sleevenote by Alun Morgan enthusing about two extended 1948 solos by young Yusef Lateef in a Dizzy Gillespie big band in which Lateef had not as yet replaced, well, Budd Johnson!  It's recognisably Budd, who was really a pre-Hawkins player, Ben Webster's first saxophone teacher and recording in Kansas City company in 1929. Next thing I'll be comparing him with Emanuel Paul! Enough!
In the course of checking something here I discovered that Louis Jordan recorded with Louis in 1932, and the drummer was -- uh?  --  Benny Hill. 
 
Hi Folks,

In Don's post on the Time Machine thread, he mentions the great Earl Hines
band of the 1930s, which got me thinking. A number of years ago I gave a record
recital at the Glasgow Jazz Record Society, a venerable club dating back to the
early 1930s, when the only way for most people in the UK to hear and learn about
the classic American source material was by listening to records, which they did
by getting together in clubs and listening to each other's discs.

My topic was Lorenzo Tio Jr and his influence on jazz reed playing, and in my
recital I followed the recording careers of his most illustrious pupils,
including Omer Simeon with Jelly and later with Hines. Also in that Hines band
was Darnell Howard, who, according to Harold Dejan, had also studied with Tio in
Chicago. Both men played alto and soprano as well as clarinet and it is
interesting to hear how the Tio clarinet approach translated to alto. There were
the long lines, the assured technical control, the tasteful filigree
ornamentation and, most notably, a time feel that was close to even eighths and
markedly different from the standard swing feel deriving from Armstrong's
time feel. All of these characteristics got carried over into early bop and my
questions to list members are:
  1.. Did the Hines band play regular radio broadcasts from the Grand Terrace
in the 1930s?
  2.. Did these reach as far as Kansas City?
It's interesting to speculate whether these broadcasts, (if they could be
picked up in KC),  were routinely listened to by Kansas City musicians and, if
so, did Tio's influence extend into bop via Charlie Parker?

Cheers,