[Dixielandjazz] Book Review, A Trumpet around the Corner

[Robert Ringwald]

A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz
by Samuel Charters
University of Mississippi Press
http://www.upress.state.ms.us
380 pages; cloth, $40.00
Review by Charles Suhor
Samuel Charters takes on a daunting task in his new book--giving a balanced 
picture
of the contributions of black and white musicians to the development of jazz 
in New
Orleans.
Charters' 1963 book, Jazz: New Orleans, 1885-1963,
 was an important collection of biographies that was limited to black 
musicians.
He wisely eschewed a mere expansion of the list in favor of a historical 
narrative
that inclusively traces the work of the black and white pioneers in the city 
and
during their migrations to Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.
Charters treats not only the foundation artists who are household names (in 
hip households)
like Buddy Bolden, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, King Oliver, Louis 
Armstrong,
the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, but also figures known mainly to students of 
early
jazz, like A.J. Piron, Buddy Petit, Chink Martin, Sidney Arodin, and a host 
of others.
While general readers will have little interest in Charters' occasional 
descriptions
of the shifting personnel among New Orleans bands, his causal, engaging 
style keeps
the text moving. Also, he anchors his narrative solidly in the evolving 
cultural
contexts, musical styles, dance fads, commercial influences, and recording 
technologies.
Sixty-four vintage photographs and dozens of skillful descriptions of 
musicians and
venues evoke a fine sense of time and place.
Charters' multi-racial perspective invites contrast with Thomas Brothers' 
recent
Louis Armstrong's New Orleans
(2006) and Richard Sudhalter's
Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945
(2001). Brothers focuses closely on the peculiarly African-American 
influences in
Armstrong's New Orleans environment, while Sudhalter's early chapters look 
at the
cultural milieu and music of the white musicians. Charters' canvas is 
larger, so
he is less detailed than Brothers; his discussions of style and genre are 
less sophisticated
and polemical than Sudhalter's.
Even so, he is a voice in a longstanding debate about black and white in 
jazz history,
along with Suldhalter, Brothers, Gene Lees, Stanley Crouch, James Lincoln 
Collier,
Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and others. He advances his argument 
gracefully, making
the point early on that the ethnic diversity of New Orleans ensured that 
musical
influences would interpenetrate and reflect many cultures. He goes on to 
report in
detail the activities and dominant stylistic traits of the music of the 
black and
white players. Among the latter, he makes the traditional distinction 
between the
"rougher ensembles" of the blues-influenced uptown black musicians and the 
"lyric
restraint" of the downtown creoles of color. (p. 63) The main lineage of 
early white
players is traced lucidly, if familiarly, to Papa Jack Laine's bands that 
spanned
several decades.
Charters does not back off from controversy. He looks beyond the bad rap 
that Nick
LaRocca's Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) has suffered. Critics and 
historians
have rightly deplored LaRocca's racist statements and unbridled braggadocio 
and noted
that a white band was unfairly given the first chance to record the new 
music in
1917. But with slim evidence of the sound of black bands until much later 
(six years
passed before the King Oliver/Louis Armstrong's recordings), Charters 
reasonably
asks that we listen to the ODJB with fresh ears. Indeed, the music itself, 
though
a mixture of ragtime and jazz elements, is quite remarkable for its energy, 
humor,
and fine contrapuntal interplay.
But Charters' revisionism takes some strange turns. Regarding the celebrated 
Oliver/Armstrong
1923 sessions, he writes that "it is difficult to imagine that the sessions 
would
have come to occupy such an important place in the history of New Orleans 
jazz had
it not been for Armstrong's presence."(p. 174) Although "the emotional 
thrust of
the music was breathtaking,"(p. 175) Charters finds the rhythm section 
"inferior"
(p. 174) and favors Paul Mares' New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the 
contemporaneous white
band that influenced Bix Beiderbecke and a host of Chicago musicians but was 
comparatively
lacking in intensity and firmness of conception.
Strangely, he cites Armstrong's slight solo on "Southern Stomps" in 1923 as 
a breakthrough,
a sign that jazz "was moving into new dimensions." (pp. 176-77) 
Unbelievably, he
says nothing about Armstrong's revolutionary solos, ensemble work, and 
vocals with
the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-27-think "West End Blues," 
"Hotter
Than That" and other gems that were quantum leaps in the jazz art. In the 
white jazz
community, Charters tells of local musicians' affection for Bix Beiderbecke, 
but
their superlatives about Orleanian Emmet Hardy, Bix's mentor, are not 
mentioned.
Charters gives warranted attention to specific works of dozens of lesser 
instrumentalists.
But like Sudhalter, he participates in an orthodoxy that is rife in 
discussions of
early New Orleans jazz. Assessments of the recordings of most of the 
musicians, black
and white, are generous to a fault-the fault being that so many of the 
players were
stuck in staccato ragtime articulation, phrasing that lands flat-footed on 
the beat,
"jazzy" surface elements like growls and whining or nanny-goat vibratos, and 
rhythm
sections churning out commonplace military oom-pahs.
Challenges to effusive praise of the lesser known bands of the 1920s are 
rare because
only the most fastidious of critics and historians own and have listened 
closely
to the recordings of Johnny Bayersdorffer, Johnny DeDroit, Louis Dumaine, 
the Halfway
House Orchestra, Sam Morgan, the New Orleans Owls, A.J. Piron, and others. 
Their
music is tuneful, danceable, and often wiggle-your-eyebrows "hot," the right 
music
for its time. Certainly the bands are worthy of inclusion in an in-depth 
history
text. But my lying ears tell me that awed reverence for such near-jazz 
material is
more shintoism than criticism.
Fortunately, in recent years much music of the early bands has been reissued 
on CDs
and many recordings are available on YouTube, often with vintage 
photographs. But
Charters doesn't provide discographical information to guide readers to the 
CDs.
Worse, his bibliography is astonishingly thin, and in many instances his 
sources
are unclear as pages of information pass without citation. He tends to rely 
on repeated
use of a few sources (e.g., Tom Bethel, Lawrence Gushee, William Russell, 
Pops Foster),
despite his claim of "incorporating recent decades of research." (p. xi)
Charters moves on to the 1930s with an insightful chapter on the Depression 
years,
a period often neglected. Group improvisation gave way to the national trend 
of big
bands reading arrangements as the Swing Era emerged. Charters tells of local 
dance
bands led by Leon Prima (Louis' brother) and Sharkey Bonano, Sidney 
Desvigne, Joe
Robichaux, Fats Pichon, and others. But as the Depression ended, he notes, 
"the excitement
and creativity of the music had become as frayed and as worn as the city 
itself."
Swing persisted into the 1940s, but Charters appears to have lost interest. 
The Dawn
Busters band played weekday mornings on WWL, with stalwarts like Pinky 
Vidacovich,
Godfrey Hirsch, and a young Al Hirt. The Lloyd Alexander big band was 
active, a cut
above the dozens of white swing bands that slogged through stock 
arrangements. A
fifteen-piece group led by trumpeter Dooky Chase (who became a famed 
resteraunteur)
from 1944-49 was a landmark band, transitioning from swing to modern big 
band jazz.
Dizzy Gillespie praised the band during a joint performance at the city's 
Coliseum
Arena.
The narrative continues to unravel with Charters' treatment of the Dixieland 
revival
that grew in the forties. He begins well by recounting the story of the 
underground
network of traditional jazz purists (e.g., Charles Edward Smith, Bill 
Russell, Heywood
Hale Broun) who brilliantly sought out, wrote about, and recorded first 
generation
black musicians. Their work was, as Charters points out, mainly noted by a 
handful
of collectors until trumpeter Bunk Johnson was picked up by major record 
labels.
He went on the road and became a symbol of the national Dixieland revival, 
with virtually
no New Orleans exposure.
But Charters dismisses the defining development on the local scene-the 
remarkable
resurgence of popular interest in jazz from 1947-53--as a "white world," 
Bourbon
Street phenomenon. (p. 352) Yet Papa Celestin's band of black veterans at 
the Paddock
Lounge was key to initiating the revival, along with the excellent white 
group led
by Sharkey Bonano at the Famous Door. Black bands led by George Lewis, Paul 
Barbarin,
and Freddie Kohlman were also active on the Street. Popular white groups 
like the
Basin Street Six and Tony Almerico carried on the revival at other sites but 
they
are not on the author's radar.
The emergence of modern jazz in New Orleans in the late forties is absent 
from the
book. While Charters accepts the idea of continuity of conception from early 
jazz
to swing in the city, he explicitly excludes the cadre of groundbreaking 
modernists
from the musical mainstream--among them, Harold Battiste, Edward Blackwell, 
Al Belletto,
Benny Clement, Edward Frank, Bill Huntington, and Earl Palmer. Dozens of 
players
jammed in obscurity at strip clubs, after hours sessions, and each other's 
houses
to carry the inventiveness of earlier generations into the new musical era. 
Charters
loses a crucial interracial dynamic here. The musicians were sometimes 
arrested for
performing together, and it was the modernists who openly advanced 
integrated performance
at the Playboy Club in 1964 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Charters does a fast-forward from the revival activity of the forties to 
Pete Fountain
and Al Hirt's return to the city to open successful Bourbon Street clubs in 
1959
and 1964, respectively, after gaining national fame. He reverses the order 
of their
return and damns Hirt with misguided praise, calling him a "Dixieland-style 
trumpeter"
and citing his shallow novelty hit "Java" as if it were representative of 
his oeuvre.
Preservation Hall, established in 1961, is thrown into the revival pot 
without context.
The conflated treatment of revivals reads smoothly, but as history it is a 
hall of
mirrors.
The final chapter is a scattershot essay that does a quick gloss on the rise 
of Rhythm
and Blues in the fifties and the state of jazz in post-Katrina New Orleans. 
Charters
mentions today's generation of young modernists (the Marsalis brothers, 
Harry Connick,
Jr., etc.), traditional jazz now played at Palm Court CafÈ and Preservation 
Hall,
an excellent modern jazz trio led by drummer Johnny Vidacovich ("the most 
exciting
drummer I'd ever listened to in New Orleans") (p. 358), and current and past 
marching
bands that are variations on the venerable brass band tradition in New 
Orleans.
The joy of A Trumpet Around the Corner
is in Charters' obvious love of the music, his personal involvement with 
many of
the players, and his ability to tell stories with vigor and fluency. The 
book would
have been a victory if he had concluded his crisp narrative and zesty 
critiques at
the late 1930s, with clearer documentation and a useful discography. His 
description
of jazz in the city beyond the thirties reflects tunnel vision at best, and 
woeful
lack of research at worst.
______________________________________________
Native Orleanian Charles Suhor has written extensively about jazz for
Down Beat, New Orleans
, and others. He is author of
Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years through 1970
(Scarecrow). He has played drums with Tom Brown, Pete Fountain, Buddy Prima, 
and
others. A former English teacher and Deputy Executive Director of the 
National Council
of Teachers of English, he has lectured on jazz and language in 
collaboration with
Ellis Marsalis, C.K. Ladzekpo, and Antonio Garcia.
-30



--Bob Ringwald K6YBV
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