[Dixielandjazz] Al Hirt

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I suspect there is a lot of warranted antipathy with reference to the Kamoyshal recordings Al Hirt made. I have managed to avoid them  . . .
I did see a television film from a jazz festival in which Al Hirt just played a solo number with rhythm. I also recall from very much the same time Don Cherry in a similar setting playing a similar number  -- Buck Clayton musical territory really -- and I wouldn't indeed couldn't say a word against the performance of either trumpeter. 
 
I am sure that there is a varicose vein of Thicksieland which remains the tawdry Kitsch pop music of some people of a certain age and which has on the one had fed musicians and has bitten the other hand, the one which fed it the real music it addled with additives, by fostering a habit among younger people of hearing a few bars and ceasing to listen because of the assumption that it's that woolly stuff which is starting up yet again. I gather Louis Metcalf was playing wonderfully around 1970, and at the time I did speak to a young jazz fan from New York who asked me about Metcalf.  He'd been put off going to hear him by the extent to which Thicksieland and Nostalgia was being marketed as if it was for instance Metcalf.  I gather that Dick Hyman found European OKOM bands something of a revelation when he came across to festivals around that time. Some North American recordings of the period, which Dick had probably missed back then, have been a bit of a
 revelation to me, when I've come across them in more recent years.