[Dixielandjazz] Fiddler Williams

[Harry Callaghan]

Absolutely uncanny is what I would have to call it.......

Only perhaps about 20 minutes before opening and reading this e-mail, I had
in my hand an album by Jay McShann that I had found mis-filed with female
vocalists.

I was looking at it and recalling how I read once that he was the man
responsible for bringing Charlie Parker to NY and while "Bird" became world
famous, who ever heard much of Jay thereafter?.

I couldn't decide at the moment whether I wanted to put the LP under "blues"
or "jazz piano" so I just placed it atop a pile of albums I had been playing
over the last coupla days, with the one on top happening to be one by Jonah
Jones

That's not all........about an hour ago, there was a plug on one of the
movie channels for "Judgment at Nuremberg"

Spooky, is what it is....is Robert Calder crawling around inside my brain as
if I'm John Malkovich?

HC.


On 4/10/10, ROBERT R. CALDER <serapion at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> I remember in December 1996 I was in a department store in Nuernberg
> (Nuremberg as it is for many people who speak English) and astonished to see
> a poster of this lively looking man with dreadlocks caught by the camera
> flapping over his tuxedo and fiddle and bow in flying condition.
> I'd not heard of Fiddler in a while, but there he was, and he would be
> performing in a travelling ensemble with among others Red Richards and
> Norris Turney.
> And sometime I'll find a copy of the recording they made. But the
> dreadlocks!  I suppose he was pushing eighty at that date.
> He wasn't a unique case, just a more extreme one than Jay McShann, who was
> internationally about as obscure until near enough 1970, because he had to
> play what he could make money playing, and like the pianist of McKinney's
> Cotton Pickers, Todd Rhodes, and like Lloyd Glenn, a very interesting
> arranger for Don Albert's band (Alvin Alcorn on trumpet, and on one title
> both an amazing arranged passage for reed section and the most
> teeth-curdling vocal) and indeed Sonny Thompson they played the bluesy side
> of the midwestern repertoire in its narrowed version as so-called Rhythm &
> Blues.
> The French Black & Blue label had something to do with some of them
> recording jazz again.
>
> And the sudden-seeming re-emergence of Stephane Grappell(y or i) had a lot
> to do with an interest in playing jazz on violin, which comes more easily
> nowadays to classically trained musicians than it did in the 1930s.  There
> was an interview with Stuff Smith in which he described all the problems of
> producing enough volume on the instrument (I liked the one about filling the
> cavity with rattlesnake tails!) when Eddie Lang was having a guitar built to
> his own specifications and Eddie Durham experimenting with the sort of
> instrument one or two people have been lucky enough to salvage from scrap
> metal merchants.  Nowadays there are probably quite a number of amateur or
> potential jazz violinists.
> And there is at least a TV recording of George Wein and Keter Betts with a
> front line of Warren Vache, Evan Christopher and Regina Carter,
> demonstrating profound awareness of the pioneering of Stuff Smith (though
> unlike Stuff, she does not look like somebody who would halt the first
> number of a set and with a look of dismay accuse colleagues with the
> despairing cry, "it's not right -- one of you cats is sober!"). I think
> Alvin Queen was on drums, and Rodney Jones the impressive guitarist. In the
> Wein band.
> Jonah Jones was the one Stuff dismissed for sobriety, which he had taken up
> on medical advice (no booze and no reefers) and he did much later record an
> excellent Louis Armstrong sort of set for Black and Blue and live into his
> nineties. Of course Jonah was noted for the most magnificent open tone, but
> where others were R&B-ing he was earning his money mostly by playing with
> harmon mute.
>
>
>
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