[Dixielandjazz] Powerful verse

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The Whiteman quotation was rather later than his heyday, and his warning to 
swing bands about becoming musically more ambitious, and expecting people to 
listen when the people had come to dance.  There was also of course some 
difference between the dancing done to Whiteman's 1920s music and The stuff 
which took off on the rapid development of Benny Goodman to the title King of 
Swing.  

Whiteman was aware of his public, and he was cautioning his juniors about the 
practical and commercial dangers of forgetting theirs.  NOT FOR DANCERS rather 
than FOR DANCERS ONLY.  Very relevant where records were made to be danced to. 

There are various sorts of dance which can be done to verses as well as 
choruses, but these had become old hat by the time Whiteman gave his at one time 
generally well-known warning. 


Of course as what was new in jazz became more a listener than a dancer music 
verses came to have no place at all for improvisers. Indeed just as where Dick 
Wellstood observed that some 1920s piano solo compositions from Harlem to Hines 
had in themselves mimimal melodic and other content, and were only things with 
which something could be done, from the 1940s  onward one finds compositions 
which are really only bases for improvisation. 


Jazzmen who had been active in 1930 and 1940 did tend to be to some extent 
fashion-conscious, and if the verse screamed out 1920s and the chorus didn't, 
the chorus could be played on its own merits, and indeed to an audience rather 
more ready to dive in. Doing away with the verse might be described as 
using a vo-do-de-o-do filter. 


I remember Humphrey Lyttelton years ago giving the trumpeter and subsequent 
Miles Davis biographer Ian Carr a blindfold test live on radio when Carr was on 
the show as a record reviewer. The soloist was Tommy Dorsey, which Carr didn't 
get; but he did say he preferred TD on trumpet to TD on trombone.