[Dixielandjazz] Sharps and Flats and Hauf a Coo!

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi All,

Now that I've come out of hibernation for a bit, I was a bit surprised to find that so many of our US listmates had never seen "fingers up" for sharps. Do they never play in sharp keys? Pretty well all Scottish musicians of my age group had to play Scottish Country Dance music since it was (and still is) popular at dances of all kinds (a great cheap way of keeping warm in the winter).

Much of the SCD repertoire comes from old fiddle tunes which are generally in sharp keys, so fingers up signals cause no surprises or consternation here. Many years back, there was an SCD band called the Olympians, led by an old pal of mine, Bobby Crowe, which featured a trumpet player sharing the lead. Bobby confirms that they played these tunes in the original keys, so the trumpet player found himself playing in E and A (concert) or F# and B natural for him. Being fiddle tunes, there are lots of wide intervals and no breathing spaces, so, with jigs and reels being taken at very fast tempos, he must have been a heck of a player to get round them. How did they find a dep (sub for US listmates)? This raises the possibility of D natural being called "hauf a deid coo" and E a "hale deid coo." I must ask Bobby when I next see him.

What's all this got to do with OKOM? Well, the famous English jazz (and everything else) accordeonist, Jack Emblow, reckons that the disproportionately high number of Scots in the early decades of jazz in the UK was because they all had a grounding in SCD, which has driving rhythms and bags of syncopation as well as elements of improvisation, so they took to jazz like ducks to water once records started to become available. The much-lamented Jake Hanna was a frequent visitor to Scotland and became interested in the drumming of bagpipe bands and SCD bands. Of the latter, he told me that he thought "there was more of that (SCD drumming) in early New Orleans jazz drumming than there was of Africa." I never had the good fortune to hear Baby Dodds or Zutty or others of their generation play live, so I can't comment, but the drummer's role in both is very similar - to generate a horizontal drive across the essentially vertical rhythms of the other rhythm players - and the snare drum techniques are largely the same with minor differences in accentuation. Certainly the Scots-Irish input to bluegrass music is pretty apparent, so they were around in large numbers in the Old South. That's scarcely surprising, since anyone who has endured a Scottish or Irish winter will see the attraction of a (much) warmer clime. 

Cue return to hibernation.

A Richt Guid New Year tae ane and aw'

Ken