[Dixielandjazz] Dixie vs Trad

[Marvin Ipswich]

I was going to keep out of this, but I'm afraid I can't bite my tongue any
longer.

Rick, Rick, Rick...

>Although Lu was copying the King Oliver band, the  time period was the
20's...

Lu Watters denied repeatedly in interviews that he was copying the King
Oliver band. Just adding an extra trumpet to the seven piece lineup and
playing a few King Oliver tunes doesn't imply copying anyone. For instance,
there were other bands in New Orleans in the 1920s that had two trumpets
(Papa Celestin and Sam Morgan immediately come to mind). There is a
well-known interview with Lu by Terry Waldo in his book "This is Ragtime"
where Lu emphatically states "How the f*** can you copy the King Oliver
band?"

Steve Barbone makes an excellent point, too, in pointing out that the Oliver
band used string bass (Bill Johnson) to begin with, then when Bill quit
Oliver used bass saxophone, then tuba with the Dixie Syncopators - which was
Oliver's larger group with three saxes. If you listen to the sides by Johnny
Dodds' band recorded for Victor, Johnson plays a mixture of two beat and
four beat on the bass. Unfortunately the primitive recording equipment at
Gennett and Okeh didn't allow Johnson to play bass. Great pity, that.

Some researcher, somewhere at some point a few years back, determined that
Turk Murphy was the first person to use the term "traditional" jazz. I don't
remember the exact details, but it was either used by Turk in an article in
Record Changer magazine or in the book "The Heart of Jazz." I seem to also
recall the term "jazz revival" coming along even later. It always seemed a
ludicrous term since there had been bands playing early style jazz or
dixieland since the music first appeared. A renewed interest in early jazz
began in the mid-to-late 1930s when big band swing was the thing, but all
throughout the 1930s there were five, six and seven piece plays playing
dixieland or whatever you want to call it, throughout the country - in New
Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc., etc.

Just FYI,  Sharkey (i.e., Charquet et Co.) disbanded in the 1970s, so,
technically, it is not really a "new" band. Jean-Pierre Morel has gone on to
front other groups playing 1920s big band jazz (big band = ten pieces).

And I can't let this one escape without a comment...

> Unfortunately, the early trad bands didn't pick up the Splash Cymbal,
which was a 20's staple.

I've studied a lot of material on early drum equipment, and as far as I can
infer there was no such thing as a "splash cymbal" in the 1920s. That has to
be, without a doubt, the most misconceived notion of all time with  some
ill-informed drummers playing early jazz. If you spend time listening to
early jazz recordings, i.e., the ones where the drummer is actually allowed
to use a cymbal, you'll find they are playing cymbals that range in size
from 12 - 16 inches. Technically, a splash cymbal is a thin, six to eight
inch cymbal, that doesn't put out anything more than a whisper of sound -
especially when choked - as the drummers frequently did then. The first
drummer I know to use a splash cymbal was Gene Krupa. All one needs to do is
take a look at the pictures of bands from the 1920s in a book like *Black
Beauty, White Heat*, or *The Pictorial History of Jazz*, to realize drummers
used much larger cymbals than some people mistakenly think.

Rick, you obviously are very passionate about early jazz, but realize there
are a lot of very knowledgeable folks here who know A LOT about the history
of the music. Tread carefully or you might get bitten!!

Sympathetically,
Marvin