[Dixielandjazz] Johnny Dodds

[Steve Voce]

This is an extract from the column that I write (have done monthly for more than 50 years) in Jazz Journal.
I hope it's interesting.

Steve Voce

Further to Dave Gelly’s collection of oddities at the BBC last month, at my BBC station we
had a record librarian who filed albums of Prokofiev’s music in the Beat Music section under ‘The Proko Five’.

   A couple of days ago Dave was expressing to me his great admiration of the clarinet playing of Johnny Dodds

   It’s sad how many instrumentalists, capable of making great music together, failed to get on when they were off the stand.
The raw life of travelling on the road, epitomised in Britain by the ‘50s and ‘60s inevitably led to friction. Unless, that is, like Melly-Mulligan and
Welsh-Semple, you were able to anaesthetise yourself. But that proved to be a one-way ticket.

   It wasn’t just road work. Louis Armstrong and Johnny Dodds had one of the finest musical partnerships at a key point in the
development of jazz.

   When Louis returned to the States in 1935 after three years in Europe, Johnny went to see him in Chicago. Apparently Louis virtually cut him dead.
It’s not impossible that this was perhaps because Johnny, as he told his children, disapproved of Armstrong’s ‘clowning and
rolling of the eyeballs’. And, although Louis and Bing had one of the most magic musical partnerships it was always a matter of sorrow to Louis that Bing
never asked him to visit his home, although he invited there many of the other stars that he had worked with.

   Seventy years after his death Dodds is quietly appreciated by more musicians than ever, a lot of them, like Dave, quite sophisticated post-Bop players.
He was indeed a wonderful clarinet player with a fine technique and great ideas. His tone wasn’t as voluptuous as Jimmy Noone’s nor did he have quite the
same grace, but his jazz improvisations, without Noone’s sentimentality, were far more exciting and trenchant rather
than decorative. Noone was one for the birds, whilst the teetotal Dodds was a family man, most stern, who saved his money whilst he was at the top and was
eventually able to buy apartment buildings on the South Side of Chicago that made his income when times were tough. (Although he had a band in Chicago
during the period he made no recordings between 1929 and 1938. In 1938 he made the half dozen satisfying recordings with Shavers and Bunn, but these were
his last until the final two tracks done in 1940 with Preston Jackson and Lonnie Johnson a couple of months before he died. His wife had died in 1931 and Dodds
had brought up his three children on his own. John Dodds Jr was born in California when Oliver’s Creole Jazz band was there. He served in the US Air
Force for 22 years and was a major when he retired.

    It intrigues me that in the multitude of Johnny Dodds’s records we are enjoying the music of a man whose father had been a slave. ‘People will be able to
appreciate our music in 50 or 100 years,’ he said.
It’s so nice that he was right.