[Dixielandjazz] Johnny Dodds

[Marek Boym]

If hard pressed, I'd probably opt for Dodds as the foremost of the New
Orleans clarinettists, although I love Jimmy Noone, Omer Simeon,
Albert Nicholas, Tony Parenti, Harry and larry Shields, the Hall
brothers - the list is so long!
Cheers

On 12 July 2011 12:29, Steve Voce <stevevoce at virginmedia.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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