[Dixielandjazz] Repeated solos

[Jack Mitchell]

Of course it's impossible for a jazz musician to play a solo on a given tune 
greatly differently after hundreds, even dozens, of times. And I can listen 
to Tea doing BASIN STREET BLUES or Wild Bill with BLUE AND BROKEN HEARTED no 
matter how many times I've heard them.

However I think it's a bit arrogant of top musicians like Louis, Bud Freeman 
and Wild Bill (all of whom I've heard with their set pieces) play the same 
tunes night after night. Several contributors to this thread  have remarked 
on how bored some musicians were following this course, so why do they do 
it? Obviously they know hundreds of tunes, so why not mix it up a bit?

Along this line I must congratulate Bob Barnard - of course he too plays set 
tunes that he knows the public want to hear, but look at his discography as 
he travels around the world, and ran his Melbourne Jazz Parties for ten 
years, and he not only covers almost the whole range of jazz and popular 
tunes, but is constantly adding new tunes to his repertoire.

Of course Graeme and Roger Bell did the same thing back in the forties - 
they deliberately set out to discover and learn as many of the known tunes 
of the day as they could find to add variety to their performances.

No doubt there are similar instances of that attitude amongst bands of which 
I'm not cognisant, but I still can't fathom why the greats restricted their 
later performances to so few tunes.

Best wishes
Jack Mitchell