[Dixielandjazz] Sweet Georgia Brown

[Ken Mathieson]

John wrote:.
>
> All the older players were interested in what was happening around them.
> Even Dodds played ride cymbal on the Mutt Carey New Yorkers and the
> 'This is Jazz' sessions. Sid was no different. His drumming is totally
> different to Max Roach, whose use of the bass drum is way removed from
> Sid's approach.
>
Hi John,
While I acknowledge that all players will (or at least ought to) be 
interested in new developments, all of the people being discussed were 
active in an era where individuality was a highly prized attribute, so it's 
not surprising that their sounds and approaches differed. It was positively 
encouraged in the jazz community. Hence Max Roach's playing is distinctly 
different from Catlett's (and everybody else's) in matters of phrasing. 
However elements of Catlett's approach were evident in Roach's playing, as 
Max happily admitted when we spoke after his appearance on the Glasgow Jazz 
Festival in 1994.

I'm not sure about Roach's approach to the bass drum being all that 
different from Sid's: Max played a straight 4 on it throughout that concert, 
with occasional bomb and syncopated snare/BD patterns, which Sid was doing 
on record well before the advent of bop. I'm sure Sid wasn't alone in this, 
particularly as it was normal practice to use only snare, BD, hi-hat and 
maybe just one cymbal for recording work, so inventive players found ways of 
using BD to compensate for the missing toms.

> ...those Be-bop groups came into their own with the likes of Kenny Clark, 
> Max Roach, Roy
> Haynes and Art Blakey. Their whole concept was different.

No argument with that. Jazz styles have changed so rapidly throughout its 
relatively brief history, with each generation building on the best of what 
had gone before, so naturally players have tended to seek out like-minded 
contemporaries as they seek to expand the jazz vocabulary. However a 
player's versatility and adaptability were as prized as his/her 
individuality and this enabled many of the best to play with musicians of 
succeeding or preceding generations.

> Ken, in my view, there is a fundamental error in principle in leaping
> into jazz half way through its history. If you want to build a house,
> you first have to lay foundations. The foundations of jazz are the
> fathers...Dodds etc. No Dodds, no Roach.
>
I see what you're saying and have already acknowledged that successive 
generations of jazzers adapt and develop the thinking of their predecessors, 
but I don't think your analogy entirely applies:. I've always thought of 
music as language and jazz as one of the subsidiary languages of music. I 
acknowledge that the roots of the English language lie in Anglo-Saxon (among 
others), but I don't need to study Anglo-Saxon in order to converse in 
today's world.

If I have a pupil who wants to learn about playing jazz drums, he's come 
from playing other types of music (usually rock) since I don't teach 
rudiments. So these youngsters come to learn about swinging jazz feel and 
often specifically about playing brushes. If jazz has crossed their horizon 
at all, it's almost certainly modern jazz of the last 50 years, so they're 
more likely to have heard Roach, Elvin Jones, Dave Weckl etc than Sid or 
Zutty or Baby. Sid's playing, to my ear, represents an excellent synthesis 
of earlier styles and a clear pointer to what was to come after. He was also 
a fine technician and above all an outstanding musician whose solos have a 
marvellous sense of structure and whose accompaniments are wonderfully 
supportive. In short, an ideal benchmark figure to demonstrate the basics of 
time playing and solo construction and simultaneously underlining the 
importance of the history and traditions of the music.

I wrote:
>> If he/she wants to become an early jazz specialist (it's never happened 
>> so far), then I'd
>> introduce Zutty, Baby etc

And John wrote:
> Maybe it's never happened because you've not pointed them towards the
> early styles.

I usually tell pupils about Baby and Zutty and other players of earlier 
styles, and recommend specific recordings to listen to, but so far no pupil 
has shown any desire to investigate in depth through lessons. If I've made 
them curious about early jazz it's a bonus but, being realistic about the 
shrinking market for these styles, there are fewer gigs, limited 
opportunities to get the all-important on-gig experience and not much money 
in it either, so, if the passion isn't there in the pupil to go for it, 
there's no point in flogging a dead horse.

Regards,

Ken Mathieson