[Dixielandjazz] Plunger, Al Grey, etc

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I would have thought the item generally referred to as a plunger was the opposite of a friend to many the plumber whose services were not required following a judicious amateur performance with the item? 


I got on very well with Al Grey, who in terms of style and chronology was decidedly pre-bop, and like Buster Cooper, another convivial trombonist, a Lionel Hampton alumnus.  As I recall, Al was drafted in to a Mercer Ellington ensemble which used guests to avoid being too ghostly a Duke Ellington Orchestra under the direction of....  

Now and then he relaxed from the demands of seriously creative soloing in the direction of extravert fun. 

Very much Lionel Hampton. OKOMist weakness I suppose less damning than the opposite. And when Al was good he was very very good. 

I suppose Joe Nanton was the leader in the sort of plunger use developed by Cootie. The sort of two handed mute and valves playing notable from King Oliver and various too nearly entirely legendary St. Louis players -- and George Orendorff with the Paul Howard band which Lionel Hampton joined, was rather phased out by the 1930s, and as I might already have said Cootie was very different in that he used the mute to modernise his playing, as Rex Stewart did too. The boppers tended to take a more European approach to matters of expression, and only with the bluesier and funkier incursions was there space for anything resembling plunger work of the Cootie sort. Or Jimmy Knepper. 

Before his conversion Wynton Marsalis talked with some approval of a reprimand he received from Art Blakey for using some ideas he'd taken from a Cootie Williams recording. Blakey had a rather elderly view of a need to keep on modernising. As I recall there was a tendency to be defensive among younger players who liked to jam with older men -- there was an anecdote about Eric Dolphy at a time when his recordings were not such as to please a lot of listmates, as if he had somehow been caught out the night he was heard (around 1960) jamming with veterans in Harlem. 
Guys born well after 1960 should be immune to that -- as was the young Bobby Watson, whom I remember from one fantastic gig in Edinburgh with the pianist Alex Shaw and front line partners in John Barnes and Roy Williams.  No worries about being unmodern. 

I also remember an Edinburgh Jazz Festival gala concert where Warren Vache filled in for an indisposed Doc Cheatham and wound up trading fours with Humphrey Lyttelton. And Humph used a plunger technique not to growl but to attain a compatibility with Warren. Two-handed trumpet-playing to modify the line, which is of course what St. Louis trumpeters were noted for in the different way of the  1920s. 


Robert R. Calder