[Dixielandjazz] NO Wanderers, was Chicago jazz show

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi All,

Anton and Adrian have got a discussion going on the relative merits of Louis Armstrong and George Mitchell as well as Jelly Roll Morton and Lil Hardin Armstrong. I'm not going to get into a debate about the relative merits of Louis and George other than to say that they were very different types of player: Louis was the mercurial virtuoso, in both leads and solos, while George was in demand as a reliable lead player who read well and played accurately, but whose solos were never as innovative or exciting or enduring as Louis' solos.

Mitchell's reliable lead is probably why he was picked for the Chicago Red Hot Peppers dates. Jelly wasn't just a great pianist and composer: he was a non-pareil arranger in his favoured idiom and tightly-arranged music requires accurate lead playing, whatever the instrumentation or idiom. Listen to the alternative takes of most of the Chicago Victors: they're musically largely indistinguishable from the issued takes. Generally the differences lie in the engineering, usually in the sound balancing of the band, since, in the main, the performances tend to vary only in ornamentation. Many of the solos are markedly similar from take to take, which leads me to conclude that most of the music, including solos, was written down or learned by rote.

That shouldn't be surprising: many of JRM's greatest compositions were originally conceived and carefully worked out as competition pieces to be used to see off local pianists in Jelly's ramblings around North America and, to a large extent, it was these pieces which Jelly chose to record first. Comparison of his various piano solo recordings and piano rolls with the corresponding Red Hot Peppers' band versions confirms this. Jelly simply arranged the band versions to incorporate the inner voices, structures and features of his long-established piano versions. It's easy to follow the evolution of these band versions by studying James Dapogny's marvellous transcriptions of Morton piano solos which were published by Smithsonian Institution Press. All the band figures, even down to simple ornamentation, are there to be seen on the page as played by Jelly on piano.

This raises the interesting issue of how much improvisation there is some of the great jazz recordings since, after all, jazz is supposed to be an improvised music. But we know that Louis, Bechet, Jelly and others had set solo routines worked out on specific numbers and that they stuck very close to those templates for the rest of their careers. When Armstrong began working with Don Redman in the late 1920s, the concept of informally pre-planned solos merged with the concept of formally orchestrated performances and you get pieces like St James Infirmary, where virtually every note played by Louis is shadowed in a harmony line by one or more of the other horns. 

Ken Mathieson