[Dixielandjazz] More on JRM and Marsalis

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi All,

A happy, healthy and prosperous 2012 to all listmates!

I've been following the dialogue about JRM and Marsalis's Sidewalk Blues with interest and would have contributed sooner, but a Scotsman's liver has a very busy schedule at this time of year! The comparison between the 2 recordings brings up some very interesting points which haven't really been covered so far.

The first is about time feel: On the JRM, everyone has the same time feel, which was the time feel of the day, so the whole performance has a rhythmic coherence. They're all talking the same rhythmic language which comes naturally to them as the jazz lingua franca of their time. Marsalis chose to go down the repertory route and attempt to recreate JRM's version in all but solos, but the rhythmic language necessary to do this is totally alien to all of them since they come from 3 generations down the line and jazz time has changed radically in the interim, so there's a strong whiff of pastiche about their perfomance. When Marsalis attempts to phrase like George Mitchell, it comes out slightly wrong and often corny.

As well as the issue of time feel, I think there's a massive difference in the concept of how rhythm works. JRM's players allow the rhythm to flow horizontally, whereas Marsalis's players tend to verticalise the rhythm. Flowing rhythm is the cornerstone of Jelly's own playing and I'm certain he chose his men very carefully to ensure the whole band adopted his concept. Just listen to the drummers on the 2 recordings. Andrew Hilaire is never prominent, but he is coaxing and cajoling the music to flow and, on other tracks where he is more prominent in the mix, you can hear him subtly syncopating across the bar lines and beats - it's not simply press rolls. In other words, he's pushing the rhythm along horizontally to balance the more vertical pulse laid down by banjo and bass. On the Marsalis, the drummer, although playing press rolls, accents them with a heavy and persistent back beat which accentuates the vertical rhythm further, so instead of the rhythm being up on its tiptoes, it sounds a bit leaden and flatfooted. It's a very common misconception among drummers in the last 50 years that jazz's early styles require a heavy and persistent back beat, but where's the historical evidence? Baby Dodds, Zutty, Spargo and later players like Catlett, Dave Tough, Wettling, Leeman, Hanna etc were all over the beat, pushing the music along, and back beats were generally used sparingly for emphasis and ride-out passages. It's a topic that I feel very strongly about: I teach pupils to view rhythm "as a liquid" and seek to make it flow across the vertical markers of barlines and beats. In my own band, my rhythm section partners were very carefully chosen to achieve this. Jelly gets it, but the Marsalis version doesn't in spite of all the men being wonderfully gifted musicians.

One of the ironies emerging from the comparison is that Marsalis allowed his men more freedom to express themselves than Jelly ever did. Comparison of the 2 JRM takes of Sidewalk Blues, shows that virtually everything - solos and ensemble parts - is replicated except for minor ornamentation. Listmates who are familiar with Jim Dapogny's huge and masterly book of transcriptions of Jelly's solo recordings and piano rolls will be aware that the inner voices for horns and most of their solo passages on the Red Hot Peppers recordings were integral parts of Jelly's earlier solo piano versions of the tunes. In his best recordings, Jelly left little to chance, so the extent of improvisation is often minimal. This isn't to say that the musicians weren't capable of improvising, but rather that Jelly was an outstanding bandleader and arranger who wanted results in the studio. Marsalis, on the other hand, opted to let his men have a free say when it came to solos. Some listmates may find the results hard to take, but it generally does avoid pastiche.

And this is the dilemma faced by musicians of later generations who want to play earlier styles. Do you copy everything - solos, ensemble inner parts etc - and inevitably lose out in comparison to the original recordings? Or do you do what Marsalis did and copy everything except solos, in which case, you get an audible crunching of gears when the band moved from 1927 ensemble to solos in today's idioms? When I put together my Classic Jazz Orchestra, I had to find a workable solution to this dilemma, but didn't see it as an "either/or" choice: Instead, I opted to write new arrangements on classic material (in reality, I had little option since I had a fixed instrumentation whereas the great music of the past was realised in a multitude of different instrumentations), but to incorporate into them cross-references to passages in ensembles and/or solos on the original recordings. Soloists are free to express themselves in their own styles and it's the rhythm section's job to adjust to stylistic changes and to prevent soloists from getting too far from the basic feel of the chart. I don't know how successful we've been in this (that's a very subjective judgement for listeners), but I'm content in the knowledge that in the process we've created something original without being disrespectful to the great music and musicians of jazz history.

I think that's enough for Ne'erday. It's time to give my liver another doing!

Cheers,

Ken Mathieson