[Dixielandjazz] British OKOM and US pop

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

One of the things I noted when various well-dressed US Dixielanders came to Edinburgh was pretty well echoed by Dick Hyman when he started to work in Europe and very much as stride pianist. European bands at festivals tended to have an interest in a wider repertoire, whereas only an attenuated selection of stock numbers came out of the American horns. 
These Americans at least did not go far back for their origins, it was by and large the repertoire of Dixieland as the pop music of some time before, and relatively polite, unlike for instance the wild stuff Don Ewell's band was delivering when Dewey Jackson filled in for Lee Collins on the date Bob Koester recorded on a borrowed tape machine. 
I suppose it was really second hand dixieland the Americans in question were delivering, like bands I have heard on pretty well riverboats on the Rhine, and I don't mean bands engaged by the boat company -- these guys were presumably there because of a gig on land, and just having a blow either on the way to or from whatever gig.  Jamming seems the wrong word for the Saints going sailing in or out yet again.  
 
And mainly oompah bands at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich or at outdoor beer or wine festivals switch into the same thing just for fun or variety, but as part of a job rather than whiling away a twenty minute boat trip. Following no very ancient precedent.  If perhaps some American dixielanders are just brass band players with a different repertoire, with a Sousa mentality, this seems to be enough the case in Germany that some younger people never heard Chris Barber properly. Dick Hyman wouldn't have found a wide repertoire among everyday dixie semi-pros heard everywhere but jazz festivals. 
 
As for those British players who have harked back to originals, I remember Humphrey Lyttelton observing that for musicians active around 1940 there was a tendency toward Dodds or Bechet (Wally Fawkes) -- whereas later on toward 1950 the starting point was George Lewis. 
 
I suppose a lot depended on how interested the instrumentalists were to explore beyond the immediate model. Why was Monty Sunshine so impressive just before a stroke disabled him untimely? Stan Tracey startled various people by engaging Acker Bilk as soloist on a very much 1970 arrangement based on then current Ellington.  
The first Sandy Brown music session the Edinburgh Jazz Festival mounted was different because Forrie Cairns on clarinet with Messrs. Armit, Fairweather and other Brown alumni was such a distinctive neo-Bechetian and very good too. I could suggest that the real question is quite how interested respective musicians are in getting beyond received ways of playing.  And with this over a long time there has been the question of how much jazz of longer-established styles musicians and others have been able to access. 
 
The worthy producers of LPs of 1920s jazz on the "Historical" label were scandalised by British reviewers who described their products as messy. As if there was no idea that Europeans had been bringing out carefully systematic selections of the oldest jazz for some time.  An American enthusiast on holiday who started a conversation with a friend of mine on a Scottish train, seeing him reading the copy of Gunter Schuller's then recently published EARLY JAZZ he had bought for my birthday, was astonished by the things I'd been able to let my friend hear. On bargain-price vinyl reissues. 
 
I once found a c.1920 Bert Williams (as in Ellington's Portrait of..) 78 in a charity/ thrift shop. Stylistically it's hardly different from Max Miller or George Formby or many another English music hall comic singer. Dixieland as nostalgic pop persists in lots of places, but the term's not so widely applied and misapplied in parts of Europe as in USA, interested Europeans have had less of a struggle to find out what had been going on in USA, to make discoveries not about the dead and gone but rather the sort of lessons there were for some earlier Europeans with the discovery of Bach. 
Of course it's a different matter if your father was a jazzman or jazz fan before you, like the guy I was at school with who brought in and played his father's 78s. As an undergraduate I was asked by a student from New York if I'd heard of Louis Metcalf.  (!!!!!) Actually I had. The New York guy had seen Metcalf's NYC residency advertised. He said he might have gone, but all too often when something was advertised as old jazz it turned out to be slushy nostalgic pop. I've never heard the highly recommended session by Metcalf which Victoria Spivey recorded for her own label at that time, 
 
slainte mhath!
Robert