[Dixielandjazz] Bixing

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I came across worse than Bixing when SonyCloumbia produced NOW THAT'S CHICAGO! to go with a film named for the city on the lake. 


Apparently before Duke Ellington was famous he was the pianist of JOE TURNER AND HIS MEMPHIS MEN. 

If I'd had access to recording details of one non-jazz vocal item I might have been able to say exactly how few tracks on the CD were recorded in Chicago.  One of the few genuine items was by a Melrose, I mean Kansas City Frank. 

The other one was by Frankie Jaxon with an amazing big band sounding rather like the best Hines of c.1930 though comprised of another personnel altogether. 
I don't know what happened to my review copy, but I think the disc also included the California Ramblers (like almost everything else a New York recording  -- there was a nice Fletcher Henderson performance, but in appalling sound! 


Then there was the geezer from I think KEYBOARD magazine who announces in the notes to the CD of the Marian McPartland/ Teddy Wilson broadcast that until Teddy arrived in Chicago there was only ever Boogie Woogie there --
I can think of 57 varieties at odds with the idiot assertion. 


If you go back enough and stay in Europe somebody in the 1940s was saying that Frank Melrose had to be a nom-de-disque for Morton, since the style was recognisably the same. As if any jazz style could emerge rootless;
on a similar sere and yellow page I see also the identification of Walter Davis and Walter Roland. Which one was the pianist's real name? The problem is quite how anybody could have supposed these two much-recorded blues pianists of the 1930s sounded the same as each other.  


And we have Delta Bluesman Blind Willie McTell . . .  from Atlanta, Georgia? 

Next thing he'll have been nicknamed the Shevardnaze of the 12-string.  


Some years ago I was reminded of SAGA records UK and their "Charlie Parker, the faceless man, for almost no photograph exists"
The reminder was a delightful young lady saying how delighted she was with her Parker CD.
There was a photograph!  I recognised it immediately!  Just think, in 1967 I saw Charlie Parker in Glasgow, sitting beside Russell Procope in the band led by the former pianist of Joe Turner and his Memphis Men. 


There was an example of the opposite sin when the idea that Charlie Green, Trombone Cholly, might have frozen to death by winter misadventure, was dismissed as romanticist and in bad taste. I imagine Cholly himself would not have wished the story to be true. 


Chilly!

Robert