[Dixielandjazz] J C Johnson

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/RedHotJazz/message/1977
 
I sent this link to Ken Mathieson off-list -- and he was responding to that. I did post quite a bit on the redhotjazz site about Procope, citing Ken's reminiscence of Harold Dejan on Tio and Procope. 
I would think this JC JOhnson does sound a lot like Procope, and Procope on alto did seem to have developed a more lyrical approach in keeping with the John Kirby sound, by the time he worked in the Ellington band, rather than the actually more New Orleans alto style on the JC Johnson. 
Hearing Procope in the flesh from nearer the band than when I first heard him a few years earlier, he was a startlingly powerful player. He did all the low register stuff on this recording from 45 years before, and to do that with a big band (Ellington) and be heard he had to project. It's a matter of carry -- I do recall that in the Usher Hall, where I heard procope, my own experience and that of others with imprudent bass and baritone singers was of watching them mouthing but not hearing that much. 
Ellington filled the Usher Hall, the Marsalis Lincoln Center band in the same venue thirty years later could be heard perfectly well, but it was as if the hall had become enormous -- the difference between players brought up without comprehensive pa. and microphone-adjusted youth of the recent past.
 
The first low register clarinet stuff on Hottentot is almost Doddsian -- from the time Johnny Dodds was producing some wince-worthy upper middle register things with the Hot Five, having shifted to the same sort of fence-post one gathers Ben Webster used for a reed. I swear my lower lip shrank in dread at the sound of close-up Procope, from recollection of its own problems with even normal reeds. I do somewhere have a Procope solo in the early 1930s with big band, and it's a big noise and I think not unlike on the J.C. Johnson (can't locate the LP at present, alas). 
 
It is quite possible that beside later being an exemplary sideman in big bands, Procope, who reminisced about hovering around Fats Waller and James P. Johnson in the very early 1920s, had established his solo playing in the 1920s when very young, and was in some respects a pre-swing era musician. The speculation that his amazing solo on Morton's DEEP CREEK was written out for him might be replaced by a reference to how much his later magnificent playing with Ellington (a one-man reed section on AZURE) was written for him and not a jazz solo. It's interesting that there is a NY clarinetist on DEEP CREEK, but playing soprano. And now I must definitely acquire his recordings with Chris Barber. 
 
Mabel Horsey turns up -- as Bill Haesler perhaps can note -- in a kind of dance band pianist role vamping accompaniments around the time, somebody who could play the chords in support, perhaps a piano teacher.  JC Johnson himself and Perry Bradford also filled in in that sort of role. 
Or she may have represented the sort of ragtime Willie the Lion Smith could be a little rude about.
The number of anonymous-sounding contributions by named pianists in the 1920s is considerably greater than the number of interestingly characterful but usually too short or otherwise restricted demonstrations by unidentified pianists from 1920-1943.
 
Hottentot reminds me of something else from the time, but I can't remember what. The harmonies on the other number bring to mind early King Oliver.  I think this is an example of the arrival of New Orleans influence in New York in a big way. I am not boasting about my memory when I say I think I would have remembered this recording if I ever heard it before. It's definitely something!
 
thanks again, Ken, 
 
Robert