[Dixielandjazz] Ray Nance

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I could bemuse North Americans -- possibly not Bill Haesler and his compatriots -- with the four names of Holding, Roberts, Garner and Marshall, whom dozy cricket commentators declare to have been among the very best fast bowlers, and continue to observe took many but not an incredible number of wickets each. Of course they all played in the same team and shared a finite number of wickets -- just as the Ellington trumpet section had for most of the time some startling players.
The unrelieved presence of just Ray Nance is an amazing experience --  though in Fred Trueman's phrase he was probably very tired when the date was finished. I was remembering from the CD notes that Nance had been on his own in the band for a little while. Maybe because the piano player liked things that way. 

I wrote that: 

--- “Pie Eye’s Blues” reinforces the moral demand to note what an amazing 
musician Ray Nance was, with a collossal tone on the --- hybrid-like 
trumpet-cornet which he preferred to more conventional horns. The only 
fiddler always, and on the dates which --- provided the bulk of the music 
here sole Gabriel!

BLUES IN ORBIT is the album/ CD in question, too much gush and rush in the rest of what I wrote, 

but ennit amazing to discover something like that, which I'd never heard before. Rejuvenating! 
I wonder where my scratchy old Earl Hines airshots are!  For the pre-Ellington Nance. I last fished them out when Ken Mathieson mentioned his idea of Darnell Howard and Omer Simeon as on-the-air clarinet=playing influences on Charlie Parker. And the terrific alto soloist was Budd Johnson, some of whose best 1940s tenor work was highly praised by an unusually misinformed Alun Morgan, who thought he was listening to the young Yusef Lateef in the big band of a trumpeter with whom Nance much later recorded -- and traded phrases with -- on fiddle.  Deo gratias, DG.


many thanks, Steve, for Braff on Nance,

Robert 


> Ruby Braff considered Nance, after Armstrong, to be one of the greatest 
> of all jazz players. Ruby's trumpet-cornet playing was much influenced 
> by Ray Nance's violin and cornet playing.
> 
> Steve Voce