[Dixielandjazz] Lester Young and Jimmie Noone

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Actually Marek referred to not hearing much if any resemblance between Johnny Dodds and Lester, but the same point applies, that they were both playing each his own distinctly jazz clarinet style, focussing expressive possibilities in ways some very accomplished clarinetists couldn't or didn't -- either when it wasn't inappropriate or when it would have been. 


Bechet has now been credited with imparting lessons to both Dodds and Noone, not to mention Louis Armstrong, from the way he and Bechet could complete each others' phrases in 1923, though Louis found out more for himself -- another question. 

If you listen to Dodds and Bechet and Noone, each of the others develops part of Bechet along certain lines. If you add enough clarinetists from the South in a certain period of influence, you get an enormous range of resemblances and differences. Kid Michall, for instance? Who recorded with a barrelhouse pianist called Charley Taylor and the blues singer-guitarist Rube Lacy. There is another obscure recording I remember by a Texan bluesman with a never-identified New Orleans clarinetist adding something strangely ethereal.  It could perhaps have been Louis Cottrell, temporarily a Texas tenor beside Alvin Alcorn in Don Albert's big band, before returning to New Orleans and eventually recording in duo with Herb Hall, who later on played some magnificent New Orleans rather than Hall family clarinet with the barrelhouse pianist known as the Gray Ghost. 

I once played some Noone to a young American musician, who had no notion of the history of saxophone playing, or of jazz, though she'd played baritone sax in a school band. Actually she asked whether anybody had done solo work on baritone!  

Noone she said played clarinet not as if it was a clarinet but as if he was a saxophone player still playing a saxophone.
I suppose it was something to do with the resonances Noone elicited and which when he leaned rather too much on them sounded what's been called soupy.  


Lotsa notes playing was I gather a New York craze in the 1920s when pop virtuosi sold records. Rudi Wiedoft was heralded as the world's greatest saxophonist, according to a family friend who was in the Glasgow theatre when the curtain was dropped on an over-lubricated Fats Waller delivering what was probably one of the private versions of Boy in the Boat. 

The technical possibiliies suggested musical possibilities, just as the unorthodoxies of the South and Chicago spawned novelty clarinet playing.  Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Carter alike drew on none too musical many-note models en route to more interesting. Doing more with fewer notes is an obvious phrase, but the boppers' ambition worthy or otherwise was to use virtuosity in a way that was anything but empty. A few decades earlier various American pianists, including Luckey Roberts and a number of Latin Americans, produced music of more interest than Europeans who could match Liszt only in how many dozen notes they played per minute. 

Charlie Parker presumably heard a lot of lotsa note playing here and there, so quite possibly Hines broadcasts let him hear purposeful virtuosity -- and in a style not deemed old hat, like some very respectable alto playing in the 1920s. And the multinote trumpet styles of Jabbo Smith and Dewey Jackson fitted no Dixieland revival. 

As for Russell Procope, I think he liked all his life the music he was playing, but that he'd developed an approach to soloing at odds with prevailing styles in the 1930s, and fitted in for the sake of the music, with Kirby and with Ellington. The same's actually the case with Barney Bigard, who switched from tenor to clarinet. 

Before Eddie Barefield, Benny Moten tended to have novelty clarinet on record. 


There's an almost Sonny Rollins but shorter tenor solo on a Muddy Waters recording of the 1950s, by the very Boyd Atkins credited, it now seems wrongly, with the alto solo on Louis's "Chicago Breakdown" from the 1920s. But in the 1940s Prince Robinson's 1920s tenor went straight into R&B. 

The history of instrumental styles in jazz goes beyond the standard general history of mainstream recordings. 


Robert R. Calder