[Dixielandjazz] PAT Flowers and Willie Mabon

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Marek says that


>On some RCA compilation they say that [Pat Flowers] as compared to no less than Fats Waller (or something of the sort), forgetting to mention that it >was Victor who did that - after all, it wanted another best selling star!  So Fowler [sic] recorded with a similar band, but Waller he was not."

I really do not give a damn what Victor said or with what or whom the label compared Pat Flowers. It is unfortunate that he was teamed up with Waller sidemen and got to sing  on material of limited potential --- indeed it's unfortunate that Waller was obliged to do so very much the same in the same company ...   Pat Flowers -- not Fowler -- was a startlingly capable stride pianist regardless of anything else, as his solo recordings make clear. As for Art Tatum, Fats Waller he too was not.  

Flowers should not have been engaged to play novelty boogie woogie -- some of his solo and trio recordings come straight from Chopin et al., and when he plays the Chopin theme straight he does so like any competent professional Chopin etc. specialist. In the Waller solo repertoire he was at least as able as anybody around now.


At Nice when Marek heard Lloyd Glenn he might have been got to vary his repertoire, for quite possibly he imagined he was expected to perform the sort of stuff he was famous in the USA for playing in the 1940s. His "Deep Blue Melody" was a nice Ellingtonian chart, and he wrote for bands other than the Don Albert one whose pianist he was. Don Albert was an interesting king Oliver sort of trumpeter, who -- just as Bennie Moten resigned the piano stool to Basie -- found a more modern performer on his own instrument to star in his band: Alvin Alcorn, about whom Pat Halcox enthused to me long ago before Alvin outshone most of the Chris Barber band on stage. Don Albert's star tenor saxophonist was Louis Cottrell Jr., better known as a postwar clarinetist back in New Orleans, not least on a recording with Herb Hall, brother of Ed, and of Robert, who was on a lot of Fats Domino records. 

  

Fortunately Sonny Thompson was recorded in France playing something different, but Hugues Panassie did write about his capacities as rather a jazzman of a kind with (though not in the same class as) Art Tatum. Listmates might like his French LP.  I think he was actually brought across to play in a non-jazz blues band. 

Willie Mabon on the other hand was neither a bluesman nor a jazz pianist, rather a pop singer who played competent anonymous piano on his vocal records for the 1940s-1950s market which in the 1930s was referred to as "Race" music. 


  Robert R. Calder