[Dixielandjazz] Sweet `Music

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I should imagine the term applied to standard pop music of the period into the 1920s, as played all across USA and Europe and various imperial possessions.  On a level with the stuff handed out to Cliff Jackson's band when they went into the studio to record the dance numbers under the name of Marvin Smolev, though a little earlier. 

Salon or Palm Court Orchestra and dance band music of the period hardly varies regardless of where the musicians came from, bland stuff of the day. Hence "sweet"  with less of what the euphemism "making sweet music together" refers to.  Lonnie Johnson recording on electric guitar for the Cincinnati KING label in the 1950s produced examples of lyrical neo-saccharinity characteristic of that, which struck horror into the hearts of teenaged blues fans expecting more like Muddy Waters. 

There's a little bit of pre-1914 salon playing in Little Brother Montgomery, and there are echoes and nuances from the general field in Thelonious Monk. The sentimentality is chastened by affection. Louis of course has his Guy Lombardo and pre-Guy Lombardo enthusiasms, as on some ensemble work in earlier recordings with larger ensemble. The capacity to play pretty without which the more sentimental stuff can't be played is certainly there in a lot of older musicians, who generally refrained. 
The sort of non-Unsentimental stuff I mean is generally associated with white folks, but as fashionable pop of the 1920s and earlier it was middlebrow banal with an appeal to "respectable colored folks".

It could be admired for delicacy. Waltzes, Veletas, even the Invitation to the Daunce cited by St. Louis' very own T.S. Eliot,
and numbers of 78rpm discs listed in Brian Rust's earlier discographies because nobody had testified to their being jazz-free,

time to warm up a bit, now!

Robert R. Calder