[Dixielandjazz] Mercury Records Art Hodes

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I remember Art Hodes on stage moaning about how the biggest-selling of all his recordings was the series of duets with Truck Parham on bass on the Mercury label, so many thousands or tens of thousands of copies sold.
Then it went out of print, and any time he got a reply from Mercury to his queries about the LP aka Album, it said that reissue wouldn't be warranted by demand. He breathed hotly about pirating the recording, something considerably -- very considerably -- more difficult then than now... All the music was his and he could let people hear it only if he risked bootlegging the recording. 


He could have been excused for not taking in what I told him later, that the only example from the LP a lot of people had heard was a single track playfully but very respectfully put on his BBC turntable by the late Charles Fox, who commemorated the impending visit to London of the Ganelan (?) Trio, Russian and avant-garde, by letting listeners hear it.  The programme/ show Charles Fox prepared and presented was called something like JAZZ TODAY and the focus was nothing if not contemporary (Fox presented the edition immediately after J*hn C*ltr*ne's death deeply stricken with grief). While Hodes was of course born in the Ukraine, his family as Jewish most likely thought of themselves as Russian, rather in relation to the Tsar than the more local forces whose nastier ways compelled a lot of people to head west. 


I wonder whether it's findable these days, that Mercury LP, not to be confused with the much later one on the Muse label, with a sleevenote peculiar for speculating about how close Art Hodes and the bassist on that disc, Milt Hinton, MIGHT have been to each other at a certain time...  Dammit, they were both involved in the Hull House project as young men in Chicago.  And of course after the concert where I heard Art he was recorded a lot more, by Bob Koester for Delmark.  And even bloody BlueNote once the old management was bust and new management installed, started to issue some recordings by him from the wealth of stuff shamefully buried in their vaults. 

Hodes observed in vinegary style, "I had no work and so I wrote a blues." Bravo!


Robert