[Dixielandjazz] Tio in NYC

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I have suddenly remembered hearing a lady on radio talk about travelling from New Orleans to New York, and I think she was Blue Lu Barker, and she had been young at the time, and was travelling with Lorenzo Tio as an escort. I have a date of birth for Mrs. Barker of 1913. Presumably somebody can come up with the year.


Bill's friend Baz's comment on the time taken by train between the two towns brought this to  mind, for the lady's memory was that she had taken sandwiches for the trip, had no idea how long it would be, and asked Tio rather early how much longer, and should she maybe now make a start into her mother's sandwiches. I think the rather early was about half an hour.  This is a very old memory, even on my part!  

I would back a clarinetist of Albert experience to recognise complexities that could annul lay listeners' observations of differences. Sounds like the same clarinetist to me on all the Piron sides, at least in the dubbing I have, though playing a bit more softly on the titles under consideration, and being done no favours at all by the sound which comes out when I listen to the RedHotJazz dubs. Many have been the voices whose reputations were lowered when judged according to what came through an unhappy combination of primitive or bad recording and misreproduction, or just the first of these. A mere(!) fifty years ago what turned out to have been Elmo Hope's final recording was marred when the machinery mis-registered his light touch so that the piano sounds out of tune -- though the pianist was sufficiently individual to be unmistakeable. Ordinariness is more easily recorded. 

The Piron recordings have further significance, in that certainly according to witnesses Karl Gert zur Heide interviewed for his book on Little Brother Montgomery, Steve J. Lewis was the outstanding New Orleans piano man of the time. Survived by these numbers, a few accompaniments and a piano roll, as far as I am aware -- but discoveries are possible.
Like Australian clarinetists worth listening to! 

Robert R. Calder