[Dixielandjazz] TOUGH ON BLACK ARTISTS

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The very great Luckey Roberts recorded a couple of piano solos in 1916 

but it seems nothing survives of them, though he did accompany a couple of comedians on disc very early.

I do have my Bert Williams 78/ 80 rpm disc from 1919 or so, with its absence of anything jazzlike. 
And I have the Cliff Jackson band recordings, most of which used the musicians' proficiency to perform dance music that could never have been made interesting, as indeed did most of the Goldkette recordings, and so many others. And there are the really driving two sides by a Mal Hallett band which somehow survived in archives, never having been issued before CD. 
I've another reissued side by a straight contralto, who might if white have had a minor role in Rigoletto, but the note in the files suggesting she might have some prospect as a "blues singer" indicate incompetence as well as unfortunate preferences on the part of producers ... 

There has never been that much of a notable colour bar among hacks and the uncomprehending who never saw much musical point in recording jazz.  
If you look beyond the area of jazz at a period when even Luckey Roberts hadn't recorded the titles lost and never issued, it seems quite likely that Keppard's reluctance to record in 1916 had a lot to do with an early suspicion that recording would never amount to anything, though perhaps Keppard thought it might be only a localised phenomenon -- with its most notable audience neighbours who could listen over and over again to his playing and lift enough to acquire resources to draw his audience away. 
My own introduction to jazz was via music whose equivalent thirty or forty years before would have been marketed in the USA as part of what was called a "race" series. I found my way to it by way of rip-offs that I didn't follow into Rock etc. Ripping off of course went on in the 1930s, well before my time, when I have no doubt some sober and quiet spoken musical half-wit would be willing to explain to the puzzled and patient why Nat Gonella's music was in fact better than that of Louis Armstrong. There's some interesting stuff in the sleevenote to one of the first vinyl reissues of Clarence Williams, about hype referring not to the music but to what other more passive listeners, kindred with intended purchasers of the product, would assume. In 1936 if you listened to Clarence Williams you'd be an anachronism.  

I still like the sick story of the college band, who fell out in angry contention but were brought together for money because they had been recorded and the wholly fictitious band under whose name the recordings were issued had developed something of a following. More recently, however, the fictional bands have been recruited, and have even mimed live on stage. 

I once mimed live on television. I was in a school choir and placed for camera purposes among the tenors, a matter of how tall we were; and they couldn't hold difficult parts with a basso profundo among them. One little girl who saw me on TV spotted I was miming. I hate singing in choirs!
"I'm sorry, Mr. Armstrong, we need a taller trumpeter"?

Robert R. Calder