[Dixielandjazz] Dixieland

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

So far as I can make out, the project of arriving at a precise definition of Dixieland and setting boundaries, like where Dixieland might end, has a lot in common with the sort of (in the bad sense) academic (in every sense) B-S which goes in for petty and inane pedantries about political correctness. Just because there is no formally appointed Big Brother as in George Orwell's 1984, this doesn't mean there's no enthusiasm for Newspeak, for a precise nearly mathematical defining of words regardless of whether they continue to refer to reality. 


Dixieland is a very loose term, with a margin or fringe of reference which is debatable but not necessarily worth debating.  I have seen the term applied to the music recorded for Commodore by Lips Page and Albert Ammons, though that's more a sort of midwestern music in some respects Chicagoan and in others Kansas City, and to say more about it needs more words not some formula... Except it IS NOT DIXIELAND.


Dickie Wells, and I really must get back the copy of his autobiography I loaned some time to a counsellor of alcoholics (there is material in the book useful to him) dated his first acquaintance with Dixieland around 1940, it was not a sort of music he ever played, and I read him as seeing in the music for which he was duly celebrated a fertilisation of a sort of brass band and marching band sort of music, not unlikely with some American influences including ragtime, by awareness of what Louis Armstrong and others had recorded. Any notion of a linear development from ragtime through (and I can loathe this word heartily) DIXIELAND to Swing to Bop is a formula ignoring the historical diversity of the USA. If you disagree, go for a walk from Brooklyn Bridge and I'll meet you there the following day after you've strolled through Detroit and Baton Rouge.  


So far as I can make out, a precise description of Dixieland makes sense only really with reference to the ODJB and to what Jimmy McPartland, Bud Freeman and a few others were doing before 1930. And after 1930, and into the 1940s and beyond. 


Quite possibly there were similarities between what Dickie Wells played as a boy, and the supposedly dull music of Fletcher Henderson before Louis Armstrong arrived, and before Garvin Bushell and Bubber Miley went to Chicago in a trip roughly parallel to some later musicians' ventures into say Cuban music -- before the string bass playing of Wellman Braud with Ellington produced another fertilising effect, such as Milt Hinton experienced from I think it was Bill Johnson, and Walter Page from another -- New Orleans anyway.

According to Harrysweets Edison, Basie reached New York with a band in which some of the ensemble music wasn't read from paper but was a result of hornmen finding notes to play, in effect improvising on the chords not solo but harmonising according to their musical awareness and talent -- Tubby Hayes subbing for Paul Gonsalves long ago in London said he was told that when Ellington called one or two numbers Tubby could find no music for, that there simply never had been any. Of course the only reason for there being any is the probability of musicians getting lost, meaning not knowing what were right notes and what wrong notes, but being at a loss to find anything worth playing. I have a tape involving a hilarious 32 bars in which Doc Cheatham, Earle Warren and Benny Waters missed the cue for a rideout, and everybody was laughing because they had to keep going to resume actually doing something at the beginning of the next chorus... None of this was
 Dixieland, and it all had wider reference. 


With McPartland/ Freeman etc. Dixieland proper, there was a liberation of different voices, due surely to Bechet and Armstrong pioneering of phrasing and harmony. And also due to talented application of European means of putting things together. There are surely parallels between what white kids were doing in Chicago, and what various non-white New Yorkers, Bostonians etc. were doing with the same influences.   


Luis Russell at the same time was in ensemble actually closer to 1923 King Oliver, and indeed Sam Morgan, with the increased number of musicians matching the demands of venues he played in, and arrangements to maintain the movement of not Dixieland but Sam Morgan and King Oliver. At the same time as other bandleaders were doing more patchy things, jazz in places, square in others, and some were marrying traditions into jazz, Russell was applying what he had learned in New Orleans,  though his initial formal legit schooling hampered him as  a jazz pianist. 


I would go with the idea that Fletcher Henderson, once musicians available to him in New York had a better idea of jazz playing, was in various respects trying to do with a band what stride pianists were doing on piano; and if you want to make adverse comments on Henderson's earliest recordings you can hear on various records of Willie the Lion Smith talking a similar uncomplimentary account of pianists he heard in his youth. Something woke people up.

It so happened that for various reasons "Dixieland" became something of a fashionable genre in the 1940s, represented now on CD by a lot of non-studio recordings including Eddie Barefield playing Dixieland clarinet on "South" from the Benny Moten repertoire of a time when Moten's band had increased in complement and started playing rather less Dixielandish music than can be heard on his Okeh recordings, and which had matched his distinctively pedalled ragtime piano (also to be heard with the Arcadian serenaders, on which Bill Haesler tells me Moten was recognised a couple of decades before I was startled by the sound of him on those recordings). But surely Dixieland is, not cocktail music despite an unfortunate George Shearing date, but a cocktail of jazz influences and a potentially fruitful compromise. I have to confess preferring versions of Dixieland by the Oompah-centred band in Munich's Hofbrauhaus to some semi-pro North American ensembles
 homogenised with Saints and tunes deemed dead in Britain fifty years ago before Henry Allen actually did things with them. 


There has been an undue prominence of the term Dixieland confusing proper navigation of the regional and other complexities of jazz between the first 1917 recordings and the rise of bebop, due to the 1940s extension of a style which allowed musicians of various origin to work together and earn money still making good music. I don't imagine Dickie Wells would have been as good as Dickie Wells trying to fit in there, and he did say it was foreign to him. 


I was worse than unimpressed when I read Clint Eastwood's comment, talking about what was supposed to be Blues Piano, about Fats Waller. All Waller had in common with Blues Piano was  a certain pre-ancestry, and Eastwood was confusing his experience of what he was hearing as a boy, "Hot Piano" as a sort of unity it isn't.  


Of course as an exceptional Kansas City (Oklahoma-born) pianist Jay McShann had a wider range (I once had a brief discussion with him of the stride master Donald Lambert, whom he knew when in New York) and so indeed had Pete Johnson, whose private recordings I've never yet heard. Waller notably refused to play anything resembling boogie woogie and quite right too, for he was interested in developing different aspects of music. And then we have Norman Mason, venerable St. Louis clarinetist, whom Bob Koester recorded long ago with the guitarists Mason was working with. Mason complained around the same time (1960) that he hated Dixieland, and that working with Singleton Palmer's band he had to play against his style. There is something restricted and tame in the examples I've heard of that band. 


King Oliver didn't play Dixieland, except in bigger band performances where the same European factors which came in with McPartland etc. were just a means of keeping the band together.  I do remember the ultimate in chronological falsehoods, where some young man probably now in his fifties and liking post-Coltrane because it was trendy was asked about Charlie Parker. He said his father had mentioned Parker, who as far as he himself knew had been an old-time dixieland saxophonist.  

Halleluia! Amen.

Robert R. Calder