[Dixielandjazz] Dixieland

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I would suppose aversion to the word "Dixieland" derives from extreme misuse of the word and popular expectations of something rinky-dink and cheery and shallow. 
Ah, the media. Last week on SKY  a News presenter prefaced the break with the statement that when the programme resumed they would "tell you what you think" ... 

There was the young man who said that he knew the name Charlie Parker from his father, and Parker had been a "dixieland saxophonist"
Then there was a reviewer in the New York Review of books who misapplied the word Dixieland to the impressive Commodore recordings of Hot Lips Page with Albert Ammons.  Not to mention the lady who thought me odd for saying "no" when she said "Dixieland" when I mentioned New Orleans Jazz, specifically Sam Morgan. 

I suppose these new players are very understandably and justifiably wary of their music being mistaken for sterile and vacuous cheer. I can remember several decades ago a young New Yorker I met saying he had seen posters for a concert by Louis Metcalf (I've never heard the highly reputed LP Victoria Spivey issued on her label, of Metcalf). The guy told me that he would have been interested to hear more older music, but whenever he went along to a gig it was old-fashioned pop music playing down to the audience. Actually Albert McCarthy told me that when he recorded the Mainstream session for I think the Felsted label (c. 1960 including Joe Thomas and very notably Herbie Nichols on piano on some tracks) that it was hard to induce some musicians to play what was wanted, and stop worrying about non-jazz expectations of the conventional mass audience of
a certain age. Actually I seem to recall Johnny Letman from that same date, turning up in Edinburgh with an initial impression that he was there to do the imitation Louis (for people who don't really like JAZZ) he had been using as a staple. Happily it was not long before there was the characteristic single bum note, which Letman produced when he was starting to play seriously. 

We can call this list what we like, as long as it doesn't conform to elderly expectations of a tame "Dixieland" which scarcely merits the name of jazz. 
The word should be avoided where it is liable to mislead. And of course "Trad" was also used by some folks at a certain time as a term of dismissal, and confusion. 


it may all be music, but some examples are better than others


Robert R. Calder