[Dixielandjazz] Tram

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Not to be confused with 'Bus' Moten 

It's worth remembering the example of Billy Kyle, who seems to have influenced a lot of people (I have a printed booklet of solo transcriptions from him).  The balance of different elements in his playing seems to have had considerable appeal even to Bud Powell.  There is also something very Billy Kyle-ish in some Hank Jones trio performances impeccable even by his standards, but curiously frozen, such that a marvellous run almost becomes wearing after it has popped up in a few different numbers, and indeed Hank's imagination did move him out of that perfection -- and near the end of a very long career he was producing hearty stride choruses in a quartet with Eddie Daniels on clarinet.  
Certainly on reed instruments, though, Tram and others were real pioneers, doing things beyond what the devisers and makers of early saxophones could hardly have imagined.  Doing things of a distinction which marks them out, irrespective of fertility of linear improvisation. To complain that Tram showed little evidence of that kind of invention is to forget the limits of opportunity, just as a lot of musicians who played solos that were long and not too long, tended to simplify in some aspects earlier conceptions of the instruments. 

Suggestions that the records don't bear out the claims made by some musicians for some of their contemporaries have too often assumed that under other circumstances there couldn't have been such evidence.  

all the best,Robert R. Calder