[Dixielandjazz] Jabbo Smith and related cases

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

This is from an article I probably won't write now, anybody wanting to quote me,PLEASE use netiquette. 


As I recall, Milt Hinton was mightily impressed by Jabbo when he heard him in Chicago in the 1920s, and had some reason for preferring him to Louis.....

One of the problems involved in talking about influences, and the importance of this man you know about, is that only a limited amount of the music made was recorded, and that variously representative: I mean that if you start looking for neglected or almost unrecorded geniuses you don't necessarily find a lot of things very different from what was done elsewhere by somebody else. That does not of course minimise the tragedy,  people are not replaceable (contrary to what various promoters and "arts administrators" presume). 


The pianist Burton Brewer reputedly cut Earl Hines, but I have literally no idea how....  Was he a Hines disciple on the basis of 1920s recordings?  Nobody seems to have asked anybody about Brewer. who died young and before the band he was in recorded, not so long after the reported battle with the Hines band of around 1930. I managed to hear Ram Ramirez when he was in Edinburgh for a few days long ago (there is a rumour that the local pianist Alex Shaw was induced to play "Lover Man" without being aware that Ramirez was in the room, and being somewhat rattled by Ramirez's congratulations).  Later I found an interview with Ramirez from around 1950, in which he spoke of his youthful guru, Garnet Clark, known generally for the recordings made in Paris with Bill Coleman, when he also recorded one title solo -- though later he was recorded by Charles Delaunay 


http://www.jazzarcheology.com/artists/garnet_clark.pdf

If the compiler of the above page contacts me I should be able to find the 1950 publication. 

Another intriguing thing is that Clark's first recording was with an ensemble directed by Alex Hill, recognised as a prodigy before his early death (see the CDs respectively of his recordings as pianist, and of his arrangement). He seems to have been more interested in harmonic developments in accord with his older-rooted piano style (his name re-emerged in the 1950s with a couple of performances issued beside barrelhouse piano numbers) and realised in his band arrangements. 

There was also Clarence Profit, of whom it seems no still photograph exists (much amusement was once caused by the bargain LP whose sleevenote made the same claim about "the faceless man", who happens to have been Charlie Parker!). In the absence of a photo it's impossible to say whether a film-clip of a washboard group Profit recorded with includes him -- his reputed presence on lots of these recordings was gradually cleared up leaving enough -- with his other recordings -- to fill one CD (though there were a couple of items which might just have been by him but have rather been credited to Duke Ellington!). One very competent pianist has kept repeating that references between Profit and on the one pair of hands Tatum and on another Monk are without evidence among Profit's recordings and therefore false.  I suppose this guy dislikes me for having accused him of calling the great stride pianist, friend of Tatum and Monk, Joe Turner a liar. Joe repeated
 the claim, and in the definitive account of Profit Jonny Simmen did identify one recording liable to have been denied contemporary issue (c.1940) by the company because of alleged bum notes.  Profit does seem to have pioneered the guitar-bass-piano trio for harmonic reasons. There might be some Profit in a fantastic solo "Just One of Those Things" by George Wallington, a Profit protege. 


I just happen to have taken a special interest in these pianists, but as for Jabbo and Roy Eldridge, there is the interesting question of the St. Louis trumpeters discussed long ago in a wonderful article by John Postgate (who died recently), and what was different about Baby James, Dewey Jackson and later Joe Thomas and Clark Terry and Miles Davis. I remember a very long time ago browsing a New York record store full of bankrupt stock from Riverside records, with the identity of Baby James dubious and garbled, on a reissue sleeve, beside LPs of Clark Terry, who remembered James, on the same label. Jabbo Smith's rapid multi-noted runs were certainly emulated by Dewey Jackson, though most of his recordings were made during a 1951 student gig in St. Louis, when he was filling in as a member of Don Ewell's band for the heroic Lee Collins, whose lungs were giving out. 

Other live recordings of the period are frenetic and wild, and if I'd heard none of them I might have been boggled by the Ewell session. But there Jackson is, rattling through the clarinet part of High Society at top speed, doing things he was doing in St. Louis at the same time as Jabbo and I suppose Rueben Reeves in Chicago.  

But there was no Louis in his playing either in the 1920s, or when he got time off his hotel porter job to fill in with the Ewell band.  There's no trumpet lead, and among 1920s St. Louis recordings punctuations tend to be made using a cup mute (notable with Baby James) in ways that might have struck fashion-victim hearers in the 1930s as quaint. When I mentioned the St. Louis men to Ken Mathieson he cited the man Buddy Tate addressed as Harrysweets, and of course there is that slurring and ignoring of bar-lines in the great Edison's playing. There is also Louis Armstrong, though obviously not where Harrysweets is sounding unlike Louis.  

Dewey Jackson's Peacock Orchestra in the 1920s does feature contrasting sections, but not after the fashion of brassy brass and flowing reeds. 

Jabbo I suppose was tied to his style so that he -- and Dewey Jackson -- just didn't fit in music people were willing to pay for, over a long period.  

Who knows who Roy Eldridge might have heard before he came up beside Rex Stewart, who certainly had everything Jabbo had, but was open to other influences (Rex plays Bix can be heard among Fletcher Henderson recordings) and helped spur Roy to a more extreme virtuosity which had the further resource of the great Slav and Jewish American Songbook to provide punctuations with its more complex harmonic changes. 

Anybody interested in chronicling effects of hearing Louis Armstrong's 1920s recordings for the first time should be aware of an interview (published in German) with Freddie Hubbard during the lay-off when that astonishing virtuoso was recovering from a ruinous lip on which a biopsy had been performed due to the possibility that the problem was cancerous (mercifully it wasn't!). He heard "Weather Bird" for the first time, and burst into tears.  He'd heard something he'd never heard before. He was also clear about his admiration of Wynton Marsalis, but he had the Marsalis record he was being played turned off quickly. He couldn't stand it. It wasn't Wynton, it was a sheer impersonation of Clark Terry, he groaned. He also regretted deeply that when himself supposedly performing some sort of Louis Armstrong tribute, he'd just "be-bopped"  without any effort to understand the music. 


Robert R. Calder