[Dixielandjazz] Novelty Music, Metcalf and Hard Labour

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I'm delighted by Bert's informative note. There were people who liked early jazz as just another variety of novelty music. Unfortunately while this did at one time give an invisible subsidy to some performances it helped establish a false perspective within public representations of the music. Over forty years ago as a student I met a young New Yorker who asked me if I knew the name Louis Metcalf.  Of course I did.  The guy had almost gone along to a gig Metcalf had in New York but had been so often disappointed when what was billed as older jazz turned out to be Schmaltz or novelty music.  Metcalf was I gather by no means trapped in a warping of time, and though he'd started early enough to have roots in the not altogether jazz of pre-Armstrong he'd incorporated that in his mature playing from Ellington onward. Unfortunately he seems to have been recorded only for Victoria Spivey's endearing concern, and I never heard the resulting LP myself. 

Bert as much as anybody might appreciate the reviewer long ago, I forget who, with his commentary on the added expressiveness -- sense of the weight of toil (lift that bale!) -- by the bulk and weight of the baritone sax Harry Carney had to hold up while standing playing a passage in an Ellington work.. Of course, dear Britain-watchers, with "Hard Labour" I was not referring to Jeremy Corbyn, Albion's alleged antithesis to D*n*ld Tr*mp 

salud!
Robert R. Calder