[Dixielandjazz] Bolden and Jabbo

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I missed out looking up where Jabbo was from.Georgia.  
Anybody who's heard much of the Country Blues recorded in the 1920s and 1930s will know how different the bluesmen of the Carolinas and Georgia were from obviously enough the Mississippi delta and its vicinity.The folk influence there was (and see Marshall Stearns) Protestant and European and harmonically orthodox. The old notion that Blues and Barrelhouse piano had been called "Fast Western" was exploded long ago when that weird phrase was found to have originated in journalism (not as bad as one of the most moronic notions in modern Scotland, the idea that the phrase "a Glasgow kiss", meaning a head-butt to an enemy's forehead, is somehow a native idiom, rather than Scotophobic crap generated by the rag Evelyn Waugh called the Daily Excess). 
But the least European piano-playing before 1940, like Sunnyland Slim, say, is from west of Texas. 

And Jabbo was brought up as was Dizzy later on, in a region where the blues was less bluesy. You could transcribe say Blind Boy Fuller on the stave without too many directions. And Jabbo was liable to have come up with a discipline and limitations and awareness founded on the same sort of background as New York musicians, Johnny Dunn or Bubber Miley. 

To judge from Bechet's autobiography and other evidence, Bolden was probably more a ragtime player, and listen to Bunk's replacement on the Boston live recordings and people playing manufactured instruments even in New Orleans were less likely to be bluesy than Bunk turned out.  It's also interesting that in his recordings with the New York band Bunk worked very successfully with East Coast Musicians who had been through the business of jazz through the 1920s and 1930s, professionals very different from the George Lewis and Jim Robinson mould. 

If anybody mentions my friend Angus Calder's hero Higgy (I contributed a page on Luis Russell to the tribute book Angus didn't live to receive on his deathbed) I could draw their attention to a CD of gospel trombone choirs from Georgia. Intriguing to see Higgy on an LP with Ray Bryant since musically they both came out of the church. And now we shall not continue to talk about Coleman Hawkins, his classical training on cello (listen to "Think Deep" on a Riverside LP) and Johann Sebastian Bach. 

continue to swing 

Robert R. Calder 
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