[Dixielandjazz] Bunk and Jabbo and Arrangers

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Steve's comment on Bunk's facility with swing riffs rather underlines the case about Bunk, that he was an extremely accomplished schooled professional musician with the capacity to play a great range of music, and in what could be called the non-freak non-pedal-note lower registers extraordinarily impressive. The other questions (probably asked before I was born!) include why he chose "Chloe" as a repertoire item, and the important considerations include his relationship to alcohol not to mention the phenomenon which appealed to the bluesman Jimmy Reed, when he was brought to Europe as Bunk was brought to New York.  

The adjective was "young" and the noun or handle that used by the current US president referring to the part of the woman he reached for prior to more comprehensive use.  


Think of Bunk beside the virtuosi of the Grimethorpe Colliery band, but versatile and hardly deaf to other things going on, like radios. The vile Duckumentallry BLUES AMERICA on the BBC of late had something about Basie records on Mississippi jukeboxes, though I have a fleeting memory of an actual sociological survey that named Jay McShann's band, the blues repertoire he was pressed to record at the expense of his more musically ambitious charts (a sort of equivalent of the case of the Goldkette recordings Ken Mathieson described as listenable only with a vo-do-de-o filter, though McShann got to play what was still his own and variously superior stuff). 


There are some amazing crossover things in the more obscure discography, like Bunk's swing riffs. The New Orleans pianist Tuts Washington, whose later career was due to the prominence of Dr. John and of Professor Longhair, was on a recording session with the singer and guitarist Smiley Lewis in the late 1940s, and played in a style which might be associated with Brother Montgomery or Morton, and the 1920s, except for some unusual boppish harmonisations. The longtime mostly legendary Texas barrelhouse pianist Buster Pickens, whom Paul Oliver recorded in 1960 (surprised to hear Pickens had played piano in a pub in Chester when a wartime soldier), coloured a lot of stuff recorded then, and buried in small company vaults from the late 1940s, with all sorts of modern and bebop harmonisations, keeping up with the times. Around the same time his longtime retired fellow pianist, Robert Shaw, not at the mercy of any public, retained the ragtime elements. 
(transitions and influences have better evidence when there were many more recordings!)
Then there's the tragic case of The Beetle, Stephen Henderson, Jack Teagarden's favourite stride pianist, with two solos salvaged from a broadcast on Art Hodes' radio show, and several items in a band with Al Casey accompanying Cousin Joe -- but the Beetle was it seems so versatile he blended into uninteresting anonymity. If it hadn't been for the French Black and Blue recording company the immediate pre-bop generation of pianists would be even worse represented, but for a lot who were recorded in later life there are ample modernisations.

Benny Waters comes to mind, with his report of how he carved Sonny Stitt (actually I was standing at the bar beside Jake Hanna when he first heard his fellow-Bostonian Waters, and during our brief absence due to use of beer he was declaring Benny the greatest living saxophonist! We got back quickly to review further evidence).

When Ken Mathieson mentioned the importance of jazz arrangers, one name which comes to mind is Lil Hardin, whose talents were perhaps at a level perfectly fitted to sorting out the King Oliver band whose second trumpeter she married. If one proceeds through the King Oliver discography the name of a more ambitious arranger crops up, Benny Waters!  One book on Jazz in the 1920s even claims that Charlie Johnson's THE BOY IN THE BOAT has chronological priority over CHANT OF THE WEED as the first jazz composition. 


Even if the dates are wrong, which they might not be, Benny is a fascinating case, and as with Bunk there was bother with women and especially WINE ...  "Aunt Hagar's Blues" and "Speakeasy Bl." are the Oliver titles listed 



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a2Kdpv1D0M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXseK8yDCCc

there's even the benefit of Ed "Andy" Anderson, still a child prodigy and oddly enough when seventeen playing a sort of Armstrong-with-Oliver second trumpet to the nineteen-year-old Henry Allen's lead


Alas I've never heard Spivey's evidence that Louis Metcalf's later LP showed signs of modernising

enough!
Robert R. Calder