[Dixielandjazz] Forrie Cairns

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

as i may have remarked to some friends in off-list business, 
Forrie Cairns was featured in Edinburgh with a band of (bar the young and wonderful bassist!)Sandy Brown veterans. 
The result for me was a revelation of the extent of Bechet in Forrie's playing. 
I could hear Ed Hall sounds in Evan Christopher and intimations of them in Albert Nicholas, but not in what I heard of Forrie 

A long time ago there was a broadcast of a performance specially recorded for the BBC,of Forrie with his brother the pianist John Cairns.Somewhere in a mountain of cassettes I have what I remember as a blues and as called "Sorry, Forrie" from that (I was short of cassettes at the moment of broadcast). What became of that tape? 

The intriguing thing about Acker is that he started with George Lewis and grew therefrom --whereas Wally seems to have come from Bechet -- although there is one tale that Jimmie Noone and Johnny Dodds both came from Bechet, who technically had the basic vocabulary of most of these men though his own things to say. 
Sandy Brown specified his own beginnings not as Peter Clayton once half-seriously opined, Johnny Dodds via steam radio, but rather the final Dodds date, two items definitely more blues than pre-bop. (Graham Tayar told me of an evening when Sandy was in his cups and denouncing bop as rubbish, only to be musically decimated by Bruce Turner, parodying Sandy. 

A little homework on the man whose name was something like Kyrill Lurie indicated to me an accomplishment like that of Albert Burbank or the Barnes brothers (not quite Louis Cottrell, who played tenor in Don Albert's big band) among New Orleanians. The Doddsianism of early Cy Laurie is splendid as what it is and a fine thing, but so presumably would have been the Doddsianism of abler musicians. And good luck to memories and recordings of the sort of lyrical beauty produced by Monty Sunshine as his young band supported him long ago in Edinburgh. 
And all praise to anybody who on a rare occasion plays unrepeatably out of her or his skin.
It's one thing crying down plain bad empty performers/ ersatzes (Sunnyland Slim rightly looked down on Memphis Slim!) but another being hostile when somebody flowers within limitations. I wonder how many estimable players worked as dependencies on more estimable ones. 
Then again, I suppose Paul Quinichette just did sound like Lester Young, and that was that. 

As for wishing some musicians had been abler than they were, at least the idea presumably oppressed them as well!
Robert R. Calder
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