[Dixielandjazz] Decca Disaster

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

There was a previous catastrophe, when a load of the late John Steiner's archives were burnt in a blaze in Chicago cinema premises, lots of permanently lost piano music.
I wonder hat Bill Haesler made of the surviving recordings by Kansas City Frank,  aka  Frank Melrose, reissued on a Delmark CD (they were recorded by Steiner and his disaster I gather inspired Bob Koester to proceed as he did with the amazing achievement that remains, in good hands, DELMARK records. 
I have in the past been publicly annoyed by the third-rate player-piano terse sub-wit of one musically respectable (PLAYED WELL) universal condemner of even specialist record companies, trying to take for granted that there would be a sell-out.  
So far as I am aware, one extreme rarity still in the Koester archive is of the St. Louis clarinettist Norman Mason, in an ensemble with guitars. Mr. Mason was unhappy with some of the recordings he did get to make, in a mule, sterile sub-idiom of toxically lukewarm North American musak known as "Dixieland" (which gave better music that name as bad one) but I wonder whether this horror headline can be the occasion of looking out more obscure resources, 
some of which at least have been saved due to the longer playing time of CDs and an unearthing of unknown music. The man I did not name above insisted that claims made as to the harmonic subtlety of the pianist Clarence Profit had to be ditched. There was no evidence.  But there is, on the initially unissued Decca material which came out on CD, although the evidence is a little obscured by the seeming desire of the recording studio  producer to let Profit have his head, and play something more like jazz fans expect, not something an engineer would hope the public would confuse with Kitsch and buy. 
But Stanley Dance and others have explored the archives of recorded jazz to a considerable extent, getting through to discover for that for instance while in the 1930s the barrelhouse pianist Willie Perryman known as Piano Red/ Dr. Feelgood, of Atlanta, Ga., did record a lot of duets with guitarist, no trace of masters persisted; and the same was the case with recordings by Bobby Henderson, who did manage to record some good stride piano for Vanguard as well as other items contemporary with the Vic Dickenson groups, but was in poor health, indeed dying, when Chiaroscuro caught up with him … 
Johnny Parth's Document label in Vienna certainly was involved in hunting out blues recordings never previously issued, and to be had from the relocated HQ in Galloway, Scotland, whence mp3s can be had. Fears of losses can to some extent be allayed. As in the case reported by Stanley Dance long ago, when in the course of excavating early Earl Hines solos he set out to trace the rumoured Basie solo piano accompaniment on a vocal recording by Edith North Johnson. He found that Basie had been …"credited" …. is hardly the word … named as playing on a performance where Ms. Johnson had performed piano duties for want of a pianist (she herself surely had no delusions) and his debut on record credited to her. The fact that we are not confronted by an unknowable jazz loss is an occasion to feel grateful to Charles Delaunay and Brian Rust and even people who might have regarded Coleman Hawkins' abandonment of his real horn, the bass saxophone and not that awful tenor -- so one reads--- for decades of chronicling and comprehensive reissues ...Bobby Henderson was much admired by Basie, it might be added, and just to round things off, not only was Edith Johnson with Basie mis-catalogued, so was the Julia Lee recording from the 1940s which features Vic Dickenson (who recorded another of his masterpiece recordings with Lee around then, but in a style of the 1920s) duetting with the thus now less legendary qua trombonist Benny Carter...
Fires are BAD. I can almost catch light myself thinking of the fire near here in Glasgow (Scotland) which destroyed one of the most distinguished sections of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART and initiated the restoration terminated before completion when the entire edifice was engulfed, more recently, along with a building of no small distinction contiguous with that masterpiece.....  
(at which point, the author of this letter disappeared in a cloud of smoke, presumably and hopefully relatable to his fondness for the tobacco pipe)
warm good wishes!Robert R. Calder 





 

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