[Dixielandjazz] Dixieland

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

cc. Klaus 
The term has been popularised by journalists, and there is the infamous case of the (if still with us young no longer in years) callow youth who on hearing the name "Charlie Parker" said his father had some of the man's records and "he was some sort of Dixieland saxophonist". No, that wasn't Gabriel's horn you just heard, it was Bruce Turner, who had as a party trick something the late Frank Lowe took up, the impersonation of great saxophonists: I never heard Bruce do that, but during gigs when things were set right, so Humphrey Lyttelton reported, Bruce would perform .."and now in the style of..."
It can be great fun, I worked out myself how to sound like Ben Webster but using an alto, especially impressive I would claim because actually playing a meaningful succession of notes on the horn was something I never mastered ...
Bruce would of course be doing his impersonation of Boyce Brown, whose religious vocation allows me to revive the "Monkish" joke of the sometime jazz writer of the Scotsman newspaper, Tony Troon, regarding a local unknown billed to share a concert with Dave McKenna.  The guy arrived in a cassock and sandals, and had taken a vow of chastity, but whether he was an unfishy friar rather than a monk I couldn't swear, and of course wouldn't so swear in his presence. 
Bruce as I recall was no admirer of Parker. 
There was a 2 CD set marking an anniversary of Commodore Records, according to whose notes Commodore and Condon what's more arose in part from the "dull, dishonest decade" of the 1930s, when people with too little else to dance to discovered the second-hand racks. The title Dixieland is a populist creation, its prominence a consequence of what can too easily be a pathological development of a will to disorganise and systematise: a marketing term at odds with reality, an over-simplification which as a sick habit has also spawned a racist vocabulary -- rather than a descriptor you get a potentially dismissive or pejorative item so over-simplified it distorts.The poorer sort of "Dixieland", commercialised sometimes because the amateurs didn't know any better, has been poison, and was after its fashion poison by the time in the 1950s the word MAINSTREAM was quite rightly pushed, and if it wasn't Bolden-to-Condon, or BIG BANDS or MODERN JAZZ people uncritical of imposed categories assumed something illicit was going on. 
Actually the first really bad thing I noted in what I've been able to see in KEN BURNS JAZZ was the confusion between big bands only on the fringe of jazz, and your proper Hines or Lunceford or Erskine Hawkins band. Ole Jerry Jerome was right about the over-specialisation of some people, who might at the time have been horrified to hear Sonny Rollins as one of their heroes say  -- as he did on the film about the grand group photograph -- how much he liked stride piano. Eric Dolphy didn't publicise his visits to Harlem to jam with antecedents who were still very much contemporaries, in a climate for which Leonard Feather was blamed (moderns versus …) and duly creatively castigated with Muggsy Spanier's "Feather Brain Blues".  
[Start whistling, somebody..]
Perhaps unlike one sometime notorious Caledonian sometime band when internal feelings grow so furiousthey risk fighting hand to empty hand a better idea's to be recombined by playing with fire Muggsy's useful tune and hope after blowing you'll again findyou're on a less than ten second honeymoon,and schmooze, amused, well quit of the onus of "Feather Brain Blues" grinning and glorious --but can Barb Jordan find for these words a tune?
Robert R. Calder 













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