[Dixielandjazz] Harry James

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I never had the slightest doubt about Harry James's jazz credentials, or the quality of the jazz he and his bands could produce, not least when as on a couple of CDs I acquired in Germany there was some wonderful Willie Smith. I once paid to see and hear Willie Smith, in Glasgow, but Willie though he had been playing months before, and had the gig, died of lung cancer very shortly before. The programme, JAZZ FROM A SWINGING ERA, as represented on CD and all the better for having some live performances from the tour, as contrasted with a very good recording made in France before the band reached UK  -- including examples from the studio of Earl Hines playing an out of tune piano IN TUNE -- even the other pianist, Sir Charles Thompson, couldn't do that! 
Earle Warren was an admirable replacement, beside Messrs. Eldridge, Dickenson, Clayton, Budd Johnson etc...  (In American money of the time my ticket cost 60 cents!  Five shillings!
What I said some time ago on this very page was that beside some wonderful Willie Smith the James CDs, which cost 3 for one euro in a bargain bucket !!!  And rather 20 than fifty years ago! included some excruciating Schmaltz.  Now and then bargains came up with tracks of little interest and not being long these things were music to replenish a beaker by. The James stuff I couldn't bear to listen to. Oddly enough I was reviewing CDs at the same time, and one came by a young and plainly gifted musician, post-bop, but some of it was verging on the same Schmaltz! I would happily listen to him again, but not if he did the same. And there was a furious mail from him saying he had painstakingly transcribed something from the 1930s, exact to the harmonies. The description might suggest what Ken does in preparing repertoire for CJO, but he (I mean you, Ken) in my experience bothers about how the notes are played. 

I met the little bald wild man Lol Coxhill twice, once in Portobello Town Hall, where he was in a band touring with the great blues pianist Otis Spann (aged 39, he looked ill months later in Glasgow and was dead within a year, woe!). The other time, Lol was playing solo in the rain in Greenwich market, to replace the rubber bands he'd to keep adjusting on his soprano when he could afford to get it serviced). He was talking about a machine such as Sonny Stitt tried for a while, and how he'd found one indispensable since he was filling in for the baritone saxophonist in a ghost Glenn Miller band he toured with  -- and he had only a tenor and the gear made it sound like the missing baritone. Of course nobody ever played a job they didn't want to (cough!) run short of readies or starve by refusing it. I once bought a dud EP by Willie Perryman (Piano Red) and there in the discography are the names Milt Hinton and Gus Johnson.

As for Harry James in Motherwell, I was a student in Edinburgh at the time. And because there were two Ellington concerts on one night I attended both. I was out of range of Harry James, and indeed of Bobby Hackett with Peter Ind, MacLellan Galleries, Glasgow, another night.
But I did hear Ken's CJO in George Square, Glasgow, changing the shape of the place !!
Robert R. Calder 
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