<html><head></head><body><div class="yahoo-style-wrap" style="font-family:verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:16px;"><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">cc. Klaus </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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". </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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..."</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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 ...</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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. </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Bruce as I recall was no admirer of Parker. </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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. </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">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". </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">[Start whistling, somebody..]</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Perhaps unlike one sometime notorious </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Caledonian sometime band </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">when internal feelings grow so furious</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">they risk fighting hand to empty hand </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">a better idea's to be recombined </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">by playing with fire Muggsy's useful tune </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">and hope after blowing you'll again find</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">you're on a less than ten second honeymoon,</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">and schmooze, amused, well quit of the onus </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">of "Feather Brain Blues" grinning and glorious --</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">but can Barb Jordan find for these words a tune?</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Robert R. Calder </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div></div></body></html>