The Penguin Jazz Guide (14 page)

& See also
The Piano Rolls
(1920, 1997; p. 9),
The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings
(1938, but in ‘Beginnings’ section, p. 5)

TINY PARHAM

Born Hartzell Strathdene Parham, 25 February 1900, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; died 4 April 1943, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Piano, bandleader

Tiny Parham 1926–1929

Classics 661

Parham; B. T. Wingfield, Punch Miller, Roy Hobson (c); Charles Lawson (tb); Junie Cobb (ss, as, cl); Charles Johnson (cl, as); Leroy Pickett, Elliott Washington (vn); Charlie Jackson (bj, v); Mike McKendrick (bj); Quinn Wilson (bb); Jimmy Bertrand, Ernie Marrero (d). December 1926–July 1929.

Fellow Canadian Oscar Peterson said (1995):
‘It’s strange music, and you wonder what he listened to in childhood that would make him go in this direction, but it swings in its awkward way!’

Born in Canada, the huge pianist kept busy on the Chicago scene of the ’20s, arranging for contemporaries such as King Oliver and leading his own groups. By the time of his death, though, he was working hotels and movie houses. Parham’s jazz was an idiosyncratic, almost eccentric brand of Chicago music: his queer, off-centre arrangements tread a line between hot music, novelty strains and schmaltz. The latter is supplied by the violinists and the occasional (and mercifully infrequent) singing – but not by the tuba, which is used with surprising shrewdness by the leader. Some of his arrangements on this Classics disc are among the more striking things to come out of the city at that time – ‘Cathedral Blues’, ‘Voodoo’ and ‘Pigs Feet And Slaw’ don’t sound like anybody else’s group, except perhaps Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, although Parham preferred a less flamboyant music to Jelly’s. The ‘exotic’ elements, which led to titles such as ‘The Head Hunter’s Dream’ or ‘Jungle Crawl’, always seem to be used for a purpose rather than merely for novelty effect and, with soloists like Miller, Hobson and the erratic Cobb, Parham had players who could play inside and out of his arrangements. The two-beat rhythms he leans on create a sort of continuous vamping effect that’s oddly appropriate, and Tiny’s own piano shows he was no slouch himself. There is a lot of surprising music on these discs, even when it doesn’t work out for the best.

BIX BEIDERBECKE

Born Leon Beiderbecke, 10 March 1903, Davenport, Iowa; died 6 August 1931, New York City

Cornet

At The Jazz Band Ball

Columbia CK 46175

Beiderbecke; Charlie Margulis (t); Bill Rank (tb); Pee Wee Russell (cl); Jimmy Dorsey, Issy Friedman, Charles Strickfaden (cl, as); Don Murray (cl, bs); Frankie Trumbauer (Cmel); Adrian Rollini, Min Leibrook (bsx); Frank Signorelli, Arthur Schutt (p); Tom Satterfield (p, cel); Joe Venuti, Matty Malneck (vn); Carl Kress, Eddie Lang (g); Chauncey Morehouse, Harold McDonald (d); Bing Crosby, Jimmy Miller, Charlie Farrell (v). October 1927–April 1928.

Trumpeter Randy Sandke says:
‘If Louis Armstrong is the Sophocles of jazz, Bix is its Aeschylus, another classic master who set the standard by which all who follow must be judged. As with all great classicists, no gesture is wasted and spontaneity and logic are intimately intertwined.’

Seventy-five years after his alcohol-hastened death, Beiderbecke remains the most lionized and romanticized of jazz figures. His understated mastery, his cool eloquence and precise improvising were long cherished as the major alternative to Louis Armstrong’s clarion leadership in the original jazz age, and his records have endured remarkably well, even though few of them were in an uncompromised jazz vein. He was mostly self-taught on piano and cornet, and never really learned to read accurately. His first extended exposure to jazz came when his well-intentioned parents sent him off to the military school within reach of Chicago: right time, right place. He joined the Wolverine Orchestra and made his first record in 1923, but it was his periods with Jean Goldkette in St Louis, 1926–7, and Paul Whiteman in New York, 1928–30, which brought him to wider attention. Whether fame or frustration fuelled his drinking scarcely matters; Beiderbecke was a clinical alcoholic, but a functioning one. There is nothing uncontrolled or wild about his playing, and his classically tinged ‘In A Mist’ suggests a musician literate at all levels.

It’s a difficult discography and necessarily a rather small one, leading to fantasies of ‘Beiderbecke tapes’ turning up all over the place. This survey of Bix’s OKeh recordings has the advantage of eliminating the commercial Whiteman material (though there is no convincing evidence that Bix bucked against the aesthetics of that band; he liked being a star) and concentrating on his most jazz-directed music; this disc includes some of the best of the Bix And His Gang sides, including the title-piece, ‘Jazz Me Blues’ and ‘Sorry’, plus further dates with Trumbauer. As a leader, Bix wasn’t exactly a progressive – some of the material harks back to the arrangements used by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band – but his own playing is always remarkable: lean, bruised, a romantic’s sound, but one that feels quite at home in what were still rough and elementary days for jazz.

FRANKIE TRUMBAUER
^&

Born 30 May 1901, Carbondale, Illinois; died 11 June 1956, Kansas City, Missouri

Alto and C-melody saxophones

Frankie Trumbauer 1927–1928

Classics 1186

Trumbauer; Bix Beiderbecke (c); Charlie Margulis (t); Bill Rank (tb); Pee Wee Russell (cl); Jimmy Dorsey (cl, as); Don Murray (cl, bs); Doc Ryker, Charlie Strickfaden (as); Adrian Rollini, Min Leibrook (bsx); Paul Mertz, Itzy Riskin, Frank Signorelli, Tom Satterfield (p); Matt Malneck (vn); Eddie Lang, Carl Kress (g); Chauncey Morehouse, Harold McDonald (d); Seger Ellis, Irving Kaufman, Jerry Macy, John Ryan, Les Reis, Bing Crosby (v). February 1927–January 1928.

Instrument collector Guy Colline says:
‘The C-melody saxophone is not excessively rare, but it doesn’t turn up too often nowadays. Anthony Braxton plays one and I believe Scott Robinson does too. It has quite a narrow bore and the sound is consequently quite thin and unforceful. But it has its place in small-group jazz.’

‘Tram’ was one of the master saxophonists of his era, coming to prominence with the Benson Orchestra of Chicago in the early ’20s and striking up a famous partnership with Bix Beiderbecke. He spent his later years working in aviation and playing only rarely. The leading saxophonist of his day, he sometimes favoured the thin light sound of the C-melody instrument over the more orthodox alto. It gave him a certain distinctiveness of timbre, but it’s often forgotten that Trumbauer was just as proficient on the other horn and one suspects a novelty interest in the C instrument.

An influence on Benny Carter (who felt he was never Trumbauer’s equal) and Lester Young, he still sounds remarkable on his best records: a cool, almost neutral tone, and a way of slipping through the most contorted phrases in such a fashion as to make them graceful and as natural as breathing. It’s a moot point as to whether it’s his solo or Bix’s which makes ‘Singing The Blues’ (1927) the classic it is. The disc here and the following
1928–1929
volume include all his sessions with Beiderbecke, and even though many of the sides get bogged down in poor vocals, effects and even blackface hokum (as in ‘Dusky Stevedore’ and the like), the best music is as good as white jazz got in the ’20s: they often save the best for the ride-out chorus, which usually goes with a real swing, and besides Bix and Tram there’s Bill Rank, Min Leibrook and Eddie Lang to listen to. These sides are easily available elsewhere in Beiderbecke editions, but this isn’t a bad way to get them or to listen to them. Such is the cult of Bix, it’s sometimes quite hard to hear his great partner for what he was.

& See also
BIX BEIDERBECKE, At The Jazz Band Ball
(1927–1928; p. 27)

DUKE ELLINGTON
^&

Born Edward Kennedy Ellington, 29 April 1899, Washington DC; died 24 May 1974, New York City

Piano

Duke Ellington 1927–1929

Classics 542 / 550 / 559

Ellington; Bubber Miley, Jabbo Smith, Louis Metcalf, Arthur Whetsol (t); Joe ‘Tricky Sam’ Nanton (tb); Otto Hardwick (ss, as, bs, bsx); Johnny Hodges (cl, ss, as); Rudy Jackson, Barney Bigard (cl, ts); Harry Carney (bs, as, ss, cl); Fred Guy (bj); Lonnie Johnson (g); Wellman Braud (b); Sonny Greer (d); Baby Cox, Adelaide Hall, Irving Mills, Ozie Ware (v). October 1927–March 1929.

Trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton said (1993):
‘To take a measure of Ellington, you have to look at a composer like Haydn or Geminiani, in terms of sheer amount of work produced, but with the qualification that Ellington wasn’t just making music, he was also making the forms of the music as he did so.’

Ellington bestrides the history of jazz on record, an impossibly rich legacy of sound that continues to energize the music. Arguably, without its existence and its example to fall back on, jazz might have been quicker to metamorphose into ‘post-jazz’ after Miles Davis’s abstract experiments of the late ’60s, early ’70s, Duke’s last years. As it is, they stand as a replenishing source, to which musicians and fans cyclically return. At some level, Ellington is the encyclopaedist of jazz, or its lexicographer. There are few aspects of the music which are not laid out, or adumbrated, in his half-century of activity.

He was born to a middle-class family, learned piano as a child, and became interested in ragtime, leading his own groups from around 1918. Duke Ellington & His Washingtonians worked in New York from 1924, and a residency at the Cotton Club from 1927 sealed its breakthrough. Long tours followed, with trips to Europe in the ’30s, and an almost continuous presence in the studios. In the ’40s, he played a series of annual Carnegie Hall concerts, wrote for the stage and briefly dispersed the big band, but reassembled it in 1949. Although the ’50s saw a decline in his fortunes, his Newport appearance in 1956 reasserted his eminence. He also wrote for film and TV, and in the ’60s continued to tour relentlessly. Illness slowed him down, but he was working up until his hospitalization for cancer early in 1974. Besides his major works, his individual compositions – with and without his frequent collaborator, Billy Strayhorn – number in the thousands.

These recordings come exactly a decade after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band sides start the clock on recorded jazz. By 1924, he was set to become that hitherto unknown phenomenon, a recording star. With ‘East St Louis Toodle-oo’, from the first important Ellington session, the music demands the attention. Any comprehensive edition will include much duplication, since Ellington spread himself around many different record labels: he recorded for Broadway, Vocalion, Gennett, Columbia, Harmony, Pathé, Brunswick, OKeh and Victor in the space of a little over three years. They also include the debut versions of ‘Black And Tan Fantasy’, Ellington’s first masterpiece, and Adelaide Hall’s vocal on ‘Creole Love Call’. But the music rapidly became more subtly inflected. Ellington progressed quickly from routine hot-dance records to sophisticated and complex three-minute works which showed a rare grasp of the possibilities of the 78rpm disc. Yet during these years both Ellington and his band were still seeking an identifying style. Having set down one or two individual pieces such as ‘Black And Tan Fantasy’ didn’t mean that Duke was fully on his way. The 1926–8 records are still dominated by the playing of Bubber Miley, and on a track such as ‘Flaming Youth’, which was made as late as 1929, it is only Miley’s superb work that makes the record of much interest. Arthur Whetsol made an intriguing contrast to Miley, his style being far more wistful and fragile; his version of ‘The Mooche’ on the 1928 Victor version is in striking contrast to Miley’s, and his treatment of the theme to ‘Black Beauty’ is similarly poignant. Joe Nanton was a shouting trombonist with a limited stock of phrases, but he was starting to work on the muted technique which would make him one of Duke’s most indispensable players. The reed team was weaker, with Carney taking a low-key role (not always literally: he played as much alto and clarinet as baritone in this era), and until Bigard’s arrival in 1928 it lacked a distinctive soloist. Hodges also didn’t arrive until October 1928.

When the Ellington band went into the Cotton Club at the end of 1927, the theatricality which had begun asserting itself with ‘Black And Tan Fantasy’ became a more important asset, and though most of the ‘Jungle’ scores were to emerge on record around 1929–30, ‘The Mooche’ and ‘East St Louis Toodle-oo’ show how set-piece effects were becoming important to Ellington. The best and most Ellingtonian records of the period would include ‘Blue Bubbles’, ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Jubilee Stomp’ (the 1928 versions), and ‘Misty Mornin’’ and ‘Doin’ The Voom Voom’. But even on the lesser tunes or those tracks where Ellington seems to be doing little more than copying Fletcher Henderson, there are usually fine moments from Miley or one of the others. These Classics CDs offer admirable coverage, with a fairly consistent standard of remastering, and though they ignore alternative takes Ellington’s promiscuous attitude towards the various record companies means that there are often several versions of a single theme on one disc (Classics 542, for instance, has three versions of ‘Take It Easy’).

& See also
Duke Ellington 1937–1938
(1937–1938; p. 64),
The Duke At Fargo
(1940; p. 81),
Never No Lament
(1940–1942; p. 81),
Black, Brown And Beige
(1944–1946; p. 91),
Ellington At Newport
(1956; p. 189),
The Far East Suite
(1966; p. 336)