Chapter 10
Small-group Jazz, the Jukebox and New Independent
Labels
You can still start arguments
by postulating that big-band jazz was not jazz at all. This is nonsense,
but the small groups of the Swing Era made a very special contribution,
providing more room for hot solos and using simpler arrangements, often
made up on the bandstand or in the studio. The greater freedom available
to small groups allowed a different kind of innovation, the hallmark
of jazz since its beginning. In the small-group recordings of the Swing
Era may be heard the seeds of the music of the future, both in the rhythm
and blues and the modern jazz directions.
In the mid-1930s several
factors combined to create the new jukebox industry, which had an incalculable
effect on popular music.
Edison’s phonograph had
been fitted with a coin slot and four listening tubes by Louis Glass
and placed in a saloon in San Francisco in 1889. In 1891 the Louisiana
Phonograph Company claimed that one of its machines, costing about $200,
had grossed $1,000 in two months. In 1906 the Gabel Automatic Entertainer
was the first machine to play a series of gramophone discs, using a
spring-loaded hand-cranked motor and a 40" acoustic horn. There were
huge, heavy, brilliantly engineered non-electric machines that played
several cylinders in rotation; one handle wound the motor and changed
the cylinder and the needle. But the phonograph parlour was soon replaced
by player pianos.
Despite the fact that there
had never been any adequate protection for the authors and composers
of songs, and that in practice such protection could only be acquired
through their publishers, Theodore Roosevelt (the ‘trust buster’) was
outraged that the Music Publishers Association (MPA) and Aeolian had
agreed a royalty of 10 per cent on piano rolls. A revised Copyright
Act for popular music in 1909 required a royalty of 2 cents and compulsory
licensing of all reproductions, whether piano rolls or sound recordings,
and for all publishers, not just those in the MPA. This was said to
be the first time in history that the government intervened directly
between supplier and user of a product.
Aeolian’s Aeriola player
piano had been introduced in 1895; in 1898 Wurlitzer built the first
coin-operated player piano. By 1910 these had overtaken nickel-in-the-slot
record players. In 1916 the ‘word-roll’ added the words to the songs,
printed on the margin of the roll: the words were not covered by the
1909 act, a good excuse to set royalties on such rolls much higher than
2 cents.
The best player pianos,
such as the Ampico, reproduced music more or less accurately, and recordings
were made by great pianists such as Rachmaninov and Busoni. But the
vast majority of piano rolls and players were mechanical in the extreme,
and no expression of any kind was available. George Gershwin and a good
number of others first heard popular music on the pianola in the corner
candy store; many a jazz pianist began by slowing down the piano roll
and placing fingers on the keys as they were mechanically depressed.
Between 1895 and the early 1920s over two million player pianos were
sold; in 1921, of 341,652 pianos of all types, nearly two-thirds were
player pianos. But the business failed during the Depression, and by
then the radio and electric recording were beginning to have their effect.
(In the 1990s the Yamaha Disklavier was operated by ‘a full library
of pre-recorded discs . . . from classical to contemporary’. So you
could still buy a piano that played itself if you wanted to.)
In 1927 several firms built
electrically operated record-playing machines; it was obvious that simply
playing the records in rotation was not good enough, and selection mechanisms
were developed. The Automatic Music Instrument Company (AMI) marketed
the first electrically amplified, multi-selection device.
Homer Capehart worked for
a company that made various coin-operated machines; he bought the rights
to a record changer called the Simplex, and was fired for doing so.
He formed his own company and made a splash at the Chicago Radio Show
in 1928, attracting almost as much attention as the first public demonstration
of television. The Capehart was not the first integrally designed automatic-changer
for the home; Victor had marketed an Orthophonic acoustic player with
an electrically operated changer, but it had problems. For one thing,
discs in those days were not of uniform size, and did not always have
lead-in grooves and a final groove spiral for tripping the mechanism.
Capehart was fired again, this time from his own company, but a few
years later the Capehart became the most impressive machine on the market.
Its elaborate record changer played both sides of a stack of intermixed
10-inch and 12-inch records, and the machine had good sound for the
period; it was slowly improved. Coleman Hawkins owned one in the late
1940s that cost $1,000, but most Americans never saw one. The price
put it out of reach.
Meanwhile, Capehart took
his Simplex to Wurlitzer, whose sales of pipe organs and player pianos
were falling, and became the company’s vice-president and sales manager.
The Simplex played only one side of each record, but was robust and
reliable. Prohibition had been repealed, so a great many new taverns
opened up, and most of them wanted mechanical music. In 1933 there were
about 25,000 jukeboxes in operation in the USA, of which only 266 were
Wurlitzer’s; in 1935 there were 100,000, and in 1936 Wurlitzer alone
shipped nearly 45,000 machines. It remained the leader of the industry
for more than a decade.
The term ‘jukebox’ did
not become common until the mid-1930s. It probably comes from the Gullah
‘juke’ or ‘joog’, meaning ‘disorderly’ or ‘wicked’ and perhaps ultimately
from the Wolof ‘dzug’, to live wickedly. The Oxford English Dictionary
quotes a scholarly American source from 1941: to ‘jouk’ was to dance;
to ‘go joukin’’ was to go pub-crawling. The term ‘juke joint’ was certainly
current; blues singer Walter Roland recorded ‘Jookit Jookit’ for Vocalion
in 1933. (A character in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending
of 1958 says ‘I’d like to go out jooking with you tonight.’)
Wurlitzer’s Model 24 was
the first to offer twenty-four selections instead of twelve or sixteen.
Capehart sold the machines to independent jukebox operators, rather
than directly to the taverns and restaurant owners, thus ensuring that
the machines were regularly serviced and the records changed. He built
up such an effective distribution system that by the time he left Wurlitzer
his own Packard company could not compete with it. (After the Second
World War he left the business, serving three terms in the US Senate
from Indiana.)
Canadian-born David Rockola
had a perfect name for the jukebox industry; his pinball-machine business
went broke in 1930, but he bought the patents of the old Gabel company
and, with the help of his creditors, Rock-Ola competed with Seeburg
(formed in 1907 as a piano company by a Swedish immigrant) for second
place in the USA jukebox business behind Wurlitzer. In 1948 Seeburg’s
engineer M. W. Kenney developed the first machine to offer a hundred
selections - it held fifty 78s, of which either side could be selected
- and the Selectomatic mechanism became nearly ubiquitous. Of all these,
only Rock-Ola was still making jukeboxes in the early 1980s. Seeburg
had got into anti-trust trouble, and when Wurlitzer left the jukebox
business in 1974, the company destroyed all its files and spare parts.
Most of the principals are now dead, so the definitive history of the
industry will probably never be written.
Jukebox cabinets became
an extravaganza of light and moulded plastic in the late 1930s. Wurlitzer’s
Model 24 had been the first to use illuminated plastics in its design;
after wartime shutdown, designer Paul Fuller produced the most famous
jukebox of all, the Model 1015, of which Wurlitzer shipped over 56,000.
Nils Miller at Seeburg was another influential designer. Paradoxically,
these masterpieces of kitsch are rare and valuable today because they
were too well built to wear out; Wurlitzer accepted trade-ins of any
make, and then destroyed them.
Early in the Depression
the record companies were not slow to understand the importance of the
jukebox business. In many parts of the country hillbillies and blacks
were more likely to hear their own recording artists on a jukebox than
on the radio; people who could not afford to buy a radio could sip a
beer and listen to music played by other people’s coins in the jukebox.
The jukebox used up so many records that it rescued the record industry
from the Depression, and retail sales began to improve as people liked
the records they heard on jukeboxes, at a time when recorded music on
the radio was not yet omnipresent. Small-group jazz was ideal: small-group
recordings were cheaper to make than big-band ones, especially if the
musicians were black.
Coleman Hawkins and Henry
‘Red’ Allen co-led three sessions in 1933 that resulted in ten lovely
sides aimed at this market. Allen’s first recordings in 1929 were credited
to Henry Allen, Jr, and his Orchestra, because his father was a prominent
New Orleans bandleader. The trumpeter worked for Fletcher Henderson
and many other leaders, and was unfairly but widely regarded as an Armstrong
imitator for many years; in fact, he was always his own man, and in
the mid-1950s, on reunion sessions with Hawkins, sounded as much like
Miles Davis as he did like Armstrong. He was also a vocalist of great
charm, and the ten 1933 sides capture an era that is gone for ever.
Made quickly and cheaply for budget labels like Perfect and Banner,
and with whichever sidemen they could pick up (such as Russell Procope,
Dicky Wells, Benny Morton and Horace Henderson on some tracks), the
recordings are mostly of Tin Pan Alley songs that white artists had
turned down.
The most successful small
group of all, both on the jukeboxes and in the charts, was led by the
pianist who was nicknamed Filthy by his friends in Harlem. Thomas Wright
‘Fats’ Waller played the piano by ear as a child, slowing down a piano
roll to learn ‘Carolina Shout’. He then enlisted James P. Johnson as
his teacher, who also became something of a substitute father. Waller’s
father was a lay preacher who could not control his wayward son; they
did not get along, and Fats probably never got over the loss of his
mother when he was a teenager. He developed an enormous appetite for
food, drink, women and song that he could never restrain, and an outsized
talent to match.
As a teenager playing the
organ in a Harlem cinema he gave some lessons to a boy from Red Bank
named William Basie. Later he studied formally himself, knowing that
he had to discipline his talent. He made piano rolls, and his first
(acoustic) gramophone sides were piano solos, ‘Muscle Shoals Blues’
and ‘Birmingham Blues’ (1922). He also accompanied blues singers such
as Caroline Johnson (‘Ain’t Got Nobody to Grind My Coffee’), Alberta
Hunter (‘You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did’) and Sara Martin. Having
written ‘Squeeze Me’ with Clarence Williams, he accompanied Clarence
and Sara in duets (‘Squabbling Blues’, ‘I’m Certainly Gonna See About
That’).
He worked in Chicago in
1925, jamming with Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, and playing solo
piano at a hotel; he told a story about being kidnapped to play at a
birthday party for Al Capone, who stuffed hundred-dollar bills in his
pocket. In November 1926 he began recording for Ralph Peer on the pipe
organ in a disused church in Camden, New Jersey; Handy’s ‘St Louis Blues’
and Waller’s own ‘Lenox Avenue Stomp’ were good enough to get him invited
back. Early in 1927 he recorded a series of improvisations with titles
like ‘Soothin’ Syrup Stomp’ and ‘Sloppy Water Blues’; counting alternative
takes, there were fifteen tracks. Let loose with feet as well as hands
on what he called the instrument of his heart, he was already a giant
talent; the sheer beauty and obvious joy in music-making on the unusual
instrument is unlike anything else ever recorded. In May he recorded
‘Sugar’, a Tin Pan Alley hit that has had many recordings, Handy’s ‘Beale
Street Blues’ and ‘I’m Goin’ to See My Ma’, credited on record labels
to one C. Todd: all three were recorded both as organ solos and on organ
with vocals by Alberta Hunter. ‘I’m Goin’ to See My Ma (and try to find
my pa)’ is a sort of happy tear-jerker: you can see Alberta there on
the railway platform, at the height of the Jazz Age and just before
the Great Depression, perhaps with a cardboard suitcase tied up with
clothes-line, happy to be going home, the place where they have to let
you in.
Further sessions in 1927
yielded more organ solos, notably a beautiful ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’,
as well as a few piano solos and some organ sides with a combo. In 1928
Waller played ‘Beale Street Blues’ on the organ at Carnegie Hall (with
Handy’s blessing), and played piano with an orchestra in a performance
of James P. Johnson’s Yamekraw. (Johnson was not allowed the
night off from conducting Keep Shufflin’.)
In 1929 came Fats Waller
and his Buddies. In We Called It Music
Eddie Condon tells the
story of being detailed to get Fats to the recording session in New
York on the first day of March. Condon got him out of bed, fortified
with liquid ham’n’eggs and into a taxi, where he wrote the quintet numbers
‘The Minor Drag’ and ‘Harlem Fuss’, the titles of which were reversed
on the record: ‘Harlem Fuss’ is a slow drag, while ‘The Minor Drag’
is a romp. At the same session he recorded piano solos ‘Numb Fumblin’’
and ‘Handful of Keys’. Among other solo piano recordings is ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’,
which he had written for Hot Chocolates that year; Waller’s recording,
and those by Louis Armstrong, bandleader Leo Reisman, Gene Austin, Ruth
Etting, and Bill Robinson with Irving Mills, were all hits. Another
solo was ‘Valentine Stomp’, a tribute to Hazel Valentine, who ran a
Harlem good-time house called the Daisy Chain where Fats liked to hang
out. (It was later also celebrated in Count Basie’s ‘Swingin’ at the
Daisy Chain’.)
At the end of the year
there were more Buddies sessions, this time with a bigger band, including
Condon, Red Allen and Jack Teagarden, and singers. ‘Looking Good But
Feelin’ Bad’ and ‘I Need Someone Like You’, both Waller songs, are sung
by a male quartet, while ‘Ridin’ But Walkin" and ‘Won’t You Get
Up Off It, Please?’ were instrumentals and ‘When I’m Alone’ (not a Waller
song) had a pop vocal by one Orlando Robinson. Still another session
the same month, by ‘Jimmie Johnson and his Orchestra’, featured two
songs by J. C. (Jimmie) Johnson (another pianist, who probably used
his initials so as not to be confused with James P.): ‘You’ve Got to
be Modernistic’ and ‘You Don’t Understand’ were sung by a male trio
(the latter a sweet ballad also recorded by Bessie Smith). In the band
were King Oliver, Dave Nelson and both James P. and Waller on pianos.
In the same year crooner
Gene Austin bailed Waller out of jail. According to Maurice Waller,
the judge was angry because Waller persistently fell behind with his
alimony payments, and Waller was let off because Austin told the judge
that Waller was needed at a recording session that afternoon, and that
if he was not there, it would put several men out of work. So Waller
went along to the session, where he and Austin (himself a southerner)
were dismayed to find that the other musicians would not play with ‘Austin’s
nigger’, who had to be put at the other end of the studio behind a screen,
and with a separate microphone. The song recorded was Waller’s ‘Your
Fate is in My Hands’, with words by Billy Rose.
The record dates dried
up as the Depression began to bite. There were two piano duets with
Bennie Payne on Victor in 1930, and two piano solos on Columbia in 1931,
on which he sang, accompanied by himself, his own songs ‘I’m Crazy ’Bout
My Baby (and My Baby’s Crazy ’Bout Me)’ (words by Alex Hill) and ‘Draggin’
My Poor Heart Around’, revealing a charming high baritone. The Lion
claimed credit for getting Fats to sing, but his writing partner Andy
Razaf said that when they went the rounds of publishers hawking their
songs, Fats’s singing would sell them better than his own. (Andreamenentania
Paul Razafinkeriefo was descended from the royal family of Madagascar.)
Tunes poured out of Waller,
but he was profligate in more ways than one, and often sold songs outright
when he needed money; the suspicion persists that he sold now-famous
tunes to Jimmy McHugh. Publishers frequently paid an advance to acquire
a song, but would then forget to pay royalties; Waller and Razaf got
their own back by selling the same lead sheet to several different publishers,
sometimes all in the same building on the same day. They wrote scores
of songs that were never even published, but their best known, apart
from ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, include: ‘(What Did I Do to be So) Black and
Blue’, an affecting song that takes a swipe at racism, also used in
Hot Chocolates and superbly recorded by Louis Armstrong; ‘Honeysuckle
Rose’, from the same year (1929), which seems to have been a variation
on ‘Tea for Two’ (he interpolated them on a piano solo in 1937); ‘Blue,
Turning Grey Over You’, ‘Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now’ and ‘Ain’t-cha
Glad?’ Razaf also wrote words for tunes by many other composers.
Waller also wrote ‘I’ve
Got a Feeling I’m Falling’ with Rose, and recorded it with the Rhythmakers
and vocalist Billy Banks (who had a skill for happy scat and recorded
under a great many names with a different line-up each time). Waller
recorded with Don Redman’s studio groups, Red McKenzie and Ted Lewis;
a recording with one of Jack Teagarden’s studio bands is notable for
the repartee between Teagarden and Waller on ‘You Rascal You’ and ‘That’s
What I Like About You’. He played the organ for a popular late-night
radio programme in Cincinnati (and in the morning the cleaner had to
remove several empty gin bottles).
In 1934, as the new jukebox
industry was beginning to take off and the record business struggled
out of the Depression, Victor invited him back, to record with a combo
as Fats Waller and his Rhythm, and jukebox as well as jazz history was
made. The group included guitarist Al Casey (a teenager when Waller
hired him), Gene ‘Honey Bear’ Sedric on reeds (one of Sam Wooding’s
favourite players in his European band), Bill Coleman and then Herman
Autrey on trumpet, Charles Turner or (later) Cedric Wallace on bass
and Slick Jones, Yank Porter or Harry Dial on drums. They were an instant
success.
The songs from Broadway
shows that we now regard as standards were not often pop hits at the
time, but for the first few years Waller’s hits came from some of the
era’s best Tin Pan Alley hacks. Among Waller’s 1934 sessions were James
P. Johnson’s charming ‘A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid’ (words
by Razaf) and ‘I Wish I Were Twins’, by Edgar DeLange (of Hudson and
DeLange), with words by Frank Loesser, one of the great lyricists; ‘Two
Sleepy People’, written by Loesser and Hoagy Carmichael, was a number
one hit for Wailer in 1938. Loesser wrote dummy tunes for his own lyrics
until his own ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ was a huge wartime
hit; from then on he wrote both words and music, creating such songs
as ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ and ‘On a Slow Boat to China’. His masterpiece,
the show Guys and Dolls (1950), which included ‘If I Were a Bell’,
was followed by The Most Happy Fella (1956) and How To Succeed
in Business Without Really Trying (1961).
Also from 1934 came Waller
and Razaf’s ‘How Can You Face Me’, together with the pop songs ‘Then
I’ll Be Tired of You’, ‘Don’t Let It Bother You’, ‘Sweetie Pie’ and
‘Believe It, Beloved’. Like Billie Holiday, Waller recorded tunes that
were new at the time; nobody knew whether they would be hits or not,
and some survived only because he recorded them, such as ‘Dream Man
(Let Me Dream Some More)’ and ‘Do Me a Favor (Marry Me)’. Among the
writers were J. C. Johnson, who wrote ‘Believe It, Beloved’, as well
as Bessie Smith’s ‘Empty Bed Blues’ and ‘Dusky Stevedore’ (recorded
by Frankie Trumbauer with Bix and many others). Mack Gordon wrote ‘Don’t
Let It Bother You’ (suitable for the recovery period: ‘Take it on the
chin / Give a little grin / Everything will be okay!’). Arthur Schwartz
and Yip Harburg wrote ‘Then I’ll Be Tired of You’; Schwartz wrote ‘Got
a Bran’ New Suit’ and many more with lyricist Howard Dietz. Dietz also
wrote with Kern, Gershwin, Vernon Duke and Sammy Fain; Harburg wrote
‘April in Paris’ with Vernon Duke and, with Harold Arlen, ‘It’s Only
a Paper Moon’, ‘Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe’ and the songs
for The Wizard of Oz.
Nobody did more than Fats
Waller, except Louis Armstrong himself, to bring jazz to popular music.
If he liked a song, he could do it more or less straight, but he often
kidded a song unmercifully, improvising his own additions to the lyrics
as well as vocal ejaculations during instrumental breaks and bridges.
Often he would blurt out (sometimes salacious) tag-lines at the end,
such as ‘No, Lady, we can’t haul your ashes for twenty-five cents. That’d
be bad business.’ ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’,
a sweet love song by Fred Ahlert and Joe Young, was played straight.
‘Truckin’’ was written for a Cotton Club revue by Rube Bloom and Ted
Koehler; it became a dance fad (a sequel was ‘Let’s Get Drunk and Truck’,
by Tampa Red in 1936). ‘All My Life’ was a pretty ballad by Sidney Mitchell
and Sammy Stept that had several hit recordings, including one by Teddy
Wilson with Ella Fitzgerald. ‘A Little Bit Independent’ was by Edgar
Leslie and Joe Burke. As is often true of the pop charts, the best records
were not usually the biggest hits, but the Waller number one ‘It’s a
Sin to Tell a Lie’ (by Billy Mayhew) is an exception: an uptempo romp,
it suited the full Waller treatment: ‘Get on out there and tell your
lie,’ he demands of Sedric before his clarinet solo, and ends with one
of his favourite tags, ‘What’d I say?!’
Waller was his own worst
enemy, so profligate that he was always in need of money. The jukebox
operators naturally preferred to buy cheaper records, and in 1939 Victor
transferred Waller to its cheaper Bluebird label, the better to compete
with Kapp’s Decca label for the mechanical business. For whatever reason,
towards the end of his career some of the songs were so bad that not
even he could save them: ‘Little Curly Hair in a High Chair’, ‘My Mommie
Sent Me to the Store’, ‘Abercrombie Had a Zombie’. But the jazz content
was nearly always present, and there are an extraordinary number of
gems: definitive versions of delightful songs like ‘Lulu’s Back in Town’
(by Al Dubin and Harry Warren), ‘Rosetta’ (by Earl Hines, on which Fats
plays celesta), ‘I Believe in Miracles’ (organ), ‘What’s the Reason
I’m Not Pleasin’ You?’, ‘There’ll be Some Changes Made’, ‘I Used to
Love You (But It’s All Over Now)’, ‘I’ll Dance at Your Wedding’ (with
the tag ‘Go on, get married again!’) and ‘The Curse of an Aching Heart’
(‘Bump, bump, bump, bump! That’s the curse back at ya!’). The mixture
of jazz, jive and beauty is unique. ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’, a charming
non-love song with the tag ‘One never knows, do one?’, was a hit in
1939, followed by ‘Your Socks Don’t Match’ and ‘Hold Tight (I Want Some
Sea Food, Mama)’. (Few knew that the last was about cunnilingus.)
The canard is heard that
Waller’s sidemen were somehow second-rate; certainly his group did not
survive the loss of one of the most ebullient musical personalities
of the century, but again and again on the recordings his men played
exquisitely apposite solos. Waller himself is still admired, for example
by Cecil Taylor ‘for the depth of his notes’. There were more piano
solos, among them ‘Clothes Line Ballet’, ‘Alligator Crawl’, ‘African
Ripples’, Duke Ellington’s ‘Ring Dem Bells’ and ‘Carolina Shout’.
Waller visited Europe twice;
in London in 1938 he recorded pipe organ solos, and with such sidemen
as trombonist George Chisholm and drummer Edmundo Ros (later the leader
of a popular Latin-American band). On a 1939 trip he recorded again
on pipe organ, and also made the London Suite, a set of six impressions
borrowing themes here and there from some of his other tunes. In Paris
he played the organ at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, an experience at
the ‘God box’ that he regarded as one of the great honours of his life.
He led a big band on one
tour. He also recorded with a protégée, pianist and vocalist
Una Mae Carlisle, who sang straight to Waller’s clowning on ‘I Can’t
Give You Anything But Love’ (1939). He made recordings both solo and
with his combo for Muzak (the recordings were unreleased for years)
and on V-discs for the armed services, including ‘The Reefer Song’ (‘I
dreamed about a reefer five feet long . . .’). At his own Carnegie Hall
concert in January 1942 he was almost too drunk to play the second half.
In December of 1943 his body gave up the struggle, and he died of pneumonia
on a train between engagements. He was only thirty-nine.
Following Victor’s jukebox
success with Waller’s records, John Hammond talked Brunswick into a
series of small-group sides led by pianist Teddy Wilson, who acted as
a contractor, hiring whichever musicians happened to be in town for
each date. Wilson, who was from a middle-class background, left college
to become a full-time musician; his first recordings as a soloist in
1934 were rejected by Columbia, who did not appreciate his understated
elegance, a stylistic influence for generations. From July 1935 to 1942,
however, he made nearly three hundred sides for Brunswick, many featuring
vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and, above all, Billie
Holiday. None of the participants received any royalties, but the records
were so popular that the following year Brunswick began recording Holiday
under her own name. From late 1937 Wilson was often replaced on Holiday’s
records by Claude Thornhill, Eddie Heywood and others, but her sessions
did not stray far from Wilson’s original conception.
Billie Holiday was born
Elinore Harris in Philadelphia; neither her mother nor her maternal
grandmother had been married, so the surname had passed down on the
female side for three generations. Her father, Clarence Holiday, played
guitar with Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman. She had a turbulent early
life, in many ways the opposite of that of the urbane, well-educated
Wilson, but, like him, she had an innate dignity that never left her,
and she was a very great jazz musician. When she was young, her voice
was pretty and sweet, but it already had the unique vocal colour that
was all that remained when she died; if the essence of singing popular
songs is to interpret them, she was one of the greatest pop singers
who ever lived. She was certainly the essence of languor, always singing
behind the beat; she brought high spirits, a laid-back sexiness or deep
sadness to her work, depending on the song, but always showed a yearning
wistfulness.
Her first recordings were
sides with a Benny Goodman studio group in 1933. When she sang on Wilson’s
first session, she was just twenty, and he was twenty-two: ‘Miss Brown
to You’ and ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ became classics. Holiday’s
soul-mate was Lester Young. It is said that they were never lovers,
but his solos with her vocals on tracks like ‘A Sailboat in the Moonlight’,
‘On the Sentimental Side’, ‘Back in Your Own Back Yard’ and ‘When a
Woman Loves a Man’ (all 1937) were the musical equivalent of making
love. He named her Lady Day, and called her mother the Duchess; she
named him Prez, thinking that along with a Duke, an Earl, a Count and
a King of Swing there ought to be a President.
Holiday recorded for Milt
Gabler’s Commodore label, and then for Decca, which backed her with
strings: like many jazz artists of that era, she hankered after legitimacy,
in the belief that string arrangements bestowed a cachet. In the 1950s
she recorded for Verve and American Columbia (CBS, with strings conducted
by Ray Ellis), and toured Europe; her excellent accompanists included
Bobby Tucker, Jimmy Rowles and Mal Waldron. Her career went slowly downhill;
she was famous for being a heroin addict, but it was alcohol that killed
her, in 1959. Even her later performances were extraordinarily moving.
On a famous Timex TV jazz programme in 1957 she sang her own ‘Fine and
Mellow’, and Young was there too; they had not long to live, but they
still had something to say to each other through their music.
There are too many masterpieces
among Wilson’s sides to describe them all, but among the highlights
is a Chicago session of May 1936, which featured the bass player Israel
Crosby, still a teenager, notably on the dramatic ‘Blues in C Sharp
Minor’; ‘Warmin’ Up’ is a high-spirited tribute to the small-group jazz
style just before modern jazz began to evolve. An unusual West Coast
date in September 1937, with Wilson, Red Norvo on xylophone, John Simmons
on bass and Harry James on trumpet, yielded intimate treatments of Waller’s
‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’. ‘Just a Mood’, which stretched
to two sides of a 10-inch 78, was an unusually beautiful original.
The success of Wilson’s
contractor method of making records may have inspired Victor to hire
Lionel Hampton to do the same thing in 1937. In his youth Hampton played
snare drum in a drum and bugle corps and became a newsboy in Chicago
so he could beat the drum in a band sponsored by the Chicago Defender.
Somewhere along the way he also became familiar with the marimba, and
soon hit the road as a drummer; he first recorded in 1929 with Paul
Johnson’s Quality Serenaders. As a member of Les Hite’s band when it
backed Louis Armstrong in a Los Angeles club Hampton played Louis’s
solo from ‘Song of the Islands’ on orchestral bells, and when the band
backed Louis on his recording of ‘Memories of You’, Hampton was encouraged
to become the first jazzman to record playing the vibraphone. Gladys,
his ambitious soon-to-be wife, prompted him to concentrate on it. A
few years later he was leading a band at the Paradise Club, and among
the musicians sitting in were Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Wilson.
The Goodman quartet first recorded in August 1936, and both Wilson and
Hampton became famous.
Hampton was more of a showman
than Wilson, and moved from chair to chair on various sides. Most of
his nearly a hundred small-group items were instrumental, except where
he himself sang, as on the charming ‘I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)’
(the original issue of which was backed with ‘Drum Stomp’, based on
‘Crazy Rhythm’, with Hamp on drums) and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.
One of his best-known records, the latter featured Johnny Hodges, and
was backed with an uptempo romp on Vincent Youmans’s ‘I Know That You
Know’. From the same date as ‘Drum Stomp’ came ‘Piano Stomp’ (based
on ‘Shine’), and Hampton also played piano on ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ (1939)
at what seemed like an incredibly fast tempo, yet it was not too fast
for his fleet two-fingered style. He played the right-hand piano part
on ‘Wizzin’ the Wizz’ while Clyde Hart played the left-hand part, and
drums on ‘Big Jam in the Wigwam’ while Cozy Cole concentrated on the
tom-toms.
Among the musicians at
a session in September 1939 were Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Chu
Berry and Ben Webster, as well as the young Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie
Christian in the rhythm section; that date included ‘Hot Mallets’ and
Carter’s ‘When Lights are Low’. The parade of sidemen used on the Wilson
and Hampton records names most of the stars of the bands of Ellington,
Basie, Calloway and Goodman. Pianist Jess Stacy was an asset at the
first few Hampton sessions, and Hampton used no fewer than eleven of
the best drummers of the era, not counting himself. The rhythm section
on ‘Jack the Bellboy’ and ‘Central Avenue Breakdown’, made in Hollywood
in 1940, was the Nat Cole Trio. ‘Bellboy’ has at least three hands on
the keyboard.
As Stanley Dance pointed
out in his notes for an RCA set of the complete Hampton sessions, one
of the joys of the recordings is the chance to hear musicians who were
not recorded often enough. Dance singles out pianist Marlowe Morris,
who was influenced by Art Tatum. Hampton’s showmanship was always evident,
and as his series wore on, along with all the beautiful jazz there was
much joyful jive, with some forward-sounding harmonies and more than
a hint of the West Coast rhythm and blues that would soon be under way.
Listen, for example, to ‘(Latch on to Some) Dough-rey-mi’, written by
Southern, Cole and Hampton, and sung by the ‘Hampton Rhythm Boys’. The
interaction of Cole’s piano and Hampton’s vibraphone on this track occasionally
predicts the sound of the George Shearing Quintet, which would be enormously
popular a decade later. Another interesting thing about the whole series
is the guitar players, from the quiet competence of Goodman’s sideman
Allen Reuss to Danny Barker, Charlie Christian, Al Casey, Freddie Green,
Ernest Ashley, Teddy Bunn, Irving Ashby and Cole’s Oscar Moore, several
of whom played electric instruments.
The Nat Cole Trio used
an uncommon instrumentation: piano, guitar and bass. Allegedly, the
drummer didn’t show up for their first gig and they decided they didn’t
need one. Cole later became one of the most popular vocalists in the
world, and deservedly so, but the trio’s records did well on the jukeboxes,
and it is too easily forgotten that his modern-sounding Hines-inspired
keyboard was very influential, on such different musicians as Oscar
Peterson and Bill Evans.
Hampton formed a big band
which began recording for Decca in late 1941, and led it well into the
1950s. It was a crowd-pleaser - critics often ridiculed its theatrical
aspect - but among its stars was young tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet.
(Critics overlooked his skill as a ballad player for years because it
didn’t fit their thesis of Jacquet as a honker; he began recording as
a leader in 1945, and in 1988 led a big band at jazz festivals.) Hampton
was still a sure bet in the late 1980s if you wanted to have a good
time; his ability to swing and to inspire younger musicians has had
an incalculable effect.
An unusual and successful
sextet was that of bass player John Kirby, the ‘biggest little band
in the land’. The group began to come together as 52nd Street in New
York became a meeting place for jazz fans. On their first hit record
(as the Claude Thornhill Orchestra in 1937) they backed Maxine Sullivan
singing ‘Loch Lomond’; that band included Thornhill (piano and arranger),
Frankie Newton (trumpet), Pete Brown (alto saxophone), Babe Russin (tenor
saxophone), Buster Bailey (clarinet), Kirby (double bass) and O’Neill
Spencer (drums). They were Buster Bailey and his Rhythm Busters with
slightly different personnel, then John Kirby and his Onyx Club Boys
with the classic line-up, and later John Kirby and his Orchestra: Kirby,
Spencer, Bailey, Charlie Shavers (trumpet), Russell Procope (alto saxophone)
and Billy Kyle (piano). Shavers’s composition ‘Undecided’ was a hit
in 1939; Shavers was almost as highly regarded as Roy Eldridge then,
and also wrote ‘Pastel Blue’; most of the Kirby group’s arrangements
were his.
Kirby and Sullivan were
married, and the band became one of the most successful black groups
in the country, performing at high-class hotel dates and on a radio
show called Flow Gently Sweet Rhythm, on which Sullivan sang
folksongs such as ‘If I Had a Ribbon Bow’ and ‘Molly Malone’ (recorded
under her name for a different label). The group also appeared on Duffy’s
Tavern and the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street,
a popular pseudo-jazz radio spot directed by NBC staffer Henry ‘Hot
Lips’ Levine; it featured Dinah Shore, and had guests like Sidney Bechet
and Jelly Roll Morton. All this was extraordinary exposure for a black
band, and a tribute to its musical qualities. It was a quiet chamber
group (Shavers usually played with a mute) and the arrangements, though
tricky and highly stylized, were studded with lively solos. Its similarity
to Wilson’s stemmed from its elegance and the presence of Billy Kyle,
who worked with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars from 1953. Anybody who played
with that group in its later years was taken for granted, but Kyle had
already been an influential and underrated stylist for many years by
then. His technique was the equal of Wilson’s, but he had a brighter
and more rhythmic side, perhaps influenced by Earl Hines. As J. R. Taylor
put it in a sleeve-note for the Smithsonian Institution: ‘Kyle’s rising
tremolo lunge behind Bailey [in ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’] is probably unique
in jazz accompaniment before Cecil Taylor.’
Kirby and Sullivan were
divorced, the war wrecked the band’s line-up and the post-war world
was not interested: the group’s big success lasted only a couple of
years, and its style had no sequel. This was partly for the same reason
that such excellent musicians as Shavers, Billy Butterfield, Roy Eldridge,
Rex Stewart and Red Allen were, in general, not as highly rewarded as
they should have been. After the war there was an absurd critical division
into ‘dixieland’ and ‘modern’ camps, so that the great mainstream graduates
of the Swing Era got lost in the shuffle, a loss which record companies
and broadcasters did nothing to prevent.
Procope, of course, subsequently
played for twenty-eight years with Duke Ellington; Shavers played in
the interracial studio band of Raymond Scott (later music director on
the radio and television chart show Your Hit Parade, whose vocalist,
Dorothy Collins, he married). Scott’s arrangements, for example, ‘In
an Eighteenth Century Dining Room’ and ‘Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry
Cannibals’, were slick and intricate, like Kirby’s, but had little jazz
content. Shavers remained popular among those with long memories. On
a tour in England in 1969, according to Digby Fairweather, he was playing
brilliantly, and was delighted to find electrical sockets in hotel bathrooms
marked ‘For Shavers Only’. He said, ‘Wait till Eldridge sees this!’
52nd Street, New York,
became a place where the amount of good music to be heard was almost
unbelievable. One of the first big acts on the Street, just as Prohibition
was repealed in 1933, was scat singer Leo Watson and his Five Spirits
of Rhythm, a group which used a suitcase as a drum and played with whisk
brooms and three tipples (novelty guitars that sounded like ukuleles).
Brass players Joe Riley and Eddie Farley used a novelty tune in their
act on the Street; ‘The Music Goes Round and Round (and It Comes Out
Here)’ suddenly became a huge fluke hit, and the Riley-Farley Orchestra
had one of the money-making versions. Violinist Stuff Smith and his
Onyx Club Boys, with Jonah Jones on trumpet and Cozy Cole on drums,
made a name on the Street in 1936 with ‘I’se a Muggin’’ and ‘You’se
a Viper’ (with a vocal by Jones). The Kirby Sextet too started on the
Street. By the early 1940s Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins,
Fats Waller and many more might virtually all be heard playing on the
Street at once. The Street was mostly a venue for small groups, but
Count Basie’s band first made it big there in 1937 at the Famous Door
(whose name derived from an old door covered with autographs). Other
clubs, mostly in what were called ‘English basements’ under brownstone
houses, included the Hickory House, the Yacht Club, Kelly’s Stable and
the Three Deuces. The Street was so successful that musicians starting
a club where they could meet were soon pushed out of their own place
by the tourists and fans. Today the brownstones have been replaced by
steel and glass buildings occupied by banks.
Independent labels were
being formed for the specific purpose of recording small-group jazz;
the first one in the USA was Commodore. Milt Gabler began selling records
in his father’s radio shop in New York in 1926; the Commodore Music
Shop became a hang-out for fans and musicians, and the records soon
replaced the radio parts. Gabler was responsible for several firsts:
his was probably the first record shop to have browsing bins arranged
by artist, and he was the first to reissue classic discs. He began by
custom-ordering pressings of out-of-print records, because he knew he
could sell three hundred copies of, say, ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’,
even if it took a couple of years. But in the case of that title Vocalion
decided that if Gabler wanted to buy so many copies of it, they would
press a few extra and sell them to his competitors. So Gabler formed
the first record club, the United Hot Clubs of America. He also hired
Jazz clubs on Sunday afternoons offering free jam sessions to music
fans. (When other clubs copied Gabler, they charged admission, but still
did not pay the musicians.)
The world’s first specialised
jazz record label was Swing in France, which began because too few jazz
records were available there. The first release in 1937 was the legendary
Benny Carter session. ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Crazy Rhythm’ were played
by a lineup that Carter has re-created several times: himself and Alix
Combelle on alto saxophones and Coleman Hawkins and Andre Ekyan on tenor;
the rhythm section included Django Reinhardt on guitar, Stephane Grappelli
on piano, Eugene D’Hellemes on bass and Tommy Benford on drums. In January
1938 Gabler’s first recording session was with Eddie Condon and his
Windy City Seven: Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, Bobby Hackett, drummer
George Wettling, bassist Artie Bernstein and Jess Stacy (whose hands
were still sore the day after Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert).
The hornmen were all among the finest musicians of their generation,
but still underrated by the general public because they were not recorded
often enough or properly promoted by the music industry, interested
then as now primarily in a fast buck. Gabler was also the first to list
the complete personnel on the record label.
In April 1939 Columbia
lent Billie Holiday to Commodore because they did not want to issue
‘Strange Fruit’, by poet Lewis Allen, and early protest song, about
lynching, which Billie had made up her mind to record. Its tragic power
is undiminished today. The backing band, with which Billie was appearing
at Cafe Society, was led by trumpeter Frankie Newton, who had left the
Kirby Sextet just as it went on to its great success (he and Kirby were
rivals for the affection of Maxine Sullivan). Cafe Society, a club started
by a shoe salesman named Barney Josephson, with some help and advice
from John Hammond and others, was a place which practised discrimination
only in favour of good music, and was popular for a decade. One of the
other sides made that day was ‘Fine and Mellow’, which Gabler titled
and helped to write; it was intended to be similar to ‘Billie’s Blues’,
which Holiday had recorded in 1936 at her first session as a leader.
When Decca Records rang to inquire about the new song, Gabler knew that
it must be getting jukebox plays, and he quickly registered its composition
in Holiday’s name before any covers were made.
From 1941 Gabler also worked
for Decca; but he kept Commodore going into the 1950s. The complete
limited-edition Commodore reissue programme embarked upon by Mosaic
Records of Stamford, Connecticut, in 1988, which filled dozens of LPs
in three massive sets, is full of priceless material, the peak of which
(for me, anyway) is the previously mentioned Kansas City Six session
of September 1938, with Lester Young playing gorgeous clarinet (on a
metal instrument), Buck Clayton on trumpet, Eddie Durham on electric
guitar and Basie’s rhythm section of Freddie Green, Walter Page and
Jo Jones. Not to mention fourteen solos by Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith,
Coleman Hawkins sides, clarinet quartet recordings by Edmond Hall and
Pee Wee Russell, and much, much more.
When Harry Lim emigrated
to the USA from Batavia (now Djakarta) in Indonesia in 1939, he was
already a jazz fan. He began producing jam sessions and from 1943 produced
records for Eric Bernay’s Keynote, until then a left-wing folk label
which had recorded the Almanac Singers. One of the first jazz dates
at Keynote was also the first solo session by Dinah Washington, a unique
and still influential vocalist who had been discovered and re-named
by Lionel Hampton. (Her real name was Ruth Lee Jones.) Leonard Feather
produced the date and wrote most of the material; ‘Salty Papa’ and ‘Evil
Gal Blues’ were hits in the black chart. The group from Hampton’s band
included Texas tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb (making his recording debut)
and pianist Milt Buckner (later more famous as an organist, one of the
inventors of the ‘locked hands’ chordal keyboard style that was soon
done to death by a generation of keyboard players). Hampton came along
to help out, playing drums on one of the four sides recorded and piano
on another. The best-known (and best-selling) Lim productions were those
by Lester Young at a session of four tunes, made the day before the
Dinah Washington date, in a quartet with Johnny Guarnieri, Slam Stewart
and Sid Catlett. It was bettered only by four more tracks three months
later, this time 12-inch 78s by a quintet with Basie and his rhythm
section. (The one track of which an alternative take was not made is
‘Lester Leaps Again’ - it was perfect in one take.)
In less than four years
Lim made well over three hundred sides. His main aim was to indulge
himself (though it earned him everlasting gratitude from jazz fans)
by recording people who did not get many chances to record under their
own names, such as trumpeter Joe Thomas, Chicago guitarist George Barnes,
Milt Hinton, Willie Smith, Babe Russin, Manny Klein, tenor saxophonist
Herbie Haymer and several members of the Woody Herman herd, including
trombonist Bill Harris, bassist Chubby Jackson; also Red Norvo, trumpeters
Jonah Jones and Roy Eldridge, Gene Sedric, Red Rodney . . . and too
many more to list.
Of the several fine Coleman
Hawkins dates, the most fascinating is the one with the Sax Ensemble
of May 1944, at which 12" 78s were made. The group comprised Catlett
(drums), Guarnieri (piano), Al Lucas (double bass), Tab Smith (alto
saxophone and arranger- he had worked for Basie and Millinder, among
others), Hawkins and Don Byas (tenor saxophones) and Harry Carney (baritone
saxophone). The septet sounds like a much larger group, thanks to Smith’s
arrangements and the sound of four great reedmen playing together. To
pick out just one track: ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ begins with
a Smith solo (very different from that of Johnny Hodges on the classic
recording of the same tune made by Lionel Hampton several years earlier)
and ends with a dazzling Smith cadenza, which is several seconds longer
on the second take and perfectly realized.
Keynote went out with a
bang: two trio sessions by the young pianist Lennie Tristano, the last
produced by Feather. Tristano’s advanced harmonic ideas were enormously
influential, but he concentrated on teaching rather than performing,
and recorded all too little; the Keynote sessions yielded tracks that
were not released for decades. Lim lost control (to Mercury Records)
of recordings he had made using his own money; he later worked at the
Liberty Music Shop (which, like Commodore, had its own label for a while)
and, in its heyday from 1956 to 1973, for Sam Goody’s record shop, where
he was renowned as the world’s most knowledgeable record-shop assistant.
In 1972 he formed the Famous Door label and was one of those responsible
for discovering Scott Hamilton, today’s enormously popular Swing Era
style tenor saxophonist.
Other independent jazz
labels of the period included HRS (Hot Record Society), Solo Art (which
recorded, among others, Chicago’s Jimmy Yancey, one of the most distinctive
of boogie-woogie piano players, with the accent on the blues rather
than the boogie), Bob Thiele’s Signature label and, the most famous
of all, Blue Note. Thiele worked as an announcer on jazz radio shows
in 1936, was a bandleader, editor and publisher of Jazz Magazine,
and formed Signature in 1939, when he was still a teenager. He was among
the first to record pianist Erroll Garner, and made small-group dates
by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Lockjaw Davis and Julian Dash. Some
of the Hawkins and Young sides were 12-inch masters; it was typical
of these small labels to attempt to give the artists room to blow, even
though 12-inch records were less commercially viable. It was a Signature
recording of Davis’s ‘Lockjaw’ that gave him his nickname. Dash had
played with Erskine Hawkins, and his tracks for Signature, with Kyle
on piano, are fascinating examples of what was intended to get on Harlem
jukeboxes in 1950; the smoochy ‘My Silent Love’ is drenched in echo.
Thiele also recorded four
sessions in 1944-5 by Flip Phillips, tenor saxophone star of Woody Herman’s
band, with other Hermanites in the backing groups. Three sessions with
Anita O’Day in 1947-8 paid a dividend: the novelty ‘Hi Ho Trailus Boot
Whip’, arranged by Sy Oliver, was a pop hit.
Blue Note, the best-known
of these labels, was formed by German immigrant Alfred Lion in 1939
to record the boogie-woogie pianos of Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons.
The Port of Harlem Jazzmen included Ammons, then Lewis, Frankie Newton
and, on some tracks, Sidney Bechet, whose ‘Summertime’ was an instant
classic. Lion was joined by his fellow Berliner and childhood friend,
Frank Wolff. In 1941 they recorded Edmond Hall’s quartet: Hall, Lewis
(on celesta - they recorded him on harpsichord the same year), Israel
Crosby (bass) and Charlie Christian (acoustic guitar). Its ‘Profoundly
Blue’ was a classic. Blue Note too made 12-inch sides. They often recorded
at night, which was far more convenient for the musicians, and provided
food and drink for them. The unusual attention to the artists’ welfare
and the distinctive label artwork (overseen by Wolff) heralded the beginning
of an illustrious chapter in the record business. The label specialised
in ‘swingtets’ led by tenor saxophonists John Hardee and Ike Quebec,
whose ‘Blue Harlem’ (1944) was another jukebox hit. Quebec joined the
staff, and it was due partly to his influence that Blue Note was the
first to record Thelonious Monk as a leader, in 1947.
But that is getting ahead
of our story. Blue Note was only one of the mostly independent labels
documenting the changes in popular music in the 1940s, a decade that
needs close attention.
