Jazz the World Forgot Vol.1 (1920s)

Home  |  Listen to the Banned (1929)  |  Frank Crumit Returns (1920s)  |  The Gay Caballero [Living Era] (1920s)  |  The Gay Caballero [Nostalgia] (1920s)  |  The Great American Bum (1920s)  |  Jazz the World Forgot Vol.1 (1920s)  |  Frank Luther (1920s)  |  Silvertone (1920s)  |  Street Walking Blues (1920s)  |  What's New  |  Contact Us
 

Down in New Orleans sometime in the 1910s, a young boy went fishing with his uncle
out at the Milneburg resort where jazz bands used to play. The young boy grew up to
be newspaperman Scoop Kennedy, who later recalled the experience...

I don't remember the exact first time I heard a jazz band. I was there in the camps connected to the long wharf at Milneburg on the swamp shores of Lake Pontchartrain. I wasknee high to my uncle Eugene, who fished the brackish waters. I was his helper. My uncle Eugene hated Sundays because on Sundays the jazz bands in the camps played so hot the soft shell crabs wouldn't sit still and be caught, and because every time I heard the beat of the bass I'd stomp my bare feet on the bottom of the lake and muddy the water and then we couldn't see what we were after. And there were 30 bands to listen to on Saturday. Each made its own separate music in its own little hot world. Only the beat was the same, the rhythm. Sometimes late in the evening, the bands by a wonderful coincidence would hit the same beat. Then all the shingle roofs would tremble and the long wharf would rumble and the water would ripple, all in unison, and the feet of the dancers in the 30 camps would scrape and shuffle just about in the same time, and that was a mighty good thing to listen to, lying there on my cot. I didn't know it then, but now that I do know I'm glad I was there in the beginning. It got into my fresh young blood and stayed there.

Kennedy's vivid first hand account is an evocative glimpse into the world that existed before jazz was commercially recorded. He was hearing contemporaries of Johnny Fischer's Orchestra and Mathews Band (see cover photos Vol. 1) playing for dancing at a time when jazz supplied the rhythm for dancing. Musicians played with an attack that could propel a roomful of dancers and cut through the din of an exuberant crowd. Bands were rated on how they played dance music. Before the solo, before the sophisticated arrangements, rhythm was king.

In the early 1920s popular new dances like the Shimmy, the Black Bottom and Charleston demanded lively rhythm, and jazz spread because it gave the dancing public the energized rhythm it wanted. Jazz was one manifestation of the ongoing social change in America. In the early 1900s Victorian dances with limited body contact had given way to the Grizzly Bear, Turkey Trot and Fox Trot, dances whose animalistic names and movements offered a hint of sexuality. Middle class women were finally free to smoke, dress comfortably and go out drinking and dancing with their boyfriends and husbands. By 1920, the middle class was frequenting places like speakeasies, cabarets and dance halls, and musicians everywhere had to keep up with the beat.

Although the waves emanating from New Orleans were felt, each region held its own musical dialect and shaped its own jazz identity. Jazz The World Forgot presents a panorama of early jazz from the most dynamic New Orleans classics to obscure and unique jazz pieces from other regions, including many recordings by unheralded orchestras who passed through the studio, left their imprint and disappeared. As a collection of musical snapshots of time and place, this project attests to the richness, variety and pervasiveness of jazz on the 1920s American music scene. These recordings also make it abundantly clear that this is not simply music that can be written down and played by skilled readers. The essence of this music exists beyond the written notes, in subtleties of timbre, vibrato, attack and phrasing. Bands like Louis Dumaine's Jazzola Eight and Sam Morgan's Orchestra play with breathtaking expressiveness and original power that must be felt.

The musicians from New Orleans pioneered an exciting ensemble style, updating the brass and marching band format with loose ragtime-based rhythm, adapting it to a smaller group, and freeing up the individual from playing from a score. Echoes of the brass band tradition are heard at the beginning of Johnny De Droit's The Swing and George McClennon's version of New Orleans Wiggle, then both records move toward a driving ensemble finish. This ensemble style spread following the popularity of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's million selling recordings of 1917 - 1918. As with the larger brass band, it is the interplay between the instruments that gives the music its interest, the way melody and rhythm is attacked by the musicians in unison, resulting in a group sound where no instrument dominates. Bands such as De Droit's also exhibit imaginative ways to work through chorus after chorus with different instruments playing lead and accent each time through. It was with the rise of featured soloists like Louis Armstrong that jazz moved from the ensemble style where no instrument dominates toward a music showcasing instrumental solos backed by the rhythm section, later examples being Floyd Mills' Hard Luck or Taylor's Dixie Serenaders' Everybody Loves My Baby.

By the early 1920s the major record companies responded to a growing market for "hot" records with a wide variety of jazz and jazz-influenced music, drawing from a wide spectrum of entertainment venues and seeking out regional sources. Ragtime influences are heard here in Benny Moten's Kater St. Rag and also Percolatin' Blues by Fowler's Favorites. From New Orleans, connections with marching bands, spirituals and a string band tradition are heard respectively in Louis Dumaine's To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa, Sam Morgan's Over In The Gloryland and Frenchy's String Band's Texas And Pacific Blues. Theatrical revues and touring stage shows shaped Goin' Crazy With The Blues by Mamie Smith, Sammie Lewis' Arkansas Shout, The Mess by Thomas Morris and Reb Spikes' My Mammy's Blues. The atmospheric sound of Charlie Johnson's The Boy In The Boat emerged out of a Harlem night club. Among the numerous territory bands that honed their sound playing for dances, recordings by Maynard Baird from Knoxville and J. Neal Montgomery from Atlanta are included here. A cross section of the great music that came out of studio session work is also represented in Big Ben by Bennett's Swamplanders, Wild Cat Blues by Clarence Williams Blue Five and Rush Inn Blues by the Whoopee Makers.

The records up to the mid-1920s contain many first rate examples of ensemble style jazz by small groups, a superb one being Gowans' Rhapsody Makers' I'll Fly To Hawaii, but by the late 1920s the trend was toward larger bands with "hot" arrangements that maintained the pulse in reed and brass sections. Saxophones and clarinets had long been treated as novelty instruments more suitable for vaudeville than playing dance music, and performers like George McClennon developed acts around the effects that could be produced. Paul Whiteman's early records, which pioneered the use of a sax section, were selling in the millions by 1920. With the success of his arrangements, other bands followed, and the smaller groups playing unwritten ensemble music were recorded less frequently. But audiences were demanding hotter music from their dance bands than Whiteman's "symphonic jazz," and throughout the 1920s the best arrangers were writing for the larger big band format in ways to propel the rhythm. Their role became a driving force in jazz, and music companies published thousands of jazz orchestrations. From band to band and region to region, the records display incredible variety within the same framework of dance rhythm. Roy Johnson's Happy Pals (Happy Pal Stomp), Oliver Naylor's Orchestra (Slowin' Down Blues), Ross De Luxe Syncopaters (Florida Rhythm and Don't You Wanna Know?) and others represented here show the work of arrangers complementing perfectly the unique character of each band's sound. Comparing Andy Preer and his Cotton Club's version of I Found A New Baby with The Ramble by Paul Howard's Quality Serenaders shows two markedly different approaches to the same chord changes.

The diversity of regional styles and sources represented in Jazz The World Forgot paints a scene of an America where technology was not yet dominant enough to spoon feed a homogenized musical formula. Records by regional acts were sold regionally. National radio networks and the band music offered in sound films wouldn't have an impact until the end of the decade. America received its entertainment locally, and its musicians adapted local influences and traditions to their music. While this activity continued throughout the 1920s, by the beginning of the 1930s the variety, flavor and regionalism in the 1920s was beginning to disappear from jazz. Where they existed, the raw, idiosyncratic edges were giving way to a slick, more polished sound and rhythm. Modern arrangements severed connections with some of the older, traditional sources of style, and rather than being judged by the rhythmic pulse of the music, the presence of soloing came to be the defining yardstick of jazz.

 

l. Louis Dumaine's Jazzola Eight
To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa (1927)

Recorded on location in New Orleans, Louis Dumaine's records evoke the rhythm and feel of the marching and brass band precursors of New Orleans jazz. Not surprisingly, Dumaine also led a marching band. To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa is loose and raggy with great ensemble interplay between the instruments as they weave through the melody, a variant of the traditional tune called My Bucket's Got a Hole in It or Midnight Special.

 

2. Roy Johnson's Happy Pals
Happy Pal Stomp (1929)

Roy Johnson's Happy Pals were based in Richmond, Virginia, but had enough of a reputation as a first rate band to be brought up to the Savoy Ballroom in New York for a battle of the bands with the Claude Hopkins and Fletcher Henderson groups. With understated and melodic trumpet riding on top of superb section work, Happy Pal Stomp moves along in a relaxed, rolling rhythm uncharacteristic of a stomp. The raw controlled vibrato of the brass and reeds impart a regional flavor, and the pace at which the music unfolds makes it a unique classic.

 

3. Mamie Smith
Goin' Crazy with the Blues (1926)

After starting the first wave of interest in blues with her prolific recording activity in the first few years of the 1920s, Mamie Smith's recording career slowed down. She continued to tour in revues at theaters and cabarets, but didn't record for over two years. When she recorded Goin' Crazy with the Blues, it was the first chance to hear her throaty sensual voice recorded electrically. The underrated Thomas Morris led studio groups that provided exciting backup for classic blues singers, and as heard here, the spirited way in which his group fills in between the vocal lines adds power to the record and lifts it above the perfunctory backup frequently heard behind these singers.

 

4. Sam Morgan's Jazz Band
Over in the Gloryland (1927)

The roots of black New Orleans jazz resonate no stronger than in the recordings by Sam Morgan's Jazz Band, made in Werlein's Music Store on Canal Street in 1927. Morgan had a reputation as one of the finest cornet players in New Orleans and the band's popularity got them bookings all along the Gulf Coast. They emphasized ensemble play with occasional instrumental solos, and the recordings they left are the finest existing examples of the older ensemble style jazz tradition. The instruments in the band mesh effortlessly with each other in a loose, energized cascade of melody, rhythm and feeling. Over in the Gloryland demonstrates the adaptation of a traditional religious song played in march tempo to the ensemble jazz style.

 

5. Pickett-Parham Apollo Syncopators
Mojo Strut (1926)

Leroy Pickett, violinist, and Tiny Parham, pianist, co-led a band that was playing the Apollo Theater in Chicago during late 1926. Both men had recorded significantly as accompanists to blues singers for Paramount Records, and this opened the door to having their own group recorded by the label. Mojo Strut is an outstanding recording that encapsulates the repertoire of a theater pit band from mood pieces required to accompany vaudeville acts to full strutting ensemble jazz. It opens with an archaic melodramatic strain, transitions to a more syncopated melody with the band chording beneath Pickett'scoy violin lead, and then features the full band swinging out, led by cornetist B.T. Wingfield's ripping, slashing solo -- all within the first minute of the record. As might befit a theater's house band, Mojo Strut is filled with other effects such as a circus-like trombone solo and an unusual wood block break.

 

6. Paul Tremaine and his Aristocrats
Four Four Rhythm (1929)

In the late 1920s Tremaine led a large dance band in New York from a home base of Yoeng's Chinese Restaurant. Four Four Rhythm shows what a dance band like Tremaine's could do when released from the shackles of providing middle of the road dinner dance fare. It's an exuberant recording of an imaginative arrangement with crisp section work propelled by an inventive drummer who uses cymbal clash inserts effectively.

 

7. Charlie Johnson and his Paradise Band
The Boy In The Boat (1928)

From October 1925 to the mid-1930s, Charlie Johnson led the resident band at the black owned Small's Paradise, a club that was one of the most popular Harlem night spots for several decades. The club featured elaborate revues, and Johnson's band also served the theatrical needs of the other performers. The added showmanship and atmosphere they developed is apparent in The Boy in the Boat, a superb example of the Harlem sound, filled with wailing clarinets and highlighted by Sidney De Paris' muted trumpet work.

 

8.  BENNIE MOTEN'S KANSAS CITY ORCHESTRA
She's Sweeter Than Sugar (1925)

Pioneer Kansas City bandleader Bennie Moten's early Kansas City band played its version of New Orleans ensemble style jazz with a looser rhythm than other regions. Moten had studied piano with pupils of Scott Joplin, and it is not surprising that his band's early records are imbued with a ragtime sense of melody and phrasing. She's Sweeter Than Sugar is a wistful melody written by Moten that feels like a much older tune and is perfect for the raggy approach of the band and the engagingly archaic sound of vocalist William Little, Jr.

 

9. Ross De Luxe Syncopaters
Florida Rhythm (1927)

Ross De Luxe Syncopaters hailed from Miami, Florida, spent one day with a field recording unit in Savannah, Georgia, and recorded some of the most atmospheric jazz of the period. The sound of the band is haunting and archaic with a sense of rhythm that has more of a turn-of-the-century lilt than late 1920s drive. The band broke up in New York a year after their records were made and members Cootie Williams and Edmund Hall went on to make names for themselves. Robert Cloud, the unheralded reedman who wrote many of their tunes, would later record with "King" Benny Nawahi. Florida Rhythm is typical of the band's eccentric rhythm accented by phrases from the horn sections. It's music by a band with an approach to playing like no other recorded band from this period.

 

10. Frenchy's String Band
Texas and Pacific Blues (1928)

Polite "Frenchy" Christian was one of the New Orleans jazzmen who ventured westward in the 1920s, settling in Dallas. With a line-up here consisting of cornet, banjo, guitar and bowed bass, Texas and Pacific Blues gives an inkling of music played around New Orleans when a string band line up was used. Frenchy plays ringing cornet close to the melody and adds embellishments to accentuate the feeling of the traditional tune Midnight Special.

 

11. Taylor's Dixie Serenaders
Everybody Loves My Baby (1931)

Taylor's Dixie Serenaders was a young band composed of high school and college students from Charlotte, North Carolina, that caught the ear of a field unit on location in Charlotte mainly to record country musicians. Everybody Loves My Baby is a spirited rendition featuring a driving sax section and a gutsy, superbly crafted 32-bar trumpet solo following the vocal chorus. After leader Dave Taylor left, the band was taken over by its piano player Jimmie Gunn, enlarged, and continued for several years as one of the top bands in the Southeast. Reedman "Skeets" Tolbert came out of this band and began a successful recording career in New York.

 

12. Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers
Kansas City Stomps (1928)

As pianist, composer and arranger of New Orleans music, Jelly Roll Morton is one of the creative geniuses of jazz. His music effortlessly fuses the flavor of marching bands, New Orleans piano ragtime, blues, flourishes of his own musical personality in composition and phrasing and much more. His Red Hot Pepper records were made with different pick-up bands of hand-chosen musicians by auditioning different bands on arrangements of his music and finding those musicians who could interpret it properly. For Kansas City Stomps he brought in New Orleans clarinetist Omer Simeon and used a band playing at Rose's Danceland in Harlem. It is an adaptation of one of his piano pieces, a showpiece of melodic ragtime moving with a marching band strut and filled with Morton's characteristic variations of phrasing and mood.

 

13. Ben Tobier and his California Cyclones
Hot and Heavy (1930)

Tobier's band was actually from New Jersey and had never set foot in California, but New York's Roseland Ballroom thought a more exotic name on the marquee would be a bigger draw. When playing at Roseland that night, the band impressed a New York based scout for a record company and they cut two sides, only one of which was issued. They were billed as the hottest six piece band on the East Coast and Hot and Heavy pumps out the full sound of a much larger band. The outstanding trumpet solo is by Lou Halmy, who later made a name for himself writing many fine big band arrangements.

14. Fowler's Favorites
Percolatin' Blues (1927)

Pianist Lemuel Fowler, a Midwesterner who came to New York after working on Mississippi river boats, accompanied many female blues singers in New York recording sessions in the middle 1920s, and in addition made several sides under his own name. Percolatin' Blues is a spirited ensemble style performance of a ragtime-era tune which also crops up in Market Street Stomp by Charlie Creath, another bandleader who worked Mississippi sternwheelers.

 

15. Oliver Naylor's Orchestra
Slowin' Down Blues (1925)

Oliver Naylor, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, drew on a nucleus of New Orleans musicians in organizing a band called Naylor's Seven Aces. In the Spring of 1925, while playing regularly at the Knickerbocker Grill in New York, the Aces recorded 2 titles, Slowin' Down Blues is a bouncy tune sounding like nothing else recorded by dance bands at that time. The imaginative arrangement features unusual shifts in rhythm and a sax section simulating a train whistle.

 

16. George McClennon's Jazz Devils
While You're Sneaking Out (Somebody Else is Eazin' In) (1926)

When black vaudeville provided a ready source of acts with built in name recognition, performers like vaudeville clarinetist George McClennon were offered the opportunity to record. For his stage work McClennon was billed as a versatile comedian whose "black in blackface" act presented him as Dr. Blues or The Clarinet King, but he also recorded some exciting jazz records with a group called the Jazz Devils. While You 're Sneaking Out contains scorching ensemble passages with an unknown Armstrong-inspired cornetist driving the band.

17. Floyd Mills and his Marylanders
Hard Luck (1929)

Floyd Mills and his Marylanders had the curious home base of Cumberland, Maryland, a small city in the western neck of the state. Like other regional bands, they traveled a summer circuit of dance halls and pavilions. Hard Luck is an appealing melody which shows off the bands well knit, hard driving ensemble sound and features strong solo work on trumpet and clarinet.

18. Maynard Baird and his Orchestra
Postage Stomp (1930)

Maynard Baird led a stellar dance band around Knoxville, Tennessee. Postage Stomp, undoubtedly one of the band's showpiece up-tempo numbers, is an exceptional arrangement played with precision and feeling, featuring beautiful section work by the reeds, tasteful solos and a steady bounce to the rhythm.

 

19. King Oliver's Jazz Band
Mabel's Dream (1923)

King Oliver was the influential bandleader and idol of Louis Armstrong whose early records with his Creole Jazz Band are landmarks in jazz history. The forty sides recorded while they were packing the house at Chicago's Lincoln Gardens show discipline and hand-in-glove cohesion between the instruments at whatever pace the tune is played, from a driving ensemble piece to a slower tune emphasizing melody and feeling. When the Lincoln Gardens burned down in 1924, the Creole Band disbanded. Oliver recorded Mabel's Dream twice and it is the second version that is heard here. The tune is a combination of two songs played with restrained ensemble work that enriches the melodies, the second of which is taken from the hymn Love Lifted Me.

20. Gowan's Rhapsody Makers
I'll Fly to Hawaii (1926)

Brad Gowans takes a popular song, adds a snappy up-tempo arrangement, and leads his Boston-based Rhapsody Makers through several roaring ensemble choruses. Gowans burns through a cornet solo with banjo and tuba right up front kicking the band along. The musicians attack the tune without getting in each others way and what results is one of the most exciting records of the ensemble jazz style.

 

21. Sammie Lewis with his Bamville Syncopators
Arkansas Shout (1926)

On a tour of the east the Bamville Dandies fronted by vocalist Sammie Lewis recorded four sides in New York. The lyrics of Arkansas Shout offer a geographic tour of the state with dance steps called "The Little Rock Slide," "Hot Springs Toddle" and "Helena Glide." Around Lewis' theatrical, somewhat affected vocals, the band plays raw exciting ensemble choruses. Cornetist Edwin Swayze went on to play trumpet with the bands of Chick Webb and Cab Calloway.


Copyright © 2001-2020 by The Jack Horntip Collection.  Conditions of Use.