Albert Schweitzer: Bach, “Little” Fugue in G Minor
Albert Schweitzer
Bach: Fugue in G Minor (“Little”)
Another of Albert Schweitzer’s recordings from the 1930s (see also the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor). This is a short fugue that takes up one side of a 12-inch record. Once again, we have the pleasure of hearing a real organist play unedited. You will hear wrong notes and hesitations, as you would when any real organist sat down to play an organ; there was no editing, other than to do the side over if things went far enough wrong. In spite of the slight surface noise, these unedited performances seem more like the experience of hearing a musician play the organ than our best modern recordings do, with their hundreds of little edits aiming for an artificial perfection.
Double Feature: All By Yourself in the Moonlight
Bidgood’s Broadcasters
All By Yourself in the Moonlight
New Mayfair Dance Orchestra
All By Yourself in the Moonlight
Recorded in 1929
Here are two versions of the same novelty number by two British bands recording at about the same time. But what different recordings they are!
First we hear Harry Bidgood, whose reliable recording band appears on so many Broadcast records under various names (we’ve already heard “I Think of What You Used to Think of Me” and a medley from The Girl Friend). His is a good performance, probably from a stock arrangement, that includes the lyrics of verse and chorus, brings out the humor, and gets the job done efficiently.
Then we turn to Ray Noble, whose New Mayfair Dance Orchestra operates on a different plane entirely. Noble was probably the best arranger in England, and he had extraordinarily good taste in musicians. This performance is typical of the band, with a sophisticated bounce in the rhythm, good solos, rich harmonies, the baritone sax weaving through the last chorus, and a general sense that the musicians are enjoying themselves rather than reading a score. You don’t know what you were missing with Harry Bidgood until you hear Ray Noble play the same number.
Ipana Troubadors: Sunny
Ipana Troubadors
Sunny
Recorded in 1926
More slick and professional dance music from Sam Lanin, whose Ipana Troubadors were the house band for a radio program sponsored by Ipana toothpaste. (We heard them earlier playing “Hello Cutie.”)
Sunny was one of Jerome Kern’s most successful shows, and this is the title song. As usual, the band gives it an irresistible dance rhythm. Other bands had better jazz musicians and special arrangements, but Sam Lanin’s bands made the patrons want to get up on their feet, and ultimately that’s what you want most from a dance band if you’re hiring one.
George Olsen: Nobody Knows What a Red-Headed Mama Can Do
George Olsen and His Music
Nobody Knows What a Red-Headed Mama Can Do
Recorded in 1925
George Olsen’s band was one of the most reliable dance bands of the 1920s, with an instantly recognizable style. The band made quite a number of recordings, and played the entire musical score for the glorious two-strip Technicolor movie version of Whoopee!, the Eddie Cantor musical for which Olsen’s band had also provided the music on Broadway.
This is a very early pre-electrical Olsen record, and we hear a lot more jazz than in his later recordings. In fact, in this instrumental version of a not-very-well-known song of the day, we never actually get the melody played straight. Instead, after the verse, we get a full-chorus alto-sax solo that doesn’t even attempt to stay close to the melody; then a trombone chorus interrupted by orchestrated variations for brass; then the verse again; then as close to a straight chorus as we get, with the brasses playing a variation on the melody, interrupted by breaks, and with eight bars taken over by the hot cornet.
It’s a surprising performance, and it would have been impossible just a couple of years later, when pure hot jazz had fallen out of favor and the public demanded more orchestration from popular dance bands. Luckily, Olsen made it into the studio in the nick of time.
The Victor sound is about as good as acoustical recordings get. In just a few months, all that skill and knowledge carefully accumulated over three decades would be utterly useless: the electrical system would eclipse acoustical recording, and recording engineers would have to learn their trade all over again.
Eddie Elkins Orchestra: The Sneak
Eddie Elkins Orchestra
The Sneak
Recorded in 1922
Eddie Elkins was a minor dance-band leader who was fairly successful in the early 1920s, but then retired from the musical world to go into the stock market in 1932. His obituary in the New York Times (he died in 1984) makes him sound like one of the great names in American musical history, but then that’s what obituaries are for.
Born in San Francisco, Mr. Elkins was among the first to develop the use of elaborately arranged dance numbers for orchestras. He was also alert to new talent and under his baton musicians such as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Red Nichols, Oscar Levant, Mannie Kline and others honed their techniques.
It is at any rate interesting that a man who had been out of the music business for more than half a century nevertheless wanted to be remembered as a bandleader. The obituary says literally nothing about his life from 1932 to 1984. Children, learn this lesson from Mr. Elkins: Music is more important than the stock market.
This particular record is a clever novelty number, with an effective plodding beat that conjures up a musical picture of a Victorian melodrama villain peering out from behind his cape as he pauses in mid-stalk to twirl his mustache. It’s a bit scratchy from sitting in unsorted flea-market stacks, but not enough to ruin our enjoyment of the music.
Five Birmingham Babies: Copenhagen
Adrian Rollini with bass saxophone.
Five Birmingham Babies
Copenhagen
Recorded in 1924
“Copenhagen” was a big hit for the Wolverines: although they didn’t originate the number, they made it a hit, and every band played it because the Wolverines had been so successful with it. Here we have a version by a small group of musicians from the famous California Ramblers. We’ve heard the Five Birmingham Babies once before, playing “Deep Sea Blues,” which is the flip side of this record.
Bix Beiderbecke, the Wolverines’ star player, was already becoming a sensation among jazz musicians. On this record, the cornet player duplicates Bix’s recorded solo note for note—the earliest recorded Bix imitation I know of.
Aside from the cornet solo, though, this record could hardly be more different from the Wolverines’ version. That’s largely because of the unique and instantly recognizable bounce that Adrian Rollini gives to the rhythm section. A few other bands used the bass sax in place of a tuba or string bass, but no one else could make that leviathan of the reed family dance the way Adrian Rollini could.
This is one of those cheap reddish-brown “Perfect” records, whose surface tended not to hold up as well as the more expensive records from other labels. But the recorded sound itself is very good, about as good as acoustical recording can ever be. I’ve preferred to leave in more of the surface noise rather than lose too much of the original sound.
California Brass Marimba Orchestra
Do You Ever Think of Me?
Recorded in 1921
Brass bands and marimba bands were both very popular around 1920, so why not combine the two? I think it might have worked very well if there had been more musicians, but here there are neither enough brasses nor enough marimbas to make a really impressive effect. I especially miss the bass: I would have traded the saxophone for a sousaphone or something. The drummer belatedly tries to throw a little jazz feeling in with his woodblocks near the end, but it’s too little and too late.
Still, it’s interesting to hear a tune that would become a jazz standard. Here it is at the beginning of its life, played straight, with the verse as well as the chorus. And, of course, there are marimbas, and how often do you get to hear this tune played on marimbas these days?
Leila Stevens: Fly Away Taxi
Leila Stevens
Fly Away Taxi
This record was made in Lebanon, so now once you’ve heard it you know as much as I do about it.
“Leila Stevens” doesn’t sound like a very Arabic name, but her singing sounds Middle Eastern enough to pass for the real thing to my Western ears. The style is much less traditional and more Beirut-nightclub than the Sammy Shahen record we heard here a while ago, and we can imagine that Leila might have been very popular in the hottest Lebanese venues in the 1950s or so. The song itself (sung in Arabic, in spite of the English title) is irresistibly catchy, and you may have trouble getting it out of your head.
Jack Chapman's Drake Hotel Orchestra, from www.redhotjazz.com.
Jack Chapman and His Drake Hotel Orchestra
Honolulu Blues
Recorded in 1923
Jack Chapman’s orchestra was a Chicago band that (according to the picture above) seems to have been part of Edgar Benson‘s musical empire. I really don’t know anything else about the band, although the Red Hot Jazz site has what seems to be a complete discography. The band on the record is slightly largar than the one in the photograph: there are two violins audible in the bridge of the last chorus, but only one in the picture. The instrumentation is unusual: the photograph shows no brasses—only reeds, strings, and rhythm—and the same is true on the record.
As for this record, there’s nothing special about it, except that it’s delightfully understated. “Hawaiian” music was one of the big fads of the 1920s, and like most of the musical fads of the time, it was susceptible to abuse. Here the arrangement is simple and straightforward, with no tricky breaks or modulations, and just enough ukulele behind the vocal to give us the proper Hawaiian atmosphere. It’s the musical equivalent of relaxing on a tropical beach with nothing to do all afternoon, or at least for the next two minutes and fifty-two seconds.
Fletcher Henderson: He’s the Hottest Man in Town
Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra
He’s the Hottest Man in Town
Recorded in 1924
Coleman Hawkins was terribly embarrassed whenever he heard one of his old records from the beginning of his career. Sometimes he would flat-out deny that he had played that solo. Other times he would sheepishly declare, “Oh, that was my grandfather.”
This particularly good performance by Fletcher Henderson’s band gives Hawkins a full chorus to demonstrate to us whether he really had anything to be embarrassed about. I think what embarrassed him was that his style changed radically over the years, and a musician is apt to regard his stylistic changes as a course of continuous improvement and discovery. We might hear his early style as something legitimately good in its own right, but to the musician it seems like what he played when he didn’t know any better.
In late 1924, Coleman Hawkins was just coming out of his “chicken tenor” phase and heading toward his “staccato” phase. In this solo, we still hear a bit of poultry-like squawking on the bridge, but the rest of the chorus seems to be headed for something more sophisticated.
I mentioned earlier that I thought Adrian Rollini might have been the world’s best jazz saxophone player in 1924. The obvious competition is Coleman Hawkins, and here’s Hawkins doing some of his very best work. I still stand by my opinion. Hawkins would go on to be the greatest jazz saxophonist of all time; he just wasn’t quite there yet. Rollini, on the other hand, was already in peak form by 1924.
There are other notable musicians on this record, too. The first-rate banjoist Charlie Dixon gets a quarter-chorus solo, and Charlie Green gets a quarter chorus to show us why he might just have been the best jazz trombonist alive in 1924. Louis Armstrong is in this band as well, although he doesn’t get a solo. The arrangement is probably by Don Redman.
