Jelly Roll Morton 1928-29 (featuring Russell Procope, George Baquet, Albert Nicholas, & Barney Bigard) * CD 322 from JSPCD Jazzbox903 * Remastered by John R.T. Davies

When starting this blog over six years ago, I knew it would take a while before addressing recordings like these. The repertoire is important, because many of the tunes are great and the composer/bandleader was a giant of jazz, but the clarinet playing is generally bad and sometimes awful. My goal for this blog was (and remains) to build a substantial body of reviews demonstrating true greatness of clarinetists throughout the various eras. Unfortunately, the overall recorded catalog of music that was created in the 1920s and 30s, which is arguably the most important era for the clarinet, was a bit indiscriminate as to the quality of players. Many of the greatest virtuosi (Jimmie Noone, Benny Goodman) were recorded right alongside some of the worst clarinetists ever documented in the studio. The poor players are almost universally flat, can't handle high notes especially, their tone is overwraught and weak from overblowing,  they break notes, their tonguing his ham fisted, their rhythm is bad, and unfortunately, they are too often copied as "authentic" by amateurs and doubling professionals alike.

While blues grittiness and pitch inflection are an essential part of playing jazz clarinet, an overall flat and flabby tone is not competent playing, no matter who is doing it. Neither Sidney Bechet nor Jimmie Noone played this way--their styles, while far apart in terms of timbre and instrumental approach, are worthy models of imitation. The same can be said of many Johnny Dodds recordings, such as the sides he cut with King Oliver. But Dodds, like many others, struggled at times with his pitch, and we should be honest about those moments. Now a word of caution: we shouldn't take this too far as no one plays spot on in tune, in a mechanical sense, every time. You can find plenty of examples of variable intonation, especially if you're tracking note to note, in any of the great players--including classical virtuosi who work within even more limited intonational parameters. But as a rule, the great players aren't sagging consistently below pitch, or riding a quarter tone sharp either.

This collection demonstrates the big step down in clarinetistry in Jelly Roll Morton's bands after the initial recordings with Omer Simeon and Johnny Dodds. A young Russell Procope (who had improved somewhat by the time he played with Ellington) plays flat on December 6, 1928's "Red Hot Pepper" and his solo on "Deep Creek Blues" is a real disappointment for such a beautiful tune. We can only imagine what a player like Noone or Bechet would have done.

By July 9, 1929, Procope had been replaced by George Baquet, who isn't any better. His clarinet is particularly bad on the out chorus of "Burnin' the Iceberg" and haunts "Courthouse Bump" and "Pretty Lil" from the same date as well. His intonation is so bad it sounds almost like a drunken parody at times. His low level playing continues on the next day's session, flabbing his way through a solo on "Sweet Aneta Mine" and sticking out horribly for his flatness on "New Orleans Bump (Monrovia)."

The torture continues on July 12, 1929, when Baquet rasps, flabs, and squeaks his way through "Down My Way", "Try Me Out", and "Tank Town Bump." I can't stress it enough: This is not 'authentic' jazz clarinet playing; it's just incompetent. Frankly, this sort of playing is unlistenable for any serious clarinetist, revealing that the standards for our very difficult instrument were sometimes poorly maintained on recordings, even by the most important band leaders. The clarinet playing is so bad the recordings would have better without a clarinet--and unfortunately, perhaps in part because of hideous performances like these, many bandleaders started deciding exactly that.

By November 13, 1929, Jelly Roll had replaced his clarinetist again, this time for a Red Hot Peppers session featuring Albert Nicholas, the childhood friend of Sidney Bechet who was to record successfully with him later in life. These recordings are not Nicholas's greatest recorded work by a long shot--he tends to be on the flat side, and his solos aren't great-- but he's at least a step up from the truly abysmal playing of Baquet.

Even Barney Bigard can't rescue this album, though his clarinet playing is better than most on the disc. The final four tunes, recorded on December 17, 1929, feature the Jelly Roll Morton Trio with Bigard on clarinet and Zutty Singleton on drums. Bigard struggles with his high clarion, altissimo intonation, and his attacks. Even though his ideas tend to be decent (he was a far more competent clarinetist at this point than anyone else on the Jelly Roll Morton sessions from these years) that really isn't saying much. His playing is excruciatingly out of tune on tunes like "Turtle Twist" and "My Little Dixie Home." This isn't good Bigard...it's actually embarrassingly bad for someone who was to play better (if inconsistently) in the future.

So why bother writing a review like this? Well, there are a couple of reasons. One of them is to say there have to be professional standards. If  a player can't handle the instrument on a basic level of musicianship, they can do real damage to the estimation of the instrument overall. Players like Buddy DeFranco and Artie Shaw routinely dismissed or disparaged the early New Orleans players, implying or openly saying they weren't important to the history of the instrument in jazz. If all anyone had heard were these Jelly Roll Morton sides, or some of the Hot Fives session where Johnny Dodds struggled with his intonation, this could be understood as an act of professional self preservation as much as anything else. This disc features such bad clarinet playing, it makes you want to go back in time with a saw and savagely adjust their barrels. But to dismiss all of New Orleans clarinet because of this would be terribly wrong. All one has to do (and should do) is listen to some Jimmie Noone as an antidote.

This disc earns a broken reed for clarinetists.

Barney Bigard on Everyone

Few jazz clarinetists have amassed a comparable resume to that of Barney Bigard, whose career stretched from the 1920s through the 1970s. Born and raised in New Orleans during the crucial transition to the recorded era, and a student of the legendary Lorenzo Tio, Bigard went on to work in what many consider to be the most important of the Chicago-based New Orleans bands (King Oliver), moving to arguably the most creative big band ever assembled (Duke Ellington), before rounding out his triptych with Louis Armstrong's All-Stars.

Fortunately for us, beyond his formidable discography with each of those legendary ensembles (and his own as a leader), Bigard left us some important interviews and a slender, yet informative autobiography. His opinions on early New Orleans clarinetists and everyone else are presented in a clear, concise manner, without frills or subterfuge, and make for an interesting perspective. Many other clarinetists have weighed in on opposite sides of the opinions presented here (Goodman disagreed with Bigard about Frank Teschemacher, for instance), but these thoughts are worth remembering, if only to prevent jazz clarinetists from falling into a rigid orthodoxy of opinion.

All page numbers are from With Louis and the Duke, Oxford University Press, 1986, unless otherwise noted.


on Alphonse Picou:

I was really disappointed with Picou and in later years I found out that he became famous just for that little part in High Society, and in fact he got that from one of Sousa's marches. That was all that made him famous. [13]


on Lorenzo Tio:

On the other hand, the first time that I heard Lorenzo Tio I was not disappointed at all. I heard him on a parade playing his A clarinet. He knocked me out right from the very start. My uncle promised me that he would take me to his house, as he knew him, and ask him to give me lessons. [13]

I started to watch for Tio, where he would play and all. I followed him all over the city of New Orleans. Anytime he would play a parade I would be right there listening to what he was making on that clarinet. Wherever he played I'd go and stand around the bandstand and all my listening was to the clarinet. I didn't care about the rest of it. If I heard a riff of something else that I liked , then I would hum it in my head, and keep humming it. I'd leave the dance and keep humming it until I got home and no matter what time it was when I got home I would get out the horn and try to pick out the notes. I would keep on until I got it down right.

Tio was at that time the best damned clarinet player in the city... [15]

I found out that Albert Nicholas had been taking lessons from Tio before me. Albert was really far advanced and a fine clarinetist. Funny, although we both had the same tutor, we don't have the same style at all. He was also teaching Omer Simeon, and there's one of the real unsung clarinet players.  [16]

[Tio] was a great reader [of written music], even by today's standards. He had real fast execution and he could improvise--play jazz in other words--on top of all the rest. He would even make his own reeds out of some kind of old cane. Yes, Lorenzo Tio was the man in those days in the city of New Orleans. [17]


on Johnny Dodds:

I know for a fact that [Kid] Ory could never read, and Johnny Dodds couldn't either...to tell the truth, when I heard him he never did impress me much. [11]

He was a little what you might call "limited." But what he played was good. He by no means ever impressed me like Jimmie Noone did. [38]


on Jimmie Noone:

I really like his style. In fact, I stole a whole lot from Jimmie. While he was playing with Charlie Cooke he mostly played harmony parts or whatever they had written on paper for him, but after at The Nest he played mostly lead all night because the band was so small.  
     

on Pee Wee Russell, Frank Teschemacher, and jazz critics:

I used to buy DownBeat magazine all the time but once I read that Pee Wee Russell had won a DownBeat poll. That did it. I never read that magazine again. Guys like him and Frank Teschemacher aren't clarinet players to me. But then I suppose even in those days critics were just as ignorant as they are today. I never, ever, played to please the critics. Not once. I never really cared about them at all. Even today I still don't. I mean you can pick up a music paper and read them knocking all of the old-style New Orleans musicians that are currently out there doing their thing. [126] 


on Edmond Hall:

Edmond was a real fine clarinet player, and in fact was a more forceful player than I was. We were buddies because I had met him years ago in New York, but without a doubt he was the "cheapest" man I knew. He used to live in a place where he had to walk up so many flights of stairs to get up there, just to save rent. When Edmond got into the band [Louis Armstrong's All-Stars] they were going on a tour of France so I asked him to pick me up a couple of boxes of reeds that they make over there. He said that he would, and so when the band came back they played out here in California and I went to see them. Edmond said, "Man. I got your reeds." You know that he wouldn't turn loose that little box of twenty-five reeds until I had given him the money. He was like the duck's ass. Water tight. [124]


on New Orleans musicians:

To me it was just beautiful to see those old guys, at their age, coming out on stage and doing a lot of things the youngsters can't do. Most people forget that those guys are the foundation of jazz music. They started it, but naturally everything progresses as it goes along. It's like the Wright brothers' plane. Now you could throw a rock  and knock it out of the sky, but...give them credit for building the first. [125-26]

A lot of those old characters from New Orleans think that anything they do is alright just because they're from New Orleans. They think they can walk on your head if they want to, but it just isn't that way. [88]


on George Lewis:

[In the old days] I never heard of George Lewis. I heard him play once at the Beverly Cavern and once again when Louis Armstrong and I went to see him in New York. This time in New York he was so sick he couldn't play at all. I heard he was a nice enough guy but as to being a legend that people built him into? Willie Humphrey was more of a legend than George Lewis. [88-89]


on Musical Style:

The only thing I say is to play your own self. Don't be copying someone else. Try to create a style of your own and then stick to it. Any of the big names have their own style. You can always tell a Louis Armstrong or a Teagarden or a Hodges, but when you get down amongst the lesser ones it's hard to tell them apart. I tell all the young guys I meet, "It's good to take influence from someone, but don't play note for note like them. You'll never make it in this racket. Play your own way." [126]


on being a Jazz Clarinetist:

I never figured myself as being a "temperamental" musician. I put myself down as easy going and I think that helped my career a lot. I was never one to care about who had top billing, or who played the last act. Some guys, that was all they thought about. I just wanted to be good at what I did. I wanted to get jobs that were in my category. I didn't want to be no symphony man. If I had devoted all my time to that I wouldn't have been a jazz clarinetist. I did want to be a good clarinetist though. Just to read enough music to get me by. That's the way I always felt. I never thought of myself as an artist, or anything like that. Just as a good jazz player that always tried to do his best. Of course I try to live up to my own standards of playing. Sometimes it materializes, sometimes it doesn't, but I keep trying anyway. I would hate to say I was all set on the horn. There is always something more to learn. And you can't stay away from music for long--at least I couldn't.  [126-27]


on Artie Shaw:

What Shaw did to begin with was to make the clarinet sound unusually beautiful in the upper register. He wasn't a low-register guy, but he was more creative than Benny Goodman. Benny did all the popular tunes and standards, but Shaw made up his own and played them so well. The guy could execute like mad. Benny could also execute, and had much more drive than Artie, but I like Artie for the things that are almost impossible to do on the clarinet. [from Stanley Dance's The World of Duke Ellington. p.88]

To me the greatest player that ever lived was Artie Shaw. [quoted in Gene Lees notes to Artie Shaw: A Legacy, p. 5]

on Benny Goodman, Buster Bailey, and Jimmy Hamilton:

Benny is a hell of a clarinetist, really great, but he's not the easiest guy to get along with. [111]

I thought Buster Bailey was one of the fastest clarinetists there ever was. He had his own style, and I could always tell his playing. He was a good musician with good execution, but he didn't have the jazz drive or the soul in there like Goodman and some other guys. In other words it didn't have the oomph to it. Where Buster was great was in a studio or a show. That's the same way I figure with Jimmy Hamilton. He's a terrific clarinetist, but he doesn't have that soul to go with what he's doing. He should have been in classical music. He's got that studio tone to begin with, and he plays straight and fluent, but it's not jazz. [Dance, 89]

on Omer Simeon:

Omer Simeon was a fine musician, an unsung hero, and a great clarinet player. [Dance, 89]

Jazz Clarinet Autobiographies: an Overview

Although most of them are out of print, jazz clarinetist are startlingly well represented by highly informative autobiographies--books that are more than marketing hype, and give a real look into the lives and thoughts of the musicians who wrote (or, more often, co-wrote) them.

In my opinion the most important of these books, and a literary work of art in its own right, is Sidney Bechet's Treat it Gentle.  Bechet's book was compiled from interview recordings and edited by a team of writers, among them Joan Reid, Desmond Flower, and the poet John Ciardi, who is still well known for his masterful translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. The work was so well done that Bechet's voice comes through almost as clearly and profoundly as his playing did. This book, which Nat Hentoff called the "most valuable and moving of all jazz biographies" ought to be required reading somewhere--at the very least among all jazz musicians.

Another brilliant, if uniquely odd and idiosyncratic book, is Artie Shaw's The Trouble with Cinderella. This book is unfortunately out of print--and the Ebay prices are climbing.

Benny Goodman's The Kingdom of Swing, published at the height of his popularity in 1938, would seem by context a fluff piece meant to capitalize on music sales, but it isn't. Instead, Benny's self-portrait reveals a side of him not often mentioned by contemporary commentators. In the beginning, especially, it details his family's struggles through poverty, radiating the warmth of that large family, while always focusing on the music and what it meant to him. Like Benny's sound, it is both warm and hard edged, simultaneously. Benny's book has been out of print for a very long time, and can be quite difficult to find.

In 1972, Pete Fountain published his memoir, A Closer Walk,  which reads like his music sounds: a upbeat party, with some heartfelt blues, to be sure, but a whole lot of brightness. As of this writing, the only copy available on Amazon is selling for about $100.

Two other important autobiographies were published posthumously: Barney Bigard's With Louis and the Duke and Woody Herman's The Woodchopper's Ball. These books, while slim, give invaluable insights to the men and their era.

Finally, Bill Russell's volume, New Orleans Style, deserves mentions, as it includes brief autobiographical sketches of Omer Simeon, Edmond Hall, Raymond Burke, and Lawrence Duhe.

I'll be giving more detailed reviews of these books in the near future--interested readers will want to get copies while they are still available. This is an endangered part of our jazz heritage.

Big Band Jazz Clarinet: Essential Performances (9)

9. Barney Bigard & the Duke Ellington Orchestra * Mood Indigo * 1931


Barney Bigard (1906-1980) was an unusual figure in the history of jazz clarinet. From New Orleans, he was taught by the legendary Lorenzo Tio, Jr., instructor of nearly every great NOLA player we remember from that era--including Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds, Omer Simeon, and Albert Nicholas. Yet of them all, Bigard was the only one who spent significant time, both touring and recording, with a prominent Big Band. That it was Duke Ellington's, arguably the most creative Big Band of them all, is a decided bonus.

Ellington had a love for the clarinet, fostered by his early experience hearing Sidney Bechet, who he referred to as "the foundation" and "symbol" of all jazz. (Dance, p10) For a time early in his career, Duke was able to get Bechet in the band, though Bechet never stayed with one group for very long, and was notoriously in and out of the music business for various reasons. Perhaps it was Ellington's love of the New Orleans Albert-system sound that made Bigard such a perfect fit. It remains one of Duke's great achievements that the New Orleans sound could be so well integrated into such a large ensemble.

The clarinetists of the Ellington band have been sometimes neglected by critics, sometimes over praised. Bigard himself was remarkably outspoken and shrewd in his opinions of the clarinetists inside and outside the band. For those of us distant from the era, it's helpful to read the words of an accomplished player from that era:

What [ Artie ] Shaw did to begin with was to make the clarinet sound unusually beautiful in the upper register. He wasn't a low-register guy, but he was more creative than Benny Goodman. Benny did all the popular tunes and standards, but Shaw made up his own and played them so well. The guy could execute like mad. Benny could also execute, and had much more drive than Artie, but I like Artie for the things that are almost impossible to do on the clarinet.
 

I thought Buster Bailey was one of the fastest clarinetists there ever was. He had his own style, and I could always tell his playing. He was a good musician with good execution, but he didn't have the jazz drive or the soul in there like Goodman and some other guys. In other words it didn't have the oomph to it. Where Buster was great was in a studio or a show. That's the same way I figure with [ fellow Ellingtonian] Jimmy Hamilton. He's a terrific clarinetist, but he doesn't have that soul to go with what he's doing. He should have been in classical music. He's got that studio tone to begin with, and he plays straight and fluent, but it's not jazz.

Omer Simeon was a fine musician, an unsung hero, and a great clarinet player. 

[from Stanley Dance's The World of Duke Ellington. pgs88-89]

To those of us who have read some rather strange scholarship on jazz clarinet, these words are a refreshingly clear headed assessment of the era, and worth remembering.