Listening to Prestige 484: Cliff Jackson

While the cats were away (at the Five Spot) the mice were playing. although very much an older generation of mice. While Eric Dolphy and Booker Little were finishing up their groundbreaking engagement at the Five Spot, Rudy Van Gelder had re-ensconced himself in his cathedral of recorded jazz in Englewood Cliffs to capture the sounds of Cliff Jackson and his Washboard Wanderers. And if many of the Swingville albums featured swing era musicians playing a mid-20th century version of swing, such was not always the case. These gents weren't even playing swing, mid-century style or otherwise. They were going

back earlier, to the music dubbed by its 1950s revivalists as Dixieland, and featuring instruments of an earlier time and sensibility: washboard, kazoo, banjo. And they were cats who were born in the first decade of the century--Floyd Casey and Elmer Snowden as the century dawned, Ed Allen even earlier, in 1897.

So, not cutting edge. But that doesn't me they aren't worth listening to. The banjo had been retired as a jazz insttrument for about 40 years by this time, and "The Sheik of Araby" as a jazz tune for nearly that long, but listen to what Elmer Snowden does with  his solo. Listen to Ed Allen and Rudy Powell. Hell, if you want to hear real jazz played on a kazoo, listen to Floyd Casey. And before long, you realize you're not just tapping your feet, you're pricking up your ears. And you want to play it again.

Cliff Jackson, Rudy Powell and Elmer Snowden are no strangers to us. Snowden was pulled out of enforced retirement by Chris Albertson for that great album with Lonnie Johnson. Jackson made his Prestige debut with the Swingville All Stars in May of 1961, and then teamed up with Johnson and Victoria Spivey a little more than a week before this session. We've heard Powell in a 1960 session with Al Casey.

Ed Allen began his career as an itinerant musician in the 1910s, and by the end of the decade was playing on the Mississippi riverboats and then leading his own riverboat band, the Whispering Gold Band. In the 1920s, he made that classic trad jazz pilgrimage from New Orleans to Chicago, where he worked with Earl Hines, Clarence Williams, Bessie Smith and King Oliver. At the time of this recording, he and Rudy Powell were both playing around the New York area in a dance band led by Benton Heath.

Abe Bolar cut his musical teeth with the Southwestern territorial bands, and recorded in Kansas City with Joe Turner and Pete Johnson--he played bass on the original Decca recording of "Piney Brown Blues." He left KC for New York with Hot Lips Page, and made New York his home from the end of the 1930s on. He played briefly in Count Basie's and Lucky Millinder's ensembles.

Floyd Casey, as a kazoo and washboard player (he also played drums) was limited in the kinds of ensembles he could play for, but he did work regularly in old-timey bands, and went back with Ed Allen to the riverboat days and Allen's Whispering Gold Band.

Three of the Washboard Wanderers' songs date back to the 1920s. Composer Ted Snyder of "Sheik of Araby," one of the most prolific and successful songwriters of the first two decades of the 20th Century, had retired from writing music by 1930. Harry B. Smith, co-lyricist with Francis Wheeler, died in 1936, but by then he had written the lyrics to over 6000 songs, and is said to be, to this date, the most prolific songwriter in the American canon,

"Wolverine Blues" was written by Jelly Roll Morton, and has always been a favorite of traditional bands. Equally popular, and also with a distinguished pedigree, is "I Found a New Baby," written by Jack Palmer and Spencer Williams.

The fourth selection is the trad jazz version of that Rudy Van Gelder favorite, the Five O'Clock Blues. It features the guys jamming on a slow blues, and making some very tasty music.

This session formed one side of a Swingville album, Uptown and Lowdown. The second side went to a group led by Dick Wellstood, in the studio a week later.

Listening to Prestige Vol 4, 1959-60, now available from Amazon! Also on Kindle!
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