Listening to Prestige 511: Swingville All Stars (Leonard Gaskin All Stars)

LISTEN TO ONE: At the Jazz Band Ball

Leonard Gaskin, New York City born and bred, found his way to Minton's and Monroe's early in the bebop era, and at age 24 followed Oscar Pettiford as bassist in Dizzy Gillespie's quintet. He played on some of Miles Davis's first recordings as a leader, recorded with Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. But as time went on he seemed to gravitate toward an earlier form of jazz, and his only two recordings as leader, both for Swingville, reflect that.

Jazz and its different forms have been known by a variety of names, not all of which caught on, not all of which are particularly endorsed by their practitioners. "Jazz" itself is rejected by many of the finest players of

this American music, while others guard the name against presumed barbarians at the gate, like Louis Armstrong castigating bebop as "Chinese music," or Eddie Condon, dismissing the beboppers with "We don't flat our fifths, we drink 'em." One well-known and well-esteemed jazz musician said of Ornette Coleman, "Whatever it is, that ain't jazz." 

Or sometimes maybe it isn't used at all. In The Benny Goodman Story, the word "jazz" is never used once. Nor is the word "swing," for that matter. Steve Allen, as Benny, talks about wanting to play "hot music" and have his "hot music accepted.

Other apellations just didn't stick. For a time, the music that came to be known as bebop was called "New York music," and I've always thought it was kind of a shame that that didn't catch on. Afro-Cuban jazz was also called Cu-bop, and maybe that was too cute by half. 

And then there's Dixieland, a name used by the white ensemble who cut the first jazz record, back in 1917. A number of Black musicians from New Orleans had joined the Great Migration northward to Chicago, the most famous among them being King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.  A number of white musicians were to make that same trek, because there was an audience for the music. They played on their New Orleans roots by calling their ensembles Brown's Band from Dixieland, or Stein's Dixie Jass Band, or -- the group that traveled from Chicago to New York, and ended up making that first record--the Original Dixieland Jass Band, later to become the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

So it was this group that first popularized jazz beyond the nightclub audience in a few major cities, and who really brought the name into common parlance--and who also struck the first salvo in the ongoing culture war over the proposition that American music -- blues, jazz, and all their descendants -- are an African American art that has been stolen by whites.

And this is mostly true. I don't know how true it is on the musician level. Real musicians play music, and jazz musicians are consummate crafters who devote their lives to getting good enough, and remaining good enough, to be allowed into the colloquy that is jazz music. Louis Armstrong cited cornetist Nick LaRocca of the ODJB as one of his inspirations. But it is absolutely true on the business end. It's no accident that the ODJB, and not King Oliver or Fate Marable, was signed to make the first commercial jazz recording.

But if the white musicians who named their bands after a term which glorified the old South of slavery were not being consciously racist, they didn't have to be. Racism was such a part of their era that it was accepted without much conscious thought. In any event, the term, like the music it described, declined until the 1940s, and the revival of traditional jazz which began when journalist and music lover Heywood Hale Broun went down to New Orleans to record the still-active keepers of that tradition, and New Orleans musicians such as Bunk Johnson came to New York and recorded. This neo-traditional music, based on New Orleans and Chicago styles of the early decades of the 20th century, took the name of the ODJB and began to coalesce under the name Dixieland jazz. By then, there was at least somewhat more social awareness, and there were some who found the name offensive (and the music bland and uninteresting), but the most popular purveyors of this faux-nostalgic music called themselves the Dukes of Dixieland. 

The Dukes were never very highly regarded in jazz circles, although Pete Fountain, Jim Hall and Herb Ellis played with them at one time or another. And they were pretty solidly white, although Louis Armstrong did sit in with them on a couple of occasions.  And their musical imitators, who wore straw hats and striped blazers and conjured up images of a mythic and genteel Old South, were also all white.

But the musical tradition of New Orleans and Chicago was real, and though "Dixieland" had pretty much been relegated to football halftime shows, county fairs and Kentucky Derby festivities, there were real musicians, both black and white, who still honored those traditions, and it was just such a group of musicians that were gathered by Leonard Gaskin for this session.

It was very much Gaskin's session, and he is listed as "leader" in the session log, although that's not normally noted. Immersion in the tradition is emphasized by the selection of material, even including one tune ("At the Jazz Band Ball") from the ODJB's original sessions.

As the free jazz revolution started to take hold, it was good to be reminded of where jazz had come from--and to be reminded that jazz's evolution had been so rapid, that these still-vital, still-creative oldtimers were playing side by side with the Cecil Taylors and Albert Aylers.  Sometimes literally side by side--Garvin Bushell, who had played with Bunk Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, would also play with Eric Dolphy,

Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Buster Bailey, Dick Wellstood, Herbie Lovelle and Gaskin  have all appeared on Prestige sessions before, the first four on earlier Swingville releases. Lovelle backed up King Pleasure on a 1952 session. Gaskin was very active for Bluesville, working with a wide variety of blues singers, but he had also played on two of Prestige's earliest bebop sessions, one with J. J. Johnson and the other with Miles Davis.

Trumpeter Yank Lawson was one of those who continued to embrace the Dixieland moniker, and created, with bassist Bob Haggart, an ensemble that managed to achieve popularity on the Dixieland/nostalgia circuit while still playing music a jazz fan could take pleasure in. He began his career with Ben Pollack's orchestra in 1933, then worked with Bob Crosby, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. He and Haggart formed the Lawson-Haggart band in the 1950s, disbanded, and then rejoined forces in 1968 to create the modestly named World's Greatest Jazz Band, which had a solid decade's run of popularity, and included Cutshall, Dickenson and Wellstood at various times.

Trombonist Cutty Cutshall played with Benny Goodman, Billy Butterfield and Louis Armstrong, but his longest association was with Eddie Condon, with whom he was still touring when he died in 1968.

Clarinetist Edmond Hall came by the tradition naturally, being from a family of New Orleans musicians. His most important association was with Louis Armstrong, but he had a pretty strong pedigree before joining Armstrong, starting with his first recording session, in 1937, with Billie Holiday and Lester Young. He played with Claude Hopkins, Lucky Millinder, Zutty Singleton, Joe Sullivan,  Henry "Red" Allen, Teddy Wilson, and Eddie Condon, among others, and was co-leader of the house band at the original Cafe Society in New York.

The recording date began with Lawson,Cheatham, Cutshall and Hall joining the rhythm section for "Tin Roof Blues," a tune that goes back to 1923 and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white group of New Orleans-to-Chicago musicians, and "Muskrat Ramble," written in 1926 and first performed by Louis Armstrong.

"At the Jazz Band Ball" is the ODJB tune, written by Nick LaRocca and other members of the group in 1917, and featuring the entire nine-piece band. The whole album is a pleasure to listen to, but on this tune in particular they really let rip, its 6:19 length giving everyone a chance to shine. 

After that, Lawson, Cheatham, Cutshall and Hall pack it in, and Dickenson and Bailey take over for "Mack the Knife," the one modern tune, but it fits right in with the mood; "Hindustan," written in 1918 by Oliver Wallace, who a quarter century later would win an Academy Award for Dumbo; and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now," a Fats Waller tune that's almost modern, having been first performed by Louis Armstrong in 1932. It really does sound from a different era and mind set than the other tunes on the album, even "Mack the Knife."

Swingville released the album as At the Jazz Band Ball by the Leonard Gaskin All Stars, but actually all it says on the front cover is the title and subtitle: A Dixieland Sound Spectacular, so Dixieland as a label was not dead yet. A later CD rerelease on a different label kept the title but named the group the Swingville All Stars.

Listening to Prestige 492: Lucille Hegamin, Victoria Spivey, Alberta Hunter

Victoria Spivey had been brought back to recording in July, by Chris Albertson and Lonnie Johnson, to record three tracks on Johnson's Bluesville album, Idle Hours (the title track a Spivey composition).  That session was all the encouragement Spivey needed to get back in the saddle, and recording for Bluesville was just the beginning. In 1962 she would form her own label, and become one of the most active participants in the blues revival, recording classic blues artists and newer artists alike. On one occasion in 1962, she did both. She put together an album called Three Kings and the Queen, featuring herself, Lonnie Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes and Big Joe Williams (not the one who

recorded with Count Basie). The Williams cuts feature a young harmonica player and backup vocalist named Bob Dylan, on one of his first recording sessions.

For this Bluesville date, Albertson and Spivey rounded up a couple of Spivey's old friends, who like her had been out of the limelight for a while. 

Lucille Hegamin, born in 1894 in Macon, Georgia, began singing in traveling tent shows around the South when she was in her early teens. In 1914, she moved to

LISTEN TO THREE

Chicago, where she became a successful cabaret singer, working with the jazz musicians (including Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jackson). She claims to have been the singer who popularized "St. Louis Blues" in Chicago, and while old-time entertainers have been known to claim all sorts of things, this is quite likely true. "St. Louis Blues" was written by W. C. Handy in 1914, and it would have been a perfect vehicle for a cabaret singer like Hegamin. It was a typical Handy composition in that it incorporated strains of tunes and snatches of words that were in circulatation at the time, but it was unusual in that it also brought together two newly popular musical forms: the blues and the tango. Probably the version of "St. Louis Blues" that she sings on this session is very close to the version she sang in Chicago--more cabaret than blues, owing little to Bessie Smith's later recording which became a kind of template for most of the versions that followed it.

It's a staple of American musichistory that Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" was the first commercial recording by an African American singer. Less widely known is that Hegamin came second, with a recording of "Jazz Me Blues" (more jazz than blues) which also became a hit, as did her followup recording, "Arkansas Blues," which she repeats on this album.

By the early 1930s, Hegamin had packed it in as performer. She got a degree in nursing, and worked in that profession until she was summoned out of retirement by Spivey. She would record again for Spivey's album, and continue singing for a few more years until ill health stopped her.

Alberta Hunter was born in 1895 in Memphis.  Her father, a Pullman porter, left soon after she was born and her mother supported the family by working as a maid in a brothel. Like Hegamin and so many others, Hunter left home for Chicago to try and make it as a singer, but she did it earlier than most. She was eleven years old. Her mother followed her after a few years.

She worked when she had to, sang when and where she could, including brothels, until she came under the mentorship of Tony Jackson.

The first half of the twentieth century is dotted with the names of African Americans who contributed in ways we can never know. Josh Gibson is said by many who saw him to have been the greatest baseball player who ever lived, yet he never played a game in the major leagues. Buddy Bolden may have been one of the greatest innovators in jazz, but he never recorded.

Tony Jackson is one of those. A New Orleans transplant to Chicago, like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, he was legend to anyone who ever heard him. It's said he could sing a whole opera, from the soprano to the bass parts, and get it all right. He could sing the blues. Even Jelly Roll Morton, famous for never giving credit to anyone but himself, credited Jackson with teaching him, and said that the only musician he ever met who was better than him was Tony Jackson. And this is a real sidebar to history, but the sartorial stereotype of the cabaret entertainer--arm garters, checkered vest, derby hat? That was Jackson.

He was also openly gay, at a time when that was not easy.

He is also said to have written dozens of songs that were stolen by others, and while there's no proving it, it's probably true. The one song he was able to retain credit for was "Pretty Baby," although co-credit was taken by Gus Kahn and Robert Van Alstyne when they used it in a Broadway show.

And he coached and encouraged young Alberta Hunter as a songwriter as well as a performer, and she became one of the best and most successful composers of the first blues era--her "Downhearted Blues" was one of Bessie Smith's best-known recordings. 

Hunter had one of the most successful blues careers of the 1920s, and remained in show business until 1957, when her mother died. Her mother had been her biggest supporter, and as Hunter explained later, with her gone, the urge to perform went away. She lied about her age, faked a high school diploma, and enrolled in nursing school. Although she heeded Spivey's call to make this album, she was essentiallu out of show business. She would work as a nurse for the next twenty years, until she reached the mandatory retirement age of 70...so they thought, She was actually 82.

She decided to start singing again, although she wasn't convinced that she had much of a career ahead of her. As she described her chances in an interview with Billy Taylor:

If somebody had walked in and said to you, "I know a woman that can sing," you say "Well, ah, what does she look like?" and, well, maybe you wouldn't tell him exactly what I look like because I'm kind of ugly, you know, but you'll say, "She's all right." "OK, how old is she?" "82." "Man, you must be crazy."

 But she found an ally in Barney Josephson, the entrepreneur who had opened Cafe Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, back in 1938. Billie Holiday first performed "Strange Fruit" there. Hunter had performed there often, and in 1976 Josephson had opened a new club in Greenwich Village, The Cookery, and he booked Hunter for a two week engagement. Josephson would later say:

Alberta came out and did her first show and I knew this was it. This lady was going to be big, big great star. Even better and bigger than she was before in her life.

He was right. The two week engagement lasted six years. She sang her classic hits, and new songs she had just written, like the one about the two fisted, double jointed man:

I don't want a man who'll bring his kids no dog or cat,

But will bring home a skunk or a lion, and say, "Here kids, play with that."

And you could tell it would take a man like that to be man enough for this woman, even in her mid-eighties.

I went to see Alberta Hunter at the Cookery several times, once with my mother. She was in town to meet up with some Italian friends, so we all went. They loved the music, of course, but the highlight of the night for me was when my mother spotted the elderly Barney Josephson across the room. She went over, said hello and introduced herself, and reminded him that they had met before, at Cafe Society.

"Chirpin' the Blues" is one of her classics, first recorded in 1923. "I've Got Myself a Workin' Man" is from her new repertoire.

It takes a woman who's pretty confident to invite two scene-stealers like these to share her debut album with her, and Victoria Spivey was all of that. Her straight-ahead blues belting makes a nice contrast to her two friends' cabaret styles. "Let Him Beat Me" is a song you wouldn't find many women singing today, but to a singer from certain generation it was a badge of toughness. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith both sang songs on the same theme. "Black Snake Blues" is a familiar theme in the blues, but Spivey, another strong composer, twists it a little. Her black snake is both the snake-in-the grass woman who steals her man and the penis by which he's led away. Spivey also contributes some piano backing to her songs.

Hegamin is accompanied by a group led by Willie "the Lion" Smith,  Hunter and Spivey by Buster Bailey Blues Busters. That means that some very fine veteran musicians were gathered together for this day of music making in an New York recording studio. 

Willie "the Lion" Smith served in France during World War I, and he got the nickname for his bravery and ferocity in battle (his version), or he gave it himself (the version of others). Regardless, he was a lion at the piano, one of the innovators of the stride style of playing. 

Trumpeter Henry Goodwin started young in the music business, touring Europe with Claude Hopkins at the age of 15. He played with Cliff Jackson and Elmer Snowden, two musicians also later brought to Bluesville by Chris Albertson, and with Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Kenny Clarke, Sidney Bechet and others.  Clarinet/tenor sax player Cecil Scott led his own bands in the 1920s and 1930s, hiring such luminaries as Dicky Wells, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges and Chu Berry. Drummer Gene Brooks was younger. Born in 1920, he arrived on the New York scene in the 1940s, and was much in demand for studio work, playing behind jazz, blues and rhythm and blues singers.

Smith's group gave way to Buster Bailey's for the next two sessions. Clarinetist Bailey comes from as distinguished a pedigree as you can get. Starting with W. C. Handy when he was just 15, he went on to play with King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong. His band had some all stars too: J. C. Higginbotham, Cliff Jackson and Zutty Singleton have all been heard on previous Prestige recordings. Trumpeter Sidney de Paris was one of the masters of his instrument and his era. He played with Benny Carter, Art Hodes, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and in later years led a group with his brother, Wilbur.

The Bluesville release was called Songs We Taught Your Mother.