LISTEN TO ONE: At the Jazz Band Ball
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.
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