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 487: Dick Wellstood's Wailerites

It's very easy, as a fan who's become a student of Prestige's history, to think Wow, everyone who is anyone has played on a Prestige record at one time or another. But of course that's not true. There are are lots of the all time greats who have never recorded for Prestige. But just as you resign yourself to that, another name from your bucket list pops up. And lo and behold, it's Zutty Singleton. The drummer who anchored Louis Armstrong's Hot Five after Baby Dodds left. The drummer on "West End Blues." And the drummer who kicks this ensemble along smartly, especially on a tune written for him, "Brush Lightly" (one of his specialties, but that's not all he does).

And he's in good company here, for a session that completes the LP project begun by Cliff Jackson's Washboard Wanderers. Wellstood and the gang also have a colorful name, if not quite as colorful: Dick Wellstood's Wailerites. For the Wailerites, Herman Autrey and Sedric are both new to Prestige, and both made their first entry into the big time with Fats Waller. And how did they get from there to Prestige? One never knows, do one? And they can play jazz, and they can play the music the way Wellstood wants it played.

And how are we to describe what that music is? Well, given what Wellstood had to say about it:

You see, there are really two musics--the one the musicians think they are playing and the one the audience thinks it is hearing.

I'm almost afraid to say anything at all.  Wellstood's Wailerites are closer to the tradition established by Coleman Hawkins and other Swingville labelmates than they are to Cliff Jackson and the other side of this record. Jackson and his bandmates could have come right out of the 1930s, or even the 1920s. Wellstood and his group are in that Swingville style--musicians who've listened to bebop, and absorbed what it has to offer, but who have chosen not to play it.

Wellstood probably couldn't go back to the music of the 1920s even if he wanted to...not that he wasn't musician enough. For one thing, when the guys in his band were busy making their mark with Fats Waller and others, Wellstood was busy being born.  Born in 1927, he was seven years younger than Charlie Parker, a full decade younger than Dizzy Gillespie. And he was living proof that bebop wasn't the only way to be inventive. As guitarist Marty Grozs described him, he “was always doing these little things that were going against the grain.”

On this album, or one side of an album, he plays three tunes, two his own compositions and one, "Yacht Club Swing," credited here to Herman Autrey, but in other places to Autrey, Fats Waller and J. C. Johnson. It was first recorded by Waller and Autrey in 1938, and there had only been a couple of other recordings before Wellstood; it has since become something of a standard for trad bands, especially ones with an international flavor.

Although Wellstood was frequently compared to Waller, and although here he uses two Waller sidemen to excellent effect, he did not particularly like the comparison. His idol had been stride pianist James P. Johnson, and he preferred to say he was playing in the style of Johnson. But the truth is, he has his own style, rooted in stride, but not bound by it. Listen to variations on stride, and the improvisations on the melody, that he runs through in "Yacht Club." The earlier musicians, bound by the limitations of 78 RPM, made brevity a virtue: Waller's recording of "Yacht Club" is three minutes of sustained brilliance. Wellstood is able to open it up to seven minutes--more room for solos all around, more room for exploration, and Wellstood's Wailerites take full advantage of it.

Wellstood played with Odetta, played with Bob Dylan, and also took a ten-month break from performing to practice law (yes, he had a law degree). But he came back to the keyboard. ''The firm liked my work, and I could have stayed there,'' he told John S. Wilson of the New York Times. ''But I realized that all those years in music had ruined me for something like the law.''

And a good thing, too.