Charquet and Co. (a.k.a. Sharkey and Co.)

[Larry Kart]

can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/JIEF43

Great stuff. Some different players too, in addition to stalwarts Alain Marquet, Michel Bescont, and Daniel Huck, e.g. cornetist Emmanuel Hussenot. "A Gypsy Without a Song" with Jean-Pierre Morel on alto horn is lovely. And clarinetist Marquet is often on fire. What a player.

P.S. When you click on the link, you need to put "Sharkey" in the search box.

[JSngry]

"A Gypsy Without a Song" with Jean-Pierre Morel on alto horn is lovely.

Indeed it is.

Was there actually "a market" for this type of there there and then?

I'm deeply impressed by how immersed everybody is, if a little weirded out at the notion of doing it full time. Was this type thing all those guys did/do?

[Larry Kart]

"A Gypsy Without a Song" with Jean-Pierre Morel on alto horn is lovely.

Indeed it is.

Was there actually "a market" for this type of there there and then?

I'm deeply impressed by how immersed everybody is, if a little weirded out at the notion of doing it full time. Was this type thing all those guys did/do?

Sure was a market. For example, check out on YouTube (conveniently) the Bennie Moten's Orch, 1929 recording of "Rumba Negro":

which is as one would expect great in its own right, though I love them both. Also, you'll recognize that several of these pieces were mainstays of the early Fletcher Henderson Orch. It should be said that every piece played by this band and its marvelous, still active successor Les Petit Jazz Band (six or so CDs on the Stomp Off label) is arranged by (in most cases) cornetist Morel; these are not off-the-record transcriptions but personal in-the-spirit-of reshapings. I believe that all or most of these guys were and still are amatuers or by now retirees from their day gigs; after Charquet and Co. (that group's final name) broke up in the late '70s, Morel dropped out of music for at least a decade, no doubt in part because of the demands of his other career (don't know what that is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he taught school). No doubt you've noticed, but with the exception of one Stomp Off CD by a larger Morel-led ensemble that is devoted to the music of Elmer Schoebel, there is no drummer.

[Larry Kart]

If by "there and then" you meant France in the '70s, I would say yes too, probably. The concert audience for "Rumba Negro" seems to be good-sized and enthusiastic.

[Larry Kart]

Two more from 1978 that have been posted by me before but might have been forgotten, plus a brief account (not by me) of the band's fate:

Charquet & Co in Laren, Netherlands in 1978. The band was founded in 1967 as

Reverend

Charkey's Congregation, which was eventually shortened to Charkey & Co,, then

finally

Frenchified to its final form. Charquet was, of course cornetist Jean-Pierre

Morel, who had

an admiration for the work of New Orleans trumpeter Sharkey Bonanno.

During the more than 10 years of its existence the group developed a repertoire

of 450

tunes, of which some 215 were arranged by Morel. In the band here are

Jean-Pierre on

cornet, Jack Cadieu tb, Alain Marquet cl, Marc Bresdin bar sax, Bernard Thevin

piano,

Michel Bescont tenor, Lionel Benhamou bj, and Gerard Gervois tuba. In the late

nineties

Morel kind of regrouped and calls his new excellent band "Le Petit Jazz Band."

P.S. It's Le Petit Jazz Band, not as I said in my prior post, "Les Petit etc." I heard Le Petit at the Chicago Jazz Fest a few years ago (Terry Martin pushed to bring them in). IIRC correctly, tenorman Bescont said that he was great admirer of Wardell Gray.

[Larry Kart]

A link (with sound samples)to Morel's Elmer Schobel CD "TNT." The group is called Les Rois du Fox-Trot:

http://www.jazzbymail.com/ViewAlbum.aspx?i...+Schoebel+Blues