"Jazz With A Beat" - A critical but well-intentioned look at a book that fills a gap

[Big Beat Steve]

Following the suggestions by Dan Gould on p. 4 of the “In With The In Crowd” thread, here are my thoughts on “Jazz With a Beat”.

To start with, a caveat to Dan Gould and others who may feel like he does: This “review” (of sorts …) really is NOT meant to put down or blast this book at all. I wholeheartedly concur with the reasoning of the author and feel a reassessment of this period of jazz history (and of what constitutes part of jazz) is long overdue. So my impressions should rather be taken as a sort of regrets about a missed opportunity of getting the message totally clearly across.

So here goes …

A warning to the “unwary“ : The following text is long, so please bear with me … And if you feel inclined to read on, do take your time and take it in manageable instalments … And sorry if at times you find my writing a bit convoluted …
I had meant to split my text into several separate posts but the forum setup wouldn't let me but merged it all ...

I read this book more or less in one go last fall as its focus strikes a chord with me about how the history of (circa) post-1945 Black jazz has long been subdivided into all too narrow categories of what “valuable” jazz is worthy of being called “jazz” and what else that was there allegedly is all too “commercial” and geared towards the mass tastes and therefore does not meet the “art” criteria of “real” jazz.

So what are my quibbles?
Something had me frowning in reading this book pretty much from the first moment … Thumbing randomly through a few pages as a first peek inside I noticed two statements that just made me say “ouch”:

-- Page 2:  “Some bands, notably Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra, employed brilliant white jazz soloists like Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer …” What?? Clearly the band name that ought to have figured here was that of Jean Goldkette and certainly not the Casa Loma band. I cannot fathom how this could have gone unnoticed through the proofreading stages.

-- Page 141 (start of the “Notes” section): “Discographical information on old 78 rpm records is extremely difficult to find. For this and most of the other discographies of old 78s, I have relied on 45worlds.com.” Huh?? The updated Blues Discography by Leadbitter/Slaven (and Pelletier/Fancourt) that includes MANY of the R&B artists considered here was published in 1987 to 1994. And in the jazz field (even bypassing for a moment the costly Tom Lord publications), Jepsen’s pioneer work has been around for some 60 (!) years; the much-updated Bruyninckx disco dates back to the 80s/90s too and does cover much of post-war R&B as well. Which shows that very detailed discographical information from diligently researched sources has been available for a long time for most acts. And shouldn’t sources like these take priority over online groups that may be hit and miss according to who contributed with what degree of accuracy (or inaccuracy, for that matter)? What is more, as far as I can see 45worlds.com does not place the featured records in the context of the respective FULL recording sessions nor the SEQUENCE of recording sessions of an artist (which would be a prerequisite to really understanding and making full use of discographical information).

Am I being too finicky in feeling that this sort of doubtful statements would make many a reader wonder about what else they may be up against in reading on? Not the best start, particularly if the subject matter is dear to one’s heart …

 

The basic premise of the book (as I understand it):

As the author outlines, despite the “accepted wisdom” that jazz largely “lost its audience” after 1945 with the arrival of Bebop as “jazz as an art form”, jazz did maintain a solid degree of popularity within the Black community after the Petrillo ban and after 1945 (the year of the Bebop revolution that kickstarted Modern Jazz). This popular subgenre of post-WWII jazz that was mostly performed by smaller groups usually came to be filed under “Rhythm & Blues” (including subcategories such as Jump Blues, City Blues, Club Blues, etc.). But these more basic and more accessible forms of jazz geared to dancing and entertainment soon were dismissed by most scribes as falling outside the scope of jazz. The consensus among many period authors and critics and as well as later jazz historians was (and often still is) that “true jazz” of the early post-war years included Bebop and the music of the still-active swing veterans that eventually came to be labeled “Mainstream Jazz” (plus whatever jazz by the traditionalists found grace with the scribes). R&B, on the other hand, rated a mention as mere footnotes at best, probably in those cases where “acknowledged” jazzmen participated in recording sessions or got their start in R&B bands.

Like the author, this is an exclusion I’ve long felt to be all too narrow and inappropriate.

The author rightly argues that close links remained throughout between the “canonized” fields and artists of jazz and the popular, less pretentious, danceable forms of jazz as embodied by Rhythm & Blues and its performers.

Incidentally, IMO this term needs some qualification: “Rhythm & Blues” of the post-Petrillo ban (or post-WWII) era covers a fairly wide field and therefore tends to be a bit imprecise. In fact even in its narrower sense it includes almost any non-Bebop Black music prior to the advent of Rock’n’Roll, ranging from vocalists and vocal groups (the precursors of Doo-Wop), Club Blues trios (Nat King Cole, Charles Brown, et al.) to powerhouse, mostly horn-led combos often categorized as “Jump Blues”. And in many cases the artists that the author highlights in order to restore their place in jazz history do seem to have sailed primarily under the Jump Blues banner.

However, the author obviously has misgivings about using the “Rhythm & Blues” (as well as “Jump Blues”) term and goes out of his way to avoid it. Instead, starting on the very first pages, even before any explanation of his use of the term is provided, he refers to this music performed by smaller groups as “small group swing” –.
That term isn’t factually wrong, of course, but IMO here things get out of focus and off-target in the book. Stylistic classifications of music do serve a purpose as they enable the listener to at least get a broad idea of what kind of music he is dealing with.

Alas, the term “small group swing” (or “small band swing”) is certainly not ideally suited as a sufficiently accurate synonym or substitute for the (apparently so often maligned) category of “Rhythm and Blues bands”. After all, “small group swing” was no new thing in the post-Petrillo ban 40s but had been around from the beginning of the Swing Era. The Swing style of jazz was no “big band affair” all the way. In addition to numerous small bands assembled primarily for recording (example: the Lionel Hampton sessions of 1937-40), there were many working bands that were a fixture of the Swing scene and were part of the acknowledged canon of jazz from Day One. Beyond huge “name” acts among Black artists such as Fats Waller or John Kirby there were the likes of Hot Lips Page, Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans, Stuff Smith, Pete Brown, Frankie Newton, Skeets Tolbert and many others who had their own regular working units from way back in the 30s and played to the Black community.

Now if “small group swing” did exist prior to the period and stylistic spectrum covered in this book and, besides, given that there were many small groups playing swing-style jazz after 1945 without having to fight for their acceptance as part of the jazz narrative, is the same term an apt way of referring to the specific music covered here? Reading this book, the reader needs to make a constant effort to remind himself that “ah, what he refers to here is what commonly was called Rhythm & Blues – or Jump Blues, or similarly.” I do feel this blurs the impact of the points the author tries to make.

And sometimes this double meaning becomes outright confusing. On page 57, for example, it reads: “So why … was (Roy) Milton’s music not recognized and embraced by the establishment? Again, it fell outside of the narrative. Small-group swing … came from the music that was brought into California from New Orleans and the southwest, and from Kansas City and the territory bands with their strong Kansas City influence. The tunes these musicians played were mostly blues and blues-influenced.”    

This seems a somewhat shaky way of reasoning to me. Disregarding the actual degree of direct influence of New Orleans (traditional or contemporary?) on these post-war small bands, did post-WWII Kansas-City influenced jazz played by small bands per se fail to be accepted by the “jazz deciders”? What about Jay McShann? Buddy Tate? And others … And again … there WAS “small-group swing” out there that of course WAS part of the “jazz narrative”. So again … simultaneously using this term with two different meanings does not help in getting the author’s message clearly across.
So, then, was the influence of blues on the repertoire of the bands this book tries to restore to their more rightful place really a major deterrent to their jazz credentials? There must have been other factors. And it likely was a matter of musical style or sophistication (regardless of whether this difference was that decisive at least in the minds of the Black audience). 

There are other instances throughout the book where the use of “small group swing” to refer to what usually was and is called “Rhythm and Blues” or even “Jump Blues” just does not work out, given that something that can be classified as “small group swing” DID exist as part of the established “jazz canon” all along:
For instance on the page 102, reference is made to “the late 1950s when the era of small-group swing was pretty much over”. Was this so? Weren’t there plenty of jazzmen within what can be referred to as “Mainstream Jazz” who did carry on working in a small-group format in the late 50s and beyond, not to mention the combos of the up-and-coming Soul Jazz exponents covered in the final chapter of this book and therefore included in the overall narrative of this book? In short, in order to make sense of this phrase we need to remind ourselves (again!) that the author wants HIS term of “small group swing” to be understood as a replacement for “early Rhythm & Blues” aka “Jump Blues”. But this just does not help the average reader in understanding the intended focus.

Regardless of how you look at it, this terminology cluttered with multiple meanings is not the ideal way to keep the spotlight on what were the common denominators of what was accepted as “jazz” from the beginning and what was relegated to “Rhythm and Blues fringe music”.

The author may have aimed his book at preaching to the converted (such as me, admittedly), but I am far from sure that the fuzziness of this term helps to get his message easily across with those who need have to be convinced first.
Though admittedly offhand I cannot think of a clear-cut better term to use. Creating an all-new one won’t do the trick IMO. Even “Rhythm’n’jazz” would be a borderline case.

At any rate, IMO “small group swing” doesn’t do the job in full as it does have a relatively precise meaning in the history and established stylistic categories of jazz. This meaning can be extended, of course, but aren’t we back to the above problem of having to remind ourselves of “which is which” in each context, then? The coverage of Louis Jordan (who had led his own small group since 1938) IMO is not quite sufficient to make the connection. Particularly if – again – “small group swing” as used in this book is specifically intended to refer to post-WWII R&B/Jump Blues small groups.

Besides, if a case is to be made for post-WWII small-band R&B as a valid part of the larger JAZZ field (and this case can indeed be made IMO), wouldn’t it help to focus somewhat more on the continuum that did exist between Bebop on the one hand and R&B or Jump Blues on the other? Wouldn’t this aid in pointing out that the distinctions that were made by journalists and historians were much less clear-cut with many musicians and of much less importance within the target Black audience? It might be useful to remember, for instance, that according to period sources (Down Beat, Billboard, a.o.) there were numerous clubs that featured straight-ahead jazz acts one week and typical R&B artists the week after within one and the same house policy of live music. And it apparently worked with their Black audiences in those years.

Also, without suggesting to get too technical, a modicum of musical analysis might have helped too. After all there were numerous artists whose music, on listening alone, did include elements from both bebop and period R&B, including (for example) Gene Ammons, Tom Archia, even James Moody, and above all Leo Parker. Digging deeper, there should be plenty of examples across the board of artists. Take the 1946 recording of veteran Jimmie Gordon for the Queen/King label, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dntnT2uQiqk

To show that such “crossover” music continued for years, how about the 1951 recording of “Fat Man’s Scat” by the Frank Motley band (featuring vocals by Lloyd “Fat Man” Smith)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWl6ROGwuFs

Another mix of R&B and bebop elements that above all was meant to entertain. It remained unreleased at the time (resurrected by the Krazy Kat label on vinyl in 1986), but is there any reason to believe that such stylistic “crossover” tunes were NOT part of the repertoires of a sizable part of the small groups working the Black clubs in the early post-war years?

Beyond such “soft” criteria, books dealing with history rely on hard facts not only to support but also to lend authority to the arguments of the author.
What mars this book IMHO are a number of factual inaccuracies and errors as well as rash assertions that, when considering them closer, really would have been unnecessary. Besides, I am afraid these errors might make it all too easy for those with far more conservative visions of what “legitimately” constitutes jazz (and no doubt there remain many in that camp out there) to dismiss the arguments forwarded by the author. Which is a pity because he does have lots of valid points in what he highlights.

 

I realize I am nitpicking a bit here and there, maybe, in singling out such cases in the listing that follows, but why not get the facts right if the facts are mentioned at all?

This also goes for those rash assertions that serve no essential purpose in the overall narrative and might as well have been left out (or gotten right from the beginning).

- Page 2, about the influence of Ray Charles on those jazzmen not following the Free Jazz trend: “Ray Charles had shown the way, and young musicians like Horace Silver and Jimmy Smith followed.”  I’ll leave it to hard bop and soul jazz experts to dissect this statement, but wasn’t Horace Silver’s “funky hard bop trail towards Soul Jazz” an established facet of his style way before Ray Charles had had an opportunity of influencing budding jazzmen? To me this does not seem like the most appropriate example to underline the author’s statement here.

- Page 7, talking about how then-current swing-style jazz of the early 40s was defined as “real jazz”: “Or was it real … because it was played by masters like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, or Bix Beiderbecke.” The author seems to have a soft spot for Bix Beiderbecke and sneaks him in every now and then. However, talking about SWING-era jazz, Bix who had died in 1931 certainly no longer was an all that relevant entity among active purveyors of SWING-style jazz. (It likely was different with the Condonites et al. but are they what is alluded to right here?). So one might as well have mentioned someone else from among the “name” jazzmen. If you MUST name a mythic figure of that caliber, why not include Bunny Berigan here, then?

- Page 7, about Jack Kerouac and his liking for jazz: “In On The Road, his narrator Sal Paradise expresses admiration for modern jazzers George Shearing, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Slim Gaillard.” Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to lump in Slim Gaillard with “modern jazz”? Wouldn’t it be more to the point to see any mention of Gaillard in Kerouac's book just as an indication of him being part of the “hipper side of jazz”?

- Page 9, about the virtuoso soloists having been “brought to the fore” by the big bands in the early 40s: Among the stars such as Lester Young with Count Basie, Illinois Jacquet with Lionel Hampton and Charlie Parker with Jay McShann”, “Coleman Hawkins with Fletcher Henderson” appears like the odd man out. Hawkins had left Henderson in 1934, which must have seemed like the distant past by the early 40s by which time Hawkins had established his credentials in a fairly different manner following his 1939 (small-group) hit with “Body and Soul”. I am not sure this sort of “name slinging for effect” really adds to the arguments presented. In case the other three really seemed insufficient, another (i.e. a different) solo-act-to-be who was still a big band sideman in ca. 1940 would have been more fitting here IMO to maintain the stringency of the reasoning that the early 40s big bands served as the platforms to “bring to the fore” huge names in jazz.

- Page 20, referring to the first JATP concert on 2 July 1944: Why give the name of the pianist as “Shorty Nadine” here? This was a pseudonym of Nat King Cole (whose name is indicated correctly in the “discography” on page 150 – but on that page the year of that concert is stated incorrectly as 1946. Sloppy proofreading!). Just listing the pseudonym does not serve any useful purpose here (or was it more for effect?). Even if that pseudonym appeared on the 78s on the Disc record release. Wouldn’t it have been more informative to give the real name alongside the record label pseudo here? BTW and FWIW, as explained in Steve Propes’ “What Was the First Rock’n’Roll Record?”, Nadine was the name of Nat Cole’s wife.

- Page 23 et seq., referring to the early recordings of Louis Jordan, there are a couple of odd and largely unnecessarily mix-ups here:

- Page 23: “His vocal on a Gaines recording, “I Can’t Dance I Got Ants In My Pants” gave Jordan his big break.” This statement sounds like Jordan made this recording with the Charlie Gaines band. Jordan did play with the Gaines band in 1934, but this recording was in fact a date under the leadership of Clarence Williams who had augmented his band with both Gaines and Louis Jordan for that session. The reasons behind this move are explained in John Chilton’s Jordan biography “Let The Good Times Roll”, p. 33-34. The discography by Brian Rust files this recording under Clarence Williams, and a recent reissue (on Classics 636) credits the tune to the Clarence Williams orchestra too (clearly listed on 45worlds.com too, BTW). A label scan of the original 78 to confirm this is on Discogs, FWIW.

- Page 26 – the first recordings of the Louis Jordan band in 1938: The author refers to a first recording “Toodle Loo on Down/The Girl That Wrecked My Life” in “late 1938” and another one, “So good/Away From You” in “January 1939”. This appears to be incorrect for several reasons:
1) ”The Girl That Wrecked My Life” is not credited to Rodney Sturgis with the Louis Jordan band at all on the original 78 but only to Rodney Sturgis, contrary to the “Toodle Loo” side (see label scan on Discogs). This track is not included on Classics 636, either (remember, listed on 45worlds.com), that is supposed to include the first recordings of the Louis Jordan band. According to Brian Rust, this track (matrix no. 64612) was recorded on 9 September 1938 (2 ½ months before the other three), and Rust goes on to explain: “acc. probably by at least some of Any Kirk’s Clouds of Joy who made matrices 64613 through 64615 on the same date.”  What is more, someone contributing to the Discogs entry of this 78 specifically named Mary Lou Williams (p) and Ben Thigpen (dr)  – two mainstays of the Kirk band – among the backing musicians for this track. (‘nuff indices now? )

2) The other three tunes released on the above two 78s do credit Louis Jordan’s band as the backing band but contrary to the author’s claim that two of them were made in January 1939, in fact all three were recorded on 20 December 1938 (as per the discographies by Rust and by Bruyninckx, as well as the Classics 636 reissue and the description of that session in John Chilton’s Jordan biography). What is more, the author’s claim that despite the lack of success of the Sturgis 78s “Jordan apparently made enough of an impression that Decca’s continued recording him” (inferring that he was recalled into the studio only after the Sturgis session), Louis Jordan’s first leader date (the oft-reissued “Honey In The Bee Ball” and “Barnacle Bill The Sailor”) in fact happened on the very same day that the three Sturgis tunes were recorded in December 1938. Which is confirmed by the fact that all three Sturgis tunes and the two tunes in Louis Jordan’s name carry five consecutive matrix numbers. In short, a fairly different sequence of events, actually.

- Page 29, about Louis Jordan having been unable to cash in on the Rock’n’Roll trend: “Actually, by the late 1950s, when rock and roll had taken over the world … Jordan had taken a step back in time. He had formed a big band and was playing classic swing” …” Not so … The big band recordings of Louis Jordan were made for Decca in 1951 (a long time before the advent of R’n’R). Though they were unsuccessful indeed, they therefore cannot be advanced as an argument to show that Louis Jordan was out of step with the trends of the LATE (or later) 1950s. Jordan did fail to hop on the R’n’R bandwagon, but this big band episode was not part of the reasons prevalent in the late 50s. By that time Jordan was recording for Mercury and had long since returned to his Tympany Five.

To cut a long story somewhat shorter, don’t the above details alone show clearly enough that consulting discographies has some usefulness? Of course discographies do contain errors and sometimes errors are perpetuated from one discographer to the next, but both in the examples above and those that follow I’d really be surprised if, of all discographical details cited, it was exactly those here where so many other sources ALL were incorrect all the time.

 

- Page 39 – T-Bone Walker and his presence on the 40s Central Avenue scene: Referring to Walker’s recordings up to the 1942-44 Petrillo ban, the author claims that “Walker was an active player on the scene but didn’t go on to make other small-group swing records” [after the Petrillo strike]. (Remember “small group swing” is used as a jazz-tinged synonym for “R&B/Jump blues small band records” in this book). But is that so? Just looking at his discography from 1945 to the early 50s, though for obvious reasons his ensemble sound was guitar-led, his backing bands almost always included several horns and featured – at various times – such names as Jack McVea, Marl Young, Al Killian, Teddy Buckner, Bumps Myers, Lloyd Glenn, Billy Hadnott, Willard McDaniel, Big Jim Wynn, Maxwell Davis, a.o. Listening to these records, Walker’s vocals may lean a bit more towards what would satisfy blues purists, but would this detract from their “jazz” or late 40s R&B credentials? And the backing bands almost always were far removed from any down-home feel. So how much more “small group swing aka R&B small group” do you need overall ?

Of course I wouldn’t go so far as to name the inclusion of his “The Hustle Is On” on a public-domain label 4-CD box set titled “Rhythm’n’Blues - Shouters” as an example to prove my point 😉, but wouldn’t T-Bone Walker in fact qualify as one of those who successfully bridged the (imaginary or real) “real blues vs R&B” divide? A divide that probably didn’t exist in the minds of huge parts of the Black audience of the times anyway  – and isn’t this book supposed to highlight this after all?  

- page 40: “McNeely was arguably the most controversial of Jacquet’s followers, because he took what Jacquet had begun and pushed it to the furthest extreme.”  Is that so? What about Joe Houston? Wasn’t he even more controversial in the minds of jazz purists? Arguable indeed …

- page 46: “The new independent labels did not have the budget or the studio space to handle the Duke Ellington orchestra or even the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra …” (remember we are talking about the very early post-war period here). These two examples are ill-chosen if they are meant to show that the indies were unable to afford signing the big bands. After leaving RCA (the story goes that this was because of some racial invectives by an RCA employee at a recording session), Duke Ellington signed with Musicraft and recorded for them for a couple of months in late 1947. And the Jimmie Lunceford band recorded for the Majestic label for the final two years of its existence in 1946-47. So …?
So if this assertion needed to be made, wouldn’t it have been preferable to indicate other bands as examples or to skip it altogether?

- page 51: about Lucky Millinder: “Millinder’s shift from the sweet swing sound to the more hard-driving sound came on May 25, 1944 …” (when Wynonie Harris recorded his only session with the Millinder band).  With all due respect, but aural evidence of the pre-Petrillo ban Millinder discography does not bear this out at all. From its recording start in 1941 and within the context of typical big band recordings of the early 40s the Millinder band ranked among the more hard-hitting Black big bands of their time. Trevor Bacon did sing more than just “suave” ballads (cf. “Big Fat Mama” and “Hey Huss”). Not to mention the vocals by Sister Rosetta Tharpe as well as many fine instrumentals that kicked some serious ass!  
Listening to their collected works, it might be argued that the Kirk and Lunceford bands of the late 30s/early 40s veered towards sweet, saccharine sounds as soon as their male vocalists stepped to the mike, but Millinder? Nah, much, much less so.

- page 55: The sessions that the Hot Lips Page band participated in ”in King’s studios on December 23 and 26” did not take place in 1943 but in 1947.

- page 70, about the biggest hit of the Joe Morris band: The usual spelling (including on the original Atlantic 78) of the title of this song is “Lowe Groovin’”, not “Low Groovin’”.

- page 71, about the hit “Cole Slaw” by Frank Culley: ”It is unclear who made up the rest of the band … it’s believed that Randy Weston was on piano and Connie Kay on drums.” It does not seem like the line-up was such an almost total mystery. While it is correct that not all participants are known (though Connie Kay is a safe bet, given his presence on many Atlantic R&B studio sessions during that period), both the discographies by Leadbitter and by Bruyninckx indicate Harry Van Walls on piano and Tiny Grimes on guitar. Is there any recent hard evidence that these names are wrong after all? Or wouldn’t it have been wise to trust long-established discographies? At any rate, this is another case where the discographies ARE out there and accessible.

- page 72, about the Budd Johnson band backing Ruth Brown: “She recorded I’ll Get Along with a band led by Budd Johnson who had done well with his sister Ella Johnson …”  Discographies do confirm that Budd Johnson’s band backed Ruth Brown on several sessions. But tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson (who played – and held his own - with many younger jazzmen in a variety of contexts up to the early 80s) was in no way connected with vocalist Ella Johnson. Her brother was pianist and bandleader Buddy Johnson - a different person altogether and firmly linked to Mercury during the period in question. This is another of those rash assertions where I cannot really see what the point was of mentioning Ella Johnson in the first place. Skipping her name would not have impaired the narrative of this paragraph in any way. Of course it is nice and useful at times to flesh out a look at history by working in additional facts (if only in passing), but then these facts need to be spot-on.

- page 84: Sources disagree about whether the real name of King Porter was James Pope (as indicated in this book) or James Poe. Leadbitter’s discography says “Pope” but the Savoy discography by Michel Ruppli says “James Poe”, and so do the liner notes to the reissue LPs of King Porter (on the Official label) and Paul Williams (on Saxophonograph).

- page 84/85: about the feverish recording activities of the Paul Williams band between 6 October and 30 December 1947.: I checked all the discographies accessible to me (particularly the Savoy discography by Michel Ruppli) and entries both under Paul Williams and under King Porter and Wild Bill Moore (under whose names some sessions involving the Paul Williams band were released) but there are some discrepancies. I did not find any sessions involving Paul Williams on 23 December 1947 (but on 20 December OTOH), and none on an unspecified December 1947 date that was NOT on 18, 20 (23) or 30 December. I’m curious to see which tunes were done on that unspecified date in December.

- page 88,about the Big Jay McNeely recording of “Benson’s Groove” (aka ”Cool Blood”):  The dates seem to be mixed up here. The recording date of 9 October 1948 cannot be correct. Both the Big Jay McNeely biography “Nervous Man Nervous”, the Savoy discography by Michel Ruppli and the reissues of that session on the Savoy twofer and the JSP box indicate 29 November 1948. Which in turn would correlate with the session of McNeely’s hit “Deacons’s Hop” that according to the author took place “just two weeks later”: All the accessible sources indicate 15 December 1948 as the date of that session.

- page 94, about the first session that Paul Gayten did for the Deluxe label to back singer Cousin Joe: “Cousin Joe’s career never took off …”
A statement that is rather open to debate again, particularly with regard to many typical “careers” of Black musicians in the zone between jazz and R&B in that era. Cousin Joe (aka Pleasant Joe) recorded regularly from 1948 to 1954, worked steadily, particularly after his return to New Orleans, often involving notable jazz musicians, to the point where he is listed in jazz rather than blues discographies. And in the 60s and 70s he had a respectable second career in Europe where he not only played the American Folk Blues festival but made numerous recordings throughout the 70s. Not that bad overall, isn’t it?

- page 95, about the Paul Gayten recording of “The Music Goes Round And Round”  “which features Gayten’s vocal and an uncredited but very good tenor saxophonist”: Again the discographies can come to everyone’s rescue if consulted: Both the Blues discography by Leadbitter et al. and the Bruyninckx jazz discography indicate Lee Allen (ts) and Red Tyler (bs) among the known men in the lineup.

- page 116, referring to Bill Doggett recording with the Lucky Millinder band:  “So the Lucky Millinder Orchestra with whom Doggett made his first recordings for Decca in 1938, and which became the featured band at New York’s Savoy Ballroom, was essentially Doggett’s” : Another mix-up of dates: It is correct that Lucky Millinder took over the Bill Doggett band in 1938. But this venture fizzled out in 1939 for financial reasons, and Lucky Millinder then started a band of his own in late 1940 and his recording career with that band started in the spring of 1941. And Bill Doggett was in the lineup of the first sessions of the Millinder band. So far, so good. But the Bill Doggett band of 1938 that for a time was headed by Millinder apparently went unrecorded. And no Lucky Millinder-led recordings were made before 1941 and after Millinder ended his tenure as front man of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band in 1938. As for to what extent the Millinder band of the 1941 sessions still matched the personnel of the 1938 Bill Doggett band and could therefore be called “essentially Doggett’s”, that would be for Doggett experts to answer.

- Page 120, about Ray Charles the jazzman : “ Ray Charles finally broke the jazz barrier in 1961 with his album “Genius + Soul = Jazz.” Did this really happen as late as that? By 1961 he had regularly been receiving coverage and reviews in European jazz magazines, for example. And what about his “Soul Brothers” LP (1958, 3 ½ stars in Down Beat) co-featuring Milt Jackson? The following excerpt from the 1958 “Soul Brothers” review by Martin Williams bears repeating in this context: “The respect which so many young jazzmen have for Ray Charles may bring about a kind of replenishment ‘from below” which an art often needs and which many feel that jazz constantly needs. For Charles, in his passionately uninhibited way, reminds the jazz musician of certain basic and valuable things which his own sophistication may lead him to neglect, look down on, even scorn, and which he seems somehow unwilling to learn about from others.”
“From below” or not, there could have been worse ways of highlighting someone’s jazz credentials. 😉

I realize I may have been overly critical in some cases in singling out all this, but it certainly never was my intention to put down that book. In fact I do like and appreciate this book and applaud its aims and agree with what the author set out to show. It is more a case of regretting these weak spots as they are a case of “missed opportunities” (in getting things right all the way) that risk weakening the impact of the author’s reasoning.
After all, this subject certainly might create some controversy along the lines of “what is jazz from that era and what isn’t and where to draw the line”. Which may be the case mainly among those “opponents” of the author who insist on the “art music” side of jazz as the ONE overriding criterion of what IS jazz. But I feel if an effort to convince those diverging opinions is made at all then the facts ought to be right throughout in order to really support the narrative of the author. Otherwise these errors might make it all too easy for some to dismiss the text as a whole.

Particularly since – as I think my remarks have shown – in many cases it would have been relatively easy either to get the facts right e.g. by consulting relevant reference documents, or to avoid errors just by not going too far out on a limb for effect.

And besides, to all of you who may feel I’ve been overdoing it: Wouldn’t anyone who has some sound knowledge on a specialist subject react the same way if those weak spots affected one of HIS favorite topics (and compared to others I’m still only a rank amateur anyway)? Just imagine someone who knows his way around the history of the AEC or AACM, for example, and comes across warts like that in a publication on THOSE subjects … So … ? 😉

To those who are still with me here now - THANKS for having taken your time to read all this!

 

Edited 20 hours ago by Big Beat Steve

[Dan Gould]

Thanks for posting this Steve ... your knowledge is much deeper and broader than my own.

FWIW I didn't find Tad's "Small Group Swing" as problematic - I felt it played up the rhythmic quality of the music and the jazz bona fides of so many of the practitioners.  I am a little surprised I missed the conflation of Budd Johnson, tenor who inspired Percy France to switch from clarinet, with Buddy Johnson, pianist and bandleader with sister Ella on vocals. (Ironically while I have known the name for a long while, I very recently received a comp of the Johnson band, air checks from the Savoy ballroom, notes by Bob Porter and with Dupree Bolton in the collective personnel (didn't see that coming) ... gonna give a listen real soon).

 

Hoping @ListeningToPrestige sees this and responds.