Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff The Magic Jazz Radio During the late 1930s and early 1940s, I spent many nights in the nation's more renowned hotels and nightclubs. Often, in the course of one...
...But the wholly unexpected surprise is a Count Basie vocal...
...Among the sidemen were such nonpareils as Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Tricky Sam Nanton, Jimmy Blanton, Barney Bigard, Rex Stewart, and Cootie Williams—with vocals by the most intelligent and lithely sensuous vocalist Duke ever had, Ivie Anderson...
...It also has a remarkable treasure: broadcasts of the Ellington orchestra in 1940, its most legendary year...
...At night, I heard clear-channel stations from Cincinnati and New York, and I learned the names of streets and newspapers I wouldn't see for decades...
...The big surprise in "1940"/The Bands of Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Andy Kirk and Jimmy Lunceford, Everybodys EV-3006, is Count Basie swinging the hell out of an Ellington tune, "Rockin' in Rhythm...
...All the tracks on the Basie set are from broadcasts...
...Anyway, it's as exuberantly explosive now as on the night it was broadcast forty-five years ago...
...Few commercial recordings were made outside the studios in those years, but jazz fans were busy recording the broadcasts throughout the resounding nights...
...If that had been put on a commercial label at the time, it would have figured prominently in all the learned analyses of the Basie canon...
...Reflections in Ellington, Everybodys EV-3005, has two 1932 medleys of the band in stereo (yes, there was stereo even then, as the notes explain...
...The same is true of Historical Prez/Lester Young 1940-1944, Everybodys EV-3002—except for one performance from a Fats Waller Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall...
...for, in his own way, he danced right along with the people on the floor...
...The Basie Special/Count Basie and His Orchestra (1944-1946), Everybodys EV-3004, not only has blazing ensemble playing but also joyously swinging solos by, among others, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Dickie Wells, Lucky Thompson, Buddy Tate, and the vastly underrated trombonist Ted "Muttonleg" Donnelly...
...This communion had a profound effect on Lester Young...
...Every once in a while all these years later, a new storehouse of previously unknown off-the-air performances is made available, and listeners who think they know everything there is to know about a particular player or band are happily astonished by these discoveries in jazz archeology...
...I was able to criss-cross the continent without moving from my bedroom because of the radio, an invention far more imagination-stretching than television...
...Also in this set are high-spirited air-shots by Louis Armstrong's big band...
...Among the initial releases are sets by Count Basie, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and a Battle of Bands, vintage 1940...
...From the same address you can get a copy of the Meritt Rag, which includes a complete list of Everybodys releases so far, as, well as information on how you can join the Meritt Record Society, which is itself one of the wonders of the jazz world...
...checks should be made payable to Marlor Productions...
...Everybodys is at P.O...
...The song is George Fra-zier's "Harvard Blues...
...But most wondrous of all at night was the jazz...
...Reinhardt, Reinhardt, I'm a most indifferent guy/But I love my Vincent baby/And that's no Harvard lie...
...Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy with pianist Mary Lou Williams ("The Lady Who Swings the Band"), and Jimmie Lunceford...
...With all these broadcasts coming alive again, is there anyone out there who recorded Fats Waller at the plush Palmer Room in Chicago on that night in the deepest of the Depression when Fats said, on the air, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight...
...Even then it was clear to me that while studio recordings often were exhilarating, there was something special about the spontaneity of live performances in rooms full of live dancers...
...In his notes to the set, Loren Schoenberg makes a useful point about the fundamental change the Basie band—when Prez was in it—made in the way people listened to and played jazz: "In the same way that a dance team would work out routines that were the most natural to suit its abilities, the Count Basie band of the 1930s played arrangements that were based on the phrases of its soloists— and primarily those of Lester Young...
...No soloist in jazz history was as continually surprising, in the subtlest of ways, as Lester Young, and so he is in these performances...
...Often, in the course of one evening, I'd hop from the Hotel Lincoln in New York to Chicago's Palmer Room and back to Canobie Lake Park in Salem, New Hampshire...
...Box 156, Hicksville, NY 11802...
...U THE PROGRESSIVE / 39...
...Jerry Valburn is a collector who searches out some of the most deeply pleasurable of these finds, and now he has a new label that is entirely devoted to black swing and blues from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, much of it from broadcasts...
...I spent time only in those rooms that booked the hottest jazz bands-Ellington, Basie, Lunceford, Chick Webb...
...The ease and swing with which the band played this music was new to a public accustomed to the sounds of Goodman, Lunceford, and others...
...The band played at its best when the dancers were in motion, and the dancers, in turn, were most relaxed when the band was in full flight...
...Well, it's more speaking than singing, but the phrasing is more singing than speaking...
...And I wondered why the record companies didn't simply set up their equipment in those ballrooms and clubs and issue the best of what turned out...
...The sessions feature Prez with both the Basie band and his own small combos...
...Each Everybodys album costs $8.00, including postage and insurance...
...The label—an ancestor of which existed in the 1920s—is called Everybodys...
Vol. 49 • September 1985 • No. 9
