THE SOUND OF REAL JAZZ & HOT DANCE

Image provided courtesy of Mike Thomas of Encyclopedia of British Dance Bands.

I was listening to Boogie Woogie by King Oliver’s Orchestra the other day, and after a bar or two I thought how much they sounded like Paul Howard’s Quality Serenaders, a California based band that made a dozen sides in 1929 and 1930 which had a very distinctive sound, not least because they were driven forward by the drumming of a young Lionel Hampton. In fact I had to check in Rust (where would we be without him?) to see if it was a mislabelling that the radio station was unaware of. But no, Oliver’s band it was, directed for that session by Carroll Dickerson.

Then, in a rather self-satisfied way, I reflected how, over the twenty-five years that I have been listening to this sort of music, I have gradually become able to tell bands, and musicians, by their sound. This should come as no surprise to the rest of you who share my taste for this music. You probably could tell one from the other right from the start, and in a few days could tell Jimmy Dorsey from Fud Livingston in a nanosecond. But I am a late developer and easily pleased, hence my smugness at my progress, albeit slow, as a discerning listener.

Vocalists are a different proposition entirely. After just a week or two of seeking out and listening to jazz and dance I could recognise Al Bowlly and Denny Dennis, with Sam Browne, Les Allen and Maurice Elwin not far behind. American vocalists were harder, I don’t know why, but my British ear had a hard time telling them apart. Okay, yes, Bing is unmistakable, and Dick Todd, Bob Crosby and Charlie Palloy are recognisable because they almost sound like Bing. As for the rest, they took time, but now I can pick out Irving Kaufman after a few notes (if it sounds like Irving Kaufman but isn’t, then it is Arthur Fields), and the same goes for Chick Bullock. As for Elmer Feldkamp, Scrappy Lambert, Billy Hillpot and Smith Ballew, they are so far all interchangeable, but check back with me in another twenty-five years. Female vocalists are fewer and easier. Elsie Carlisle, Evelyn Dall, Ann Lenner, Vaughn de Leath, Annette, Billie, Ella – I know and love them all.

But voices are voices. It is natural to be able to tell them apart. It’s when you can start differentiating between other sounds that you are developing a sophisticated ear (or hopefully two of them). Did you ever read about how, in the days when Morse code was used, each operator has his own distinctive way of keying the dits and dahs: his fist, as they called it, and other operators could recognise it and identify him by it. That concept was beyond me – I couldn’t see how something that mechanical could be that distinctive. However it didn’t take me long to realise, then recognise, that each band (well, many of them) had its own distinctive sound, created by its instrumentation, arrangements and the location in which it recorded. In fact, now, my new refined ear can distinguish between one recording company and another - sometimes. Anything recorded by the British Crystallate Company on its Rex, Eclipse or Crown labels had a very distinctive sound to it. And all those sides by Lou Gold, Sam Lanin and the rest of the gang and issued in England on Imperial have a uniformity about them thanks Grey Gull, ARC etc.

Anyway, for sure you can’t mistake Ellington – no one else could make a band sound like that, and though many tried they never really managed it. It was just a case of so-and-so doing an Ellington. And consider: didn’t McKinney’s Cotton Pickers have a unique sound? Big, substantial, coming right at you head on in those glorious monaural days (And that reminds me of another very distinctive vocalist: Don Redman, with his gentle, rather put upon tone: Gee, Ain’t I Good To You?). Is anyone fooled by the label that attributed Forgetting You to Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra? Oh yes, Goldkette: the best white band to come out of the USA ever. My Pretty Girl and Clementine have never been bettered in 80 years, but they didn’t do Forgetting You. That was McKinney’s.

When I started collecting pre-war jazz and hot dance 78s, buying everything I could find, I couldn’t tell one band from another. I just wanted the tunes, and the sound that went with 1920s and 1930s recording technology. It was almost a damascene moment when I first realised I could tell a band by its sound – Jack Hylton’s it was, from 1929 or 1930. No one else had that big, buoyant sound. Speaking of big and buoyant, there was Paul Whiteman – his band I mean, not him personally (I don’t know, though) – who had his own sound, which was unique to his organisation. Jack Payne, maybe the most exuberant of all the British bands, especially during his BBC days, was recognisable after less than a bar. So were Ambrose, Jack Jackson, The Six Swingers, Ted Weems, Ben Pollack. I could name lots more, and so could you.

Then of course we come to the instrumentalists. It’s one thing to recognise a voice, but it’s another, and far more satisfying, to pinpoint an instrumentalist. Twenty different, indifferent man playing the piano can all sound alike, but no one sounds like Fats or Jelly. Sidney Bechet and Coleman Hawkins stand out easily from any band they play in, as does Britain’s Freddy Gardner. And while we are on the subject of unique – I mean truly, indisputably, utterly unique – I’ll simply say Bix, Tram, Louis, Adrian Rollini.

So what happened? When did bands lose their own individual sounds? IMHO, which isn’t all that H, there were two debilitating influences – swing and the war. No, make that three debilitating influences, the third being Glenn Miller.

Swing may have been the new wave, but in rushing to embrace it so many bands put themselves in a straightjacket. BG and TD were first class musicians, with countless sides to their credit as members of all manner of hot bands, and while they had their own great sounds as bandleaders, they spread the swing infection to others who lacked their distinctiveness and just churned out cookie-cutter records one after the other. Not Bob Crosby’s though; they kept the faith always.

Then when Glenn Miller, a competent trombonist, skilful organiser and brilliant arranger, with a record of playing with some truly wonderful bands behind him, found a sound to distinguish his orchestra from all the others, and made a success of it, even though every one of his records sounded pretty much like all the others, everyone else except the really big names (e.g. Goodman, Dorsey x 2, Krupa, Shaw) tried to jump on the bandwagon. Everything drowned in dollops of slow moving woodwind. I heard a record a few days ago by The Skyrockets from around 1942, led by Paul Fenhoulet, himself no mean jazz player, and it could have been just anyone. Musical goop, plodding along, with no joy to it. Almost a sedative.

Maybe in wartime, with sudden death a real possibility for so many, people in their off hours wanted more syrup than spice but that excess of slush, and swing, had the effect of almost killing off a whole genre, if I may use that awful word. After the end of the recording ban in the USA, which lasted from 1942 to 1944, and after the war, the restarted jazz didn’t last long before splitting into two factions. Of the other faction, I shall say nothing. On our side we still had Louis, the Duke and many others, but it wasn’t the same. The sound had gone. Our thanks, of course, to Lou Watters, Bob Scobey, Humph and many others but we never quite got back the sound we wanted. With new techniques in recording, which meant that a band no longer had to play a number all together, start to finish, without a single mistake, changes were inevitable -- especially with the change of speed from 78 to 33 and 45, and with the replacement of shellac with vinyl. But it’s a shame that in the 1930s, with so many top jazzmen around, that the process had to be accelerated.