“Perhaps nothing in human history has spread across the earth so far, so fast as New Orleans music,” wrote Alan Lomax in Mister Jelly Roll. “Thirty years after its genesis it was as popular and understandable in New York, Paris, Prague and Shanghai as in its own hometown.”
And so it continues, under the name of “Dixieland,” on this recording of excerpts from the first two concerts by Paul “Doc” Evans and his band. Dixieland cornetist Evans, who is a household name in Minnesota, but whose reputation extends far beyond his native state, is that rare combination of artist, scholar and man-with-a-message. The object of these open-air jazz concerts—held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the summer of 1957—was to trace, musically, the spread of Dixieland jazz from New Orleans across the face of the globe.
Buddy Bolden was first of the fabulous kings of the jazz trumpet—Joe King Oliver and Louis Armstrong followed his lead—was considered to be the first to have played Dixieland. He combined or re-formed many musical styles into jazz.
There was the cakewalk, for example, represented here by the Whistlin’ Rufus of Kerry Mills, better known as the composer of At a Georgia Camp Meeting. There was the spiritual, already being transmuted in part into the blues, and suggesting a further transmutation of the leader-and-chorus, hand clapping swing of Down by the Riverside into the basic beat of jazz.
All this jelled in Bolden’s mind and came out The Girls Are All Crazy ’Bout the Way I Walk (except, as Evans reports, New Orleans veteran Bunk Johnson said, “I wouldn’t exactly call them girls,” and Evans himself adds, “I don’t think the word was walk”) and Get Outa Here, both of which—the tight ensembles, the hypnotic 4/4 beat and the repetitious, almost primitive double 8-bar phrase which keeps recurring with an increasingly explosive intensity between solos in the latter tune—are Buddy Bolden’s world, or as nearly a true representation of that world as we are likely to enjoy half a century removed.
It is not surprising that many of the young white musicians of New Orleans were excited by the new music sweeping out of the Negro quarter in the early 1900s. Much of early jazz was, expressly, marching music played for the many Negro fraternities and clubs of New Orleans, which staged almost daily parades. The influence shows in the basically brass-band instrumentation of the Bolden band, which is essentially the instrumentation of the Dixieland band of today.
And it is here that the white musicians found entrée into what were then the mysteries of jazz. They had a good deal more to learn, and learned part of it—for example the meaning and manner of the blues, as in the charming Bluin’ the Blues and Farewell Blues. But what they learned, they turned splendidly into a raggy, infectious style of playing such original multi-themed compositions as Clarinet Marmalade and Eccentric.
The white New Orleans Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) was signed by Victor Recording Co. in 1917 and brought jazz to the national attention. The shame was that New Orleans Negro trumpet King Freddie Keppard refused his opportunity to make the first jazz record, “because then people will have a chance to steal my stuff.”
Joe Oliver looked every inch the king in the old-fashioned photos which show his band stiffly posed at Chicago’s Royal Garden Café. He was a big man and a dignified one. Though he was not an innovator, he could read and write music, as well as playing jazz trumpet better than anyone else. His was basically the same music that had been heard in New Orleans for the past 25 years. He didn’t try to change the music, he polished it, making of his band a kind of college at which every major Negro jazz figure matriculated—among them Armstrong, the Dodds brothers, Ory and St. Cyr.
The music had become a complex music—compositions of several themes, played out in closely-knit ensemble passages, punctuated by individual breaks, as in Mabel’s Dream. It has assimilated the blues, which Oliver played beautifully, as in Jazzin’ Baby Blues of his composer-pianist Richard M. Jones. It had also assimilated ragtime through the stomp, as in the re-creation on this record of Snake Rag. A quasi-graduation exercise of Oliver’s college is Ory’s Creole Trombone, commemorating the tent-show music which many of the New Orleans veterans had played.
Chicago also saw the rise of a young white group, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Bugle Call Rag, with its last series of interpolated breaks, has always been a great crowd-pleaser for Evans, as it once was for the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Their music—closer to the Negro tradition than that of the ODJB because of a better understanding of the blues and an insistence on the 4/4 beat rather than the 2/4 now associated with Dixieland—fathered, in turn, such white musicians as the McPartlands and Eddie Condon and it was thus that the mainstream of New Orleans jazz was passed on, for better or worse, to other, even younger would-be white jazzmen in the succeeding years.
— RUSSELL ROTH