Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz (American Made Music) by Samuel Charters

Author:Samuel Charters [Charters, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2008-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE NEW ORLEANS RHYTHM KINGS, UNDER THEIR EARLIER NAME, THE FRIAR’S SOCIETY ORCHESTRA, 1922. FROM LEFT: GEORGE BRUNIES, PAUL MARES, LEON ROPPOLO, ELMER SCHOEBEL, JACK PETTIS, LEW BLACK, STEVE BROWN. THE DRUMMER, BEN POLLACK, IS IN THE LEFT REAR.

What the success of the 1922 and 1923 NORK recordings made clear was that there were already two clearly defined New Orleans jazz styles; one white, one black, both of them popular and both growing in poise and musical assurance. The Rhythm Kings’ next sessions at the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana, in the spring of 1923 were to define many of the directions white jazz would follow for the next decades, though only through a series of coincidences that the recordings were made at all.

Once again the Melrose brothers were behind the trip to Indiana, probably even paying the musicians and the studio costs for at least one of the two days they were scheduled to be in the studio. The material to be recorded included some of the strongest new compositions that the Melrose brothers were publishing, from “Sweet Lovin’ Man,” a popular piece played by King Oliver’s band that was co-composed by Lil Hardin and Walter Melrose, to “Wolverine Blues,” a composition by one of the company’s newest discoveries, pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Each of the eight titles they recorded became part of the bedrock of the style they had refined and reshaped. The Rhythm Kings were booked into the studio on March 12 and 13; the first session by Oliver’s band was scheduled for the studio three weeks later, on April 6. In those three weeks, between the recordings by the two bands, much of the outline of the two diverging jazz traditions was documented and clarified.

The near-cancellation of the sessions with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings almost inadvertently shaped the music that emerged. Shortly before the sessions were scheduled, Mares found himself without a band. Elmer Schoebel and the others in the rhythm section had gotten tired of the long hours, and Schoebel was also exasperated with the casualness of the New Orleanians, who were still in their early twenties and often acted like schoolboys. They were careless about rehearsals; they didn’t bother to learn to read music, so he had to play new material over and over for them and teach them the arrangements—which they then wouldn’t bother to follow. They also continually upset Fritzel by insisting on playing their own music when the customers would have been happier with more dance numbers, and by their habit of playing noisy practical jokes on each other on the bandstand. Some nights they spent more time talking to the even younger Chicago musicians who clustered beside the bandstand than they did entertaining the crowds. When the Midway Gardens offered Schoebel a job as leader of the orchestra there, he immediately accepted, and took the rhythm section with him.

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