Post 356: 'ELEPHANT STOMP'

Who composed Elephant Stomp? This has long been one of those intriguing mysteries in the history of traditional jazz.

The composer's name is sometimes given as St. Gery Alferay. More often it appears as St. Gery and Alferay. These names were long assumed to be pseudonyms.

The tune (two themes of 16 bars each) became popular after Humphrey Lyttelton began featuring it in 1954. At one time, some suspected that Lyttelton himself had composed it.

Adding to the confusion, there seems to have been at least one other Elephant Stomp (in three themes, and from the 1930s) but this was not the tune Lyttelton played.

Dick Baker (I have written before about his great website), with the help of his colleague Erwin Elvers, not long ago published a solution to the mystery. Elvers says that 'Alferay' was a French tenor sax player called Albert Ferreri and that 'St. Gery' was his French colleague, a pianist called Yannick Singery. Apparently, Singery was on piano when Albert Nicholas recorded the tune in Paris in 1953. Maybe that's how Lyttelton picked it up.

Well, all that makes sense; and it's good enough for me.

I think it's a useful tune in the repertoire because it's bouncy, simple to learn and easy to improvise on. My ear tells me it goes as below. There are two sets of 16 bars, both repetitively made up of 8 + 8. And the chord progressions are simple. A band can play it through a couple of times and then stick on B for solos.

Post 288: DICK BAKER'S GREAT RESEARCH AND WEB SITE

In 2013 I had an e-mail from Dick Baker, whom I did not previously know. This in turn led me to discover Dick's website:
CLICK HERE.

What a tremendous resource for all traditional jazz enthusiasts this is! I cannot recommend it too highly.

Dick has listed in alphabetical order nearly 4000 tunes from the traditional jazz canon. Here's a typical page. There are currently over 400 such pages.

With every title, Dick has given wherever possible the date of composition and the name(s) of the composers. There often follows a mini-essay in which he discusses such matters as controversies about the composition, alternative versions, and recordings of the piece.

It is hard to imagine what an intense labour of love this project has been (and still is). It must have cost Dick (and others) hundreds of hours of painstaking research and writing.  We are all deeply indebted to him.

Post 287: LASSE COLLIN'S GREAT CONTRIBUTION

Scattered around the Globe there are many individuals who have voluntarily and generously given hundreds of hours of their time to help support and propagate traditional jazz.

I can not list them all. But I personally am specially grateful to the anonymous person (?Scott Alexander) who created the highly-informative 'Red Hot Jazz' website:

CLICK HERE. (Unfortunately, I am told that nothing new has appeared on this site for several years, even though it is a 'work in progress'. It is possible that the creator has died, though obviously we must hope this is not the case.)

And I am grateful to the people who run the CD-publishing company Document Records. They have enabled us to hear so much of the almost-forgotten music of the 1920s and 1930s:

CLICK HERE.

Then there is the great Dick Baker, about whom I have written before. For years he has been tirelessly researching the old tunes, trying to establish who composed what and to tidy up hundreds of confusions:

CLICK HERE.

And I have a huge admiration for John Birchall, who has spent years building up a massive library of tunes our bands play, all in Band-in-a-Box form:
CLICK HERE.
There are also many great video-makers, who have done us huge favours by making the best music available on YouTube. I follow several of them, and have long been impressed especially by the work of the video-maker codenamed digitalalexa:

CLICK HERE

and the video-maker codenamed RaoulDuke504:

CLICK HERE.

But today, especially on behalf of all of us who try to play the music, I want to praise Lasse Collin - a man who - month after month for many years - has been creating HUNDREDS of Lead Sheets from which we may learn the tunes.

It is virtually impossible to find or buy the sheet music for the wonderful tunes the bands played in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Lasse Collin has been working them out by ear to the best of his ability and publishing his findings (usually complete with lyrics where possible) - free to everyone - on his web-site.

Lasse says:
New Orleans jazz is played by heart and ear. You fake some good old tunes and improvise on the melodies and the chords they are built on. Most of the tunes were forgotten a long time ago;, nobody asked for them. ...... To preserve these tunes is more of a cultural achievement. Often you have to transcribe them from old recordings, because there has not been any sheet music available for many decades, if ever.


Lasse adds (with undue modesty) that his transcriptions 
are mostly an interpretation of the song and don't claim to be quite right, simply just "good enough for jazz". The upper section with the chords is for C-instruments (banjo, guitar, piano, bass), the lower with the melody is for instruments tuned in Bb (trumpet, clarinet, soprano- and tenor sax, trombone). Have a look at the tune, memorize it, put in your soul, and play it hot!

Here is an example of what he offers on his site.

You can also click on examples of Lasse's bands playing most of the tunes. Pretty good, eh?  And extremely useful to all of us who try to play the music. Well done, Lasse. We are all indebted to you! To explore Lasse's wonderful site for yourself,

CLICK HERE.

ADDITIONAL NOTE added in August 2023 : Sadly, I have just heard that Lasse died on 23 December 2022.

Post 22: 'NEED A LTTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL'; AND THE RESEARCHER DICK BAKER

Click on THIS VIDEO. It is concise (only 30 bars in total) and therefore simple for musicians to learn and memorise. It has a good, strong, easily-singable melody and a very pleasant down-the-ladder harmonic progression (plus The Sunshine Chord Sequence at the end). Bars 7 and 8 of the Chorus can be played as a 'Break' - to be taken either by a singer or by a member of the band; and Bars 17 and 18 of the Chorus are an appealing 'Tag'. For all these reasons, I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl is a very good tune for jazz bands to have in their repertoire.

I have written before about the amazing Dick Baker who has spent decades researching the origins and histories of tunes played by traditional jazz bands. He now has information about nearly 4000 tunes on his website, which runs to over 400 pages of closely-typed information: CLICK HERE; and then go to Stomp Off Records Project.

Dick has been tracing the origins of I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl, the song made famous by Bessie Smith and - more recently - brilliantly revived by Tuba Skinny and their fine singer Erika Lewis.

Dick sent me an email:

Ivan, In my quest to update and improve the Stomp Off index, I went hunting for this on a trip to the Library of Congress in January. The composers were actually Dally Small, Clarence Williams and J. Tim Brymn, and the filed copyright was "I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl." The original lead sheet, possibly in Clarence Williams's handwriting, is attached. The copyright as printed in the book reads I need a little sugar in my bowl words and melody by C. Williams, Dally Small and J. T. Brymn. © 1 c. Jan. 14, 1932; E unp. 50141; Clarence Williams music pub. co., inc., New York. The record label, alas, screwed things up a bit. The initial "I" was dropped (but it's common for record companies to shorten, streamline, or otherwise change titles for their labels), but the composer credit on the Columbia 14634-D label is Williams, Byrne [or poss. Byrns] and Small. There WAS a composer named W. A. D. "Danny" Small, but this evidently isn't that guy.

Here is the leadsheet Dick discovered. What is interesting about it? It is dated (rubber stamp) '1932'. The composers are given as stated by Dick. The tune is set in the key of Ab, with a melody line and no chords for the Chorus and a melody line and a few hints at chords for the Verse. The Verse has 16 bars. The Chorus has 18 bars (really 16 bars plus a two-bar tag).

The 16-bar Verse is typical of its time - not specially interesting melodically, simple and with a repeated phrase, and ending with a dominant 7th to lead into the Chorus.

What I find strange is that Bessie Smith recorded it (in a musically very good version) in 1931; and yet the copyright manuscript (not such good music - especially the Verse) is dated 1932. I would have expected it to be the other way round.

Bessie Smith sang a shorter (12-bar) verse which is better than the 16-bar Verse in the manuscript.

Turning to the Chorus, Bessie's version is very close to the manuscript version of the melody.

Bessie, by the way, sang the song in the key of F, though the manuscript is in Ab.

When Tuba Skinny recorded the song (on their first CD, in May 2009), they based their performance on the Bessie Smith version, including the 12-bar Verse and using the key of F.

Here are the lyrics Dick Baker discovered. Bessie Smith kept close to the first three lines of the Verse, but scrapped the remaining three, replacing them with one line (thereby reducing the Verse to 12 bars). With regard to the Chorus, Bessie pretty well kept the words as in the manuscript, though she slightly amended a couple of phrases.

Bessie then went on to sing a second Chorus (not typed into the manuscript above). This second Chorus was based on the first, but with cruder metaphors.

I'm pleased Tuba Skinny's version omits Bessie's second Chorus altogether. Erika Lewis sings the Verse and first Chorus only, following Bessie Smith but with a little toning down of the language, conveying a mood rather than archness. And Tuba Skinny abbreviates the title even further to Need a Little Sugar.

Writers of jazz history books in the past used to snigger like schoolboys at the 'innuendos' in the lyrics of songs performed by the likes of Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey and Lucille Bogan.  (In England, we had the songs of George Formby: their 'cheekiness' was fashionable at one time.) But we live in an age when people are neither amused nor shocked by the metaphors used; and today there is little appetite for this kind of verbal humour.

So, regardless of the lyrics, let us value this tune for its conveying of mood, its conciseness, its simplicity, its strong melody, its harmonic progression, its 'Break' and its 'Tag'.

Long before I received the photocopy of the manuscript above from Dick Baker, I did my best to pick the tune out by ear. This is the 'Need a Little Sugar' leadsheet that I came up with (as in the recordings: 12-bar verse and an 18-bar chorus). It's good enough for me.

==============
Footnote

My three books about traditional jazz are available from Amazon.