Post 522: LOOSE MARBLES JAZZ MASTER CLASS!

I must thank blog reader Phil Lynch for recently advising me to watch a particular YouTube video. It has given me huge pleasure.

I am referring to a video of The Loose Marbles playing at Abita Springs in 2016. It runs for over 50 minutes and I will give you the link to it later.

Craig and the Bass Sax

The band on this occasion comprised no fewer than ten musicians. Normally, such a number could be a recipé for disaster. I dread to think what a horrible din would result if three guitarists, a banjo player, a drummer and a double bass all got together in the rhythm section of some of the English pub bands I have seen.

And yet, such a combination in The Loose Marbles is so disciplined and restrained that it underpins the music with a gentle foot-tapping pulse. Here, because the musicians are all virtuosos, all conforming to the house-style set by the leader Michael Magro, the music throughout is beautifully melodic and played with a loving delicacy. There is no mere exhibitionism, no attempt by any of the players to show off their own technical prowess. Instead, there is huge respect for melody, balance and for each other.

The reeds set the tone. Such tunes as Song of the Islands, A Flower Lei, Postage Stomp, Last Night on the Back Porch, The Isle of Capri (played briskly) and Home on the Range are all led by the clarinet. And in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the first chorus is played on the bass saxophone by the versatile Craig Flory.

Yes, the tunes feature the bass saxophone; and Craig has an important rôle in this line-up, especially as - despite having ten musicians - there is no trombone.

Multi-instrumentalist Tyler Thomson is seen here among the guitarists; and he even gets to take a neat little solo in Isle of Capri. And that fine and sartorially-elegant musician Matt Bell plays slide guitar - with the instrument on his lap, producing some lovely Hawaiian effects. (Friend James Sterling has told me Matt is playing a resonator all-steel guitar and that the correct terminology for what he is playing is 'lap steel'.)

You have only to catch the happy look on Matt's face at certain points in this video to see that he knows the music this band is making is something really special.

The great Marla Dixon provides some very sweet vocals, for example in 'A Flower Lei' and 'Last Night, on the Back Porch'. And in her trumpet-playing, she adapts brilliantly to the requirements of the Magro style. We find her often playing deft, muted phrases in support of the melodies of the three reed players in this unusual 'front line'.

I must mention that the programme includes the song The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. It is a lovely waltz tune. It is very rarely played and I guess many of my readers will never have heard of it. I can tell you Sigma Chi was a college fraternity founded in the mid-19th Century at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The song was composed in 1911 by Byron D. Stokes (words) and F. Dudleigh Vernor (music).

The final tune in the programme is Tight Like This - a catchy minor-key number composed by trumpeter Langston Curl in 1928 and made famous by Louis Armstrong.

The musicians I have not yet mentioned are Julie, Tomas, Max, Robin, and John - all of them superb and on absolutely cracking form.

I have written before about The Loose Marbles and the importance of this band in 21st-Century traditional jazz. To read my article, CLICK HERE.

To enjoy the video for yourself:

CLICK HERE.

Post 444: THE SIDNEY STREET SHAKERS - CD WITH A MISSION

An exciting discovery has been The Sidney Street Shakers, a new young band based in St. Louis, Missouri. In particular, important jazz-history research has led to their first CD - Laughing My Weary Blues Away.

This band (basically an eight-piece) was formed in 2013 and is managed by multi-instrumentalist Kellie Everett. The musicians take pride in the contribution of St. Louis to early jazz history. They have set out to revive and recreate tunes composed and played by St. Louis musicians in the 1920s.

They claim the early history of jazz in St. Louis (as compared with that of New Orleans) has been relatively neglected. For example, quoting from their CD's liner notes: 'The greatness of St. Louis' music is due to St. Louis talent. Music didn't come to the city via the river; and that kind of thinking obscures the important contributions of St. Louis artists like Charlie Creath. Louis Armstrong was in the Waifs' Home in New Orleans when Creath was playing cornet in P. G. Lowrey's travelling show circulating early music ideas.'

They also want to remind us that some of the earliest recordings were made in St. Louis and that mixed-race bands performed there surprisingly early in the history of jazz. 

Kellie Everett must have done a phenomenal amount of work in researching the bands (most of whom left no recordings) and the jazz music they played. I guess you - like me - have never heard of the bands from whose work Kellie made her selection - The Missourians, Harry's Happy Four, Dewey Jackson's Peacock Orchestra, Powell's Jazz Monarchs and others. Kellie must have spent hundreds of hours transcribing the music from old recordings. Eventually she settled on a representative 15 tunes for inclusion on this CD.

You can find most of the 1920s performances of the originals on YouTube. Doing so helps you appreciate how meticulously the transcriptions have been made and how very closely these recreations follow the originals.

Accompanying the CD is a booklet largely written by historian Kevin Belford. Into eight small pages it crams a mass of information about the bands and the 15 tunes.

The CD has been really well recorded. The acoustics and balance are just right. You can hear every instrument clearly.

The music is played in a bright but respectful, accurate, tight, non-exhibitionist style by a group of fine musicians. They obviously work from Kellie's detailed transcriptions. The tunes invariably have arresting introductions and neat, clever codas. There is a clockwork, pulsating rhythm. Two-bar 'breaks' are well organised and constantly crop up (Jelly Roll Morton would have approved!). The trumpet - mostly stating the melody, is usually muted, and there is strong flavouring from the saxophones, including the bass sax which Kellie herself plays, Adrian Rollini-style. There are solos against stop chords; and you find 'Doo Wacka Doo' riffs here and there. Occasionally you may detect a kazoo, or even a comb-and-paper; and the voices of the musicians are built in to some of the arrangements - most noticeably in Laughing Blues, where an entire chorus of this 12-bar tune in F is filled with half the band laughing while a few keep the rhythm going - just as on the original 1926 recording by Powell's Jazz Monarchs.

The performances are peppered with short improvised 'solos' but these are always pretty, melodic and unpretentious rather than flashy - and that's just how I like them.

The great Chloe Feoranzo constantly provides flowing, lyrical decorations, whether on Clarinet or C Melody Sax, and she takes some sweet solo breaks. In Hot Stuff, Chloe shares a 32-bar theme with pianist Mary Ann Schulte (this is similar to what happens on the original 1929 recording of this tune by Oliver Cobb's Rhythm Kings). What a good player Mary is! She constantly provides the perfect underpinning of the music but she also shows herself very capable when given a chance to take a solo, as in Blue Grass Blues. This piece is extraordinary: it begins like something out of Chopin; and ends reminiscent of the final theme of 'Wolverine Blues'! To sample that track, you are welcome to CLICK ON HERE FOR A VIDEO THAT I HAVE PUT TOGETHER.

Mary also has a pivotal rôle in Market Street Stomp. Chloe and Mary produce some fluent and pretty work on East St. Louis Stomp.

Kellie Everett herself plays so well throughout (bass and tenor sax) - showing that the bass sax can be a punchy alternative to a sousaphone or string bass and also that the instrument is capable of decent melody-making in its own right. The strings (Joe Park, Joey Glynn and - on some tracks - Jacob Alspach [he also plays trombone]) are always solid and have a chance to shine in Blue Blood Blues. The washboard and drums are played sympathetically by Ryan Koenig and Matt Meyer. Student percussionists could learn a lot by listening carefully to their discreet, sensitive support of the rest of the band. Kyle Butz is also very good on trombone: he plays on six of the tracks. Timothy John Muller, who, I gather, is also the on-stage music director of the band and helped Kellie considerably in preparing the scores, is - I'm proud to say - a fellow countryman of mine! He comes from Penrith in England. Tim leads with a mainly-muted trumpet, stating the melodies and producing variations very tastefully. 

The tunes are all new to me. I was specially impressed by Soap Suds which seems to be a complex piece with a final theme that reminds me (harmonically) somewhat of Bogalusa Strut, though it's played in the unusual key of G. The little solos by Chloe and trombonist Kyle Butz are good examples of those pretty improvisations I mentioned.

Ozark Mountain Blues - an up-tempo number in Ab and anything but 'bluesy' - brings out powerful performances from all the band, and gets the CD off to a good start. And Swinging The Swing is a brisk, merry tune to add to our collection of tunes using the Bill Bailey chord sequence.

Hot Stuff is a tune we could all easily and profitably add to our repertoires - a medium-tempo straightforward AABA 32-bar in Eb, with a familiar chord progression.

The band takes its name from the Sidney Street that is a thoroughfare running west for over two miles from the Mississippi in St. Louis. The band used to rehearse in an apartment on that street when they first formed. On the evidence of Google Maps, it is a mostly leafy residential street with some attractive-looking houses.

Some videos of The Sidney Street Shakers have been put up on YouTube. But these videos fail to do justice to their music. Some present only fragments of tunes. CLICK HERE for part of a performance of 'San', which at least gives a reasonable idea of how the band looks and sounds.

In most of the videos, the background noise or the acoustics of the venue make it very difficult to appreciate what the band is doing. In some, the visuals are poor, with jerkiness, persons blocking the view, or a lack of focus on those who are actually playing. So, if you are interested in hearing this band or learning more about early St. Louis music, you need to obtain the CD. It's available at:

http://bigmuddyrecords.com/product/laugh-my-weary-blues-away/

By the way, Kellie Everett, the driving force behind the whole project, and who plays the saxes so well, has also been playing the banjo for twelve years. With two other members of the band, she belongs to the St. Louis Banjo Club. Trumpet-player T. J. Muller has also become a fine plectrum banjo player.

Further good news is that the jazz scene in St. Louis is growing, in combination with the local swing dancing revival.

Post 395: JAMES EVANS, CHLOE FEORANZO - AND A MAGICAL MOMENT

During my April 2016 visit to New Orleans, one moment stood out as the most wonderful and magical.

I was in the audience at The Spotted Cat on Saturday 9 April when The Shotgun Jazz Band was playing. Chloe Feoranzo, the great young clarinet and saxophone player (and singer) had moved to New Orleans only a few days earlier and had not yet even finished unpacking her belongings. But she was already sitting in with some bands and booked to play in others.

The Shotgun Jazz Band, 9 April 2016
Left to Right:
Chloe Feoranzo, John Dixon, Marla Dixon,
Tyler Thomson, James Evans (here, unusually, on trombone)

With so many musicians engaged elsewhere in French Quarter Festival duties, The Shotgun Jazz Band was short of its regular staff: they had no trombone player. So the brilliant James Evans (like Chloe, one of the world's greatest traditional jazz reed players and also a very good singer) switched to trombone for some numbers (yes, he can play that instrument very well too!). And Chloe played the full gig on reeds.

When we reached the final number of the second set, Marla Dixon left the stand to go among the audience with the 'tips bucket' as she always does. This left James and Chloe in charge of the music. They chose to play Bye Bye Blues, both using their C Melody Saxes. It was a stunning performance that I shall never forget.

Thank goodness for James Sterling! He - a reader of my blog - had driven over from Florida and was filming it on his mobile phone. Thanks to James, you too can now witness (on YouTube) this very special performance of Bye Bye Blues.

It is astonishing to think that only four musicians were involved (two of them on saxes) and that such pulsating music resulted. We have John Dixon on banjo and Tyler 'Twerk' Thomson on string bass (in my opinion the best combination in the world, when it comes to driving music along in a rock-steady 4/4). The piece starts off normally enough with James Evans introducing the melody. The excitement gradually builds up. Note what happens from two minutes 55 seconds, after John Dixon's chorus. James and Chloe play one chorus 'trading eights' and then one 'trading fours' and then another 'trading twos'. Absolutely thrilling. It is amazing what is produced by James Evans and this young lady half his age. Just look at the faces of James Evans and Tyler Thompson. They knew something very special was going on. Finally, there is a throbbing 'all-in' chorus in which the two sax players are positively bouncing in their seats. I can tell you the audience loved it and there were tears of joy in the eyes of seasoned veterans.

Now turn up the volume and please watch the video for yourself by clicking here.

I spent quite a bit of time chatting with video-maker James Sterling and his wife Markay during my visit and I can tell you he is a wonderful and generous gentleman.

Post 184: CONCERT KEYS AND TRANSPOSING INSTRUMENTS

CORNET - a B Flat Instrument
(so its 'C' sounds the same note as a piano's 'B Flat')

I have had an enquiry from a reader. He says I wrote that Michigander Blues is normally played in the key of D minor. But when he tries it on his trumpet it seems to be in his key of E minor.

So let me explain that several instruments used in traditional jazz are transposing instruments, which means that music written for them appears to be in one key but when played it sounds in a different key. Most trumpets, for example, are Bb instruments, so if you play C on such a trumpet, you will produce the same note as Bb on the piano. The same is true of most clarinets.

You also come across Eb instruments, such as some tubas and saxophones. This means that if you play C on one of these instruments, it will sound the same note as Eb on the piano.

So my trumpet player - performing Michigander Blues in HIS E minor - is actually playing it in D minor (concert pitch - as sounded on the piano).

Why have instrument manufacturers made matters so complicated?  It's simply because they have found - over many decades of trial and error - that the tuning and fingering on the transposing instruments are better if they are built in such a way.

As a player of a Bb trumpet or Bb clarinet, you should in my opinion always refer to the concert key in which you are playing a piece of music with your band. Don't confuse the rest of the band by mentioning your own personal key. So, for example, if the band decides to play Michigander Blues in D minor, then D minor it is, even though you know that you personally will be playing it in your instrument's E minor.

To put it another way, you will always be one tone higher than the 'concert key' that the pianist or banjo or guitar player uses.

So for example if the band announces that it is going to play Muskrat Ramble in Ab, you know immediately that you will be playing in your Bb.

Maybe this sounds tricky, but after a short time such thinking becomes automatic.

Here's Shaye Cohn's Bb cornet. When she plays C on this, it sounds the same note as the Bb on a piano or banjo.

Here she is playing Michigander Blues. You can hear that the band is playing the tune in D minor. But if you watch Shaye's fingers, you will notice that she personally is of course having to play it in the cornet's E minor:
CLICK HERE.