Know About Jazz

W. C. Handy Composer (1873–1958)

Journalists call him the Father of the Blues. This is not quite true: he was actually the first to write down blues tunes, which is not the same thing at all. Best known as the composer of St. Louis Blues (1941).

Lionel Hampton Vibraphone, piano, drums (b. 1913)

Shares with Milt Jackson the honour of being the best-known vibraphone player in jazz.

Eldridge Trumpet, fluegelhorn (b. 1911)

Though not so well known now, Eldridge was a most important trumpeter in the 30s, doing a lot towards developing the trumpet from the point to which Armstrong had taken it in the 20s. His fame was widest during the years 1941–43 when he was with the Gene Krupa orchestra.

RECORDS Swingin’ on the Town—HM V 7EG 8682 (EP); Coleman Hawkins and his Confrères—HMV 7EG 8625 (EP).

ig Bill Broonzy Blues singer, guitar (1893–1958)

One of the great singers of unsophisticated country blues and a very fine guitarist. He recorded a lot in the last few years of his life.

Bechet Soprano-saxophone, clarinet (1897–1959)

One of the few jazz players to use and create an individual style on soprano saxophone.

Chris Barber Trombone (b. 1930)

Leader of the best of the British groups playing in the traditional style, but no ordinary ‘trad’ musician. His band has existed continuously since 1954 and has built up a genuine jazz sense of its own, to become one of the few ‘old-style’ groups to be taken seriously by other, more progressive, jazz musicians. He is very interested in ragtime, and his band plays it well; a more recent interest is gospel music. Trumpeter Pat Halcox, erratic but imaginative, gives the band much of its special sound; and in Eddie Smith it has the most driving yet most unobtrusive banjo player in Britain.

of the first girl vocalists to be featured with a band. She started with Paul Whiteman in 1929. She had been influenced by the great Negro singers, and had a tremendous jazz sense.

There was also How high the moon, another ingenious piece which became almost the modernist’s national anthem. Playing pieces like this was bound to change the jazzmen’s ideas a bit.

Since the piano was the one instrument in jazz which had always a bit of a lone hand it was logical that the trend would start with the pianists—the great boogie woogie experts like Jimmy Yancey, Cripple Clarence Lofton and Pinetop Smith, followed shortly after by Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis; the more free-styled Jelly Roll Morton and Will Ezell; and later the great virtuoso pianists of the calibre of James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Earl Hines (who had played a fascinating solo years earlier on Armstrong’s West End blues), Jess Stacy, Teddy Wilson and Count Basie. Between them the pianists represent many different styles (James P. Johnson started a school of playing with a very swinging left-hand part known as Harlem style, while Basie was one of the pioneers of the big-band swing style) but they were all imaginative musicians, well able to sustain a performance by themselves.

As the musicians became more skilful they quite naturally wanted to show off their new powers and extend their gift still further, and they couldn’t very well do this in the tight, intricate New Orleans ensemble. This trend away from the old style really got under way soon after the main group of musicians spread northwards from New Orleans. What has been called ‘Chicago style’, for instance; played by both white and colourect musicians, often amounted to a string of solos by trumpet, trombone, clarinet, saxophone (usually the tenor) and piano, with an ensemble chorus (chorus means, in jazz terminology, one complete section of twelve or thirty-two bars) to start and finish the whole thing, like the bread round an outsize sandwich.