The Story Of The Original Dixieland Jazz Band H O Brunn 9781258163136 Books
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The Story Of The Original Dixieland Jazz Band H O Brunn 9781258163136 Books
I quite agree with the reviewer of the second 1977 edition that Nick LaRocca's bias against African-American and Creole influences on classic jazz is unfortunate, but there are so many sketches which minimize the white contributions that it's refreshing to hear another story. Ed Burns, for example, seems to limit the origins of jazz to the black community, spirituals, work songs, and Buddy Bolden etc., but in the multi-cultural history of New Orleans, white musicians did far more than simply copy the blacks. My friend, the late Tony Sparbaro (Spargo), the drummer of the ODJB,told me some stories of the band's inception, and Brunn draws on some of these same sources. It's not the last word on the ODJB, but it's closer than most.Product details
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The Story Of The Original Dixieland Jazz Band H O Brunn 9781258163136 Books Reviews
This is a misleading and quite ridiculous book. In telling the story of the ODJB it is clear and offers an account of their story. But in doing so HO BRUNN attempts to claim the credit for the ODJB for somehow "inventing" jazz - even for inventing the word! That this ignores the efforts of pioneers such as Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong (who doesn't get a mention!) just makes the book look like an exercise of racist supremacists. This is the fault of Nick La Rocca, whose place in jazz history has been tainted by this book. There is no doubt the records of the ODJB undoubtedly influenced white America but to compare any of the musicians to any great name in jazz merely makes the author look ludicrous. To listen to the band is to listen to little more than a parody of the New Orleans pioneers. It should be noted that Larry Shields (clarinet) and Tony Spargo (drums) both distanced themselves from La Rocca and his claim to "invent" jazz, and played happily in multi-racial bands in the 1940's. The ODJB records showcased a new novelty music to a wide audience. But it took the genius of Louis, Bix, Morton, Ellington, Basie and countless others to make that music America's great gift to the modern world.
Mr. Brunn had access to many of the people who make up the story of the ODJB. He talked with them personally. He helped leader and cornetist Nick LaRocca dig through his garage-ful of documents and memorabilia. He got the whole story of the band - where it played, how it made the first ever recordings of jazz, when it broke up, when it got back together, influences, how it developed its distinctive sound. He got the whole story - almost. Sadly, he chose not to address the very thing that is now so troubling about the ODJB LaRocca's nasty comments about blacks. You could finish this book and not know a thing about those comments. It is another story to be told, I guess, and would probably take another book to tell well. But it must be told. It is a sad story, for LaRocca chooses to believe that blacks had no part in the creation or the development of jazz. And Brunn, the apologist, apparently is only too happy to buy into that myth, describing the band in the end as "the five pioneers who brought into existence the most phenomenal revolution in the annals of American music." This book will never be the final word on the ODJB, but will always be a great resource for those hungry for information from that period in our nation's musical history. And it is a great, evocative, easy read.
It is a difficult and sensitive question to address in our politically corrected age, this notion of where that 'jazz' music came from; other reviewers here point to the multicultural influence, and indeed Louis Armstrong himself recalls people of all walks there in the streets of New Orleans, freely mixing their musics, not just Creoles and Blacks, but Italian, French and Chinese. But here is what Pops said
"Only four years before I learned to play the trumpet in the Waif's Home, or in 1909, the first great jazz orchestra was formed in New Orleans by a cornet player named Dominick James LaRocca. They called him 'Nick' LaRocca. His orchestra had only five pieces but they were the hottest five pieces that had ever been known before. LaRocca named this band 'The Old Dixieland Jass Band'. He had an instrumentation different from anything before, an instrumentation that made the old songs sound new. Besides himself at the cornet, LaRocca had Larry Shields, clarinet, Eddie Edwards, trombone, Ragas, piano, and Sbarbaro, drums. They all came to be famous players and the Dixieland Band has gone down now in musical history." - Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music, 1936
That's a strong endorsement for LaRocca's version of history. We also know Benny Goodman spent his childhood emulating Larry Shields, but also, very telling, we have Benny on film telling us that the 'real' jazz wasn't like the original jazz, it had to be "cleaned up", structured, infused with the classical tradition, and Louis and others tell us this happened with the closing of Storyland and Jim Crow and the 'respectable' Creole orchestras (one of which Pops played with, causing him to switch from brass-band cornet to orchestral trumpet) found themselves lumped in with everyone else and needing music to play. Keep in mind, Storyville was closed down in 1917 -- 2 years after LaRocca's young punk band started ripping up the streets, and a full year after that first Chicago run gave them the name 'Jass'.
Is it possible then that both are right? Could LaRocca have invented something out of ragtime and his confessed love of Sousa, molded also by his ignorance of 'proper' music and his limited technical skill? By all accounts, the ODJB of 1916 was nothing like the world-touring band of 1919. Take ragtime, injected his youthful and raucus enthusiams, animal noises and, perhaps fundamentally important, his borrowing of the harmonic structure of a known song to create a new tune (as he describes of Livery Stable Blues) peppering it all with boundless energy (shows to 8am!!) his bizarre antics (the infamous barnyard noises) and their limited lineup -- all this adds up to a new way to approach the old brass band music that was invigorating and infectious, shocking audiences until they learned how to dance to it, and subsequently attracting virtually all of the 'proper' musicians, of all origins, all eager to get in on the (lucrative!) craze by, as Benny said, "cleaning it up". So yes, the Afro and Creole influence is there in what WE call 'Jazz', and LaRocca doesn't deny the strong influence of ragtime, which he deemed too passive and proper, and also the blues which he openly exploits in Livery Stable Blues, but it could be much of what we recognize as 'influence' really happened just after LaRocca broke the sound barriers. Is it possible, or at least plausible, that LaRocca set the stage that Bennie Moten and Joe Oliver then took to town?
Even the name 'jass' isn't from anyone's ethnic vocabulary ... except that of the marginalized new-immigrant Irish! In Chicago 1916, four years after an ethnic-Irish journalist in San Francisco wrote how a baseball pitcher "had the jazz" -- would you put a sexual slur in a 1912 newspaper sports story? -- it was quite likely that any old (Irish) drunk might catch this ruckus and yell out, "'Ch'eas it up, boys" a phonetic match to tJ'ass, or Jass or better 'Jasz' and finally, cleaned up as 'jazz' (which the band's name evolution clearly shows) An Irish word meaning the raw energy of life itself! Pops said the word was always there, Duke said it just appeared.
This book is an important record on this matter of jazz history, even if it is a recollection, even if no one in their right mind would accept the testimony of Mr Jellyroll either! Nonetheless, there are still details and connections and allusions in what these old timers have to say that deserve to be heard and at least considered in our reconstructions of history. This book is just such a record, taken from direct conversations with the players (at the time in their early 70's?) but also from their own personal memoriabilia. We owe it to them to give them their say.
As Mr. Barnes indicated in his earlier review, it's unfortunate that Nick La Rocca's bias minimizes or even negates the African-American/Creole contributions to jazz, but many other historians, including Ed Burns, are inclined to play down the white musicians' role in jazz development. Harry Brunn's book,which I own in both editions, makes use of some sources which parallel stories that my friend, the late Tony Sparbaro (Spargo), the drummer for the ODJB told me. Clearly, in the multicultural blend in New Orleans, it's difficult to isolate contributions, but Brunn makes a case for the pioneers of recorded jazz. It's not the last word on the ODJB, but it's a word that needs to be heard.
I quite agree with the reviewer of the second 1977 edition that Nick LaRocca's bias against African-American and Creole influences on classic jazz is unfortunate, but there are so many sketches which minimize the white contributions that it's refreshing to hear another story. Ed Burns, for example, seems to limit the origins of jazz to the black community, spirituals, work songs, and Buddy Bolden etc., but in the multi-cultural history of New Orleans, white musicians did far more than simply copy the blacks. My friend, the late Tony Sparbaro (Spargo), the drummer of the ODJB,told me some stories of the band's inception, and Brunn draws on some of these same sources. It's not the last word on the ODJB, but it's closer than most.
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