(Instrumental group, 1917–25) The Original Dixieland Jass Band were five young white musicians from working-class uptown New Orleans – Nick LaRocca (cornet), Larry Shields (clarinet), Eddie Edwards (trombone), Tony Spargo (real name Sbarbaro, drums) and Henry Ragas (piano). All alumni of ‘Papa’ Jack Laine’s stable of bands, they went to Chicago and then to New York, where ...
ushered in by big bands led by Benny Goodman, Chick Webb, the Dorsey brothers (Jimmy and Tommy) and Glenn Miller. New Orleans jazz and its stylistic off-shoot, Dixieland, had both largely faded from popularity. New Orleans pioneers King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton drifted into obscurity. Original Dixieland Jass Band leader Nick LaRocca left music altogether and ...
jagged, syncopated character of ragtime increased the banjo’s appeal and by the 1920s it had begun to play a part in the birth of jazz, appearing in the Dixieland bands of New Orleans. Surprisingly, the banjo was also used in blues, where its role was much more like that of a guitar. Ragtime used the banjo mainly ...
reshaped to improve the ease of carrying such a heavy bass instrument, the sousaphone is particularly suited for the American marching band. It was also a regular part of Dixieland bands, adding some beef to the bass part in the rhythm section. It is rarely seen in Europe. Saxophone Musicologists say, with justification, that the saxophone is ...
rhythm section providing a beat, a bass line and harmonic filling material, and the front-line instruments playing the tunes. The earliest forms of jazz – New Orleans and Dixieland – have a core grouping of trumpet, clarinet and trombone supplying the tune and piano and drums forming the rhythm section. Sometimes violins or banjos would be found and ...
, by jazz drummers. The resulting set-up was first known as ‘traps’ (short for contraption – a term still used by some players) and was common by the 1920s in Dixieland and dance bands. By the 1950s the basic combination of instruments and implements had stabilized: • Bass drum (smaller than in military bands), struck by a floor-pedal beater. • Snare ...
New World, it accompanied spirituals, and thence became a regular ingredient in the Black Minstrel (and white pseudo-Minstrel) movement. In turn this led to its involvement in traditional Dixieland jazz; in the 1940s Bill Monroe introduced it to bluegrass music, from where it found its way into the 1970s country rock sound. More recently it made a return ...
premeditation – or, in the parlance of Louis Armstrong, ‘taking a scale and making it wail’. Cool jazz or fusion, swing-era big bands or bebop quintets, Dixieland or the avant-garde: the music thrives on a collective spirit of interplay and the daring chances taken by the participants individually or as a group, and strictly in the ...
Alabama, who appropriately came from Fort Payne, in Alabama, emerged into the spotlight in 1980, when ‘Tennessee River’ topped the Billboard country charts. Three group members – Randy Owen (guitar, lead vocals, b. 1949), Teddy Gentry (bass, vocals, b. 1952) and Jeff Cook (keyboards, fiddle, vocals, b. 1949) – were ...
disbanded in 1934, its membership became the core group for Bob Crosby’s orchestra. Pollack became the musical director for Chico Marx in the early 1940s and continued to play Dixieland music with his Pick-A-Rib Boys into the 1960s. Styles & Forms | Twenties | Jazz & Blues Personalities | Don Redman | Twenties | Jazz & Blues ...
Beiderbecke rebelled against his strait-laced parents and his own upper-middle-class upbringing by becoming a jazz musician, a path that his parents found abhorrent. Inspired by recordings of the Original Dixieland Jass Band from New Orleans (and particularly the playing of the group’s trumpeter and bandleader Nick LaRocca), Beiderbecke began playing cornet aged 15. Completely self-taught, he developed a distinctive ...
(Trumpet, cornet, guitar, 1915–76) After Bobby Hackett was praised in Down Beat by Boston critic George Frazier in 1937, he headed to New York and settled into a group of neo-traditional players loosely associated with Eddie Condon. Although a lifelong fan of Louis Armstrong, Hackett’s gentle, fluid lyricism made him a more logical descendent of ...
Wolverines in 1925. He joined Ben Pollack’s band in 1927 and recorded with the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans that same year. McPartland worked steadily through the 1930s in Chicago and continued leading Dixieland sessions for the next four decades. Styles & Forms | Twenties | Jazz & Blues Personalities | Blind Willie McTell | Twenties | Jazz & Blues ...
Jazz Band. He played on Armstrong’s historic Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (1925–27) and also recorded with Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers (1926). St. Cyr led a small Dixieland band at Disneyland from 1961 until his death. Styles & Forms | Twenties | Jazz & Blues Personalities | Henry Thomas | Twenties | Jazz & Blues ...
sources and distinctive vocal skills reflective of artists such as Frizzell and Stewart. His album catalogue is highly original and includes concept tributes to Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers, Dixieland jazz and religion. He was acknowledged as a ‘poet of the common people’, with his songs telling of man’s toil, trials and tribulations, with equal adroitness displayed in ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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