This
week we begin our look at the blues and the move of popular music into the
Swing Era with a classic chart, The St.
Louis Blues. Our listening for the
week is blues great Bessie Smith singing the melody with Louie Armstrong on his
cornet playing a counter-melody. W.C.
Handy’s composition dates to 1914 with the recording in our listening dating to
1925. As a pianist and a jazz educator,
I am familiar with the chart, and I was immediately taken by the tempo of the
listening. Piano publications that I
have played indicate a much more “up-tempo” style, and I do recall playing a
version of The St. Louis Blues in a
concert band salute to jazz and the blues that was similarly up-tempo. While Armstrong freely improvises behind
Smith with a great deal of notes and fluency, the style here is clearly more of
a ballad than the up-tempo foxtrots and quick dances of the time. This particular YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmFUXYaZIMk
purports to be a recording of Handy playing his chart on piano with period jazz
orchestra, and I easily hear the foxtrot style with touches of ragtime infused.
While not the best source of information,
Wikipedia’s entry on The St. Louis Blues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Louis_Blues_(song))
tells of Handy admitting to using the tango at the beginning because it was in
style at the time, even though he quickly went into the standard blues of the
day. Wikipedia also credits The St. Louis Blues with being the
inspiration of the foxtrot style. Yet,
Smith and Armstrong do it as a ballad. Fletcher
Henderson’s Wrappin’ It Up is much
more in the style of what I was expecting to hear from The St. Louis Blues and quite similar to the Handy recording I
located on YouTube.
With
Smith and Armstrong we have a demonstration of an early ballad in the blues
style, when we get to the Benny Goodman chart, we get a swing ballad that is
something of a meld of the original Handy, the Henderson chart’s style and
backgrounds, and the Smith and Armstrong recording. I hear a progression in style of the ballad
as we move from the blues to swing, and it becomes clear to my ears that all
three charts are intricately related. By
the time that Paper Doll comes in
during World War II, we’ve had almost twenty years of development from Smith
and Armstrong’s balladification of The
St. Louis Blues, and you can hear some very different harmonic and rhythmic
lines in that development.
Glen
Miller’s In the Mood, a swing chart
that remains on that needs to be in every stage band’s books, gives us further
development of the dance style from what we heard in The St. Louis Blues. There
is no tango or one-step here, the foxtrot would work, but even with the cymbal
swinging off of beats two and four, a rhythmic element that I’ve heard in all
the charts I’ve listened to thus far this week has been the emphasis on the
beat itself. Be it The St. Louis Blues from 1914 to the recording of Paper Doll from the text in the 1942,
that almost Palestrina-smashes-the-conducting-pole-into-his-foot emphasis on
each beat remains part of the driving force of the rhythmic underpinning of the
music.
I
love the old Tonight Show Band recordings, and I owned all three on cassette
and now digitally from iTunes. Tempos are
not always the same, especially Doc’s version of In the Mood, which is significantly faster than Miller’s, order or
complexity of the charts aren’t always the same, but that stompy push on each
beat. I am not seeing a recording of One O’Clock Jump with our text, but
YouTube recordings abound. Doc’s
version, which is full of just wild, showy playing, and dating to the
mid-1980s, still pushes away, as authentic as everything we’ve listening to
this week.
