Read Online The Penguin Jazz Guide by Brian Morton, Richard Cook - Free Book Online

brass band, and it seemed to stand him in good stead through his life. Unlike the sentimental portrait of the film, Nichols was a tough-skinned professional who insisted on a minimum of musical integrity and moved on briskly, as he did from the Casa Loma Orchestra, when his own musical needs were not observed. His precise, lightly dancing work on either cornet or trumpet might seem to glance off the best of Beiderbecke’s playing, and the scrupulous ensembles and pallid timbre of The Five Pennies or whatever he chose to call a group on its day in the studios now seem less appealing. But it is unique jazz and, in its truce between cool expression and hot dance music, surprisingly enjoyable when taken a few tracks at a time.
    Nichols went out under a whole range of names – The (Six) Hottentots, The Original Memphis Five, The Arkansas Travelers, The Five Pennies most famously – and recorded prolifically. Of the compilations, there is a good survey on Retrieval of the work with Miff Mole but, even if it is a more specialist choice, this Red Heads disc is probably the best track for track. It collects all of Nichols’s sessions under this name for Pathé, and on titles such as ‘Get A Load Of This’, ‘Plenty Off Center’ and ‘Trumpet Sobs’ the line-up is down to three or four players – chamber-jazz of an unusually sparse sort, giving the young leader clear space to lead and improvise in. Pathé’s thin recording wasn’t helpful, but the music – lean, dancing and strikingly different from what was going on under either Armstrong or Beiderbecke in a similar period – exerts its own pale fascination. It’s also as well to remember that, when he made the earliest sides here, Nichols hadn’t even turned 21.
    WILLIE ‘THE LION’ SMITH
    Born William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Betholoff Smith, 25 November 1897, Goshen, New York; died 18 April 1973, New York City
    Piano
    Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith 1925–1937
    Classics 662
    Smith; Dave Nelson, Frankie Newton (t); June Clark, Jabbo Smith, Ed Allen (c); Jimmy Harrison (tb); Buster Bailey (cl, ss, as); Cecil Scott, Herschel Brassfield (cl); Prince Robinson, Robert Carroll (ts); Edgar Sampson (as, vn); Pete Brown (as); Buddy Christian, Gus Horsley (bj); Jimmy McLin (g); Bill Benford, Harry Hull (tba); Ellsworth Reynolds, John Kirby (b); O’Neil Spencer (d, v); Eric Henry (d); Willie Williams (wbd); Perry Bradford (v). November 1925–September 1937.
    Humphrey Lyttelton said (1993): ‘He came on Jazz 625 [television programme] in around 1966. Here was this man who had been present at the beginnings of stride piano, working in New York before the First World War, sat at the piano with his “doiby” on his head and a cigar jutting up from his jaw, cheerfully belligerent, full of stories.’
    A founder-member of the New York stride pianists, Smith served in the First World War, then haunted the toughest New York clubs. He led occasional bands, toured, and became a self-appointed living historian and raconteur in his old age. He wrote ‘Echoes Of Spring’. An unrivalled raconteur, Willie Smith came into his own when an old man, reminiscing from the keyboard, but these more youthful sessions stand up very well and are surprisingly little-known.
    The disc opens with two of his few appearances on record in the ’20s; each of the pair of sessions is by a pick-up group, both with Jimmy Harrison and one with Jabbo Smith in the front line. Typical small-group Harlem jazz of the period, with Perry Bradford shouting the odds on two titles. The remainder is devoted to sessions by Smith’s Cubs, an excellent outfit: with Ed Allen, Cecil Scott and Willie Williams on washboard on the first eight titles, they can’t help but sound like a Clarence Williams group, but the next three sessions include Dave Nelson (sounding better than he ever did on the King Oliver Victor records), Buster Bailey, Pete Brown and Frankie Newton, effecting a bridge between older hot music and the sharper