MOSAIC RECORDS BOOKLET

Richard Sudhalter is an accomplished journalist, author and cornetist/trumpeter. He has analyzed and idolized Bix Beiderbecke, played his music and written his biography (Bix: Man & Legand). His authoritative and informative essay in this 36-page booklet alone is worth the price of admission. A dream team of Michael Brooks, Dan Morgenstern, Mike Peters, Dave Sager, Loren Schoenberg, Joe Showler, Richard Sudhalter and spearheaded by Scott Wenzel brings forth a discography of astonishing detail with many additions and corrections.

In the age of microsizing, every Mosaic Records Box Set booklet is still 11 x 11 inches to allow our customers to appreciate all the extras we put into printing them (and for easier reading).

SOUND QUALITY

The source material for this set came from the original metal parts and mint condition 78s from world-wide collectors including John Liefert, Keith Miller, Joe Showler, Scott Wenzel and John Wilby. However, the truly remarkable sound restoration was longly and lovingly prepared by sound wizard Doug Pomeroy. The best that this important music has ever sounded.

PHOTOGRAPHY

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Bix Beiderbecke
Even with all the published accounts of the lives of Beiderbecke, Trumbauer and Teagarden, there are never before seen photographs within this booklet which represent some of the finest in the Mosaic catalog. Producer Michael Brooks provided us with incredible images that were given to him the Trumbauer family, and Charles Peterson’s photos of the Imperial Theatre Swing Concert with The Three T’s Band are also a highlight.

SAMPLE RECORDING SESSION

Friday, February 4, 1927

Taken together, the three numbers scheduled for recording at OKeh this day form a useful musical guide to the nascent Beiderbecke-Trumbauer partnership.

Trumbology, for example, is a saxophone display piece in the fleet-fingered manner of popular virtuoso Rudy Wiedoeft. Heard widely on records and radio, Wiedoeft was among the most imitated instrumentalists of his time; even saxophonists with "hot" aspirations learned much from his tone, vibrato and attack, both in such balladic "salon" pieces as As surely as Trumbology is designated to feature Trumbauer, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band stomp Clarinet Marmalade bespeaks the prerogatives of Bix Beiderbecke. As a boy in Davenport, Iowa, he'd learned cornet by playing along with ODJB records, and salted the Wolverines' repertoire with such items as Sensation, Fidgety Feet, Lazy Daddy, and the inevitable Tiger Rag. Based on a routine apparently worked out during a nine-month residency with Trumbauer at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis, Marmalade combines solos and jam passages with just enough organization to provide shape. Tram and Bix take sixteen bars each, sharing a spirited cat-and-mouse break in the final ensemble.

Though a performance of great energy, it might have profited from inclusion of a bass instrument. Part of what sold the full Goldkette orchestra to its audiences was the driving beat laid down by New Orleans-born string bassist Steve Brown. Why, then, not bring him along to Union Square to slap and snap such numbers as Clarinet Marmalade to maximum intensity?

Victor had worked out how to record Brown's bass in 1926, but smaller companies getting used to the new methods seem to have lagged behind: most technicians feared that too powerful a sound from slapped bass or a most parts of a standard drum kit would knock a cutting stylus out of its groove, ruining a recording. Only toward decade's end, in groups led by Eddie Lang, Luis Russell and others, did Hibbard and his New York OKeh staff finally solve such problems.

However good Clarinet Marmalade may have been, it is the third title, another Dixieland Jazz Band creation, that inscribes this Friday in the hot music history books. Indiana-born J. Russel Robinson had joined the ODJB after the sudden death of its pianist, Henry Ragas, quickly emerging as a formidable songwriter. The band's 1920 record of his hit, Margie, also introduced Singin' The Blues (Till My Daddy Comes Home). From a commercial point of view, at least, such repertoire choices now seem quaint: if Trumbology stood a chance of popularity as a novelty, Clarinet Marmalade harked back to post-Great War days, and Singin' The Blues had never been widely performed. Neither, certainly, seemed aimed at a record-buying market attuned to My Cutey's Due At Two To Two Today, When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along, and other ditties being played and sung in the first days of 1927.

Still, the coupling of Singin' The Blues and Clarinet Marmalade did well enough to be cited in OKeh advertisements later that year as one of the firm’s four best selling records, alongside performances by Sophie Tucker, pianist-singer Seger Ellis and organist Sigmund Krumgold, rendering the Rudolf Friml operetta favorite Indian Love Call.

As played by Tram and Bix, Singin' The Blues consists of a four-bar introduction, two full-chorus solos and an ensemble, played at a relatively brisk medium (quarter note = 138) tempo. Both Trumbauer's and Beiderbecke's solos are melodic paraphrases, each widely scrutinized, adapted, and quoted for many decades after its creation. Together, whatever the tempo, they can be said to have introduced the concept of the ballad solo into hot jazz.

It's perhaps hard to imagine something so integral as a jazz ballad as having had a discrete, identifiable beginning; but here’s the evidence. Before Singin' The Blues there was simply no such thing in hot jazz, at least on record, as an introspective solo on a popular song – blues solos are a phenomenon apart – played to lyrical effect. Between them, Beiderbecke and Trumbauer (and Lang, for a melodically alert combination of rhythmic and single-string accompaniment) share credit for having pioneered this approach.

Both choruses created great stir when Singin' The Blues was released; veteran jazzmen everywhere, among them Benny Carter, Lester Young, and Rex Stewart, happily confirmed the extent to which it affected them. Arranger Bill Challis, close friend of both Bix and Tram, adapted the entire performance in an arrangement for the Goldkette and Paul Whiteman orchestras. Fletcher Henderson's band recorded it twice, with Trumbauer's solo arranged for the reed section and Stewart playing a paraphrase of Bix's chorus.

(Historians and discographers have always taken it for granted that Trumbauer's instrument on all these titles was the C-melody saxophone, then at the apex of its 1920s popularity. But critical listening by various latter-day scholars, and by such musicians as saxophonist Dan Levinson, a popular performer on the C-melody instrument, has introduced the possibility that he may have used alto in some instances. Scott Robinson, who also uses C-melody frequently, hears that instrument on the February 4th session, but agrees – on the basis of the instrument’s register “break,” and of various passages between notes – that Trumbauer may be using alto elsewhere).