A short while ago, I was having a look at the Site Meter record of visitors to my blog pages and I noticed that someone had been brought here after he Googled “Louis Armstrong Wonderful World Lyrics”. In my posting about composer versions I had used all those words, though not in the order he listed them and most certainly not in the sense that he was intending. I would ever waste time or effort writing out the lyrics to that dreadful song. What A Wonderful World was just about the last thing Louis Armstrong recorded before he died in 1971, and it is a piece of crap. Such a shame it is, that he is so widely remembered for it. Now, readers of my previous postings may, if they are good at reading between the lines, have discerned that I am very, very fond of vintage jazz. It is a pity that more people aren’t. Jazz, and the ragtime that spawned it, were the first original American art forms, and as such are the heritage of everyone in this country. But if you go to just about any music store and look at the jazz section in the CD department, you will see very little from the first fifty years of the genre, and most of what is there will be unsuitable. It’s a sure fire certainty you’ll find several offerings of Glenn Miller, but folks, Moonlight Serenade isn’t jazz! Neither is Perfidia. Just run of the mill dance music. Now, Glenn Miller played with some excellent jazz bands before he led his own orchestra (Red Nichols, Ben Pollack, for example), but you’ll be lucky to find examples of those. And then there’s Louis. Probably – no, make that definitely – the best black jazz musician ever. How will he be represented? By CDs containing Wonderful World, Hello Dolly and Mac The Knife. Singing them, mind you, not playing his trumpet. This man was the supreme jazz trumpeter of all time. His West End Blues is a work of utter genius, and since the day it was first issued in 1927 it has never been unavailable – on 78, then LP, and now on CD. But probably not in stores. You have to go and hunt through the specialist labels for it now. The recordings Louis made in the 1920s and 1930s are uniformly brilliant – don’t take my word for it, have a look here for example, and take your pick – and it is a travesty that most people know him for a second rate show tune and a bit of schmaltz.
It was my wife’s idea to use thumbnail images of 78rpm record labels at the start of every blog entry, and I think it was a brilliant one. The effect is rather like an illuminated letter at the start of an ancient monastic parchment. The images I use all come from The British Dance Band Encyclopaedia, an excellent site put together by Mike Thomas, who very kindly gave me permission to plunder his section on record labels as the mood took me. There is much more to this site than labels, though, and I recommend a lengthy visit to anyone interested in the dance band days.
The late John Gunn said something the other day, New Year’s Eve 1981 I think it was, which has stuck in my mind ever since. I was listening to a three-hour show on Essex Radio, a one-off to celebrate the New Year, in which John Gunn, editor of the much missed Gunn Report, and Ray Pallett, editor of Memory Lane (still going strong:
In my last posting I made reference to Nick Dellow and since I was able to write about a site he had pointed me to, I thought it only fair to mention the gentleman again and point out a couple of items he was responsible for. He has written two very interesting articles for V.J.M. in recent years. Well, very possibly more than two actually, but the ones I am referring to are his lengthy and detailed interviews with Brian Rust (
A few weeks ago my chum Nick Dellow told me about the British Pathe film archive which is now available online (
I usually listen to Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz Record Requests (BBC Radio 3, every week) on Saturday evenings, since it is broadcast that afternoon in England and then archived for a week on the net. The show’s remit is wide, covering jazz of all genres (or, in my opinion, some jazz and a lot of other noises), but since he plays the tunes in chronological order, and the playlist is published on the show's
The Sunday before last, Glenn Robison, in the first set of that week’s episode of Rapidly Rotating Records (If you don’t know it,
The other day my wife, knowing my love for authentic jazz, asked what jazz song I hated. I’m not sure what was behind her question but I was able to answer with little more than a nanosecond’s consideration. When The Saints Go Marching In. “But everyone likes that song!” she replied, almost squawking with indignation. “I don’t,” I was able to reassure her, “And lots of people don’t.” It beats me why people so often think of that tune when they think of jazz. It’s a clapped out, second rate spiritual with nothing to do with jazz. There were only two recordings of it during the shellac years – one by Louis Armtrong’s Orchestra in 1938 and one by Wingy Manone’s, a year later. The first was a vehicle to hang some hot solos on, and the second, not surprisingly for Manone, was tongue in cheek, and hot. There are dozens and dozens of jazz standards but The Saints never was one. The guilt for its wide currency, and for the prevalent laymen’s belief that it is actually jazz, must belong to the trad revival of the fifties. During this period, some very good bands came to the fore, but so did lots of dire ones, and so many of them cranked out that tired piece of garbage. I’m not alone in disliking it. Look, for example, at the last paragraph of Brian Rust’s excellent My Kind Of Jazz (London,1990)
This may be old hat to the rest of you, but I have only just discovered a site that looks as though it has been around for a few years already. I didn’t know about
Image provided courtesy of Mike Thomas of