Jack Teagarden

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Jack Teagarden (1905-64)

TROMBONE, VOCAL

“A Texan, Teagarden took the trombone to new levels, with his impeccable technique, fluency and gorgeous sound, allied to a feel for blues playing which eluded many of his white contemporaries. He was also a fine, idiosyncratic singer. He was with Ben Pollack for five years from 1928, with Paul Whiteman in the 305, and finally led his own swing orchestra, though it left him broke in the end. He joined the Louis Armstrong All Stars in 1946, stayed till 1951, then led small groups of his own and toured for the rest of his life. He died in New Orleans….

Teagarden's star is somehow in decline, since all his greatest work predates the LP era and at this distance it's difficult to hear how completely he changed the role of the trombone. In Tea's hands, this awkward barnyard instrument became majestic, sonorous and handsome. By the time he began recording in 1926 he was already a mature and easeful player whose feel for blues and nonchalant rhythmic drive made him stand out on the dance-band records he was making.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

“But Teagarden was different, and defining what made him different calls for a brief digression. Creative jazz soloists seem to fall into two general types. There are the proteans, endlessly questing, discovering, reinventing, reshaping—all in pursuit of some half-glimpsed, fugitive perfection. Among these, Coleman Haw-Jans springs readily to mind: over four decades his basic style took various forms, from silken smoothness to something occasionally approaching brutality. Like composer Igor Stravinsky, he seemed to devise and perfect a given mode or approach only to desert it, again auf der Suche. [literally “in search;” with the connotation of a quest].

Others, by contrast, arrive relatively early at an effective mode of expression, then spend the rest of their days adjusting, refining, polishing their creation to a high luster. Beyond argument, Jack Teagarden belongs to, exemplifies, the latter group: his style "set" quickly, and thereafter changed only subtly. It included not only recognizable patterns but entire "master choruses" on familiar numbers, delivered often enough to become trademarks. There were certain blues solos, all the more beloved for their familiarity; pet cadenzas, richly decorated with lightning triplets and gruppetti of impeccably executed sixteenth notes; set routines on such standards as "Basin Street Blues," "The Sheik of Araby," "Rockin' Chair," and the aforementioned ' 'St. James Infirmary.”

- Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.

“Because he was just the way he sounded — relaxed, warm and wonderfully creative — Jack Teagarden was one of the most beloved and most admired musicians in all of jazz history. He brought to music his own very personal, languid style, singing or swinging the blues on his trombone with a minimum of effort and a maximum of emotion. His admirers spanned two generations, beginning with fellow musicians like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and the Dorseys during the twenties and extending well into the sixties when a comparative youngster, Gerry Mulligan, proclaimed "He has everything a great jazz musician needs to have — a beautiful sound, a wonderful melodic sense, a deep feeling, a swinging beat, and the ability to make everything, even the most difficult things, sound relaxed and easy."”

- George T. Simon, The Big Bands, 4th Ed.

The emergence of Jack Teagarden as an important jazz stylist was a significant feature of the 1920s jazz scene. Big T, as he was affectionately known by his fellow musicians, brought a maturity and a solidity to the sound of the trombone and until late in his life played with a laconic grace that few, if any, on his instrument have equaled. His collaborations with Louis Armstrong — who rated their musical relationship higher than any he had known — was one of the great partnerships in Jazz history. The story of this funny, happy Texan is told with affection and detail in Jay D. Smith and Len Guttridge’s Jack Teagarden: The Story of a Jazz Maverick.

Originally published in 1960 by Macmillan and Company, Martin Williams, the esteemed Jazz author and critic, wrote the following forward to the paperback edition published by DaCapo Press in 1988.

“In 1950, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Louis Armstrong granted a long and generally fascinating interview to the editors of a magazine called the Record Changer. The publication was read by jazz record collectors, so there were many questions about Armstrong's early days and about his musical relationship to his mentor Joseph "King" Oliver. It was the elder cornetist who first brought the young Armstrong out of New Orleans, and who was an early influence on his style. Louis, as usual, was properly respectful of "Papa Joe." But he made it clear that he also wanted to talk about his current "brass team," and about Jack Teagarden. He rated that later musical relationship most highly, higher than any such he had ever known, it is safe to say.

The meshing of Armstrong and Teagarden was a close one musically, no question. And it was partly a matter of Louis's own sizable effect on everybody's music. However much he was inspired by Oliver, Armstrong has offered music something new, something which Oliver, for all his accomplishments and importance, had merely hinted at  — a new rhythmic sense, a new momentum, a swing based on several things, even on a new way of sounding the individual notes. Jack Teagarden was one of the first trombonists to absorb that Armstrong sense of swing in the Armstrong manner.

Teagarden's musical personality and demeanor were distinctly and unmistakably his own, however. Indeed, what Louis contributed could inspire the singularly concentrated ease of a Jack Teagarden on the one band, and (let us say) the stark three-minute dramas of a Billie Holiday on the other. And it could allow each of those artists (and hundreds of others) also to be themselves.

As I say, Teagarden was himself. And he was, technically speaking, a superb trombonist, a superb brassman. In the late 1950s, composer-arranger Bill Russo, himself a trombonist, declared that he had decided that Teagarden was, after all, the best trombone-player — and this at a time when a J.J. Johnson-inspired bebop virtuosity reigned supreme on the instrument, especially among the young. Earlier, Teagarden's 1950 recording of his dazzling variations on Richard Rodgers's Lover (a Broadway waltz converted into an up-tempo 4/4) was admired by young and old alike. And by audiences as well, for Lover quickly became something of a set-piece for Jack, joining Stars Fell on Alabama, Basin Street Blues, St. James Infirmary and I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues as a standard part of his almost-nightly repertory.

Most of the Teagarden standards were slower than Lover, of course, and they partly depended on the singular character of what has been called "the Teagarden aura." However, in those slower vehicles Jack's techniques often showed themselves at their best. His was an art of flourishes and ornaments, but flourishes so discreetly conceived and placed as to enhance and never draw attention to themselves. And his ornaments were executed with perfectly controlled combinations of the right embouchure and slide co-ordination. Perhaps only Ellington's virtuoso trombonist Lawrence Brown could rival them. And they depended on such quick, flexible lip techniques that perhaps only a man like trumpeter Harry Edison, some years later, might have challenged them.

The "live" recordings made at the remarkable 1947 Louis Armstrong All Stars, and of which you'll read more in these pages, were later issued on LP, and they show Jack's art succinctly. Here was Teagarden, mind you, on stage with Armstrong, and Armstrong was the kind of performer who needed only to walk in front of an audience to gain its full attention. And who needed only to blow a few of his powerful, authoritative notes to confirm that attention. In Teagarden's half-chorus solo on Pennies from Heaven (an Armstrong vehicle, after all) Jack distilled that piece's melody line to a simple, all-but-original lyric statement, and then ornamented his own lovely phrases with superbly understated terminal flourishes. And of course he made it all sound paradoxically easy. Then Jack, at center stage, played and sang St. James Infirmary with such totally straightforward, cool concentration that one would be hard put not to hang on to his every note and phrase.

Talk about a Teagarden aura! As if to say, "There is Louis's power (God bless him) and here is mine, and you see they aren't the same."

Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his instrument, might have stepped into almost any kind of music and made a career for himself. But one thing that Jay D. Smith's and Len Guttridge's book makes clear is that Jack could not have been any kind of musician except a Jazz musician. A Jazz musician simply has to make his music and dedicate his life to it, even though he may not tell you (or himself) why he has to. He may not, indeed, even be able to say why, or need to say why. The need is to make the music and, necessarily, lead the life that makes that possible. All of which has little or nothing to do with ego or acclaim or money. He needs to give his music to the world and he hopes the world will understand.

You will find out about that need in these pages. You will also find plenty of the pranks and boys-will-be-boys anecdotes that seem so prevalent, diverting, and (under the surface) necessary a part of the musical life.

I could say that Smith and Guttridge engaged in a labor of love in researching and writing their book for Jack. But I would also describe it as a labor of infatuation, and I offer that further description with respect.

— MARTIN WILLIAMS October 1987”

If you are not familiar with the career and music of Jack Teagarden, you owe to yourself to check it out in all its manifestations and Jay and Len’s biography is a good place to start. [You may also wish to seek out Howard J. Walters, Jr., Jack Teagarden’s Music: His Career and Records although used copies of it are somewhat expensive].

Sure, Jack is one of “the old guys,” but when Jack was a young guy, he was one of the inventors of the music we institutionalize today as “Jazz.” He was a courageous and brave man, who walked the talk and created the foundation for Jazz trombone in his lifetime along with the likes of Kid Ory and Miff Mole.

Imagine, night-after-night, standing next to Pops and playing Jazz!  Over the span of his brilliant career, Louis Armstrong didn’t share the stage with many, but there always was a spot for Big T.

Big T and Little Louie - when Giants Walked the Jazz World.

Learning to Improvise - "Conversing with the Piece"

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

I think the first time I was ever aware of improvising to music was when I noticed  an Uncle who whistled stuff that was vaguely familiar, but at the same time was not. I mean, I could hear elements of a familiar melody in his whistling, but I couldn’t hear the melody itself.

He was a tinkerer and a putterer and he whistled all the time while making something in his workshop, working on his car out on the driveway or doing some chore around the house.

I was around him frequently because he was the father of my favorite cousin and they lived within walking distance of our house.

One day while sitting on the steps to their house waiting for my cousin, I watched as my Uncle washed his car in the driveway. He was whistling a tune I recognized.  It was Honeysuckle Rose. He repeated the melody a few times, but each time he did so, he altered slightly.

When I went over and asked him about it, he said that he was just “improvising.” It was the first time I ever heard that word.

I’ve been involved with and fascinated by the process of improvising ever since.

As the following excerpt from Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz explains, there are many different approaches to learning Jazz improvisation.

Conversing with the Piece

Initial Routines

Applying Improvisation Approaches to Form

“Soloists elaborate upon what the structure of the piece has to say; what it tells them to do.”

— Tommy Flanagan

“Keeping the melody in mind, you always know where you are, even when you play intricate things.”

— Lou Donaldson

“The language of music is sort of a motivic language. It's a developmental language in a sense, and there is just so many subtle ways that it's used in relationship to the form or the phrase or the period or whatever.”

- Bill Evans

“I keep thinking that it doesn't matter what tunes you play. The process is the same, and if it works then it's like a new piece, you know. And it is a fact that the better you know the song the more chances you might dare take. And so that's why Bird played a dozen tunes all his life, basically, and most of the people that were improvising—Tristano played the same dozen tunes all his life. And you know, it's amazing what depth he got. He wouldn't have gotten that otherwise, I don't think, in that particular way.

I think it's something similar to Monet painting the lily pond at all times of the day, catching the reflection of the light. I just feel with each situation I'm in, different rhythm sections or whatever, that "I'll Remember April" becomes just something else. And it is a very preferable point — that's the main thing. Everybody who knows that material knows that material pretty well — the listeners and the musicians. So they know, you can just nakedly reveal if anything's happening or not; there's no subterfuge. And that aspect of it is appealing to me, I think”.

- Lee Konitz

“The routines by which artists absorb different approaches to improvisation and learn to create phrases based on their materials are but preliminary exercises during practice sessions. Performers go on to consider the applications of their materials within such formal musical contexts as tune and solo renditions. Pianists and guitarists have the instrumental capacity to reproduce harmony while simultaneously performing tunes or inventing melodic tunes. Others practice along with records. As they sense the progression from the rhythm section's accompaniment of soloists, they superimpose their own improvisations over those of the recording artists, "weaving in and out of what they're doing" . In fact, artists like Henry "Red" Allen learned to improvise "in all keys in New Orleans by playing along with records set at every different speed. Each speed would put the music in a new key." For Billie Holiday, singing publicly with Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong recordings formed part of her early teenage apprenticeship.

Performing with music on the radio provides supplementary practice opportunities, introducing the increased challenge of grasping the forms of new compositions during a single hearing or over the course of unpredictable re-plays. Adopting alternative methods, some artists use playalong records, in which the rhythm section performs in a spare supportive mode. Performers of chording instruments may record their own versions of progressions and drill with them. As often as not, improvisers also practice formulating solos without accompaniment by reading lead sheets or envisioning their personalized representational maps of pieces.

As a prelude to extensive melodic invention, some artists routinely warm up by practicing a piece's melody. Its rendition, typically the first event in a formal jazz presentation, assists musicians in making a transition from their normal world of verbal thought and visual imagery to the precomposed world of sounds, effectively stimulating thought in thé language of jazz and awakening the musical imagination.

Before their performance, artists also commonly consider the meanings of compositions. Song texts often provide a key to a piece's meaning. "The oldtimers always used to tell horn players to learn the lyrics just like a singer does, so that they know the meaning of the piece," Max Roach recalls. This enabled them "to get underneath the piece to really sing with their instruments and play with more feeling."

In practicing the melody, artists experiment with the various transformational activities discussed earlier, along a scale from interpretation to improvisation. In negotiating a song's features, for example, they need not leap directly over a wide interval. Rather, they might travel its distance via sonic paths selected from their tonal models — ascending chords, scale fragments, or vocabulary patterns of appropriate dimension — arriving at the same place through routes of distinctive interest.

Having worked on the rendition of a piece's melody, students prepare for creating original solos. Toward such ends, preliminary exercises emphasize technical mastery over the application of various musical models within each composition's progression. The point is to perform unfalteringly and without harmonic error. To accomplish this, musicians sometimes alter the formal constraints they place upon themselves. Initially, to lessen the pressures associated with thinking in time, they perform in free rhythm. More confident, they perform to a steady beat. Artists also begin and end their drills at whim, isolating discrete portions of a progression for practice, methodically addressing its features.

Eventually, they advance through the piece’s form. "I’d set the chords in front of me and play the melody, watching where the chords fall in relation to the melody," Gary Bartz remembers. "Then I’d start to solo on it, playing through it one section at a time, the first eight bars, the first ten bars, the first twelve bars, the first half a chorus, and so on, up to the bridge. Then I’d just play the bridge. Once I could do that, I’d play through thé whole chorus." Performers do not necessarily make an effort to remember the products of their early drills. Successes simply assure them that each section will present minimal difficulty during formal solos. When problems arise in the course of their trials, however, musicians stop to study the piece's structure again.

Of the many conventions for creating solos, learners commonly begin with an approach known as "playing off the melody." That is, after performing a piece's melody at the opening of an arrangement, artists can continue to bear the tune in mind as a constant reference for the solo improvisation. Percussionist Alan Dawson cultivates this orientation in students by having them sing jazz tunes while practicing intricate technical exercises and, ultimately, while practicing the formulation of drum solos. They soon become used to hearing the exercises and improvisations in relation to the piece, and vice versa. In performances, pianists, bass players, and guitarists sometimes vocalize the tune softly to themselves as they improvise, thereby supplying a subtle counterpoint to their instrumentalization.

Through this approach, the melody can also provide the conceptual basis for solos, prompting artists to pursue various options described earlier for its treatment. During some renditions of ballads and blues, soloists preserve the melody's characteristic shape throughout by limiting themselves to minor embellishments and periodic improvised commentaries. Such performances blur the distinction between the melody's presentation and the improvised solo.

On the other hand, soloists may treat the melody of a composition allusively. In Art Farmer's early efforts to improvise, he avoided strict imitation of the melody, striving instead to fashion phrases in each piece's "general style" so that solos were "like an extension of the melody." As Curtis Fuller observes, others make only slight reference to the composition by "flirting" intermittently with its specific tonal, harmonic, or rhythmic features, creating variations on them. Deriving more substantial guidelines from the composition, improvisers may adopt its rhythmic phrasing as the entire underpinning of a solo's design. "Pres could really feel a song," Lou Donaldson says. "He could make you hear the song just from his phrasing." Common examples are found in blues choruses in which players improvise three four-bar phrases modeled upon the classic AA'B structure of many blues melodies and song texts: introducing a phrase, repeating it (perhaps with slight variation), then following it with a contrasting phrase or punch line. This procedure typically occurs in initial solo choruses that serve as a transition to more adventurous improvisations.

Soloists can also quote partial or complete passages from the piece, combining them with their own in different ways. Sometimes, the performer plays part of the melody and then he improvises something," Lonnie Hillyer says; "then he plays something else from the melody and then improvises some more … [as if] answering or accompanying himself." Hillyer views such excursions as commentaries inspired by the play of the music upon the mind. They represent a kind of conversation between the improviser and the composition. References to the melody provide a useful connective tissue between a solo and its respective vehicle, reaffirming the identity of the latter and imbuing the former with special characteristics. This approach contributes significantly to "what makes your improvisations on different tunes different," Lee Konitz offers, especially when pieces share comparable harmonic structures. Of course, artists may decide to pursue a radical course and ignore the melody of the piece altogether, in effect, says Konitz, "composing their own songs from wholly new melodies."

Besides using the melody as the conceptual basis of solos, practicers adopt another fundamental approach in which they conceive ideas largely in terms of the component shapes of formerly mastered vocabulary patterns. When musicians abandon the melody as a model for invention — whether temporarily in the context of its rendition or during their solos — they depend on the progression's salient features as signposts for the improvisation's "progress." Moreover, the syntactic implications of harmonic structures assist artists in their endeavor. Once they cultivate a "feeling for form, the form will guide you; it will almost play itself.”  For many students, the early effort to speak jazz, that is, to use the vocabulary, begins with imitating the precise placement of phrases within the structure of a piece where an idol originally performed them. Listening to "the way guys like Bird played" taught Lonnie Hillyer about appropriate usage, about "where a phrase fit and where it wouldn't."

Jimmy Robinson similarly took "the best things" from different solos and "worked it out" so that he could put each phrase into "a certain part of the tune" each time he played it. Harold Ousley elaborates upon the process: "You practice using a phrase when you play along with records and when you go to sessions. After a while, you begin to hear and feel where a phrase goes, and, suddenly, you are able to play the phrase in the right place. Eventually, it becomes ingrained in you because you practice it so much. It becomes a natural habit when you improvise."

In the meantime, learners observe that their mentors use vocabulary flexibly, maximizing its potential for creating different solos. Analyses of jazz masters' performances reveal important information to aspiring artists, leading the way for their own trials. After hearing "Bird take things he used at one particular point in a tune and play them in other places," Lonnie Hillyer "figured that he must have been trying to make them come out differently. That's all it's about, just trying to make things come out differently every time you play them." Probing more deeply, Hillyer and his friends gradually discovered the principles that ensured that Parker's phrases would "come out" correctly as well as "differently" in each instance.

One essential "secret" is that performers can potentially introduce a particular phrase in their solos wherever its complementary chords occur. This realization immediately creates new possibilities for vocabulary usage within the structures of compositions that had served as initial vehicles for students. Once Bobby Rogovin and his peers had, as he says, "taken a certain amount of licks off records, we would take two that were about the same and switch them around in different parts of the solo." The same principle applies throughout the jazz repertory. "There may be a certain set of chord progressions that you find in different places in different tunes. If you know a crip [phrase] that fits that chord progression, you can use it on different tunes. You can prove that if you listen to any record by Bird. He'd play crips all the time. He'd play a crip to a set of progressions on 'Night and Day' and then use it again on another tune like 'Embraceable You.”  Practicers expand their options further by transposing phrases to fit different chords of the same quality arising in different progressions.

Moreover, many phrases are compatible with different kinds of chords. Combined with various harmonic settings, the figures produce diverse timbral colors, differing degrees of harmonic tension, and differing schemes of tension and release. Thus, although they apply figures consistently in many instances, artists like James Moody also "practice trying to play something that you like and being able to put it anywhere you want in a tune." Harold Ousley's experience is similar: "The same phrase will sound different in different places in a progression; it works on different chords. It's like having a red shirt on or having a blue shirt on — the same style made by the same company, but each with a different hue. Or, if you play the phrase on a certain chord, it will sound more flavored. It's like using Accent [a spice product] to flavor food, bringing out the taste more." As Josh Schneider learned from Barry Harris, this process entails not only exploring "how far on top of [compatible] chords or away from their roots" a player can perform a pattern, but how effectively a player can resolve the pattern within the context of the progression to different adjacent chords or key centers.

Adding further interest to their creations, improvisers cull the skills of rhythmic displacement, which enables them to vary the positions of their phrases within compatible harmonic territory. "Bird had an uncanny sense of rhythm, and he was always unique with the way he would play the same passage," Tommy Turrentine says. "In one tune, he might take that passage and bring it on the first beat of the measure of a progression. Then, on another tune, he might take the same crip and start it on the 'and' of the third beat of the measure so that it would come out in a different place." Through comparable practice routines, artists gain technical mastery over their vocabulary's flexible applications.

Improvisation drills emphasizing tunes and vocabulary patterns provide fully formed shapes, that is, detailed melodies, long or short, for the artist's consideration. Furthermore, within formal musical contexts, musicians methodically practice applying rhythmic and theoretical approaches whose emphasis is on models not yet formed into phrases. One, in particular, cultivates "rhythmic inventiveness." Ken Mclntyre encourages aspiring players to begin by restricting themselves to the roots of a piece's successive chords or even to the piece's tonic pitch alone. By severely limiting tonal options, students focus their efforts on creating rhythmic phrases varied in substance and length and spanning different portions of the progression. Similarly, at times, Barry Harris encourages students to improvise rhythmic patterns by chanting them in a monotone within the framework of compositions.

Alternatively, artists practice performing a composition's chords, initially "spelling out" their elements and eventually going on to explore their varied permutations. Benny Bailey typically sees "the changes in front of me when I play and try to image what to do with them — different kinds of ways to approach them." For James Moody as well, "what's hip about it is that you can take a set of chords and play different inversions of them." He continues:

Maybe, one time through the tune, you play all the first inversions of the chords, just for their sound; then you play all the second inversions for a different sound. Starting on a certain note and going to another note within the same chords gives a different texture to the solo. You listen to what it sounds like one way, and then you say, "I wonder what it would sound like if I switch it around." There are so many different ways to switch chords around.

Some musicians routinely alternate approaches to acquaint themselves with a composition, formulating their first solo chorus around the piece's melody, their second around its chords, and their third around its related chord-scales. In addition to practicing these approaches with their principal instruments, horn players commonly experiment with them vocally or at the keyboard, where they can invent patterns in relation to an audible harmonic accompaniment. Subsequently, they learn them on their other instruments.

As artists explore different approaches to improvisation — whether vocally or instrumentally, or conceptually improvising away from an instrument without vocalizing their creations — their ideas can assume different forms of representation. Improvisers sometimes emphasize aural thinking. At other times, they emphasize theoretical thinking. Additionally, their rich field of imagination can feature abstract visual displays. Curtis Fuller "tries to paint little pictures" when he improvises. Fred Hersch, too, "sees things very graphically that way." He visualizes what he plays as "a kind of big playground with things jumping around on it, usually in terms of melodic movement: things going up this way, balanced by something going down that way." Or he will see "large masses of things moving along: one string of notes jumping up and down, stopping, twitching around. Music has a feeling of space around it; it exists in space, these little mobiles of things. I like to think of music visually like that," Hersch explains.

Numerous other impressions can come into play as well. At times, Emily Remler visualizes the music's beat as a regular sine wave in relation to which she varies the phrasing of her melodies. One saxophonist speaks of visualizing precise linear figures in staff notation the instant before performing them. Several pianists mention that, having learned versions of a piece's structure and distinct melodic routes through them as alternative configurations of black and white keys, they can subsequently envision the designs as a matrix of superimposed patterns on their keyboards— a composite tablature-like image whose reading can suggest different pathways for invention.

Additionally, as elaborated in this work, an artist's intermittent internal verbalizations cut across these varied aural and visual designs to evaluate and direct performances. Depending on the nature and demands of a particular improvisation, the soloist might also move mentally between musical and extramusical matters, dwelling on memories or engaging in free association to the music's impulses. The images soloists receive during performances influence the improvisation in various ways. Beyond simply reinforcing its current musical content, they can generate a spontaneous elaboration of mood or melody. Sometimes, this involves experiences that artists associate with the titles or the key lyrics of songs, prompting the use of musical quotations. Roy Haynes fondly recalls an occasion when Charlie Parker improvised a "burning" solo in which he quoted "The Last Time I Saw Paris" repeatedly "in different keys." Unable to contain his curiosity afterwards, Haynes asked Parker what actually had happened "the last time" Parker saw Paris.” [!]

My Man George, Wettling ... that is: A Tribute

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"George Wettling had great enthusiasm for life and for music. And, undoubtedly, he was the most important drummer in the Chicago style of jazz."

—JEFF ATTERTON

"A good band is based on good drums and good piano. Give me a good piano and George Wettling and I'll give you a good band any

time."

—EDDIE CONDON

“George Wettling had his own way of doing things. But his roots were quite apparent. Like a number of his contemporaries, he was genuinely inspired by the music of the New Orleans jazz pioneers. His love for jazz in general — the New Orleans style and its Chicago offshoot in particular — was so intense that he built a life around them. Even in his last days, the fire burned brightly. ‘Some guys get old and tired and get out of Jazz,’ he noted. ‘I'll never do that. Hell, man, Jazz's been my whole life.’

His favorite drummers were Baby Dodds, the classically inventive New Orleanian who also influenced Gene Krupa and Dave Tough; Zutty Singleton, another marvelous New Orleans drummer; and others, including Harlem's George Stafford, Benny Washington (who played with Earl Hines), Tubby Hall, Ben Pollack, Chick Webb, and Krupa. But Dodds was his man; you could hear it in his playing.

Wettling began in the manner of most drummers — he heard the drums and was captivated. ...

Wettling had a fine touch, ample technique, and a distinctive sound on the snare drum. He was a good listener and responded inventively to ensembles and solos. He would change the background behind each soloist, adapting, giving and taking, building, serving as the time center and as another interesting voice in the ensemble. …

Because he was a fine reader of music, a very flexible drummer, and an excellent tympanist, Wettling held a variety of jobs, including several in radio and TV. For approximately ten years, 1943-1952, he was a staff man at ABC Radio. But he devoted the major portion of his time to bringing fire and intensity to small bands, most of which were traditional.”

-BURT KORALL, Drummin’Men

“De même que Dave Tough était un amoureux de la littérature, George, lui, se passionnera pour la peinture - d'où sa grande ouverture d'esprit. Il est, en effet, très important pour un artiste de pratiquer d'autres modes d'expression que le sien afin d'élargir le champ de ses connaissances et d'affiner sa sensibilité. Cette culture à maintes facettes est nécessaire pour alimenter et approfondir l'art dans lequel on est spécialisé.

“As Dave Tough was a lover of literature, George Wettling was enthralled with painting - hence his open mind. It is indeed very important for an artist to practice other forms of expression than his own in order to expand the scope of his knowledge and sharpen his sensitivity. This culture of many facets [i.e.: a broad background in arts and letters] is required to power and deepen the art in which one specializes.”

- Georges Paczynski, Une Historie De La Batterie De Jazz

I owe drummer George Wettling [1907-1968] a huge debt of gratitude, which may sound like an odd compliment from someone who was essentially steeped in modern Jazz drumming.

But if it hadn’t been for George’s tutelage, which I came by indirectly through countless hours of listening to his classic Jazz recordings, I would have missed out on one of the happiest gigs of my life

George was one of the young white Chicagoans [many of home attended Austin High School in Chicago’s West Side] who fell in love with Jazz as a result of hearing King Oliver's band (with Louis Armstrong on second cornet) at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in the early 1920s. Oliver's drummer, Baby Dodds, made a particular and lasting impression upon Wettling.

Wettling went on to work with the big bands of Artie Shaw, Bunny Berigan, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, and even Harpo Marx: but he was at his best on (and will be best remembered for) his work in small 'hot' bands led by Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and himself. In these small bands, Wettling was able to demonstrate the arts of dynamics and responding to a particular soloist that he had learned from Baby Dodds.

Wettling was a member of some of Condon's classic line-ups, which included, among others, Wild Bill Davison, Billy Butterfield, Edmond Hall, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell, Cutty Cutshall, Gene Schroeder, Ralph Sutton, and Walter Page.

Listening to George's playing, and to other “Chicago-style” drummers like Gene Krupa and Dave Tough, I realized that what they were doing was essentially phrasing 2-beat New Orleans or Dixieland Jazz with the 4/4 time feeling that came of age in the Swing Era. The music was so alive and I just really enjoyed everything about it.

So when the opportunity arose to join a Traditional Jazz Band at a club in Glendale, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, I jumped at it.

As Grover Sales explains in his seminal Jazz: America’s Classical Music, provides the historical context for the evolution of Traditional Jazz:

“Five years before the arrival of bebop, a New Orleans revival was afoot, fueled by the mounting resentment of purist white critics and fans against the heretical sophistication of Ellington, Tatum, Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, and similar modernists who they believed had tainted the purity of jazz by injecting European antibodies into what had been an incorruptible native folk art. Since history assures us that jazz from its earliest beginnings was a mixture of every cultural transplant to the New World, European as well as African, such notions seem quaint today. But these notions were cherished as articles of faith by keepers of the flame like French critic Hugues Panassie, who insisted that bebop was "degenerate noise" and a short lived fad that lay wholly outside the "true" jazz tradition. This position found its fullest expression in The Heart of Jazz, by William L. Grossman and Jack W. Farrell:

Much of Dizzy Gillespie's bop ... is characterized by a nonsensicality of content, an end result Armstrong never intended but which came from an almost inevitable consequence of the departure . . . from traditional values and meanings. Ellington . . . might help find a way to perpetuate the eternal values in New Orleans jazz while expanding the idiom, but his musical imagination turns to the theatrical. He is, indeed a sort of jazz Wagner. He has the same sort of dramatic feelings about Negroes that Wagner had about Germans.

The New Orleans revival got off to a modest start in 1940 when collector Heywood Hale Broun issued recordings of veteran New Orleans blacks in quavering versions of blues and parade music of their youth around the turn of the century. The following year saw the beginning of white revival bands in San Francisco, when Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band copied the instrumentation, the tunes, and as far as they were able, the style of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band recordings made twenty years earlier. By the time bebop was in full bloom dozens of white revival bands were thriving throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and in England where a fever for "trad" (traditional) was rampant among the youth, including some of the founders-to-be of British rock.

The revival brought elderly blacks out of retirement—Bunk Johnson, George Lewis—and provided work for young whites — Turk Murphy, Lu Watters, and England's Chris Barber. It also forced modernists like Earl Mines, Jack Teagarden, and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell reluctantly into the dixieland camp during a doctrinaire era that split the jazz world into two warring factions. It is significant that, without a single exception, no young blacks could be found participating in the revival movement either as players or as listeners. They would as soon be seen chomping a watermelon on the front steps of city hall as partaking in what they scorned as "old-time slave, Uncle Tom, minstrel-man jive." Tempers ran high as lifelong friends and colleagues Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay stopped speaking because of bebop. Fistfights broke out in Parisian cabarets where Dizzy Gillespie performed, punctuated with cries of, "You dare to call this music!" The jazz press abounded with hate-ridden jeremiads about the "modernist degenerates of bebop" and the "moldy-fig reactionary revivalists," reminiscent of the doctrinal fury of sixteenth century Catholics and Protestants.

In retrospect, the revival produced foolish rhetoric but much also of lasting value, as did the ragtime revival three decades later; it rescued from obscurity a long-neglected style of collective improvisation and an imposing repertoire of excellent tunes. The best of these revival bands, Wilbur de Paris's New New Orleans Jazz (Atlantic 1219), exudes a vitality that bears repeated hearings today, but the same cannot be said for most revival players venerated to sainthood by their white idolaters, some of whom launched a serious campaign to run Bunk Johnson for the presidency. What seems most remarkable about the revival movement is the emotional heat and religious fervor it unloosed—and why.”

I didn’t know anything about any of these Camps or Schools or Schisms, all I knew was that for three nights every week from 9:00 PM until 2:00 AM, I got to play classic New Orleans tunes like That’s A Plenty, Muscrat Ramble, St. James Infirmary and some later adaptations of this style in tunes like China Boy, Hindustan, and Wolverine Blues in a hot Chicago-style or Traditional or whatever Jazz band made up of trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass and drums [aka Me!] and it was a blast.

At first I was greeted with some hesitation by the older guys mainly along the lines of “He’s too young to know much about this music;” He’s probably a Bebopper;” “He doesn’t know any of the tunes.”

But thanks to George Wettling, I more than held my own.

With few extended solos, most of the tunes lasted only 3-4 minutes so that meant that we played a bunch of songs each set, sometimes as many as 15 a set totaling around 60 a night. I had a ball. Loved every minute of it.

My chops loved it, too; as my hands got stronger, my wrists were able to relax thus increasing my speed and power.

I added some heat and sizzle to the the usual four-bar drum breaks or “kickers” that help serve as tags to take most tunes out, but I made sure that I kept my bass drum doing four-beats to the bar so that the “old timers” could count when to come back in.[Grins].

And I owe it all to George Wettling.

Mention his name today and all you get are blank stares; very few drummers have ever heard this style of Jazz drumming. But in fairness, when they are introduced to it they light up like the proverbial Christmas tree and make comments like: “Listen to what that Dude is doing with accents off a press roll;” “His time is so bouncy - he makes the music come alive!;” “What a snap and pop he brings to his back beats.”

Here’s more about George from Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.

“George Wettling had been (with Tough and Krupa) part of the original Chicago circle and, like them, spent most of the '30s playing in big bands. His were the brushes backing Bunny Berigan's vocal on the best-selling "I Can't Get Started," his the steady but non-intrusive beat that lifted the bands of Artie Shaw, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, and others. A well-schooled musician, he'd worked regularly in radio and commercial recording studios.

But Wettling seemed happiest by far in the small, unfettered jam groups which were Eddie Condon's specialty. Overshadowed to some degree by Krupa's flamboyance and Tough's sheer brilliance, Wettling more than matched them in his ability to unify and steer a rhythm section. Like Krupa, he'd learned by listening to Baby Dodds, Ben Pollack, and other pioneers and had retained the flavor, the ability to blend into an ensemble. Wettling's small-group work, with Condon and countless others, is remarkably subtle in its sense of mood and pace, its control of a finely calibrated sense of abandon. In Burt Korall's authoritative words:

"His time was firm; it bubbled and danced. His breaks had an inner life and logic. His solos were well-crafted bursts of energy. Wettling had a fine touch, ample technique, and a distinctive sound on the snare drum. He was a good listener and responded inventively to ensembles and solos. He would change the background behind each soloist, adapting, giving and taking, building, serving as a time center and as another interesting voice in the ensemble.”

His propulsive drumming enlivens hundreds, even thousands, of records, and (hose with Condon are among the best. It's Wettling's accented press roll, a Baby Dodds legacy, that carries Bud Freeman to the very edge of anarchy on the Commodore "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," Wettling's drive that sends the nor-I mally demure Bobby Hackett careering through the final ensemble of the uptempo blues "Carnegie Jump," Wettling's and Jess Stacy's quiet prodding that gets Pee Wee Russell rocking happily on "Rose of Washington Square."

Wettling was a master — some would contend the master — of that overused and frequently misunderstood hallmark of so many "dixieland" performances: the four-bar end-of-performance drum break. Following a final tutti, especially at faster tempos, it's a kind of eight-bar melody reprise, the drummer taking the first four bars and the band returning, all pistons firing, to finish out the cadence. In some bands it becomes a sixteen-bar reprise, drummer and ensemble taking eight apiece.

Done right, it functions as both tension release and "kicker" in the journalistic sense: the punchy last line that leaves the reader's senses sharpened, tingling. Some drummers — Cliff Leeman, Nick Fatool, Ray McKinley — have understood this and done it with masterly finesse. Depending on the player, that means either a display of technique, a witty or imaginative "four" in the bebop sense, or even (Fatool is outstanding at this) a melodic paraphrase.

But in George Wettling's hands this modest device became a small-scale work of art. Again and again he'd seem to hurtle out of an ensemble and into the break with a force, an irresistible momentum, that swept the band right along with it. There was no sense of an ensemble stopping for the drummer to do some little trick before the horns returned: a Wettling break was part of the action—in a way it was the action.

Examples, a few among dozens: "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" (from Brother Matthew, ABC-Paramount), "I've Found a New Baby" (Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz, Columbia), "Runnin' Wild" (Dixieland in Hi-Fi, Columbia /Harmony)—which also offers a nimble full-chorus Wettling solo; "China Boy" (The Roaring Twenties, Columbia).

Perhaps the definitive example of Wettling's ability to energize a band is on a ten-inch LP issued by Columbia in 1951 under his own name. It's a Condon unit, of course, with "Wild Bill" Davison, Edmond Hall, and other regulars. Each of the eight titles works steadily, inexorably, to a climax of drive and almost demonic energy. Wettling's four-bar break at the end of a swaggering "Memphis Blues" employs a kettledrum to great and humorous effect. "Collier's Clambake" (basically the chord sequence of "St. James Infirmary" at a medium-bright tempo) starts at a high intensity level, Davison punching out the kind of virile, aggressive lead that earned him his nickname. Even by the standards of Condon groups, "After You've Gone" is extraordinary. Like "Clambake," it opens hot: "They sound as if they've been playing the number for five minutes, heating up to this pitch, before turning on the microphones," pianist Dick Hyman has remarked. That's largely Wettling's doing. He hits it hard and keeps cranking things up, through solos by Sullivan, Hall, and trombonist Jimmy Archey (Condon's guitar strong and audible behind them), to a stomping final ensemble.

This is no random collection of seven men playing together: it's a bond, a team, component parts fused into a splendid performance engine fueled by Wettling and cornetist Davison; bars 13-16, for example, are a furious ensemble explosion, Davison tearing up to his high E-sharp and cascading down over four bars, to be deftly caught by Wettling's bass drum "thwack" on the last beat of bar 16.

(Among Wettling's fans was the great American abstract painter Stuart Davis, whose brand of modernism was as stubbornly individualistic as the styles of the jazzmen he liked to hear. The two men struck up a friendship, and before long the drummer, a gifted amateur painter, had become a Davis student. By 1950 he'd mastered a style which, though strongly influenced by his teacher, was skilled and vigorous on its own, winning him several well-received exhibitions _ in the '50s. Adorning the Columbia album cover was a photograph of the band, superimposed on a Wettling painting representing the same scene. It's good work, strongly in the spirit of such jazz-influenced Davis canvases as "The Mellow Pad," 'Rapt at Rappaport's," and "Something on the Eight Ball," from the same period. Though Pee Wee Russell's paintings later attracted more publicity, it is Wettling who is the superior craftsman.)