© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Commodore was founded in 1938 as an offshoot at a legendary min-Manhattan Jazz record store. It was one of the first and best examples of a unique and highly important element of the American Jazz scene – a record company owner whose principal motivation was a deep love for the music and whose main goal was to celebrate Jazz and its players.
Commodore was essentially the creation of one remarkable man, Milt Gabler, who [in what was to become the tradition among the many other small, independent Jazz labels that followed] was the CO, the producer of virtually the entire catalog, and frequently the shipping clerk.
Although much of his producing activity was focused on the “Dixieland” [Traditional Jazz] style spearheaded by Eddie Condon and involving notable artists such as Pee Wee Russell, Jack Teagarden, Bud Freeman and Bobby Hackett, Commodore was also responsible for major recordings by Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and many other key figures of the day, before ceasing operations in the mid-1950s.
Incredibly, Mr. Gabler was simultaneously active as the head of recording for Decca Records, one of the most prolific pop [and Jazz] labels of the period.”
- Richard Witmer, Barry Kernfeld, Ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
“What carries each performance is the rhythmic and emotive force he injects, and that's his and his alone. It's an uncompromisingly strenuous way of dealing with the horn, almost athletic in the sheer strength it requires — which is why a lot of Davison emulators — and there have been more than a few over the years — have ultimately fallen down on the job. And it's why he always came off on the records with that special, get-it-while-it's hot, kind of urgency.”
- Richard M. Sudhalter, Wild Bill Davison: The Commodore Master Takes [Commodore CMD - 405]
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles often wonders what would have happened to the legacy of Jazz without the contributions of the independent Jazz labels.
Although some of these small label entrepreneurs were more successful than others, the road that many if not most of them traveled to record and preserve so many interesting and important Jazz works often reminds me of the response to the fabled Jazz question:
“How do you make a million dollars in Jazz?”
Answer: “Start with two million!”
All of this came to mind when I pulled Wild Bill Davison: The Commodore Master Takes [Commodore CMD - 405] out of the collection for a “spin” in my CD player.
Not only do the 24 tracks on this disc offer the listener a musical stroll down a Dixieland Memory Lane, but, as an added bonus, the insert notes to the Davison Commodore collection are by none other than Richard M. Sudhalter, the author of wonderful biographies on Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael and the definitive Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945.
I find the writings of Dick Sudhalter to be as passionate as they are informed.
He writes about Jazz in a way that I can relate to - full of energy and enthusiasm - but also with the researched insights that come from one who has done their homework.
In other words, Dick Sudhalter is a fan, but he also knows what he’s talking about.
And, he's from a generation - like me - who cut their Jazz teeth on Dixieland.
The Commodore recordings have been reissued a number of times and the collection that I have was set to CD by Orrin Keepnews, who was also quite famous for his efforts at such independent labels as Riverside, Mainstream and Landmark. He had this to say as a prelude to Dick Sudhalter’s insert notes to Wild Bill Davison: The Commodore Master Takes [Commodore CMD - 405]
[Some opening remarks by the reissue producer: Wild Bill Davison, who as it turns out made a very lasting early impression on annotator Dick Sudhalter — and an equally lasting, even earlier impression on me — cut 24 sides as a leader for Commodore Records, not bad productivity for a just-under-two-year period that also included a sizable chunk of World War II and a musicians' union recording ban. Since Davison was above all a dynamic, no frills, full-speed-ahead player, it seems entirely appropriate thai we are able to present the master takes, as initially issued, of all double-dozen selections, which have been preserved for over half-century and more in their original acetate form. — Orrin Keepnews]
THERAPY WITH A FLAMETHROWER
It's hard to say now, so long afterward, which made the more powerful first impact, the sound of him or the look.
Think of it. You're young, maybe fourteen, deeply impressionable. You've happened an hot jazz in much the way you find an old air force flight jacket or lovingly-cared for baseball mitt in a dark corner of the attic. Like Howard Carter opening King Tut's tomb, or so you've imagined: that some sense of something ineffably precious, its presence hitherto unsuspected.
You've badgered your folks into letting you take cornet lessons because you heard Bix on an old record and couldn't get the carillon tone out of your head. Gradually other sounds have been moving in beside it: smooth, singing Bobby Hackett; magisterial Bunny Berigan; snappy, strutting Sidney De Paris.
And Wild Bill Davison. All those choruses on the Eddie Condon records, sounding as if they'd been ripped bodily from the horn. Tough as the street-corner kids down on the other side of West Newton Square, yet as heart-on-sleeve as some Irish tenor singing about the "Lass of Aughrim."
Above all, an amazing knack for cranking a band to a pitch of excitement that made Bill Haley, Elvis and the rest of the pop tinpots sound as foolish and phony as they probably were. There was, especially, a version of "St. Louis Blues," from one of Rudi Blesh's This Is Jazz broadcasts — Davison, Edmond Hall, Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Archey, Pops Foster, Baby Dodds — whose sheer megawattage could just scare you to death. Wild Bill, indeed.
Then came a snowy February night when the family was visiting New York, and a dear old uncle steered the lot of us downtown to West Third Street and a tiny club called Eddie Condon's. The picture remains sharp: second-story gallery running round the room, like something out of a saloon in a cowboy movie; down on the floor, people with crewcuts mashed shoulder-to-shoulder at tiny tables, their chatter often — but not often enough — hushed by what was happening on the bandstand.
Up there, incredibly, is Bill Davison himself, looking like anything but the standard image of the cornet or trumpet player. Not like Louis Armstrong, horn tilted up and eyes rolled back as the tone takes flight; not like Maxie Kaminsky, so tiny that his instrument seems gigantic in his hands. Not like Bix. in some old photo or other, dented cornet pointed resolutely at the floor.
Nope. This guy is seated, one leg crossed casually over the other, drink on an upended barrel in front of him. He sweeps the cornet into the side of his mouth to expel some supercharged phrase, then jerks it away as if it's too hot to keep there. And, I realize, awe-struck, he's chewing gum! Where in the world does he keep the stuff when he's blowing?
In short, he looked just the way he sounded — like a guy from Ohio (a town named, aptly, Defiance) with a fierce, uninhibited way of attacking the beat, driving a band of whatever size halfway into tomorrow. The music comes out as from a flamethrower, but with a density and momentum only suggested by even the best records.
Lots of years have passed, and change, as they say, is the only constant. Eddie Condon's is long gone, and with it the incomparably wise-ass guitar player who ran it. So, too, are Ed Hall, Cutty Cutshall, Gene Schroder, George Wettling and all the test of the one-off characters on the stand that night. Even Wild Bill himself turned out, in 1989, to be as mortal as the next guy.
But memories — and the records — remain. Sure, they're not a patch on the real thing; but absent that, they'll do just fine. A lot of young guys, some of them not yet even conceived on that once upon a time evening, still play something like the same kind of jazz. Many are able, fluent, even gifted. But the frisson, the shock, generated by the guy with the chewing gum? Never no more.
Orrin Keepnews, who has heard a lot of great jazz in his time, captured more than a little of it on records, and is the producer of this reissue, was thinking about all that not long ago, remembering for my benefit the dark World War II days at the beginning of 1943 when, not quite out of his teens, he was approaching the date of his induction into what was then the Army Air Corps. On quite a few evenings he'd wander, as if drawn by a magnet, into Nick's, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Tenth Street. There was no Condon's yet — that was still a couple of years off. But Nick's, a club actually run by a man named Nick Rongetti whose love of hot jazz was matched only by a saintly tolerance for the ways of its practitioners, was headquarters for Condon and his pals, most of whom had been associated with him in one way or another since the old days in Chicago.
The horns that winter included George Brunies, who as a kid had come north from New Orleans to join a history-making band at the Friars' Inn in downtown Chicago, and Pee Wee Russell, whose unique clarinet style invited such otherwise contradictory adjectives as cranky, gentle, querulous, tortured, whimsical, vulnerable, neurotic, unpredictable, bardic, confiding, discursive, succinct, economical, guileless, convoluted — and just as many more, all equally applicable.
And, charging everybody's batteries, Bill Davison. "I was there as often as I could," Keepnews recalled. "Those guys — Bill, Brunies, Pee Wee — sounded so good together. Strong. Powerful. Natural. They knew just what they were doing, and I can't remember a night when it didn't work. I'm not exaggerating when I say it saved my sanity."
That band, the one that worked its therapy on Orrin's pre-military nights, eventually got to make records. At first, of course, James C. Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians recording ban was in effect — theoretically a good idea, in that it sought to win payment for professionals every time their records were played on radio or juke boxes. That it turned out to be such a disaster remains a pity: singers, not subject to its restrictions, moved right in to fill the vacuum where the bands had been, with results we all know. But that's a story for another day.
By late '43, Decca and several small companies, including Milt Gabler's Commodore label (Gabler's main job was making records for Decca), had settled with Petrillo. Milt moved fast, assembling Davison and friends at a recording studio owned and managed by radio station WOR. They recorded on the last Saturday in November, took Sunday off, then recorded again on Monday and Tuesday. The results were nothing short of spectacular — about as close as you could come to an evening at Nick's while still comfortable in your living room.
(Producer's note: Monday's four selections emphasized Brunies and were issued under his name, placing them outside our present scope.)
Even the estimable Dan Morgenstern, who usually expresses his enthusiasms with a measure of literary restraint, lapsed into the "gee whiz!" prase of the youthful jazz fanatic in writing a while back about those records. And no wonder: there's something about the music, a youthful esprit and sense of commitment, that inspires such effusions as "These guys have come to play!."
When Tom Saunders talks about Bill, he gets that telltale far-off look in his eyes. Tom plays comet better and hotter than most anyone around, and he talked to me recently about the first time he had heard Wild Bill: "I must have heen about nine. And whatever I heard — it might well have been one of the Commodores — just amazed me. The fire, the feel. It wasn't long before I knew I wanted to play that way: not his notes, but the drive, the heat. The strength of it."
But all the snap and sizzle, the sheer fervor, can seduce perception. Was Davison himself a great soloist, a particularly creative jazz improviser? Perhaps not: his choruses fall too readily into pattern, predictability, explore few, if any, melodic or harmonic byways. Very often they come off as processions of set-piece figures, albeit attractive ones. You know what's next, even wait for it, smile knowingly when the long glisses the falsetto high notes with their strong terminal shake, the down and dirty drive licks, wheel into view.
But was he a performer, an artist, of immense expressive gifts? Just as certainly, yes. That's what enriches his opening and closing Baby, Won't You Please Come Home cadenzas here, provides all the wattage for his lead on That's a Plenty and Original Dixieland One-Step, and transfigures so personally the melody of Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams. There's never a moment that's not arresting, that doesn't rivet attention.
As a catalyst, an inspiring forte, Davison had few peers. Perhaps Roy Eldridge, if in quite another way, or Sidney Bechet with whom Bill played especially well. His ardor illuminates Ghost of a Chance, pumps life into tired old Jazz Me Blues and Muskrat Ramble, makes the machinery run.
Davison's idea of his job, I suspect, was just that: to lead and energize; and he did it superbly. Sure, there are moments when he declares fealty to Louis (Confessin') and others where his reverence for Bix (I'm Coming Virginia) is hard to miss. But all that is background, reflecting the sounds he'd heard and admired as a young man. What carries each performance is the rhythmic and emotive force he injects, and that's his and his alone. It's an uncompromisingly strenuous way of dealing with the horn, almost athletic in the sheer strength it requires — which is why a lot of Davisan emulators — and there have been more than a few over the years — have ultimately fallen down on the job. And it's why he always came off on the records with that special, get-it-while-it's hot, kind of urgency.
Listen to Tom Saunders again: "I was working in Detroit, at a place called the Surfside Lounge. Bill was in town, featured with a band over at the Showboat. I'd talked a lot about him to the Surfside's owner, saying things like, 'Jeez, I'd like to go down and hear him.’ So one night while we're playing, unbeknownst to me Dave, the owner, jumped in his Jaguar, drove down to the Showboat. There was nobody in the place; the band was playing for maybe three people. He bought Bill a drink, told him about the Surfside, about the band he had there — and about the Jaguar, knowing Bill was a car nut.
"Next thing you know, Bill's boxing his horn up, telling the band to finish the night without him. Well, Dave brought him in the back door, and we're playing — 'That's A Plenty' or something. And all at once this hot, searing horn lets fly, and damn near took my head off my shoulders. I said to myself, 'Goddamn! That could be only one guy.' And I turned around and there he was. What a night!
"Dave signed him up when he was done at the Showboat. He was supposed to do two, three weeks, and wound up staying four or five months. It just worked, and we became great friends, remained close, almost a father-son thing, until he died."
Milt Gabler seems to have had to do an unaccustomed amount of lineup juggling in putting together the Davison sessions, possibly because there was a war going on. It generally worked out well. For example, on the first four of the six sessions that make up this collection, when Pee Wee wasn't there the clarinet was Edmond Hall, equally able to stand alongside Bill and match his firepower. Hall's distinctive Albert-system tone (dry down low, acid up high, always warm) and cut-and slash attack made him an eminently suitable partner, as on Original Dixieland One-Step. Ditto for the rhythm section, especially the team of Schroeder, Condon, Casey and Wettling.
The only personnel problem came from a quarter least expected. As Gabler has attested, every time he'd tried to get Dave Tough on a Commodore date something had gone wrong. But he persisted, and finally, in the first week of 1946, he succeeded. The drummer had just left Woody Herman's band, which he'd helped build into one of the most thrilling of the day. Fascinated by the innovations of bebop, yet rooted in older timekeeping methods, he was a man in transition — brilliant and articulate, neurotic and deeply troubled.
And somehow, for reasons not easy to define, his union with Davison on High Society, Wabash Blues and the rest doesn't really click. The big Chinese ride cymbal, which had powered Herman's band and those of Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw before that (and been such a delight on other records with Condon and Bud Freeman) seems ill-suited to the rough-and-ready ways of the Davison-Brunies entente. The rhythm never quite settles down.
Still and all, that's a minor complaint. Just listening, cut after cut, to the uncompromising solos and take-no-prisoners ensembles, the consistent forcefulness of it all, makes clear what got to Keepnews, to Saunders, to Morgenstern, and — no doubt about it — to teenage me so very long ago. There's nothing else in all jazz quite like it. And how blessed we are, every one of us, to have savored it in our lifetimes.”
— RICHARD M. SUDHALTER
[Trumpeter, writer, and jazz historian Dick Sudhalter takes a special pleasure in retailing the Dixieland (sometimes known as "Nicksieland") style exemplified, several decades ago, by such swashbucklers as Eddie Condon and Wild Bill Davison.]
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