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Austin, a suburb to the west of Chicago, was an inauspicious setting for a jazz movement. In 1922, a group of students began gathering regularly at a soda parlor located near the nondescript buff brick Austin High School. The parlor featured a windup Victrola and a pile of records. "One day we found a record by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in the stack, and we put it on, not knowing what kind of band we were about to hear," Bud Freeman later recalled, "Were we excited by it! We were used to hearing commercial dance bands, but this sound was something.
“Right then and there,” Jimmy McPartland continues the story, "we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys. So we all picked out our instruments. Tesch [Frank Teschemacher] said he was going to buy a clarinet, Freeman plumped for a saxophone, (Jim] Lannigan picked a bass tuba, my brother [Dick McPartland] said he'd play the banjo, and I chose cornet, the loudest instrument." All but Freeman had studied violin before their introduction to the jazz idiom. Within a short while, the students had formed a working band, the Blue Friars —named after the Friars Inn. the Chicago nightspot where the New Orleans Rhythm Kings played - in emulation of the new jazz sounds they had discovered. Nonetheless, mastering the transition to improvisation required a practical education, in which study of the Rhythm Kings was supplemented by careful listening to recordings (especially the Wolverines' sides with Bix Beiderbecke), as well as Saturday night visits to performances (including firsthand appreciations of King Oliver's Creole Band at Chicago's Lincoln Gardens). Before long, other young players fell into the orbit of the Austin High Gang. Drummer Dave Tough, who was dating an Austin girl, became a close associate of the group. Some time later, when Tough left the band to travel to Europe, his younger friend Gene Krupa stepped in to play drums with the Austin High crew. Clarinetist Benny Goodman, then a freshman at nearby Harrison High, became acquainted with the Austin High gang when he attended a performance at a boathouse in Columbus Park. Soon he too was playing with various members of the group.”
- Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, 1st Ed. [1997]
“There can never be another group like the Chicagoans, for they represent the coming together of two provincial forces—the New Orleans musical fraternity and the Chicago jazz gang—and the sturdy music that resulted from this meeting. While ingrown cliques will always be with us, it is no longer possible for one self-contained group of jazzmen to find direct inspiration in the work of another self-contained group imported nearly intact from a different part of the country. Today the patterns of change and influence are national and international in scope, a situation that was only forecast before the twenties with the first traveling jazzmen and the first commercial jazz recording. It is a loss, in a way, because the Chicagoans accomplished what they did by playing and listening together. The weak members were not rejected but encouraged, prodded, and helped along until they could stand alone. On the other hand, this very feature of the Chicago attitude may be a clue to the vein of melancholy that runs beneath the blithe music of these men. They were a kind of adolescent gang, and some of them never grew up. There is, after all, something fundamentally sad about an adolescent who is pushing 60.
As the swing era, during which each of the Chicagoans reached the apex of his creative powers, came to a close, members of the old gang either withdrew from the competitive arena or huddled together for protection again—this time against the shift to modern jazz. Goodman, Krupa, and Freeman explored the new music but failed to become part of it. Only Tough could have done that, and he drank himself into the grave without finishing the job.
So the music of the Chicagoans came and went. Their records tell us how good it was — while it lasted.”
- Richard Hadlock, Jazz Masters of the 20s
Here’s more from Richard Hadlock’s piece about The Chicagoans.
Back in Chicago, the well-schooled players were finding good jobs in 1924 and 1925, and the seat-of-the-pants improvisers were taking what was left, Benny Goodman played the Midway Gardens with pianist Elmer Schoebel (another former New Orleans Rhythm King who had never been to New Orleans). Then Art Kassel took over the band, which included, in addition to Goodman and Schoebel, former Rhythm King Steve Brown (who was from New Orleans) on bass, Danny Polo on reeds, and a Mares-Oliver cornet disciple (who sounded something like Spanier) named Murphy Steinberg.
Spanier and de Faut, the Bucktown Fivers, were at the White City Ballroom with Sig Meyers, and Joe Sullivan was grinding out vaudeville assignments with Elmo Mack and his Purple Derby Orchestra. Trumpeter Al Turk and saxophonist Wayne King were working steadily. Jess Stacy was playing with Joe Kayser at the Arcadia Ballroom. The Teschemacher-Freeman-Tough entente had become, in 1925, Husk O'Hare's Wolverines. In 1926, they had a couple of good jobs at the White City Ballroom, about a block from the Midway Gardens, and drew admiration from Beiderbecke, Armstrong, and drummer Zutty Singleton (who had recently arrived from St. Louis). This kind of praise was, of course, highly valued.
The Chicagoans were, by and large, a cocky and self-impressed group. Teschemacher was moody and serious, McPartland brash and outgoing, Tough cynical and questioning, Freeman impulsive and ingenuous, but all were convinced that they had something no one else had, and each member of the gang bristled with enthusiasm. It was, however, inevitable that the band would break up. Each man needed a wider exposure to varying musical climates and a chance to develop his own identity. Whether it was the result of a conscious recognition of this need or not, the first move was made by Teschemacher, who joined Floyd Towne's band, first at the Triangle Cafe and then at the Midway Gardens in 1926. This group was an outgrowth of Sig Meyers' band and included trombonist Floyd O'Brien, George Wettling, Danny Altier on alto, Towne on tenor, Muggsy Spanier, and eventually Jess Stacy on piano. It wasn't too far from musical home for Teschemacher, after all.
Benny Goodman found a promising spot in August, 1925, when he answered Ben Pollack's call to join his new band in California. Pollack had hopes of building a first-class jazz band that could also present modern, cleanly executed arrangements instead of mere jamming on a select list of "jazz" tunes all night. He hired Glenn Miller, a skilled trombonist and arranger, and Joseph "Fud" Livingston, an imaginative arranger, composer, and reedman.
Fud had been around Detroit and Chicago for about a year, working with Jean Goldkette units and broadening his knowledge of jazz. Although he was born in South Carolina, Livingston fit the Chicago pattern — a deep love for jazz, an aggressive and optimistic instrumental style, an interest in widening the expressive scope of jazz through unusual harmonies (his interest in whole-tone scales may have come in part from Beiderbecke, who was jobbing with Goldkette about the same time Fud was), and, one might add, a colossal thirst for alcohol.
Pollack's idea was a kind of sophisticated extension of the King Oliver band approach: over a steady, swinging rhythmic foundation, make the music sound impromptu, but base the improvisations on a real structure, with interesting scored passages worked out in advance. The Pollack unit would not be as free as the unique Oliver band, but it might go beyond it in other respects because its members were good readers as well as skilled improvisers. It would also borrow a little from the outlook of the best Goldkette bands. The idea looked good and sounded good, but Pollack had to make concessions to commercial demands and finally watered the band down with a couple of violins in order to keep working. And then, too, Glenn Miller, as arranger, was less aware of New Orleans music than Pollack and leaned toward the more salable Roger Wolfe Kahn sound.
Goodman's first released record was a Pollack date in December, 1926, when Benny was 17. His solo on an ordinary popular tune, He's the Last Word, bubbles with vitality and confidence and contains an explosive staccato burst that may be the first such Chicagoan musical device on record. Livingston's tenor also reveals a feeling for the tense "shuffle" style (sharply accented dotted eighth notes followed by weak sixteenth notes) that has often been identified with Chicago musicians and probably came from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Bix, Jimmy Noone, and Johnny Dodds.
The Austinites didn't approve of the Pollack compromise and said so. They held out for the all-improvised sound of the smaller band, although most of them had been working off and on with bands just as commercial and usually not as good as Pollack's.
The Wolverines, under McPartland, secured one more good engagement before breaking up. Art Kassel took them, with Bud Jacobson in Teschemacher's place, to the Greystone Ballroom in Detroit (another lively jazz center in the twenties), where they were delighted to find themselves playing opposite Fletcher Henderson's excellent 1926 band. Freeman was the one most affected by this circumstance, for it was his first encounter with Coleman Hawkins, who had already lapped all competition on the tenor saxophone. It can be assumed that a different Bud Freeman came away from Detroit after the Greystone job. Even a decade or so later, Bud remembered the stomping, on-the-beat approach of the Henderson saxophonist in 1926-1927 as his favorite of several phases of the Hawkins style that had evolved over the years.
Dave Tough left the group next, then McPartland and Lannigan joined Bill Paley's band, and the others were left to dig up whatever they could find. Mezz Mezzrow had been sitting in with the gang now and then and occasionally had enlarged the sax section to three men for special jobs. He cut quite a father figure among the Austin gang, for Mezzrow was seven or eight years older and seemed very worldly, indeed. He was acquainted with most of the South Side musicians, with several gangsters, with a connection for obtaining quality marijuana, with booking agents, and with the insides of several jails. Teschemacher, Freeman, Sullivan, and Gene Krupa were impressed, but Tough, though friendly, could see through the bluster. Mezzrow favored all-out emulation of the New Orleans players, and gradually the gang lined up against him, stressing instead the development of then-own group style. When Eddie Condon moved into the inner circle, he, too, was unconvinced by Mezzrow's arguments, and the Chicagoans ventured further away from New Orleans jazz.
As a matter of fact, the New Orleans men themselves were breaking up their bands and the old improvised marching style. Armstrong had left Oliver, the Dodds brothers (clarinetist Johnny and drummer Baby) were playing a more intimate kind of jazz at Kelly's Stables, Jimmy Noone had a two-reeds-plus-rhythm-section group, and Oliver himself had hired a saxophone section. Only Jelly Roll Morton continued to cling to the earlier forms. Mezzrow's attempts to convince Sullivan of the virtues of playing the Morton style were again unsuccessful, for Sullivan had heard the young and very modern Earl Hines, who was clearly the man of the hour among Chicago pianists in 1926-1927. Tough and Krupa still regarded Baby Dodds with enormous respect and affection, but now Zutty Singleton seemed more in step with their musical thinking.
Bix was at nearby Hudson Lake with Pee Wee Russell in 1926, and most of the Chicagoans made pilgrimages to the resort to hear the band, play records, discuss music, and drink. Mezzrow went, too, but he had begun to feel left out when the gang discussed non jazz works by composers like Stravinsky and Eastwood Lane. Even purist Muggsy Spanier had become interested in formal music, and, of course, Sullivan had had plenty of it in his background to begin with. Mezz just wanted to play the blues and was unhappy about this new digression.
Teschemacher was especially fond of Beiderbecke and began to show it in his playing. Like Russell, who had been deeply affected by Bix's melodic and harmonic concepts, Tesch introduced a hard, rasping quality into his tone that brought it closer to the brassy bite of the cornet and carried it away from the more liquid sound of the conventionally played clarinet. Benny Goodman and Fud Livingston had also found this an effective means of adding punch and excitement to their solos. Beyond this characteristic (which Goodman eventually dropped), these four clarinetists also shared an admiration for Jimmy Noone, who had changed during the twenties from a delicate contrapuntal ensemble style to a powerful cornet-like lead with graceful embellishments. Thus was created what many call "Chicago style" clarinet.
Rhythm came first for the Chicagoans. They leaned heavily upon the skills of Tough, Krupa, and Wettling in establishing the fundamental pulse. Stacy and Sullivan picked up pointers from various Chicago blues pianists, as well as from Hines, and pushed the band either by hammering out steady four-beat chords or by adding an eight-to-the-bar pattern borrowed from the popular boogie-woogie specialists on Chicago's South Side. The banjo player was encouraged to maintain a steady four beats to the measure and refrain from the fancy flourishes common in earlier jazz bands. The drummer was allowed to fill in empty spaces, and it required taste and understanding to carry this responsibility. Tough was the ideal man for the job, but Krupa and Wettling were quite acceptable.
As for the bass, it was pretty much up to the individual player, but no one argued with the Steve Brown approach that Lannigan used, which alternated from a two-to-the-bar pattern to contrapuntal triplets and clever off-the-beat accents.
All horns played on the beat or even slightly in front of it. Melodic ideas were important, but they usually came in rhythmic bursts and clusters. How the player pounced on a note was as important to the Chicagoans as the pitch of the note itself. Emotional impact was everything. No group of jazzmen had ever attacked music with more vigor and bravado than did this eager fraternity.
Russell and Stacy, who had formed their musical habits independently of the Chicagoans, were not quite so ferociously inclined. They had each investigated the subtle art of understatement in their solo work and had come up with excellent results. Pee Wee's unusual sensitivity at a time when the entire country, including its jazz musicians, seemed caught up in a "get hot" complex, can be heard on a mid-1927 Red Nichols recording of Ida. Here Russell explores the harmonic pockets of the song's structure in a restrained, almost recalcitrant manner, borrowing from Bix's ballad approach and adding the unique Russell sense of whimsy that marks all his best work. His solo created a bit of a stir among some musicians at the time, but most of the Chicagoans were not ready for "pretty" jazz yet. They didn't care for cornetist Nichols either, whom they regarded as a mere Bix imitator and not a very convincing "hot" player.
Early Stacy on record is rare, but a glimpse of his 1928 style can be had on a recording by Danny Altier's orchestra, which included Spanier, Wettling, clarinetist Maurie Bercov (who played much like Teschemacher), and guitarist Ray Biondi. Jess, at 24, had already formed the mature style for which he became widely known years later with Benny Goodman's orchestra. His right-hand figures were more linear than those of Hines or Sullivan, but the Chicago rolling bass line was there and so were the hornlike melodic statements so characteristic of the best Chicago pianists of the period. There was, though, no hammering on the keyboard; Stacy displayed superb control and an advanced sense of dynamics throughout his solo on My Gal Sal and behind the dismal vocal on I’m Sorry Sally.
While most of the Chicago gang wrestled with all these problems, Benny Goodman, now back home, was continuing to play with Pollack whenever there was work or to accept casual engagements whenever the band's luck ran out, which was often. In 1927, he recorded a couple of trio performances with Chicagoans Bob Conselman on drums and Mel Stitzel on piano (That's a Plenty and Clarinetitis) that reveal him as a gifted young clarinetist at that time, with an already recognizable style, but a style yet rooted in the same Dodds-Noone-Beiderbecke idiom within which Teschemacher worked. The vibrato, phrasing, attack, and general ebullience were quite similar to Teschemacher's later work, but the tone was cleaner and clearly Goodman's own.
A favorite hangout for Chicagoans in 1927 was the Three Deuces, where Sullivan, Freeman, Tough, Krupa, Teschemacher, Condon, Wettling, and Mezzrow were regulars at frequent jam sessions held in the dank basement.
Goodman, Beiderbecke, and others dropped in whenever possible and helped to establish the saloon as a kind of recreation center and clubhouse for local and visiting jazzmen. The sessions held there, some still remembered by the participants, marked the arrival of the Chicagoans as jazzmen with their own following of musicians, tyros who were now attracted to them just as they had been attracted to New Orleans jazz groups in the first place.
About this time, Dave Tough picked up his drums and went to France with clarinetist Danny Polo. Dave was a restless man, unhappy with his environment. (Mezzrow recalled in later years how Tough read the American Mercury from cover to cover, "especially the section called 'Americana,' where all the blue-noses, bigots, and two-faced killjoys in this land of the free got a going over they never forgot.") It seemed logical to Tough to go where other creative Americans were gathering.
Gene Krupa had met most of the Chicagoans through the Benson booking office, and Mezzrow was already preaching Baby Dodds to the i8-year-old drummer and helping him to fit into the spot vacated by Tough. Gene's enthusiasm was boundless, and by late 1927 he was, after Wettling, the Chicagoans' favorite available drummer. That fall, practically everyone in the gang got a chance to make records, partly as a result of a selling job by singer-promoter-comb player Red McKenzie, who had now settled in Chicago and usurped Mezzrow's big brother role among the Austinites.
The first date was for Charles Pierce, a local butcher and sometime alto saxophonist who admired the Chicago jazz gang and often hired them for his band. Spanier and Teschemacher were the bright lights of the session, which produced China Boy, the familiar Chicago war-horse, and a real blues called Bull Frog Blues. China Boy was arranged for two cornets and three reeds and is of interest chiefly for Teschemacher's agitated, explosive solo, which overcomes a series of clinkers (usually a result of Tesche's pinching and straining in the upper register, causing a higher note than intended to come out) and ignites an otherwise rather stodgy band performance. Spanier blows a disappointing stock chorus on Bull Frog Blues, but Tesche grasps the blues idea quite well and is close to the Jimmy Noone sound throughout. The arrangement was probably based on Jelly Roll Morton's Jungle Blues, recorded three or four months before Bull Frog.
The next record, made the following month, is more satisfactory. Again a straightforward blues was included, called Friars Point Shuffle, as well as a popular song, then about a decade old, Darktown Strutters' Ball. The personnel was mostly first-string Chicagoans: Spanier, Teschemacher, Mezzrow (tenor sax), Sullivan, Condon, Lannigan (tuba), Wettling, and Red McKenzie (vocals). Spanier seems happier on this one, plays a good enough blues solo, and Tesch sounds even deeper into Noone, except for a wider vibrato and a nervous, almost frenzied, quality that the more assured Noone never displayed. Sullivan solos with characteristic vitality, featuring a rolling left-hand bass line and closely grouped, powerful chord clusters in the right. Lannigan manages to establish an oscillating rhythm with his tuba by playing a stream of dotted-eighth- and sixteenth-note patterns. The record is, in all, a good representation of what was going on among the more talented Chicagoans in 1927.
Benny Goodman defected from the struggling Pollack band for a while to play with Isham Jones in 1927, but he soon returned, and at approximately the same time, Jimmy McPartland joined the Pollack crew. They got out another record in late 1927, Waiting for Katie and Memphis Blues. Oddly enough, the blues side was poor and Katie was, in the final passages, an excellent band performance, with almost fully mature Goodman (he was 18) and advanced saxophone section work. On this number, Pollack comes close to the best of Jean Goldkette, a very high level for 1927, indeed. His ace soloist was Goodman, whose ears and fingers were ahead of most of his contemporaries, including the slightly older Austin gang. "The boys that hung out at the Three Deuces were terrifically talented guys," Benny wrote in his autobiography, "but most of them didn't read, and we thought their playing was rough. We didn't pay them much mind, although we liked to jam with them."
McPartland, who has never shed the Beiderbecke mantle he acquired so early, quite naturally showed great improvement in 1927 over his 1924 Wolverine level (which can be heard on a single record cut at that time), though he was never to be more than a pleasant utility cornetist. He participated in another Wolverine recording session in 1927 with a group that included Maurie Bercov and Dick Voynow, but nothing much came of it.
Prior to his first record date in late 1927, Krupa worked all over the Chicago area with bandleaders like Joe Kayser, Leo Shukin, and Thelma Terry. He studied, at one time or another, with Al Silverman, Ed Straight (from whom Tough learned his rudiments ), and Roy Knapp, striving to become a thoroughly trained and highly flexible drummer. At the same time, Freeman played with Herb Carlin's band, followed up casuals through the booking offices, and worked a movie theater job with Tough and Condon in a band fronted by Jack Gardner, a good Chicago pianist. Freeman and Tough were close friends, and when Dave left for France, Bud let Mezzrow talk him into striking out for Hollywood, presumably to make a fortune as an actor. They got as far as Colorado, then turned around and ran for home.
Joe Sullivan was busy with dance bands like Sig Meyers’ or Louis Panico's and did occasional radio work. And Teschemacher, according to Condon, was dropping into the Apex Club to hear Jimmy Noone at least five times a week. He also continued to work in Floyd Towne's band at the Midway Gardens with Spanier, Stacy, Wettling, and trombonist Floyd O'Brien.
More than twenty years later, Artie Shaw, who visited Chicago with Irving Aaronson's orchestra about 1928, described (in his book The Trouble with Cinderella) his reactions to O'Brien and Teschemacher:
“I remember one night—or morning, rather, for it started around four A.M.—when a bunch of us, who had decided to have ourselves a little session, wound up in some dance hall where they were holding one of the Marathon Dance contests that were always taking place in those days. Different musicians floated in and out, sat in for a while, played a few choruses, and then got up to let some other guy blow. There was a piano player named Jess Stacy, and another named Joe Sullivan. There was one trombone player, Floyd O'Brien, who had one of the most peculiar, lazy, deliberately mistaken-sounding styles I've ever heard. He would almost, but not quite, crack a note into little pieces, and each time you thought he was about to fall apart he'd recover and make something out of what started out to sound like a fluff — till after a while you began to get the idea that this guy not only wasn't making any mistakes at all, but had complete control over his horn. He would come so damn close to mistakes that you couldn't see how he was going to get away with it; but he always recovered somehow — and this trick of almost, but never quite, making the mistake, and each time recovering so that the things he played went off in altogether unexpected and sometimes quite humorous directions, was what made his style so peculiar to start with — although it's impossible to give the flavor of it in language. ... I sat next to him [Teschemacher] and watched him while he played. We were all slightly drunk on bad bootleg gin, but it didn't seem to affect his playing any. He too had this odd style of playing, but in an altogether different way from O'Brien's. Even while he'd be reaching out for something in his deliberately fumbling way, some phrase you couldn't quite see the beginning or end of (or, for that matter, the reason for it in the first place), there was an assurance about everything he did that made you see that he himself knew where he was going all the time; and by the time he got there you began to see it yourself, for in its own grotesque way it made a kind of musical sense, but something extremely personal and intimate to himself, something so subtle that it could never possibly have had great communicative meaning to anyone but another musician and even then only to a jazz musician who happened to be pretty damn hep to what was going on.”
A recording session for the Okeh company in December, 1927, was arranged by Red McKenzie, whose valuable contacts with that firm were left over from his earlier commercial successes with the group he called the Mound City Blue Blowers. As McKenzie and Condon's Chicagoans, McPartland, Freeman, Teschemacher, Krupa, Sullivan, Lannigan, and Condon cut four sides that obtained wide distribution throughout the country and made a favorable impression on Eastern jazzmen, most of whom had not realized how much the Chicagoans had improved. The biggest surprise was Krupa, an unknown, whose well-recorded drum work on these sessions rocked the New York jazz cliques, and ultimately unseated Vic Berton as their chief percussionist, Krupa's intense study of Dodds, Singleton, and Tough, along with his vast natural energy and superb sense of time, placed him, as of the last days of 1927, in the front rank of jazz drummers.
The tunes recorded were Sugar, China Boy, Nobody's Sweetheart, and Liza (not Gershwin's), all in F, which must have been the gang's favorite key signature. Tesch wrote out a few connecting passages to give the ensemble fabric more strength, but most of the music was freely improvised in a small-band style that stemmed from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, various Beiderbecke recording groups, the Dodds brothers' combination, Jimmy Noone, and, inevitably, a number of semi commercial units around Chicago in which the gang had played over the years. Teschemacher's scored interludes were borrowed in part from such standard dance band sources, and the clarinetist frequently sought similar straight parallel-harmony parts in the improvised ensemble passages rather than a weaving New Orleans contrapuntal line, as advocated by Mezzrow. He also devised an unusual introduction to Liza, in 6/4 time.
Freeman, nervous on his first recording, demonstrated that, while his tone was still rough, he had ideas and a rapidly developing command of his horn. Sullivan, after Krupa, emerged as the steadiest and most arresting performer in the group. His powerful left hand and Hines-like right tied the rhythm section together and provided much of the lift for which these records are famous.
Teschemacher was in better form for this date than he had been on earlier recordings, but he was still an uneven player. His solos ranged from breathtakingly inventive melodic paroxysms, with notes flying off in unexpected directions like so many fireballs (China Boy), to stilted, groping phrases that amounted to little more than rough caricatures of Jimmy Noone (Sugar). For all his faults, though, Tesch had achieved a personal, identifiable, and highly stimulating mode of expression that soon rubbed off on dozens of other clarinetists around the country.
Two Chicagoan ensemble devices that intrigued Eastern jazzmen can be heard on these records. Mezzrow described them some years later (in his autobiography Really the Blues) as the "explosion," a sudden flare preceding each repetition of the initial melodic statement in a conventional song structure, and the already mentioned "shuffle rhythm," a staccato, heavily accented eighth-note pattern usually applied to the bridge, or release, of a song. These and other simple but effective methods of increasing and releasing tensions came largely from the mind of Dave Tough, who, more than any other single musician, translated New Orleans musical ideas into the jazz language of the Chicagoans. Had he been in town for the occasion, Tough would doubtless have been the hero of the McKenzie-Condon recordings.
The Chicagoans knew they had left their mark when Red Nichols recorded Nobody's Sweetheart a couple of months later, complete with shuffle rhythms, explosions, and a Chicago-like clarinet solo by Fud Livingston.
For a few months after the Okeh sessions, there was little change in the Chicagoans' job situations. Krupa played for Benson orchestras, in Eddie Neibauer's Seattle Harmony Kings, and, for three months or so, with Mezzrow (Milton Mesirow and His Purple Crackle Orchestra); Tesch and Jess Stacy were still with Floyd Towne; Sullivan continued with Louis Panico; Tough was still seeking culture in France. Benny Goodman, encouraged by the success of the McKenzie-Condon recordings that featured his old friend and fellow Pollack sideman McPartland, secured a one-session Vocalion date using the same instrumentation. Bob Conselman played drums, but the others were drawn from the Pollack fold. The titles were A Jazz Holiday and Wolverine Blues, and the performances were more directly derived from Bix Beiderbecke's small-band records of the preceding year than from either the New Orleans bands or the Austin gang. The session pointed up a split among the Chicagoans that had been widening for some time and could now be heard in their music. McPartland, Goodman, Freeman, Wettling, and Teschemacher were drifting away from New Orleans patterns toward a more sophisticated, lighter music that emphasized clean execution, advanced harmonies, and melodic wit. Their guiding light was the modern work of Beiderbecke. Sullivan, Mezzrow, and Spanier were primarily Armstrong-blues men. As Sullivan once expressed it, "I love Bix like I love my right arm, but I go by way of Louis."
Not that Freeman et al, didn't have a deep admiration for Louis ("Too much Armstrong," Teschemacher once admonished Bud after one of his tenor solos); nor did Spanier and the others fail to appreciate Bix. Each side still indulged in a good deal of hero worship in both directions, but the split was there.
McKenzie and Condon, figuring they had a winning combination, landed two more record dates. One record, under the heading of McKenzie and Condon's Boys, was not issued, but the other, by the Chicago Rhythm Kings, was successfully released in April, 1928. Three sides, There'll Be Some Changes Made, I've Found a New Baby, and Baby, Won't You Please Come Home? (the last not issued at the time), feature Teschemacher, Spanier, Mezzrow, Sullivan, Condon, Lannigan, and Krupa. Mezzrow was included because Freeman had gone to New York to join Pollack, who had been impressed by Bud's first records.
The reproduction quality and studio balance of these recordings are superior to the December sessions for Okeh, and Spanier furnishes a solid Armstrong-inspired lead. Krupa, who can be heard clearly this time, is again the lion of the date. Although Gene was not the first to use the then difficult-to-record bass drum on records (Baby Dodds, for one, preceded him), he makes daringly prominent use of it here, filling out the rhythm section in a way that had never before been caught on wax. His tom-tom accents and explosions were, too, unusual and very exciting in 1928, when electrical recording methods, permitting a more extensive use of deep-tone drums, were only about two years old. Also to Krupa's credit was his ability to hold a firm tempo behind Spanier's pushing lead, which caused many weaker drummers to accelerate in a misguided attempt to catch up with the cornetist. Spanier has trouble with drummers on this point to this day.
Teschemacher seems more contemplative here than on previous recordings and is even closer to trumpet phrasing. The effect of the tenor-clarinet-cornet Chicago front line is, in fact, that of three tightly knit parallel melody voices and a distinct departure from the old New Orleans Dixieland format, which calls for a trombone bass line, a simple cornet lead, and contrapuntal clarinet figures. Tesch explored this new idea even further at this time by working out a fourth tune, Jazz Me Blues, for three reeds and rhythm. It is, interestingly, the best side of the date, and Tesch seems more comfortable playing lead over the saxophones of Mezzrow and Rod Cless than he had before in his wandering ensemble lines above Spanier's horn. Tesch's Jazz Me Blues is rather close, too, to the ensemble approach of the trumpetless band Jimmy Noone fronted at that time.
I've Found a New Baby and There'll Be Some Changes Made settled any question that might have remained about the emergence of a new crop of talent from Chicago. These men had created a fine, workable method of small-band collective improvisation that accommodated the newer trends in jazz (solo virtuosity, a steady four-to-the-bar swing, harmonic explorations beyond simple triads with added sevenths, an enlarged set of responsibilities for the drummer) while retaining some of the good things in New Orleans jazz (the blues, a "vocal" approach to personal expression, unified collective spirit, a driving on-the-beat momentum, intelligent use of understatement). For some Chicagoans, this formula for small-band swing, with the addition of a relaxed ballad style, served well for a lifetime; others continued to search elsewhere for musical fulfillment.
To be continued and concluded in Part 3.
