Audio Glimpses of the Past

I spend a good bit of time in antique stores these days, searching for 78s. A couple of months ago, I visited an Atlanta antique store which had an interesting-looking box. It looked like it might have records in it, and it did - not 78s, but 40 or 50 home-recorded discs. They were 12" discs; some were marked as 33 1/3, and some were labeled with song titles or rudimentary information about the radio programs they were recorded from. I bought three of the most promising-looking of the records, took them home, and found them to be easily playable on my turntable. Moreover, they were quite well-recorded, for the most part. A couple of the sides were pretty disappointing - they proved to be nothing more than recordings of disc jockeys playing records, but several of the sides were intriguing and musically rewarding enough to get me pretty excited.

Radio was once a more interesting and creative medium than it is these days. Bands of all types commonly broadcast live from clubs and ballrooms, their sounds carried over the various radio networks to listeners across the country. These broadcasts were sometimes recorded by hobbyists with home recording equipment, which until the late 1940's meant a disc recorder of some kind. The person who recorded the stash of discs I found labeled some with his name, and even with information about the equipment he used.

Our recordist was named J.M. Keith, apparently from Atlanta, since most of the radio stations he recorded from were Atlanta stations like WSB and WAGA. On a couple of discs he engraved the make, model, and serial number of the recorders he used. The earlier records were made with a Presto Model Y, serial #4111. The Model Y paired one of Presto's cheaper recorders with an amplifier and speaker. Later, Mr. Keith upgraded to a Presto 6N, serial #1891. The 6N was a high-quality machine, used by many radio stations. And it wasn't cheap. The price for 6N was $735 in 1950; it probably wasn't much less in 1948, when Keith seemed to have acquired his.

Our friend J.M. Keith had somewhat eclectic tastes; he recorded all kinds of music. There's a really horrible "lounge" quartet from a club in New York, several disc jockey shows, and lots of recordings from the semi-classical Bell Telephone Hour. Listening to those first three discs and examining the labels and sleeves gave me some insight into Mr. Keith's labeling system, though, so I went back to the antique store and bought all of the records that I though might contain worthwhile music. I ended up with a dozen discs. They all seem to be have been recorded in 1947 or 1948. I played them all one evening, one after another, and it was like a trip back in time - like listening to a couple of hours of late-forties radio, dialing to different stations every twelve minutes or so. Most of the discs are quite well-recorded, although in a few cases, the surfaces have deteriorated a little bit. And Mr. Keith would occasionally record with the gain set too high, resulting in some distortion.



There ended up being six sides of music that were interesting enough to digitize and preserve:

Three tunes by the Ray McKinley big band from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, August, 1947. One of these is Eddie Sauter's amazingly forward-looking "Sand Storm," which the band had recorded in the studio a year and a half earlier.

Three selections by a very different big band, that of Noro Morales. "Caramba Bebop" from this broadcast is a very hot piece of Latin jazz, with an oddly wonderful piano solo by Morales.

A broadcast by the Adrian Rollini Trio. Rollini was the first great bass saxophonist in jazz, but by 1947 he was playing vibes and doubling on chimes. These are the only hot jazz chimes solos I've ever heard.

A side split between Rollini's trio and the Mary Osborne Trio. Osborne was an excellent Charlie Christian-inspired guitarist, but she's featured mostly as a vocalist here.

Twelve or so minutes from an August, 1948 broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry. This is an interesting broadcast, but I was surprised at how lame most of the music was. The other side of this disc is much better:

Part of the WSB Barn Dance program that followed the Grand Ole Opry. Barn Dance was similar to the Opry, but the music (and comedy) is more "down home."

I have uploaded selections from all of these broadcasts (except the Grand Ole Opry) here. Once on the page with the links, you can click to listen or right-click to download. I hope you enjoy these audio glimpses of the past. And thank you, J.M. Keith.

Blues Poetry II

As I was cleaning out my file cabinet a few days ago, I came upon a folder of transcriptions of blues lyrics that I did about 15 years ago. Once again, I was stuck with what beautiful poetry blues lyrics can be. Here are four of my favorites from that old stash of transcriptions, plus one more (the Percy Mayfield song) that I transcribed tonight.

Transcribing blues lyrics can be a challenge. Thick Mississippi accents, idiosyncratic pronunciation, archaic turns of phrase, poor recordings with worn surfaces - all of these conspire against an accurate hearing of the lyrics. Comparing different published transcriptions of the same song might reveal very different hearings. But I reviewed all of these tonight, and I'm satisfied with their accuracy. Being Southern helps, as does experience with listening to the blues.

And as wonderful as some of these lyrics are, they are greatly enhanced by hearing them in context, sung by these brilliant musicians. The interaction of the lyrics, the singing, and the instruments is what creates the complete picture. I've listed the original issue, place and date of recording after each song. Punctuation and line breaks are, of course, my own.

Mama, “Tain’t Long for Day
Blind Willie McTell

Wake up, mama, don’t you sleep so hard.
Wake up, mama, don’t you sleep so hard.
Boy, it’s these old blues walkin’ all over your yard.

I’ve got these blues, reason I’m not satisfied.
I’ve got these blues; I’m not satisfied.
That’s the reason why I stole away and cried.

Blues grabbed me at midnight, didn’t turn me loose ‘til day.
Blues grabbed me at midnight, didn’t turn me loose ‘til day.
I didn’t have no mama to drive these blues away.

The big star fallin’, mama, it ain’t long for day.
The big star fallin’, mama, ‘tain’t long for day.
Maybe the sunshine will drive these blues away.

(Oh, come here quick.
Come on mama,
You know I gotcha.)

Mm – mm.
Mm – mm.
Mm – mm.

Victor 21474
Atlanta, Georgia; October 18, 1927


Son House is one of my favorite bluesmen, and one who really paid attention to the quality of his lyrics. "Pony Blues" is traditionally about sexual prowess; House's version seems to be about more than that. Everyone will have his or her own interpretation, but to me, House's pony is himself - his soul.

The Pony Blues
Son House

Why don’t you catch my pony; now saddle up my black mare.
Oh, my pony; saddle up, up my black mare.
You know I’m gonna find my baby, well, in the world somewhere.

You know, he’s a travelin’ horse, and he’s too black bad.
He’s a travelin’ pony; I declare, he’s too black bad.
You know he got a gait, now, no Shetland ain’t, ain’t never had.

You know, I take him by the reins and I led him around and round.
I said I take him by the reins and I, I led him around and round.
You know, he ain’t the best in the world, but he’s the best ever been in this town.

You know, he’s a travelin’ horse and he don’t deny his name.
He’s a travelin’ pony and he don’t deny his name.
You know, the way he can travel is a lowdown, oh, dirty shame.

Why don’t you come up here, pony; now come on, please, let’s us go.
I said, come up, get up now; please, pony, now let’s us go.
Let’s we saddle on down on the Gulf of, of Mexico.

You know, the horse that I’m riding, he can foxtrot, he can lope and pace.
I said the pony I’m ridin’, he can foxtrot, he can lope and pace.
You know, a horse with that many gaits, you know, I’m bound to win that race.

Mm, he’s a travelin’ horse and he don’t deny his name.
He’s a travelin’ pony; he don’t deny his name.
You know, the way he can travel is a lowdown, oh, dirty shame.

Library of Congress 92401
Robinsonville, Mississippi; July 17, 1942


Sad Days, Lonely Nights
Junior Kimbrough

My mama told me –
I was a child.
She said, “Son,
Gonna have hard days.”

My daddy told me, too.
He said, “Son,
Gonna have sad days,
Lonely nights;

Sittin’ alone;
Head hung down,
Tears runnin’ down.”


Done got old –
Sad days,
Lonely nights
Done overtaken me.

Sometimes I sit alone;
I wonder ‘bout the things
My mama and daddy told me.

Sad days,
Lonely nights
Done overtaken me.

Fat Possum 1006
Holly Springs, Mississippi; April, 1994


Memory Pain
Percy Mayfield

Every time I see a woman, it makes me think about mine.
Every time I see a woman, it make me think of mine.
And the way she used to treat me, boys, I just can’t keep from cryin’.

I used to come home in the evenin’; that woman would be gone.
When I would come home in the evenin’, my woman would be gone.
And when I would get up in the mornin’, boys, she’d just be coming home.

I don’t see well, and I’m absent-minded,
And I hardly sleep at all.
My past has put me on a habit
Of nicotine and alcohol.
It serve me right to suffer; serve me right to be alone.
Seems I’m still livin’ with the memory of the days that’s past and gone.

Specialty 2126
Hollywood, California; April 23, 1952


This Joe Callicott song was later recorded by Ry Cooder as "France Chance." Callicott's reference to "great news" means "big news," not "good news."

Love Me Baby Blues
Joe Callicott

Drop down, baby, just like showers of rain;
Hate to hear my fair brown call my name.
Yeah, I hate to hear my fair brown call my name;
Well, she calls so loud and the poor girl calls so plain.

Walked to the station, tears runnin’ down;
I got news my baby done left town.
Yeah, I got news my baby, well, she done blowed this town.
Well, I got great news – my baby done blowed this town.

Rooster crowed in England; heard ‘im in France.
Look like the other guy won’t ‘low me no chance.
Yeah, look like the mmm…, ah, they won’t ‘low me no chance.
Ah, look like to me I can’t get a possible chance.

I knows my doggie when I hear him bark;
I know my baby if I feel her in the dark.
Yeah, I know my baby… I feel her in the….

Ah, tell me woman, how can you be so mean?
Give all of my money out on the brand new stream.
Baby, oh tell me, woman, how can you be so…?

Arhoolie 1042
Nesbit, Mississippi; August, 1967

A Chance Encounter With Ma Rainey

I'll begin this post as so many bloggers have over the years: It's been a long time since my last post. I'll try not to let that happen again. Now, on to business:

Yesterday I drove the 90 miles or so from Atlanta to Columbus, Georgia to hunt for 78s and do some geocaching. Columbus in a nice little city; the downtown area is pretty healthy, mostly due to the large number of Columbus State University students spending their money, I imagine. After looking around downtown for awhile, I drove down 5th Avenue and was surprised to see a historical marker proclaiming "Ma Rainey Home."

Ma Rainey was one of the seminal blues performers and recording artists, although "seminal" seems like an odd adjective to apply to a woman. She was born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus in 1886 - earlier, notice, than either Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson. She was singing the blues on tours throughout the South by the time she was 20, and was one of the first Southern blues singers to record - although Bessie Smith beat her to the studios by ten months. Rainey recorded 111 released sides (including alternate takes); unfortunately, her entire recording career was for Paramount Records, famous for the poor quality of their recordings and pressings. But enough of her voice comes through the lousy sound to make it clear that she was the real deal - a strong, earthy singer who sounds like she grew up with the blues.

I had forgotten that this great woman was from Columbus. By the time my brain had processed what I had just seen, I had passed the house. I quickly backed up, pulled over and got out of the car. I read the marker several times, and stared at the house for awhile. It's a large house - I suspect Rainey rented out rooms - and it's painted yellow, as it apparently was when Rainey lived there between her retirement in 1935 and death in 1939. The house is now a museum, but I didn't know that - there was nothing to indicate that it was open to the public. So I just stared.

The marker indicated that Porterdale Cemetery, where Rainey is buried, was nearby. I found the cemetery about a half mile away. Three guys were digging a grave near the entrance, so I pulled over and asked where Ma Rainey's grave was, and one of them showed me. Rainey is buried between two of her Pridgett sisters; each has a concrete slab over her grave. Ma's just reads "Gertrude Rainey" and the date of her death, but she also has a nice new headstone proclaiming her status as "Mother of the Blues."

After visiting the grave, I had the urge to drive back by the house while playing some Ma Rainey music. This was all unplanned, so I didn't have any Rainey CDs with me, but I had brought Allen Lowe's idiosyncratic blues history box set Really the Blues? as road music, so I found "Don't Fish in My Sea" and cranked it up.

It was very cool to run across Rainey's house more or less by chance, and to be led to her gravesite by the plaque. I'm planning to go back before too long, actually visit the museum and take some pictures.

At the cemetery, I had a gut-wrenching moment not directly related to Ma Rainey. Porterdale Cemetery was a burying ground for the black residents of Columbus - for most of the South's history, segregation didn't end with death. Near Rainey's grave was the grave of an infant. The headstone was inscribed with the child's given name (which I don't remember), the date of her death (1858) and "Kizzie's Baby." No last names. I thought it was odd, until it hit me - Kizzie and her child didn't have last names. They were slaves. You can't live down here without frequently thinking about the terrible history of the region, but it was a powerful experience to unexpectedly come across the raw evidence of human slavery - not in a museum, not in a book, but while just wandering around.

So Long, Donna's

Music has been a part of life on New Orleans' Rampart Street at least since the beginnings of jazz. On South Rampart one could hear Bunk Johnson and Sidney Bechet playing at the Eagle Saloon or young Louis Armstrong holding forth at the Red Onion. (Both of these buildings are still standing.) The ballroom of the Astoria Hotel was a popular spot in the 1920s and 30s; you could catch Lee Collins and David Jones with their Astoria Hot Eight. Heading downtown to North Rampart, Luis Russell led the band at the Cadillac before moving north to Chicago. The Boswell Sisters were "discovered" while singing at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Cosimo Matassa opened his first recording studio at the corner of North Rampart and Dumaine, the corner immortalized in Professor Longhair's "Go To the Mardi Gras." In the 1970s, Lu & Charlie's featured Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste, and James Booker. More recently, Big Sam Williams' Funky Butt was one of the best places in the city to hear music, but the club never reopened after Katrina hit. And now an era has ended: a couple of weeks ago Donna's, the last music club on North Rampart, closed its doors for the last time.

Music clubs come and go all the time; none of them last forever - although it looks like the Village Vanguard has a shot at immortality. So why does the closing of Donna's affect me so much?

From the time that it opened in the early 1990s (I don't remember the exact year), Donna's was something special. Even to an introvert like me, who mostly just wants to be left alone, Donna's was warm and welcoming. It's kind of a cliche, but you felt like family as soon as you walked in the door.

And, of course, the music was often amazing. In the early days, Donna featured brass bands; there weren't really any other clubs featuring this amazing New Orleans hybrid music at the time. The bands would stand at one end of the room, and if you wanted to use the restroom, you had to walk through the band. The first time I heard a New Orleans brass band in the flesh was in Jackson Square, where the young Rebirth Brass Band was playing for tips, but my second exposure to this incredible sound was at Donna's, where I heard the Algiers Brass Band. It was such a stunning experience that I went back a couple of nights later to hear the Pin Stripe BB. I was also fortunate enough to catch Tuba Fats' Chosen Few, the Mahogany, Treme, Hurricane (from Holland), and Hot 8 Brass Bands there.

Later, of course, they built a bandstand against the windows facing Rampart. And expanding from brass bands, Donna booked a variety of New Orleans music (mostly jazz) into the club.

Memories from Donna's:

The Tom McDermott Quartet had just played a version of "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gave to Me" which took all sorts of unexpected and unusual turns. I remember one passage in which drummer Shannon Powell was playing in a different, but related, tempo than the rest of the group. As they played the last note, a police car zoomed down North Rampart, sirens blaring. Bassist Matt Perrine laughed and said, "Oh, no - the trad police!"

Uncle Lionel Batiste coming into the club, dressed as sharp as a tack, and dancing with all the young ladies to whatever band was playing.

Speaking of Mr. Batiste - standing near him as the Treme Brass Band was playing and realizing just how interesting and creative his bass drumming is.

Hearing Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers' dark, spooky version of "Light Up." One young man took the message of the song to heart and lit up a joint in the middle of the floor. Donna, who was sensitive to illegal shenanigans in her club, came over the bar like some sort of action hero and had the guy out the door in seconds.

The sitters-in: you never knew who was going to show up to play - Leroy Jones, Nicholas Payton, David Torkanowsky, Kermit, visiting musicians from Europe or Japan. One night Tom McDermott was playing with the young band Loose Marbles when veteran trumpeter Jack Fine came in and sat at the bar. He stayed there all night with his horn on the bar, and whenever he felt like it, he'd pick up the trumpet and join in from his barstool.

And on a couple of occasions, Donna's was where I experienced some of the best music I have ever heard in my life. I can think of at least two evenings when Evan Christopher and Tom McDermott, playing either with a quartet or as a duo, "lifted the bandstand," as Thelonious Monk put it - they played music that transcended "good music" and touched another level.

Donna's husband Charlie manned the kitchen. I still think his barbecue ribs were the best I ever had.

Donna and Charlie decided to close the club for a variety of reasons. Charlie has had health problems, and Donna has been commuting to and from Florida, where she has a teaching job. But the primary reason seems to be the condition of the building; the landlord has been unwilling to make repairs, and the building has been slowly falling apart. Incidentally, this was one of the reasons for the demise of the Funky Butt - and that building was owned by the same landlord.

I don't live in New Orleans; I was a couple-of-times-a-year visitor to Donna's. I doubt anyone associated with the club would remember me. But I owe some of my most cherished memories to that little club on the corner of North Rampart and St. Ann. So long, Donna's - I'll miss you.

Wonder and Madness at 78 Revolutions per Minute

My record collecting has been out of hand for years. My wife just shakes her head when I come home with more recorded music. But until fairly recently, I could tell her, "Well, at least I don't collect 78s." Those who have read this blog regularly know that I can no longer make that claim.

Record collectors are a little nuts anyway, but collecting 78 RPM records is just over the top. In an age when an iPod can hold 1000 hours of music, filling your home with highly breakable pieces of shellac which hold six minutes of music is just ridiculous. And they will fill your home - 78s take up a lot of room. I'm up to seven boxes.

So why bother? Well, the reason I got into 78s is that there is still some music which can't be heard any other way. Not much, these days, with some exhaustive CD reissue programs around the world, but there are still 78s that have not been reissued in any other form. The Boyce Brown record on the Collector's Item label (discussed in an earlier post) is a prime example. I've got more than a few very cool records which are unavailable in any other form.

And even though most of the stuff is available in other formats, there is still something kind of magical about hearing the music as the musicians expected it to be heard at the time. I'm not saying that they wouldn't have preferred more advanced technology if it had been available, but most of the music issued on 78s was conceived to be issued in that form.

And a well-made 78 in good condition can sound wonderful. There is always some surface noise present, but the ears quickly adjust to that. Many LP and CD reissues of material from 78s filter out the surface noise, which also takes out frequencies of the music, removing some of the "life" from the sound. I never had any complaint about the sound quality of my CD reissue of the 1923 recordings by A. J. Piron's New Orleans Orchestra - until I found one of the original records in excellent condition. The 78 sounds much better than the CD. There are certain records in my collection that I cherish for their sound - I can hear Louis Armstrong's breath through his horn and hear Eddie South's bow on the strings of his violin.

There's more to my love of these old records - something less tangible. They are artifacts from the past - windows to a forgotten world. As I hold or play a 78, I often speculate on who originally owned the record - why did they buy this particular record - did they enjoy it? I recently bought a box of records from an antique dealer in Chattanooga. There were a few records in the box which "didn't belong" - they obviously came from another source. But most of the box seemed to be from a single collection. Whose records were they?

Well, the original owner was probably from the country, presumably somewhere in East Tennessee or North Georgia. The vast majority of the records are what we would now call country music, but the style was usually called "hillbilly" at the time. Most of the records come from a ten-year period starting in 1924; the earliest record is a real gem from that year - an Okeh record by Henry Whitter, the first "hillbilly" artist to record. The record buyer's tastes leaned, for the most part, toward the more commercial side of country music - Carson Robison is the most-represented artist, and his music was slicker and more "citified" than the more down-home hillbilly musicians. But there were plenty of amazing "real-deal" records in the box, too, by groups like the West Virginia Night Owls, the North Carolina Ramblers, and the Carter Family.

The person (or family) who accumulated this collection was probably fairly religious - there are quite a few "white gospel" discs in the stack. He (or they) was probably Irish, and not too many generations removed from the Emerald Isle. There are Irish songs performed in country style (like a Conqueror record by Mac and Bob), but there is one straight-up record of Irish dance tunes by the Four Provinces Orchestra, an Irish band out of Philadelphia.

My precursor's record buying tailed off around 1934, but there were a few later records in the stack, like the bizarre gospel song "Television in the Sky," recorded in 1939 by the West Virginia trio of Cap, Andy and Flip. The most recent record is a 1942 Roy Acuff.

I owe this mysterious person a debt for bringing together this fascinating collection of early country music. And I'll keep buying those ten- and twelve-inch shellac discs until I totally run out of room.

Goodbye to Two Giants

I haven't posted here in awhile, and it gives me no pleasure that this post is a memorial. Two giants of avant-garde jazz (for lack of a better term) have died in the past few days. Trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon passed last week at the age of 84. And tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, 81, left us yesterday.

For much of their careers, these two men were, to an extent, outsiders - even by the already marginalized standards of avant-garde improvised music. Both were founding members of organizations whose purpose was to encourage and promote the somewhat challenging music created by their members; Dixon was the primary mover behind the Jazz Composers Guild, which grew out of the October Revolution in Jazz, a week-long series of concerts he set up in 1964. Anderson was a founding member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), the Chicago organization that gave a forum to Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, and many others. The Jazz Composers Guild soon fell apart, split by the differing aims of its members, but the AACM is still going strong.

On his first recording, a 1962 album by the Bill Dixon/Archie Shepp Quartet, Dixon sounds like a fairly conventional free-jazz trumpet player, if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms. It was soon apparent that his music went beyond Jazz with a capital J, however. His magnificent 1966 record Intents and Purposes sounds like it has at least one foot in the realm of contemporary classical music. And his trumpet style developed into one of the most distinctive and unusual in jazz - he used smears, spaces, squeezed notes, blats, sounds that were more air that pitch, and multiphonics. And it all worked; when a Dixon solo was over, it felt like a unified statement, not like a series of effects.

Bill Dixon was, by many accounts, a difficult figure to deal with. I suspect that he would have responded to such a statement by saying that he was uncompromising. He became a professor at Bennington College at Vermont in the late 1960s, and remained there for many years. Dixon recorded infrequently in the seventies and eighties, but recordings became more frequent during the last two decades of his life. His solo on "With (Exit)," from Cecil Taylor's 1966 Conquistador! album, is still one of the most striking passages in recorded music. Just as the piano, basses, and drums begin to get more agitated, Dixon enters with long, ethereal notes separated by spaces, the intervals carefully chosen. It's a beautiful moment.

For many years, Fred Anderson was even more obscure than Bill Dixon, at least to the world outside of Chicago. He made strong contributions to Joseph Jarman's first two albums in 1966 and 1968, then didn't record again for a decade. When I was a young man learning about jazz, I knew Anderson as a somewhat legendary figure who had contributed to the Chicago avant-garde scene of the the sixties, but I had no idea if he had ever recorded again. Somewhere along the way, he became something of a father figure to younger Chicago musicians such as Hamid Drake and Ken Vandermark. Recordings became more frequent, and he developed a strong reputation in the avant-garde jazz world.

His tenor sound was filled with history; you could hear Coleman Hawkins and Gene Ammons in his playing, although his influences were so well internalized that he never sounded like anyone except himself. While Dixon went into academia, Anderson became a saloon owner - his Velvet Lounge on the Near South Side of Chicago became a mecca for musicians and fans. For those of us who never had the chance to hear him there, there are several live albums from the Velvet Lounge, including an 80th birthday tribute CD and DVD.

Recordings by Dixon and Anderson are easier to find now than in the past, although there are still plenty of gaps in what is available. Hear them on record, since we can't hear them in person anymore. Every year, every month, fewer giants walk the earth. We've just lost two.

Brother Matthew

When I was a high school kid trying to learn all I could about jazz, I found a book in my school's library that fascinated me; I checked it out over and over again. It was the first (1955) edition of Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer's A Pictorial History of Jazz. Even though that book was pretty outdated (it was nearly 20 years old by the time I discovered it), it was the first book that helped me get a handle on the complex, sometimes baffling history of the music. I spent hours poring over the rather poorly-reproduced photographs and captions, trying to understand how all of these musicians fit together, and wondering what they sounded like, since I had only heard recordings by a few of them. In retrospect, the Pictorial History presents a pretty flawed and incomplete view of jazz history, but it was very helpful to me at the time, and I was glad to find a battered copy in a used book store as an adult.

One picture particularly intrigued me, for some reason, and I'm still not entirely sure why. It's a picture of group that only existed for one day, and only for the purpose of making a 78 RPM record for the Collector's Item label. The only one of the five musicians who could be considered to be a fairly big name in the jazz world was cornetist Wild Bill Davidson, although pianist Mel Henke did a good bit of recording later, both in the jazz and pop worlds. But the most interesting figure in the photograph was the small-boned, wispy man with the thinning hair who was playing the alto saxophone. Boyce Brown was described in the text as "obscure," but I somehow knew right away that he was someone I wanted to hear.


Boyce Matthew Brown (1910-1959) was not your typical rough-and-tumble Chicago jazzman; he was introspective, temperate, and lived with his mother. He wrote poetry, read philosophy, and listened to the music of impressionist composers like Debussy and Delius. He was musically literate, but his extremely poor eyesight made sight-reading difficult for him, so he did most of his playing in small Chicago jazz bands. Brown's playing is striking and unusual, even after the passage of many years. He improvised with great drive, but at the same time, his phrasing was often asymmetrical and off-center, and his note choices were unusual.

Boyce Brown recorded fewer than a dozen times in his career. His recording debut was with Paul Mares and His Friars Society Orchestra in 1935; this session is currently available on a Retrieval CD called New Orleans Rhythm Kings: The Complete Set. He is a racehorse out of the gate on the first tune, "Nagasaki;" it's clear that a special talent has been turned loose.

Perhaps his most well-known recordings are the four 1939 sides which Jimmy McPartland's band made for the Decca Chicago Jazz album. This album (a set of six 78 RPM records) attracted a good bit of attention at the time. George Avakian's orginal liner notes are worth quoting:

To most, this record ("China Boy") will serve as an introduction to Boyce Brown's alto sax. He shares a chorus with Bud Jacobson and gives us a typical solo: perfectly executed, fast, full of notes, but completely logical and amazingly conceived. Boyce's personality is expressed in his music - a statement which has worn thin, but here it is the cold truth. Boyce is unlike any musician you have ever met, and his is a completely individual and unorthodox style. Take warning that Boyce will need a lot of listening. His complexity makes a casual hearing worthless. Careful attention will be rewarded by an understanding of the subtleties of Boyce's ideas, which are distinctively his own.

Somewhat amazingly, the publicity the Decca album generated led to Brown winning the "Best Alto Sax" category in the 1940 Down Beat magazine readers' poll - above Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter! Unfortunately, this was "little more than a prelude to obscurity," as writer Richard Sudhalter has said. Boyce had one more record date on which he was prominently featured: the aforementioned Collector's Item session. It's not entirely clear who the leader of the session was; there is no band name on the labels, although they do have all the musicians' names. The sides are often listed in discographies under Wild Bill Davidson's name, and the band is sometimes called the Collector's Item Cats. The matrix numbers in the run-off groove area of the record start with the letters "BB," however, which leads me to believe that it was Boyce's date.

The two issued sides, "On a Blues Kick" and "I Surrender Dear," have never been reissued, as far as I can tell - although "On a Blues Kick" is scheduled for issue on a future volume of Allen Lowe's mammoth blues history set, Really the Blues? (dubbed from my copy of the original record, by the way). These two sides perhaps represent Brown's greatest recorded solos - thoughtful, interesting, and somehow logical and odd at the same time. And for me, they are the reason that I started collecting 78s - I wanted to hear these legendary recordings, and there was no way to do so except to find the original issue.

Because of the rarity of these recordings, I have posted them in mp3 form for listeners to hear or download. Click the links below to hear this rare record. It's unclear who the copyright holder is; if contacted by such a party, I will remove these recordings upon request.

Boyce Brown's story took an unusual turn, at least for a jazz musician. This quiet, thoughtful man converted to Catholicism in 1952, and became a monk in the Servite order the next year. He played the saxophone only occasionally after that, once for a 1956 ABC-Paramount album called Brother Matthew With Eddie Condon's Jazz Band. He agreed to make the album, in part, to raise money for the monastery. These days the record is almost universally panned, but it's not so bad, in my opinion. Brother Matthew is rusty, but his ideas are interesting, and Condon's guys sound like they're having a alcohol-fueled good time. Brown died in the Servite monastery three years later.

The best source for information about Boyce Brown is probably Richard Sudhalter's book Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz. It contains a quote from George Avakian, made over 50 years after his notes for the Chicago Jazz album:

People hearing him for the first time were just flabbergasted. I know I was. Where did this guy get this odd way of playing? Where did it come from? I guess there was a rather mysterious quality in all that.

On a Blues Kick

I Surrender Dear