This is the latest in our regular series of blog features, You Don't Know Jazz! With Dr. Lewis Porter.

Series Introduction

Episode 1: A Blues Recording From the Congo -- In 1906!

Episode 2: The Origins of the Word "Jazz"

Episodes 3-5: Myths About Jazz -- Part One, Part Two, Part Three

Episode Six: Putting Louis Armstrong in Context: Part One, Part Two

Episode Seven: Myths About Early Jazz Drumming

(PLEASE NOTE: If the reader uses any of the material from this series, no matter how brief, this article and its web address must be cited as the source. Thank you for respecting the intellectual property of Dr. Porter.)

Some Revelations about Two Jazz Films, plus Citizen Kane!

Dr. Porter reveals some unknown facts about jazz on film, plus Citizen Kane. Read on!

Of course, I’m most active as a jazz pianist and jazz scholar, but I do have other areas of interest: one area where I’ve also spent a great deal of time after jazz is film, followed by classical and world music.

In this blog I’m presenting three of my own discoveries from the world of film. The first two are jazz-related, while the third is a bonus: I reveal an influence on perhaps the most famous film of all time, Citizen Kane, a connection that I don’t believe has ever been noted before.

1. Jammin’ The Blues

Jammin the Blues is one of the most admired short films in the history of jazz, partly because it is one of the few film records of the legendary tenor Lester “Pres” Young, about whom I have published two books.

Filmed in August 1944 by famed still photographer Gjon Mili, Jammin’ the Blues is equally famous for its visual artistry.

Pres and the other musicians, such as trumpeter Harry Edison and guitarist Barney Kessel, recorded the soundtrack in a studio before Mili began filming. During the days of filming, the recordings were played back numerous times, and Mili asked the musicians to try and match or "mime” their work on the recordings every time.

Perhaps because Mili's background was in still photography, he tended to stage the shots - that is, he would set everything up artistically the way he wanted it, put the camera in place and film, not moving the camera within each shot. Then he edited the shots together, and they are pretty well coordinated with the music.

It is a bit humorous to note that while Edison, Kessel and others do a good job of matching their fingerings to the pre-recorded music – Edison said later in a filmed interview that he made a real effort to do that - Pres doesn’t seem to be trying at all. In the very first shot, Pres’s fingers show he's playing a different solo from what you hear.

This is the most famous shot of the whole film: at first, all you see is an abstract, a circle within a circle. After the opening credits, these circles start to move, and we realize that these circles are in fact the rims of Young’s famed porkpie hat.

Young’s "porkpie" hat was his trademark, which he created by taking a dress hat and folding it down in a certain way. He actually demonstrated how he did this in a pictorial essay in Ebony magazine:

The one public figure who was closely identified with a porkpie hat before Pres was comic film actor and director Buster Keaton. In fact, I have noticed that this famous opening shot of Jammin' the Blues was based on the opening shot of a 1923 short film by Keaton, The Balloonatic! I think of it as Mili's tribute to Keaton, probably inspired by the fact that both artists wore porkpie hats.

Not only does Keaton’s film contain the same shot, but the shot is the opening shot of the film, as it is in Mili's film, and it is lit with dramatic contrast, as in Mili’s film.

I’ve never seen the relationship between these two films noted before.

2. The Blue Gardenia

The Blue Gardenia is a 1953 American film by the noted Vienna-born director, Fritz Lang (1890-1976). This isn't a jazz film, but one of its most famous scenes revolves around Nat "King" Cole, who appears in the film playing the piano and singing the film’s theme song.

Let me summarize the plot of this scene. A woman has just learned that her boyfriend has found somebody else, so she agrees to go on a date with someone new, an artist, played by Raymond Burr, later well-known to television audiences as Perry Mason and Ironside.

This artist takes her first to a bar, where Nat Cole sings and plays “Blue Gardenia,” then to his apartment to see his paintings. He plays a recording of this same song as background music. He then tries to rape her, and she defends herself, apparently killing him.

The "Blue Gardenia" theme re-appears in the background, now distorted and anxious. Krin Gabbard, an expert on jazz films and professor at SUNY in Stony Brook, NY, has written perceptively of this scene, and we thank him for providing a clip of this key scene.

Nobody before now has noted that it is Lang's "homage" to his contemporary, the monumentally influential British-born director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980).

Hitchcock's first film with sound, in 1929, was called Blackmail. In fact, Hitchcock filmed a silent version more or less simultaneously. It revolves around a long scene whose premise is precisely the same as the Lang scene, even down to the fact that the date is a painter, and that the musical theme appears in distorted form after the murder.

Perhaps Lang noticed a similarity between the script he was shooting and Hitchcock's classic, and decided to emulate it, even discussing this with the music composer for the film. In the Hitchcock film, the musical theme is played by the artist himself at the piano, not on a recording.

You can compare the two scenes for yourself:

If you would like to watch Hitchcock's entire film, you can find it here.

3. Citizen Kane

You might think that there is nothing more to learn about Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ amazing 1941 film, which has been praised and scrutinized countless times. But there is something unusual in a scene towards the end of the film which caught my eye.

In this scene, Kane's wife leaves him, and, standing alone in her room, he snaps – in his rage, he destroys all her little trinkets, turns over shelves, as he moves stiffly around the room like a Frankenstein monster--and that's the key.

Welles sometimes spoke disparagingly of the Kane character that he played so brilliantly, and had fun hiding a number of "insider" references into this, his first feature film. This is one such reference: the 1939 film Son of Frankenstein has a similar scene, where the monster destroys a roomful of items. Watch in particular how the monster moves when he strides across the room at about 0:20, and compare it to the way Kane moves. This is another of Welles's methods of "deflating" his Kane character.

The other revealing similarity is that in the Welles film, Kane suddenly stops when he comes across a snow globe that, we learn later, reminds him of his youth. In Son Of Frankenstein, the monster discovers a children's book of Fairy Tales, and that's what calms him down. By the way, Boris Karloff was a marvelous English actor, great at the Frankenstein monster and great in non-monster roles as well.

STAY TUNED for the next installment of this blog! Lewis

This is the latest in our regular series of blog features, You Don't Know Jazz! With Dr. Lewis Porter.

Series Introduction

Episode 1: A Blues Recording From the Congo -- In 1906!

Episode 2: The Origins of the Word "Jazz"

Episodes 3-5: Myths About Jazz -- Part One, Part Two, Part Three

Episode Six: Putting Louis Armstrong in Context: Part One, Part Two

(PLEASE NOTE: If the reader uses any of the material from this series, no matter how brief, this article and its web address must be cited as the source. Thank you for respecting the intellectual property of Dr. Porter.)

Myths About Early Jazz Drumming

Dr. Porter debunks some common myths about early jazz drumming and drummers. Read on!

Just Keeping Time? No!

You always hear the same about drumming before bebop: “Early drummers just kept time.”
“Just keep time?” I don’t even know what that means. To me, the only thing that “just keeps time” is a metronome, and any drummer who plays like that would get fired in a second!

Click here to hear what “just keeping time” sounds like to me!

That’s not what you hear on early jazz recordings. People simply haven’t listened to enough jazz from the teens, twenties, or thirties to know what they’re talking about. It is true that the drums can be hard to hear on too many of these early recordings, so you have to know which recordings to listen to.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB)

Let’s start with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB). The ODJB was first band to record jazz, and the 78s they made in 1917 for Victor and Columbia in New York launched the worldwide jazz craze.

On “Original Jass Band One Step,” one of their first recordings for Victor on February 26th, 1917, drummer Tony Sbarbaro (aka Spargo) is very audible. What you actually hear is him going crazy! He plays all over the place; the only piece of the drum kit he uses sparingly is the cymbal.

It’s ridiculous to say early drummers like Sbarbaro are “just keeping time,” because clearly there’s a lot going on. If anything, if you really hear them, what a modern listener would say is that it’s too busy. What it sounds like to a modern listener is that they’re going crazy all over the drum set, and filling things in all the time with “drum rudiments,” the fundamental patterns every kid in a parade band learns.

On "Livery Stable Blues," from the same session, we can clearly hear Sbarbaro's booming bass drum:

This contradicts another common misconception about early jazz drummers: that they didn’t use bass drums in the recording studio, because it made the recording needle jump and the engineers couldn’t record it.

In this case, I’m not going to say this is a complete myth. There is a kernel of truth to this that has grown into a big misunderstanding. Because most people haven’t actually listened to early jazz, too many have taken a situation that happened in certain recording studios, or repeated a story they have been told, and they’ve spread it to apply to all jazz recordings of the early days.

Even the earliest jazz drummers had bass drums, and big, loud ones (see the photo of the ODJB above)! They were bigger than what drummers use today. And it was an African American drummer from New Orleans, Dee Dee Chandler, who invented one of the first bass drum pedals around 1895.

The recording engineer on the ODJB’s Victor sessions was a man named Charles Sooy. Sooy had experience recording symphony orchestras, and he allowed Sbarbaro to use his full kit in the studio, including his bass drum. He also carefully rehearsed the band to capture the best possible balance of instruments, to overcome some of the limitations of the acoustic recording equipment of the era.

Take a look at this 1937 newsreel reenactment of the ODJB’s Victor recording session, with the original band members. At 1:53, you can see Sooy himself at the recording console, as well as a nice shot of Sbarbaro’s foot on the bass drum pedal.

Beware, though, that this glorification of the ODJB gets many things wrong - for example, it falsely states that Victor transported them to New York to record in 1916, and the band was referring to its music back then as "swinging!"

Warren "Baby" Dodds

Warren “Baby” Dodds, from New Orleans, became well known from the recordings he made starting in 1923 in and around Chicago with King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton.

Dodds’ famous early recordings were made in the Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana in 1923. Gennett’s recording setup was primitive in comparison to what was used by the big labels in New York – Gennett’s studios, in a converted piano factory, weren’t even soundproof, so bands had to stop playing when trains passed outside.

Unlike Sooy, Gennett’s head engineer Ezra Wickemeyer didn’t allow Dodds to use his bass drum, or even a snare. So the highly versatile Dodds played primarily on wood blocks and his drum rims, as on this excerpt from “Chimes Blues," accompanying Louis Armstrong's first recorded solo ever:

Wickemeyer did allow Dodds to play his Chinese tom-tom, which we can hear him play on this excerpt from “Mandy Lee Blues,” as he accompanies his brother Johnny’s clarinet solo:

So as we can hear, it’s not that Dodds or other early drummers just played the wood blocks or things like that. The truth is it depended on the studio – if it had a rickety wood floor that would shake, and whether the engineer was familiar with how to record drums, because that’s something they hadn’t dealt with so much in the early days. It also depended on the band, and how important they felt it was to get the bass drum onto the record.
The bottom line is there were plenty of drums in early jazz, if you listen for them.

By the time you get to the thirties, with drummers like Jo Jones and Sid Catlett, you have a style that’s a lot less busy and is more streamlined, where they’re using the hi-hat cymbals to create a certain kind of propulsiveness and not just going wild on the drums. Then by the Bebop era, you have a heavy emphasis on the big suspended cymbal, what they call the ride cymbal, and much less use of the drums themselves when you’re accompanying somebody.

"Just keeping time?” I don’t think so!

FOR FURTHER STUDY:

—The website jazz-on-line.com has thousands of great early jazz tracks 
for listening or free download.

Stay tuned to the WBGO blog for more installments of “You Don’t Know Jazz!” by Dr. Lewis Porter.