Podcasts about Red Norvo

Warren Wolf's History of the Vibraphone pays tribute to 11 legendary vibe players, including Lionel Hampton, Gary Burton, and Dave Samuels, presenting a deep dive into the vibraphone's jazz legacy. Starting in classical music under his vibraphonist father's guidance, Wolf trained on vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, drums, and piano from a young age in Baltimore. Influenced by his dad's extensive jazz record collection and the local organ trio jazz scene, he eventually studied under Dave Samuels at Berklee, where he later taught. Wolf's rich blend of early classical rigor and exposure to jazz and R&B shaped his style, which now spans swing to fusion.  In History of the Vibraphone, Wolf performs each track as an homage to original artists, joined by saxophonist Tim Green, pianist Alex Brown, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Carroll “CV” Dashiell III. Standout selections like Gary Burton's “Captain Señor Mouse” and Samuels's “Spring High” reflect Wolf's influences and his mission to celebrate lesser-known vibes players. Currently a professor at Peabody Conservatory, Wolf remains dedicated to jazz education. Baltimore's thriving scene is central to his work, with venues like Keystone Korner and An Die Musik hosting vibrant jam sessions. Wolf's upcoming tour hints at a possible sequel to this record, potentially honoring Red Norvo, Tito Puente, and Mike Mainieri. ⁠https://njjs.org/⁠ https://www.warrenwolf.com/ History of the Vibraphone https://open.spotify.com/album/0raNJZzMHYyOr9R398NJ3E?si=CkIRJL2-Rm2iFwruCESL-Q

Songs include : Worried Man Blues by the Carter Family. Don't Worry Bout That Mule by Louis Jordan, Worried Blues by Gladys Bentley, Worried Over You by Red Norvo and Do I Worry by the Ink Spots. 

IKE QUEBEC “QUINTET” – New York, July 18, 1944Blue HarlemIke Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Milt Hinton (b) J.C. Heard (d) “SWINGTET” – New York, September 25, 1944If I had you, Mads About YouJonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Ike Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Oscar Pettiford (b) J.C. Heard (d) JOHN HARDEE “SEXTET” – New York, February 28, 1946Hard tack, If I had you, Mad about youJohn Hardee (ts) Sammy Benskin (p) Tiny Grimes (g) John Simmons (b) Sidney Catlett (d)“SWINGTETT” – New York, May 31, 1946River edge rock,C jam blues, Flying home, Tiny's boogie woogieTrummy Young (tb) John Hardee (ts) Marlowe Morris (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Jimmy Butts (b) Eddie Nicholson (d) EDMOND HALL “CELESTE QUARTET” – New York, February 5, 1941Edmond Hall blues, Celestial expressEdmond Hall (cl) Meade Lux Lewis (celeste) Charlie Christian (g) Israel Crosby (b) “ALL STAR QUINTET” – New York, January 25, 1944Rumpin' in '44, Seein' RedEdmond Hall (cl) Red Norvo (vib) Teddy Wilson (p) Carl Kress (g) Johnny Williams (b) y su Swingtet : Jonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Continue reading Puro Jazz 15 de octubre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

IKE QUEBEC “QUINTET” – New York, July 18, 1944Blue HarlemIke Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Milt Hinton (b) J.C. Heard (d) “SWINGTET” – New York, September 25, 1944If I had you, Mads About YouJonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Ike Quebec (ts) Ram Ramirez (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Oscar Pettiford (b) J.C. Heard (d) JOHN HARDEE “SEXTET” – New York, February 28, 1946Hard tack, If I had you, Mad about youJohn Hardee (ts) Sammy Benskin (p) Tiny Grimes (g) John Simmons (b) Sidney Catlett (d)“SWINGTETT” – New York, May 31, 1946River edge rock,C jam blues, Flying home, Tiny's boogie woogieTrummy Young (tb) John Hardee (ts) Marlowe Morris (p) Tiny Grimes (g) Jimmy Butts (b) Eddie Nicholson (d) EDMOND HALL “CELESTE QUARTET” – New York, February 5, 1941Edmond Hall blues, Celestial expressEdmond Hall (cl) Meade Lux Lewis (celeste) Charlie Christian (g) Israel Crosby (b) “ALL STAR QUINTET” – New York, January 25, 1944Rumpin' in '44, Seein' RedEdmond Hall (cl) Red Norvo (vib) Teddy Wilson (p) Carl Kress (g) Johnny Williams (b) y su Swingtet : Jonah Jones (tp) Tyree Glenn (tb) Continue reading Puro Jazz 15 de octubre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

On this episode: Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra (Beiderbecke), Singin' The Blues Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Red Norvo, Hank Jones, Sleepwalker Boogie Art Pepper, Jazz Me Blues Milt Jackson, Sermonette Ron Carter, Eric Dolphy And Mal Waldron, Bass Duet Machito with Cannonball Adderley, Congo Mulence Dave Brubeck/Tony Bennett, That Old Black Magic Ray Bryant(p), Walter Booker Jr.(b) & Freddie Waits(ds), Gotta Travel On Ray Charles, Sidewinder Joni James, Just One Of Those Things Herbie Mann, Never Ending Song of Love (LP Version) Earl "Fatha" Hines, Pretty Baby The Crusaders, Double Bubble Wynton Marsalis, New Orleans Bump

Features vintage recordings by Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Red Norvo.  We also learn a little about Oscar DuMont's Orchestra and Ronnaldo answers Listener Mail. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat.  Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * The music featured in this podcast is considered Public Domain.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

The early recordings by the Charlie Barnet Orchestra (and Glen Island Casino Orchestra and California Ramblers) . . before he hit it big, good records featuring the leader, Kermit Simmons, Chris Griffin (trumpet), Don Morres (clarinet), Bill Miller and Red Norvo (piano) and others . . transitional swing! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

The melody had three daddies — in 1944 bandleaders Duke Ellington and Harry James collaborated with alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges to develop the tune — but it was those sassy lyrics that made the song: I never cared much for moonlit skies, I never winked back at fireflies, But now that the stars are in your eyes, I'm Beginning to See the Light!Those words came from the smart pen of the great Don George. In his book, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia praised George's witty use of a list of “light” images and his ability to deal with a difficult song. “Ellington's tune was particularly hard to set,” Furia noted, “since each A section consists of the same, driving vamp-like phrase repeated three times over before the melody finally changes.” In his way, George heightens this musical insistence, using the same rhyme for the first three lines of each section, then “George ends by rekindling one of the oldest songwriting cliches, mixing his metaphors of light and heat:” But now that your lips are burning mine, I'm beginning to see the light.Beyond the LightWhile Don George surely is best known as one of Ellington's prime lyricists, his career spanned another 40 years following the Duke era and included such pop hits as "The Yellow Rose of Texas” for the iconic Mitch Miller.George also worked on special material for many performers, from Nat King Cole and Patti Page to The Pointer Sisters.His lyrics are a study guide for wordsmiths of all stripes. For instance, in David Jenness' and Don Velsey's discussion of composer Moose Charlap, they note that one of the cleverest apologies ever comes from a 1956 George lyric for a famous Charlap melody: The girl in my arms meant nothing to me, I Was Telling Her About You.On the ChartsBut let's get back to “Beginning to See the Light.” A year after its composition, the song spent several weeks on “Your Hit Parade” and charted three times in 1945, with co-writer Harry James' version leading the pack. Ellington vocalist Joya Sherrill, who was only 17, had just joined the band when they recorded the tune in an arrangement that featured co-author Johnny Hodges on sax and Lawrence Brown on trombone.Jazz instrumentals of song have been recorded by bassist Oscar Pettiford, pianist Art Tatum, drummer Chico Hamilton and vibist Red Norvo. Vocalists Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra all have made memorable renditions.More recently, Ann Hampton Callaway included it in her 1996 tribute to Fitzgerald, guitarist Martin Taylor and the David Grisman Quartet recorded it in 1999, and in 2004 — 60 years after the song's creation — it was revived by the late, great Al Jarreau.Our Take on the TuneOur latest Duke Ellington number, this is a sweet vehicle for sassy solos by everyone in the band. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Features recordings by Artie Shaw, Jan Savitt, Jimmie Grier and Red Norvo.  We also listen to some classic spots featuring Pepsi Cola. Consider supporting The Big Band and Swing Podcast by becoming a Hepcat.  Learn more at SupportSwing.com. * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

Tonight's show has lots of rhythm, spanning 1926 to 1999: Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton & His Red Hot Peppers, Dizzy Gillespie with Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Red Norvo, Hank Jones. Also Machito with Cannonball Adderley, Milt Jackson, Dave Brubeck with Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Ron Carter with Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron, Ray Bryant, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Herbie Mann, The Crusaders, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Wynton Marsalis.

Elf jazz classics: van de dramatische ballad 'I'll be seeing you' door Billie Holiday, via een live-uitvoering van het swingende 'Walking Shoes' door Gerry Mulligan, naar 'Only a Paper Moon' door zanger en pianist Nat King Cole en het wonderschone 'Something to Live For' van Ella Fitzgerald. Je hoort het allemaal (in stereo!) in deze eerste editie van onze Jazz special, voorzien van een korte toelichting bij elk nummer door jazz-guru Erik Nap ('bij Count Basie springen de veters uit je schoenen'). Tussendoor hebben we het ook nog even over Candy Dulfer, Blood, Sweat & Tears en Bob Dylan. Gun jezelf dit uurtje oorstrelende jazz. PLAYLIST: 1. Way down yonder (1955) Dutch Swing College Band 2. I'll be seeing you (1935) Billie Holiday 3. Walking Shoes (1954) Gerry Mulligan Quartet 4. Only a Paper Moon (1956) Nat King Cole 5. Doodlin' (1955) Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers/Horace Silver 6. Something to live for (1965) Ella Fitzgerald 7. Lester leaps in Count Basie 8. Slam Slam Blues (1954) Red Norvo met o.a. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Slam Stewart 9. That's All (1982) Sarah Vaughan 10. Jim (1975) Clark Terry and the Oscar Peterson Trio 11. It Had to Be You (1961) Erroll Garner En laat ons even weten wat je ervan vindt op Instagram: Vakwerk_podcast of via de mail: vakwerk-podcast@kpnmail.nl

In this Podcast Extra of "The Big Band and Swing Podcast" we examine and listen to Disc #143 of the V-Disc Collection.  This V-Disc features vintage recordings by Red Norvo and John Kirby. (E005)

This week we continue our look at the World War Two recording program known as V-Discs. We are playing from a collection of 4 cds from Time-Life Records. This is a great set which has many varied performers. Some of the V-Discs we will be listening to include Kay Starr, Jimmie Lunceford, Red Norvo, Bea Waid, Slim Gallaird, and others. I also have another short history of V-Discs from another source different than the one in Part One. I hope you enjoy this look at the program from World War II known as V-Discs. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

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Many “river” songs try to tap into the romance of riverboats, but few can claim to be born on the river and be written by an actual steamboater. New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Arodin got his start in music in the 1920s working in bands that entertained on excursion boats that traveled up and down the Mississippi River. “(Up a) Lazy River,” Arodin's most famous competition, was a tossed-off composition based on a common jazz chord progression that Arodin learned on the boats to use as a warm-up exercise before a performance. For the tune, Sid simply slowed it down to a lazier pace.Sidney's StartNow, the story goes that at 15 Arodin got his first clarinet and took lessons for only two months. This was the sum total of his "legit" musical training, until years later when he took a week off to teach himself a bit of music theory after being fired from a band for not knowing how to read the sheet music.His very first gig was a Saturday night dance in his hometown of Westwego, Louisiana. When a combo hired from New Orleans hit town minus an ill clarinetist, Arodin ran barefoot through mud and oyster shells to grab his own clarinet.From his 16th birthday onward, Arodin was rarely at home. First, he was hired on the riverboats, then he eventually made it to New York City where he worked with Johnny Stein's Original New Orleans Jazz Band beginning in 1922. (In the mid-'20s in that group he played with the young still-unknown Jimmy Durante.)The Hoagy Carmichael ConnectionIt was during Sidney's New York years that he met his famous collaborator. As Hoagy Carmichael wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Sometimes I Wonder, it was a mutual friend, Harry Hostetter, who introduced them.“Harry met a lot of musicians in the Broadway area,” Hoagy wrote, “and he came running up to me one night.”“‘This guy, Sidney Arodin, plays a pretty clarinet and he's got a tune you gotta hear, Hoag.'”“‘Where?'”“‘Over on 56th Street in a clip joint.'”That night, Hoagy and Harry dropped in. “It was a shabby brick-front walk-up on the second floor,” he recalled, “and the only customer was a balding man of about 55 with a hired girl on each arm, drinking champagne. They must have clipped this gent for five hundred at least before they let him out. Harry and I were guests of Sidney's, so none of the girls glanced our way.“Sidney played his tune and I was highly pleased,” Carmichael wrote. “I knew Harry couldn't be wrong. In the ensuing weeks, I wrote a verse and a lyric and titled it ‘Lazy River.'”Carmichael went on, “The ambition of every songwriter was now accomplished, although I didn't know it then — that of having in his folio something on the order of a folk song that could be played and sung in most any manner, something that could be sung all the way through by drunken quartets or by blondes over a piano bar.”Carmichael made the very first recording of “Lazy River” in 1930 for Victor with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti and Red Norvo. That was followed in 1932 with cover versions both by Louis Armstrong and by Phil Harris. One of the most beloved rendering of “Lazy River” came in 1942 with The Mill Brothers' Decca recording, but, hey, there is no shortage of versions to choose from. It is one of the most recorded numbers in the Great American Songbook, and hundreds of covers of “(Up A) Lazy River” have been released, and are still coming out today.Sid's Last YearsIn the 1930s, Arodin returned to Louisiana to gig with combos assembled by assorted New Orleans trumpeters, including Wingy Manone, Sharkey Bonano and Louis Prima. But for his last seven years starting in 1941, Arodin's health failed and his musical appearances became less frequent.Curiously, while he cut quite a few sides with quite a few groups during his playing career, Sidney himself never recorded his most famous song.Doug and The Jazz BoxOur take on the tune: Our buddy Doug Chaffin wasn't feeling too swell earlier this week when Randy Hamilton, Danny Cox and Charlie Bowen landed on his doorstep. However, we brought with us a secret medicine just guaranteed to make him feel better. It was Charlie's new guitar, a sweet 2016 D'Angelico Excel — a hollow-body arch top jazz box — which we immediately put into Doug's experienced hands. Well, after Doug strummed a chord or two, we could hear him already smiling behind his face mask. Listen to him just swinging in the living room on this great old jazz standard.More Doug? Coming Right Up!If you'd like to spend a little more time with Doug Chaffin in your ears, check out to the Doug Channel on our free music streaming service, Radio Floodango. A couple dozen Doug-enriched tracks await you. Click here to get started. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

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Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire" by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode and the shorter spoken-word tracks. Information on Dick Bock, World Pacific, and Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger have all released autobiographies. Densmore's is out of print, but I referred to Manzarek's and Krieger's here. Of the two Krieger's is vastly more reliable. I also used Mick Wall's book on the Doors and Stephen Davis' biography of Jim Morrison. Information about Elektra Records came from Follow the Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, which is available as a free PDF download on Elektra's website. Biographical information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes from this book, written by one of his followers. The Doors' complete studio albums can be bought as MP3s for £14. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are two big problems that arise for anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history, and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast -- things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on a subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragons of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal -- we know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other, related, problem, is deliberate disinformation. This comes up especially for people dealing with military history -- during conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are, and after a war has concluded the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine -- depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars, and on all sides. Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting, since assuming the Presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F Kennedy, to get further into the war, but had needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident provided him with that excuse. On August the second, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters -- they used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time -- President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second "attack", however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and use that as justification to get Congress to authorise him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam, and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then-Captain, later Rear Admiral, Steve Morrison: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the forties, fifties, and early sixties -- there was a lot of back and forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of these genres, and so we've looked at swing, bebop, and modal jazz before now. But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the fifties, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at Cool Jazz. Cool Jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed, that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of "jazz" as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular fifties jazz musician, are very much in the "cool jazz" mode: [Excerpt: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"] And we have mentioned on several occasions the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were cited as influences by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the Modern Folk Quartet: [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Regret?"] We have also occasionally mentioned people like Mose Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode. But we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of bop and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his bop and modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette, who performed together for a couple of weeks in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different lineup, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gil Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Konitz, had all been working for the big band Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, a band which along with the conventional swing instruments also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music: [Excerpt: Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, "To Each His Own"] The Davis Nonette also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody, rather than call-and response riffing: [Excerpt: The Miles Davis Nonette, "Venus De Milo"] Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled "Birth of the Cool", by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a bandleader himself, and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"] While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called the Haig, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big-band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio, with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlowe, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Red Norvo, "This Can't Be Love"] By 1952 Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue, which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide -- the idea of a group with a rhythm section that *didn't* have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual, style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group were the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock. Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes -- a taste for hashish, and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock *loved* the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Harte, a notable jazz drummer, he raised three hundred and fifty dollars to record the first album by Mulligan's new group: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Aren't You Glad You're You?"] Pacific Jazz, the label Bock and Harte founded, soon became *the* dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound.  The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name, as by Chet Baker, or as "Lee Konitz and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet" when Mulligan's old bandmate Konitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz. But both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953 Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star. Not only was Baker a great jazz trumpet player, he was also very good looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song "My Funny Valentine" one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "My Funny Valentine"] But when Baker recorded a vocal version, for his album Chet Baker Sings, it made Baker famous: [Excerpt: Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine"] When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker, but Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazines, and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early fifties. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had *two* of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bock loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956 he was invited by his friend George Avakian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician he was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music -- they were putting it out as a speciality release rather than something that would appeal to the general public -- and so they were happy for Bock to sign Shankar to his own label. Bock renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases, and he produced Shankar's next album,  India's Master Musician: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Charu Keshi"] Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bock, and Bock would also try to find ways to combine Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians including Bud Shank (who we'll hear about again in a future episode) on flute: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken-word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Willy the Shake"] But they also put out spoken-word albums that appealed to Bock's interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Heard. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chet Baker Sings!, but as well as being a jazz fan Heard was very connected in the world of the arts -- he was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley -- and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality. He practiced yoga, and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism: [Excerpt: Gerald Heard, "Paraphrased from the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu"] We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", when Ralph Mentzner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions" -- Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the mescaline trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic drug use, though Heard was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement -- though he always advised Leary and his associates not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle rather than risk the wrath of the establishment -- and he's cited by almost everyone in Leary's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him advocating LSD use. It was Heard's books that made Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religions and associate of Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Heard was one of the people who gave Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Bock also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964 he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on The Psychedelic Experience, which Shankar did as a favour for his friend even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation as its ideas were too controversial: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience (film)] And Heard introduced Bock to other ideas around philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bock became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959 teaching a new style of meditation which he called Transcendental Meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even his birth name -- both "Maharishi" and "Yogi" are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as "the Maharishi". What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu, and only have a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather getting a proper understanding requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language, so my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them as they pertain to mid-sixties psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable, and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school as I understand them seem to centre around an idea of non-separation -- that God is in all things, and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase "I am that, thou art that, all this is that", which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "All This is That"] The other phrase they're singing there, "Jai Guru Dev" is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati -- it means "all hail the divine teacher" or "glory to the heavenly one", and "guru dev" or "guru deva" was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death, as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in "Across the Universe" as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor, and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither -- the rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dev, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claim that the system he taught was Guru Dev's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the monastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught -- but of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism (as best I understand this) is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate -- you should go off and become a monk and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life -- the student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi, or renunciate, but that you could skip straight from being a student to being a Sanyasi and spend your life as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said: "Obviously enough there are two ways of life: the way of the Sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A Sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realises, through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life." What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial, or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions, while there are other people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh -- and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings you could get *more* of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching. There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent seventy years living in a cave and eating only rice -- and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bock became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures: [Excerpt: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Deep Meditation"] Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures, in 1961. In the early sixties, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded, but Bock remained in charge of the label, and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. Aura was much less successful than the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl-group record, "Shooby Dooby", by the Lewis Sisters, two jazz-singing white schoolteachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown: [Excerpt: The Lewis Sisters, "Shooby Dooby"] The most successful act that Aura ever had was Sonny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top twenty hit in 1956 with "Confidential", a song he'd recorded on Specialty Records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Dorinda Morgan: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "Confidential"] But Knight's biggest hit on Aura, "If You Want This Love", only made number seventy-one on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "If You Want This Love"] Knight would later go on to write a novel, The Day the Music Died, which Greil Marcus described as "the bitterest book ever written about how rock'n'roll came to be and what it turned into". Marcus said it was about "how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself: as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts; as white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men". Given that Knight was the artist who did the *best* out of Aura Records, that says a great deal about the label. But one of the bands that Aura signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screamin' Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audiences wanted and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing. They put out two singles on Aura, "Henrietta": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Henrietta"] and "Soul Train": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Soul Train"] Ray Daniels was a stage name -- his birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name -- and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band, and music wasn't really his ideal career.  Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrence did, he'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brothers' band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was OK. What he really liked, though, was jazz -- he was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner, and so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Aura Records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still legal, and been fascinated by its effects, but worried that he couldn't control them -- he couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bock, Bock told him that the best method he knew for doing that was transcendental meditation. Bock gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums, and told him to go to a lecture on transcendental meditation, run by the head of the Maharishi's west-coast organisation, as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robby Krieger, and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had -- they'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusioned with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation, while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA -- though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in "not joining the Army". UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bock California had become the centre of American interest in music from India -- so much so that in 1967 Ravi Shankar would open up a branch of his own Kinnara Music School there. (And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies I've used for the Doors says that Krieger heard about the Maharishi while studying at the Kinnara school. As the only branch of the Kinnara school that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a *really* long commute he wasn't studying there at this point.) Densmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz -- just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens' drummer, who had started missing rehearsals -- he'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brothers, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarek's from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later accounts, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry and European art film, but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid -- he'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of "practical jokes" which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead -- lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy (or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret) and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robby Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, "as if it was common knowledge". His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of rootlessness -- he never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with friends or girlfriends -- and a lack of sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly, but would always disrupt the shows -- he was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive boor when drunk -- by shouting out for them to play "Louie Louie", a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had -- the first time he'd ever performed live -- and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate ways, with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach -- Morrison had decided to stay in LA, and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time, and had lost a great deal of weight, and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs -- this was summer 1965, and the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and the Stones' "Satisfaction" had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than "Louie Louie". Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing, and as Manzarek later put it "he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice". The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Densmore, "Moonlight Drive": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Moonlight Drive"] Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure, for Morrison, though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos, were under Rick and the Ravens' name, and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seem to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty Records, which now owned Aura, and who saw no commercial potential in them, even in one that later became a number one hit when rerecorded a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Hello I Love You"] Although to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks, and stuck new words to it: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"] But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry, and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals but who they otherwise knew as a loud annoying drunk in the audience would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone they were signed by Columbia Records, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a Byrds album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the Byrds themselves, later writing "The Byrds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all. They couldn't play jazz. Hell, they probably didn't even know anything about jazz. They were folk-rock, for cri-sake. Country music. For whites only." (Ray Manzarek was white). They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment -- Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the Animals and the Dave Clark Five used. But they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmore, and that his thoughts had been "Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head." But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school -- Bill Wolff and Robby Krieger. Wolff and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school -- they had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school -- and had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencos by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino: [Excerpt: Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino, "Caracolés"] And they'd decided they were going to become the new Dos Flamencos. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk-revivalists like Spider John Koerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Krieger and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school, and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz musicians. At this time Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a Damascene conversion -- the next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustic for a red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolff, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band. Krieger had the advantage over Wolff for two reasons -- one of which was actually partly Wolff's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography: "A critic once said I had 'the worst hair in rock 'n' roll'. It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky, Jewfro, so one day my friend Bill Wolff and I experimented with Ultra Sheen, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to Black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolff, as we all called him, said 'You're starting to look like that jerk Bryan MacLean'". According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him better looking than Wolff, at least until the straightener wore off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolff, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord, and then use a resonant tube -- these days usually a specially-made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for older blues musicians often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down -- to slide across the strings. Slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues, especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"] But while the members of the group all claimed to be blues fans -- Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club in the South Side of Chicago where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience -- none of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was, and Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottle necks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band -- Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likeable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions, but Manzarek soon grew to resent Densmore, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, about the divorce of heaven and hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the twenty-second of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died). Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea -- Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception instead. Initially the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man", originally recorded by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] And a version of "Alabama Song", a song written by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, from the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with English language lyrics by  Elisabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lotte Lenya, and it was her version that the group based their version on, at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend: [Excerpt: Lotte Lenya, "Alabama Song"] Though it's likely given their tastes in jazz that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dolphy and John Lewis: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy and John Lewis, "Alabama Song"] But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one, but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called "Light My Fire", and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying "we're not a folk-rock band" and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the Mamas and the Papas, but the other band members liked it -- but it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much but which seems to me to be very likely to have at least been a subconscious influence -- "She's Not There" by the Zombies: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Now, there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record. First, like the Doors, the Zombies were a keyboard-driven band. Second, there's the dynamics of the songs -- both have soft, slightly jazzy verses and then a more straight-ahead rock chorus. And finally there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for "She's Not There" goes from Am to D repeatedly: [demonstrates] While the verse for "Light My Fire" goes from Am to F sharp minor -- and for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp, and A, while the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A, and C sharp -- they're very similar chords. So "She's Not There" is: [demonstrates] While "Light My Fire" is: [demonstrates] At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asus2 chord rather than an A minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A minor and played that instead. Now again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge "She's Not There" as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was. But either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released, and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semitone too slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos -- and apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you, that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pyres, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song, in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus -- in Krieger's original version, he'd sung "Come on baby, light my fire" three times, but Morrison changed the last line to "try to set the night on fire", which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of "My Favorite Things": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] But Manzarek in his autobiography says it was inspired by Ole, the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Ole"] Both are of course similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the “Light My Fire” instrumental section, though none of the Doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group (and of course "Light My Fire" is in four-four rather than three-four): [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over.  Both Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro, but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when, and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it, and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger, though, the story is rather different, and the evidence seems to be weighted in Krieger's favour. In early live performances of the song, they started the song with the Am-F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (live at the Matrix)"] But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts with a change from G to D, then from D to F, before going into a circle of fifths -- not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like "Hey Joe", but a descending one, the same sequence as in "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" or "I Will Survive", ending on an A flat: [demonstrates] To get from the A flat to the A minor or Asus2 chord on which the verse starts, he simply then shifted up a semitone from A flat to A major for two bars: [demonstrates] Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line which was inspired by one of Bach's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779"] Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by other than that it was one of the two-part inventions, and to be honest none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears, and I think more than anything he was just going for a generalised baroque style rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque -- the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothchild, the producer who we will talk about more later, came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just general noodling it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's staff producers wanted to work with them and so they were dropped -- though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards. And others say that they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal, and without any proper gigs, though they started picking up the odd private party here and there -- Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well -- Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next -- they tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the Animals or the Rolling Stones than a group with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the Vox organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano. Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play basslines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group -- though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour -- and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands. Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music – though on records they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group were still trying to get a record deal, they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was *the* place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there like the Whisky A-Go-Go, but those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular, club on the strip called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers. At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Krieger later said "It's rarely talked about, but Ray was a natural born showman, and his knack for stirring drama would serve the Doors' legacy well in later years" But Morrison soon gained enough confidence to sing by himself. But they weren't bringing in any customers, and the London Fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped -- and the club itself shut not long after. But luckily for the group, just before the end of their booking, the booker for the Whisky A-Go-Go, Ronnie Haran walked in with a genuine pop star, Peter Asher, who as half of Peter & Gordon had had a hit with "A World Without Love", written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Haran was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act -- that would always be a group that had records out -- but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed -- after Morrison first tried to play it cool and told Haran they would have to consider it, to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the Whisky would be Them, Van Morrison's group -- one of the cover versions they had been playing had been Them's "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] They supported Them for two weeks at the Whisky, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities according to the other members of the Doors, and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night Them played the venue, Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of “Gloria” which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residencies at the Whisky, and over the summer of 1966 the Doors were the support act for the Mothers of Invention, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Strip was the centre of Californian musical life, before that centre moved to San Francisco, and the Doors were right at the heart of it. Though it wasn't all great -- this was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip, as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song, by the Standells: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned. That Standells song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love. And it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the Doors -- just like when they'd been picked up by the Whisky A Go-Go just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog, so they got signed to a record deal just as they were about to lose their job at the Whisky. They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. "The End" had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it in to one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band, and Morrison had added lyrics to it. Lyrics that were partly inspired by his own fraught relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Oedipal payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whisky A Go Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra Records. Elektra had for a long time been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music, first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robby Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whisky A Go Go, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jac Holzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Holzman saw them he was unimpressed -- they sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands -- but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgement and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of "Alabama Song", and everything clicked into place for Holzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled -- Elektra wasn't a major label like Columbia, but they were a label that nurtured artists and wouldn't just toss them aside. They were even happier when soon after they signed to Elektra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R -- Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jac Holzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothchild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] They were Robby Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothchild on that level. And while Rothchild had mostly worked in New York, he was in LA that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the Doors were part of -- other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in the Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundi, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison, though Buckley had a much larger range: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] There was one problem, though -- Rothchild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman, instead. But Holzman persuaded him because Rothchild owed him a favour -- Rothchild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside Holzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income, and Holzman also did all the paperwork with Rothchild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance Rothchild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session though. The first day, they'd tried recording a version of "The End", but it hadn't worked, so on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of "The End" had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about, and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game -- which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished and it still worked fine. But Morrison had taken a *lot* of acid, and on the way home after the session he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire. He got his girlfriend to turn the car back around, drove back to the studio, climbed over the fence, saw the glowing red lightbulbs in the studio, became convinced that they were fires, and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher, before leaving convinced he had saved the band's equipment -- and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally went well, and the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album, "Break on Through", didn't make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Break on Through"] But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album, and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing "Light My Fire" -- at this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music. Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record, too, if it was the length of a normal single, and so Rothchild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven-and-a-half-minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing microsurgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length, but they were horrified when Rothchild actually played it for them. As far as the group were concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothchild and Botnick cut that section down to just this: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (single edit)"] The group were mortified -- what had been done to their song? That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, it was just... a pop song.  Rothchild explained that that was the point -- to get the song played on AM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked them

We start with our Fearless Beer Review. We get into some of the new vinyl we got this week, and that leads to our Songs Of The Week from Khalid and Red Norvo. We finish up with some new music and other happenings in the music world. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on iTunes. Leave a comment on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or AsinineRadio.com. Email us at AsinineRadio@gmail.com. We're even on Spotify! iTunes: www.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/asi…130289553?mt=2 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/60pYwZVJoOm2NvmmQHcks7 Twitter: www.twitter.com/AsinineRadio Instagram: www.Instagram.com/asinineradio/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/asinineradio/

Speculation - the Teddy Wilson Quintet and the All Star Sextet, all featuring Charlie Shavers, Red Norvo, Teddy Wilson, Remo Palmieri, Al Hall and Specs Powell, with a cameo by Maxine Sullivan - 1944-45 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Overlooking Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, Welcome to the Suncoast Supper Club. Your host is Danny Lane “high above the dance floor”. For the next hour, you’ll hear the greatest music from the Big Band Era – continuously from four stages surrounding the dance floor. Dinner is winding down and Kenneth, the maitre ‘d, is seeing the guests to their tables. They’re settling in with cocktails and introductions. That's our virtual ballroom. Your V.I.P. table is ready …. at The Suncoast Supper Club. You’ll hear: 1) Blue Moon by Les Brown & His Band Of Renown 2) Nevertheless by Ray Anthony & His Orchestra (with Ronnie Deauville & The Skyliners, vocals) 3) Eager Beaver by Stan Kenton & His Orchestra 4) All Of Me by Benny Carter & His Orchestra 5) Too Close For Comfort by The Count Basie Orchestra (with Joe Williams, vocal) 6) King Porter Stomp by Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra 7) I Got Rhythm by Fats Waller 8) Swingin' The Blues by Count Basie & His Orchestra 9) Ten Cents a Dance by Ted Heath and His Music 10) The Hucklebuck by Lionel Hampton (with Betty Carter, vocal) 11) American Patrol by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 12) Sing, Sing, Sing by Louis Prima (backed by his Las Vegas group, Sam Butera & the Witnesses) 13) Chattanooga Choo Choo (Cha Cha) by Tito Puente 14) Liza (All the Clouds'll Roll Away) by Red Norvo & His Orchestra 15) I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate by Muggsy Spanier & His Ragtime Band 16) Elmer's Tune by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra (with Peggy Lee, vocal) 17) Traffic Jam by Artie Shaw 18) For Dancers Only by Jimmie Lunceford & His Orchestra 19) Things Ain't What They Used To Be by Charlie Barnet & His Orchestra 20) I'll Be Seeing You by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra (with Frank Sinatra, vocal)

WETF Show - Benny Goodman in 1945/6 . . from December '45 to Jan '46 - one radio show and two transcription sessions featuring the big band (with Stan Getz, Bernie Privin and Mel Powell) and the Trio, Quintet and Sextet (with Powell, Red Norvo, Mike Bryan and others). Some of Goodman's greatest and least inhibited playing under his own name --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Charlie Parker the sideman in the 1940's and 50's . . recordings with Red Norvo's Selected Sextet, The Sir Charles Thompson All Stars, Clyde Hart All Stars, Miles Davis Quintet and Sextet featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Flip Phillips, Teddy Wilson, Buck Clayton, Dexter Gordon, Trummy Young, Sonny Rollins and others. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Lighter Than A Feather - Red Norvo's Hickory House Band 1936 Small group featuring arrangements by Norvo and Eddie Sauter before Norvo's big band with Mildred Bailey came together (although she guests on one live side, as do Red McKenzie and Mae Questal). With Stew Pletcher, Herbie Haymer, Don McCook, Ram Ramirez, Howard Smith, Dave Barbour, Pete Peterson and Moe Purtill. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Great small group recording sessions led by xylophonist and marimbaist Red Norvo featuring Bunny Berigan, Stew Pletcher, Jimmy Dorsey, Don McCook, Johnny Mince, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman (on bass clarinet!), Jack Jenney, Charlie Barnet, Chu Berry, Herbie Haymer, Teddy Wilson, Ram Ramirez, Dick McDonough, Artie Bernstein, Moe Purtill and Gene Krupa . . Red knew his musicians . . . . --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Episode 34 features music by Ray Anthony, Jimmy Mundy, Wilbert Baranco, Jimmy Lunceford, Red Norvo and more.  Dinah Shore also recommends to See the USA in Your Chevrolet.  ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today! * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

Episode 32 features some great music by Gene Krupa, Tommy Dorsey, Red Norvo, Lucky Millinder and Freddy Martin.  We also listen to an old radio ad for Carnation Evaporated Milk. ...and remember, if you want to listen to more Big Band and Swing Music check out SwingCityRadio.com to hear Your Big Band Favorites from the 1930's, 40's and Today! * All music in this podcast are Creative Commons.  Artists are credited within the podcast.

In this episode, we feature the work of xylophonist Red Norvo, Band leader/pianist Duke Ellington; and great vocalist Rebecca Kilgore. 

https://www.esferajazz.com El vibráfono es un instrumento musical de percusión que está formado por una serie de láminas metálicas colocadas de forma gradual y que vibran al ser golpeadas con baquetas, una técnica similar a la que utliza el piano. El vibráfono fue inventado hacia 1920 siguiendo el patrón del xilófono uno de los pocos instrumentos musicales que no ha sufrido ninguna modificación desde sus orígenes. Es además el único instrumento que nació para ser tocado en una orquesta de jazz y que ha sido posteriormente incorporado a las orquestas de música clásica. A pesar de ello es un instrumento a menudo ignorado y esa es la razón que nos ha llevado a los gatos a dedicarle un programa en este tejado soleado. El vibráfono comenzó a usarse como instrumento de acompañamiento, hasta la llegada de Lionel Hampton y Red Norvo. El primero grabó el primer solo de vibráfono en un tema que se llamó Memories of you mientras que Norvo destacó por su musicalidad interpretando swing y ragtime cosa que sin duda influyó en la consagración del Vibráfono como instrumento solista. Con la evolución del jazz, igualmente evoluciona el vibráfono que poco a poco fue tomando un carácter cada vez más solista. En los 50s aparece Milt Jackson, otro vibrafonista fundamental y a mediados de los años 60 gracias a la aportación de Gary Burton, el instrumento tomará un impulso que lo convertirá en un sonido muy identificable para los amantes del jazz de todo el mundo. Burton es el primero en tocar con cuatro baquetas, ya que hasta el momento el vibráfono había sido tocado, al igual que el xilófono, con sólo dos. Más tarde llegaría gente como Bobby Hutcherson, Tito Puente, Roy Ayers, cal Tjader, Bill Molenhoff, Mike Mainieri, David Friedman o Dave Samuels entre muchos otros grandes. Hoy nos vamos a ocupar del vibráfono.

My guest today has been a band leader for over 60 years. He made his name playing the vibes which is this hosts favorite instrument. It's a percussion instrument with a warm sound and can be played in a trio setting the way Red Norvo did with Tal Farlow and Mingus or in a Quintet setting like Cal Tjader did with Armando Peraza, Al mcKibbon and Dick Birk. It fits into all types of musical settings and it was popularized by my guest by his virtuosic approach and an ability to create an output within the big band ensemble. My guest today is a lover of people. He has an insatiable desire to play music you can tap your foot to. That's what Jack Kleinsinger told me about my guest. He's played on the east coast and west during the heyday of bebop and swing. His peers include Bill Holman and Chet Baker, Jimmy Rowles and Ray Brown, Milt Jackson and Harold Land. These cats had to sing for their supper because if they didn't sing there would be nothing left to eat. My guest was a relentless entertainer and musician. He created a following through his gesticulations and banter along with a Jitterbug Waltz when music was made for dancing. His collaborations with Steve Allen and Star Time increased his name recognition in the often obscure world of improvisational swing or melodic invention. He continues to be a link in the chain For younger musicians who are searching for something to say. There are no more live clubs on every corner of urban America, there are no longer 1 month residencies at the London House or Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse or Lord Chumleys and the barriers and stratification that have been put up in music hurt the ability for experimentation and chance taking because mega money has superseded quality art, pacification rules the day as opposed to the visceral culture that was visible on Market Street in Chicago or Harlem. Ultimately the ego has superseded the music in that individuals now project their own monster chops at the expense of the accompanists, the listening and the love. This is why lessons in life from the old guard are key. It's why my guests son plays with venerable grey beards Ron Carter, Kenny Barron and Ron McClure......time for some good vibes. Terry Gibbs welcome to the JFS. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

Edmund Hall was one of the most distinctive and accomplished clarinetists in the Trad Jazz style from 1940 until he passed away in 1967. This podcast focuses on the recordings he made for Blue Note in the 1940's under his own name and with James P. Johnson, Art Hodes and Sidney DeParis. The Hall sessions feature more swing-oriented groups with Charlie Christian (playing acoustic guitar!), Meade Lux Lewis (on celeste!), Red Norvo and Teddy Wilson while the others utilize the talents of Sidney DeParis, Max Kaminsky, Vic Dickenson, James P. Johnson, Art Hodes, Carl Kress, Jimmy Shirley, Everett Barksdale, John Simmons and Sid Catlett, among others. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Join us in the MAKE BELIEVE BALLROOM. On this week’s showJess Stacy’s Monumental Solo.The Andrews Sisters 13 Weeks with Glenn Miller.Red Norvo, the only xylophonist to lead a big band!Reminiscences and music with Harry James, Benny Goodman and Bea Wain.Additional music by The Rhythm Boy’s, Mildred Bailey, Larry Clinton Orchestra, Paul Whiteman, Ted Heath, Dick Haymes and Frank Sinatra.

One of the best (and most underrated) Jazz singers of the 1930's was Mildred Bailey - a member of the Coeur D'Alene native American tribe, she grew up in Seattle where, with her brother Al Rinker, began performing in the Jazz style of the 1920's. After being hired by Paul Whiteman, she began singing on recording sessions in New York in the early 30's. She married Red Norvo in 1933 and was featured with his band, being billed as "Mr. and Mrs. Swing" until the early 40's. During that time she made many recording sessions with Jazz players who appreciated her style. The three sessions on this show feature Bunny Berigan, Johnny Hodges, Chris Griffin, Chu Berry, Mary Lou Williams, Teddy Wilson, Floyd Smith and others as well as first rate singing. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Shellac Stack No. 187 wonders what made Caldonia's big head so hard. We sample some popular adaptations of operatic melodies, dance with Jack Crawford, Sam Lanin, Don Bestor, and Fred Rich, head south of the border with Morton Gould and the San Remo Dance Orchestra, and hear from Elmo Tanner, Red Norvo, and others. Support … Continue reading »

There were several jazz players named Joe Thomas - this one was perhaps the best! A trumpeter who worked with Fletcher Henderson and a number of other big bands, he really came to prominence during the 1940's in assorted small group swing recordings. This podcast features some of the great sessions he made for the Keynote label with players such as Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, Trummy Young, Red Norvo, Hilton Jefferson, Coleman Hawkins and Vic Dickenson as well as some lesser known but superb players such as Ted Nash and Hank D'Amico. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

The Brox Sisters - "Who" Mildred Bailey with Red Norvo and His Orchestra - "A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid" The Old Codger Show Proud Sponsor - "Squibb Dental Cream" The Red Norvo Trio with Tal Farlow & Charles Mingus - "Prelude to a Kiss" Ruth Etting - "It All Depends on You" Lennie Tristano - "Spontaneous Combustion" Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Quintet - "Hot House" Reddy Kilowatt - "The Reddy Kilowatt Song" Benny Goodman Sextet - "Flying Home" The Three Peppers - "Serenade in the Night" Cozy Cole's All-Stars - "Father Cooperates" Sophie Tucker - "Egyptian Ella" Hooiser Hot Shots - "Ha-Cha-Nan" Whispering Jack Smith - "All By Yourself In the Moonlight" Arthur Schutt - "Limehouse Blues" The Chordettes - "Mr. Sandman" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/94225

This is the last of the five part series on Time Life’s Giants of Jazz—28 three record sets with huge booklets featuring swing era musicians who helped define jazz. This week you’ll hear and hear about James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, Henry Red Allen, Red Norvo, and more Teddy Wilson. In…Continue reading Episode 87: Giants of Jazz Part 5,Johnny Hodges,Lester Young, Willie Eckstein

Special guest Charles Baty returns to the Truth About Vintage Amps Podcast for our final episode of 2019.    Submit your vintage amp questions to Skip here: podcast@fretboardjournal.com or, better yet, leave us a voicemail or text at 509-557-0848. * SUPPORT TAVA & ANGELA INSTRUMENTS *  Order a PDF download of Steve Melkisethian's tweed Princeton amp project here.  This week’s sponsor: Grez Guitars (link) Some of the topics discussed on this episode: 1:46 An update on the Angela 5F2 Princeton schematic/article 4:23 TAVA Podcast Giveaways: A Stew-Mac Champ kit; an A/B box from Skip (winners to be announced during episode 27) 12:43 Reserve one of Manbroidery's two-prong TAVA hats (Instagram link)  14:33 More cast iron 17:26 Triad Electronics' return to guitar amp transformers, plus Benson Amps 25:02 Charles Baty returns: Red Norvo, Tal Farlow, Chico Hamilton, Red Garland & Chile Colorado! 48:21 Gibson GA8T (Discoverer) amps 51:14 A 1966 Fender Vibro Champ with a mystery hum 57:02 Silverface Fender Champs versus 1960s Gibson Skylark / Atlas / etc. 59:11 Sonic variations between vintage matching, serviced Fender amplifiers 1:03:59 Using a Variac and a power strip to power up multiple amps simultaneously 1:07:53 Vintage guitar amps with built-in legs 1:12:25 A request for a single-episode Champ schematic walk-through 1:12:46 25uf cathode bias 12ax7 cathode-bypass caps on Champs 1:17:19 Getting up to speed on electronics basics 1:20:08 Amp class 1:23:14 Buck Nickels and Loose Change – "Makin' Wine" (Larry Cragg in action! YouTube link.) 1:23:39 A new speaker configuration for a Danelectro DS100 cab 1:28:08 Gibson Invader amps 1:31:11 Grid leak biasing vs. cathode biasing 1:34:56 Modifying the Angela dual-singled amp with Russian 6P1P-EV tubes 1:36:35 Australia, Toyota Land Cruisers and fly fishing guides 1:38:43 Swollen caps in a 1979 Fender Deluxe Reverb and tips on drilling holes in a chassis Special thanks to TAVA listener Eric Casimiro for helping us edit this week's episode. 

The Truth About Vintage Amps Podcast has turned one! Once again, Skip Simmons is fielding guitar tube amp questions from around the world. Submit your questions to Skip here: podcast@fretboardjournal.com or, better yet, leave us a voicemail or text at 509-557-0848. * SUPPORT TAVA & ANGELA INSTRUMENTS AND ENTER TO WIN* Order a PDF download of Steve Melkisethian's tweed Princeton amp project here. You may just win something!  This week’s sponsor: Grez Guitars (link) Some of the topics discussed on this episode: 1:18 The TAVA Index (h/t to Harper’s magazine) 6:55 What’s on Skip’s bench? 8:49 Speaker reconing: Scumback speakers 10:46 Skip’s Christmas wish list: A Subaru replacement, a break from phone calls 13:42 TAVA givewaway: A Stew-Mac Tweed Champ kit! 14:12 Our Angela Instruments amp project download 15:35 Manbroidery’s two-prong patch / a future Ebbett’s Field Flannels hat? (Instagram link)  17:00 Another giveaway: An A/B box or $125 Skip labor credit giveaway 19:40 Skip gets a tractor 24:14 Dual rectifier tubes and Sag 101 28:40 Jason tries to get a special guest 31:29 Cabbage and mushrooms   35:00 Cabinet glue 40:49 Fender’s White amplifiers 44:09 Choosing a Fender for your band 48:12 How Skip drains filter caps 51:35 Lafayette amplifiers 54:28 A 1971 Fender Bassman (AA371) with stray voltages 59:23 Making an Ampex 602A work for guitar 1:11:32 Splitting a 2x12 speaker cab 1:15:19 Using a looper pedal to help with soundchecks (h/t Julian Lage) 1:16:50 Music recommendation: Red Norvo 1:18:12 Budweiser Copper Lager and cast iron pans 1:25:43 A Cornell Romany Pro that goes through power tubes 1:33:34 Book review: Maurice J. Summerfield’s 'The Jazz Guitar' 1:34:32 Light bulb limiters 1:36:56 A Princeton Reverb-style amp with a pull-switch on the volume control 1:41:35 A Classic Tone 5E3 power transformer with one metal washer 1:43:35 A history of phase inverters 1:46:02 More new parallel, single-ended amps Special thanks to TAVA listener Eric C. for helping us edit this week's episode. 

Today's Bombshell (Bombshell Radio) Bombshell Radio Sundays Harry & Edna on the Wireless Sunday's 10am-11am EST and Mondays 1am-2ambombshellradio.comBoom ~ Joe LossIn a little Spanish Town ~ Chick Webb & his little chicksI'll Take the South ~ Cleo BrownJust you Just me ~ Red Norvo and his OrchestraMr and Mrs is the name ~ Jack Payne and his orchestraThey all Fall in Love ~ Jack HyltonYou Gave Me Love ~ James "Sugarboy" CrawfordShe Likes to Boogie Real Low ~ Frankie Lee SimsAmerican Car magazine interviewRockin in rhythm ~ Charlie BarnetCrazy rhythm ~ Ray NobleJangled nerves ~ Fletcher HendersonDon't you Remember Me ~ Frankie CarleOpus 1 ~ The Mills Brothers

VE 131 Prehistoric Rock: Roll 'Em Pete Big Joe Turner 1938 House of Blue Lights Freddie Slack (co-writer with Don Ray) and Ella Mae Morse 1946 Down the Road Apiece: Will Bradley Trio 1940 Good Rockin' Tonight: Wynonie Harris: 1948 Joe Liggins: The Honeydripper Bull Moose Jackson: Big Ten Inch Amos Milburn: One Bourbon, One Scotch One Beer Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Rock Daniel 1941 The Fat Man: Fats Domino: Louis Jordan & His Tympany 5 : Ain't That Just Like a Woman Julia Lee and her Boyfriends Gotta Gimme Whatcha Got We're Gonna Rock Wild Bill Moore 1947 Rock t he Joint: Jimmy Preston 1949 Move It On Over Hank Williams 1947 Jack Guthrie: Oakie Boogie Woody Guthrie: Jesus Christ Robert Wilkins; That's No Way To Get Along Rolling Stones: Not Fade Away Van Morrison : In The Days Before Rock And Roll. VE 131 Prehistoric Rock Today on the VE---rock, before it rolled. A rumage through the pre-historic rock vaults for songs that foreshadowed rock and roll, compiled by guest programmer Dan Miele. These are vintage recordings but their vitality will surprise you. I'm PC and this is the VE Roll 'Em Pete Big Joe Turner 1938 Prehistoric rock on the VE. From the year 1938 AD that's the blues shouting daddy of em all, Big Joe Turner with "Roll Em Pete." One of the first R&B recordings to make use of what was to become the rock and roll back beat - as opposed to the more common shuffle rhythm. This song was later recorded by Count Basie, and Joe recorded with the Basie band in later years. Joe Turner was the frist to record Shake, Rattle and Roll, which later became a hit for Bill Haley and His Comets. Things are really rockin at the House Of Blue Lights....Freddie Slack and Ella May Morse... House of Blue Lights Freddie Slack (co-writer with Don Ray) and Ella Mae Morse 1946 Down the Road Apiece: Will Bradley Trio 1940 Dinosaurs roam the earth again--it's prehistoric rock on the VE. A couple there that were echoed in 60s rock. Mitch Ryder refefrenced "house Of Blue Lights" by Freddie Slack and Ella Mae Morse, and The Rolling Stones covered Will Bradley's "Down The Road Apiece." Robert Plant recorded this one by Wynonie Mr Blues Harris with his group The Honeydrippers...and I'll follow it up with the song that gave th eband their name......... Good Rockin' Tonight: Wynonie Harris: 1948 Joe Liggins: The Honeydripper The Honeydripper was Joe Liggins, who along with Wynonie Harris, was an inspiration to Robert Plant. It's prehistoric rock on the VE. Here are a couple you'll know from their rock covers by Aerosmith and George Thorogood.... Bull Moose Jackson: Big Ten Inch ***pull from YOutube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJpO4ObZSdg Amos Milburn: One Bourbon, One Scotch One Beer *** pull from youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TqglR7YG1Y The VE with prehistoric rock from Amos Milburn and Bull Moose Jackson...with the original versions of songs you know well from seventies rock. Here's someon ewho held the title "queen of rock and roll" when the competition iin thie category was pretty slim....but Sister Rosetta Tharpe had it all goin gon...gospel chops and sex appeal.... Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Rock Daniel 1941 The Fat Man: Fats Domino: The VE with PreHistoric Rock....but it begins inprope with thhe fat man, Antione Domino, from 1950....the tune is a variation on the traditional New Orleans tune Junker's Blues, which also provided the melody for Lloyd Price's Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Now, the guy known as the King of the Jukebox. Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five tore it up with hilarious story-songs. His guitarist Carl Hogan guitar has been cited by Chuck Berry as one of his main influences Louis Jordan & His Tympany 5 : Ain't That Just Like a Woman 1946 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqiWTb-UWA Julia Lee and her Boyfriends Gotta Gimme Whatcha Got 1946http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Pq98BQ7E7Bk The VE with Prehistoric rock.. THAT girfriend could sing! Julia Lee And Her Boyfriends..who just happened to be two legendary names of jazz-- Benny Carter and Red Norvo. No small wonder that she commanded such prime session men--Julia sang and played piano in her brother George Lee's band, which for a time also included Charlie Parker. So where did 'rock" really begin? 1947--Wild Bill Moore We're Gonna Rock Wild Bill Moore 1947 Rock the Joint: Jimmy Preston 1949 The VE with Prehistoric Rock, and the name itself, attributed to Clevland DJ Alan Freed, was taken from tenor sax man Will Bill Moore's "We're Gonna Rock" which showed up on his Moondog Show radio programs...also Jimmy Preston and Rock The Joint. Let's rock out today's VE with one more that George Thorogood latched on to, by a legend of country music who died before rock was born... Move It On Over Hank Williams 1947 Jack Guthrie: Oakie Boogie The Year was 1947. And like the legendary flying saucer that crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico, the alien music life form of rock and roll was taking shape with some help from country cousin Hank Williams, and right there Jack Guthrie and the western swing jam "Oakie Boogie, which Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock owes a debt to. Jack was the cousin of the seminal American music figure who would have been 100 years old this week. Woody introduced one element of what would become rock that we haven't touched on yet...the political and intellectual...soomething that was rare in popular music of his day...but as a folk singer, Woody could speak his mind, and he makes an obvious political statement in this song from 1940: Woody Guthrie: Jesus Christ Robert Wilkins; That's No Way To Get Along Pre Historic Rock on The VE....Woody Guthrie, Jesus Christ, and Revered Robert Wilkins, "That's No Way To Get Along..." rock rooted in bible stories....and that last one brings us to the half century mark this week of the British rock band that brought all the early influences together in an entirely new, original sound. Rolling Stones: Not Fade Away 50 years ago, the Rolling Stones played their first gig at The Marquee Club in London. This week, they posed outside thevenue and strongly hinted at a fiftieth anniversary tour. Not Fade Away. 20 years ago, let alone 50, who would have thought that would be The Rolling Stones legacy. To top off this VE exploration of Prehistoric rock, here is an evocative and epic song by another great interperter of the rock roots. From his 1990 album "Enlightenment," Van Morrsion sings of "The Days Before Rock And Roll, " and how those distant radio signals in the deepest night brought a brilliant new light into his young world. Van Morrison : In The Days Before Rock And Roll. And that's the VE. A true mystic poet, Van Morrsion always finds a way to say it for all of us. Find past VE shows archived at PRN.FM and on demand aty RDTS.CA. Please share the VE Radio Show with a Facebook friend, and follow me on Twitter. I'm PC

On today’s episode, I took a slight detour in my musical bus toward a town near Annapolis. I did not drive this time, instead I called, but I was on-board of my imaginary musical bus. Today’s guest is Michael Noonan, a vibraphone player who has over 25 years of experience as a jazz musician on vibraphone as well a musical instructor. On this episode, we talked a lot about our upbringings, music business (specially people’s skill), Red Norvo (if you do not who he is, check him on Spotify or YouTube) and about musical trends. Michael made a commitment to return back for an EP Capsule when his band releases the next CD or album; definitely I took his word up. If you want to know more about UJE and contact them, here is the link of their webpage: http://www.unifiedjazz.com/ To learn more about my podcast, you can follow me on Twitter @Music2Flavors and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Musicin2Flavors/, or at my website at www.musicin2flavors.com If you know a friend or acquaintance that works in the music industry and think that he should be an ideal person to chat and record his conversation, please contact me at Music in 2Flavors@gmail.com Thank you for listening and see you on our next episode. If you would like to be a patreon of my podcast, you can go to my website and click on the Patreon banner or visit https://www.patreon.com/musicin2Flavors where you can choose the amount of money that you want to pledge. Thank you for listening to Music in 2Flavors and thank you for being a loyal listener of my music adventure.

On today’s episode, I took a slight detour in my musical bus toward a town near Annapolis. I did not drive this time, instead I called, but I was on-board of my imaginary musical bus. Today’s guest is Michael Noonan, a vibraphone player who has over 25 years of experience as a jazz musician on vibraphone as well a musical instructor. On this episode, we talked a lot about our upbringings, music business (specially people’s skill), Red Norvo (if you do not who he is, check him on Spotify or YouTube) and about musical trends. Michael made a commitment to return back for an EP Capsule when his band releases the next CD or album; definitely I took his word up. If you want to know more about UJE and contact them, here is the link of their webpage: http://www.unifiedjazz.com/ To learn more about my podcast, you can follow me on Twitter @Music2Flavors and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Musicin2Flavors/, or at my website at www.musicin2flavors.com If you know a friend or acquaintance that works in the music industry and think that he should be an ideal person to chat and record his conversation, please contact me at Music in 2Flavors@gmail.com Thank you for listening and see you on our next episode. If you would like to be a patreon of my podcast, you can go to my website and click on the Patreon banner or visit https://www.patreon.com/musicin2Flavors where you can choose the amount of money that you want to pledge. Thank you for listening to Music in 2Flavors and thank you for being a loyal listener of my music adventure.

Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Louis Jordan and "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Louis Jordan's music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This four-CD set is very cheap and has most of the classic tracks on. And here's a similarly-priced collection of Chick Webb. There aren't many books on Louis Jordan as an individual, and most of the information here comes from books on other musicians, but this one is probably worth your while if you want to investigate more. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. Transcript We've spent a lot of time in 1938 in this podcast, haven't we? First there was Flying Home, first recorded in 1939, but where we had to talk about events from 1938. Then we had "Roll 'Em Pete", recorded in 1938. And "Ida Red", recorded in 1938. 1938 is apparently the real year zero for rock and roll -- whether you come at it from the direction of blues and boogie, or jazz, or country and western music, 1938 ends up being the place where you start. Eighty years ago this year.   And 1938 is also the year that one man made his solo debut, and basically put together all the pieces of rock and roll in one place.   If you've seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races -- well, OK, if you've not seen A Day At The Races, you really should, because while it's not the best film the Marx Brothers ever made, it's still a good Marx Brothers film, and it'll brighten up your day immensely to watch it, so go and watch that, and then come back and listen to the rest of this. And if you haven't watched all their earlier films, watch those too. Except The Cocoanuts, you can skip that one. Go on. I can wait.   OK, now you've definitely seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races, so you'll remember the dance sequence where Ivie Anderson sings "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm", and the amazing dancers in that scene.   [Ivy Anderson "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm"]   That's a dance called the Lindy Hop -- you might remember that as the dance the "booglie wooglie piggy" did in a song we excerpted in episode two, it was named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous airman and Nazi sympathiser -- and the people dancing it are Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. And they were responsible for a controversy, on the night of Benny Goodman's first Carnegie Hall concert -- the one we talked about in episode one -- that is still talked about in jazz eighty years later.   [Chick Webb "Stompin' At The Savoy"]   That's "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Chick Webb, one of the most famous swing recordings ever, though it was later recorded by Benny Goodman in an even more fanous version. The Savoy Ballroom was where Whitey's Lindy Hoppers used to dance -- there was an entire corner of the ballroom set off for them, even though the rest of the floor was for the other dancers. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop was invented, and it was the place to dance, because it was where Chick Webb, the real king of swing played.   We've seen a few kings of swing so far -- Benny Goodman was the person most associated with the name, and he had the name longest. A few people called Bob Wills that, too, though he mostly billed himself as the king of Western swing. But Chick Webb was the person who deserved the title more than anyone else. He was a small man, who'd contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and he'd taken up the drums as a kind of therapy. He'd been playing professionally since he was eleven, and by the time he was thirty he was leading what was, bar none, the best swing band in New York for dancing. People called him the King of Swing before Goodman, and his band was an absolute force of nature when it came to getting people to do the Lindy Hop. Benny Goodman admired Webb's band enough that he bought the band's arrangements and used them himself -- all of the Goodman band's biggest crowd-pleasers, at least the ones that weren't arrangements he'd bought off Fletcher Henderson, he bought from Edgar Sampson, the saxophone player who did most of Webb's arrangements. Sampson is the one who wrote "Stompin' at the Savoy", which we just heard.   There was a rivalry there -- Goodman's band was bigger in every sense, but Webb's band was more popular with those who knew the real deal when they heard it. And in 1937, the Savoy hosted a cutting contest between Webb's Savoy Orchestra and Goodman's band.   A cutting contest was a tradition that came from the world of stride piano players -- the same world that boogie woogie music grew out of. One musician would play his best (and it usually was a "his" -- this was a very macho musical world) and then a second would try to top him -- playing something faster, or more inventive, or more exciting, often a reworking of the song the first one had played -- and then the first would take another turn and try to get better than the second had. They'd keep going, each trying to outdo the other, until a crowd decided that one or the other was the winner.   And that 1937 cutting contest was a big event. The Savoy had two bandstands, so they would have one band start as soon as the other one finished, so people could dance all night. Chick Webb's band set up on one stage, Goodman's on another. Four thousand dancers crowded the inside of the ballroom, and despite a police cordon outside to keep trouble down, another five thousand people outside tried to hear what was happening.   And Chick Webb's band won, absolutely. Gene Krupa, Goodman's drummer (one of the true greats of jazz drumming himself) later said "I'll never forget that night. Webb cut me to ribbons!"   And that just was the most famous of many, many cutting contests that Chick Webb's band won. The only time Chick Webb ever definitely lost a cutting contest was against Duke Ellington, but everyone knew that Chick Webb and Duke Ellington weren't really trying to do the same kind of thing, and anyway, there's no shame at all in losing to Duke Ellington.   Count Basie, though, was a different matter. He was trying to do the same kind of thing as Chick Webb, and he was doing it well. And on the night of Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert, Webb and Basie were going to engage in their own cutting contest after hours. For all that the Goodman Carnegie Hall show was important -- and it was -- the real jazz fans knew that this after-show party was going to be the place to be. Basie had already played the Carnegie hHall show, guesting with Goodman's band, as had Basie's tenor sax player Lester Young, but here they were going to get to show off what they could do with their own band.   Basie's band was on top form at that time, with his new vocalists Jimmy Rushing, a great blues shouter, and Billie Holiday, who was just then becoming a star. Chick Webb had a couple of good vocalists too, though -- his new teenage singer, Ella Fitzgerald, in particular, was already one of the great singers.   [Chick Webb – Ella]   And everyone was in the audience. Goodman's band, Mildred Bailey, Ivie Anderson (who we heard before in that Marx Brothers clip), Red Norvo the vibraphone player, Duke Ellington. Every musician who mattered in the jazz scene was there to see if Basie could beat Chick Webb.   And… there was a dispute about it, one which was never really resolved in Webb's lifetime.   Because Webb won -- everyone agreed, when it came to a vote of the audience, Webb's band did win, though it was a fairly close decision. Again, the only band to ever beat Chick Webb was Duke Ellington.   But everyone also agreed that Basie's band had got people dancing more. A lot more.   What nobody realised at the time was that Whitey's Lindy Hoppers had gone on strike. Chick Webb had misheard a discussion between a couple of the dancers about how good the Basie band was going to be that night, assumed that they were saying Basie was going to be better than him, and got into a huff. Webb said "I don't give a good Goddam what those raggedy Lindy Hoppers think or say. Who needs 'em? As far as I'm concerned they can all go to hell. And their Mammies too."   After this provocation, Whitey issued an ultimatum to his Lindy Hoppers. That night, they were only going to dance to Basie, and not to Webb. So even though most of the audience preferred Webb's band, every time they played a song all the best dancers, the ones who had an entire quarter or so of the ballroom to themselves to do their most exciting and visual dances, all sat down, and it looked like the Webb band just weren't exciting the crowd as much as the Basie band.   Of course, the Basie band were good that night, as well. When you've got the 1938 Count Basie band, with Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday singing, you're going to get a good show. Oh, and they persuaded Duke Ellington to come up and play a piano solo -- and then all the band joined in with him, unrehearsed and unprompted.   But despite all that, Webb's band still beat them in the audience vote.   That's how good Webb's band were, and it's also how good his two big stars were. One of those stars, Ella Fitzgerald, we've already mentioned, but the other one was an alto sax player who also took the male lead vocals – we heard him singing with Ella earlier. This sax player did a lot of the frontman job for Webb's band and was so important to the band in those years that, allegedly, some people thought he was Chick Webb. That man was Louis Jordan.   [Chick Webb I Can't Dance I Got Ants In My Pants]   Louis Jordan was a good sax player, but what he really was was a performer. He was someone who could absolutely sell a song, with wit and humour and a general sense of hipness that could possibly be matched at that time only by Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, and Jordan was a better musician than either of them. He was charming, and funny, and tuneful, and good looking, and he knew it.   He knew it so well, in fact, that shortly after that show, he started making plans -- he thought that he and Ella were the two important ones in the Webb band, and he planned to form his own band, and take her, and much of the rest of the band with him. Webb found out and fired Jordan, and Ella and most of the band remained loyal to Webb.   In fact, sadly, Jordan would have had what he wanted sooner rather than later anyway. Chick Webb's disability had been affecting him more, and he was only continuing to perform because he felt he owed it to his musicians -- he would often pass out after a show, literally unable to do anything else. He died, aged thirty-four, in June 1939, and Ella Fitzgerald became the leader of his band, though like many big bands it eventually broke up in the mid-forties.   So if Jordan had held on for another few months, he would have had a good chance at being the leader of the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald band, and history would have been very different. As it was, instead, he formed a much smaller group, the Elks Rendez-vous Band, made up of members of Jesse Stone's band (you'll remember him from episode two, he wrote "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"). And on December 20, 1938 -- ten days before "Roll 'Em Pete" -- Louis Jordan and his Elks Rendez-vous Band went into the studio for the first time, to record "Honey in the Bee Ball" and "Barnacle Bill the Sailor".   [excerpt of "Honey in the Bee Ball"]   Shortly after that, they changed their name to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five.   Before we talk about them more, I want to briefly talk about someone else who worked with Jordan. I want to talk about Milt Gabler. Gabler is someone we'll be seeing a lot of in this story, and he's someone who already had an influence on it, but here's where he becomes important.   You see, even before his influence on rock and roll, Gabler had made one important contribution to music. He had started out as the owner of a little record shop, and he had a massive passion for good jazz music -- and so did his customers. And many of those customers had wanted to get hold of old records, now out of print. So in 1935 Gabler started his own record label, and licensed those out of print recordings by people like Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, becoming the owner of the very first ever reissue record label. His labels pioneered things like putting a full list of all the musicians on a record on the label -- the kind of thing that real music obsessives cared far more about than executives who only wanted to make money.   After he had some success with that, he branched out into making new records, on a new label, Commodore. That would have stayed a minor label, but for one thing.   In 1939, one of his regular customers, Billie Holiday, had a problem. She'd been performing a new song which she really wanted to record, but her current label, Columbia, wasn't interested. That song was too political even for her producer, John Hammond -- the man who, you will remember from previous episodes, persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band and who put on shows that same year sponsored by the Communist Party. But the song was too political, and too inflammatory, even for him. The song, which became Billie Holiday's best-known performance, was "Strange Fruit", and it was about lynching.   [insert section of Strange Fruit here].   Billie Holiday could not get her label to put that track out, under any circumstances. But she knew Milt Gabler might do it -- he'd been recording several small group tracks with Lester Young, who was Holiday's colleague and friend in the Basie band. As Gabler was a friend of hers, and as he was politically left-leaning himself, he eventually negotiated a special deal with Columbia, Holiday's label, that he could produce her for one session and put out a single recording by her, on Commodore.   That recording sold over a million copies, and became arguably the most important recording in music history. In December 1999, Time Magazine called it the "song of the century". And in 2017, when the black singer Rebecca Ferguson was invited to play at Donald Trump's inauguration, she agreed on one condition -- that the song she performed could be "Strange Fruit". She was disinvited.   As a result of "Strange Fruit"'s success, Milt Gabler was headhunted away from his own label, and became a staff producer at Decca records in 1941. There he was responsible for producing many of the greatest records of the forties -- not least that famous Lionel Hampton version of "Flying Home" we looked at towards the end of episode one -- and he began a long collaboration with Louis Jordan -- remember him? This is a story about Louis Jordan.   Jordan's new band had a sound unlike anything else of the time -- Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown later claimed that Jordan had most of the responsibility for the decline of the big bands, saying "He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper."   And while we've talked before about a whole raft of economic and social reasons for the decline of the big bands, there was a lot of truth in that statement -- while there were sometimes actually as many as seven or eight members of the Tympany Five, the original lineup was just Jordan plus one trumpet, one sax, piano, bass, and drums, and yet their recordings did sound almost as full as many of the bigger bands.   The style they were playing in was a style that later became known as "jump band" music, and it was a style that owed a lot to Lionel Hampton's band, and to Count Basie. This is a style of music that's based on simple chord changes -- usually blues changes. And it's based on the concept of the riff.   We haven't really talked much about the idea of riffs yet in this series, but they're absolutely crucial to almost all popular music from the twentieth century. A riff is, in its conception, fairly straight forward. It's an instrumental phrase that gets repeated over and over. It can act as the backbone to a song, but it can also be the basis for variation and improvisation -- when you "riff on" something, you're coming up with endless variations and permutations of it.   Riffs were important in swing music -- generally they were a sort of back-and-forth in those. You'd have the saxophones play the riff, and then the trumpets and trombones repeat it after them. But swing wasn't just about riffs -- with a big orchestra, you had to have layers and stuff for all the musicians to do.   In jump band music, on the other hand, you strip everything back. The track becomes about the riff, the solos, and the vocal if there is one, and that's it. You play that riff over the simplest possible changes, you play it to a rhythm that will get everyone dancing -- often a boogie rhythm -- and you make everything about the energy of the performance.   Jordan's band did that, and they combined it with Jordan's own unique stage personality. Jordan, remember, had been the male singer in a band whose female singer was Ella Fitzgerald. You don't keep a job like that very long if you're not good.   Now, Jordan wasn't good in the same way as Ella was -- no-one was good in the same way as Ella Fitzgerald -- but what he was very good at was putting personality into his vocals. One thing we haven't talked much about yet in this series is the way that there was a whole tradition of jive singing which dates back at least to the 1920s and Cab Calloway:   [excerpt from "Reefer Man"]   Jive singers weren't usually technically great, but they had personality. They were hip, and they often used made up words of their own. They were clever, and funny, and sophisticated, and they were often singing about the underworld or drug use or prostitution or other such disreputable concepts -- when they weren't just singing nonsense words like Slim Gaillard anyway.   [Excerpt of "Flat Foot Floogie"]   And Louis Jordan was very much in the mould of singers like Gaillard or Calloway or Fats Waller, all of whom we could easily do episodes on here if we were going far enough back into rock's prehistory. But Jordan is the way that that stream became part of the rhythm of rock music.   Most of Jordan's songs were written by Jordan himself, although he's not the credited writer on many of them -- rather, his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, is credited for contractual reasons. Jordan and Moore later split up after multiple separate occasions where she stabbed him, but she retained credit on the songs. So, for example, she's credited on "Caldonia", which is a perfect example of Jordan's comedy jump band style.   [Louis Jordan: Caldonia]   "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie," Jordan's biggest hit, was slightly different. From early 1943 -- just after Gabler started producing his records -- Jordan had been having occasional crossover hits on the country charts. These days, his music sounds to us clearly like it's blues or R&B -- in fact he's basically the archetype of a jump blues musician -- but remember how we've talked about Western Swing using so many swing and boogie elements? If you were making boogie music then, you were likely to appeal to the same audience that was listening to Bob Wills, just as much as you were to the audience that was listening to Big Joe Turner.   And because of this crossover success, Jordan started recording occasional songs that were originally aimed at the white country market. "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" was co-written by Gabler, but the other songwriters were pure country and western writers -- Denver Darling, one of the writers, was a hillbilly singer who recorded songs such as "My Little Buckaroo", "I've Just Gotta Be A Cowboy" and "Ding Dong Polka", while the other writer, Vaughn Horton, wrote "Dixie Cannonball" and "Muleskinner Blues".   So "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie" was, in conception, a hillbilly boogie, but in Louis Jordan's hands, it was almost the archetypal rhythm and blues song:   [insert section of Choo Choo Ch'Boogie here]   You can hear from that how much it resembles the Bob Wills music we heard last week -- and how the song itself would fit absolutely into the genre of Western Swing. There's only really the lack of a fiddle or steel guitar to distinguish the styles. But you can also hear the horn-driven pulse, and the hip vocals, that characterise rhythm and blues. Those internal rhymes and slangy lyrics -- "take me right back to the track, Jack" -- come straight from the jive school of vocals, even though it's a country and western song.   If there's any truth at all to the claim that rock and roll was the mixing of country and western music with rhythm and blues, this is as good a point as any to say "this is where rock and roll really started". Essentially every musician in the early rock and roll period was, to a greater or lesser extent, copying the style of Louis Jordan's 1940s records. And indeed "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie" was later covered by another act Milt Gabler produced -- an act who, more than any other, based their style on Jordan's. But we'll come to Bill Haley and his Comets in a few episodes time.   For now, we want to listen to the way that jump band music sounds. This is not music that sounds like it's a small band. That sounds like a full horn section, but you'll notice that during the sax solo the other horns just punch in a little, rather than playing a full pad under it -- the arrangement is stripped back to the basics, to what's necessary. This is a punchy track, and it's a track that makes you want to dance.   [sax solo excerpt]   And this is music that, because it's so stripped down, relies on vocal personality more than other kinds. This is why Louis Jordan was able to make a success of this -- his jive singing style gives the music all the character that in the larger bands would be conveyed by other instruments.   But also, notice the lyrics -- "the rhythm of the clickety clack". It's that backbeat again, the one we've been talking about. And the lyrics here are all about that rhythm, but also about the rhythm of the steam trains.   That mechanical steam train rhythm is one of the key influences in blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll -- rock and roll started at almost exactly the point that America changed from being a train culture to being a car culture, and over the coming weeks we'll see that transition happen in the music. By the 1960s people would be singing "Nobody cares about the railroads any more" or about "the last of the good old fashioned steam powered trains", but in the 1940s and early fifties the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people's minds, it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch'boogie.   And so next week we'll be talking a lot more about the impact of trains in rock and roll, as we take our final look at the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938…   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Louis Jordan and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Louis Jordan’s music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This four-CD set is very cheap and has most of the classic tracks on. And here’s a similarly-priced collection of Chick Webb. There aren’t many books on Louis Jordan as an individual, and most of the information here comes from books on other musicians, but this one is probably worth your while if you want to investigate more. And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum. Transcript We’ve spent a lot of time in 1938 in this podcast, haven’t we? First there was Flying Home, first recorded in 1939, but where we had to talk about events from 1938. Then we had “Roll ‘Em Pete”, recorded in 1938. And “Ida Red”, recorded in 1938. 1938 is apparently the real year zero for rock and roll — whether you come at it from the direction of blues and boogie, or jazz, or country and western music, 1938 ends up being the place where you start. Eighty years ago this year.   And 1938 is also the year that one man made his solo debut, and basically put together all the pieces of rock and roll in one place.   If you’ve seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races — well, OK, if you’ve not seen A Day At The Races, you really should, because while it’s not the best film the Marx Brothers ever made, it’s still a good Marx Brothers film, and it’ll brighten up your day immensely to watch it, so go and watch that, and then come back and listen to the rest of this. And if you haven’t watched all their earlier films, watch those too. Except The Cocoanuts, you can skip that one. Go on. I can wait.   OK, now you’ve definitely seen the Marx Brothers film A Day At The Races, so you’ll remember the dance sequence where Ivie Anderson sings “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”, and the amazing dancers in that scene.   [Ivy Anderson “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”]   That’s a dance called the Lindy Hop — you might remember that as the dance the “booglie wooglie piggy” did in a song we excerpted in episode two, it was named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous airman and Nazi sympathiser — and the people dancing it are Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. And they were responsible for a controversy, on the night of Benny Goodman’s first Carnegie Hall concert — the one we talked about in episode one — that is still talked about in jazz eighty years later.   [Chick Webb “Stompin’ At The Savoy”]   That’s “Stompin’ at the Savoy” by Chick Webb, one of the most famous swing recordings ever, though it was later recorded by Benny Goodman in an even more fanous version. The Savoy Ballroom was where Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers used to dance — there was an entire corner of the ballroom set off for them, even though the rest of the floor was for the other dancers. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop was invented, and it was the place to dance, because it was where Chick Webb, the real king of swing played.   We’ve seen a few kings of swing so far — Benny Goodman was the person most associated with the name, and he had the name longest. A few people called Bob Wills that, too, though he mostly billed himself as the king of Western swing. But Chick Webb was the person who deserved the title more than anyone else. He was a small man, who’d contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and he’d taken up the drums as a kind of therapy. He’d been playing professionally since he was eleven, and by the time he was thirty he was leading what was, bar none, the best swing band in New York for dancing. People called him the King of Swing before Goodman, and his band was an absolute force of nature when it came to getting people to do the Lindy Hop. Benny Goodman admired Webb’s band enough that he bought the band’s arrangements and used them himself — all of the Goodman band’s biggest crowd-pleasers, at least the ones that weren’t arrangements he’d bought off Fletcher Henderson, he bought from Edgar Sampson, the saxophone player who did most of Webb’s arrangements. Sampson is the one who wrote “Stompin’ at the Savoy”, which we just heard.   There was a rivalry there — Goodman’s band was bigger in every sense, but Webb’s band was more popular with those who knew the real deal when they heard it. And in 1937, the Savoy hosted a cutting contest between Webb’s Savoy Orchestra and Goodman’s band.   A cutting contest was a tradition that came from the world of stride piano players — the same world that boogie woogie music grew out of. One musician would play his best (and it usually was a “his” — this was a very macho musical world) and then a second would try to top him — playing something faster, or more inventive, or more exciting, often a reworking of the song the first one had played — and then the first would take another turn and try to get better than the second had. They’d keep going, each trying to outdo the other, until a crowd decided that one or the other was the winner.   And that 1937 cutting contest was a big event. The Savoy had two bandstands, so they would have one band start as soon as the other one finished, so people could dance all night. Chick Webb’s band set up on one stage, Goodman’s on another. Four thousand dancers crowded the inside of the ballroom, and despite a police cordon outside to keep trouble down, another five thousand people outside tried to hear what was happening.   And Chick Webb’s band won, absolutely. Gene Krupa, Goodman’s drummer (one of the true greats of jazz drumming himself) later said “I’ll never forget that night. Webb cut me to ribbons!”   And that just was the most famous of many, many cutting contests that Chick Webb’s band won. The only time Chick Webb ever definitely lost a cutting contest was against Duke Ellington, but everyone knew that Chick Webb and Duke Ellington weren’t really trying to do the same kind of thing, and anyway, there’s no shame at all in losing to Duke Ellington.   Count Basie, though, was a different matter. He was trying to do the same kind of thing as Chick Webb, and he was doing it well. And on the night of Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert, Webb and Basie were going to engage in their own cutting contest after hours. For all that the Goodman Carnegie Hall show was important — and it was — the real jazz fans knew that this after-show party was going to be the place to be. Basie had already played the Carnegie hHall show, guesting with Goodman’s band, as had Basie’s tenor sax player Lester Young, but here they were going to get to show off what they could do with their own band.   Basie’s band was on top form at that time, with his new vocalists Jimmy Rushing, a great blues shouter, and Billie Holiday, who was just then becoming a star. Chick Webb had a couple of good vocalists too, though — his new teenage singer, Ella Fitzgerald, in particular, was already one of the great singers.   [Chick Webb – Ella]   And everyone was in the audience. Goodman’s band, Mildred Bailey, Ivie Anderson (who we heard before in that Marx Brothers clip), Red Norvo the vibraphone player, Duke Ellington. Every musician who mattered in the jazz scene was there to see if Basie could beat Chick Webb.   And… there was a dispute about it, one which was never really resolved in Webb’s lifetime.   Because Webb won — everyone agreed, when it came to a vote of the audience, Webb’s band did win, though it was a fairly close decision. Again, the only band to ever beat Chick Webb was Duke Ellington.   But everyone also agreed that Basie’s band had got people dancing more. A lot more.   What nobody realised at the time was that Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had gone on strike. Chick Webb had misheard a discussion between a couple of the dancers about how good the Basie band was going to be that night, assumed that they were saying Basie was going to be better than him, and got into a huff. Webb said “I don’t give a good Goddam what those raggedy Lindy Hoppers think or say. Who needs ’em? As far as I’m concerned they can all go to hell. And their Mammies too.”   After this provocation, Whitey issued an ultimatum to his Lindy Hoppers. That night, they were only going to dance to Basie, and not to Webb. So even though most of the audience preferred Webb’s band, every time they played a song all the best dancers, the ones who had an entire quarter or so of the ballroom to themselves to do their most exciting and visual dances, all sat down, and it looked like the Webb band just weren’t exciting the crowd as much as the Basie band.   Of course, the Basie band were good that night, as well. When you’ve got the 1938 Count Basie band, with Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday singing, you’re going to get a good show. Oh, and they persuaded Duke Ellington to come up and play a piano solo — and then all the band joined in with him, unrehearsed and unprompted.   But despite all that, Webb’s band still beat them in the audience vote.   That’s how good Webb’s band were, and it’s also how good his two big stars were. One of those stars, Ella Fitzgerald, we’ve already mentioned, but the other one was an alto sax player who also took the male lead vocals – we heard him singing with Ella earlier. This sax player did a lot of the frontman job for Webb’s band and was so important to the band in those years that, allegedly, some people thought he was Chick Webb. That man was Louis Jordan.   [Chick Webb I Can’t Dance I Got Ants In My Pants]   Louis Jordan was a good sax player, but what he really was was a performer. He was someone who could absolutely sell a song, with wit and humour and a general sense of hipness that could possibly be matched at that time only by Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard, and Jordan was a better musician than either of them. He was charming, and funny, and tuneful, and good looking, and he knew it.   He knew it so well, in fact, that shortly after that show, he started making plans — he thought that he and Ella were the two important ones in the Webb band, and he planned to form his own band, and take her, and much of the rest of the band with him. Webb found out and fired Jordan, and Ella and most of the band remained loyal to Webb.   In fact, sadly, Jordan would have had what he wanted sooner rather than later anyway. Chick Webb’s disability had been affecting him more, and he was only continuing to perform because he felt he owed it to his musicians — he would often pass out after a show, literally unable to do anything else. He died, aged thirty-four, in June 1939, and Ella Fitzgerald became the leader of his band, though like many big bands it eventually broke up in the mid-forties.   So if Jordan had held on for another few months, he would have had a good chance at being the leader of the Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald band, and history would have been very different. As it was, instead, he formed a much smaller group, the Elks Rendez-vous Band, made up of members of Jesse Stone’s band (you’ll remember him from episode two, he wrote “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). And on December 20, 1938 — ten days before “Roll ‘Em Pete” — Louis Jordan and his Elks Rendez-vous Band went into the studio for the first time, to record “Honey in the Bee Ball” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”.   [excerpt of “Honey in the Bee Ball”]   Shortly after that, they changed their name to Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five.   Before we talk about them more, I want to briefly talk about someone else who worked with Jordan. I want to talk about Milt Gabler. Gabler is someone we’ll be seeing a lot of in this story, and he’s someone who already had an influence on it, but here’s where he becomes important.   You see, even before his influence on rock and roll, Gabler had made one important contribution to music. He had started out as the owner of a little record shop, and he had a massive passion for good jazz music — and so did his customers. And many of those customers had wanted to get hold of old records, now out of print. So in 1935 Gabler started his own record label, and licensed those out of print recordings by people like Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, becoming the owner of the very first ever reissue record label. His labels pioneered things like putting a full list of all the musicians on a record on the label — the kind of thing that real music obsessives cared far more about than executives who only wanted to make money.   After he had some success with that, he branched out into making new records, on a new label, Commodore. That would have stayed a minor label, but for one thing.   In 1939, one of his regular customers, Billie Holiday, had a problem. She’d been performing a new song which she really wanted to record, but her current label, Columbia, wasn’t interested. That song was too political even for her producer, John Hammond — the man who, you will remember from previous episodes, persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band and who put on shows that same year sponsored by the Communist Party. But the song was too political, and too inflammatory, even for him. The song, which became Billie Holiday’s best-known performance, was “Strange Fruit”, and it was about lynching.   [insert section of Strange Fruit here].   Billie Holiday could not get her label to put that track out, under any circumstances. But she knew Milt Gabler might do it — he’d been recording several small group tracks with Lester Young, who was Holiday’s colleague and friend in the Basie band. As Gabler was a friend of hers, and as he was politically left-leaning himself, he eventually negotiated a special deal with Columbia, Holiday’s label, that he could produce her for one session and put out a single recording by her, on Commodore.   That recording sold over a million copies, and became arguably the most important recording in music history. In December 1999, Time Magazine called it the “song of the century”. And in 2017, when the black singer Rebecca Ferguson was invited to play at Donald Trump’s inauguration, she agreed on one condition — that the song she performed could be “Strange Fruit”. She was disinvited.   As a result of “Strange Fruit”‘s success, Milt Gabler was headhunted away from his own label, and became a staff producer at Decca records in 1941. There he was responsible for producing many of the greatest records of the forties — not least that famous Lionel Hampton version of “Flying Home” we looked at towards the end of episode one — and he began a long collaboration with Louis Jordan — remember him? This is a story about Louis Jordan.   Jordan’s new band had a sound unlike anything else of the time — Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown later claimed that Jordan had most of the responsibility for the decline of the big bands, saying “He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper.”   And while we’ve talked before about a whole raft of economic and social reasons for the decline of the big bands, there was a lot of truth in that statement — while there were sometimes actually as many as seven or eight members of the Tympany Five, the original lineup was just Jordan plus one trumpet, one sax, piano, bass, and drums, and yet their recordings did sound almost as full as many of the bigger bands.   The style they were playing in was a style that later became known as “jump band” music, and it was a style that owed a lot to Lionel Hampton’s band, and to Count Basie. This is a style of music that’s based on simple chord changes — usually blues changes. And it’s based on the concept of the riff.   We haven’t really talked much about the idea of riffs yet in this series, but they’re absolutely crucial to almost all popular music from the twentieth century. A riff is, in its conception, fairly straight forward. It’s an instrumental phrase that gets repeated over and over. It can act as the backbone to a song, but it can also be the basis for variation and improvisation — when you “riff on” something, you’re coming up with endless variations and permutations of it.   Riffs were important in swing music — generally they were a sort of back-and-forth in those. You’d have the saxophones play the riff, and then the trumpets and trombones repeat it after them. But swing wasn’t just about riffs — with a big orchestra, you had to have layers and stuff for all the musicians to do.   In jump band music, on the other hand, you strip everything back. The track becomes about the riff, the solos, and the vocal if there is one, and that’s it. You play that riff over the simplest possible changes, you play it to a rhythm that will get everyone dancing — often a boogie rhythm — and you make everything about the energy of the performance.   Jordan’s band did that, and they combined it with Jordan’s own unique stage personality. Jordan, remember, had been the male singer in a band whose female singer was Ella Fitzgerald. You don’t keep a job like that very long if you’re not good.   Now, Jordan wasn’t good in the same way as Ella was — no-one was good in the same way as Ella Fitzgerald — but what he was very good at was putting personality into his vocals. One thing we haven’t talked much about yet in this series is the way that there was a whole tradition of jive singing which dates back at least to the 1920s and Cab Calloway:   [excerpt from “Reefer Man”]   Jive singers weren’t usually technically great, but they had personality. They were hip, and they often used made up words of their own. They were clever, and funny, and sophisticated, and they were often singing about the underworld or drug use or prostitution or other such disreputable concepts — when they weren’t just singing nonsense words like Slim Gaillard anyway.   [Excerpt of “Flat Foot Floogie”]   And Louis Jordan was very much in the mould of singers like Gaillard or Calloway or Fats Waller, all of whom we could easily do episodes on here if we were going far enough back into rock’s prehistory. But Jordan is the way that that stream became part of the rhythm of rock music.   Most of Jordan’s songs were written by Jordan himself, although he’s not the credited writer on many of them — rather, his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, is credited for contractual reasons. Jordan and Moore later split up after multiple separate occasions where she stabbed him, but she retained credit on the songs. So, for example, she’s credited on “Caldonia”, which is a perfect example of Jordan’s comedy jump band style.   [Louis Jordan: Caldonia]   “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” Jordan’s biggest hit, was slightly different. From early 1943 — just after Gabler started producing his records — Jordan had been having occasional crossover hits on the country charts. These days, his music sounds to us clearly like it’s blues or R&B — in fact he’s basically the archetype of a jump blues musician — but remember how we’ve talked about Western Swing using so many swing and boogie elements? If you were making boogie music then, you were likely to appeal to the same audience that was listening to Bob Wills, just as much as you were to the audience that was listening to Big Joe Turner.   And because of this crossover success, Jordan started recording occasional songs that were originally aimed at the white country market. “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” was co-written by Gabler, but the other songwriters were pure country and western writers — Denver Darling, one of the writers, was a hillbilly singer who recorded songs such as “My Little Buckaroo”, “I’ve Just Gotta Be A Cowboy” and “Ding Dong Polka”, while the other writer, Vaughn Horton, wrote “Dixie Cannonball” and “Muleskinner Blues”.   So “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” was, in conception, a hillbilly boogie, but in Louis Jordan’s hands, it was almost the archetypal rhythm and blues song:   [insert section of Choo Choo Ch’Boogie here]   You can hear from that how much it resembles the Bob Wills music we heard last week — and how the song itself would fit absolutely into the genre of Western Swing. There’s only really the lack of a fiddle or steel guitar to distinguish the styles. But you can also hear the horn-driven pulse, and the hip vocals, that characterise rhythm and blues. Those internal rhymes and slangy lyrics — “take me right back to the track, Jack” — come straight from the jive school of vocals, even though it’s a country and western song.   If there’s any truth at all to the claim that rock and roll was the mixing of country and western music with rhythm and blues, this is as good a point as any to say “this is where rock and roll really started”. Essentially every musician in the early rock and roll period was, to a greater or lesser extent, copying the style of Louis Jordan’s 1940s records. And indeed “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” was later covered by another act Milt Gabler produced — an act who, more than any other, based their style on Jordan’s. But we’ll come to Bill Haley and his Comets in a few episodes time.   For now, we want to listen to the way that jump band music sounds. This is not music that sounds like it’s a small band. That sounds like a full horn section, but you’ll notice that during the sax solo the other horns just punch in a little, rather than playing a full pad under it — the arrangement is stripped back to the basics, to what’s necessary. This is a punchy track, and it’s a track that makes you want to dance.   [sax solo excerpt]   And this is music that, because it’s so stripped down, relies on vocal personality more than other kinds. This is why Louis Jordan was able to make a success of this — his jive singing style gives the music all the character that in the larger bands would be conveyed by other instruments.   But also, notice the lyrics — “the rhythm of the clickety clack”. It’s that backbeat again, the one we’ve been talking about. And the lyrics here are all about that rhythm, but also about the rhythm of the steam trains.   That mechanical steam train rhythm is one of the key influences in blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll — rock and roll started at almost exactly the point that America changed from being a train culture to being a car culture, and over the coming weeks we’ll see that transition happen in the music. By the 1960s people would be singing “Nobody cares about the railroads any more” or about “the last of the good old fashioned steam powered trains”, but in the 1940s and early fifties the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people’s minds, it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch’boogie.   And so next week we’ll be talking a lot more about the impact of trains in rock and roll, as we take our final look at the Carnegie Hall concerts of 1938…   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

This week's episode of Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting is about the early work of Charles Mingus, from the middle 1940s to 1956 when he signed with Atlantic records, and features his work as a leader and as a sideman in the bands of Miles Davis, Teddy Charles, Red Norvo (about whom a story from Mingus' autobiography Beneath The Underdog is shared) and more!

(Part 2 of 2)Drummer Joe Corsello was born and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. Joe studied at Berklee under drum legend Alan Dawson and later, with Joe Hunt. As the house drummer for Michael’s Pub in New York, Joe backed jazz greats Red Norvo, Hank Jones, Zoot Simms, and pianist, Marian McPartland, and toured with Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee. Joe is a co-founder of the jazz/rock band, New York Mary. The band recorded two successful records and toured with the B52′s, Patti Smith, Stevie Wonder and Tony Williams Lifetime band. Joe currently travels with saxophonist Sonny Rollins and can be heard on recordings with Rollins, Marian McPartland, Benny Goodman, Mike Mainari, and the list goes on…………www.joecorsello.com Website         Newsletter         Become a Patron

Drummer Joe Corsello was born and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. Joe studied at Berklee under drum legend Alan Dawson and later, with Joe Hunt. As the house drummer for Michael’s Pub in New York, Joe backed jazz greats Red Norvo, Hank Jones, Zoot Simms, and pianist, Marian McPartland, and toured with Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee. Joe is a co-founder of the jazz/rock band, New York Mary. The band recorded two successful records and toured with the B52′s, Patti Smith, Stevie Wonder and Tony Williams Lifetime band. Joe currently travels with saxophonist Sonny Rollins and can be heard on recordings with Rollins, Marian McPartland, Benny Goodman, Mike Mainari, and the list goes on…… www.joecorsello.com Website         Newsletter         Become a Patron    

This week's Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting is all trios, featuring Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Red Norvo, Bud Powell and more.  Help support the show by visiting patreon.com/wednesdaynightprayermeeting

Knas hylder et instrument, som ikke længere høres så meget. Nemlig vibrafonen. Nyd en times knas med navne som bl.a. Red Norvo, Lionel Hampton, Max Leth og Louis Hjulmand. Ingen dikkedarer. Ingen slinger i valsen. Jazz med jazz på. Musik du kender. Vært Jens Rasmussen henter guldet frem fra gemmerne og spiller jazzmusik fra 1920-1970. www.dr.dk/p8jazz

Chamber Music By The Stan Getz Quintet (con Horace Silver, Duke Jordan o Roy Haynes); Diz And Getz y For Musicians Only (con Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Oscar Peterson, Max Roach o Ray Brown); Hamp & Getz (con Lionel Hampton y Shelly Manne); y Groovin' High (con Red Norvo, Louis Bellson u Oscar Moore), suenan en la tercera entrega del especial dedicado a Stan Getz. Tomajazz: © Pachi Tapiz, 2017 HDO es un podcast editado, presentado y producido por Pachi Tapiz.

English The program nº 36 is based on the variations that occur within the Jazz, Classics in the key of Jazz. Dedicated to my good friend LUIS MILT JACKSON   (Detroit, January 1, 1923 - October 9, 1999) American jazz vibraphone that surpassed the two major historical figures of the instrument, Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo, and which remained for fifty years at the top of The popularity, his stylistic scope was hugely varied, encompassing bop, blues and more traditional ballads. TILL BRONER OSCAR PETERSON AND STAND GETZ ELIAN ELIAS DIANA KRALL CLASSICS IN JAZZ KEY SADE LIONEL RICHIE B.B. KING AND ERIC CLAPTON Basia Mezzoforte HOTEL COTES 2 ESPAÑOL EL programa nº 36 se basa en las variaciones que se dan dentro del Jazz, Clásicos en clave de Jazz. Dedicado a mi buen amigo LUIS MILT JACKSON (Detroit, 1 de enero de 1923 - 9 de octubre de 1999) vibrafonista estadounidense de jazz que sobrepasó en relevancia a las dos principales figuras históricas del instrumento, Lionel Hampton y Red Norvo, y que se mantuvo durante cincuenta años en lo más alto de la popularidad, Su ámbito estilístico fue enormemente variado, abarcando bop, blues y las baladas más tradicionales. TILL BRONER OSCAR PETERSON AND STAND GETZ ELIAN ELIAS DIANA KRALL CLASICOS EN CLAVE DE JAZZ SADE LIONEL RICHIE B.B. KING AND ERIC CLAPTON BASIA mezzoforte HOTEL COTES 2

Celebrating Drum and Percussion Month.  Works include: Drum Boogie, Sing, Sing, Sing, Ionization, Strictly Drums, Bughouse and Quiet Riot. Performers include: Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa. Cozy Cole, Red Norvo, Milt Jackson and Shelly Manne.

Music from a bygone era but just as fresh as the memories you have for it. Let's go back in time with Danny Lane for the best hour of your day. Request your favorite Big Band song to dannymemorylane@gmail.com In this episode you'll hear: 1) You're A Heavenly Thing by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra 2) Let's Get Away From It All by Frank Sinatra (w/ The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra & Connie Haines and the Pied Pipers, vocal) 3) Just One of Those Things by Sonny Burke & His Orchestra 4) Sock Hop by Si Zentner & His Orchestra 5) Stop, Pretty Baby, Stop by Count Basie (w/ Joe Williams, vocal) 6) Old Spice by Lucky Millinder 7) Alexander's Ragtime Band by Ray Charles 8) Perdido by Harry James & His Orchestra 9) A Bushel And A Peck by Perry Como & Betty Hutton 10) Take The "A" Train by Marica Hiraga 11) Jericho by Cozy Cole 12) King Porter Stomp by Ted Heath 13) Ration Blues by Louis Jordan 14) Little Brown Jug by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra 15) Oop Bop Sh'bam by Buddy Rich 16) I Didn't Know What Time It Was by The Les Brown Orchestra 17) Johnson Rag by Xavier Cugat 18) Just You, Just Me by Red Norvo & His Orchestra 19) Somebody Somewhere by Doris Day 20) Tiger Rag by Al Hirt

This is quintessential Tal Farlow one of the masters of Jazz guitar with his trio including the fabulous Eddie Costa at the piano and Vinnie Burke on bass. The repertoire is mostly standards but done in the unique and wonderfully refreshing manner by one of the great masters of Jazz guitar Tal Farlow! This album was recorded in May of 1956 after Tal did his apprenticeship with Red Norvo and Artie Shaw and others. This band became the house band at The Composer, an upscale Jazz venue in New York until it's closing in 1958. Enjoy a guitarist who was not only swinging but creative and distinctive and whose technical facility was the envy of every other guitarist. Tal Farlow Jazz giant!

Tonight's music is swinging, lyrical and elegant and played by a group of Jazz masters under the leadership of one of the pioneers of Modern Jazz, vibraphonist Milt Jackson. After Lionel Hampton and to a lesser extent, Red Norvo, it was Milt Jackson who brought the vibes into Modern Jazz. He predominated on that instrument throughout his lifetime. As the primary member of The Modern Jazz Quartet he was able to branch out into his own career in person and on records and this date is one of his finest.Done in January of 1956 it pairs Milt Jackson with one of the most authoritative voices of the tenor saxophone and sadly one of the most overlooked...Eli "Lucky" Thompson. His sound and concept is one of the most original. These two gentlemen are accompanied by an ideal rhythm section of Hank Jones, one of the piano masters, Wendell Marshall on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. Standards and blues abound and played with the touch of five Jazz Masters.

Records left off of previous podcasts. Music includes: God's Got a Crown, Grinder Man Blues, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Horses and Tea For Two.  Performers include: Memphis Slim, Arizona Dranes, Red Norvo, the Berlin Philharmonic and Blanche Calloway.

Xylophone, marimba and vibraphone recordings.  Songs include: Triplets, Who's Sorry Now?, Memories of You and Avelon. Artists include: Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, George Hamilton Green and Adrian Rollini.

Big Band Serenade presents Red Norvo & His Orchestra with Mildred Baily together they were Mr & Mrs Swing 1933-1945 The music in this program is listed in order of play;1) "Knockin' On Wood"  1933 2) "Hole In The Wall" 19333) "In A Mist" 19334) "Dance Of The Octopus" 1933 5) "Tea Time" 19386) "Now And Then" 19387) "Saving Myself For You" Vocal Mildred Bailey8) "Picture Me Without You" 1936 Vocal Mildred Bailey9) "Have Mercy" 1939 10)"Yours For A Song" 1939 11)"Who Blew Out The Flame" Vocal Mildred Bailey12)"Which Switch Witch" 194413)"Seven Come Eleven" 194414)"Blue In E Flat" 1935 *******Please Take Our Survey******

He's one of the most under-heralded geniuses of the jazz guitar. After cutting his teeth on the NYC bebop scene of the late '40s, and building a rep with vibraphonist Red Norvo, Farlow receded from jazz life to live in a shore town in New Jersey. Pete Wagula's lesson examines the titan's style, with a predilection for chord melody, but an astonishing facility for single-note runs and double stops. Farlow, renowned for his big hands, will test your stretching capabilities. Overall, an invaluable look at one of the all-time greats. Tab, notation and Power Tab files available at http://truefire.com/list.html?store=audio_lessons&item=1339 (log-in to access streaming audio and files).