The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions (1924-36)
In the 1920s jazz was still new, and barely recorded until mid-decade; it wasn’t always easy for musicians and listeners to tell exactly what the music was. It was built on the already thoroughly intertwined strands of black and white American music: ragtime and marches, blues and spirituals, vaudeville and pop songs, rickety community bands and leviathan concert outfits like John Philip Sousa’s, with their virtuoso cornet and saxophone soloists and contrasting sweet and hot stylists. There were more elements at play than any one musician could get to, and finding the right balance could be a matter of trial and error.
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Looking back, we can see clearly enough where the music was going. Follow Louis Armstrong’s career through the 20s and you’ll learn a lot about how jazz ensembles, rhythm, improvisation, and instrumental technique evolved. Tram, by contrast, spent his career betting on the wrong horses. His pal Bix drank himself to death by 1931, at age 28, but Tram lived until 1956, the only early jazz innovator to survive so long who failed to keep up with the music one way or another. Saxophonist Sidney Bechet played with modern rhythm sections in the 50s; Armstrong had a number one hit in Beatles-invasion 1964 (“Hello, Dolly!” unfortunately); pianist Earl Hines (still) sounded amazingly modern in the 70s. And Jack Teagarden, the third-billed star of this box, had a modern sense of relaxation from the beginning.
Bix was celebrated for hitting every note like a bell, and his clarity of execution sings through–but behind the artful triplets and rips is an overall pattern of alternating weak and strong accents that can give his lines an air of marching in place. He’d often season a line with more colorful pitches than Armstrong chose, but Armstrong’s phrasing makes him sound more modern in retrospect.
By 1934 Teagarden and Trumbauer were recording together; by now the trombonist had also become one of Whiteman’s well-paid trophy soloists. Mostly they recorded under Tram’s leadership, and those collaborations, filling the last disc here, let him exit this survey with dignity. The band’s pulse has loosened up, even on three tracks with Casper Reardon’s angelic harp in the rhythm section. By 1936 Tram’s own solos were swinging a bit more, in the contemporary way, some ragtime throwbacks notwithstanding. Snappier drummers like Stan King help a lot, and Teagarden’s presence sets everyone’s wheels rolling. It’s a tribute to his modern rhythmic conception that he’d play many of the tunes he recorded in these years for the rest of his life, into the early 60s–notably “Stars Fell on Alabama,” with lyrics by Mitchell Parish that dip into moonlight-and-magnolia nostalgia without the tar-baby underpinnings of, say, “Ol’ Pappy,” which Teagarden sang in the persona of “a little pickaninny.”
