The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz by Tom Piazza

of interest, and a must for the Ellington fan, is Reflections in Ellington (Natasha Imports NI 4016), which contains two medleys recorded by the 1932 band in stereo - not reprocessed stereo but the real thing, recorded on two machines and then synchronized. The fascinating story of the discovery of this material is told in the liner notes.
Ellington occupied the same position in every era of jazz that he did in the late 1920s and very early 1930s. We'll revisit him periodically.
Lonely Melody
Jazz-oriented bands weren't the only ones to hire what were called hot soloists in those days. Every band needed one or two musicians who could provide at least a semblance of a jazz solo. As a gross generalization, the black big bands tended to have a higher jazz quotient than the white bands, but even the sweetest of the sweet (with the possible exception of Guy Lombardo) usually had at least one hot soloist. Probably the most famous example was the orchestra of Paul Whiteman.
Whiteman was called the King of Jazz by a public and press that equated the word with the uninhibited excess and license of the 1920s life-style. Whiteman's was basically a dance band with pretensions, and little of its enormous output would be recognizable as jazz today. But throughout the late

 

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1920s and 1930s, he hired some very good musicians indeed, including violinist Joe Venuti, the Dorsey brothers, saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, trombonist Jack Teagarden, and, perhaps the best known, cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.
Most of the best of Whiteman's records were orchestrated by the great arranger Bill Challis. Records like "Changes," "Lonely Melody," and "From Monday On" have beautiful, complete statements by the short-lived Beiderbecke; they are collected on Bix Lives! (RCA/Bluebird 6845-2-RB). In listening to the cuts collected here, note how the jazz aspect of the performances fades in and out, like a radio station just on the edge of its range. At times, as in "San," the jazz wing of the band is given full freedom. At other times, Beiderbecke takes his solo over crooning voices, or his solo stands out in the middle of lush string arrangements like the Statue of Liberty in a cornfield. One of the most interesting cuts is ''You Took Advantage of Me," which has a full chase chorus of two-bar exchanges between Bix and his soulmate Frank Trumbauer on C-melody saxophone. But the jazz element is rarely integrated fully into the performance; the violins and other sweet elements provide a sentimental spin that was temperamentally foreign to what bands like Henderson's were trying to bring off.
Other orchestras, such as those of Roger Wolfe Kahn and, especially, Ben Pollack, could generate considerable jazz feeling when they wanted to. Pollack's most serious jazz soloists were trombonist Jack Teagarden and a young clarinetist from Chicago named Benny Goodman, who joined the Pollack orchestra when he was only seventeen. You can hear Teagarden with the Pollack and Kahn bands, as well as on several sides recorded during his mid-1930s tenure with Whiteman, on Jack Teagarden/That's a Serious Thing (RCA/Bluebird 9986-2-RB), which also includes some flat-out small-group jazz with the trombonist.
Good as those sides are, Teagarden gets even more of a chance to shine - alongside Goodman himself - on Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: B.G. and Big Tea in NYC (Decca/GRP GRD-609). This collection of tracks recorded between 1929 and 1934 shows what happened when the best hot soloists from the white dance orchestras of the time were turned loose to play more or less as they wished. Most of the bands on this collection were recording-studio-only affairs made up of the likes of Goodman, Teagarden, violin master Joe Venuti, the brilliant guitarist Eddie Lang, and the much-recorded trumpeter Red Nichols. Probably the best tracks here are the four 1931 sides - "Beale Street Blues," "After You've Gone," "Farewell Blues," and "Someday Sweetheart" - by Venuti and Lang and their