This post is from an author we have worked with at Mumubl or an author who has recognised regular high quality posts.
What are featured authors?
I think what’s fascinating with the early jazz era is that it’s always, to a certain extent, captured the public imagination. It’s such a strong aesthetic shorthand — when we think of the ’20s and ’30s, everyone’s seen something like The Great Gatsby film. I don’t remember not being aware of it. Part of that might be because it was really the advent of more accessible recording technology — photographers and filmmakers were more able to go and capture Lindy hopping in the Savoy ballroom — so it’s woven in with things being more easily documented. We have a much better idea of what things looked like and sounded like in the ’20s and ’30s than we would from the 1910s, when people were still buying sheet music and going round a piano, or 78s. So maybe it’s that point where jazz and things being easier to record, document, sell and move around meshed together.
When you do the high-school jazz band thing that basically everyone in the band grew up doing, it tends to be Chameleon and Watermelon Man and things like that. Then maybe in the more advanced band you’d go earlier, looking at Count Basie. So I grew up doing the jazz thing at school, which took you back to the big bands, playing some Duke Ellington arrangements. But it was really through joining the Easy Rollers that I got more nerdy about the even earlier stuff — looking at Omer Simeon and Johnny Dodds, these clarinet players especially. Before that, 18-year-old me knew who Benny Goodman was because my grandad was really into big bands, but it took a while to go further back into those avenues.
There’s a similar voraciousness to the ’20s — it’s raucous, kind of rebellious, an underground and subversive culture, with segregated cultural happenings, and maybe we’ve smoothed the edges off the social reality of where that music was happening. A lot of these musicians probably didn’t have the least dependent habits they could have had, and there was a grittiness — the people appreciating this music often had difficult lives defined by discrimination. There’s something about it that gets a similar appeal from me as, say, listening to Buzzcocks records — a kind of anti-establishment energy that unifies these things. But we’re so used to people buying a flapper dress off Amazon for a party that we’ve lost the grip of where that music really emerged from.
There’s a pretty fun instrumental by Omar Simeon called Bo-Weevil, also known as Beau Koo Jack — clarinet and piano. I learned the whole thing, and it taught me a lot about the language. Anything from that first small-combo Benny Goodman thing is brilliant musically, and also socially very important — he had Teddy Wilson as a black piano player, an integrated band put together by a white musician of some repute.
Taken from an interview with Jamie Stockbridge of The Easy Rollers in conjunction with Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot – You can get tickets for the band’s show there on the 15th July, along with their other upcoming gigs at https://www.theeasyrollers.co.uk/diary and you can view the other upcoming events at the Shakespeare North Playhouse at https://shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/
