Bubber Miley: Rare Recordings, 1924-1931 (Vintage Music Productions, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I was listening to yet another CD from Amazon.com – an obscure collection on something called Vintage Music Productions of rare recordings by trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley from 1924 through 1931. Miley was, not in terms of musical style but in terms of his brief lifespan and the alcoholism that did them both in well ahead of schedule, the Black Bix Beiderbecke: they were almost exact contemporaries (they were born within a month of each other, Bix on March 10, 1903 and Bubber on April 3, 1903) and they both died in their late 20’s, Bix on August 6, 1031 and Miley on May 20, 1932) – which brings added poignancy to the record date they both made with Hoagy Carmichael on May 21, 1930 on which they recorded “Rockin’ Chair” – at the time of the date Bix had drunk himself out of Paul Whiteman’s band and Miley had drunk himself out of Duke Ellington’s, and within two years of making that record both men would be dead. (It’s also the only record Bix ever made with a Black musician, and as I once noted on the Bixography Forum the two both spoke the jazz language but distinctly different dialects of it. I remember wishing that Bix’s one date with a Black musician could have been with Louis Armstrong instead!)

I was surprised that quite a few of Miley’s recordings with Duke Ellington, most of which are not particularly “rare,” were included, since most of those aren’t particularly rare (though there are exceptions: “Move Over” with Lonnie Johnson on guitar and listed as bandleader, and a version of “St. Louis Blues” with the white bandleader Warren Mills listed as leader). The liner notes somewhat overstate (I think) Miley’s importance to the formation of the Ellington sound, arguing that before he arrived the Washingtonians (the original name of the Ellington band, reflecting his origins in Washington, D.C.) were a novelty dance band that didn’t sound particularly jazzy and Miley essentially was to Ellington what Louis Armstrong was to Fletcher Henderson: the man who taught the pianist-bandleader how to swing and made the group over into a real jazz orchestra. The annotator, Jeff Hopkins, also argues that Miley was the “principal composer” of the pieces that name both him and Duke as writers, including such seminal Ellington works as “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Creole Love Call” and “The Mooche.” The disc closes with some of the records Miley made as a featured guest with Leo Reisman’s orchestra when Victor signed the trumpeter as a solo artist (leading a band with the odd name Bubber Miley and His Mileage Makers, none of whose sides are included here but there’s a YouTube posting of them) and a frequent guest with various studio bands. I remember recognizing Miley’s horn on some of the records Fred and Adele Astaire made with Reisman to promote their last Broadway show, The Band Wagon (1930) – some of which were made on 33 ⅓ rpm masters for Victor’s short-lived (due to the Depression) “Program Transcription” series of early-1930’s LP’s. Also two of the Reisman songs, “Rolling Down the River” and “Without That Gal,” are reversed on the disc’s documentation.

Miley was an explosive trumpeter and the master of the plunger mute (the rubber part of a plumber’s plunger detached from its handle and used to create a wah-wah effect), though the first jazz musician to record with the plunger mute was King Oliver on the 1923 “Dipper Mouth Blues.” (The tune has become a Dixieland jazz standard, and it almost always includes a note-for-note recreation of Oliver’s solo – but most Dixieland players do it on open horn and so I was startled when I first heard Oliver’s record and realized he was using the plunger.) The plunger mute became an integral part of Ellington’s sound throughout his career, but there’s some debate over who first introduced it; Ellington said it was trombonist Charles Irvis, who had a mute that made his trombone sound like a saxophone; when it broke one night Irvis picked up the largest remaining piece and held it over his horn, moving it in and out and thus creating the wah-wah effect, but it was Miley who really put that sound on the jazz map. There’s also the weird enigma of a medley including Ellington’s “The Mooche” that is apparently the soundtrack from a Vitaphone short with Reisman, though it’s not clear from Hopkins’ liner notes whether the movie itself survives – apparently a still shows a stout trumpeter in silhouette (as if they were trying to conceal from viewers that the player was Black), but that doesn’t look like the photos of Miley we have, which show a thin man. It would be nice to see this movie if only to know whether it counts as the first appearance of an interracial band on film (predating the Benny Goodman Quartet in Hollywood Hotel seven years later).