Hot Flashes: Rare High-Quality Short-Lived Bands: Their Complete Recordings

Hot Flashes: Rare High-Quality Short-Lived Bands: Their Complete Recordings
Vintage Music Productions VMP 0191 (2006)

Musical Stevedores: “Happy Rhythm,” “Honeycomb Harmony”: Freddie Jenkins, Louis Metcalf (t), Henry Hicks (tb), Clarence Grimes, Charlie Holmes (as, ss, cl), Cliff Jackson (p, cymbal), Elmer Snowden (bjo), Bud Hicks (b-b, scat vcl) – N.Y.C., 1/16/29 (Columbia)

Trombone Red and His Blue Six: “Greasey [sic] Plate Stomp,” “B-Flat Blues”
Charlie Gaines or Jabbo Smith (t), Robert Freeman (tb), Otto Hardwick (as), Duke Ellington (p), Fred Guy (bjo), Sonny Greer (d), unk. (vcl) – N.Y.C., 6/18/31 (Columbia)

Charlie Skeete and His Orchestra: “Tampeekoe,” “Deep Henderson”
Leonard Davis, Tommy Hodges (t), Tommy Jones (tb), Gene Johnson (cl, as, bs-s), Cliff Glover (cl, as, ts), Charlie Skeete (p, dir), Joe Jones (bjo), Bill Brown (b-b), Tommy Benford (d) – N.Y.C., 6/8/26 (Edison)

Lee Weimer’s Black and White Aces: “Louisiana Bo Bo,” “The Merry Widow’s Got a Sweetie Now”
Eddie Stone (vcl on “The Merry Widow’s Got a Sweetie Now”), otherwise unknown – Richmond, IN, 7/28/28 (Gennett)

Jelly James and His Fewsicians: “Make Me Know It,” “Georgia Bo Bo”
George Temple (t), David “Jelly” James (tb), Perry Smith (cl, as), Hank Duncan (p), Ollie Blackwell (bjo), Ralph Bedell (d) – N.Y.C., 1/25/27 (Gennett; also released on Silvertone as “Memphis Daddy and His Boys”)

LeRoy Tibbs and His Connie’s Inn Orchestra: “One O’Clock Blues,” “I Got Worry (Love Is On My Mind)”
Ed Allen, Gilbert Paris (c), TeRoy Williams (tb), Arvil Harris (cl, as), prob. Andrew Brown (cl, ts), unk. (ts), Allie Ross (vln), LeRoy Tibbs (p, dir), Leroy Harris (bjo), Cyrus St. Clair (b-b), Hugh Davis (d) – N.Y.C., 2/1/28 (Columbia)

Lloyd Hunter’s Serenaders: “Sensational Mood,” “Dreamin’ ’Bout My Man”
Lloyd Hunter, Reuben Floyd, George Lott (t), Dan Minor (tb), Noble Floyd (cl, as, arr), Archie Watts (as), Harry Arnold (ts), George Madison or Burton Brewer (p), Amos Clayton (bjo), Wallace Wright (b-b), Jo Jones (d), Victoria Spivey (vcl on “Dreamin’ ’Bout My Man”) – N.Y.C., 4/2/31 (Vocalion)

KXYZ Novelty Band: “I Never Knew,” “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “I Found a New Baby,” “That’s A-Plenty,” “Avalon,” “Basin Street Blues,” “Bugle Call Rag”
Kit Reid (t), Joe Barbee (ts), Jack Sharpe (p), Raby Cummins (g), Jimmy Johnson (b), Bill Smith (d) – San Antonio, TX, 1/29/35 (Bluebird)

“Mason-Dixon Orchestra” [pseudonym for Frank Trumbauer and His Orchestra]: “What a Day!,” “Alabammy Snow” (listed on VMP 0191 as “Alabamy Snow”)
Charlie Margulis, Harry Goldfield (t), Andy Secrest (c), Bill Rank (tb), Irving “Izzy” Friedman (cl, as), Frank Trumbauer (C-ms), Charles Strickfaden (cl, bs), Min Leibrook (bs-s), Lennie Hayton (p), Ed “Snoozer” Quinn (g), George Marsh (d) – N.Y.C., 5/15/29 (Columbia)

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

I recently purchased a CD on the Vintage Music Productions label, released in 2006, called Hot Flashes: Rare High-Quality Short-Lived Bands: Their Complete Recordings. The concept behind this album was to collect records by jazz bands that recorded only once, usually just producing two songs – one for each side of a 78 rpm shellac-and-clay record, the standard format for music between the demise of the Edison and Columbia cylinders in the early 20th century and the advent of 33 ⅓ rpm LP’s and 45 rpm singles in the late 1940’s. The “brain” behind this CD was Bill Hebden, who in his essay on the back of the CD booklet explains how the record collecting bug bit him as early as the 1940’s, when his older brother Chuck shipped out to the Pacific during World War II.

According to his Web page, http://www.hebden-media.com, Bill Hebden took up photography, first as a hobby and then as a profession, after his discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps in the 1950’s. In the 1960’s he started collecting old jazz records on a systematic basis, and in the late 1970’s he launched his own reissue label, Swing Time (not to be confused with Jack Lauderdale’s Los Angeles-based Swingtime Records from the early 1950’s, which launched the early career of Ray Charles). In 1980 he added the Vintage Music Productions label so he could reissue jazz records that predated the swing era. (His Web site is still up but the links to order any of his CD’s are dead.)

In his liner notes to Hot Flashes, Bill Hebden recalls how he got interested in one-off recordings. “One day at a flea market, a fellow was selling piles of 78 rpm records for 10¢ each,” he said. “I offered to buy them all for 5¢ each, and to my delight he accepted. In this collection was a Columbia 1861 by the Mason-Dixon Orchestra, [of] whom I had never heard. When I dropped the needle on the tune ‘Alabammy Snow,’ I was amazed at what a great recording this was and wondered why their music was not being played on the radio. I later learned that this was the only record they ever made, and this started me thinking of how many other high-quality bands there must be that never became popular.”

Ironically, Hebden started his obsession under false pretenses. The “Mason-Dixon Orchestra” was actually a pseudonym for Frank Trumbauer and His Orchestra, which was itself a spinoff from the most popular band of the period, Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Trumbauer had started his series of medium-sized jazz band records for the Okeh label in 1927, and featured two of the greatest jazz stars of the period, cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and guitarist Eddie Lang. Trumbauer played a then popular but now obsolete instrument called the C-melody saxophone, which was pitched between an alto and a tenor sax and was called that because it was the one sax whose players could read their music straight from a piano part instead of having to transpose.

In late 1927 Trumbauer (nicknamed “Tram”) and Beiderbecke joined the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and they continued to make records under their own names for Okeh while also recording with Whiteman on Victor and Columbia. But Whiteman restricted his musicians’ recording activities: they couldn’t do outside sessions with non-Whiteman musicians. They could record as solo artists, but they had to fill their ranks with other players from the Whiteman organization. Bix was a notorious alcoholic – he essentially drank himself to death at age 28 in 1931 – and the combination of his drinking, the tough demands of Whiteman’s music and tour schedule, and the limited opportunities to play jazz improvisations in Whiteman’s tightly arranged music wore him out.

As Bix’s issues made him less reliable, Whiteman hired another cornetist, Andy Secrest, to backstop him and cover for him if he missed a gig or showed up too drunk to perform. In May 1929 he and Tram agreed that he would no longer play on Tram’s small-band dates for Okeh so he could concentrate his energies on his responsibilities for Whiteman. “What a Day!” and “Alabammy Snow” – made under the “Mason-Dixon Orchestra” pseudonym because they were recorded for Whiteman’s label, Columbia, rather than Trumbauer’s, Okeh (though the two companies had started doing some operations jointly and by 1932 Columbia had absorbed Okeh) – were the first Trumbauer sides on which Secrest replaced Bix.

The Mason-Dixon Orchestra records are actually not all that rare. They are available on the first of three CD’s of Trumbauer’s work on the T.O.M. (“The Old Masters”) label, and they appeared on the now out-of-print Mosaic Records seven-CD boxed set of Bix, Tram and Jack Teagarden. There are also a lot of YouTube posts containing them, many put up by people who over-optimistically claim Bix is on the records (according to the Bix discography compiled by the late Philip Evans and William Dean-Myatt, he isn’t on them or any subsequent records under Trumbauer’s name). Also some of the people who’ve posted these sides to YouTube have made a big deal over the heavy-duty “Southernicity” of the title “Alabammy Snow,” the band name “Mason-Dixon Orchestra,” and the catalog number of the original 78 – 1861, also the year the Civil War started.

Bill Hebden’s Hot Flashes compilation is missing two key records that should have been included and weren’t. One is probably the most famous one-shot record in jazz history: “Blue Devil Blues” and “Squabblin’” by Walter Page and His Blue Devils, recorded in Kansas City November 10, 1929. The band had been founded in Oklahoma City in 1925 and lasted until 1933, and it was one of several bands auditioned for records by Jack Kapp of the Brunswick company (though their record came out on Brunswick’s cheap label, Vocalion). Alas, Kapp decided that another Kansas City-based band, Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy, were more commercial and he let the Blue Devils go. Though the band faded out in jazz history, quite a few illustrious musicians – including pianist Count Basie, singer Jimmy Rushing, trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page and alto saxophonist Buster Smith (Charlie Parker’s teacher and a major – and woefully under-recorded – musician in his own right) made their recording debuts with the Blue Devils.

The other record I wish Hebden would have included is “Starvation Blues” b/w “Boot to Boot” by Jesse Stone and His Blue Serenaders, recorded for Okeh in St. Louis on April 27, 1927. Stone went on to form a big band in Kansas City – regrettably unrecorded – and become musical director for an all-woman band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. (A number of music-industry businessmen organized all-women bands during World War II – it was one way to make sure your musicians wouldn’t get drafted – but the International Sweethearts were an especially good one with plenty of players who could have held their own in a major band if they’d been given the chance.) In 1948 Stone joined the staff of Atlantic Records as a producer and arranger, and in 1954, under the pseudonym “Charles Calhoun,” he wrote one of the first rock ’n’ roll hits, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” introduced by Black blues singer Joe Turner and covered by the white band Bill Haley and His Comets.

Of the records Hebden actually included, the first 12 songs are pretty much in a similar style, the rougher, cruder style that was what was considered “straight-ahead jazz” between 1926 and 1931, when most of these tracks were recorded. Most of the records feature banjo and brass bass, tuba or bass saxophone in the rhythm section instead of the lighter, more fluid, more powerfully driving guitar and string bass that replaced them in the early 1930’s (actually a few progressive bandleaders, including Jean Goldkette, Paul Whiiteman and Duke Ellington, started using string bass instead of tuba in the late 1920’s). The mainstream pop music of the 1920’s was Whiteman’s so-called “symphonic jazz,” which used jazz elements in highly arranged contexts that drew on classical music. They played mainly in ballrooms for dancers and cultivated a smooth texture that would be peppy and easy to dance to.

Some bands played in a rougher style, mainly Black orchestras that played venues in the Black community and whose audience was mostly people who’d done the “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the South to the North in the early 20th century. They were looking for better-paying work than the farm labor most of them had been stuck working in the South, and as the great Northern factories started hiring Black workers, Blacks started getting enough disposable income they could buy phonographs and records – and a lot of the records they bought reminded them of the street bands they’d heard back home.

A few of the musicians on these records have major, or at least semi-major, reputations. The first tracks, “Happy Rhythm” and “Honeycomb Harmony” by the Musical Stevedores (a name which says volumes about the target audience!), features two trumpeters from the early Duke Ellington Orchestra, Freddy Jenkins and Louis Metcalf; and reedman Charlie Holmes, who played with Louis Armstrong in the early 1930’s. The next tracks, “Greasey Plate Stomp” and “B-Flat Blues” by Trombone Red and His Blue Six, features Ellington himself on piano and three members of his band: saxophonist Otto Hardwick, banjoist Freddy Guy and drummer Sonny Greer. One wonders why Ellington, already a major bandleader with a lucrative gig at New York’s Cotton Club, would sneak off and do a session like this, but he probably saw it as a painless way to make a few bucks – and he contributed compositionally, too: the ending of “B-Flat Blues” is ripped off from the ending of “Black and Tan Fantasy,” written by Ellington and trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley and first recorded in 1927, four years before “Trombone Red”’s date.

One of the quirks of this collection is it’s not always easy to tell just from the records whether the bands involved were white or Black. Since racially mixed recording sessions were almost unheard of at this time, we can pretty well guess that the Stevedores, Trombone Red and Skeete bands were Black from some of the musicians’ names. Trumpeter Leonard Davis and drummer Tommy Benford with Skeets’ band, and trumpeter Ed Allen, trombonist TeRoy Williams and tuba player Cyrus St. Clair with LeRoy Tibbs’ group, aren’t particularly famous but have shown up on enough Black records to indicate these bands were Black. Lew Weimer’s band, ironically, is shown as white via a photo on the CD cover even though, aside from singer Eddie Stone, none of their names are known. A Google search for Hank Duncan, pianist with Jelly James and His Fewsicians, shows a photo of a Black man even though he played intermission piano for years at the largely white New York Dixieland club Nick’s.

The first 12 selections on Hot Flashes tend to blur together despite a few individual qualities that stand out – the “Black and Tan Fantasy” knockoff on Trombone Red’s “B-Flat Blues,” the luminous acoustics of the Charlie Skeete sides (Edison, who almost never recorded Black artists, was still recording acoustically but he was using a different grooving system and his records sounded better than those of other companies’ pre-electrical sides) and the laid-back almost Bixian trumpet of George Temple on the Jelly James version of “Georgia Bo Bo.” The most famous version of this song by Fats Waller and lyricist Jo Trent was recorded May 28, 1926 by a band called “Lil’s Hot Shots” for Vocalion, the cheap subsidiary of Brunswick Records.

The group was really Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, with his then-wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Edward “Kid” Ory on trombone and John St. Cyr on banjo and guitar. The problem was Armstrong’s Hot Five was under contract to Okeh Records, where they were among their best-selling artists, and though Armstrong might have got away with a session on another label if he’d just played trumpet, on “Georgia Bo Bo” he also sang. When the “suits” at Okeh heard the Vocalion “Georgia Bo Bo” they recognized Armstrong’s voice immediately and called him to their offices like a schoolkid being summoned by the principal. “Who’s that voice on this record?” they asked him. Armstrong, who for his whole life worked his way out of threatening situations by defusing them with humor, said, “I don’t know … but I won’t do it again!”

The Jelly James version of “Georgia Bo Bo” is slower, funkier and more laid-back that Armstrong’s classic, and though Armstrong is unsurpassable this is a very good alternative reading. It also shows how Black trumpet players learned from the delicacy and lyricism of the white Bix, despite the reverse-racist consensus surrounding jazz history today that holds that jazz is an exclusively African-American form and white musicians only copied Black models without innovating anything on their own. It’s nonsense: Black tenor sax giant Lester Young always cited white (and part-Native) Frank Trumbauer as his biggest influence, Benny Carter and Charlie Parker acknowledged their debts to white saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey, and white players like Bix Beiderbecke, Django Reinhardt, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan and Lennie Tristano created unique styles owing little or nothing to Black models. But thanks to people like Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch and Ken Burns, it’s become the ruling consensus on jazz history today.

Things perk up quite a bit when the CD gets to track 13, “Sensational Mood” by Lloyd Hunter and His Serenaders. Though it was recorded April 2, 1931 it doesn’t sound like a leftover from the 1920’s the way the other 1931 tracks on this album do. Even though Hunter was still using banjo and tuba instead of guitar and string bass in his rhythm section, this is an all-out swing record that would have sounded fresh and vital in 1937. The well-rehearsed ensemble blends, the call-and-response riff patterns between reed and brass sections, the interspersing of solos and group passages and the overall excitement mark this as a swing song looking forward to the sound that would dominate American popular music between 1935 and 1945. It’s also the first record of the great drummer Jo Jones, who would drive Count Basie’s greatest bands and remain an icon of swing until his death in 1985.

The flip side of “Sensational Mood,” “Dreamin’ ’Bout My Man,” is a 32-bar pop song (not, as I’d assumed it would be, a 12-bar blues) by Victoria Spivey. She was a contemporary of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and a major musician in her own right who lasted until 1969 and formed her own record company, Spivey Records, in Chicago in 1960. (Among the artists she recorded was a young white singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan, who made his first commercial sides for Spivey Records.) In his book Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest critic and record producer Ross Russell called “Dreamin’ ’Bout My Man” “a routine TOBA vocal, well backed by the ensemble.” TOBA was a vaudeville circuit for Black performers, theatres and neighborhoods; the initials officially stood for “Theatre Owners’ Booking Association,” but conditions were so rough the performers joked that it really meant “Tough On Black Asses.”

The next surprise is the eight tracks by the KXYZ Novelty Band from Houston, Texas, recorded in San Antonio on January 29, 1935. They play a program of standards any group presenting itself as a jazz band would have been expected to know in 1935: “I Never Knew,” “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “I Found a New Baby,” “That’s A-Plenty,” “Avalon,” “Basin Street Blues” and “Bugle Call Rag.” What distinguishes them is the laid-back way they play these songs and also their instrumental lineup: just two horns, trumpet and sax, in the front line – no clarinet or trombone – and a rhythm section of piano, guitar, string bass and drums. With the guitar left out, this would become the standard lineup of small jazz bands into the bebop era of the late 1940’s and, indeed, of most so-called “straight-ahead” jazz bands today.

While the KXYZ Novelty Band remain firmly rooted in swing and don’t play the advanced chords or fast-paced melodic runs of bebop, their lineup points to the future of jazz as the economics of music changed and the big swing bands were no longer sustainable. KXYZ was founded in 1926 and is still on the air today, though according to its Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KXYZ) it’s gone through a dizzying array of ownership and format changes, including easy-listening, Spanish-language and now a news station aimed primarily at African-Americans. Radio stations used bands like this to accompany singers and other on-air talent and to fill in in case a program ran short – and if this is what Houston listeners in 1935 heard when the station needed to fill time, they were lucky indeed!