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00 NO Nighthawks Notes.txt
NEW ORLEANS NIGHTHAWKS
GHB Records GHB-98, 1980
LP rip (192 kbps) by Dick Baker, May 2011
BUGLE CALL RAG
KEEPIN' OUT OF MISCHIEF
CASEY JONES BLUES
YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY
THE PAY OFF
SNAG IT
KANSAS CITY KITTY
CRAZY RHYTHM
THE MOOCHE
NAGASAKI
BEALE STREET BLUES
GLAD RAG DOLL
WHITE HEAT
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE RED BLAZER TOO
or, The Untouchables Revisited
by Neil McCaffrey
You make your way up to Yorkville, one of Manhattan's last surviving ethnic neighborhoods. Dominating Third Avenue between 88th and 89th is the Red Blazer Too. But something doesn't look quite right. Oh, that's it--where's the El?
(By the way, for the literary purist, Red Blazer Too is not a typographical error. It seems that Denis Carey, the Godfather of the establishment, owns another oasis called the Red Blazer. So this one is the Red Blazer Also.)
An awning, no less, guides you in. You expect a door with a peephole. You're ready to say that Jimmy sent you. (Jimmy Walker, naturally.) But no, this spot is wide open. And inviting. It's a tennis court and a half long, no more than 25 feet wide. A bar runs the length of the outer room. But the action is in the back room. Of course.
There's music. Real music. Music the like of which ushered in Repeal, and made Prohibition endurable. On a bandstand that could comfortably accommodate the Boswell Sisters sit not three but, somehow, ten musicians, complete with horns and tuxedos. They're playing makes-you-wanna-Charleston-down-to-Charleston music. All that's missing is Frank Nitti. (He'll be in later.) Your favorite stars crowd the walls: Gary, Cary, Mae, Bing, even promising starlets like Judy and Lana (though Judy and Lana were still picking daisies when they launched this music). The crowd--and it is crowded--is all of one generation: the 18-to-88 set.
High atop the bandstand, his shock of light brown hair brushing the rafter, the string bass/tuba/bass sax player is calling the tunes--to men old enough to address him as grandson. Can it be that a fellow born only yesterday, in 1952, is leading this band? It can't; but it is.
The man is Vince Giordano, and he presides over not so much an orchestra as a phenomenon. The New Orleans Nighthawks are a revival band with a difference. The Glenn Miller band is a Miller revival band. Even Mercer Ellington leads a revival band. Bless 'em all--but why revive only the Swing Era? After all, the New York Philharmonic is mostly a revival band. No need to apologize for Vince and the Nighthawks.
No need at all. The music covers the decade just before the Swing Era changed our lives in 1935, and is considerably more than quaint. It was the decade when dance music emerged from behind the potted palms . . . when jazzmen found their solo voices. . . when pioneer arrangers like Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson, Bill Challis and Duke Ellington, Joe Haymes and Benny Carter discovered they could make whole sections and big bands swing . . . when Bing Crosby and Mildred Bailey and Ethel Waters taught their fellow vocalists how to leave off declaiming and start singing.
It was a decade in music when simplicity lived comfortably with sophistication. (Come to think of it, the Thirties was the last decade that could make that statement.) The Nighthawks also remind us that the Golden Age of Jazz was the Golden Age of Dancing. This was no coincidence. In fact, it is a truism among the au courant that when jazz wanders far from the dance floor, It first struts a bit before the hoi polloi then pauses to contemplate its navel, and finally settles into therapy. Jazz is an art, all right; but deliver us from the Jazz Artist.
No such pretentiousness finds its way onto the Nighthawk bandstand. Greybeards mingle in easy camaraderie with players who look like they're still learning to shave. Professionals all, they kid one another--and respect one another.
The respect is well founded. As this album demonstrates, many of the charts are demanding--the more so when Vince hands them out for a first reading right there on the bandstand, as he does several times a night. The old pros, and their young heirs, glance over them for at most a minute; Giordano counts off the tempo; and away they go, sightreading a new arrangement with, usually, a mere three or four fluffs. When a first run-through or a second goes especially well, the men punctuate the coda with laughs of honest pleasure. Mind, there's no showboating. The laughs are like the spontaneous outburst of a golfer who has just sunk the impossible putt. They'd laugh the same if they were rehearsing out in the garage.
If Tuesday night at the Red Blazer Too were just an evening of timeless music, decent food, honest drinks and 1969 prices, Nitti himself would manage a smile. But it's more. There on the bandstand are the survivors from the Heroic Age--and more than survivors. When Clarence Hutchenrider or Moe Dale picks up his horn to solo, it isn't merely Oldtimers' Day. The decades melt away, and you realize with warm surprise that they still play in the big leagues.
But what about the day after tomorrow? Will we then really be reduced to the phonograph? Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks say No, and this album should make you a believer. Here the torch is passed on to the Second Generation, players like Dick Wellstood and Bobby Pring; and above all to the Third Generation, embryo stars like Vince Giordano and Mike Peters.
If the 18-to-88 crowd at the Red Blazer Too is any index, we might be witnessing the birth of a cult--and more than a cult. "Impossible!" whines a chorus of Moog synthesizers. Well, maybe. But it wouldn't be the first Renaissance in Western civilization.
THE PLAYERS
Which isn't all he collects. The band owes its astonishing repertoire to Vince's collection of some 4,000 arrangements, largely stocks, from the pre-1935 era. (Yes, Virginia, once upon a time a band could buy orchestrations for 75 cents each--stock arrangements by famous arrangers. That was in the Dark Ages, when instead of supporting a dozen big bands, America had to make do with three thousand or so.)
Jimmy Maxwell -- lead trumpet. Millions have watched this great bearded bear of a man leading the trumpets on the Tonight Show, back when it emanated from New York. Jimmy has been at the top of his trade since he broke in with Benny Goodman in 1939. It was a time when Benny was running through trumpet players like Kleenex. Jimmy joined and stuck. In fact, when Benny disbanded in July 1940 because of back trouble, he kept Jimmy on salary until he reorganized late in October. Jimmy stayed through 1942, getting his chance along the way to play the lead book; but not getting much solo space, "After You've Gone" being the only significant solo he waxed in three years. This album repairs all that. Better late than never, meet Jimmy Maxwell, soloist.
Bernie Privin -- trumpet. When Bernie climbed into the vacant trumpet chair on the bandstand of the Hotel Lincoln's Blue Room late in 1938, Artie Shaw was the hottest name in music. Nothing daunted, the Brooklyn 19-year-old was soon dispatching about three-quarters of the trumpet solos, inventively. Later, Staff Sergeant Privin and Bobby Nichols split the jazz trumpet book with Glenn Miller Army Air Force band. Bernie also saw service with the wild (in both senses) Charlie Barnet crew before the Army, and with Benny Goodman just after it. Then he settled into the lush life of a New York studio musician, pausing along the way to become the Squire of Lower Westchester. If you ever get to hear the Nighthawks in person, pick a seat near Bernie, and listen hard for his droll sotto voice remarks about music and the passing scene.
Bobby Pring -- trombone. Bobby is a veteran of the interesting Les Brown band of the early Fifties--probably the band that best blended Forties swing and modern jazz. Bobby is an admirer of Jack Jenney, and you get more than a snatch of the master when Bobby uncorks a ballad.
Artie Baker -- lead alto sax, clarinet. In many a Forties band, Artie was one of those anonymous workhorses. You may have caught him with Raymond Scott or Charlie Spivak (isn't that Artie's clarinet on Spivak's hit "Brother Bill"?) or, in another setting, with Toscanini, no less. And when Artie Shaw stepped down from the swollen bandstand that carried his swing-and-strings ensemble in late 1941 and early 1942, it was Artie Baker who rose from the sax section to front in the maestro's absence. Now, with the Nighthawks, the ebullient Mr. Baker finally gets to stretch.
Moe Dale -- tenor sax, clarinet. If one player in the band can be singled out as underappreciated, Moe's the man. His first notable job was with Tal Henry, who led one of the better Southern bands of the Twenties and Thirties. He did time with Ted Lewis in the mid-Thirties, escaped without harm, and landed with one of the later Paul Whiteman orchestras. His long, rolling lines recall nameless swinging saxists from bands like that of Gene Kardos, and his solos fit the Nighthawk charts to perfection.
Dick Wellstood -- piano. The guest star of the session, Dick broke in with Bob Wilber's Scarsdale High School dixieland group right after the war. He has been growing ever since--but never too far from the almost savage stride piano on display here.
Mike Peters -- banjo. Mike, like Vince Giordano, is another amazing young musician who in his mid-twenties has already absorbed the whole mainstream jazz tradition. Mike put in two years on guitar with Joe Venuti (who knew a bit about good guitarists), and even served as executor of the estate of the jazz giant, though he's young enough to be Joe's great grandson. With violinists Charles Wizen, Mike is coleader of Jazz a Cordes, a group that hearkens back to Django, Stephane, and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.
Eddy Davis -- drums. Although Eddy is playing drums with the Nighthawks, his main instrument is tenor banjo. He also majored in composition and double bass at Chicago Conservatory. He has worked with such greats as the Dukes of Dixieland, Bob Scobey, Darnell Howard, Don Ewell, Junie Cobb, and others. GHB is releasing an album of Eddy's own group, the Hot Jazz Orchestra, which displays such talent as Dill Jones, Bobby Gordon, and the leader of the Nighthawks, Vince Giordano.
Thus, eleven good men and true. If you were raised on the bands that covered the Paramount stage with an acre of brass, ten pieces may strike you as skimpy. Not to worry. They do everything they have to. As it happens, the Nighthawk instrumentation--three brass, three reeds, four rhythm--was the usual lineup of a dance band of the late Twenties and early Thirties. It sounds just fine. And doesn't make your ears ache.
INDEX SHEET FOR GHB-98
New Orleans Nighthawks
THE SELECTIONS
Side 1
Casey Jones Blues (Charlie Brown) America's long romance with the railroad is commemorated in many a song. Charlie Brown (a good man) wrote and scored this driving tone poem. Maxwell and Dale shine. Solos: Maxwell, Dale (tenor sax), Maxwell, Pring.
You're Driving Me Crazy (Walter Donaldson) No, it's not Louis Armstrong. But Giordano and Maxwell almost fool us. Artie Baker's alto sax solo bears comparison with the great one (by Les Hite?) on the 1930 Armstrong record. Frank Skinner provided the stock arrangement, which Giordano doctored to resemble the Armstrong record. Vocal: Giordano. Solos: Maxwell, Baker (alto sax), Maxwell.
Snag It (Joe Oliver) Mel Stitzei, pianist with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, stayed close to King Oliver's classic recording for this stock arrangement. Solos: Pring, Baker (alto sax), Hutchenrider (clarinet), Maxwell.
Side 2
Beale Street Blues (W. C. Handy) The bright tempo and Jimmy Dale's riffing chart give this Handy quasi-blues a lift that the more familiar versions miss. Solos: Baker (clarinet), Dale (tenor sax), Privin.
White Heat (Will Hudson) A bit ragged, this version won't make you toss your Lunceford record. It was the last track cut at an incredible 13-song, three-hour session, so traces of fatigue come as no shock. Even so, it's interesting to note that Will Hudson's barnburner works not only for Lunceford's five-man brass powerhouse. The Nighthawks achieve a surprisingly fat sound with a mere two trumpets and one trombone. Arranger: Hudson. Solos: Privin, Pring, Dale (tenor sax), Wellstood.
Neil McCaffrey
President
Movie/Entertainment Book Club
NOTE: All selections recorded in New York City on December 6, 1978.
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