With NORK 1922: Eccentric, Farewell Blues, Discontented Blues, Bugle Call Blues, Panama, Tiger Rag, Livery Stable Blues, Oriental. With Original Memphis Melody Boys, Midway Dance Orchestra, etc. 1923: There Ain't No Gal Like My Gal, Blue Grass Blues, I Never Knew What a Gal Could Do, Lots O' Mama, House of David Blues, Black Sheep Blues, Sobbin' Blues, Cotton Picker's Ball, Buddy's Habits, Wonderful Dream.
You are welcome. All the Schoebel that is readily collected is here in one bite. So entirely Chicago you can miss what it took, like he was a hit song writer on a foundation of New Orleans polyphony, riverboat, vaudeville, for a market of fox trot dancers. Like Morton his tunes tell a story. Here comprises his 1922-23 product as a band leader and arranger.
His Friars Society Orchestra pointed the way forward from ODJB. His deployment of multiple saxophones, banjo, iconic front three, later with Art Kassel, and melodic hooks is already a big band jazz on a polyphonic base. Unlike Redman whose counterpoint was non-New Orleans, Schoebel worked with frontline polyphony and a driving banjo.
Contemporary with Oliver and Morton, his bands were less rhythmically primal than Oliver and less bluesy than Morton. There’s a kind of easy dance mobility that comes somewhat close to polka and you could dance all night. His version of Eccentric is definitive but many of his arrangements are. Eccentric in a large ballroom must have been like a Riverboat. He interpreted the ODJB and New Orleans songbook guiding the direction given from Chicago influencing a generation but namely the Original Memphis Five and the Wolverines. Of course there is no best selling biography. But maybe there will be one available in the library collection. There is here as with the very different Ramblers the originality of approach that defines jazz as a national music. Morton invented jazz but as the music of either you are inventing it or it isn’t jazz.
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