Wolverines: When My Sugar Walks Down the Street, Goofus Five: Everybody Loves My Baby, King Oliver: Canal St. Blues, California Ramblers: Tessie Stop Teasing Me, Cliff Edwards: Somebody Loves Me, Wolverines: Susie, Henderson: Shanghai Shuffle, Morton: Shreveport Stomp, King Oliver: The Southern Stomps, I Ain’t Gonna Tell Nobody, NORK: Weary Blues, Tiger Rag, Oliver: Chattanooga Stomp, Morton: The Pearls, The Little Ramblers (Moore, Davis, Rollini, Brodsky, Fellini, King): Deep Blue Sea Blues, I’m Satisfied Beside That Sweetie of Mine, Those Panama Mamas.
The young Wolverines with Jimmy McP. The Goofus Five with Bill Moore-Bobby Davis-Adrian Rollini in a novelty groove. Then Henderson/Redman gravitas with an Armstrong solo. Oliver stomps from the year before with Armstrong in the basso emphasis of Southern Stomps with the basso deep brass. Morton and NORK provide interludes and then Rollini’s ramblers go novelty. The way it was in 1923 and 1924. What a difference a year makes.
Syncopation primed earlier generations, at the turn of the Century George Walker and Bert Williams created a jazz like singing tradition. Amidst Souza marches, Joplin ragtime, Creamer and Layton hit tunes, vaudeville, banjo ragtime, etc. all circulating as a national music on the theater and tent circuits. Thereupon emerging everywhere as in Carter Family and Opry, bluegrass, honky tonk, Western, r’n b, rockabilly. But New York hosted the Blues record craze with Bessie Smith even Ma Rainey among 40 or more such recording divas.
If you’re going to NYC, from anywhere in the world and you stay you may become a naturalized New Yorker, if not necessarily American.
NYC used to be Dutch, not a source of Americana, but keeper of professional traditions as in James P. Johnson and T. Waller, Carnegie Hall aspirants. Marion Harris the pop star participated in jazz integration, moving to Columbia Records to sing WC Handy.
If you make it in NY not necessarily true you make it anywhere. Take Al Smith. If you make it in America you don’t necessarily make it in NY. Oliver and Morton did some of their best work there but were not greeted with the adoration later generations would lavish.
NYC did not adopt jazz in its New Orleans form as had Chicago. It has a virtuoso recording status detached from its Southern and wide American functions in gigs like dances, compare this to polka which is purely a dance music. Or marching bands. From America came C&W, blues, rock, soul, spirituals, gospel, etc. all defined for audiences as distinct from jazz. But for example Fats Domino an inventor of rhythm and blues would be welcome at any jazz festival. From boogie jump blues you pretty much go anywhere. NY sounds have also diffused into America, Palmiere, Puente, hip hop, stride, Monk, bebop, Tin Pan Alley, doo wop, salsa. Jazz survives better than ragtime did and It may be that its living popularity in New Orleans will have another big impact in the future on America. It got lucky on the coattails between the fox trot and the blues craze. It finally receded back to a niche in bebop to emerge with stars like Jobim, Miles, Cannonball, Desmond/Brubeck. The male dominated electric blues took a lot of virtuoso talent in a different direction. Jazz as defined in New Orleans today is a pathway forward with stars, festivals, parades.
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