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One of the best footnotes in Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords is the apocryphal tale of the apartment OKeh A&R man Bob Stephens and trumpeter Jack Purvis shared, filled with test pressings of Hot Five and Hot Seven alternate takes, left behind and lost for good when the roommates didn’t pay the rent. We can console ourselves for the loss (real or imagined) with three new CD’s featuring Bent Persson. If you know his work for Stomp Off, Arbors, Jazzology, Opus 3, Kenneth, and other labels, you’ll want to skip to the end for ordering information. If you don’t know him, read on to meet an astonishing talent. In a Manhattan record store more than twenty years ago, I saw a new issue on the Kenneth label – the logo mimics the Gennett typeface, a reassuring detail. The record announced itself as the first volume of Bent Persson’s recreating the 50 Louis Armstrong Hot Choruses (and many of the 127 breaks as well). I had heard something about the Hot Chorus folio but had never seen it, and none of the Kenneth musicians were familiar to me. At the time, Louis-repertory was all in vogue: individual trumpet players and trumpet trios tried, with varying degrees of success, to reproduce the great recorded solos. Yet this was something new: the idea of hearing “new” Louis choruses on unfamiliar repertoire (he had never recorded 12 of the 17 songs on the first volume) was, I hoped, worth the record’s price. It turns out that I took no risk, as I found out in the first minutes of listening. Bent Persson is an electrifying musician, a trumpeter / cornetist who can sound more like Louis than anyone else – even better, he seems magically able to think like Louis in his prime, so Bent’s improvised choruses are seamless extensions of the written ones in attack, tone, and vibrato. His specialty is the athletic, impassioned Armstrong of the Hot Sevens (as in “Wild Man Blues” or “New Orleans Stomp”) although he also summons up Louis’s later periods beautifully – the 1932-33 Victors, the Deccas, all the way up to a convincing “C’est Si Bon” on the Classic Jazz Band’s most recent Catapult release. He doesn’t try to string together one memorized phrase after another; rather, he is an actor who immerses himself in his Louis-role. The result is something new, plausible, and convincing that goes beyond the immense technical mastery necessary to execute those demanding solos. Persson’s gifts aren’t narrow: he can also summon up Bix so well that only Tom Pletcher has surpassed him. In addition, Bent has “become” Red Allen, Buck Clayton, and Cootie Williams on other sessions as requested, notably in small groups accompanying Maxine Sullivan. (For his biography, complete with pictures, visit his website: http://w1.859.telia.com/. The banner on his links page is “Get Hot! Blow Hot! Play Hot! Stay Hot!” a nobly Socratic philosophy.) The Hot Jazz Trio lives up to its name, in that “hot” here means graceful rhythmic intensity, not high volume or bravura tempos. Their instrumentation might seem odd, making some listeners anticipate semipro Dixieland troubadours meandering around a carnival or park, but the trio is anything but amateur. Not only does Persson evoke Bix and Louis (and Arthur Whetsol) in his own solos; he also plays the alto horn delightfully, summoning up both Dick Cary and Juan Tizol. Ullenberger is an inspiring rhythm player and soloist, single-string and chordal, as nimble as Howard Alden. He’s listened hard to Eddie Lang and Teddy Bunn, and, like his countryman Holger Gross, he makes the banjo sound pastoral, not industrial. I had heard Frans Sjornstrom on the 1999 Stomp Off “I’m Glad,” featuring Tom Pletcher, Persson, and the Classic Jazz Band. He is a marvel; his bass sax is as supple as an alto but he never plays an extraneous note in solo or ensemble. His huge velvety sound is reminiscent of Rollini, Spencer Clark, or Joe Rushton, and he is a compelling improvisor and melodist. Even better: the three men are wholly committed to group improvisation and to arrangements that vary from chorus to chorus. It’s a democratic band, where melody statements and even unaccompanied passages are shared equitably. At times, the voicings astonishingly trick the ear into thinking that three or four additional musicians are playing. Imagine a Bix and his Gang OKeh with only Bix, Rollini, and Lang, a pianoless Red Hot Peppers, the Hot Seven reduced to a Hot Three – except that the Hot Jazz Trio fills in the missing parts with the assured telepathy of a long-time working band, even though they have only been performing in public since November 1999. The second CD, Persson’s reinvestigation of the Armstrong Hot Choruses, requires some background, offered in the liner notes through an excerpt from a 1968 interview with Elmer Schoebel: “During the Chicago days I was sharing [an] office with Walter Melrose of the ‘Melrose Music Co.’. One day in 1927, Melrose said he was going to publish a set of Louis Armstrong breaks but there was a technical problem of getting the Armstrong ‘hot’ breaks down on paper. Finally, Melrose and I hit on the idea of having Armstrong record his breaks. We bought a $15 Edison cylinder phonograph and 50 wax cylinders, gave them to Louis and told him to play. The cylinders were duly filled up by Armstrong and the ‘breaks’ were copied into written form. I transcribed the ‘breaks’ which were published. These were not orchestrated at any time and were not made for that purpose. I had all the records (cylinders), later I turned them over to Melrose. When I was in Chicago, in 1949, a collector was offering $1,000 per cylinder but Melrose and I could not find them.”The published folio contained solos and breaks, emphasizing Melrose songs (which explains the many Morton compositions). In itself a rarity, its contents were raw material for Persson and the gifted improvisers he gathered around him, but “raw” is putting it mildly. Persson’s website reprints an excerpt from Louis’s printed solo on “High Society”: a simple melody line, lacking chord symbols or tempo markings, thus without any suggestions for interpretation or even (on multi-theme pieces) any indication of what strain Louis was improvising on. Turning these solos into fully imagined performances required imagination, which Persson has in abundance. Gosta Hagglof, the producer of these CD’s, an Armstrong scholar, and the head of Classic Jazz Productions, began working with Persson in the mid-1970’s on this project. Happily, the recorded results are far more than solos in a vacuum: Persson had to experiment with the solos themselves (would this one sound better on cornet or trumpet? at what tempo?) and then create suitable contexts to enclose them. His arrangements are indebted to Oliver, Henderson, Morton, and to Louis’s own small groups. There are stunning cornet-piano duets on “Grandpa’s Spells” and “Mr. Jelly Lord,” and if you have wondered what the Red Hot Peppers would have sounded like had Louis replaced George Mitchell, this CD provides glorious answers. Persson interprets the solos and breaks energetically, and everyone improvises happily. You can enjoy the CD as wonderful Louis-inspired versions of unusual repertoire; or (with the help of the liner notes) listen for the magical solos and breaks. Either way, it would have cheered Louis himself. (Hagglof is also the guiding light behind the Ambassador label, where you will find Louis’s 1935-1949 studio recordings, alternate takes, and live performances pitch-corrected and in good sound on nine compact discs – an essential birthday present for the Armstrong fancier in your household. Persson’s first two lp volumes of Hot Chorus material have been combined on compact disc as “Volume 1 / 2, ” Kenneth CKS 3411, with five newly recorded performances. A third CD, “Volume 2 /3,” is in the works: the three CD’s will contain all the material originally recorded on four lps, with some new performances as well.) At first glance, Persson’s collaboration with the Royal Blue Melodians, “For the Love of Satchmo,” might seem the least ambitious project – a revisiting of 1929-1941 Armstrong performances with arrangements and solos by Persson and vocals by Eddie Jansson. Yet this CD is more than note-by-note recreations in superior fidelity. “Revisiting,” in Persson’s hands, is an open-ended process, with the original arrangements spruced up (and beautifully performed), punctuated by first-class solos, graced by Persson’s reverent but creative approach to the originals. In the notes, Hagglof writes, “Why try to re-record some of those impeccable and precious masterworks by the unsurpassed giant Louis Armstrong? Is it possible to do it better or as good? Of course not! But you can do it differently to a point when you base an interpretation on those classic solos – classic in the same sense as you speak of interpreting music from past centuries.
Remember, that when we listen to Louis Armstrong’s recordings, we believe that these were masterworks on the spur of the moment.
They were of course, so it is hard to realize that when the band left the studio to play live somewhere – often the same night
– the audience received new, different and stunning solos live, reaching the same level of ingenuity as the recent recording – day by day!”
The results surely justify Hagglof’s enthusiasm – the Royal Blue Melodians perfom the arrangements splendidly,
with fine solos by pianist Larsson, trombonist Arnberg, reedmen Brodda and Larsson.
Persson and Hagglof have also made it possible for us to visit a pair of lost OKeh performances,
“Little By Little” and “Look What You’ve Done To Me,” and the results are intriguing even though the second song is forgettable.
Another fine idea is a version of “The Skeleton in the Closet” based on the soundtrack of “Pennies From Heaven.”
Fourteen songs have brief vocals by Eddie Jansson, who, to his credit, doesn’t imitate Louis and handles ballads well.
However, he occasionally mangles words (an occupational hazard in learning lyrics from the record, not the sheet music)
and stumbles over lyrics at fast tempos. The latter is forgivable when you hear Jansson making his way through the minefield of
“I’m A Ding Dong Daddy”. Hearing the original lyrics, we understand why Louis chose to “forget” them in the studio.
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HOT JAZZ TRIO
JAZZ, BLUES AND STOMPS Kenneth CKS 3417 Bent Persson (tpt/cnt/alto horn/vcl); Jacob Ullberger (acoustic and electric guitar/bj); Frans Sjostrom (bass sax). Recorded September 22-23, November 30, 2001, Upplands Vasby, Sweden. BEAU KOO JACK / BLACK BEAUTY / COPENHAGEN / A PRETTY GIRL IS LIKE A MELODY / WHEN YOUR LOVER HAS GONE / KING PORTER STOMP / BLACK BOTTOM STOMP / WARM VALLEY / YOU TOOK ADVANTAGE OF ME / (LENA FROM) PALESTEENA / SOMEBODY STOLE MY GAL / BASIN STREET BLUES / SIDEWALK BLUES / RIVERBOAT SHUFFLE. TT: 52: 57.
LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S “50 HOT CHORUSES FOR CORNET” (1927)
AS RECREATED BY BENT PERSSON: VOLUMES 3-4
FOR THE LOVE OF SATCHMO |