1

In the Preface to the book Jazz: a History of America’s Music, written by Geoffrey C.

Ward (2001) to accompany Ken Burns’s turn-of-the century TV documentary series,

Jazz, Burns offers the apparently unexceptional suggestion that: ‘The true story of

jazz… can never be fully told’. In historians’ eyes, calling a story ‘true’ opens many

chasms to the unwary, but ‘true’ may sometimes be used in such contexts to mean ‘in

all its fullness’, which, while not problem-free, is perhaps less loaded. Burns’

solution to the problem of fullness – of too many people, too many performances, too

many experiences: too much information, known, unknown and unknowable – is a

tried and tested one: to select a number of ‘remarkable and emblematic stories and try

to tell them well’ (2001, ix).

One of the alternative solutions to telling ‘remarkable and emblematic stories’ is

to use a ‘microhistorical’ approach, in which the scale of historical observation is

reduced and the focus is directed onto the interrelationships and interactions between

people and processes in a narrow framework of time and/or place. Selectivity is

immediately apparent in choice of subject - the narrow point does not choose itself –

but what happens when this approach is set against the idea of ‘fullness’? If fullness

cannot practically be told over a period of, say, one hundred years, can it – should it?

– come closer to being told over a much shorter period of time in the past; and if so,

what will the result be, and will the exercise have any value?

What follows is an attempt to examine the intricacy and complexity of the popular

music moment in the context of a jazz recording session, a microhistorical moment.

In so doing it offers a counterbalance to ‘big picture’ history. Among other things, this

approach will oblige us to revisit the issue of the complex environment in which

agency and decision-making function on a day-to-day level.1 Another, perhaps less

obvious reason for embarking on this course is that much about it mirrors our own

daily lives and experience. A principal job of the historian is to tease out the tensions,

1 In a sense, jazz discography has developed to such a point of fine tuning that it is a form of

microhistory. But discography’s focus is deliberately narrow; it has no interest beyond the

recording.

An Exercise in Stop-Time: The Complexity of a Musical Moment

DAVID HORN

2

struggles and contradictions that are active below the surfaces of our lives and

experiences, and to reveal to us the way these affect us, showing the workings of

cause and effect on a deep level. But my simple point is that, just as I find it very

hard to live my own life in full acknowledgement of the forces at work in the

underlying narrative, so I expect it was the same with historical figures in whom I

take an interest. That, emphatically, does not mean that I am (I hope), or that they

were, merely insensitive. We all have lived and live our lives in acknowledgement –

even if often only dimly – of a sense of being part of a narrative. Three important

points about this narrative need to be noted: (a) we are aware how intricate it is - how

many factors bear upon it - but are not fully so; (b) we are also aware of how linear

and spiral narratives intertwine (things change and things repeat but not in the same

context); and (c) we enter the narrative without knowing its beginning, and we act

without knowing its end.

Bearing this in mind, I want, like Burns and Ward, to tell a story, but in this case it

is the story of a popular music moment. For our purposes, I see a popular music

moment as a short duration of time with a distinctive and recognisable identity, criss-

crossed by many intersecting threads or trajectories, personal and non-personal.

These criss-crossing trajectories are crucial to the narrative, but it is not my intention

to overplay the process of identifying them. In the course of the story they will

identify themselves - sometimes obviously, sometimes only modestly - and hint at

something of their own histories.

Microhistory

Before the story can begin, I need to say another word about a microhistorical

approach. Microhistory itself, as a distinctive, named branch of historiography, has

been in formal existence since around the late 1970s, when Italian historians, centred

in particular around Bologna, advocated an approach based in an ethnographic history

of everyday life. The best known of these historians was and is Carlo Ginzburg,

whose most celebrated book, Il formaggio e i vermi (translated into English as The

Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller), was published in

1976. The impact of the movement, including its interest in detective work, can be

seen in Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose.

The microhistorical method has been summed up by Ginzburg himself:

3

We find a series of facts (usually, but not always, covering a brief period) with

which it is possible to reconstruct the interconnections among diverse

conjunctures (quoted in Muir & Ruggiero 1991, p.6).

The purpose, in the words of a sympathetic historian, Edward Muir, is ‘to elucidate

historical causation on the level of small groups where most of real life takes place

and to open history to peoples who would be left out by other methods’ (Muir &

Ruggiero 1991, xxi). The ideal result, to quote Muir again, would be ‘a

prosopography from below in which the relationships, decisions, restraints, and

freedoms faced by real people in actual situations would emerge’ (ibid., ix-x).

Microhistorians tend to choose as their subjects what another pioneering writer,

Edoardo Grendi, termed ‘normal exceptions’ (Muir & Ruggiero 1991, xiv), people on

the margins of ‘normal’ society but whose activities make us revisit what we think of

as norms.

There is, needless to say, much more to it than this. But I offer it as something of

a framework for what follows. I am not claiming that what you are about to read

represents a systematic application of microhistorical techniques to a moment in jazz

history; but it is, I think, informed by them.

The Moment

The ‘moment’ I have chosen is a day in the second half of December 1945,

possibly the 22nd

; the setting is Los Angeles.2 It is now seven months since the

surrender of Germany at the end of World War II, four months since the atomic bomb

was dropped on Hiroshima, three months since the Japanese surrender, less than two

months since the foundation of the United Nations in San Francisco, and a month

since the start of the Nuremburg Trials for Nazi war crimes.

A small, locally-based record company called Philo has recently signed a

three-year recording contract with the 36-year old tenor sax player Lester Young, and

has set up the first recording session under that contract. It is this session that forms

the centre of our moment. The session features Young and four other musicians, all of

2 The date of 22 December is taken from the information for the session by Helen Humes (see

below). Büchmann-Møller, perhaps the most reliable authority on the details of Lester

Young’s career, places the date ‘about December 20, 1945’ (1990, 248).

4

whom are working freelance: trombonist Vic Dickenson, pianist Michael ‘Dodo’

Marmarosa, bass player George ‘Red’ Callender, and drummer Henry Tucker Green.3

All are African-American except Marmarosa, whose parents were immigrants from

Italy.

The group of musicians appears to have been assembled at short notice – a

pick-up band, in effect. Young, one of the best known tenor sax players of the late

1930s and early 1940s, is newly back in Los Angeles and has not had chance to form

his own group, or to join another established one. Drummer Henry Tucker Green has

been recording with singer Helen Humes and her band for the same record company,

Philo. In fact, he is in the studio on Dec 22 to record with her again; and so when

Lester Young comes to record maybe he is drafted in to provide Young with a

drummer. In his turn, either before or after making his own recordings, Lester Young

is himself drafted in to Helen Humes’s band – perhaps he volunteers, in the

collaborative spirit which often characterises such environments, or perhaps he is

merely fulfilling the terms of his contract.4 Humes has just had a chart hit with ‘Be

Baba Leba’. Her vocal style straddles three closely connected worlds of big band jazz,

blues, and popular singing. Among the items she records on December 22 is

‘Pleasing Man Blues’, in which Young, one of two sax players in the band, can be

heard soloing in the penultimate chorus (Buchmann-Møller 1990, 253).5

Within Young’s group some musicians know each other well, others not so

well, some possibly not at all – though in the busy, criss-crossing scene they move in,

the likelihood of the latter seems slim. Bassist Red Callender and Lester Young are

well acquainted; they both played in a band led by Young’s brother Lee, in Los

Angeles and beyond, between 1941 and 1943 (Callender was also responsible for the

arrangements), and in 1942 Callender joined Young and pianist Nat King Cole in a set

of trio recordings made in 1942 for the same Los Angeles label, Philo, when it was

3 Some sources include a guitarist, Freddie Green, but no guitar is audible. The confusion may

have been caused by the fact that Henry Tucker Green sometimes appears as Henry Tucker.

Büchmann-Møller notes that, in any case, at the time this recording was made Freddie Green

was ‘playing one-nighters with the Basie band before opening at the RKO Theater in Boston

for a week’s stay from December 20’ (1990, 249). 4 It is also worth noting that the issue numbers for the two 78s from the four Lester Young

recordings are immediately preceded and immediately followed by the issue numbers of

Helen Humes’s records. 5 ‘Pleasing Man Blues’ is credited on the label of Philo P125B to H. Humes and H. Brock.

The label lists the personnel, including ‘H Tucker’ as drummer. It can be heard on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMVLZKvCe24

5

just starting out. These recordings drew widespread praise from critics. There is no

documentary evidence that Green has played with Young before, at least in any

formal sense – but he and Callender are both regular participants in the Los Angeles

scene.

Pianist Dodo Marmarosa has not recorded with Young before; but he and

trombonist Vic Dickenson have both been playing recently, though separately, with

the popular offbeat guitarist Slim Gaillard here in Los Angeles, and may have met

each other through him.

Dickenson has played with Young before on many occasions. They both

toured with the Count Basie orchestra in the early 1940s, and they, too, know each

other well, having that special familiarity and understanding that musicians can

develop on the road. Dickenson has come to Los Angeles this time around as a

member of the Eddie Heywood sextet, which has had a minor hit in 1944 with their

recording of a Cole Porter tune, ‘Begin the Beguine’, from Porter’s recent Broadway

musical, Jubilee6. Dickenson and Callender have recently recorded together in Los

Angeles for the Lamplighter All Stars and Kay Starr and Her Stars.

Recording as ‘Lester Young and His Band’, the quintet records four tracks at

this session.7 Three of the four are numbers by Young himself, and are his copyright.

One of these is entirely original, ‘D.B. Blues’, and the others are original melodies

(more accurately, short riff-like phrases) played over the chords of well-known songs:

‘Lester Blows Again’ is based on Fats Waller’s ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Jumpin’ at

Mesner’s’ (named for one of the Mesner family who were the executives of Philo

Records) is based on George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’. Each is recorded here for

the first time. The fourth recording is Young’s treatment of an almost ten-year old

song, ‘These Foolish Things’, written by Harry Link, Holt Marvell and Jack Strachey

for a London show in 1936, and by now a jazz standard.8

The decision on what to play is taken, presumably, by Young himself, as the

group is performing under his name and is mostly performing his numbers (though he

6 Issued on Commodore 1513 in 1944.

7 At the time of writing, two of the tracks, ‘DB Blues’ and ‘These Foolish Things’, can be

found on YouTube. All four recordings are available on music streaming services. 8 The recordings were issued in 1946 as Philo 123 (DB Blues and Lester Blows Again) and

124 (These Foolish Things and Jumpin at Mesner’s). The labels read ‘supervised by Norman

Granz.’

6

is not known as a composer and has written comparatively little of his own).9 We

cannot be completely sure if he chose himself to include ‘These Foolish Things’, but

it seems likely. There is no particular evidence to suggest a huge amount of pre-

planning, and the session almost certainly proceeds with a minimal amount of

rehearsal. Studio time is expensive, and the person who arranged for Lester Young to

record for Philo, producer Norman Granz, also prefers to capture ‘the unrehearsed

element of surprise’ (Daniels 2002, 274). 10

When this particular recording session takes place, in late December 1945,

Bing Crosby’s recording of Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ has recently been

released for the fourth time in four years and on December 15 made its expected

appearance in the main Billboard national juke-box chart.11

It is Crosby’s fifteenth

charting record of the year. ‘White Christmas’ is poised to take over the Number 1

spot from another Crosby record, ‘I Can’t Begin To Tell You’, which reached the top

on December 15, and which in turn took over from yet another Crosby record, ‘It’s

Been a Long Long Time’. Frank Sinatra has also re-released ‘White Christmas’, for

the first time in his case, and it too is in the chart.12

It is the thirteenth of his records

to chart in 1945.13

Big band leader Tommy Dorsey has had the same number of

charting records in the year as Sinatra. The orchestras of Guy Lombardo and Kay

Kyser – often categorised as purveyors of ‘sweet’ music – have had nine and seven

records in the chart respectively (Whitburn 1986, passim).

Meanwhile, over in the Billboard national juke box chart for race records – the

chart that will later be renamed ‘Rhythm and Blues’ – top spot has been claimed since

September by ‘The Honeydripper’, by a Los Angeles band, Joe Liggins and the

9 Although there have been rumours that he was responsible – and uncredited - for a number

of ideas taken up by Count Basie’s orchestra (see Porter 1985). 10

Daniels is speaking of recordings made by Philo’s successor Aladdin in 1946, and

specifically of the approach of Norman Granz, but it seems probable the same already applied

in late 1945. 11

Decca 18429. It topped the chart on 29th December but only stayed in for four weeks, a

victim no doubt both of seasonal taste and familiarity (Whitburn 1986). 12

Columbia 36860. Sinatra’s recording reached number 5, and like Crosby’s, only stayed four

weeks (ibid). 13

Another one, his recording of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, a Rodgers & Hammerstein song

from their musical Carousel, currently running on Broadway, appeared in the chart for just

one week three months earlier.

7

Honeydrippers (Whitburn 1988, p.257).14

When it was first released by the local

Exclusive label, Liggins’s record was distributed only on the West Coast, but has now

sold over two million copies. It is said to have been assisted on its way by enterprising

Pullman porters, who bought up dozens of copies in Los Angeles and boosted its

popularity by selling them in the Mid West and on the East Coast. Listeners in

Chicago and elsewhere may well be struck by the relaxed confidence and easy-going

urbanity of the music. The prominence of riffs, the infectious and repetitive rhythms,

the role of the tenor sax and a general sense of irony in ‘The Honeydripper’ all testify

to the influence of Louis Jordan and his so-called ‘jump’ music. Jordan has recently

had two number one records in succession: ‘Mop Mop’ and Caldonia’. ‘Caldonia’

spent 26 weeks in the chart altogether.

Central Avenue and Hollywood

Joe Liggins and his band are well known figures in the black entertainment

scene in Los Angeles that centres around Central Avenue and adjacent streets. Venues

include the Club Alabam, located next door to the Dunbar Hotel, a building that

symbolised the area’s rising status when it was erected in the 1920s. Lester Young has

just rented a house in a street off Central Avenue, with his second wife, a white

woman, Mary Dale. The area has been a focal point of music and entertainment for

the city’s black population for several decades. Restrictive covenants, which seek to

contain the black population within demarcated neighbourhoods, were declared legal

in 1919, and have meant that a high proportion of Los Angeles’s black population

lives in the Central Avenue area. The street, observed one musician, is ‘like a

beehive... people going and coming out of everywhere’; another describes it as ‘sort

of lit up’ (Bryant et al. 1998, 46, 351).15

14

Released on Exclusive 207. At the time of writing, available on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au25J4WhoBg. 15

For further information on Central Avenue, see Gary Marmorstein, ‘Central Avenue Jazz:

Los Angeles Black Music of the Forties’, Southern California Quarterly 70 (4) (1988), 417-8;

Tom Reed, The Black Music History of Los Angeles: Its Roots; A Classical Pictorial History

of Black Music in Los Angeles from 1920-1970 (Los Angeles: Black Accent on LA Press,

1992); and Ralph Eastman, ‘”Pitchin’ Up a Boogie”: African American Musicians, Nightlife

and Music Venues in Los Angeles, 1930-1945’, in California Soul:Music of African

Americans in the West, ed. Jacqueline C. Djedje and Eddie S. Meadows (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1998), 79-103.

8

During the war Central Avenue had received a boost, fuelled by inward

migration and by a growing economy based on the wartime industries, in particular

munitions. This growth attracted a large number of immigrants from the southern

states, whose cultural differences with the longer-term black residents continue to be

often remarked upon. Along with the boost to entertainment – and to some extent

driven by it – has come a growth in other areas of business, in some of which (though

not many) black ownership has been a prominent factor. Now that the war is over,

jobs are beginning to drop away, especially for African Americans.

For musicians, Central Avenue lends itself to the formation of networks, to

those extensive ‘constellations with whom any particular performer plays’ (Monson

1996, 12). There is no single Central Avenue style; rather, strands of African-

American music and dance co-exist and interweave. Stylistic antagonism is not

uncommon among both musicians and audiences, but many musicians are equally at

home in different idioms.16

The New Orleans revival has not influenced the area very

heavily, being more popular among white audiences elsewhere in the city. Nationally,

big bands have being experiencing a dip in their fortunes, and the number of touring

and local big bands has declined, for a variety of reasons - musicians being drafted,

changing tastes, economies of scale – but major black bands such as Ellington’s and

Basie’s still have a huge local following and are guaranteed good audiences if and

when they visit LA. For most musicians working locally, whether nationally known

or not, making a living means playing in small groups – which a lot of them prefer,

though they are more economically exposed in that environment and face a greater

need to promote themselves than in the more sheltered ranks of the big band, where

long-term employment used to be a reality for many.

Living just off Central Avenue, Lester Young can get a little work in the many

clubs that line the street, such as The Bird in the Basket and the Downbeat; and when

there is no work there are jam sessions after hours that run from two (when the liquor

license officially ends) till dawn. Jam sessions have been a part of many jazz

musicians’ lives for some years, in Young’s case since his time touring with the

territorial bands in the previous decade. Among fellow musicians he has enjoyed a

reputation for the fiercely competitive attitude he displays at jam sessions, but one

16

As, indeed, Ingrid Monson found with the musicians she studied in New York from 1989

(Monson 1996).

9

that also respects the jam session as shared, communal - and often learning –

experience. Jam sessions, as observed in his native Oklahoma City by the writer

Ralph Elllison, are a place where a musician ‘must...”find himself,” must be reborn,

must find his soul’ (1966, 206; quoted in Daniels 2002, 172).

Among the musicians in and around Central Avenue are many for whom Los

Angeles is either their native city, or has been home for many years; just as many are

in transit, although ‘transit’ is often a slow moving process; and others have only

recently arrived and are seeking to establish themselves in the various clubs and

record studios. Lester Young’s quintet has examples of each of these:

Red Callender, born in Virginia in 1918, has spent much of the past nine years

in Los Angeles, having arrived with a touring revue, Irvin C. Miller and his

Brownskin Models, and elected to stay. He has built a reputation as a

dependable and versatile bass player in tune with diverse contemporary styles.

Vic Dickenson has been in Los Angeles for about a year, not long in a highly

mobile career that has seen him, like Callender, acquire a considerable

reputation for flexibility and dependability - though he is twelve years older

and has been called on to ring more stylistic changes to earn a living.

Dodo Marmarosa is a newish arrival. Since leaving his native Pittsburgh at the

age of 16 to work with big bands, he has recently decided to give up the big

band scene and come to Los Angeles to seek to establish himself as a freelance

musician.

Henry Tucker Green appears to have been in the city for several years.17

Another versatile musician, he has played both with visiting New Orleans

musicians and big bands. He is also in demand for locally made race records.

Lester Young, like Dickenson, is very familiar with life on the road, having

worked initially with carnival bands and a touring family band led by his

father in the 1920s. Work with a string of territorial bands in the 1930s,

including the Blue Devils, culminated in a stint with Count Basie’s Orchestra

which brought him to national attention. Young’s father had moved all his

family save Lester to a house on Central Avenue in 1929 (Lester was on the

17

Information on Green is hard to find. I am sincerely grateful to Eddie Meadows for

searching possible sources.

10

road with territory bands by then, and his relationship with his father had

always been somewhat tempestuous). According to Daniels, Young

‘considered the Central Avenue house his home’ (2002, 235). He moved there

himself in 1941, after his father’s death, and so is now renewing his

acquaintance with the area and is returning to a familiar context and network.

Since the late 1930s he has worked both in the big band scene, and in small

groups that were mainly offshoots of those bands.

As already indicated, the group is racially mixed. Racism in Los Angeles, many of

whose law enforcers have migrated from the South, is as prevalent as in many other

large US cities, but on Central Avenue itself, for now at least, opportunities for racial

integration have been increasing, among both performers and audiences. Club Alabam

presents shows for integrated audiences (Bryant et al 1998, 19). For whites, no doubt

some of this is ‘slumming’, in a form not dissimilar to that which drew people to

Harlem in the 1920s, while for their part some club owners disapprove of black males

accompanied by white women. But the overall everyday situation does not

discourage interaction. When black performers look to move to other parts of town,

however, they encounter many difficulties, not least because of the restricted

covenants. Back in July of this year Hollywood property owners sought a court

injunction to prevent saxophonist Benny Carter and vocal group the Mills Brothers

from buying property in so-called ‘restricted’ areas (Miller 1946, 188). The racial

divide for musicians across the city as a whole is summed up by the existence of two

branches of the musicians’ union, the American federation of Musicians, one (Local

47) for whites and another, housed on Central Avenue (Local 767) for blacks.

Up in Hollywood itself, a bus ride from Central Avenue, many clubs are

segregated and in the movie industry jobs for black musicians are limited. But the

club run by Billy Berg on North Vine Street is an exception. Here a band of New

York-based black musicians has recently arrived after a cross-country train journey

and begun an engagement. Berg has been looking to put on the latest New York trend

and has been advised by another New York musician, Harry the Hipster Gibson, that

these musicians are the hottest current band (Gioia 1992, 16). Famous on the East

Coast for their innovatory music, known as bop or bebop, they are known in Los

Angeles only to a relatively small coterie of musicians and enthusiasts, mainly centred

around the Downbeat Club on Central Avenue. The band is led by trumpeter Dizzy

11

Gillespie and features alto sax player Charlie Parker, trumpeter Miles Davis and

drummer Max Roach. On 26 November, shortly before leaving New York for the

West Coast, the band made several recordings for the New Jersey company Savoy -

like Philo a new company, set up in 1942 - among them ‘Billie’s Bounce’.

Record labels

Within days of their arrival the Gillespie-led band is attracting many locally-

based musicians to its audiences. Someone else closely interested in the musicians’

presence on the West Coast is Ross Russell, proprietor of a record store in Hollywood

called Tempo and of a small, newly launched record company, based at his store,

called Dial. Tempo has become something of a meeting place for enthusiasts for new

music, and Dial has been set up to record that music locally whenever possible.

Dial has joined a growing list of small LA-based record labels, among them

Atomic, Exclusive and Philo. Most of the companies are newly formed, though some

go back as far as the early 1940s. In 1942 these companies had to contend with a

national recording ban called by the American Federation of Musicians, which lasted

into 1944. Among those that survived the ban were Philo and Capitol. Philo appears

to have survived by putting its operations largely on hold; Capitol in contrast was

better resourced and more resourceful. Formed in Hollywood in 1942 by Hollywood

music store owner Glenn Wallichs, Capitol was the brainchild of songwriter Johnny

Mercer, whose most recent credits as a lyricist at that time included ‘That Old Black

Magic’. Mercer was supported financially by his fellow lyricist Buddy De Sylva, by

then a Paramount Executive. In the weeks before the recording ban took effect, in

1942, Capitol made a stack of recordings to tide the company over. Some of these

became hits, the first of which was ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, featuring Freddy Slack’s

Orchestra with 17-year old Texan singer Ella Mae Morse, who performed a blend of

country, pop, and blues (Sanjek 1988, 217ff).18

As a fellow Los Angeles record label, Philo (named because of its proximity

to Philharmonic Hall19

) has seen Capitol grow away from it. Now, in late 1945,

Capitol is close to having sold 40 million records and on track to become a new major

18

At the time of writing, the recording is available on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLc7rohX9As 19

Callender 1985, 76.

12

company, to rival East Coast giants Columbia, Victor and Decca. Capitol uses its

Hollywood location and connections to seek out new talented individuals, in a range

of styles, including country music, jazz, popular song, who the company thinks have

star quality, and to give them scope to develop. It also differs from the established

majors in its attitude to radio as a marketing tool. Seeing the growing number of

independent radio stations as allies in promoting new music, rather than rivals,

Capitol sends disc jockeys free promotional copies and does not expect payment for

airtime (Sanjek 1988, 218).

Yet for many of the musicians based in or around Central Avenue this is of

relatively little interest, as records by black musicians still lack regular radio

exposure. But even without that, the growth in small record labels, many with Jewish

proprietors, has led to a boom in recording activity and, as Joe Liggins has proved,

recording for a small label can result in a hit record.

Musicians’ experience

The musicians involved in the recording session led by Lester Young come to

the recording studio on this particular day with skills, attitudes and personalities that

bear the imprint of experience, and the interactions that flow from this will be an

important part of the day’s proceedings. Vic Dickenson’s experience has been the

longest and most varied. In his teenage years he played New Orleans and Chicago-

style jazz around his native Columbus, Ohio, before going on to a career in a

succession of touring bands playing in the developing big band idiom. Known

initially as a section man, by the 1940s he had made the transition to soloist. He

remained comfortable in both swing and more traditional styles.

Like most musicians have to do, Dickenson has developed an identifiable style

– in his case usually described by words such as those used by a pundit in Esquire

magazine in 1945: ‘easy-going, flowing’. Not an ostentatious performer, he is known

for his good humour and dependability, his encyclopaedic knowledge of popular song

and its harmonies, and his quick musical brain.

Whereas Dickenson is still transient in Los Angeles, Red Callender is very

much a local fixture. He and Green are the epitome of the busy freelance musician,

turning up on a variety of recording dates in a variety of styles. (‘If I didn’t have two

record dates in a day’, he would later say, it was a bad day’ [Callender 1985, 75].)

Callender was on Joe Liggins’ ‘The Honeydripper’ and has also played with Louis

13

Armstrong. He is a master of the contemporary double bass style, pioneered by

musicians such as Walter Page of the Basie orchestra, who moved the time keeping

role of the instrument to a steady four-beat metre. The double bass is not yet

regularly regarded as a solo instrument in its own right, but Callender is one of a

group of musicians whose technique is such that that role is starting to be accepted.

He has had a number of pupils, too, among them a young resident of the Watts district

of LA, by the name of Charles Mingus.

In addition to playing for Helen Hume, Henry Tucker Green has also been

playing in Los Angeles with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra (though not necessarily at

the same time as Callender), and with them he has recorded the first big band version

of Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop tune, ‘Groovin’ High’, for Excelsior Records.

Michael ‘Dodo’ Marmarosa is twenty years old when he makes these

recordings. He has come to LA after a stint touring with Artie Shaw’s big band. Like

many other talented instrumentalists he is grateful to the big band scene but has found

the idiom restricting. Within the big band world, the leaders he worked with

recognised a remarkable talent, with a very strong technique, in which the influence

of a classical training was apparent (Dodo is known to warm up by playing Bach two-

part Inventions). Recently, he has been playing with one of the West Coast’s first

bebop-orientated ensembles, led by trumpeter Howard McGhee. He has also become

the house pianist for another of Los Angeles’s new independent labels, Atomic. It was

in that capacity that he recorded with guitarist/comedian Slim Gaillard, a couple of

weeks before the present session with Lester Young. Gaillard is known for his

invented language, which he calls ‘Vout’. One of the records Dodo recorded with

Slim Gaillard, ‘Laguna’ – which features a solo by the pianist - is a celebration of

sunbathing at Laguna Beach, in nearby Orange County. (Not so long ago, blacks were

prohibited from using public beaches.)

Marmarosa is quite at home in Gaillard’s semi-crazy, hipster world, as he is

known to be eccentric himself. Back in 1944, when touring with the Charlie Barnet

band, and aged 18 or 19, he threw a piano out of a hotel window, to see what chord it

struck when it hit the ground. His odd behaviour is ascribed by some to an incident in

which, aged 17, he was badly beaten one night in Philadelphia while on tour with

Gene Krupa’s orchestra. But he is also profoundly serious about his music. He is open

to and accomplished in most or all existing styles, but even more than Callender he

has a keen interest in new initiatives in jazz over the past couple of years, which are

14

allowing the pianist to develop a wide range of expressive potential. The piano’s role

has been changing for a number of years. In ensemble contexts, with or without a

soloing instrument, the instrument has increasingly dropped any time-keeping

function and now can often be found punctuating the ensemble sound with chords and

chordal phrases in a rhythmically unfettered way. When it solos, there are greater

varieties of approach, with many pianists relying in a regular pulse in the left hand,

while others no longer feel that need.

Lester Young is the best known musician in the group, having sprung to fame

just under a decade ago when he joined Count Basie’s band and was soon recognised

as having a very different tenor style from his contemporaries, displaying a lighter,

‘cool’ tone, a more linear approach to improvisation and many subtle variations of

rhythmic drive. Young is the dominant partner on these Philo recordings in terms of

the amount of solo time he gets, but perhaps because his is not a dominant personality

– he is widely regarded among jazz musicians as a gentle, sensitive, and generous

character – and everyone seems to have room to breathe. It is also noticeable that,

although it is some time now since small group jazz became dominated by a format

consisting of a series of solos, many vestiges of earlier practice remain, here notably

the ensemble playing in some of the final choruses, which underlines the feeling of

collectivity.

The Entrepreneur

If relationships and partnerships are central to this session, they do not end

with the musicians. Things in the jazz world are often casual in some respects, but the

session at the centre of our moment has not just happened by chance, but is the result

of a contract, signed a month before by Young and Philo executives Leo, Ed and Ida

Mesner. Instrumental in arranging both contract and session – and probably the line-

up of musicians also - is a local intermediary, Norman Granz. In the early 1940s

Granz was an assistant film editor at Warner Brothers in Hollywood with a passion

for jazz. Like club owner Billy Berg, like the Mesners, and like the founder of Savoy

on the East Coast, Herman Lubinsky, Granz is Jewish. In 1942 he persuaded club

owner Billy Berg to put on jam sessions which the public could sit in on. These used

to take place on Sunday afternoons, not a favourite working time for jazz musicians,

including Lester Young, who was in LA at this time, but the idea was a success. Then,

in July 1944, Granz hired the Philharmonic Hall in LA and, in a bold attempt to

15

translate the world of the jam session to the concert stage, organised the first of what

would later become a world-famous series of jazz gigs, ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’.

Ever since, the Hall’s management has been making it hard for him to repeat his

achievement on their premises, disapproving as they do of the racial mix on the stage

and in the audience – although Granz is about to make an agreement with the hall’s

management for another concert, that will take place in January 1946. Granz, in Dave

Gelly’s words ls ‘driven by two passions – to bring jazz before the public, and to

challenge racial prejudice’ (2007, 107).

In any case, Granz has already made something of a name for himself, so

much so that earlier in 1945 he was invited to join an elite squad of jazz critics

offering their opinions on the current jazz scene to the national magazine Esquire for

inclusion in a Yearbook of Jazz. Esquire called its team its ‘board of experts’ In

giving reasons for his choice of the best instrumentalists and vocalists of 1945, Granz

lamented the fact that he could not include Lester Young ‘whom I consider the

greatest man I’ve heard on his instrument’ (Miller 1946, p.55).

To find out why Young needs people to make his arrangements prior to this

session, and why Granz was unable to cast his vote for him in the Esquire poll earlier

in 1945, we need to go back a few months.

Military detention

When Lester Young records for Philo in late December 1945, he has just been

discharged from a military detention barracks at Camp Gordon, Georgia, just south of

Augusta. In March 1945 he was court martialled for possession of drugs, given a

dishonorary discharge, and sentenced to a year’s detention in the disciplinary barracks

in a notoriously racist state.20

In December the army released him two months early,

and Granz immediately made arrangements to get him back into his familiar world

and routine as quickly as possible. In the Los Angeles recording studio Young names

the first track in memory of the experience: DB Blues - Detention Barracks blues. A

small humourous gesture, and typical of the man, but the whole experience has been,

as he himself says, a nightmare, made the more incomprehensible to Young because it

20

The principal sources for biographical information on Lester Young are Büchmann-Møller

1990 and Daniels 2002. For a penetrating musicological analysis, see Porter 1985.

16

started at a time when his life seemed reasonably predictable (often an aspiration, if

not a clear-cut one, for the itinerant musician).

In the summer of 1944, a year and a half before our ‘moment’, Lester Young

returned to Los Angeles, a scene he knew well, as we have noted, having spent a

couple of years in the city working with his brother Lee, who still lived there with his

family. Lester was on a nationwide tour with Basie’s Orchestra, which he had

recently rejoined. Their itinerary brought them to Los Angeles in late July, and again

in early September. The band was a huge success, with crowds lining up four abreast

round the block to buy tickets. The second gig, in September, took place in a venue

with a non-segregated audience – and, apparently, air-conditioning (Daniels 2002,

251).

While he was in Los Angeles during these gigs Lester Young’s friend Norman

Granz seized the opportunity to turn a private aspiration into a reality. The aspiration

was to use his Warner Brothers connections to organise the making of a short film

that would attempt to recreate the world of the after-hours jam session. The musicians

would include his great hero, Lester Young. The ten–minute short, entitled ‘Jammin’

the Blues’, was made in Hollywood in the summer of 1944.21

It was directed by

Albanian-born photographer, Gjon Mili, whose first film this was. Mili had already

photographed many jazz musicians, as a photographer on Life magazine, and had

begun to make a reputation in particular for his multiple exposure technique. Shot in

black white, Jammin’ the Blues required the musicians to pre-record their

performances, and synchronise their on-camera performance to the playback – an odd

paradox on the face of it, as the film was supposed to capture musicians jamming.

But actually the film was more about smoky atmosphere, laidback sound and cool

image than it was about jamming. Its opening few minutes, beginning with a shot of

the top of Young’s pork pie hat, would become celebrated. The bass player in the film

was Red Callender.

Jammin’ the Blues was nominated for an Academy Award when it was

released in 1945. The nomination was probably as much in recognition of the camera

technique as the music, but in terms of public acclaim it not only raised Lester

Young’s status yet more among the jazz fraternity, it brought his name to a wider

cinema audience.

21

At the time of writing, it can be seen on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v_Y3Pbiims

17

As things turned out, however, he was not immediately able to benefit from

either of those things. During the making of the film in Hollywood Young received a

written summons to report to the army. He ignored it, as he had ignored previous

letters, believing he would not be drafted, despite awareness that many fellow

musicians had not escaped and that the draft had severely depleted the ranks of many

big bands. Although he had a strong physique, Young had numerous habits that

seemed on the face of it to make him unlikely military material. For one thing, he is

said to have consumed a quart of 100% proof whiskey a day on a regular basis

(though now a heavy drinker, he was noted in his early years on the road for not

drinking at all). For another, he had smoked marijuana regularly since his late teens or

early twenties. On top of that he was regularly on the move.

Perhaps it was the last of these that spurred the army to act, because one day at

the end of the Basie band’s second stint in LA, in late September 1944, an agent

visited the club, disguised as a fan (complete with zoot suit). After gaining the

musicians’ confidence, buying them drinks and talking with them, he pulled out a

badge and ordered Young and drummer Jo Jones to report the following morning, or

go to jail for five years (Büchman-Møller 1990, 117).

When he was drafted, Lester Young was known among his peers as a highly

unusual individual – this in a profession that increasingly thought of itself as peopled

by unusual individuals. His individualism extended beyond his playing style into an

idiosyncratic, inventive use of everyday speech that could act almost as a code. He

was also known, as we have seen, to be gentle, laid-back and highly sensitive. It is

hardly surprising, then, that a hard time awaited him in his brief military career. It was

obvious from the outset that he would never make a soldier. The many indignities

included a lumbar puncture to which he reacted so badly he had to put in a padded

cell. On top of such things, the authorities’ suspicion that he was a one-off - not

something anyone was allowed to be in this environment – was no doubt partly

responsible for the fact that, in addition to the difficulties of military discipline, drink

and drug deprivation, and the unaccustomed physical activities he was asked to

endure, Young was shut out from music making until the very end.

There is no need to chronicle his army career in detail here. Suffice to say that

in January 1945 he fell badly during an obstacle course, and soon after he was

discharged from hospital he was found to have semi-legal and illegal substances in his

locker. After the court martial, he was dishonourably discharged and sentenced to

18

hard labour at a detention centre, in the pious hope that, to quote the summary of the

judgement, ‘his undesirable traits may be corrected by proper treatment and

disciplinary training’. The one mitigating factor of his new environment was that he

was permitted to play again, in the confines of a small band that provided music for

dances for non-commissioned officers.

On his release in mid-December 1945, Lester Young heads for Los Angeles

(his ticket purchased by Norman Granz), not only because of the contract he has

signed with Philo shortly beforehand and the support he has had from Granz, but also

because he has family there: his second wife Mary Dale, his brother Lee and sister

Irma.

This is the most recent personal history which Lester Young brings to the

Philo recording session: a complexity of emotions with which his sensitive nature had

to contend, pleasure at being back with fellow musicians and family, mixed with

various needs: to play again, to earn a living, to get his name before the public again,

to reach or exceed previous standards, and to deal with business aspects; all this while

the memories of detention and abuse are still vivid. The only musician in the group to

commit a memory to writing, Red Callender, recalled that on his release Yung

‘became quite close-mouthed... He was an introvert by nature and the army had

darkened his view of humanity’ (1985, 48).

Whatever Young’s emotions and behavioural patterns, he is faced with a

situation in which there is much negotiating to be done, many decisions to be made.

He needs to find his way around a complex situation involving other people as well as

himself. He is familiar with such situations from the past, but renegotiating them,

seeing that the group dynamics operate successfully, after a spell away must make it

doubtful if in such a situation personal emotion could be the controlling factor.

Added to which, he has not regularly been in the position of leader of an ensemble in

the past.

The Recordings

The presiding spirit of the session seems to be one of informality. It is an

informality based on a set of historically developed conventions in which there is a

space for spontaneity. But that set of conventions also anticipates several other things,

among them confidence, familiarity, the playing of expected roles, and organisation.

Each musician ‘could be regarded as the holder of musical codes which, given the

19

right moment/situation, he/she would bring into play’.22

Confidence in their abilities

and familiarity with the idiom and its requirements enables a group of musicians such

as these, with an uneven knowledge of each other, to collaborate with each other at

short notice. The character of that collaboration is based on a synergising of

collective and individual performance.

So the milieu to which Lester Young returns is one in which there is a

considerable measure of support. There is every likelihood that that support extends

from being musical into a wider form – and as such would be in marked contrast to

the life has led these past months. There is also interaction, requiring each musician

to be alert and responsive. And there is also responsibility: it is his session, his

leadership.

The pressure of time is a further contributing factor. Red Callender later

recalled that ‘on any record date of three hours we did at least four tunes’ (1985, 75).

Studio work, Callender also notes, presents different challenges to live performance,

but at the same time offers the chance to use experience. ‘In the studio you play only

what you know will work, you know to play the microphone, to judge what you’re

doing by the needle... by the pot...on the dials they turn in the control room’ (ibid.,

174).

The organisation of the performances follows the by now standard practice for

small groups of a series of ‘choruses’ (a ‘chorus’ being one complete play-through of

the harmonic sequence of the chosen piece). There are degrees of flexibility as to

how many instruments get to solo; and as to whether, and if so when, the entire

ensemble plays together, and in what style. In three of the four recordings, the

structure of the piece follows the same pattern: choruses in the form of an

instrumental solo backed by the rhythm section, are followed by concluding choruses

played by the whole ensemble. The order of soloists is the same in each piece: Young,

Dickenson, Marmarosa. One piece is entirely given over to an instrumental solo by

Young with rhythm section backing. On none of the recordings are there opportunities

for solos by bass or drums.

‘DB Blues’, the first piece to be recorded, is a medium tempo recording, following

the first pattern outlined above. Young’s opening chorus states the theme in a lightly

dancing rhythm, and his second makes use of many of stylistic features for which he

22

Bob Davis, personal communication.

20

was known by the early 1940s – a heavier sound, honks, repeated notes followed by a

glissando, use of rubato to give a sense of dynamism, to name just a few. In the last

two choruses the whole group plays, but Young and Dickenson dominate, engaging in

tossing repeated improvised phrases at each other. It is not dialogue, so much as a

stylised type of repartee, but one embedded in a version of the collective

improvisation of earlier jazz.

The basic structure is unusual. It has become commonplace for small group

performances to be based on either a series of 12-bar blues choruses or those of a 16-

or, more often, 32-bar popular song. In the latter case the 32 bar unit divides into four

sets of eight. These song structures are often summarized as AABA or ABAC, etc,

referring to the way they incorporate structural repetition and change. ‘DB Blues’ is

unusual in being a melding of the two forms. An AABA song, its A sections are 12

bar blues sequences, while the B is an eight-bar popular song bridge (based on the

chords of ‘I Got Rhythm’). There are ten choruses in all, organised as follows (see

Figure 1):

1 A 12 bars Lester Young 6 A 12 bars Vic Dickenson

2 A 12 bars Lester Young 7 B 8 bars Dodo Marmarosa

3 B 8 bars Lester Young 8 A 12 bars Dodo Marmarosa

4 A 12 bars Lester Young 9 A 12 bars Ensemble

5 A 12 bars Vic Dickenson 10 A 12 bars Ensemble

Figure 1: Structure and organisation of ‘DB Blues’

On his return from enforced exile, therefore, Lester Young selects a form which

unites the two dominant underlying structures of the jazz world as he knew it (perhaps

we could even speak of two agendas?). One is edgy, emotionally and physically

ambiguous, closely linked by its history to the African American experience. The

other comes from the world of professional, usually white songwriters, especially

those of Broadway; no less capable of emotional depth, it is perhaps more overtly

sentimental or romantic and more physically constrained.23

In their respective shapes

23

By the late 1950s, when African American musicians chose songs from the ‘American

songbook’, it was not uncommon, then and later, for those performances to be read as

inversion based on cultural differences linked to race. Ingrid Monson, for example, writes of

John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ (1959): ‘Coltrane’s quartet turns a musical theater tune

upside down by playing with it, transforming it, and turning it into a vehicle for the

21

they both, as it were, leave home and return – they end much where they began - but

when the popular song comes home it has experienced more harmonic contrast than

has the blues.24

Young uses the opportunity his structure gives him to counterpose the buoyant

and at the same time somewhat gritty blues choruses, especially the last, with its

honks and repeated notes, with the emotional lift that the eight bar bridge brings. With

the benefit of hindsight, it might be argued that the determined but yet carefree spirit

that pervades this performance is a kind of statement by Young about being back in

the fold, about having survived, his identity and sense of worth intact. But such

readings have also to take into account not just personal histories but a veritable

plethora of decisions and conventions, among which are those which have developed

to allow the expression of collective creativity.

Like DB Blues, the two up-tempo numbers, ‘Lester Blows Again’ and

Jumpin’ at Mesner’s’, are organised as a sequence of AABA choruses featuring an

individual soloist plus rhythm section, and the order of soloists is the same. Each

piece concludes with ensemble polyphony centred round a lively exchange of short

phrases between Young and Dickenson, which suggest a closeness between them. In

thematic terms, ‘Lester Blows Again’ barely has a theme as such; Young begins

improvising almost immediately; ‘Jumpin’ at Messners’ has a short riff-like theme in

the first A, followed by the second A by improvisation. It is noticeable that each

soloist’s performances in this number are more melodic than in ‘Lester Blows Again’,

in terms of striking phrases – alongside with a swinging rhythm that persists

throughout. Young’s playing has is an edge of emotion even in these up-tempo

numbers, which, like ‘DB Blues’ contain honks, glissandos and use of rubato; in

‘Lester Blows Again’ a honk becomes almost a wail. Dickenson’s rips on the

expression of an African American-based sensibility that even many non-African Americans

prefer to the original’ (1996, 118). While transformation is decidedly in evidence in the

Young quintet’s music, perhaps especially in ‘These Foolish Things’, any intention to invert

seems unlikely, as Young had performed this type of repertoire for a large part of his

professional life, and indeed as a member of father’s his touring show band, regularly

performed the popular songs of the day. 24

Büchmann-Møller notes that ‘this 44-bar form has later inspired younger musicians to

create similar compositions, such as …Julian Cannonball Adderley’s “Scotch and Water”

…John Coltrane’s “Traneing In” and “Coronation”, and the bass player Sam Jones’s “Unit

7”’ (1990, 249).

22

trombone in his solo in ‘Lester Blows Again’ sound somewhat pale emotionally in

comparison.

In one of the four records we find Lester Young in more reflective, perhaps

more introspective mood. ‘These Foolish Things’ differs from the other three in

having no solo opportunities for the other instrumentalists, apart from a few

introductory bars from Marmarosa. Young has recorded ‘These Foolish Things’ just

once before, with Johnny Guarnieri’s All Star Orchestra, in New York on April 18,

1944.25

On that recording, after a brief intro from Guarnieri, Young plays the first

eight bars of the melody, then improvises for the next eight. At the bridge Guarnieri

takes over, followed by clarinet and trumpet soloists; Young does not solo again. The

recording that is part of our ‘moment’ is noteworthy for many things, among them

that Young solos for 48 bars, and that the original melody is entirely absent from start

to finish. Young is feeding off a practice that is becoming common in certain jazz

circles by this time, of fashioning a new melodic creation from the harmonic bones of

the old one.26

But he does not just feed off it; he places himself at one end of the

possibilities that this practice allows in terms of departure from the original; he moves

from interpretation to transformation to new creation.

In terms of structure, Young follows a pattern he had previously developed for

ballads.27

Having played through a 32 bar AABA sequence, instead of returning

to the harmony of the beginning A, he repeats the bridge, then the final A. So the

overall structure is AABA’BA. By now he has mastered a way of using the structure

to enhance the emotional charge of the performance. For example:

* when he reaches the bridge for the first time the mood seems to intensify (the

original song does not have that quality at this point);

* in the next eight bars, as A returns, the mood seems to first to relax, then shifts

again towards the end, almost to one of relaxed defiance;

* the immediate return to the bridge with its contrasting harmonies quickly

intensifies and darkens the mood again;

25

Savoy 511. Besides Guarnieri and Young, the personnel featured Billy Butterfield

(trumpet), Hank D’Amico (clarinet), Dexter Hall (guitar), Billy Taylor (bass) and Cozy Cole

(drums). Some discographies list the ensemble as The Johnny Guarnieri Swing Men. 26

A transcription of the opening bars can be found in Porter 1985. For a full transcription see

Büchmann-Møller 1990. 27

The same pattern is followed on the 1944 Guarnieri recording of the tune.

23

* at the very beginning of the final A, in what becomes the climax, there is this

short descending phrase at high volume, which comes across like a cry (of what? not

of pain; perhaps of achievement against the odds?), followed by a relaxed glide to the

end.

Do any of those observations tie ‘These Foolish Things’ to his personal

experience any more strongly than ‘DB Blues’? Although Red Callender’s comment

that Young became more of an introvert was quoted earlier, the tone of the piece is

not that of self-pity or brooding; rather, the emotional rises and the final climax are

more cries of determination than of desolation. We can never know what Young

himself was intending, but we can say that such a creative enactment of the principle

of ‘new for old’ is at the very least a powerful assertion of identity. ‘New for old’ can

also suggest he is glad to be back in a familiar world, one he can grace with new

ideas, new ways of giving. As the linear sequence of unhappy events in Young’s

recent past is broken by his return to life among family, friends and acquaintances, the

spiral that brings him back also to making music does not point back to the past, or

straight forward to the future, so much as it allows him to re-orientate himself in the

present.

In identifying these stylistic and structural phenomena, the historical strands or

trajectories of which are drawn together, or converge, in our moment, we are very far

from exhausting the subject. The fact that Young’s saxophone sound is so close and

so recognisable – and must have brought happiness to those who had missed his

performances in his enforced absence – cannot be separated from developments in

recording studio techniques. Some of the other trajectories that could be identified

around Lester Young alone include: breathing techniques; tone; public taste in the

matter of tone, the semiotics of tone, and of the use of sounds such as growls, buzzes

and off-pitch notes; the relationship between composition and improvisation in this

stylistic context, etc.

What happened to the main participants?

The various individuals and institutions that have peopled this narrative would

never experience quite the same intersection of various trajectories that formed the

moment we have examined, but a brief look into the future illustrates, unsurprisingly,

both the own ongoing histories of those trajectories and their continuing relevance.

24

Central Avenue went into a gradual decline as a centre of music and

entertainment, partly as a result of layoffs after the war, and partly because of a

change in police attitudes later in the 1940s from one of comparative tolerance to one

of regular harassment and intimidation, all at the behest of a new chief of police who

was motivated above all by a hatred of racial intermingling (Bryant 1998, p.308). Two

developments in the 1950s, while both positive for the black community, had negative

consequences for the future of the street as a focal point. In 1954 restrictive covenants

were outlawed, and the black community began to spread to other areas, though still

adversely affected by racism. A year earlier, in 1953, the merging of the two locals of

the American Federation of Musicians, while an important early success in the battle

to reduce segregation, also resulted for black musicians in the loss of a ‘vital

communal bond’ (ibid., p.404), and its demise was controversial. By the time Red

Callender wrote his autobiography in the early 1980s he found Central Avenue ‘a

shadow, a skeleton of what was’ (1985, 176).

Philo Records changed its name to Aladdin in 1946 and while it was never a

major player became a successful company specialising in rhythm and blues,

recording among others Amos Milburn, Lightnin’ Hopkins and the early Soul Stirrers.

Norman Granz relaunched his concerts in 1946 and in due course made JATP

an international event. He set up numerous record labels, including Verve (for which

singer Anita O’Day made the first album) and Pablo, and is often credited with

making Ella Fitzgerald a household name. He never lost his opposition to racism and

was constantly active in the cause, for example intervening personally to remove

notices in a theatre in Houston which had been set up to divide the auditorium into

segregated seating. He moved to Europe and died in Geneva in 2001.

Dodo Marmarosa played regularly with Parker and other East Coast musicians

such as Miles Davis at venues on Central Avenue. He also recorded with them, most

notably in March 1946 at a classic bebop session for Dial that produced ‘Ornithology’

and others. When he recorded with Lester Young in 1945 Dodo was about to get his

first session under his own name. Mental ill health dogged him, however, and in the

late 1940s he retreated to Pittsburgh. He also had to suffer the travails of being drafted

in the 1950s. He made several short comeback attempts, but by the 1970s could be

found looking after his ageing parents in Pittsburgh, where he died himself in 2002,

not before a British newspaper had published a premature obituary of him in 1991.

25

Vic Dickenson remained on the West Coast for several years, eventually

following an increasing trend and going east. He got his own line-up in the 1950s.

Increasingly, as new styles followed fast on the heels of each other, he played with

musicians identified with a jazz ‘mainstream’ He continued touring into his

seventies, and died in 1984 aged 78.

Red Callender continued to be in wide demand on the West Coast and spread

his net accordingly, appearing with Louis Armstrong in the movie New Orleans in

1946, and making records with many of the younger generation, including Charlie

Parker (for example, on ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’ [February 1947], and Dexter Gordon.

He played with Dodo Marmarosa again in a Wardell Gray-led quartet in 1946, and in

1947 he recorded his first solo on the Gerald Wilson Orchestra’s recording of

‘Dissonance in Blues’ (Callender 1985, 76). Callender became involved in television

work, and also produced numerous compositions. His autobiography was published in

1985. He died in 1992, aged 76.

Henry Tucker Green left the Gerald Wilson orchestra in 1946 (before

Callender played with it) and concentrated increasingly on what a few years later

became known as rhythm and blues. He was for many years drummer with the proto-

rock ‘n’ roll group the Treniers, who had hits with records such as ‘It Rocks, It Rolls,

It Swings’. He also played with the Red Caps and the Romaines.

Lester Young recorded five further sessions for Aladdin. For many years he

toured regularly with Jazz at the Philharmonic, which saw him better off than he had

ever been. Though he made attempts to settle, married for the third time and had a

son and daughter, the road drew him back constantly, to the detriment of his personal

relationships. Many jazz critics of the time, writing for journals such as Down Beat

and Metronome, became critical of his recordings (Metronome complained that the

two 78 rpm records that were issued following the session that is our moment, ‘sound

as though they were made in a hurry’ [Daniels 2002, 270]), and jazz writers continued

– and still continue - to debate whether his talent went into a decline or continued to

change and develop. What does seem true is that by the 1950s he found it increasingly

hard to summon it up. Alcohol dependency was a prominent factor in a deterioration

of his spirit too. In 1958 he moved into the, the Alvin Hotel, (across the road from the

Birdland club where he had played numerous times). Seriously depressed, he felt, as

Porter observes, ‘obsolete’, despite the fact that ‘so much of modern jazz was based

26

on [his] innovations’ (1985, 29). In 1959, having been taken ill on a solo tour in Paris,

he died at the Alvin Hotel. He was 49.

Commentary

These five musicians, Young, Dickenson, Marmarosa, Callender and Green,

never recorded together again as a group. The moment in which they came together

was not repeated, and they largely went their separate ways – though no doubt they

saw each other in an around Central Avenue, and both Red Callender and Vic

Dickenson played with Young on subsequent but separate dates. Dickenson recorded

with Young again about two weeks later, around January 11 1946, and Callender

recorded with him for Blue Note in August 1946.

As one jazz recording session among thousands this one does not claim a high

place in the registers that historians typically use. It does not stand at the beginning of

a movement for change, nor does it contain ideas that would later be seen as the

source of such change. It is not seen as marking the peak of anyone’s powers – though

‘These Foolish Things’ is highly cherished by many, and ‘DB Blues’ did make the

race charts at the time. The session’s appearance in the historical record is almost

entirely limited to its role as Lester Young’s first recording opportunity after his

release from the army’s tender care – an episode which usually gets more attention

than the recordings do. In itself it can tell us perhaps about his mood that day, but

little about such longer stories as whether his talent declined, and if so when that

process started and why.

Does that list of negatives in any way invalidate the kind of close study of this

particular moment that we have undertaken today? A similar exercise could be

undertaken for another session roughly contemporary with this one, such as Charlie

Parker’s Dial session in March 1946. But the fact that the Parker session is widely

regarded as exceptional would risk driving the study in particular directions. Without

the pressure from issues such as ‘pioneering change’ to threaten to garner our

attention, what happens in the case of our moment is that its intricacy becomes crystal

clear. Within this intricacy, one thing we see is that no one individual is submerged;

the method grants each individual their place.28

28

As the present study was virtually completed I became aware of Catherine Tackley’s fascinating

study (2012) of the recording of Benny Goodman’s celebrated Carnegie Hall concert of 1938. Despite

the centrality of Goodman himself, Tackley’s approach does grant each individual their place. That her

27

But when we illuminate a sonic event in this way, it is evident that not only

are there many trajectories criss-crossing the moment - or, to put it in Ginzburg’s

language, many interconnections among diverse conjunctures - some of which are in

close contact with each other, while others are more singular, but also that each does

so bearing the imprint of its own history and the evidence of its previous intersections

with other histories. A simple list, in no special order, of the historical trajectories that

have intersected in this narrative might look something like this:

Small record companies

Record contracts

Employment for musicians/Making a living

Ownership

Dynamics of small jazz ensembles

Formality/informality in recording sessions

Inter-relationships and interaction in recording sessions

Differences between recording and live performance

Collectivity

Discipline

Rehearsal and planning

Degrees of familiarity between musicians

Intersecting pathways among musicians

Leadership of combos

Composition in jazz

Structure in jazz

Blues in jazz

Relationship with pre-existing recordings of same tune

Instrumental techniques

Virtuosity and individualism

Intersecting of sonic forms in musical and other ways

Blurring of edges of genre labels

Internal genre histories

Local scene

Touring

Domiciles among musicians (temporary/longer term)

Racism and racial segregation

Radio

Musicians unions

Music promotion

Contribution of Jews to jazz

Local state interventions

Relationship to social mainstream

Relationship to dominant trends in jazz

Critical opinion

priorities are different from my own can be seen in her overall aim in contributing to a series of studies

of jazz on record; and also in Part 2 of her study, which is devoted to a comparative musicological

analysis of the performances on that album with other performances by Goodman and others.

28

Each person involved relates to and draws on the various historical trajectories in

slightly different ways. Dodo Marmarosa, for example, is as yet relatively

unacquainted with the historical thread ‘dynamics in small groups’, while for Lester

Young it is deeply familiar, but something from which he has been forcibly separated.

Given the lifestyle of the time, a majority of jazz musicians conformed to the

notion of ‘normal exceptions’ identified by Grendi as a component part of a

microhistorical focus. Among the five, Young, while the most famous, seems to feel

the sense of being an outsider most in his relationship with society at large, and not

only because of the racism that had doubtless affected three of his colleagues also.

All of the individuals involved also have their own inner threads or

trajectories, also moving at different speeds – such as instrumental skill, business

knowledge, responsiveness to others, creative imagination. As with the non-personal

threads each of these has its history and that history is rarely stationary. The complex

intersecting of these trajectories creates a kind of matrix29

in which an individual

‘moment’ such as the one we have looked at can occur – but by itself it does not bring

the moment into existence. What makes the moment a reality is the decisions made by

the people involved. In making those decisions they draw in to the frame a range of

personal histories – their accomplishments, their attitudes, their experiences, their

relationships with each other. They also draw on their knowledge of and familiarity

with the other historical trajectories, personal and non-personal, that are present.

When these trajectories intersect to form a musical moment, the fact that the

moment is documented as a group of sound recordings may encourage the impression

that the moment has been frozen. But what this narrative makes clear is that the

process by which music is made is in continuous flux; the ‘moment’ represents

transitory, unrepeatable coalescence. It does not follow from that, however, that

nothing is stable; the matrix formed by what I have called the complex intersecting of

trajectories is formed from a myriad pasts and leads on by various routes into a

myriad futures, but its function is to be concerned with the present, and to give a

reality, or perhaps better, a groundedness to that present.

As with other areas of history, when we look at the longue durée of popular

music history we seek to identify what links events and people together in significant

29

I am very grateful to Bob Davis for the idea of a matrix, and for the many helpful

observations he made on the first draft of this essay.

29

chains of cause and effect. But looked at up-close, cause and effect perhaps seems less

significant than the daily complexity within which people construct narratives of

themselves and within which decision-making and agency operate. Seen in this light,

what makes popular music history so interesting is the sheer number of trajectories,

the complexity of their intersections, the imprint of their history, and the consequent

demands on the dialogues that underlie and inform the daily decision-making process.

That, in essence, is what this story has been about.

References

Bryant, Clora, et al., eds. 1998. Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Bűchmann-Møller, Frank. 1990. You Just Fight For Your Life: The Story of Lester Young.

New York, Praeger.

Callender, Red, and Elaine Cohen. 1985. Unfinished Dream: The Musical World of Red

Callender. London: Quartet Books.

Gelly, Dave. 2007. Being Prez: The Life & Music of Lester Young. London: Equinox; New

York: Oxford University Press.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1976. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century

Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gioia, Ted. 1992. West Coast Jazz Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960. New York, Oxford

University Press.

Miller, Paul Eduard, ed. 1946. Esquire’s 1946 Jazz Book. New York: Barnes.

Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Muir, Edward, and Guido Ruggiero, eds. 1991. Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sanjek, Russell. 1988. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred

Years. Vol. 3. From 1900 to 1984. New York, Oxford University Press.

Tackley, Catherine. 2012. Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. New

York: Oxford University Press.

Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. 2001. Jazz: A History of America’s Music. London:

Pimlico.

Whitburn, Joel. 1986. Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music.

Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research.

-----------. 1988. Top R&B Singles 1942-1988. Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research.

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© David Horn 2013

Dhorn87506@aol.com