As Long As They Can Blow. Interracial Jazz Recordings Before 1935 and Other Jive

By Stephen Provizer

The overarching goal of As Long As They Can Blow is to show the mutual respect that black and white jazz musicians had for each other and how a shared love of the music and the relative privacy of the recording studio resulted in hundreds of early interracial jazz recordings.

 

The book doesn't fall into any single genre. At its heart is the first discography of these sessions ever put together and a concise list that can be used for quick access to those sessions. There is a brief history of the recording industry, with an emphasis on how the industry dealt with the question of race, as well as a list of formal and informal interactivity between black and white jazz musicians outside the recording studio. Finally, there is a piece in the voice of Mezz Mezzrow and one in the voice of Eddie Condon, both of whom were active in interracial sessions. The facts are there, but the author uses techniques of creative non-fiction to put them into story form.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Provizer
• Release date: Dec 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798892923743

Stephen Provizer

Stephen Provizer is a musician (brass) who has been writing about jazz since the 1990's. His work can be found in publications like Coda, Downbeat, Syncopated Times, AllAboutJazz.com, Forward, Artsfuse.org and at his blogs--interracialjazz.com and brilliantcornersbostonjazz.blogspot.com

Book preview

STEPHEN PROVIZER

AS LONG AS THEY CAN BLOW

INTERRACIAL JAZZ RECORDINGS AND OTHER JIVE BEFORE 1935

Author: Stephen Provizer Publisher: Re-Balance Publishing ISBN: 979-8-89292-374-3

© Stephen Provizer 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author/publisher.

Dedicated to:

The proposition that people can get along.

Thanks to:

Patricia, Tura, Rob, Brian Rust, Tom Lord, and all the knowledgeable jazz folks

that helped me get this together.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

The preface acknowledges the importance of writing that addresses the racism and sexism prevalent in the history of American popular music. However, the empha- sis in this project is on the bond between musicians of different races who came together to make recordings that may not have had the dramatic impact of, say, Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings, but which created musical threads that were wo- ven into the fabric of jazz.

Prelude and Pathway

In this section, I give a succinct history of the recording industry, placing its growth in the racist background of the day. I explain the use of white musicians to back up black artists and the rise of Race Records, followed by the growing number of interracial sessions and touch on the question of racial passing.

Interracial Recording List

This is a chronological list of interracial sessions, including some pre or proto-jazz sessions.

Interracial Discography

This is a discography, which includes all musicians, dates and songs recorded. It does not include all releases of songs, as such would double the length of the dis- cography. However, all the information is there for anyone who wants to find all the releases of all the tunes.

Episodes of Intermingling

I introduce another reason for the comity which existed among musicians of dif- ferent races; namely, mutual identification as outsiders, which worked to bring together members of ethnic groups such as Jews and Italians with blacks. I then relate brief stories of interchanges between the races outside of the recording stu- dio.

Mezz Mezzrow and the Disciples of Swing: An Inside Look at Interracial sessions

Reed player Mezzrow authored an autobiography "Really The Blues," one of the most extraordinary personal documents in jazz. Using this and other sources, I

write in Mezzrow’s voice to describe several important episodes in jazz interracial recording (and live performance).

Eddie Condon: A Mover in Interracial Recording

We are also lucky to have extensive autobiographical writing by banjo-guitarist Condon. I use his writing and other sources to re-create Condon’s voice as he talks about recording with Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and other white musicians.

Bibliography

1.  Preface

Over the last 20 years, the trend has been to interpret jazz history through the lens of cur- rent critical thinking about race and gender—a necessary corrective to writing that elided or made short work of the racism and sexism prevalent in the history of American popular music. Because of racial and gender prejudice, a lot of music created and performed bet- ween 1890 and 1920 did not become a part of our recorded legacy.

However, the walls between vernacular musicians were more porous than the de facto and de jure walls of segregation. Love of ragtime, blues and jazz music provided a bond that transcended prevailing racial cultural mores. There is ample evidence-written, oral and recorded, of the amity and mutual respect that jazz musicians of all races and genders had for each other. Unable to play publicly on the same stage (with rare and complicated ex- ceptions), musicians of different races met and interacted at after-hours jam sessions, rent parties and other unofficial spaces. Beginning in the 1920’s, record companies realized the profits that lay untapped in this music. While just a small percentage of their releases, companies were booking more and more integrated recording sessions.

Should our perception of jazz history change when we learn that some proportion of the records that musicians of that era listened to were integrated sessions? I believe it should. These recordings were an important part of the normal listening repertory of both black and white musicians; generators of contemporaneous musical inspiration. Songs, instru- mental techniques, and arrangements were passed back and forth, as each race became more familiar with the work of the other.

We take it for granted that black musicians were the source from which white musicians drew inspiration, but there’s also ample testimony that some of the most well-known black jazz musicians credited white musicians with influencing their playing. To say that this detracts from the accomplishments of Armstrong, Bechet, Ellington, Henderson and so many others is ridiculous. Jazz is not a zero-sum game and acknowledging the contributi- ons of Adrian Rollini, Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Frank Trumbauer and other white musicians simply opens us up to a wider field of vision.

What constitutes jazz is always a contentious question and interested parties have diffe- rent views of what should be included in a list of this kind. Improvisation and the blues are foundational to jazz, but exist to some degree in other genres, such as Country/Hillbilly, Country-Blues, Western Swing, Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues and Bluegrass. I’ve compiled a list of over 300 pre-jazz and jazz interracial recordings from 1893 to 1935 and in this list, I take a mainstream path, for lack of a better description. I hope my effort inspires others to undertake their own lists or to adapt this one, using whatever criteria they choose—possibly broadening the study to include adjacent genres and European jazz recordings.

Beneath each entry lurks a great deal of subtext; coded and cryptic, even to jazz cognos- centi. In some cases, we may know about friendships or casual contacts between musici- ans that led to their recording together. Sometimes, circumstantial evidence allows us to conclude that a recording company or a music publishing company put people together for commercial reasons. Often, an educated guess is the best we can do.

Happily, there exist two autobiographies that were written by musicians who were impor- tant participants in interracial recording sessions. Guitarist Eddie Condon was a prolific writer who documents several such sessions in his autobiography We Called it Music. Reed player Mezz Mezzrow’s Really The Blues is a singular document that does the same. I’ve drawn from these and other sources to create monologues in Condon’s and Mezzrow’s voice that gets us behind the scenes of these sessions.

As you read those, bear in mind that until the mid-1930’s, there was almost no racial mixing in public performance venues. That has changed over time—slowly, but it has. It’s important to know that there was a group of men and women who bonded around the music and reached out to the other to help tell their stories. The impact of the recordings may not have been as dramatic as that of, say, Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings, but the musical threads were nonetheless woven into the fabric of jazz. Remove them and the evolution of the music would have been very different.

2.  Prelude and Pathway

In the mid to late 19th century, scientists unlocked the secrets of chemistry and electro- magnetism and created a new world of seemingly magical devices. Sound recording was one of them.

Three key figures arose to compete in the nascent recording industry: Thomas Edison, Emile Berliner, and Alexander Graham Bell. Edison created a system of sound recording and playback on cylinders in 1877 and founded the Edison Phonograph Company in 1888. In that same year, Berliner invented the system of the lateral cut flat disc record and the playback device for it called the Gramophone. Berliner established the American Gramophone Company in 1891, and the United States Gramophone Company in 1893, which became the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901. In 1886, a group of busi- nessmen established the American Graphophone Company, based on technology deve- loped by Alexander Graham Bell and others at the Volta laboratory. In 1887, this became Columbia Records.

Sound recording, along with other new technologies-telegraphy, photography, x-rays, te- lephony, incandescent lighting and radio-had a global impact. But the dissemination and application of these inventions were subject to the pressures of the racist, eugenics-besot- ted, capitalist world in which they arose.

Claims of theft and patent battles were endemic and accelerated along with the potential financial rewards. Edison, Victor and Columbia held the recording patents and skirmished among themselves. In the 1910’s, independent labels, like Emerson (founded by a former Chief Recording Engineer at Columbia Records), looked for small technical changes that could allow them to avoid copyright infringement. A court decision in 1921 was a game changer, as Victor’s patents on flat records were defeated in court and immediately, many independent record companies began making records.

It’s been estimated that about 800 commercial recordings were made by blacks prior to 1920 i - a miniscule percentage of the 400,000 pre-1923 recordings that have been entered into the public domain.ii Almost none of these sessions were integrated and of those that were, it was because the record company used their own white staff musicians to back up black performers.

Uplift vs. Entertainment

It’s somewhat mysterious that after the phenomenal success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917,iii record companies remained fairly cautious about releasing jazz and blues recordings.iv One element at play was the question of finding a balance between uplift

and entertainment.v

There was a burgeoning amount of bad press about jazz corrupting youth. Record com- panies knew that the substantial machinery used for playback would have pride of place in many living rooms and the question of respectability needed to be taken into conside- ration, as would a prevailing ethic of self-reliance. Many Americans would recoil at the idea that pianos—once the source of self-generated entertainment in the home—would be supplanted by machines that would now do the work.

The success of vernacular music in the early 1920’s largely overwhelmed concerns about respectability. However, through the 1920’s, at least, the legacy companies, Victor, Co- lumbia and Edison were aware of their image, watching to see which way the wind was blowing and whether having their company associated with jazz would negatively affect their overall sales.vi

The Question of Race

The American recording industry was as segregated as the rest of the American entertain- ment industry.vii Black instrumentalists simply did not appear in symphonic ensembles, large concert bands (except James Reese Europe’s) or as staff musicians for record com- panies. This is the reason that in so many pre-1920 cases, black musicians were accompa- nied on record by white musicians chosen by record companies. Burt Williams and Noble Sissle had many sessions with white backing groups.

Minstrel and vaudeville performances and companies were somewhat more racially mixed. For example, black singer George W. Johnson performed with white tenor BIlly Murray and Bert Williams with Leon Errol. Wilbur Sweatman is an interesting example.

Sweatman, born in 1882, was a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, able to play multiple cla- rinets at the same time. He started his career in circus bands and medicine shows and moved into minstrelsy and vaudeville. His talent was such that he organized his own band in