Great & imperishable.

GREAT & IMPERISHABLE 

WE HAVE HAD Louis Armstrong &Sidney Bechet in New York 1923-1925 (Smithsonian), the Hugues Panassie dates (RCA Victor), and the retrospective Sidney Bechet--Master Musician (Bluebird) to teach us that Sidney Bechet led the jazz world in technique, voice, intonation, and invention until the mid 1920s, when Louis Armstrong, learning from him, caught up and surpassed him, at least in brilliance. Bechet, like the greatest of the early jazzmen, came from New Orleans, that melting pot of blues, quadrilles, opera, rags, gutbucket--almost anything that could make sound. As early as 1919, the classical conductor Ernest Ansermet heard Bechet in Europe and wrote that perhaps the future of music was bound up in this one instrumental singer.

Bechet began as a clarinetist, thanwhich in its New Orleans phase there is no than whicher. He moved on to the soprano saxophone, fuller in body than the clarinet but in his hands as supple. (On one of his recordings, he is, through the magic of replays, the entire band--soprano, trumpet, piano, drums, etc.) The genius of Sidney Bechet--the beautiful tone he evoked from his instrument, his impeccable phrasing, and his unfailing improvisations--is there in the recordings I have mentioned. But we can hear him now in the Complete Blue Note Recordings of Sidney Bechet (Mosaic Records, 197 Strawberry Hill Avenue, Stamford, Conn. 06902). The significance of these recordings is that Blue Note rescued those it recorded from the Procrustean bed of the three-minute 78 rpm and allowed them to spread out on 12-inch discs, which almost gave them a chance to duplicate what they played on 52nd Street, in Greenwich Village, and in Harlem. And here you have Bechet at the height of his powers, in the 1940s, surrounded by musicians out of the top drawer of the time's jazz--delivering some of the best small-band jazz you could hear.

Those small bands, for the mostpart playing "head' arrangements-- that is, ad hoc arrangements never set down on paper--were held together by a kind of musical empathy, and this required that the men understood each other and the tradition from which they sprang, the values common to all of them. It can be said that, on these recordings of jazz and blues themes as well as pop, there is not one brash note to offend Bechet's quiet and soulful lyricism or his New Orleans cante jondo. The roster tells you why: men like Frankie Newton (trumpet), Art Hodes (piano), Max Kaminsky (trumpet), Pops Foster (bass), and that superlative drummer "Big Sid' Catlett. This is jazz comme il faut and jazz to give you the amens.

But I rejoice a little more fortwo other Mosaic sets of reissues-- The Complete Edmond Hall/James P. Johnson/Sidney De Paris/Vic Dickenson Blue Note Sessions and The Complete Recordings of the Port of Harlem Jazzmen (also from Blue Note). For here we have jazzmen of genius or superlative talent who recorded relatively little--and that little seldom reissued. Most of those featured are muscians' musicians and jazzmen's jazzmen: James P. Johnson, who helped fashion "stride' piano from the rags and the blues, and who taught Fats Waller; Edmond Hall, one of the greatest of all clarinetists; the now-forgotten De Paris brothers; Frankie Newton, who played, mute or open-horn, with purity and contained intensity--and the music is what we heard night after night in brownstone boites or on the records we could afford in the early 1940s. In these albums are the great cadenzas, the solos that built on solos, and the grace that was lacking from the big, successful swing bands.

What these three collections bringtogether is the very best that was being played in the late 1930s and the 1940s by black and white jazzmen --a combination of New Orleans and Chicago style, with an overlay of the harder Harlem sophistication. At the time these records were being cut, Milt Gabler was issuing his equally great Commodore sides, but for the most part this was crisper jazz at a slightly greater remove from the richer New Orleans strain.

IN OUR college days, we took "survey'courses in literature--usually starting with Homer and ending with the nineteenth century. There have been "survey' collections of jazz, usually called histories, and among the best of these was the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. Now this collection has been reissued in an extensively revised form. The new edition is far superior to the old--seven LPs that run the gamut from the piano regtime of Scott Joplin up to the Sixties. With them comes a 120-page paperback book sketching the history of the recordings and the men who made them, and analyzing the music itself. For advanced jazz collectors, the Smithsonian Collection will duplicate much of what they already have on their shelves--the great Armstrongs, Bechets, Coleman Hawkinses, Art Tatums, Count Basies, Ellingtons, etc., etc. And they will wonder why, in what purports to be devoted to "classic' jazz, so much vinyl is expended on musicians who have already begun to be removed from the pantheon of jazz.

But for those who are moving intoan understanding and appreciation of jazz, the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz will be a delight--and invaluable. The annotations of Martin Williams are sound--and, unlike much writing about jazz, really explain what the musicians are about. I get letters from readers asking me to prepare a discography of the best available jazz, which would take me months of work. I can now recommend the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz as a base on which to build. (Smithsonian Recordings, 111 Tenth Street, Des Moines, Iowa 50336.)