Jazz in the thirties.

IF SOMEONE ever writes an adequate history of jazz, he will cast a light on that dark age for white musicians, the early Depression years. Turning on his radio then the hardy householder would hear the heigh-ho-everybody of Rudy Vallee, or Wayne King's saccharine waltzes, or Russ Columbo's androgynous croonings. To hear jazz, the embattled citizenry had to journey to Harlem's dance halls and nightclubs, their counterparts in Chicago's North Side, or those other oases in Kansas City or uptown New Orleans. White musicians were left to gig for coffee and cakes or play among the off-key saxophones of Guy Lombardo. It was not much of a life.

But jazz is a magnificent obsession. After a stint with the commercial bands, white jazzmen could redistill their juices at after-hours jam sessions, drinking Prohibition rotgut and making music. Every now and then the recording companies would relent sufficiently to assemble a group of white jazzmen for a session. And there was always John Hammond, a crew-cut Yalie dropout with enough of the long green to devote himself to the perpetuation of jazz. Back in the Thirties, he would say to me, "Hey, Ralph, there's a great piano player at a beer garden out in Staten Island"--and I would be introduced to the likes of Art Hodes. Returning from a winter night's drive to the boondocks, John would kick off his shoes to let the cold metal of the accelerator pedal keep him awake in the wee hours.

But John Hammond did more than that. By sheer chutzpah he was able to push some of the English recording companies to do major jazz recording. And this led to a series of recording dates that DRG/Swing has now reissued as part of its "historic jazz" project. The musicians he assembled make up a Who's who of the best--Bunny Berrigan, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Eddie Lang, Jess Stacy . . . You know what instruments they played.

DRG/Swing's two-record album Jazz in the Thirties brings together some of those Hammond dates. I mention first a Benny Goodman pickup group featuring Jack Teagarden. Two of the sides they cut were "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues" and "Texas Tea Party"--the "Texas" honoring Big T and the "tea" honoring pot--with Teagarden singing the lyrics with fine irony and playing his beautifully rounded and blues-based trombone. Goodman's tone in those days was reedy, and his solos were down-to-the-boots jazz. And they had Jess Stacy, his slicked hair making him look like a turn-of-the-century bartender, giving out with some of the most solid piano this side of the Ninth Avenue that was. Stacy cut some sides of his own--two of Bix Beiderbecke's off-chord piano solos and his own rolling "Barrelhouse"--an event in pianistic jazz.

Gene Krupa, with the young and deeply talented Israel Crosby, recorded a memorable concerto for string bass, "Blues of Israel," as well as a "Jazz Me Blues," both of which show what a fine drummer he was before he began flashing the sticks. But the demonstration of genius, if I am not rushing the word, in Jazz in the Thirties is the sides cut by Bunny Berrigan. Bunny could play it clean or dirty, high register or low, lyric or gutbucket, and had he not fallen into the bottle and drowned therein, he would have achieved the recognition he merited as one of the great trumpets of all jazz. In this album, his "I'm Coming, Virginia"--building on Bix's solos--and his surging "Blues" tell it all.