As its title suggests, “Snake Rag” is a rag, following the march/ragtime struc-ture of several disparate strains. (Note: Oliver recorded this piece twice, for Gennett in April 1923 and for OKeh Records two months later; we have chosen the more accomplished OKeh performance.) Th is sly piece, disrupted by an unusual series of two-part bluesy breaks, takes its name from Oliver’s slang for complicated chromatic lines: he called them “snakes,” and the snake here is the descending scale played, unaccompanied, by the dual cornets of Oliver and Armstrong at the end of the A and B strains. Th e last strain, or trio, is twice as long: thirty-two bars instead of sixteen. Th e fact that it is played three times in succession contributes to the buildup in excitement and tension. Yet notice how steady the underlying pulse remains.
During the trio, Oliver and Armstrong play quite diff erent two-bar breaks, accompanied by the trombone. Th ese breaks preserve an aspect of the band’s presentation at Lincoln Gardens that had become a signature routine, and a mystery to musicians in the audience. Th ey couldn’t fi gure out how the two
chromatic moving by half step
Gennett recordings
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KING OLIVER ■ 103
LISTENING GUIDE
KING OLIVER’S CREOLE JAZZ BAND
King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, trumpets or cornets;
Honore Dutrey, trombone; Johnny Dodds, clarinet; Lil Hardin, piano; Bud Scott, banjo; Baby Dodds, drums
■ Label: OKeh 4933; Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings (Archeophone ARCH OTR-MM6-C2 )
■ Date: 1923
■ Style: New Orleans jazz
■ Form: march/ragtime
What to listen for:
■ march/ragtime form
■ dramatic changes in texture from polyphony to monophony (breaks)
■ breaks in A and B strains: descending chro-matic line, trombone glissando
■ modulation to a new key at the trio
■ variety of breaks for the two cornets
snake rag
cornetists managed to harmonize perfectly on apparently ad-libbed passages.
Armstrong later explained that seconds before each break, Oliver would mime the fi ngering of the upcoming part on his cornet, which cued him as to which break they would play. Th e two examples on this recording are exceptionally bluesy, and we can imagine the audience cheering them on.
INTRODUCTION (STRAIN A, abbreviated)
0:00 The band beings polyphonically, in collective improvisation. Dodds on clarinet drops from a high note to play swirling patterns while Dutrey sticks to a slow, unsyncopated line on the trombone. The two cornets (Armstrong and Oliver) improvise on the main melody.
0:05 Break: the cornets play a “snake”—a steady descending line in harmony.
0:07 Using his slide, the trombone answers with simple, comic glissandos, followed by a pair of chords from the band.
STRAIN A
0:09 The fi rst strain begins on the I chord. Oliver plays the lead cornet, with Arm-strong barely audible behind him.
0:22 The band repeats the snake.
STRAIN B
0:26 The second strain begins on a different harmony (V).
0:33 In a two-bar break, Dutrey plays three upward trombone glissandos, the last accented by a cymbal crash.
0:40 The band repeats the snake.
STRAIN B
0:46 Strain B is repeated, with slight variation.
0:59 Snake.
STRAIN A
1:03 Strain A is repeated, with more variation.
1:17 Snake.
1.15
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104 ■ CHAPTER 4 NEW ORLEANS
Last Years
As infl uential as his music proved to be—as we will see, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Duke Ellington all borrowed from him—Oliver en-joyed only a brief time in the sun. As his gums continued to worsen, he tried to modernize the New Orleans sound with larger ensembles, such as the ten-piece Dixie Syncopators (which included three saxophones), but the arrange-ments failed to fi nd a place in the market. Increasingly, he had to delegate the trumpet solos to younger musicians. By 1935, he couldn’t play at all; plagued by illness and bad business decisions, he settled in Savannah, Georgia, where he worked as a pool-room janitor and ran a fruit stand. He was broke but not broken when Armstrong ran in to him, in 1938:
He was standing there in his shirtsleeves. No tears. Just glad to see us. Just another day. He had that spirit. I gave him about $150 I had in my pocket, and Luis Russell and Red Allen, Pops Foster, Albert Nicholas, Paul Barbarin—they all used to be his boys—they gave him what they had. And that night we played a dance, and we look over and there’s Joe standing in the wings. He was sharp like the old Joe Oliver of 1915. . . . And pretty soon he died—most people said it was a heart attack. I think it was a broken heart.
■ SIDNEY BECHET (1897–1959)
It can be argued that Sidney Bechet, who played both clarinet and soprano saxophone, was the fi rst great soloist in jazz history. During the early years of jazz, when the saxophone was on the margins of this music, playing sweet
STRAIN C (TRIO)
1:21 With no transition, the tune suddenly modulates to a new key. This strain (trio) lasts twice as long as the previous two. Dutrey plays a trombone line with a distinctive rhyth-mic profi le.
1:37 Dodds fi lls a break with a descending clarinet line.
STRAIN C
1:58 Strain C is repeated, with considerable variation.
2:13 During a break, Oliver and Armstrong play a bluesy and complex riff.
2:32 Break: St. Cyr sings out in full voice, “Oh, sweet mama!”
STRAIN C
2:34 On this third appearance of strain C, the collective improvisation becomes freer and more intense.
2:50 For the fi nal break, the cornets play a new passage, ending with a lengthy blue note.
CODA
3:10 The band tacks on an additional two measures before the cymbal fi nally cuts them off.
& bbbb 44 ..œœ
Cornetsb jœœ œœn œœb œœ œœ œœn ..œœb jœœ
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SIDNEY BECHET ■ 105
sounds in a dance orchestra or virtuoso novelties on vaudeville bills, Bechet turned the instrument into one of its leading voices. He was a moody, im-passioned man whose tendency toward violence occasionally landed him in jail; but his emotions were imparted to the very sound of his instrument. He was one of the music’s fi rst global stars: he spent a good deal of the Jazz Age overseas, and was one of the fi rst Americans to perform in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
Bechet was born in New Orleans to a musical Creole family. Although primarily self-taught on the clarinet, he was also instructed by a few re-nowned Creole teachers, including George Baquet, who heard him playing on a street corner and took him under his wing. As a young man, Bechet played in every important marching band in the city, occasionally doubling on cornet. In 1916, he left to travel with touring bands; one took him up to Chicago, where, three years later, he attracted the attention of Will Marion Cook (1869–1944). A classically trained violinist and conductor (and protégé of composer Antonin Dvorˇák), Cook made his name as a songwriter and composer. In later years, he organized the fi rst concerts in New York devoted exclusively to black composers, including jazz musicians. When they met, Cook was about to take his Southern Syncopated Orchestra to London, and he recruited Bechet—a momentous decision on two counts.
In London, Bechet purchased a straight (no bell curve) soprano saxophone, the instrument with which he ultimately made his mark. He also played clari-net in several prestigious halls with Cook’s orchestra (they played for King George V), inspiring the fi rst serious essay written about jazz. Th e writer was a famous conductor, Ernest Ansermet, and his lengthy review singled out “an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the fi rst of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet.” He concluded:
I wish to set down the name of this artist; as for myself, I shall never forget it—it is Sidney Bechet. When one has tried so often to rediscover in the past one of those fi gures to whom we owe the advent of our art,—those men of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, who made expressive works of dance airs, clearing the way for Haydn and Mozart who mark, not the starting point, but the fi rst milestone—what a moving thing it is to meet this very black, fat boy with white teeth and that narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art, save that he follows his “own way,” and when one thinks that his “own way” is perhaps the highway the whole world will travel tomorrow.
Bechet’s fellow musicians were also in awe of him. At one performance, Cook’s wife, Abby Mitchell, sang an aria from Puccini’s Madame Butterfl y, and Bechet, without warning (and drawing on his own Creole love for opera), left his seat, walked over to her, and improvised an accompaniment. He ex-pected to be rebuked or fi red, but after she fi nished, Mitchell embraced him with tears in her eyes and said, “Ah, Sidney, only you could have done it like that.”
By the time Cook left England, Europe had taken American Negro music to its heart, an aff ection that would continue throughout the twentieth cen-tury. Bechet liked the way he was treated there and, with a contingent of musi-cians from the Southern Syncopated, decided to stay. He played in both Paris and London, clearing the way for an invasion of black entertainers, but his involvement in a violent argument in London ended with his deportation.
Will Marion Cook and London
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106 ■ CHAPTER 4 NEW ORLEANS