Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Bass Ale Blues, connecting the Original Memphis Five with Malcom Lowry without a single mention of Bass Ale.



Don't ask me how I manage to pick "next" when it comes to books, just know that it will be a book -- bound, tactile and absurdly old-fashioned.

Appropriately, at the present time I'm reading Dick Sudhalter's Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, a mildly controversial volume published in 1999, in which the author charts the influence of white musicians on the development of jazz.

Given that I've usually advanced the argument that black musicians have been the prime movers of jazz, Sudhalter's book is a scholarly and well-reasoned supplement to ancient history. I'm less interested in a final verdict than with his stories of players and aggregations long forgotten, among them the Original Memphis Five.

Somewhat incredibly for jazz, a genre long specializing in archival LP and CD collections spanning the gamut of styles and performers, only a small number of this group's 300-plus sides have been reissued. Many are feared lost.

Of course, some tracks by the Original Memphis Five (including various pseudonyms) are readily available, including "Bass Ale Blues." It's the first I've heard of this song, which was written by Frank Signorelli (apparently there are no lyrics), and it strikes me as beyond strange that a jazz musician would refer to an imported English beer during the peak of Prohibition.

It gets even weirder. Stuck in the middle of an unfruitful bout of Googling, I was guided here:

Malcolm Lowry @ the 19th Hole

It's a blog started in 2009 to celebrate the centenary of Malcolm Lowry's birth.

And who was he?

Lowry wrote the classic novel Under the Volcano, perhaps a "modernist masterpiece," and a work I adored during my dissipated mid-1980s years. Lowry tells the story of the doomed alcoholic Englishman Geoffrey Firmin's downward spiral in Mexico, set against the spectacle of the annual Day of the Dead.

Finally, who would have known that the Original Memphis Five was one of Malcolm Lowry's favorite jazz combos?

As a later singer (and cultural commentator) observed:

Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down
They're going to destroy
Our casual joys
We shall go on playing
Or find a new town

Blues de la Cerveza?

__

4 comments:

Joseph Scott said...

"black musicians have been the prime movers of jazz" Sudhalter's position also (for anyone who might read this and not know that).

bluesserenader said...

Quote:

"Somewhat incredibly for jazz, a genre long specializing in archival LP and CD collections spanning the gamut of styles and performers, only a small number of this group's 300-plus sides have been reissued. Many are feared lost."

Unquote.

Comment: Rubbish. None of the OM5's original 78 rpm recordings are "lost", all of them are confirmed and held in collectors hands. Up till now, there have been issued five single CDs and two double CDs of the 1921 - 1926 recordings of the Original Memphis Five groups (including pseudonyms like Ladd's Black Aces and Cotton Pickers)- 212 different tracks, with no duplications between these nine CDs. Furthermore, in early 2019 there will appear a five-CD-box containing all 124 as yet unreissued OM5 tracks - making available the total recorded output of this seminal early jazz band (excluding alternative takes).

bluesserenader said...

Compared with Sudhalter's coverage of the OM5, Ralph Wondraschek's research piece presents a far more detailed and well-researched account on the career of the OM5. Three parts have already been published:

http://www.vjm.biz/178-om5-part-1-internet.pdf

http://www.vjm.biz/179-om5-part-2.pdf

http://www.vjm.biz/181-om5-part-3-internet.pdf

Part four will be published in February 2019.

The New Albanian said...

Thanks to Bluesserenader for the info and links.