BAY CITY STOMPERS: A Musical Tribute to Lu Watters. (Produced by George H. Buck for the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation BCD 280) 62.10 min.
Sage Hen Strut; Hesitating Blues; At the Jazz Band Ball; Got Dem Blues; Big Bear Stomp; Gut Bucket Blues; Pastime Rag #4; South; Richard M. Jones Blues; Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble; London Blues; Copenhagen; Antigua Blues; Canal Street Blues; St. Louis Blues; Muskrat Ramble; 1919 March; Friendless Blues.

Reviewed by Bill Mitchell

When the first Lu Watters records were issued in 1942 they occasioned much controversy in the jazz community. To some, they were corny and retrogressive, deserving no more than prompt dismissal. To others they were exciting and delightful, and if they gave more than a passing nod to jazz history, what was the big deal? Is new always better? So went the arguments. Now, 65 years later, the Watters amalgam of brassy San Francisco/New Orleans/ragtime is still going strong. A look at the lineup at the nation's jazz festivals will confirm that a good many of the featured bands are Watters-influenced in varying degrees. It was Watters and his cohorts that brought back tubas and banjos, revived the tunes of such pioneers as King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, etc., and contributed a few new stomps, blues, and rags of their own.

On October 23, 2004 a concert/dance party at the Townsend Center in San Francisco drew a lively crowd of 600 Lu Watters fans to enjoy a musical tribute to their idol. An all-star group of traditional musicians, The Bay City Stompers, enthusiastically emulated Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band of over half a century ago. It was fortunate that the event was well recorded and is now on CD for our enjoyment.

Spearheading the BCS is the powerful two-cornet team of Jim Cullum and Leon Oakley. William Carter on clarinet and Tom Bartlett on trombone complete the front line. The rhythm section features Marty Eggers, piano; Ray Cadd, tuba; Clint Baker, drums; and John Gill, banjo/onstage leader. These are all distinguished and experienced traditionalists whose credentials are detailed in the liner notes. Oakley, Carter, and Gill once worked for Turk Murphy, and Turk had worked for Lu Watters -- a lineage which is not to be sneezed at. Tom Bartlett, an alumnus of the Salty Dogs, sounds remarkably like Turk, both instrumentally and vocally. Eggers captures the brittle, raggy sound of Wally Rose.

As for the program, there are three Watters originals: two sassy barnburners ("Sage Hen Strut," "Big Bear Stomp") and the appealing "Antigua Blues." Watters typically included a piano rag in his sets, and the BCS follows this tradition by featuring Mary Eggers in one of the most unusual of the classic rags, the leisurely "Pastime Rag #4," an Artie Matthews composition which includes some unique note clusters. There are several trad jazz classics that were among Watters' favorites, and the program ends with his theme song, W.C. Handy's "Friendless Blues."

A "must have" for Lu Watters fans, this CD is available from the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation,, 41 Sutter Street, PMB 1870, San Francisco, CA 94104. You might want to join the foundation, whose quarterly newsletter contains articles and photos about the jazz scene in the Bay City area, past and present.

RAG NOUVEAU: Piano Compositions by Mick Kinney (Produced by Mick Kinney, 2007) 41:28 min.
Palindrome; Along the Gloaming; Sympathetic (Creole Waltz); Tendency; Mosaic; Habanera Jorge (Si Tu Supieras); Broken Keys; Minor Conundrum; The Healing Tonic; Sirius Nocturne.

Reviewed by Bill Mitchell

A native of Wisconsin, Mick Kinney has been based in Atlanta since 1977. He is a versatile musician: pianist, fiddler, banjoist, composer/lyricist, and accompanist. He has played stride piano in New York and Cajun accordion music in Los Angeles. His first rag was written at age 16, after hearing that Eubie Blake had written his first one at that age.

That Kinney became conversant with many styles of music is evident in his latest CD, an olio of original compositions that derive to some extent from ragtime. Other influences include Gottschalk, Nazareth, and Jelly Roll Morton ("Spanish tinge" in particular). In the words of David Marcus, a professor of music theory at Clark Atlanta University, "I find his [Kinney's] original piano rags a particular delight. They are graceful, nostalgic, slightly off-kilter, and expansive...In the music's false stops and sudden starts, elegant harmonies and gentle syncopations, there is much pleasure, from small guffaws to belly laughs." The professor's words encapsulate the nature of Kinney's offerings.

Classic ragtime is neatly structured, usually with four melodic sections patterned as AABBACCDD. There is usually a change of key in the trio. "Slow march tempo" is often indicated. [italic]Rag Nouveau[end italic] ignores these conventions, but borrows generously from ragtime's syncopation. From there, anything goes -- it's like playing tennis with the net down, to borrow Robert Frost's comment on free verse. Kinney's titles are whimsical, and the music is certainly not lacking in whimsy either. Think of a hodgepodge of Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud, or of a Picasso painting, or the prose of Gertrude Stein or James Joyce. Nouveau indeed!

A palindrome, as puzzle fanciers know, is a sentence, or even just a word, that reads the same forward or backward. Kenney's "Palindrome" may or may not sound the same forward or backward, but what I hear is a patchwork of syncopated ramblings with modulations and tempo fluctuations. "Along the Gloaming" is, at six minutes, the longest of the compositions. It involves mood changes from friskiness to introspective romantic musings, with a touch of the Spanish tinge. It is rather restless and meandering. "Sympathetic (Creole Waltz)" is graceful and lilting. "Tendency," with its twists and turns, doesn't live up to its name--it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. "Mosaic," on the other hand, does seem aptly titled, as snippets of this and that are assembled into surface decoration. "Broken Keys" is raggy and more structured than the other pieces. It comes across as a tongue-in-cheek satire on classic ragtime.

Rag Nouveau is, I'll grant, interesting and well performed, but hardly endearing or memorable. Frankly, I found it somewhat disconcerting. Others, more musically sophisticated than I, may well find it exciting and amusing. One thing for sure: it is not easy listening. If you are an avant-gardist, go for it.

For information on ordering, write to Reluctant Records, P.O. Box 1993, Decatur, GA 30031, or contact the artist at www.MickKinney.com

January 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.