Continued: CD Reviews

And the sound stands up pretty well, all things considered. The judgment that hotter bands like Jean Goldkette's wonderful breeder band for upcoming jazzers and the ever-reliable McKinney's Cotton Pickers well outshown Whiteman is quite right. But it is also true that Whiteman was a clever and skilled manipulator of pop music, dance trends and the ever-fickle public. His records sold steadily for Victor, and his road trips and concerts sold out. He hired top-flight musicians and leaned heavily on capable arrangers (many here are by his first composing partner, Ferde Grofe), and the basic formula worked. Listen to a standard like "Wang-Wang Blues," with its self-conscious echoes of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, or "San," with its novel overhaul of the ever-popular oriental foxtrot to grasp Whiteman's shrewd ability to simplify and sell trendy stuff.

Some numbers sound outdated and too given to doo-wacka-doo nonsense, but standards his band established like "I'm Coming Virginia," "Side By Side" or "Magnolia" are still durable and listenable, often because of Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys, who set the standards for pop band vocals and quietly hip singing, long before figures like Frank Sinatra and other purveyors of cool. Whiteman's solo instrumentalists are always interesting, even when stuck in a quaint framework, and the later work of genuinely gifted arrangers like Matty Malneck and Bill Challis led to all the memorable hits with Bix and Tram, Bill Rank, Doc Ryker, Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti and others who possessed more than trace amounts of jazz talent. Even the earnestly old-fashioned Henry "Hot Lips" Busse, with his ooga-horn mutes, sounds effective on those early sides.

In all, the CD is a pleasant reminder that Paul Whiteman has been thoroughly under-estimated and ridiculed as a jazz influence for far too long. We laugh now at the grandiose "King of Jazz" title, but he was at least a grand master of hot dance music at a time when the wider pop music audience needed training wheels to move on to the real hot jazz.

Available from www.timelessjazz.com

ALTON BLUES: BARRELHOUSE BUCK McFARLAND (Delmark 788)
Four O'Clock Blues; Alton Blues; Lamp Post Blues; Charlie's Stomp; Railroad Blues; Dupree Blues; I Got to Go Blues; Barrelhouse Buck; Mercy Mercy Blues; Don't Stop Now; Buck's Blues; Talk; Goodbye Blues.

Reviewed by William J. Schafer

This CD retrieves the last recordings of an Alton, Ill., blues pianist from the 1920s, rediscovered and put on tape in the early 1960s. Barrelhouse Buck had recorded under his name for Paramount in 1929 and 1934-35. He worked with blues legends such as Ike Rogers and Peetie Wheatstraw and was rediscovered by record producer Robert Koester and fan Charles O'Brien. He was then 58 years old, and when he finished these recordings he had only eight months to live.

In many ways, McFarland was a typical roughneck blues pianist playing what was variously known as "barrelhouse," "boogie woogie," "stomp style," etc. Small labels like Paramount, Gennett, Vocalion and others found and recorded these blues ticklers wherever they could.  Much of their music was lost amongst the tidal wave of jazz, country and blues materials churned out in the 1920s, while some were rediscovered and popularized in the 1930s with the big boogie woogie craze.

McFarland fits in with players such as Montana Taylor or Cripple Clarence Lofton, Rufus "Speckled Red" Perryman from St. Louis or Pinetop Smith (whose "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" recording effectively launched the craze). He was not as skilled, lyrical or polished as the monumental Jimmy Yancey or the very popular Leroy Carr.

On these late recordings, McFarland runs through a gamut of styles and patterns, using a wide variety of left-hand figurations. His singing is as rough and ready as his keyboard work and shows some reflection of Peetie Wheatstraw's energetic and emotionally wrought style. He varies the tempos and the complexity of his tunes, with some blues very slow and sparse and the uptempo stomp numbers fairly intricate in both hands.

This very basic, ground-level blues of the sort that Jelly Roll Morton remembered in "Mamie's Blues" and in a number like "Dupree's Blues," which is very short, almost a fragment, McFarland can capture some of the poignancy or pathos of this kind of sad blues. Most of the rest of his pieces are too exuberant and extroverted, more angry than tragic. Most are conventionalized "floating refrains" or traditional lyrics, delivered with a lot of gusto and not much refinement.

This kind of blues piano proliferated in rural work camps -- juke joints -- and in cities all over the country, with tribes of bluesmen from Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and other commerce and entertainment centers. The players were self-taught, self-confident and itinerant. They developed personal eccentricities that turned into unique styles. They transmitted their music as they traveled, begged, borrowed and stole everything they needed to make up a repertory to fill an evening in a barroom.

McFarland's kind of blues are those played in the juke joints, barrelhouses, blind pigs, the low-downest of locations for a raucous audience intent on a good time and a cheap ticket to oblivion. He may have been one of the last of the old-timers who first recorded this music, even though he was shy of 60 years when he died. What is certain is that there won't be more like Barrelhouse Buck.

Available online from www.delmark.com or call 1-800-684-3480.

September 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

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