Customer Reviews

Louisville Stomp

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Don't let the amateurish look of the packaging discourage you--this is one great CD! It collects all the extant issued recordings and alternates by the Dixieland Jug Blowers--a studio group that recorded for Victor on a couple sessions in 1926 and 1927. This is hot jazz mixed with old-time country music. As the name of the group suggests, the star attraction here is the empty gallon stone jug played to perfection by jug virtuoso Henry Clifford. Despite its wheezy fart-like sounds, it's actually a difficult instrument to master, and Clifford really goes to town with it (working in a few short solo breaks here and there to great effect!). Jazz fans will be interested to know that clarinestist Johnny Dodds is featured on tracks 8-13. The sound quality is fantastic--all tracks were transferred and restored by legendary engineer John R. T. Davies. These tracks have never sounded better! A few label scans, photos, or additional notes (there are onyl three panels' worth) would have been appreciated, but this is not a major flaw. The music's the thing here, and it's just great. Forget "high-brow" music for the moment--this is about as "low-brow" as it gets, but it will have you smiling and tapping your foot, and that's what's important. This isn't one of those discs I put on and listen to from start to end, but I pull it out from time to time and get a real thrill from five or six cuts before putting it away again. Fun stuff! Recommended!

The best-known track in this compilation is "Boodle-Am-Shake", which was issued in England on HMV 78, as was "Carpet Alley" and Hen Party Blues". If you've heard any of those titles you'll know what to expect; an earthy music-making, in which the leader's violin floats above a trio of banjos, the whole underpinned by the resonant sound of a bass melody being blown across the mouth of a large jug.

Despite the Louisville tag, these sides were all cut in Chicago in late 1926 and mid-1927, which had the advantage that the basic line-up was augmented for the subsequent sessions, the most noteworthy addition being that of Johnny Dodds on the second session. Elizabeth Washington provides a country blues style vocal on four of the mid-1927 tracks, and Prince la Vaughan does the same on the final two titles.

This compilation gathers together not only all the five issued alternate takes, but also an unissued test. For a collector of these distinctive sides this has to be the reissue of choice.

This band and others largely led by fiddler Clifford Hayes were what launched a national craze for jug band music in the late 1920s which, in turn, led to the recording of other bands, most notably the Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. Sales and popularity for these recordings outstripped the local and African American markets they were originally recorded for. We are lucky that this came in the late 1920s just before the great Depression killed off race record recordings until the mid and late 1930s.

For those expecting countryish, rudamentary blues mixed with string band music, this is Jazz which a small admixture of hokum thrown in. One does not expect the five string banjo of Gus Cannon to come in here, or the funky singing that the Memphis Jug Band excelled at. Instead, I am always expecting Louis Armstrong, the early Coleman Hawkins, or other soloists that I adore from 1920s Black Jazz to be taking the next solo.

While the jug is here, the other instruments are mainly those of the jazz bands of the time: pianos, full drum kit, tenor banjo, clarients, saxes, and trumpets. Clifford Hayes' great jazz-blues fiddle luckily graces every side. A treat because it is relatively rare on Jazz recordings of this time is the great jazz guitar on a number of cuts, providing great single note lead that is again hard to find but great to listen to in a recording from these years.

This is a joy to listen to, a joy to listen to.