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Tom-tom workouts
Louis Jordan on DVD and Baby Dodds alone at the drums
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

A professor shakes his head disapprovingly as Louis Jordan and band — performing, for some reason, in a college classroom — launch into a song. That’s a typically abrupt set-up on Films and Soundies (Idem Home Video/MVD, in their Swing Era series), which compiles ‘40s film appearances by singer/saxophonist Jordan and His Tympany Band (more often known as "Tympany Five"). The tune’s lyrics — "There was a time when jazz was in line/But today, you gotta have the beat" — are telling. Wildly popular from the end of WW2 into the early ‘50s, Jordan’s urbane, stripped-down swing was a formative influence on modern rhythm and blues, and hence on rock and roll. "Five Guys Named Moe" and "Jumpin’ at the Jubilee" played down the structural elaborations of the big bands, and the harmonic sophistication of bebop, in favor of brevity, humor, and firm, danceable rhythm.

In many ways, this collection is a less than ideal introduction to Jordan’s music. Personnel and songwriting credits are entirely absent. Some songs you’d expect to find were never filmed or else not included; "Is You Is," for instance, ain’t. The video quality varies, with a few selections badly overexposed; worse, there are audible gaps in "Texas and Pacific" and "G.I. Jive" — not the kind of jumps that gave "jump blues" its name.

Of the 35 performances, 25 are from three feature films, each named for a current hit, that Jordan starred in between 1946 and 1948 (he died in 1975). Here, dialogue scenes have been cut, leaving only the band numbers. From what one can make of the plots, we aren’t missing much. Beware! is the one with the college setting; this being a musical, that square professor is nodding to the beat by the end. Reet, Petite, and Gone! is a backstager in which Jordan addresses "Wham Sam (Dig Them Gams)" to lounging showgirls. Look Out Sister! is the strangest, with "Two Gun Jordan and His Jiving Cowhands," in full Western regalia, jiving up "Turkey in the Straw" at an all-black dude ranch.

"Beware!" is a highlight, with the Five raucously interrupting Jordan’s advice to bachelors: "If you turn out the light/And she doesn’t put up a fight . . . look out, brother, look out!" But the band look miserable on the nursery-rhyme-styled "The Green Grass Grows All Around"; you can guess they had to learn it for the film. Ten "soundies" — single-song shorts that presaged music video, complete with more leggy eye candy — that fill out the program are more consistent, and better-sounding, including excellent takes of "Down, Down, Down," and "Caledonia." Despite the disc’s flaws, fans of Jordan’s recorded work will want to see him in action using the slightest material as an excuse to swing.

New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds needed even less of an excuse — in fact, he didn’t need a band. His 1946 one-man session Talking and Drum Solos (Atavistic) was the brainchild of jazz historian Frederic Ramsey. In the ‘20s, Dodds had worked with Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong; years later, Ramsey recorded him alone discussing and demonstrating an already vanishing style of jazz drumming, with the influence of parade music still audible. On this CD reissue, the original Folkways 10-inch is paired with another Ramsey project, field recordings of the last surviving rural brass bands. (Ramsey believed this to be African-American vernacular music that combined with Creole influences at the birth of jazz.)

Talking and Drum Solos isn’t, of course, the ideal party record, but it’s enjoyable taken on its own terms. (The brass bands are a tougher listen.) The "talking" tracks are just that, with Dodds commenting on the stylistic preferences of Oliver and Armstrong and complaining that younger players can’t do a proper press roll before showing off his own technique. The drum solos are where the action is. "Tom Tom Workout" is a perfectly timed alternation of resonant and deadened timbres. "Maryland" is showier, combining expected touches — busy woodblocks, four-to-the-measure bass — with the jittery, almost avant-garde "nerve beat" of two sticks shaken in one hand.

Even today, Dodds isn’t a forgotten figure; he’s a hero of, among others, Dutch improv giant Han Bennink. And in the late 1940s, though Ramsey recorded him as an act of conservation, his influence was widely felt. On the clip of "Jumpin’ at the Jubilee" that ends Films and Soundies, Jordan’s uncredited drummer takes what seems an unusually long solo for its time (at least for a recording). Whether he knew it or not, much of what he plays sounds like a post-war hipster’s translation of "Tom Tom Workout."


Issue Date: October 1 - 7, 2004
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