Small Band Jazz

The golden heart of jazz is small group improvised blues music. Folk want to be free to do their own thing in social settings where coherence and pleasure can emerge only with small manageable numbers and simple musical structures.
The original New Orleans music was based on three front line horns and the blues.
Mayo Williams gave Decca the 'Harlem Hamfats', the first 'Jump Band' in 1936. Then Louis Jordan in 1938. And 'Rock 'n' Roll was on its way!
In Chicago and then New York - 
Red Nichols
The Jam sessions and small group improvised jazz was alive all through the Big Band Swing era ... 
Bob Crosby and The Bob Cats
Artie Shaw and his Gramercy Five
Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy
Benny Goodman and his Trio, Quartet and Sextet
Billie Holiday and Lester Young
Colemen Hawkins and 'Body and Soul'
A new name was coined for small group jazz after the demise of the big bands 'Mainstream'
In France Django Reinhardt exploits the freedom of jazz as an antidote to the tyranny of the Vichy Regime.
Louis Jordan (1908 - )
Father Jordan was his inspiration, a cornet/trombone player in Brass Bands and in minstrelsy. Louis started on the clarinet.
In New York Louis Jordan was playing small group jazz which was clean, fun and good for dancing ... folk loved it. The start of 'Rhythm and Blues' ... the competition at Birdland was music for musicians ... the Beboppers were playing for themselves, for 'horse' and for listening not dancing ...
Ray Charles was merging blues, jazz and Gospel into the excitement of 'Soul' ...
Saxophonist Louis Jordan leaves Chick Webb's sax section to form his Tympany Five. This might well mark the beginnings of what we know as Rock and Roll. 'Somebody Done Hoodooed the Hoodoo Man' and 'Bounce The Ball (Do Da Ditle Um Day)'
Jump bands begin to form. These are small, Swing oriented bands featuring off colour lyrics and commercial arrangements. Louis Jordan has the most famous Jump band. These bands will evolve into Rock and Roll bands, possibly in response to the later Bop revolution.
Small swing bands innovate
1936 Basie's 1936 record 'Lady be Good' featured a very cool, behind the beat, sax by Lester Young in an era of very hot solos. Lester's sweet and light sound
Basie's small band the K.C. Six records such songs as 'Dicky's Dream' and 'One O'Clock Jump'
Lester considers his solo on 'Shoe Shine Boy' his finest.
Jay McShann arrives in KC 
Billie Holiday Did I Remember?, No Regrets and Billies Blues.
Goody Goody- Benny Goodman
The Music Goes Round & Round- Tommy Dorsey
Django Reinhardt and the Hot Quintet make a recording of I Can't Give You Anything but Love.
Big Joe Turner ( - )
During the 1930s, Big Joe continued his dual role as a singing bartender at the 'Sunset Club', where Pete Johnson's band was featured.
In an interview, John Williams, former saxophonist for Andy Kirk, recalled how Joe would be 'chasin' and pourin', and he'd get high about 3 o'clock in the morning and start singing the blues. The Sunset had an outdoor PA system, but Big Joe didn't need any amplification when he stepped outside to call 'his children home' in his half-shouted blues style.
In 1936, with the help of John Hammond, Big Joe and Pete Johnson moved to New York, where their reception was less than enthusiastic. They came back to Kansas City briefly before returning to New York to participate in the Spirituals to Swing concert produced by Hammond. They recorded two selections--"Goin' Away Blues" and "Roll 'Em Pete" -- for the Vocalion label on December 24, 1936.
Beginning in 1939, Joe and Pete played an extended engagement at Cafe Society in New York. On November 11, 1940, Joe Turner and His Fly Cats (featuring Pete Johnson) recorded 'Piney Brown Blues' in tribute to the manager of the Sunset Club. Produced by Dave E. Dexter, Jr., for the Decca label, "Piney Brown Blues" was included in the first album of Kansas City jazz. 'Piney' was issued as a single and became a hit, selling 400,000 copies in 1941.
Big Joe added rock to the roll and became one of the fathers of rock'n'roll when he recorded 'Shake Rattle and Roll' for the Atlantic label in 1955.
Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy 'Until the Real Thing Comes Along'
'Jump Blues' genre emerged after WW 2. Popular OKOM performers in the genre were Louis Jordan and Louis Prima.
They were a precursor to Rock & Roll and us old farts remember well the power of jump blues, the DANCE MUSIC OF THE LATE 1940s THROUGH THE 50s. Dixieland was art music, played now for listening and so the kids danced to Jump Blues.
Who could forget the power and feeling of "Big Joe" Turner, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, T-Bone Walker, Louis Prima and B.B. King. It was a happening' thang. JUMP had it all - it was (and is) able to blend many different musical styles, colours & textures. It is a canvas upon which one is able to paint clear and pure, colour with tone. Many, were the times that the great artists from the orchestras of Count Basie and Duke Ellington would sit in on these small combo settings during recording sessions. Surely this was due to their love for the simplicity, purity and clarity of the Jump sound. One artist that was a part of that era is tenor sax player "Big Jay" McNeely.
It derived in part, from the Kansas City Sound of the late 30s, early 40s. Then, of course, in the 50s, ELVIS picked up on Jump Blues. It is what he sings on his first recordings. And Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys made it a country thang.
Louis Jordan was, like Louis Prima, a jazz musician who left trad jazz and/or swing for R&B and the world of entertainment. His first million seller was 'Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby' about 1944, or 45. Second one right after WW 2 was 'Caldonia, What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?. Then came his biggest seller, 'Choo Choo Ch Boogie'. My favourite is: 'I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts of Town'. IMO this blues is a classic. More below.
In the Forties, bandleader Louis Jordan pioneered a wild - and wildly popular - amalgam of jazz and blues with salty, jive-talking humour. The music played by singer/saxophonist Jordan and his Tympany Five got called "jump blues" or 'jumpin' jive', and it served as a precursor to the rhythm & blues and rock and roll of the Fifties. Jordan was born into a musical family - his father was the leader of the Arkansas-based Rabbit Foot Minstrels - and he majored in music at Arkansas Baptist College. After serving stints as an alto saxophonist with jazz bands led by Clarence Williams, Chick Webb and others, Jordan broke off in 1938 to form his own band, whose specialty was small-combo jump blues delivered with madcap wit to a danceable beat."
Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five launched 54 singles into the R&B charts in the Forties, including 18 songs that went to #1. During the period 1943-1950, Jordan held down the top slot for a total of 113 weeks - more than 25% of the time! For good reason he was dubbed 'King of the Juke Boxes'. Jordan's best-loved songs include 'Choo Choo Ch'Boogie' (#1, 18 weeks), 'Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens' (#1, 17 weeks) and 'Saturday Night Fish Fry' (#1, 12 weeks). His songs' appeal stemmed from their lively evocation of good times and the swinging sounds of Jordan's band, from hot jazz to shuffling boogie blues. Jordan not only supplied a good deal of the slang of early rock and roll but also directly influenced the freewheeling spirit of its progenitors, including Bill Haley and Chuck Berry. The latter paid tribute to Jordan with this simple declaration: 'I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist.'
All of us kids, musicians and hipsters back in the late 40s, early 50s loved this music, the way it was presented and the sexy dancing that went with it. At the end of WW 2, how could one not like it? Wine, women & song were back again after some hard times in the depression, and then the World War. 
Prima and Jordan were no fools. They swung like crazy and produced some really great dance music and entertained their audiences. No wonder the kids left Dixieland for R & B and then R & R.
Yes, the 'jump' shuffle beat patented by Jordan was a great lift and a great gift. What R&B added via Earl Palmer and others was a heavy backbeat to intensify the pulse. Too bad it became an automatic pile-driving effect, like someone shooting a pistol on 2 & 4.
I felt that Prima's shuffles had more of a manic energy whereas Jordan's was relaxed and well suited to the hip humor and bluesy feeling he generated. Two of my favourites were the classic "Let the Good Times Roll," plus a calypso number called "Run, Joe" and the pre-rap rap "Beware," with advice to guys about how to psych out feminist wiles.
Re 'Caldonia', one of the great stunts in jazz was Woody Herman's record of it, after Jordan's hit but not a 'cover' of it. It's a superfast tempo with Woody singing in his own humorous way while the band cooks like mad behind Don Lamond's totally hot drums. Not to missed, and once heard, not to be forgotten.
'Jump Blues', a Chicago outfit in the mid-1930's - Harlem Hamfats - were playing, and some say originated, jump blues. There was also a long tradition of small Chicago piano, guitar, drum sessions by Big Bill Broonzy, Little Brother Montgomery, Big Maceo and Washboard Sam that performed some up-tempo blues as part of their repertoire. Memphis Minnie and the jug bands from the Memphis area certainly were precursors of jump blues as well. Then there's Sammy Price from Texas, Slim Gaillard w Slam Stewart, the Spirits of Rhythm and, yes Wingy Manone in the late 1930's.
Cab Calloway was mining the "jive" vein of swing throughout the thirties and gave us such jump/rock precursors as 'Straighten Up And Fly Right' and 'Jumpin' Jive'. Not a small group setting, for sure, but certainly spiritually related to all that came later.
People who remember Nat Cole primarily for silky smooth love ballads may be surprised to learn that he came to the world first as a highly influential pianist and that many of his earliest recordings were distinctly in the jump vein. Check out his work with Eddie Cole (his brother) and his Solid Senders and with the early King Cole trio. These were the direct inspiration for Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, Charles Brown, and eventually Ray Charles, whose recordings showed a heavy Cole influence before he tumbled on the soul approach that made him a legend.
Hit That Jive, Jack!

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