Jazz Drumming Before Baby Dodds: 1910-1920

This is a playlist of popular music recorded in the United States between 1910 and 1923 that goes with Chapter 2 of the book I’m publishing on Substack.

I was searching for the beginning, the earliest recorded examples of jazz drumming— a self-directed drummer playing a steady beat with variations.

What I found is: ragtime, professionally-written songs, ragtime-inflected syncopated dance music, instrumental novelty numbers, and the earliest recorded jazz.

YouTube playlist is here, comments are below:

• Arthur Pryor’s Band, “Temptation Rag” (Henry Lodge), Victor, recorded July 1910. This seems to be Lodge’s most well-known tune; trombonist Arthur Pryor was a soloist in Sousa’s band. The orchestra attacks the lightly syncopated rhythms head-on; the phrasing sounds dated to us but surely sounded great in 1910. Couple nice cymbal crashes whet our appetite for more, but in 1910, the thing we love— a drumset drummer who keeps time without a score, conductor, or overseer— was rarer then hen’s teeth.

• Roy Spangler, “Red Onion Rag” (Abe Olman), recorded ca. 1912-1913. Pianist Roy Spangler’s only entry in the Lord Discography is a single session that yielded this rag. Like Pryor’s Band, Spangler is exciting but rushing. For the funky syncopations of ragtime to properly speak, a steady tempo is a must, and this was where drummers came in.

• James Reese Europe, “Too Much Mustard” (Cecil Macklin), Victor, recorded 1913. Is this ragtime, or a tango? Do you dance the one-step, two-step, or turkey trot to this? Even in 1913, no one was certain. Here’s a chance to hear Buddie Gilmore doing his best to keep the mandolins and violins of Europe’s Society Orchestra in something like rhythmic alignment.

• James Reese Europe, “Castle House Rag” (Europe), Victor, 1913. Gilmore is better featured here, and the orchestra almost relaxes in the second strain. Author Matt Brennan is convinced that Gilmore’s solo-like break at the end of the piece was improvised, which, if he means Gilmore is the author of the solo, I completely agree. If he means Gilmore made it up on the spot, I do not agree.

• Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, “Castle House Rag” (Europe), recorded 2014, New World Records. Though it’s obviously not the same arrangement as Europe’s original, I found this instructive, bringing clarity to Europe’s and Will Marion Cook’s musical vision.

• James Reese Europe, “Down Home Rag” (Wilbur Sweatman), Victor, 1913. Wilbur Sweatman was a clarinetist and vaudevillian; we’ll hear a record of his own later. Gilmore keeps the violins and mandolins mostly in time, but the hectic and unsettled feel tells us all we need to know: all of this— the music, the recording technology, the composition— was new.

• The Hedges Brothers and Jacobson, “San Francisco Bay”, Columbia, recorded ca. 1913. This spirited vocal trio— I think Elven Hedges is the pianist— has a much better beat than the instrumentalists. Clearly, the trio is singing in a Black style, but thankfully aren’t engaging in the ‘plantation dialogue’ so common on the vocal records in this period. No drumming but we can imagine some possibilities.

• Bert Williams, “You Can’t Get Away From It” (music, Jean Schwarz; lyrics William Jerome), Columbia, recorded 1913. “Great politicians all pal around with the rag musicians”— Bert Williams has announced a new reality. Williams became a national icon as Black minstrel, demonstrating to the industry that a mass audience was ready for Black musicians playing Black music. This, track, far more than James Reese Europe, has a jazz sensibility; Williams’s sliding asides of “no”— projecting his persona, becoming a character— seems to suggest the future.

• Fred Van Eps, “Raggin’ The Scale” (Van Eps), recorded ca. 1916, Victor. The banjo is a strictly African American instrument and a close associate of the drumset, but I haven’t been able to find a recording of African American banjoist in this period. Fred Van Eps, father of guitarist George Van Eps, has great melodic ideas but the 2 against 3 ragtime underpinning eludes him.

• Victor Military Band, “Blame It On The Blues” (Charles L. Cooke), Victor, recorded 1915. The Victor Military Band was a studio orchestra said to be filled with many principles from Sousa’s Band. When our percussionist clippity-clops on the woodblocks, we’ve finally arrived at something like the earliest recordings of jazz drumming. Once again, the band just barrels along, playing a popular blues-influenced tune as if it was “The Stars And Stripes Forever”, which we now know is incorrect. There was far to go.

• Lionel Belasco, “Bajan Girl” (Belasco), recorded 1915, Victor. Belasco was a Trinidadian composer, bandleader, and pianist, best-known for his song “Rum and Coca-Cola”, with lyrics by Lord Invader, a big hit for the Andrews Sisters and others. Here, in a NYC studio in 1915, Belasco plays the best beat we’ve heard yet. The syncopations are easy, the tempo is steady: we’re getting there.

• Joan Sawyer’s Persian Garden Orchestra, “When You’re A Long, Long Way From Home” (George Meyer and Sam Lewis), recorded 1915 Columbia. Joan Sawyer was a ragtime dancer along the lines of Vernon and Irene Castle who lent her name to a NYC restaurant/nightclub, the Persian Gardens. The club’s orchestra was led by Dan Kildare, a Black violinist. Our drummer takes far more liberty than anything we’ve yet heard: snare drum filigree, woodblock commentary, a tomtom, crash cymbal, and slide whistle. No drumset, no continuous timekeeping, but much increase in fluidity, and the accented buzz roll in the refrain is awfully close to what we’re looking for.

• Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Livery Stable Blues”, Victor, 1917. This is the very beginning of jazz as a recorded music, and an authentic hit from nearly 110 years ago. As usual, the hit record depends on the drummer: Tony Sbarbaro colors the arrangement, makes the transitions, and keeps the rhythmically wandering clarinet and trumpet from getting too far gone.

• Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Tiger Rag” (traditional), Victor, 1917. Listen close for Sbarbaro’s bass drum and notice his tasteful restraint, something the rest of the band eschews. While the ODJB is easy to criticize from a musical or racial standpoint, repeated listens convince me that there was nothing like this in 1917.

• Earl Fuller’s Famous Jazz Band: “Slippery Hank” (Franklin Hoyt Losey), Victor 1917. After the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s commercial success, many groups tried to get on the jazz bandwagon. Earl Fuller (not playing here) was a NYC society bandleader who pivoted to jazz in the wake of the ODJB; clarinetist Ted Lewis, an early Benny Goodman influence, is present, and drummer John Lucas rolls lustily. Compared to this, the ODJB is deep and subtle.

• Howard Kopp with Frank Banta, “Calico Rag” (Johnson), Columbia, 1917. Howard Kopp was a percussionist who recorded for Columbia in the Nineteen ‘teens. Love those rolls and cowbell, but listen carefully and realize that this is not a jazz drumming as we know it.

• Wilbur Sweatman, “Indianola/Those Draftin’ Blues”, Columbia, 1918. With an instrumentation matching the ODJB, clarinetist Sweatman’s quintet has the best rhythm and ensemble balance so far. Drummer Henry Bowser plays straight through on snare, tomtom, woodblock, and even a crash cymbal. Sweatman’s group seems to set the stage for King Oliver, still half a decade in the future. Good to remember that Duke Ellington passed through this band at some point.

• Original New Orleans Jazz Band, “Ja-Da” (Bob Carleton)/“You’ll Find Old Dixieland in France” (George Meyer, Grant Clark), Gennett, 1919. Further in the wake of the ODJB, the Original New Orleans Jazz Band was formed in NYC and comprised of white New Orleanians (plus NYC pianist Jimmy Durante). Drummer Johnny Stein stays on woodblocks as the group alternates between two tunes. Not much dynamics and nothing like a solo, but such was jazz in 1919.

• Art Hickman, “Rose Room” (Hickman), “Cairo” (Freed and Weeks), “Hold Me”/“Midnight Maid”, “Dance It Again With Me” (Wallace), 1917-1919, Columbia. Oakland-born drummer, pianist, and bandleader Art Hickman may have been present when the word ‘jazz’ migrated from sports to music in 1913. Hickman sounds good— I like his woodblocks on “Rose Room” and his flashy tomtoms on “Cairo”— and was popular, pioneering a blend of society music with a jazz influence.

• Paul Whiteman, “Whispering” (John Schonberger), Victor, 1920. Whiteman, crowned the “King of Jazz” by the Buscher company in 1923, commissioned “Rhapsody In Blue” from George Gershwin and was the best-known bandleader in the Twenties. His “Whispering” is a peak example of cutting-edge society music in 1920: a steady beat, a hint of jazz, and a charming, mellifluous sound. Noteworthy that there’s no drumming to speak of here.

• Vincent Lopez, “Nola” (Felix Arndt), Okeh, 1923. Lopez was a NYC bandleader and radio personality, and this is what jazz was to him. Like Hickman and Whiteman, Lopez uses a steady beat, a new thing, at least on recordings, making this a far cry from the enthusiastic rushing of Roy Spengler and Fred Van Eps. No drumming, but a lovely instrumental novelty.

All of this music is well-played and easily enjoyed, but it is not the thing we are searching for. The irreverence and willingness to go rogue and damn the torpedoes found in all jazz, amateur, virtuoso, or professional, is pretty much absent. With this stuff, there’s just too many rules being followed.

Incomplete as it is, the playlist illuminates how jazz, as we know it, did not just happen, of its own accord and on schedule. Radical thinkers and self-conscious artists all, the earliest jazz musicians made the new music, because they had to.

As I was working on this, one crucial difference between Louis Armstrong (or Jelly Roll Morton or Duke Ellington etc etc) and Art Hickman-Paul Whiteman dawned on me: Armstrong and his peers cared more than Hickman and Whiteman. Armstrong was more serious, more invested, certainly more creative, practiced harder, and thought about music more; he was just way more into it than the society guys. It’s that simple and that complex.

This morning I had a student play along with Elvin Jones, Steve Davis, McCoy Tyner, and John Coltrane’s original studio recording of “My Favorite Things” from October 1961, struck again by both the magic of that specific track and astonished at all the greatness that came from it, musically and culturally. Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman did not inspire legions of music lovers to push the art forward. How could they? That was not the point of their music, yet was always, always the point of Louis Armstrong et al. I am learning, I am learning.