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alyn shipton 12 / THE NEW ORLEANS REVIVAL IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE Background to the Revival A t the end of the 1930s, a movement began in the United States that looked back fondly at the jazz of the 1920s and sought to revive it in various ways. On the one hand there were record producers, such as George Avakian, who set out, although he was still a sophomore at Yale, to produce discs for Decca that re-created the sounds of pioneers in Chicago, New York, and Kansas City. In the event, he only made the Chicago set, leaving other producers to go on and make the others in subsequent years. However, between August 1939 and January 1940 he recorded the bands of Eddie Condon, Jimmy McPartland, and George Wettling, playing in the style of a decade and a half earlier. The twelve sides they cut were compiled into one of the first—if not the first—ever jazz ‘‘albums’’ (Chicago Jazz, Decca A 121). Its six 78 rpm discs were packaged together with a booklet containing Avakian’s notes about the Chicagoan style. ‘‘I was inspired by the recordings Milt Gabler made at Commodore ,’’ said Avakian. ‘‘But I thought to myself, ‘Gee, why don’t they play the way they did ten years or so earlier?’ So I said to Eddie Condon, one of the things I want to do is put in the old Chicago flares. Everybody jump in on the last two bars of a chorus and give a springboard to the next soloist. Or give a big roar into the last chorus and then drop down on the middle eight, that sort of thing. So they were delighted to do it.’’∞ Following the success of this project, Avakian went on to produce reissues for Columbia of the best of its 1920s jazz catalogue. On the other hand, at almost the same time, the Chicagoan cornetist Muggsy Spanier, himself a pioneer of 1920s jazz, but latterly a swing band player with Ted Lewis’s orchestra and then Ben Pollack’s band, formed a band ‘‘to play the kind of music I used to play with Tesch and the old Chicago gang.’’≤ In 1938, Spanier had slowly recovered from a perforated ulcer and horrendous complications, and this near-death experience made him resolve to play the music he loved to the exclusion of more recent styles. His Ragtime Band was formed in April 1939. He built its repertoire not only around the music he had witnessed in 1920s Chicago, by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, but also by drawing on pre-1920 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (which had briefly reformed in 1936 to be filmed and recorded). Spanier’s actual Ragtime Band lasted barely a year, but it was to be hugely influential on the revival that followed. 254 a l y n s h i p t o n He was to continue to work in similar settings at Nick’s Club in Greenwich Village, and in Bob Crosby’s Dixieland-orientated groups. Spanier (like Eddie Condon, as demonstrated on Milt Gabler’s recordings of both men for the Commodore label) saw his work more as part of a continuous tradition than a revival. Meanwhile, on the West Coast in San Francisco, within twelve months of Spanier’s debut, the trumpeter Lu Watters formed his first seven-piece band at the Mark Twain Hotel to play a repertoire that was similarly drawn from earlier models.≥ This group was the precursor of his Yerba Buena Jazz Band, the principal Californian revivalist ensemble. In their di√erent ways Avakian as an external producer who dictated a set of aesthetic values to his musicians, and Watters and Spanier creating a similar impetus as players of the music themselves, were to be the two paradigms for the jazz revival of traditional styles in the years that followed . This was at first the case in the United States, although there the movement gradually lost its initial momentum, but it became particularly true of Europe, where such initiatives lasted well into the 1960s and beyond. In American jazz historiography, the work of Avakian, Spanier, and Watters is generally seen as the launch of the revival of interest in traditional jazz.∂ However, a year before their e√orts got under way, a couple of European pioneers had arrived in the United States with similar, and in some ways more ambitious, ideas that reinforce the paradigm of...

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