Wolverine Jazz Band at Bemis Hall, for Classic Jazz at Lincoln Library May 28, 2012

Review by Peter Gerler

videos by Harold McAleer

pictures by Harold and Marce

THE WOLVERINE JAZZ BAND LIVE AND ON RECORD

By Peter Gerler

John Clark, leader and reeds; Jeff Hughes, cornet; Tom Boates, trombone; Ross Petot, piano; Jimmy Mazzy, banjo & vocals; Rick McWilliams, tuba; Dave Didriksen, drums.

New England’s Wolverine Jazz Band can sit down and swing—an irony, since swing makes you want to stand up. Last May, they kicked off a full-house concert at Bemis Hall in Lincoln, MA with Joe Oliver’s Canal Street Blues—out of the Crescent City marching band tradition. It was a good choice: New Orleans music is always about community. As the historian Al Rose has written, jazz “first appeared as music to be played joyfully in the open air by the brass bands of New Orleans’ countless fraternal organizations and by string ensembles at the parades, picnics, and ‘lawn parties’….It grew out of a whole way of life in and near the continent’s most cosmopolitan city.” (Rose: 106)

In Canal Street Blues, you hear the parade moving down New Orleans’ main boulevard, its “neutral zone,” the black-Creole dividing line, with flags waving and crowds moving-–bringing the racial sides together. The Wolverines opened the tune in one voice, carrying Oliver’s whole-band torch. In New Orleans “ragtime,” solos were rare; the band was the star. Many of the early black New Orleans bands came out of post-slavery “social aid and pleasure” clubs; the music was about finding camaraderie.

For their next tune, Jelly Roll Morton’s Original Jelly Roll Blues, the Wolverines adhered to the tradition. Morton, called the first jazz composer, painted musical trompe l’oeils—taking his listeners into the New Orleans French Market bustle, the District brothels where lonely men found company, the backroom piano contests, portraying a laid-back, four-beat life along the River. The Wolverines brought Jelly’s spirit to the Bemis stage. The horns echoed Johnny St. Cyr’s long-ago opening banjo riff, Clark’s clarinet brought the brass band trills, and the band marched through Jelly’s final modified blues sequence with its strange second-to-third-bar change.

In the fact that the Wolverine band is one of a countrywide—nay, worldwide—spread of living “jazz” purveyors, it too is a star. The sound that emerged as possibly the first world music doesn’t have to be “kept alive”; it is alive by its nature. “I don’t care how good the artist is, if you don’t have the Dixieland beat, you ain’t there,” the New Orleans bassist and Ellington alumnus Wellman Braud observed.

The Wolverines have brought that beat for seventeen years, since leader Dr. John Clark earned his big break—a spot in the late Ray Smith’s Paramount Jazz Band. Clark had been gigging for the better part of a decade, since college. Playing more than one horn gave him a leg up. “I brought my old, beat-up baritone sax to the sit-in session with Smith, because I thought there’d be other clarinet players there. The bari added something, and Ray loved that.”

In 1995, Clark went to Europe with the Paramount, then parlayed that into the formation of a new band, the Yankee Clippers. For this, he pulled cornetist Hughes from the Paramount and tubist McWilliams from another group, the Dixieland Strutters. He rounded up drummer Didriksen from the Happy Feet—another Clark musical alma mater. These three have hung in since the inception. Later, Clark got pianist Petot and banjoist Mazzy, who replaced Moishe Feldman and Bob Sundstrom, respectively.

At first, Clark’s gigs couldn’t support a trombone player, but later he got Boates. There’s another irony here: when Clark started out, he wanted to play trombone. But his mother said he was too small. “I would be carrying the trombone around with you,” she said. So now, Clark says, ”When I’m carrying my baritone sax and my alto and clarinet and bag of music books and stands and everything, I think how lovely it would be to just carrying a trombone.”

Quickly the “Yankee Clippers” became the “Wolverines,” in part because a folk group already owned the former name. Also, “Wolverines” brought an echo from jazz’s early days: Jelly Roll Morton had penned his enduring Wolverine Blues in 1923—the year after Louis Armstrong joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.

And the eternally audible Bix Beiderbecke joined his first steady group—the originalWolverines—in 1924. (Bix’s group had been so named because they played Jelly’s tune—one of their signature arrangements–regularly.) “The name ‘Wolverines’ has a jazz pedigree,” said Clark. “And knowing I would have Jeff Hughes with me—he was a Bix-style trumpet player. I figured that would be a tie-in.”

But Clark, who teaches music at Connecticut College, wants the band’s music to appeal to all ages, young and old. “I didn’t want to limit it to one repertoire,” he says. “Straw hats, red vests—the Wolverine Jazz Band has never, will never—over my dead body.”

The Wolverines have cut eleven CDs in their seventeen years. Their latest, “The Street Beat,” opens with the Bob Crosby New Orleans anthem, South Rampart Street Parade, in which they have something to say. “Cry when you’re born, rejoice when you die,” goes the old Crescent City proverb. So when the funeral parades “cut loose the body” and turned back to town, the snare drum kicked off a strutting, world-apart celebration, described by the Crescent City banjo and guitar man Danny Barker as “the greatest real-live free show on earth.”

It often happened on the black main stem—South Rampart—and the Wolverines take you into that borderline religious experience, setting out in straight march time—because as the author William Least-Heat Moon noted about kites, “No string, no flight.” (Paraphrase: No string, no swing.) Boates’ ‘bone solo transmits the joy and romp of a second-line parade, and in Mazzy’s distinguished, turn-over-every-stone banjo play, you can see a child skipping along.

“The Street Beat” also features a re-enactment of the Joe Oliver classic Chimes Blues, in which a 22-year-old inchoate trumpeting street waif named Louis Armstrong laid down his first-ever recorded solo. (The jazz critic Gary Giddins observed that, when you heard that solo, “You heard the future.”)

The Wolverines’ take on Chimes launches with Boates’ barrelhouse trombone then clicks into Petot’s clocklike reading of Lil Hardin’s “chimes” piano passage. Now cornetist Hughes grabs onto Louis’ solo and takes it in a new direction, in his own laid-back, horsey time. Art is in session.

With Didriksen’s drum clip, the “The Street Beat” upbeat delivery of Paul Barbarin & Luis Russell’s Come Back Sweet Papa sounds more like Papa’s gone like a turkey through the corn. I’ve often thought of this tune as an example of not-swinging vs. swinging. The original Armstrong Hot Five side opens with clarinetist Johnny Dodds on alto saxophone, tooting the melody along, a child with a new toy. It was not his best horn. Then on a staccato stop, Armstrong swoops in, swinging to redefine the concept.

The Wolverines’ Come Back dispenses with Dodds’ opening; instead, Clark’s clarinet ambles in with Armstrong’s set-up strain, found later during the Hot Five take. It’s a nice solution. Then on top of McWilliams’ laid-back tuba pokes and snaking long notes emerge nice ambulations by Mazzy and Boates, a trading session between Clark and Hughes, and a piano perambulation by Petot . Enter a 3-horn, chamber jazz “trio,” opening into the final stampede through town. They must have found Papa.

Birmingham Breakdown on “The Street Beat” follows the original 1927 side by Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra—with its tight, 20-bar theme seemingly designed after a dance step, and with a rhythmic pattern foreshadowing by a year that of the standardCrazy Rhythm. Petot’s stride piano turn, “re-issuing” Ellington’s original solo and riding on Didriksen’s and McWilliams’ easy drums and tuba, swings as much, if not more, than Duke’s–as if Petot has had the last 85 years to loosen up. Toward the end, he brings a fierceness echoing Morton’s incendiary piano solo on Black Bottom Stomp.

(Ross Petot’s own recent CD, “New Ragtime & Other Stuff,” offers a collection of original piano rags, composed and played by Petot in the classic tradition. There are echoes of Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Scott Joplin, Fats Waller—even Dave McKenna. The sound is Teutonic, Harlemesque, parlor-dance, barrelhouse. Definitely worth a listen.)

“The Street Beat” also ties back to Clarence Williams’ bands of the twenties—which the Wolverines would have had to do sooner or later. Williams, who in 1906 moved to New Orleans after hearing Buddy Bolden up the river, spawned numerous jazz tunes—either by composing them himself or by issuing others’ works through the publishing house he formed with A. J. Piron. Over the years—in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York–Williams provided recording work for dozens of early jazz players.

He recorded Cushion Foot Stomp at least five times during 1927, perhaps most notably with his Clarence Williams’ Washboard Five. (Some early jazz bands could have a jerry-rigged sound; washboard, jug, and “spasm” bands were not uncommon.) The Wolverines do a sweet turn with Cushion Foot, closely mirroring the Williams side.

It’s a two-part tune—the first part riding on a blues strain, the second following the basic “ragtime” progression of Lazy River or Jazz Me Blues. Part two grabs you with its two-note, pushing-at-the-sides motif. Didriksen drives it with laid-back brushes. Clark, in his clarinet solo, pushes funk through his windpipe, as McWilliams’ tuba slides up into Mazzy’s sliding-in vocal. You can’t understand the lyrics on Williams’ original (like Armstrong on Sugar Foot Strut)—and Mazzy emulates them beautifully!

Yet Mazzy’s vocals put a stamp on whatever group he plays in, and it was no different as the Wolverines wrapped up Bemis with Ted Lewis’ Dip Your Brush in the Sunshine. Singing as through a megaphone, Mazzy took his crowd back to vaudeville and the Chautauqua tents, as he evangelized them to “Make love a duty, and you’re bound to find beauty.” He’s been there, and he believes it.

It was a Memorial Day Concert, and the Wolverines polished it off with God Bless America. “God Bless Jazz,” it could have been, since one came out of the other.

Wolverine Jazz Band CDs, concert listings, biographies and more are available on their website, http://www.wolverinejazzband.com.

Ross Petot’s CDs and biography are available throughhttp://home.comcast.net/~newenglandtradjazz/RossPetot.htm.

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They were dancing in the aisles at this CJALL Annual Live Jazz Concert in Lincoln MA to Jimmy’s vocalizing on this sweet ballad. Sponsored by the Friends of the Lincoln Library this event draws large crowds every year. http://www.cjall.org/

Jimmy Mazzy sings How Can I Be Blue?