BLP 1205

George Lewis And His New Orleans Stompers Volume 1

Released - 1955

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, April 8, 1955
Avery "Kid" Howard, trumpet, vocals; Jim Robinson, trombone; George Lewis, clarinet; Alton Purnell, piano, vocals; George Guesnon, banjo; Alcide "Slow Drag" Pavageau, bass; Joe Watkins, drums, vocals.

tk.8 Walking With The King
tk.9 Gettysburg March
tk.12 Savoy Blues
tk.16 My Bucket's Got A Hole In It

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, April 11, 1955
Avery "Kid" Howard, trumpet, vocals; Jim Robinson, trombone; George Lewis, clarinet; Alton Purnell, piano, vocals; George Guesnon, banjo; Alcide "Slow Drag" Pavageau, bass; Joe Watkins, drums, vocals.

tk.20 Mahogany Hall Stomp
tk.26 Lord, Lord You Sure Been Good To Me
tk.29 High Society
tk.30 See See Rider Blues
tk.31 Heebie Jeebies
tk.33 When You Wore A Tulip

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Mahogany Hall Stomp	S. Williams	April 11 1955
See See Rider Blues	Ma Rainey	April 11 1955
When You Wore A Tulip	Mahoney-Wenrich	April 11 1955
Bucket Got A Hole In It	C. Williams	April 8 1955
Walking With The King	Traditional	April 8 1955
Side Two
High Society	Piron-Williams	April 11 1955
Savoy Blues	Kid Ory	April 8 1955
Gettysburg March	Traditional	April 8 1955
Heebie Jeebies	Atkins	April 11 1955
Lord, Lord You Sure Been Good	Kid Howard	April 11 1955

Liner Notes

THERE'S A STORY to this band, and it's right here — in the music they play. It's the New Orleans story, if you like, but it's really even more than that. In a sense, it's a story that re-writes the jazz legend, and makes you wonder what, after all, really makes this music go.

Picture a studio out in Hackensack, New Jersey. Picture seven men from New Orleans walking into that studio — most of them in their forties, two of them in their middle to late sixties. Some of them know the rough planking and the hot sun of the New Orleans docks. All of them have followed the ups and downs of a jazzman's life, from the early 1900% or before. Some of their horns are in beat-up cases—the clarinetist has an old Albert, a type that was supposed to have gone out of style years ago because you couldn't get around it fast enough.

And you watch them set up — the thin clarinetist, George Lewis, with a soulful face that breaks into light when he smiles "Big Jim" Robinson, the stevedore, whose large hands make a trombone look like a toy. There's "Slow Drag" Pravageau on bass. He's sixty-seven, but he keeps it a secret...even from his bass. Near him stands "Kid" Howard on trumpet, who's not a kid any more, and who followed the riverboats up to Chicago in the old days to see how they were doing on the South Side. You watch George Guesnon tune up his banjo. It's got a funky sound, but to a New Orleans ear, it's just right. Beside him sits Alton Purnell, hitting a few chords on the Steinway. He grins. It's not exactly what a Professor's piano should look like, but if you hit it right, you can forget about the twelve coats of varnish and shellac. And there, fixing the foot pedal on the bass drum, is Joe Watkins. The bands he's played with make a long list, and he knows the feeling of New Orleans pavements gliding under his foot as he strides along, the straps of his parade drum biting into his shoulders.

It's a recording studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, and the year is 1955. The past and the present are about to rub shoulders, and you wonder what it's going to sound like. And then Lewis kicks off the beat for Mahogany Hall Stomp —and the walls move back two feet.

And as you listen, you realize something you've half known, half hoped for, but never really dared believe. New Orleans Jazz isn't dead. It's as alive and kicking today as it was on those warm nights, so long ago, when the scent of magnolias blended with the sound of whacky horns down Bourbon Street way.

If New Orleans Jazz died that night in 1917 when they closed Lulu White's, these men never heard about it. If it was supposed to have changed in Chicago in the mid '20s, and then gone through a big band phase in New York in the '30s, they didn't hear about that either. For as you listen, here is the old sound on high fidelity. It takes a minute to get used to it — to really believe it — but it won't throw you. And you know what the old records were trying to sound like — and couldn't quite.

If you've any idea that these New Orleans musicians are digging up a museum piece, just listen to any one of the cuts on this marvelous LP. For this is the only way these men know how to play — they're playing jazz, and this is what it sounds like, and if by some miracle Oliver, or Jelly, or Keppard walked in through the door, they'd think they were home again. For this is their music too—with the flags up and waving. It's certain, and sure, and it believes in itself.

Listen to the Lewis clarinet on See See Rider, with a tone a yard wide, and all velvet. Listen to Robinson on Mahogany Hall Stomp, catch the wonderful vocal of Alton Purnell on Heebie Jeebies, the incredible beat of "Slow Drag" Pavageau's bass on Lord Lord, You Sure Been Good To Me, the truly great clarinet-trombone ensemble which Lewis and Robinson cook up on Walking With The King. And if you want, you can practically slide into line behind Joe Watkins drums, as you round the corner playing Gettysburg. Marches, blues, hymns, all played as fresh as the day the music was born. "Kid" Howard's horn is the kind that made the shutters slide open on Basin Street, and George Guesnon's banjo, with its tremendous rock, is right up there at the front of the rhythm, pushing the horns, driving them, without ever stepping on them.

Notice the tunes that they play, some of which haven't had a New Orleans going over since the last edition of the "Blue Book." And above all, listen to the ensembles—sweet, driving, hot, superbly recorded, building to peaks they can't top — and then topping them on the next Chorus. You'll hear the rhythm laying down an incredible driving beat, you'll hear Robinson holding up the bottom of the band with a trombone that opens the gates, and then shakes them, and you'll hear "Kid" Howard sliding through with a driving horn that sets down a melody line and seduces it at the same time. And all through, there's Lewis, changing the whole tone of ensembles with his clusters of clean, high, nervous notes, and then coming downstairs with a tone so broad and sweet and steaming hot you'll begin to wonder how a clarinet ever sounded like that.

The books talk about a golden age of jazz, and the legend, and the giants in the land. These records talk about the same thing, but they let you in on a secret. When New Orleans Jazz "died," somebody forgot to lock the gate. Here is the music again — as incredibly alive as the day it was born. You've got it in your hands right now.

—ROBERT S. GREENE

Cover Design by REID K. MILES
Ship Engraving from BETTMAN ARCHIVES
Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

1998 CD Issue Liner Notes

The role of independent record labels in documenting and preserving American music — and especially jazz — has not always achieved the recognition it deserves. Independents such as Gennett, Paramount, Okeh and Nordskog did much to document the early New Orleans pioneers who worked their way north and west at the dawn OF the Jazz Age. But the bust of the recording industry in the latter 1 920s cleared them all from the field, if the majors had not already swallowed them up by then. Following recovery in the mid-1 930s, a new generation of independent labels emerged: United Hot Clubs of America, Hot Record Society, and Commodore began with reissue campaigns that served as a threshold for more adventurous projects infused with a sense of "the righteous cause," the belief that jazz was an art form worthy of documentation and preservation. Perhaps the most adventurous of the new labels, and certainly the one that best exemplified the trend toward stylistic pluralism, was Blue Note Records, founded in January 1939 by a German expatriate, Alfred Lion. A statement of purpose accompanied Blue Note's first brochure in May 1939: "Blue Note Records are designed simply to serve the uncompromising expressions of hot jazz or swing, in general. Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression. By virtue of its significance in place, time and circumstance, it possesses its own tradition, artistic standards and audience that keeps it alive. Hot jazz, therefore, is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments." This manifesto, dedicated as it was to preserving the integrity of Blue Note artists, stands in stark contrast to the usual tales of manipulation by unscrupulous A & R men within the record industry, and yet it also elucidates how viable such a strategy could be, for Blue Note successfully kept pace with the times, moving from boogie woogie, traditional jazz, and swing to bebop, hard bop, soul, and beyond. In retrospect, the Blue Note catalog amounts to nothing less than one of the nation's most significant musical treasures, and the reissue programs directed by Michael Cuscuna since 1975 have ensured accessibility to these priceless recordings.

The same impulse which generated renewed vigor among independent record labels in the late 1930s also resuscitated the careers of several New Orleans jazz musicians whose reputations had remained strictly local until the historical writing of William Russell and Charles Edward Smith in Jazzmen (1939) brought them to national attention. During the 190s trumpeter Bunk Johnson and trombonist Kid Ory held forth as the twin pillars of a New Orleans revival which vied with bebop and modern jazz for the hearts and ears of young jazz enthusiasts. Despite the impact of this jazz schism (which preoccupied critics primarily), or perhaps because of it, musicians well into middle age were able to cultivate a dedicated youthful following, satisfying a hunger for authenticity and the virtues of a seemingly less complex time before world wars and the Depression. The Bunk Johnson saga ended in anti-climax following marginally successful seasons at the Stuyvesant Casino in New York City in 1945-46, but the revival found a more reliable champion in the band's clarinetist, George Lewis, who rose like a phoenix from the ashes after the trumpeter's death in 1949. Lewis had worked with all the best leaders in New Orleans in the 920s, including Buddy Petit, Ernest "Kid Punch" Miller, Chris Kelly and Henry "Red" Allen, and during the Depression he had traveled regionally with Evan Thomas before returning home to face the hard scrabble gigs along Decatur Street on the river front. During World War II, his association with Bunk on recordings for Jazz Man and American Music in 1942 and 1944-46 afforded a degree of notoriety. However, as Paige Van Horst observed in his notes to The Complete Blue Note Recordings of George Lewis: "George Lewis was not a prime candidate to become a jazz idol. His success seems in many ways accidental. He was a small, frail, shy, soft-spoken man and probably would have finished his days playing tavern lobs in New Orleans and working as a stevedore had there not been a back-to-the-basics movement in jazz during the late 1930s." This, of course, made him perfect for the Blue Note roster.

The sixteen cuts collected on this CD were recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey studio on April 8 and April 11, 1955 and were produced by Alfred Lion. George Lewis's first connection with Alfred Lion and Blue Note had been a session recorded by Bill Russell in 19Å3—issued on the specially-created Climax label because it was a non-union recording — which had sold well and helped to establish name recognition for the clarinetist in his own right. The Van Gelder sessions resulted from a fortuitous engagement for George Lewis and his New Orleans Stompers at Childs' Paramount Restaurant in New York City in the midst of a national tour. It was Lewis's first return to Manhattan since his Bunk Johnson days nearly a decade earlier. The repertoire represents a cross-section of traditional New Orleans standards—popular tunes, marches, blues, hymns and stomps—all relying on the classic collective approach that makes New Orleans music so appealing. The interplay between soloist and ensemble is not always flawless, and New Orleans bands often sound rough to the uninitiated, but the intention of the musicians is to evoke surprise, and thus excitement, and to make the listener feel the music and respond to it. We can rest assured that George Lewis will not be remembered for his technique or for the number of records sold, but he had a "voice" that was unique in its emotional power and lyrical intensify, and once heard, it could never be forgotten.

—Bruce Boyd Raeburn
Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University