BLP 1208

George Lewis And His New Orleans Stompers - Concert!

Released - March 1959

Recording and Session Information

Studio Radio performance, Bakersfield, CA, May 28, 1954
Avery "Kid" Howard, trumpet, vocals; Jim Robinson, trombone; George Lewis, clarinet; Alton Purnell, piano; Lawrence Marrero, banjo; Alcide "Slow Drag" Pavageau, bass; Joe Watkins, drums, vocals.

Gettysburg March
Bill Bailey
Burgundy Street Blues
Walking With The King

"Seven Arts Club", Bakersfield, CA, May 28, 1954
Avery "Kid" Howard, trumpet, vocals; Jim Robinson, trombone; George Lewis, clarinet; Alton Purnell, piano; Lawrence Marrero, banjo; Alcide "Slow Drag" Pavageau, bass; Joe Watkins, drums, vocals.

Over The Waves
Canal Street Blues
Red Wing
Just A Closer Walk With Thee (edited version)
Ice Cream
Mama Don't Allow It

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Ice Cream	Jim Robinson	May 28 1954
Red Wing	Mills-Chattawy	May 28 1954
Mama Don't Allow It	Davenport	May 28 1954
Burgundy Street Blues	Lewis	May 28 1954
Bill Bailey		May 28 1954
Side Two
Over The Waves		May 28 1954
Just A Closer Walk With Thee		May 28 1954
Canal Street Blues	Oilver	May 28 1954
Walking With The King		May 28 1954
Gettysburg March		May 28 1954

Liner Notes

ONE of the first things heard on this record is the deceptively gentle voice of George Lewis diffidently stating that "After a year or so you may not hear this music any more." It was, to say the least, an understatement. This concert was recorded in 1954 and today, December 24, 1958, the George Lewis band is continuing its phenomenal career without apparent let-up or slow-down, the last of the great New Orleans jazz groups and the only traditional jazz group playing outside of New Orleans with a roster of musicians who, without exception, can claim to be pioneers in the music that's known as jazz.

A comparatively few years ago this jazz was called by one critic the "nothing-to-lose" school of music. The critical remark was not intended as a compliment. Yet today with a deeper understanding by those who listen to it with their hearts as well as their ears, the phrase becomes a definitive description; a brief three-word all-encompassing analysis of a music that defies analysis, yet is fast dying through over-analysis.

The early jazz musicians played for themselves, for each other and for their people. Jazz has been called a "happy" music, but this is true only in part. Jazz, as it was played by its originators, was a music of the heart, and whose heart — least of all the Negro's in the deep South — is always happy? Jazz was a form of self-expression, a means of articulating emotion by a people who spoke their greatest truths in music. A woman sang the blues when she wakened lonely in the morning; a man sang them in a jail cell; a child thumped a row of tin cans with a stick, or another twanged strips of inner tubing stretched over an empty crate, and each of them made music. The music on this record comes as close to the jazz that grew from these beginnings as any you will hear today.

George Lewis and his men played this concert without the knowledge that they were being recorded. There was no tension of recording studio, no direction, no worry over acceptance or non-acceptance by critics of the finished product. It was a happy gig, played in their favorite state, California, and the emotional atmosphere of the date is set from the first uninhibited rousing notes of Big Jim Robinson's tromhone in Ice Cream. The music speaks for itself. Jazz is a language, and on this record it is the language of musician speaking to musician and communicating with an audience without the knowledge that they were being overheard. Which is as it was in the beginning and always should be, but unfortunately seldom is.

Too many words have been written about jazz. And that includes these words. Too many books by too many people have been published year in and year out; books whose factual inaccuracies lie half-buried under the weight of academic dissertations about a subject which, in the beginning, was a music of the heart played by a naturally gifted people without a thought of critical acclaim, without the knowledge that the time would ever come when they would be 'discovered' by the critics, the musicologists and the intellectuals.

Critics have been almost unanimously kind to George Lewis. Critics who have damned with everything but faint praise other traditional bands have, even when pointing out flaws, showed unmistakably that the Lewis clarinet, the Lewis ensemble spirit, have a special quality of clarity and truth that defied their most captious analysis.

Collectors of George Lewis records will treasure this one in particular for it is the last time George's life-long friend, the great New Orleans - banjoist, Lawrence Marrero, was to be recorded with the band. Some of Marrero's finest recorded solos will be found on these sides.

It would be impossible to pick out the various high notes in this truly great album. One could mention the magnificent backing of the rest of the band in George's poignant Burgundy Street Blues; the driving piano and rhythm break in Over the Waves; George's grieving, moaning clarinet in Closer Walk with Thee, the vocals by Kid Howard and Joe Watkins, but to each listener the music will have its own message for those who have ears to hear it.

Lewis himself needs, perhaps, a word of explanation. Some day a perceptive and sensitive writer will do a biography of George Lewis and capture the gentleness and charm of this man who today, at 58, weighs 98 pounds and is, as this is written, packing his bags in New Orleans for a second tour of England and a first tour of Europe. If a champion is one who is knocked to the canvas repeatedly and comes back fighting each time at the count of nine George Lewis deserves the title of "champion". Throughout his life this frail man has been plagued by ill-health. Yet he has played, year in and year out, night long gigs after ten hours stevedoring on the New Orleans docks, for sometimes as little as 75 cents. There were many times when he needed the 75 cents, but there were times when he didn't. He played because he had to play. He played in New York for two months with a severe anemia, collapsing on the stand with pneumonia, in the middle of a number, towards the end of the engagement. He played in San Francisco tortured with angina. Years ago in New Orleans he played a four-hour parade three weeks after a serious abdominal operation, while his wife walked on the sidewalk beside the band in case he "fell out." The answer to the repeated question "Where does George Lewis get his tone" is found here, in the heart and spirit of a mar. who played for 44 years against overwhelming odds, in joy and in heartbreak, but almost always in ill health, who has never given up, or succumbed to trends or commercial opportunism.

The description of jazz as a "happy" music is most truly applicable to spirituals. Even in the ragtime, the marches and the stomps, a sensitive ear and heart can detect the release of emotions other than happiness. But in an up-tempo spiritual there is true happiness, for no matter how loudly the intellectual agnostic may decry it, here is a faith that cannot be denied or scorned. It is as real as red beans and rice. Without it a people would have perished. When the Lewis band plays Walking with the King it becomes more than a rousing foot-stomping rendition of a hymn. It is a statement of faith, of knowledge, of certainty that on a long, lonely road there is a royal companion. Because of that there is joy.

In 1957 George Lewis toured England, playing as guest artist with the Ken Colyer band. Altho concerts had been held down to four a week, it was an arduous experience. At the end, following two appearances in France, he was dog-tired. Wherever he went he had been acclaimed by wildly enthusiastic fans; several times the sturdy British 'bobbies' had been pressed into service to protect him. The jazz-minded British spread out the red carpet and handed him the keys to their hearts. No blame could attach to any musician who had completed that tour with an ego considerably larger than when he started.

At the end of the tour I asked him how he felt. "I'm tired," said George, "but I made it." Then he said something that had within it the essence of the music of George Lewis, and of his band, the secret of the Lewis tone, the revelation of the source of the strength that has kept him going, and the answer to the academicians and the critics of the "nothing-to-lose" school of music. George Lewis needed health and he needed strength; he needed money and security and all the things that most musicians of his calibre have acquired but that he has not attained because — despite the spirit of a lion — frailness of body has kept them away. Yet he was not concerned with these needs. He told me, at the end of that tour, "I guess one reason I made it is because every time I went on the stage in one of them big halls I prayed — like I always do everywhere — that God would stick with me and help me play my very best for these folks who'd been so good to me."

— DOROTHY TAIT

Cover Design by REID MILES
Rerecording by RUDY VAN GELDER