When Hoagy Carmichael and his friends Bob Gilette and Bix Beiderbecke went on a road trip to Chicago, their first stop was Lincoln Gardens, the club where King Oliver’s band was appearing. Many years later, Carmichael wrote about that night:
As I sat down to light my first muggle, Bix gave the sign to a big black fellow, playing second trumpet for Oliver, and he slashed into Bugle Call Rag.
I dropped my cigarette and gulped my drink. Bix was on his feet, his eyes popping. For taking the first chorus was that second trumpet, Louis Armstrong. Louis was taking it fast. Bob Gilette slid off his chair and under the table. He was excitable that way.
‘Why,’ I moaned, ‘why isn’t everybody in the world here to hear that?’ I meant it. Something as unutterably stirring as that deserved to be heard by the world.
When Eric Stephenson sent me links to a few of Tuba Skinny’s numerous YouTube videos, I had a similar reaction, though I stayed out from under the table. I soon discovered that a great many people had gotten there ahead of me, that this band I’d never heard of before has been around for 12 years and has performed all over the world by now. They’ve achieved this level of recognition for two major reasons.
The first is the internet, mainly YouTube. Fans of the band have filmed and posted innumerable Tuba Skinny concerts and segments of street performances, and have created an excellent Wikipedia page that, among other information, collects reviews of the band’s performances and recordings and interviews with individual members.
I realize I’m coming rather late to the party, but after many years of ranting against cell phones, computers, and the internet, I’ve been forced to recognize that these technologies have made possible a new route to creating musical careers, a route that can simply skirt the Music Biz – its greed, its homogenization, its cultivation of the lowest common denominators – and take music directly to people who want to listen to it.
The second reason for Tuba Skinny’s worldwide popularity is more fundamental – it’s the music they play and the way they play it.
I regret to say that most reviews of their performances and recordings have insisted on labeling them “trad,” one of the brands the sales promotion division of the Music Biz has come up with over the past fifty years. “Trad” implies dedicated, superficial copying of older American music, the kind of Firehouse Five Plus 2 crap that’s been around ever since bop came along to drive out the riff raff, aka the jazz audience. This sort of “dixieland” stuff was initially played by aging survivors of the first wave of New Orleans jazz. Some of them could still play, and creditably imitate what they and others had once discovered and created. But the ground from which that early jazz sprang was long gone, taking the heart of the music with it, leaving only soulless facsimiles. Tuba Skinny is not “trad.” To illustrate what I’m talking about, compare these two performances of “Ballin’ the Jack,” one of the most often revived chestnuts of the ragtime era:
(Tuba Skinny – 2018)
(Clancy Hayes & His Washboard Five-1950)
Tuba Skinny is a collection of musicians who came to New Orleans from all over the country – Oregon, upstate New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Virginia – and found that the original spirit of jazz still somehow survived in the streets of that city, and, walking those streets, playing music to the people who’d refused to leave them even after Katrina, they absorbed that spirit, a spirit that goes all the way back to the Sunday dances of the slaves, later on the freed men and women, in Congo Square.
The great New Orleans reedman Sidney Bechet wrote, “But down at the bottom of it – inside it, where it starts and gets into itself – down there it had the same thing there is at the bottom of ragtime. It was already born and making in the music they played at Congo Square.” Frederick Turner, who quoted Bechet’s observation in his irreplaceable Remembering Song (Viking, 1982) added in a footnote that “Bechet used the term ‘ragtime,’ as many of the early players did, to refer to what we could now call ‘jazz.’ It does not refer . . . specifically to the written ragtime compositions of Joplin et. al. though . . . these compositions were staples of jazz bands from around 1900 to 1918. Bechet’s ‘ragtime’ (jazz) rather refers to a style in which any music could be played, whether ragtime, blues, or Tin Pan Alley songs.”
Writing about the great trumpet player Ruby Braff, I tried to describe what that “style” of playing required: “You have to be constantly hearing the original melody and chords in your head as you’re playing a new melody, and you have to be listening to that new melody to see where it started and where it wants to go while you’re producing it. And if you’re a jazz musician, you also have to be listening to what the other musicians are playing, and incorporate that into what you’re playing. When I think about all this, it sounds nearly impossible.”
The most important aspect of the original jazz tradition is the listening, not just to what you’re saying, but to what everyone else is saying. Because, as many others have observed, jazz was only a “style” in the sense that Nelson Algren used the word: “Style is that force by which a man becomes what he most needs to become. When this need is one common to multitudes and the man’s force suffices, we call him an artist, because in saving himself he saves others.”*
What the Congo Square dancers and drummers and singers, the pianists and horn players of early jazz most needed to become was fully human. They needed to be recognized as part of America, as legitimate participants in democracy. And to do that, they created a musical style that demonstrated undeniably both what that democracy required – everyone listening to everyone else with attention and respect – and offered – the chance to make your own unique individual voice heard as part of one great chorus.
Less grandiloquently, Louis Armstrong described it thus: “Now you talking about jam sessions. . . . those were the things, with everyone feeling each other’s note or chord, et cetera . . . and blend with each other instead of trying to cut each other . . . nay, nay, we did not even think of such a mess. We tried to see how good we could make music sound which was an inspiration within itself.”
I can’t imagine a more eloquent or more accurate description of the music Tuba Skinny is making. You can hear them listen to each other, taking up and developing each others’ musical ideas, tossing them back and forth. They’re often all improvising simultaneously, yet they never run into each other or get lost in their own creations – because they’re trying to see how good they can make the music sound. And the music – melody, chord progressions, structures, rhythm, tempo, dynamic variations – provides the drinking gourd for everyone to keep in sight at all times on each communal journey.
When you watch Tuba Skinny and its dancing fans, it doesn’t look as if anyone’s philosophizing about what they’re up to. It looks like they’re having a hell of a good time, bouncing along on the waves of rhythm. And it’s the sense of rhythm that makes this band so distinctive, that sets it off from the “Trad” imitators of New Orleans jazz.
That early jazz, growing, as Sidney Bechet observed, out of Congo Square, was made by (largely) working men, people who worked with their whole bodies, people for whom an awareness of their bodies in relation to the earth or the gangways or the wagons they worked on was a matter of life and death. They got around on their two feet, and if they got around sometimes on wheels, those wheels were moved by horses’ four feet.
From that essentially 2/4 and 4/4 experience of motion, the rhythms of early jazz developed. But in Congo Square and in the innumerable bands that grew out of it, those basic, pedestrian rhythms were complemented, embroidered, enriched by the accompanying, subtly modifying rhythms of whole bodies – because early jazz was made, like the music of Congo Square, as just one part of the dance of life.
By the end of the 1920s, you can hear those rhythms of a nation that lived mainly on foot, of a people who were well advised to stay alert to their surroundings all the time, and be ready to respond to any sudden challenge or opportunity, changing into the rhythms of the new America – the America of Henry Ford and the transcontinental railroads and the assembly lines in thousands of industries. Where the challenges and opportunities to and for the individual worker were circumscribed and repetitious, where only the foremen and shop stewards had any degree of autonomy, and that only in fleeting moments. Where the average working stiff was a cog in one division of a larger machine, a member of a brass or reed or rhythm section, playing the exact same riffs over and over again, night after night, with a few Stars – middle management – left space to occasionally shine on their own. So much for democracy. The basically pedestrian rhythms of early jazz gave over to the wheels-on-the-track, higher and higher speed 4/4 of the “swing” era.
Through the 1930s, jazz was still married with dance, though of a more and more athletic variety, as the tempo of the music rose along with the tempo of everyday life. But by the end of the decade, a new generation of musicians was coming into jazz, a generation not satisfied with the increasingly mechanized, arranged, predictable formulas that had replaced the early excitement of the swing era. Duke Ellington, whose music and whose band had never lost the original democratic spirit, observed the emerging musical developments with trepidation:
He put his doubts and fears into a single funny line. ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.’ . . . His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the twentieth century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute.
For Ellington it was a death knell. The art form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its entertainment value. . . . In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious.” (Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, Norton, 2007)
I’d be the last to argue that jazz, as it abandoned its connection with dance, as it began to incorporate all sorts of rhythms and devices and instruments from world music, as it began to prove that it was deadly serious, didn’t produce a great body of superb music.
But it also lost its democratic heart, the marriage of form and freedom, the spirit of e pluribus unum that was recognized and loved all over the world as essentially American. It lost the joy of communal enterprise.
(At the dawn of the 1960s, feeling this loss, a number of musicians – Ornette Coleman probably the best known – tried to recapture group improvisation without the discipline of any agreed-upon form, to drink without any gourd to drink from. “Free Jazz,” they called it. It sounded like a bunch of kitchen implements falling down an endless flight of stairs. People couldn’t swing with it. They continued their flight to rock and roll.)
The great Kid Ory, talking of Buddy Bolden, the first “King of Jazz,” said, “I’d go out to the park where he was playing, and there wouldn’t be a soul around. Then, when it was time to start the dance, he’d say, ‘Let’s call the children home.’ And he’d put his horn out the window and blow, and everyone would come running” (Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, Rinehart, 1955). The musicians of Tuba Skinny must have heard that call, still filling the streets of New Orleans after all these years. They came running.
I’ve refrained from talking at all here about the individual musicians in Tuba Skinny. Not because they aren’t very fine, very distinctive practitioners of their various instruments, because they most certainly are. In fact, focusing on each one’s contribution offers one of the many rewards their recorded output – eleven cd’s at this writing – offers a listener. I’ve refrained partly because I wanted to emphasize this band’s return to the early verities and virtues of jazz, and partly because I want you to go listen to them yourself. Writing about music is difficult but possible, but ultimately music speaks for itself better than any collection of words can. A few suggestions:
“Goin’ Back Home”:
“Give Me Some”:
A performance in Sidney Studios:
With Simon Gronowski, holocaust survivor and ragtime pianist;
