In 1963, my father, a jazz fan, took me to see the Hall Brothers Emporium of Jazz performing at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was a grey day and snowy as I recall. The auditorium was dark with wood textures and the air was funky with the small of wet coats and sodden shoes and scarves. The place was heated with steam radiators and some parts of the hall were very warm with an odor in the air of boiling water contaminated with lead and copper. I was too young to understand the concert -- I think I was about nine. The Hall Brothers were a fixture at the jazz club in Mendota and they played New Orleans jazz. Dixieland jazz of that sort has always seemed ancient to me, an intricate antique form of music as remote from the present as Telemann or Vivaldi. But consider this -- 46 years separated that concert in 1963 from Louis Armstrong's famous May recording sessions at Okeh with his Hot Seven in 1927. I'm now 67 years old. The time between that 1963 concert and Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues" is roughly the same period that separates today from David Bowie's Golden Years (1976), or the Bee Gees' songs featured in Saturday Night Fever or Abba's "Dancing Queen" -- none of these tunes seems antique to me, because, of course, they are part of my life. When my father introduced me to Dixieland music, it was an old time form of music, but,in fact, really modern, comparatively speaking --as modern as David Bowie or Freddie Mercury or Abba is to listeners today.
On April 3, 2022, the Southside Aces played a ninety minute concert at the Paramount Theater in Austin. One of the musicians hails from Albert Lea and was somewhat familiar with the Moorish fantasia architecture at the Paramount Theater. He took a picture and sent it to his mother. From the bandstand, the tuba player told us that his mother vividly recalled attending movies in the theater not so long ago -- the last film that played the Paramount Theater was Godfather II (1974), the year of David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel". Six musicians comprise the Southside Aces -- trumpet, clarinet, electric guitar, sousaphone, drums, and trombone. The performers are virtuosi and flawlessly replicate the sound of classic New Orleans and Dixieland jazz. The concert was wonderful and demonstrates the continued vitality of this sort of music. In general, the sound is complex and requires that the listener remain alert and attend carefully to the filigree of textures and ornamentation. The impression that this music produces is one of three or four skilled musicians all playing simultaneously against a rhythm and percussion backbeat. Each musician seems to be playing a completely different version of the melody and its chorus -- yet, somehow, these various parts all intermesh to produce a coherent, if exceptionally, intricate whole. I'm always mystified by the way that the separate pieces of this sonic puzzle somehow fit together -- each soloist seems to performing a variation on the theme that is wholly distinct and constructed from elements almost completely different from what each other musician is playing at his side. But the result isn't chaos but something like a Bach fugue -- the different parts are all held together by some mysterious legerdemain that, I suppose, musicians can describe and understand but that is beyond my comprehension.
The concert began with the "Boogaloosa Strut', a jaunty uptempo dance tune. This was followed by the standard "Margie" on which the trombone player sang the lyrics. Three movie tunes were, then, presented in succession in homage to the theater venue. These included a gorgeous rendition of "Over the Rainbow" (played by heavily muted horns) and "Hello Dolly" with the trumpet playing growling out the lyrics in the manner of Satchmo's famous version of this show-tune and, then, a macabre and ingenious arrangement of the "Imperial March" from Star Wars -- this is hard to imagine as a New Orleans flavored jazz tune, but the arrangement was excellent, snarky and grotesque. The Aces programmed ten additional tunes, all of them brilliantly performed. There was a "mouse-band" version of "Yacht Club Blues", "Muskrat Ramble," a song that actually has, to my surprise, a fast babble of surreal lyrics (sung by the sousaphone player.). The group has performed at the Bix Beiderbecke festival in Davenport, Iowa and played Bix's "Davenport Blues" as well as a version of the 1899 Scott Joplin tune "Maple Leaf Rag." In addition, the Aces did a version of Ma Rainey's 1922 "C.C. Rider", Sydney Bechet's flamenco-flavored "Le Petite Fleur," and a couple of original songs, written in a style that is a pastiche of classic Dixieland, however tinted, I think, with some sinister sounding film noir elements "Skokie" by Louis Armstrong is a Latin-themed tune that sounds a bit like Duke Ellington scaled-down. (I've never heard the song although it's serpentine principal theme seemed familiar to me. But this is a characteristic of Dixieland jazz -- the music is always surprising in the twists and turns that it takes, but, nonetheless, feels fundamentally familiar and even predictable in certain ways; this is the classicism that is intrinsic to this musical form.) The final tune "Shake it, Break it" pulled out all the stops -- there was a spectacular trombone solo played very, very softly against a sizzle of cymbals, and then, a shouted vocal chorus.
I left the auditorium thinking about my father, the Hall Brothers Emporium of Jazz (the musicians always dressed in black with narrow ties like old-time morticians), and what feel like great and melancholy expanses of time that, when viewed objectively, are really only fading memories of things that happened just yesterday. Music is timeless. We change but it doesn't. Between 1927 and the concert that I attended as a child in 1963, there was a Depression and a World War and rock and roll was invented -- I think the Beatles were touring in 1963. But none of this is really relevant to the music except in tangential way. There's an element of escapism in all of this -- when I ventured out onto the street where the air was cold and moist and the day completely grey, it occurred to me that I hadn't thought about Covid, or cops kneeling on someone's spine or, even, the atrocities in the War in Ukraine for two hours -- I suppose this was a very fine thing indeed.
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