Dixieland Jazz from New Orleans - Imperial Records

George Girard and His New Orleans Five
and Frank Assunto And The Dukes Of Dixieland
featuring Pete Fountain

1959 Imperial Records LP 9086

Titles
George Girard and His New Orleans Five

Side 1
1. I've Found A New Baby
2. Crazy Man Crazy
3. Three Little Words
4. When The Saints Go Marching In
5. Barnyard Blues
6. I Got Rhythm

Frank Assunto And The Dukes Of Dixieland

Side 2
1. Whispering
2. Sweet Georgia Brown
3. Bourbon Street Parade
4. Glory Of Love
5. Slide, Frog, Slide
6. Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

1959 Imperial Records LP-9086 - Dixieland Jazz From New Orleans - Various Artists - Issued in mono only

Side One is George Girard and His New Orleans Five and Side Two is Frank Assunto & Dukes Of Dixieland. Pete played with George off and on after the demise of the Basin Street Six, and full time with the Dukes in this period. Pete may have played on these records, but there is nothing in the liner notes. I'll listen to it and hear if Pete's unique style is there. Any feedback on the line-up of the bands is appreciated.

All titles are from the original LPs on Imperial Records:
- 1954 Imperial Records IMP-3005 - Dixieland Jazz From New Orleans - Frank Assunto & Dukes Of Dixieland
- 1955 Imperial Records IMP-3009 - George Girard Band - George Girard

Liner Notes:

The fascinating fact about Dixieland, our oldest form of jazz, is that it always emerges as a new rage. It seems that each succeeding generation suddenly rediscovers Dixie, and then proceeds to dedicate itself to its revival. To be sure, it never passed from the scene in the first place.

In this curious chain of events can be found the very essence of Dixieland's appeal, and, obviously, the secret of its longevity. It is music which sparkles with a freshness ever new to the ear. As each passing generation basks in the warmth of Dixie's undimmed glow, it is left feeling that here is the real music - a form of music which surely deserves far more recognition. It immediately takes it upon itself to sing Dixieland's praises and thereby inform the world of the vast musical treasure it has uncovered. Thus, a time-old rage is born a-new. And, thus, Dixieland continues to flourish as the vigorous and lusty old timer of American music.

What is there about this type of music which so captivates us all? Some feel that the true strength of Dixieland lies in the freedom of its style. It's an unbridled brand of music which lets the instrumentalists go wherever their mood will take them. The performer is not fenced in by preconceived arrangements and held imprisoned by the printed page. In pure Dixieland, the result is a free flowing style of music which never sounds the same. It may well be that it owes its freshness to the very reliance on improvisation.

Others maintain that Dixieland's charm lies in the warm and familiar feeling the music creates. To be sure, there's an old-shoe comfort in good Dixie, an easy and relaxed atmosphere which leaves its listeners a-glow. This well may be the result of the freedom it allows its performers.

Perhaps the core of Dixieland's widespread appeal consists of the combined strength of these two factors. Dixieland was born out of the turbulent post-Civil War South. It was conceived and cradled in New Orleans. It drew its sustenance from songs of prayer and plantation, from dirge and from dance to emerge as a most unusual musical mixture. It grew into a zesty, happy-go-lucky youth, but one can occasionally sense a plaintive note in its make-up. When Dixie reached manhood it became restless and wandered from its Crescent City home. It went up the Mississippi to answer the lure of the beckoning North - on to St. Louis and from there, to Chicago and Kansas City. It spread across our land and around the world to become America's stalwart contribution to the world of music.

Of course, it took with it the great musicians who fostered its growth in New Orleans for only they could properly perform it in the true tradition of the old Crescent City days.

This album offers two of the best known New Orleans groups noted for their authentic renditions of pure Dixieland. Listen and you, too, will feel that you've just rediscovered Dixie.

George Girard - Dixieland Festival, Volume II - Stomping At The Famous Door - VIK Records

George Girard

Dixieland Festival, Volume II

Stomping At The Famous Door

1956 VIK Records LX-1063

Side One:
1. Mahogany Hall Stomp
2. Chinatown My Chinatown
3. Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans
4. Da-Da Strain
5. St. Louis Blues
6. Sweethearts On Parade

Side Two
1. Original Dixieland One-Step
2. Dark Eyes
3. Wang Wang Blues
4. Mama Don't Allow It
5. Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone
6. Beale Street Blues

Liner Notes:

Conducted by George Girard.
Recorded at the Parisian Room, New Orleans, June 12, 1956.
Recording Engineer: Jepson Miller.
Produced and directed by Herman Diaz, Jr.
Cover photo by Lucky Kaderian
© by Radio Corporation of America, 1956

George Girard And His New Orleans Five

Personnel:
George Girard trumpet
Harry Shields clarinet
Bob Discom piano
Bob Havens trombone
Emile Christian bass
Paul Edward drums

After Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver and the other great jazz stars of that early generation left New Orleans more than thirty-five years ago for greener pastures, the Crescent City seemed to dwindle as a jazz center. Occasionally a musician from New Orleans made his way north to achieve some measure of fame but since New Orleans was no longer a great jazz seedbed he might have picked up almost as much jazz background if he had been born in Cheraw, South Carolina, as Dizzy Gillespie was, or Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as Shorty Rogers was.

But suddenly, after World War II, the town that gave birth to jazz rediscovered its native music and the young musicians of New Orleans came face to face with the startling fact that they had a heritage, the noblest heritage in all jazz. Instead of hustling off to Los Angeles or Chicago or New York to seek their musical fortunes, they stayed at home and began pumping strong new blood into the old New Orleans jazz tradition.

George Girard is one of the brightest stars of this new generation of New Orleans jazzmen. Born in 1930, he started playing his trumpet professionally when he was sixteen. As usual, he began by leaving town to work with traveling bands for a couple of years. But when he came back to rest up and settle his traveler's stomach with some home cooking, he found the town in the throes of a Dixieland revival. Irving Fazola, the great clarinet star of the Bob Crosby band who came home to play out his string before he died at thirty-six in 1949, was giving New Orleans a new reason to remember its great jazz days and the New Orleans Jazz Club was beating the drums and blowing the trumpets for a revival of the great jazz days of the past.

Girard, who had never bothered with Dixie before, was swept up in this local enthusiasm. He sat in with Tony Almerico's band (which can be heard in Vol. 1 of this Dixieland Festival series, VIK LX-1057) and picked up the knack and the repertoire of the Dixielanders. The next year, when he was nineteen, he became the trumpeter in the Basin Street Six, one of the two outstanding young bands formed in New Orleans since the war (the other is the Dukes of Dixieland, featured on VIK LXA-1025). The Basin Street Six had three years of high success but this success brought on more out of town bookings than some of the stay-at-home members wanted to take. So the band broke up. That was when Girard formed his own group. He took it into the Famous Door on Bourbon Street in 1952 and it has been there ever since.

Three of Girard's men have been with him from the start - pianist Bob Discom, drummer Paul Edwards and bassist Emile Christian. Discom has spent all his life in New Orleans but most of his musical career has been concerned with serious music. Girard gave him his first professional job as a jazz pianist. Edwards is an example of the revitalized jazz lodestone that New Orleans had become. A native of Columbus, Ohio, he took such a liking to Dixieland music that he packed up and went to New Orleans to make it his home. His first job there was with this band.

Christian is a direct connecting link with the halcyon days of New Orleans jazz. He played trombone with that pioneering group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Early in the Twenties, he went to England with the ODJB and stayed on for twenty years. Since his return to New Orleans, Christian, who is now fifty-nine, has given up the trombone in favor of the bass.

Clarinetist Harry Shields also provides a connection with the ODJB, although a less direct one. His brother was Larry Shields, the magnificent clarinetist in that early group. Harry, a contemporary of Emile Christian, has spent most of his musical career in New Orleans.

Trombonist Bob Havens, like Paul Edwards, is a young outlander who has been lured to New Orleans by its music. Havens was playing with Ralph Flanagan's band when he first heard Girard's group at the Famous Door. Girard just happened to need a trombone man and Havens was so inspired by the band that he quit Flanagan, sweated out his New Orleans union card and took over the trombone chair at the Famous Door.

These recordings were made during a special performance by Girard's band at the Parisian Room on Royal Street. The tunes are primarily well established Dixieland favorites but a special New Orleans flavor is injected by the inclusion of three numbers closely associated with the town's greatest jazz-playing son, Louis Armstrong - Mahogany Hall Stomp, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans and Sweethearts on Parade.

- JOHN S. WILSON

When The Saints Go Marching In - Camden Records

When The Saints Go Marching In

Featuring Pete Fountain, Al Hirt and Others

Below are the inside covers

1972 RCA Camden Records COS-9018(e)
(Stereo effect reprocessed from monophonic)

Side One
1. When the Saints Go Marching In
2. High Society
3. Farewell Blues
4. Darktown Strutters' Ball
5. Ballin' the Jack
Pete Fountain and Other All Star Dixielanders

Side Two
1. 'Way Down Yonder in New Orleans
2. Muskrat Ramble
3. 12th Street Rag
4. Tin Roof Blues
5. Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey
Pete Fountain and Other All Star Dixielanders

Side Three
1. Original Dixieland One-Step *
2. Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans *
3. Milenberg Joys **
4. Sweethearts on Parader *
* George Girard and His New Orleans Five
** Tony Almerico's Dixieland All-Stars

Side Four
1. Down by the Riverside
2. Jazz Me Blues
3. Cornet Chop Suey
Al Hirt and his Band
4. Just a Closer Walk with Thee
Al Hirt, Trumpet, with Orchestra Conducted by Marty Paich

Liner Notes:

WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN (2 LP, Gatefold Cover)

Dixieland, the music that roared out of the South and became a major part of an authentic American art form called jazz, has itself always been a happy blend of a variety of musical strains. Conceived in cosmopolitan New Orleans, rendered street-wise in the notorious Storyville district, the precocious music, alternately "hot" or "blue," but always alive, was not to be contained in its birthplace. When Storyville closed forever in 1917, the new sound expanded rapidly beyond the Crescent City.

A popular music in the truest sense (it sprang from the work songs, religious "shouts" and gospel songs of emancipated slaves combined with voodoo rhythms and street music, plus elements of multi-faceted Creole sounds), Dixieland was performed and perfected at public functions - funerals, picnics, political rallies, dances, lawn parties, Mardi Gras. And because it was and still is "people's music," it encompasses the full range of human feeling. Like poetry, it is best when heard live so one can feel it.

The early poets of this music, the "giants" Charles "King" Bolden, "Bunk" Johnson and the legendary Louis Armstrong are gone, but new men have emerged who add to a growing tradition. Two of the best of the new poets are on this album. More importantly they play the music the way it is supposed to be heard - live. They perform, not in the rather antiseptic surroundings of a sound studio, but in the steaming clubs that also support the tradition.

AI Hirt and Pete Fountain are the "big" names on this album, but there are others who are considered all pro by their peers. For example, listen to George Girard and his New Orleans Five play the Original Dixieland One-Step, Sweethearts on Parade or Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.

Girard and his colleagues (who are also heard on the Pete Fountain sides) swing in the old style in their version of the One-Step. This cut features a fine series of solos, one in particular by clarinetist Harry Shields. Not once does the One-Step lag, and the live audience reaction at the end fits perfectly. On Sweethearts on Parade listen for the clear enunciation of the solos. The pleasant enough vocal serves as a bridge for the crisp play of Shields and the fluid clarity of trombonist Bob Havens.

Tony Almerico's Dixieland All-Stars contribute a rousing Milenberg Joys with audience vibrations surfacing in the background, which act as a spur to a fine group of musicians. Tune in to drummer Johnny Castaing's first solo.

Pete Fountain's group plays a string of the best known and revered numbers in the Dixieland repertoire. Pete and his men make you feel the room's excitement as they swing into such evergreens as Muskrat Ramble, High Society, 'Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, 12th Street Rag and the title song of this album, When the Saints Go Marching In.

But the big man on this album is none other than AI Hirt. Al, a big tree of a man, certainly has his roots in New Orleans. No one can see him or watch his antics on records, so his popularity can only be ascribed to professional competence and technique. Both are in abundance on this album. Hirt has described his style as "... the Nashville sound. It's a combination of pop, country western and jazz." Hirt sticks to Dixieland classics here. Listen to him handle Louis Armstrong's Cornet Chop Suey with deftness and power. Or feel the pre-funeral dirge, Just a Closer Walk with Thee. Follow him as he builds and swings in Down by the Riverside. The discipline is there, but so is the feeling.

So there you have it. The best of Dixieland played by the best and performed before live audiences in the city where it all began. All you have to do is join in.

Martin R. Miller