William Warfield in performance with The Jim Cullum Jazz Band

Riverwalk Jazz presents a two-part special, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band’s acclaimed jazz transcription of George Gershwin’s American folk opera Porgy and Bess. Theater legend William Warfield, the award winning bass-baritone famous for his memorable stage role as Porgy, appears as narrator in this encore presentation.

DuBose Heyward, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, wrote the novel Porgy in the early 20s, painting a story of love and honor based on characters from the Charleston waterfront scene. George Gershwin read Porgy in 1926, fell in love with the story and immediately wrote to Heyward inviting him to collaborate on an opera based on the novel.

Gershwin received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera to write a grand opera in 1930 and was free to select the libretto. While Gershwin was impressed with the Met’s offer, he knew that the venue would present formidable problems to his mounting an opera based on Porgy. At the time, the Met’s doors were closed to African-American performers and Gershwin was firm on using an all-black cast.

For a few years, Gershwin searched for another story. Nothing appealed to his interest like Porgy, and he refused to present it in blackface, as was the practice of the time. Meanwhile, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, still basking in the success of their landmark musical Show Boat, made an attractive offer to Heyward for the musical rights. The popular entertainer Al Jolson was to play Porgy and the producers planned to turn the book into a musical comedy with a cast in blackface. The pressure forced Gershwin and Heyward to move forward and announce their intention to compose a folk opera based on Heyward’s novel—and the groundbreaking news that it would be performed on Broadway with an African-American cast.

Sheet music cover for "My Man's Gone Now," 1935

Late in 1933 Gershwin began to work on Porgy and Bess. He visited Carolina churches, nightclubs and prayer meetings, immersing himself in the culture. Meanwhile, Heyward and Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics. Gershwin’s score brilliantly combines popular and classical forms, bringing together elements of opera, jazz and folk music.

Gershwin was quoted in the New York Times in 1935:

“Because Porgy and Bess deals with Negro life in America it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in the opera and I have adapted my method to utilize the drama, the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor, the dancing and the irrepressible high spirits of the race. If doing this, I have created a new form, which combines opera with theater, this new form has come quite naturally out of the material.”

To Gershwin’s great disappointment, Porgy and Bess opened at New York’s Alvin Theatre on October 10, 1935 to mixed reviews and closed in less than six months. Gershwin died in 1937 at the age of 38, before Porgy and Bess became recognized as one of the great artistic accomplishments of American culture in the 20th century.

1935 Curtain Call at the Alvin Theater. Photo wosu.org

The Jim Cullum Jazz Band began to create an original jazz transcription of Porgy and Bess in late 1984 with arrangements by the band’s pianist, John Sheridan. The work premiered with highly favorable reviews at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio in October, 1985, and was released on compact disc by CBS Masterworks in 1987.

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George and Ira Gerswhin with author DuBose Heyward 1934;

courtesy The Ohio State University Libraries

Poster for Shall We Dance?

The great masters of American songwriting created some of their finest works for romantic movie musicals, and many  originally staged on Broadway made their way to the silver screen. Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, and the very prolific Harry Warren were all major contributors to Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s.

Virtually all of these composers were influenced in their work to a greater or lesser degree by the jazz they heard all around them. And, there are jazzy elements in the movie scores themselves, especially in the hot dance arrangements, some of which show the clear influence of the seminal recordings from the previous decade by jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and others. It’s a fair statement that Fred Astaire’s feet moved in a way unthinkable without jazz culture.

The influence flowed in the opposite direction, back in toward jazz itself. There is a long history of jazz musicians adopting these popular movie love songs as their own, transforming them with their hot swinging rhythm and “blue” tonality. Through the voice and trumpet playing of Louis Armstrong, for example, the pedestrian “You Are My Lucky Star”—composed by Nacio H. Brown and Arthur Freed for the movie musical Broadway Melody of 1936—morphs into something majestically syncopated and probably not envisioned by its creators.

Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee (1934)

This week, Riverwalk Jazz presents a Valentine’s Day concert of classic love songs side by side with soundtrack clips of love scenes from the films that made them popular hits. Singers Nina Ferro and Rebecca Kilgore join The Jim Cullum Jazz Band on stage at The Landing to perform love songs including: Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek”  from the 1935 RKO picture Top Hat starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” was written by George and Ira Gershwin for the 1937 RKO picture, Shall We Dance?, also with Fred and Ginger. That year, the song was nominated for an Academy Award.

Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” was introduced by Fred Astaire and Claire Luce in the 1932 stage musical The Gay Divorce. In the 1934 movie version, Fred’s dance partner was Ginger Rogers.

“Time After Time” was composed in 1947 by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne for the film It Happened in Brooklyn. In the film, it is sung by Frank Sinatra and reprised by Kathryn Grayson.

Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes In Arms (1939)

“Where or When” with words by Lorenz Hart and music by Richard Rodgers was introduced by Ray Heatherton and Mitzi Green in the1937 stage musical Babes in Arms. In 1939, Doug McPhail, Betty Jaynes and Judy Garland sang it in the movie version.

“Embraceable You” was composed by George and Ira Gershwin for the 1930 stage musical Girl Crazy, introduced by Ginger Rogers and Allan Kearns. In the 1943 movie version, it was sung by Judy Garland.

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1937 movie poster for Shall We Dance. Image moviegoods.com

Rhythmakers 1932 Re-issue Image courtesy EPM/Jazz Archives copyright 1997

The country was deadlocked in the Great Depression in 1932 when an unlikely group of musicians came together in a New York recording studio. There was a cabaret singer from Cleveland, a piano ace from Harlem, a Crescent City trumpeter, and a clarinetist from St. Louis. Some black, some white—they had one common denominator—stellar jazz talent. Recording under the name The Rhythmakers, this multi-racial, mega-talented studio band produced a hot, driving sound.

It all started with a routine business trip to Cleveland for jazz impresario Irving Mills, who discovered and signed the quirky, new singing talent—Billy Banks. Mills brought his protégé to New York to headline at Harlem’s popular nightspot, Connie’s Inn. To promote Banks and his New York engagement, Mills hired guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon to put together a band for a series of records starring Billy Banks.

Drummer Zutty Singleton Photo courtesy Red Hot Jazz Archive

And what a band it was! Condon assembled a remarkable gathering of jazz titans. Trumpeter Henry ‘Red’ Allen, bass players Al Morgan and Pops Foster, and drummer Zutty Singleton were all from New Orleans. Condon hired fellow Chicagoan, pianist Joe Sullivan; Missourian Jack Bland on guitar; and the self-styled jazz clarinetist Pee Wee Russell. For the later sessions, Condon added stride piano master Fats Waller and a 27-year-old trombone wizard named Tommy Dorsey.

Over time, Billy Banks’ gender-bending vocals on The Rhythmakers’ tracks have been famously mistaken for those of the 1930s bandleader, the very female Una Mae Carlisle. Banks had a parallel career as a female impersonator on the vaudeville stage when he was not fronting jazz bands.

This week, trumpeter Duke Heitger and guitarist Clint Baker join The Jim Cullum Jazz Band on Riverwalk Jazz to celebrate the passionate spirit of The Rhythmakers.

Tommy Dorsey Photo courtesy allaboutjazz.com

Legally imposed racial segregation enforced throughout the country made it impossible for The Rhythmakers to perform in public in the ’30s. American audiences were simply not ready to see black and white performers on stage together. As a result, The Rhythmakers remained strictly a recording band.

Today, these Rhythmakers tracks, laid down in four separate sessions, are highly prized by musicians, record collectors, jazz writers and fans. Though the sessions engendered a spirit of lighthearted fun, a brilliant, fiery chemistry evolved between Pee Wee Russell and Henry ‘Red’ Allen that reflected the truly uninhibited, improvisatory nature of jazz.

"Margie" sheet music, 1920 Image: freehandmusic.com

The propulsive, rhythmic feel of the recordings is fueled by the driving rhythm section of the New Orleans men, plus the use of two unusual strummed instruments played by Eddie Condon and Jack Bland. They were lutes with plectrum necks made by the Vega Banjo Company. Vega had manufactured these unusual hybrid instruments in the 1920s so that jazz banjo players like Condon could play a guitar-like instrument without having to learn new fingering.

After making The Rhythmakers recordings and headlining at Connie’s Inn, Billy Banks worked around New York for a short while, then went on tour in Europe, eventually settling in Tokyo, Japan.

Henry "Red" Allen, 1935 Photo courtesy Duke University

Three decades later in 1964, on tour with the Eddie Condon All-Stars in Japan, Pee Wee Russell had a reunion with Billy Banks. Pee Wee had not seen Banks since The Rhythmakers sessions in 1932 in New York. The story goes that after an initial greeting, Pee Wee asked Banks, “So—you got any more gigs?”

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Rhythmakers 1932 Reissue Image: EPM/Jazz Archives copyright 1997

Ron Hockett, Howard Elkins, Catherine Russell and host David Holt. Pearl Stable 2010 Photo by Jamie Karutz

You might say that Catherine Russell was born with music in her blood. Her father

Swing era bandleader Luis Russell and his daughter, Catherine Photo courtesy Catherinerussell.net

Luis Russell was a star bandleader and arranger of the Swing Era; and music director for Louis Armstrong on his rise to stardom. Her mother, the multi-instrumentalist Carline Ray, played guitar with the iconic WWII-era group, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and was Mercer Ellington’s bassist and vocalist.

Long before launching her own solo career in jazz, Catherine Russell was a ‘first call’ backup singer—working with artists in just about every genre of music from pop to rock, from blues to country. Ms. Russell has performed or recorded with an impressive array of trend-setting artists, including Rosanne Cash, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Feinstein, Madonna, Al Green and Isaac Hayes. At heart, she is a genuine jazz and blues singer who can sing virtually anything. Her voice is a soulful instrument that radiates power.

Since the release of her first album in 2006, rave reviews have poured in from the Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, and Down Beat. Her most recent album, Inside This Heart of Mine, has topped the jazz radio charts.

Catherine Russell Pearl Stable, San Antonio 2010 Photo by Jamie Karutz

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, Catherine Russell joins The Jim Cullum Jazz Band with Dick Hyman on piano, on stage at the historic Pearl Stable in San Antonio. They present a selection of songs from Catherine’s recent chart-topping albums in new interpretations conceived in collaboration with bandleader Cullum and jazz legend Hyman. And Catherine talks about a range of subjects, from her beginnings as the daughter of a pioneering woman of jazz, to what she looks for in choosing songs and how she feels the spirit of her father in her music.

The work of the great American composer and songwriter Alec Wilder is not often heard on our show, but tonight Catherine presents one of his gems, “South to a Warmer Place”—in a stunning duet with Dick Hyman. The rich harmonic textures of this song give Catherine and Dick a chance to display their creative power and performing brilliance.

Mike Pittsley, Howard Elkins, Jim Cullum Jr., Ron Hockett and Catherine Russell at Pearl Stable, San Antonio 2010 Photo by Jamie Karutz

Another outstanding piece is “Troubled Waters,” from Ivie Anderson with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which Catherine and the band give their own heart-stopping rendition. The old blues, “Spoonful” from Howlin’ Wolf gets an interesting treatment with Catherine’s vocal, Jim Cullum on cornet, Howard Elkins’ banjo, and Mike Waskievich’s antique ‘flower drum.’

Ron Hockett, Catherine Russell, Dick Hyman, David Holt Pearl Stable, San Antonio 2010 Photo by Jamie Karutz

Dick Hyman pays tribute to the Luis Russell Orchestra with “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” the first tune recorded by Louis Armstrong with The Luis Russell Orchestra led by Catherine’s father.

Catherine Russell with Dick Hyman on piano and the full Jim Cullum Jazz Band close the show with a crowd-pleasing Bessie Smith number, “Kitchen Man.”

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Catherine Russell and pianist Dick Hyman, 2010 Photo by Jamie Karutz

Tatum in action at New York's 52nd Street, courtesy Duncan Scheidt

Squarely grounded in the ‘stride’ piano style of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, Art Tatum took solo jazz piano to new heights of harmonic sophistication and breathtaking execution.

Nearly blind from infancy, Tatum learned to play by ear as a toddler. Irresistibly drawn to the piano, Tatum would place his fingers on the keys depressed by player-piano rolls in his mother’s collection. As a boy, he entertained his friends by replicating the sound of a bumblebee or an airplane on the piano.

In 1932—at the age of 22—Tatum moved to New York as singer Adelaide Hall’s accompanist and began recording commercially, both in solo performance and with small groups. Although few pianists dared to copy his challenging style directly, Tatum’s innovative re-harmonization of standard tunes had a direct impact on the shape of the harmonic language later developed by the be-bop movement of the 1940s.

Art Tatum, arranger/pianist Phil Moore and others at The Club Downbeat, NYC Photo by William Gottlieb

Art Tatum didn’t talk much about himself, but other musicians who admired his playing made up for it. One night in 1938, after Tatum dropped by to hear his mentor Fats Waller play, Waller told the audience, “I just play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.”

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, actor Vernel Bagneris offers a glimpse of Art Tatum through the words of jazz musicians who knew him—bandleader and pianist Count Basie, Maurice Waller—son of Fats, guitarist Les Paul, blues singer Al Hibbler and drummer Louis Bellson.

"Fine and Dandy" sheet music Arnett-Delonais Co.,1908 Image from ragtimepiano.ca

Concord recording artist Shelly Berg joins The Jim Cullum Jazz Band in new arrangements of the Tatum classics “Tea for Two,” “Humoresque” and “Willow Weep for Me.” And Berg tackles Tatum’s famous showcase piano solos “Tiger Rag,” “Sweet Lorriane” and “Fine and Dandy.”

On the radio show, in response to being asked how to understand Art Tatum’s contribution to jazz, Shelly Berg says, “Babe Ruth’s record has been broken, but after all these years nobody has ever eclipsed Art Tatum.”

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Tatum in action at New York’s 52nd St. Photo by Duncan Scheidt

Ma Rainey and her band, 1923 Photo courtesy britannica.com

Long before Mamie Smith had the first hit recording of the blues in 1921, blues shouters in traveling tent shows stirred things up across the South. Nothing could draw a crowd like the spectacle of Ma Rainey moaning the blues on a hot summer night.

Tent show ad featuring Ma Rainey & the Alabama Minstrels. Image courtesy bluesimages.com

Following the harvests throughout the South, tent shows brought vaudeville to black audiences along dusty back roads. Out of lumber camps and river settlements, the working-class poor traveled by foot or packed into train cars for the thrill of seeing live entertainment.

Under a canvas big top, beneath a southern moon, in the early decades of the 20th century, blues shouters belted out songs like “He May Be Your Man but He Comes to See Me Sometimes.” Blues Queens were the stars of traveling troupes, like the Georgia Smart Set, Tolliver’s Circus and Musical Extravaganza, and Ma Rainey’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels. A typical “tent show” included a hot rhythm band, chorus dancers, comedy sketches, acrobats, animal acts and sometimes sideshows. The headliners were “black pearls,” Blues Queens, covered in rhinestones and bugle beads, who closed the show with a star turn, shouting the blues. The biggest stars of them all were “the gold throat mamas”—Ma Rainey and her protégé Bessie Smith.

Victoria Spivey Photo courtesy Red Hot Jazz Archive

The blues numbers Ma Rainey sang weren’t only about lost love and sexual innuendo. She sang the blues about devastating floods, a blight on the crops, being broke, or going to prison. As the blues migrated to big cities in the North and became popular with mainstream audiences, no one kept more closely to the themes of Ma Rainey’s country blues than Victoria Spivey. In 1929, Spivey had a hit with a chilling number called “Dirty T.B. Blues.”

Ma Rainey never achieved the mainstream success of younger blues shouters— Alberta Hunter, Bessie Smith or Ida Cox. But Rainey was immortalized in a piece published in 1932, by Harlem Renaissance poet Sterling Brown, excerpted here:

Ma Rainey Photo courtesy www.qmh.us

“When Ma Rainey comes to town

Folks from anyplace, miles aroun’

From Cape Giradeau to Poplar Bluff,

Flocks in to hear Ma do her stuff;

Comes flivverin’ in, or ridin’ mules,

Or packed in trains, picknickin’ fools…

That’s what it’s like fo’ miles on down,

To the New Orleans delta an’ Mobile town,

When Ma hits anywheres aroun’.”

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, actor Vernel Bagneris and singer Topsy Chapman join The Jim Cullum Jazz Band in a tribute to Ma Rainey, her Rabbit Foot Minstrels and blues shouters of the Deep South in the 1920s.

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Ma Rainey Photo courtesy www.qmh.us

Jim Cullum on cornet with his high school jazz band. Their coach, Jim Cullum Sr. on sax.

In the 1950s when almost everyone else his age was listening to Elvis Presley, Jim Cullum locked onto the sounds of early jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and Jelly Roll Morton. Jim’s lifelong passion has been researching and performing repertoire from an often overlooked, but increasingly popular era of American music—jazz and popular song from the 1920s and 30s. Jim’s original musical arrangements of this classic jazz repertoire have captured the acclaim of critics, aficionados and new generations of avid fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Dick Hyman

Jim Cullum at Pearl Stable, 2010. Photo by Jamie Karutz

This week we honor The Jim Cullum Jazz Band and celebrate its 50th Anniversary in a concert recorded live at The Tobin Estate at Oakwell in San Antonio.  Bandleader and cornetist Jim Cullum Jr. traces the history of the Band through five decades of performances at home and on the road, from Carnegie Hall—to a bull ring in Mexico—and concert halls in Siberia.  For our Golden Jubilee Concert, the Band is joined by former members pianist John Sheridan, trombonist Mike Pittsley and special guest, piano legend Dick Hyman. This celebratory performance features the Band’s signature arrangements of music composed by George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael and Boots Douglas. Jim recalls luminaries such as Clark Terry, Lionel Hampton and Benny Carter, who joined his Band onstage for over two decades of Riverwalk Jazz radio shows on public radio stations across the country.

Clark Terry

Benny Carter

Savion Glover

Jim Cullum playing for Louis Armstrong, 1965

At an early age, Jim Jr. developed a secret passion for his father’s collection of classic jazz 78rpm records by Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden. Listening to early jazz greats on his sister’s portable record player behind the closed doors of his own bedroom, young Jim Jr. memorized Armstrong and Beiderbecke solos by whistling them. Jim was barely in his teens when he plunked down seven dollars for a pawn shop cornet, and then went on to form a 4-piece jazz band coached by his father. Jim Cullum Jr’s talent as a promoter won the ensemble their first gig playing outside a local Dairy Queen. Jim says, “We got four lines of credit and got paid in ice cream cones, milkshakes and hamburgers.”

Jim Cullum Sr. and Jr. with The Happy Jazz Band on the San Antonio River

A few years later, father and son formed the seven-piece Happy Jazz Band. By 1963 the Cullums and a group of San Antonio investors founded the first Landing jazz nightclub on the San Antonio Riverwalk in the basement of the Nix Hospital building. A year later the band began broadcasting on local radio, “squirrel cage radio,” as Jim calls it, eventually lead to a regular show on the much larger, 50,00-watt clear-channel AM station, WOAI. Jim says, “It was a powerful signal. One time we got a post card from Bing Crosby who’d heard our live broadcast from San Antonio aboard a yacht in Acapulco Bay.”

Jim Cullum Jazz Band with Guests Catherine Russell and Dick Hyman. Photo by Jamie Karutz

Cat Russell. Photo by Jamie Karutz

A strictly acoustic 7-piece ensemble, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band has earned a reputation as a premiere traditional ensemble in the US and abroad, specializing in a highly individual sound developed from pre-World War II jazz stylings.  Jim’s father,  Jim Cullum Sr., was an accomplished musician who played clarinet and saxophone in bands led by Jack Teagarden and Jimmy Dorsey. Jim Sr. had close friendships with members of the Bob Crosby Bob Cats—Bob Haggart, Yank Lawson, Billy Butterfield and Ray Bauduc—who would later influence Jim Jr’s approach to the music.

The Jim Cullum Jazz Band at The Carver Center, SA

In our show this week, Jim shares high points of the Band’s career, including appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Wolftrap, on the PBS TV series Austin City Limits, European tours, and the Band’s many concert trips to Mexico with stops in Guadalajara, Monterrey, Mexico City and the annual Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato. Jim also tells the story of the Band’s first Mexico tour with an entourage of band wives and girl friends in a broken-down limo converted into a band bus—culminating with a concert in a bull ring, broadcast live across the country.

Russian Billboard of The Jim Cullum Jazz Band

Another one of a kind event was their April 2007 tour of Russia. In 17 days the Band played 9 concert dates across 5 time zones from the Baltic Sea to far eastern Siberia, traveling by air, bus, and 2 days aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway. Jazz-savvy Russian audiences were wildly enthusiastic everywhere they played.

Turk Murphy and Jim Cullum at Carnegie Hall

A major milestone in their five decades of performing was the Band’s participation in a tribute concert to Turk Murphy at Carnegie Hall in January 1987. Organized by Jim Cullum, the concert featured the JCJB, the Hot Antic Jazz Band of France, and Turk’s San Francisco Jazz Band. Jim says, “The whole jazz community admired Turk for his integrity, his persistence, and his music. The idea of the concert was to honor not only Turk but the whole San Francisco jazz community. It was an absolutely thrilling event.”

Sheet music for "Summertime"

In 1985, Jim and the Band undertook an adaptation of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This work was recorded for CBS Records and later for the Riverwalk Jazz public radio series with narration by stage legend William Warfield, who had played the title role in a 1950s’ Broadway production.  Jim says, “All my life I’ve admired the work of George Gershwin and particularly Porgy and Bess.  No one had ever done a jazz transcription of the entire opera, so we set out to do this in 1985. John Sheridan did a lot of the arranging.”

The Band rehearsing Porgy and Bess with William Warfield

Jim Cullum also reminisces about his family’s close relationship with fellow Texan Jack Teagarden on our show this week. Jim says, “Teagarden brought jazz to San Antonio. He was from Vernon, Texas up in the panhandle and came here when he was 15. He joined the musician’s union and started playing at The Horn Palace. Jazz was so new—King Oliver had yet to make his records, and Louis Armstrong was still a kid in New Orleans. And yet, Jack Teagarden was playing jazz at The Horn Palace.”

Jim Cullum at Pearl Stable. Photo by Jamie Karutz

To close out their 50th Anniversary concert at The Tobin Estate at Oakwell, Jim Cullum selects a piece the Band played for standing-room-only audiences throughout Russia. It’s a composition by a little-known San Antonio drummer in the 1930s—Boots Douglas.  Jim and the Band give a hot jazz treatment that’s all their own to The Raggle Taggle.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Jim Cullum at Pearl Stable, 2010.  Photo by Jamie Kaurtz

Bandleader Jim Cullum, 2009. Photo by Jennifer Whitney, SA Express News

Often at late night jam sessions, when the bartender is about to give “last call,” the best jazz of the evening is played. Those who stick around get rewarded with some of the hardest swinging, most creative music there is. It was on a night like this, at the end of the Sacramento Jazz Festival, that we captured these energized performances.

In spite of a long weekend of non-stop playing, all the musicians were up for this session at the historic Crest Theater in Sacramento, and unleashed a high-voltage concert of hot jazz—often with as many as ten players on stage. Among the guests that night were some of the leading lights of today’s classic jazz scene.

Trombonist Bill Allred. Photo courtesy billallred.com

Trombonist and bandleader Bill Allred is based in Central Florida. He was a member of the Wild Bill Davison All-Stars and appeared with Jack Teagarden, Billy Butterfield, Al Hirt, Clark Terry and many others. Floridians remember Bill as the bandleader and entertainment producer at Rosie O’Grady’s Emporium at Church Street Station in Orlando. Currently, he leads the Bill Allred Classic Jazz Band, a favorite at jazz festivals and parties worldwide. The band is noted for performing rarely-heard masterworks of jazz arranging, especially those of Matty Matlock and the “Paducah Patrol.” Bill’s powerful trombone style is reminiscent of the great Abram ‘Abe’ Lincoln.

Jon-Erik Kellso. Photo courtesy kellsojazz.com

Trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso hails from Detroit. Early associations included James Dapogny’s Chicago Jazz Band and appearances on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. After a move to New York City in 1989 to join Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks, Jon performed and recorded with lions like, Ralph Sutton, Howard Alden, Marty Grosz, Milt Hinton and Dick Hyman; and backed vocalists Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur and Leon Redbone. Jazz critic Owen Cordle wrote, “Kellso has a fluent gift of melody and a knack for spicing it up with a Roy Eldridge-like rasp, a Howard McGhee-like excitability, and Rex Stewart-like tonal effects.” Currently, Jon leads The Ear Regulars every Sunday at the Ear Inn, a Manhattan restaurant.

Drummer and bandleader Hal Smith. Photo jazzmusiccruises.com

Bandleader and drummer Hal Smith is based in California. He is a specialist in historically-informed Chicago-style drumming, but also enjoys playing Western Swing and “rockabilly” styles. Hal has appeared with legends including the Lawson-Haggart Jazz Band, Dukes of Dixieland, Turk Murphy’s Jazz Band, Doc Cheatham, Wild Bill Davison, Billy Butterfield and many others. These days, jazz fans frequently hear Hal with the Butch Thompson Trio, the Carl Sonny Leyland Trio and the Yerba Buena Stompers.

In addition to his record releases on Jazzology, Stomp Off and Arbors, Hal has produced several historical CDs for various labels. And Hal frequently writes about the music he loves, and is active in America’s Finest City Dixieland Jazz Society in San Diego.

Duke Ellington Orchestra recording of "Limehouse Blues." Image mikesnoise.typepad.com

Many familiar jam session favorites are on the bill for this week’s Last Call Late Night Jam, including “Limehouse Blues,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “That’s a Plenty,” and “How Come You Do Me Like You Do”—all played without formal arrangement, “off the cuff” and totally “in the moment.”

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Crest Theater marquee, Sacramento.  Photo courtesy flickr.com

Still photo from 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Photo courtesy totalfilm.com

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was a best selling book in the year 1900.  It appeared as a stage play in 1902 under the simplified name The Wizard of Oz. And the 1939 Warner Brothers movie adaptation, starring Judy Garland with Bert Lahr, Jack Haley and Ray Bolger, and featuring a magnificent music score by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, remains an icon of pop culture. Like other popular songwriters of his generation, jazz was a key component in everything Harold Arlen composed.

Harold Arlen early publicity photo. Photo courtest last.fm

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz comes to life as Broadway actor Vernel Bagneris portrays all the characters of Oz in a new script for radio based on the original L. Frank Baum book. And the brilliance of Harold Arlen’s art as a songwriter is displayed in new jazz arrangements and performances by The Jim Cullum Jazz Band, of Arlen’s music from the movie score.

Vernel Bagneris. Photo courtesy Riverwalk Jazz

“Delightful madness…is how I would describe the experience of my role in the Riverwalk Jazz production of the Wizard. In a studio setting, holding on to the sound and vocal inflections of different characters would be challenging for any actor. But, in front of a live audience, playing all of the parts was sheer lunacy. Luckily, ‘The Landing’ crowd embraced the audacious fun that the band and I were having, and cheered us on to the end.  For that, I’m still grateful.”

More recently, Bagneris finished working as assistant director and choreographer for Taylor Hackford’s musical Louis Prima and Keely Smith Live at the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles. He also has parts in two films, a comedy called Welcome to Academia and a drama The Way of War.

In the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum explains what he was hoping to achieve with his tale:

Author L. Frank Baum. Photo courtesy commons.wikimedia.org

“…the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children of today.  It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale; its new wonderment and joy are retained, and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”

Illustrator WW Denslow. Photo courtesy oz-central.com

Critics of the time lavished praise on L. Frank Baum’s Wizard, and on the 154 illustrations by W.W. Denslow. It was 1900, when Dorothy first clicked her heels, longed for home and won her way into the hearts of children everywhere—and their parents, too.

With original jazz arrangements by The Jim Cullum Jazz Band and a tour de force performance by Vernel Bagneris, the Riverwalk Jazz Wizard is sure to please.

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Composer Harold Arlen. Photo courtesy of S.A Music Company

Show Boat playbill. Image courtesy of Jeffery Jarrett, Ph.D Dept of Management Science, CBA, University of Rhode Island.

“The scene is a glorious summer day on the levee at Natchez on the Mississippi River. The year is 1887. Gliding on the still water … gleaming in the sunlight, the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theater sails into view.”
Show Boat, Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber. Photo courtesy State Historical Society of Wisconsin Visual Archives.

From this bucolic opening in her sweeping novel, Show Boat, the Pulitzer prize-winning author Edna Ferber went on to tell a richly romantic story of youthful hope and human disappointment set against serious themes of racism, failed marriage and addiction.

Placed in the American South in the early days of the 20th century, Ferber’s epic novel inspired the ground-breaking Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein Broadway musical of the same name in 1927. With his stage interpretation of Show Boat, Jerome Kern elevated American musical theater which had been dominated by frothy musical comedy “revues” and melodramatic operettas.

Jerome Kern. Photo courtesy Jerome Kern, His Life and Music.

In Show Boat, Kern dealt with realistic themes of human life. Kern’s Show Boat broke theatrical conventions in several ways. It was among the first Broadway productions to fully integrate the story line with the musical numbers. And in a radical move, Jerome Kern presented the first cast that freely integrated black and white players on stage.

One of the great vocal artists of his time, William Warfield played the dockhand ‘Joe’ in the 1951 MGM movie adaptation of Show Boat. Warfield’s bass baritone became so deeply associated with “Ol’Man River,” that it is immediately recognizable as his theme song as well as the signature composition of the Kern musical. In a 1995 interview in San Antonio, Mr. Warfield talked about his recording of “Ol’ Man River” for the 1951 film, remarkable because it was captured on the first take.

The music in Jerome Kern’s score of Show Boat has been much loved by jazz artists from Artie Shaw and Bud Freeman to Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Petersen.

Stage scene from Show Boat, 1927. Photo courtesy Assumption College The E Pluribus Unum Project

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, William Warfield is heard in an Encore Presentation joining The Jim Cullum Jazz Band as narrator in a 1995 production of Show Boat, combining The Jim Cullum Jazz Band’s original jazz transcription of the Kern score with a script based on the Ferber novel.

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Stage and screen legend William Warfield as ‘Joe’ in MGM’s 1951 movie adaptation of Show Boat.  Photo courtesy William Carter