What's the earliest recording of Alphonse Picou playing High Socie

[medjuck]

Listening to Barney Bigard playing it on the new Mosaic Pops collection got me thinking about this.

Edited July 24, 2014 by medjuck

[jeffcrom]

He played it on his first recording session - the Kid Rena session for the Delta label: August 21, 1940. Actually, to be totally accurate, it was recorded on an acetate disc one week earlier, August 14, at a rehearsal for the Delta session. He was 61 at that first recording session. The entire session and the rehearsal acetates (which in some ways sound better than the studio recordings) are on the American Music CD Prelude to the Revival, Vol. 2.

The Delta session is often criticized for Kid Rena's "disappointing" trumpet playing; in his prime, he was said to be at the level of Buddy Petit, Chris Kelly, or maybe even Armstrong. But I like it for what it is - a straightforward New Orleans lead. The problem with the session is that there are two clarinets, who step all over each other. Louis "Big Eye" Nelson Delisle is the other clarinetist.) I blame the only picture of the Buddy Bolden band, which shows two clarinets. It's Picou playing the "High Society" solo, though.

Edited July 24, 2014 by jeffcrom

[medjuck]

So I guess he created the solo (apparently based on a piccolo solo) long before he recorded it. I've read that almost everyone else playing it copied his solo and I think there are many recordings by others before 1940. I always presumed he recorded it in the late teens.

[jeffcrom]

There was next to no jazz played by black jazz bands recorded before the "breakthrough" year of 1923. (Kid Ory's 1921 recordings were the major exception.) Most of the New Orleans musicians who recorded in the 1920s were those who went north to Chicago or New York. There were some excellent recordings made in the Crescent City in the twenties (Sam Morgan, Louis Dumaine, Jones-Collins Astoria Hot Eight, etc.), but the record companies missed more than they caught - many great New Orleans musicians who stayed in Louisiana didn't get recorded until the 1940s, 1950s, or even the 1960s. And of course, some legendary ones, like Buddy Petit and Chris Kelly (two trumpet players mentioned above) never recorded at all. When Picou did start to record in the 1940s, he did at least record with some frequency for 20 years or so.

But, yes, Picou is generally credited with adapting the written piccolo solo to clarinet, and making it an essential part of the tune. I think that Johnny Dodds' 1923 version with King Oliver is the first on record.

[JSngry]

Ok, I need/want to know/learn this - I've gleamished the most basic origins of "High Society" the composition, but what documentation of it is there in its original form, which I guess was a march or a rag?

And who was Porter Steele?

[jazztrain]

A reference on line suggests that the Porter Steele below may be the one in question.

The following extracts are from "The Achievements of the Class of 1902, Yale College, From Birth to the Year 1912."

>>>

Porter Steele 

Partner in the firm of Steele, DeFriese & Steele, lawyers, 
32 Liberty Street, New York City 

Residence, 33 Monroe Place, Brooklyn, N. Y. 

Bom December 12, 1880, in Natchez, Miss., the son of Judge 
Hiram R. Steele, a lawyer, and Mary E. (Porter) Steele (died 
May 25, 1910). He is of English descent. His great-great- 
great-grandfather, Rev. Stephen Steele, was graduated at 
Yale in 1717, two brothers, Roswell Hiram Steele, 1908, and 
Charles Messinger Steele, 1910, and a cousin, Albert Aston, 
1905. 

Prepared at Brooklyn Polytechnic Preparatory School, 
where he belonged to the musical clubs. In college he was 
leader of the University Orchestra and the University Band 
Junior and Senior years and a member of the New Haven 
Symphony Orchestra. He received second colloquy appoint- 
ments. 

He is unmarried. 

On graduation he entered the Columbia Law School, 
where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and 
Phi Delta Phi. In 1905 he entered the law office of 
Steele, DeFriese & Frothingham, his father's firm, and 
in 1908 was admitted to the firm under the name of 
Steele, DeFriese & Steele. Aside from his profession 
he has continued to devote a great deal of time to music, 
composing instrumental and vocal pieces of both seri- 
ous and popular themes, and conducting musical plays. 
A complete list of his compositions will be found in the 
bibliographical notes. Since January, 1906, he has 
been a trustee for the Bondholders committee of the 
Arizona Water Company. 

He received the degree of LL.B. from Columbia in 
1905. He is a Eepublican. He is a member of Christ 
Church (Episcopal), Brooklyn, N. Y. His clubs are 
the Yale of New York City and the Representatives 
Club (honorary member). 

Porter is giving, I am glad to say, more time to 
music. He writes : ' ' Have finished a course in harmony 
counterpoint and composition with R. Huntington 
Woodman, the composer, and expect to continue 
further with him in the theory of music. Expect 
eventually to give up the greater part of my time to 
composing. ' ' 

>>>

Elsewhere in this volume the following appears:

>>>

Better show the ''High Society" one to Porter 
and get his 0. K. on the way it goes to the music. If I 
have time, and it seems worth while, I '11 try and string 
words to the whole march; but the trio which I send 
you is all we arranged for, and probably all we can get 
the oinobathetic bunch to memorize. 

>>>

As far as early recordings of the tune, it looks like there's one by Prince's Band from May 6, 1911 on Columbia.

There also was a version recorded by Benny Peyton's Jazz Band (with Sidney Bechet) in early 1920 in London, but it wasn't issued.

Ok, I need/want to know/learn this - I've gleamished the most basic origins of "High Society" the composition, but what documentation of it is there in its original form, which I guess was a march or a rag?

And who was Porter Steele?

[jazztrain]

There's more about Porter Steele here (according to Jack Mitchell), some of which I'll paste below:

http://ml.islandnet.com/pipermail/dixielandjazz/2009-August/060790.html

>>>

There's more to the clarinet solo than that. Far from being "a traditional 
New Orleans march" HIGH SOCIETY was written by 21 years old Porter Steele in 
1901, when Steele was at Yale University, leader of the University Orchestra 
and Band, and active in the mandolin and glee clubs. It was published that 
year by Ruby Brooks and E. J. Denton, a banjo duo, well known in 1890s on 
the vaudeville circuit. They engaged Robert Becker, leader of a pit band in 
NY city, to write the orchestration.

Becker transcribed the tune for orchestra and invented the brilliant piccolo 
part for the Trio. I can't find the details at the moment but at least two 
recordings were made of the tune in the early years of the twentieth 
century - it would be interesting and no doubt educational to hear them, and 
the piccolo part. When the orchestration reached New Orleans John Robichaux, 
then playing at Mahogany Hall, bought it, and his clarinetist Alphonse Picou 
transposed the piccolo part to his clarinet, and it became a hit. At the 
time HIGH SOCIETY was played as a slow march.

Pops Foster recalled that Bab Frank with his Peerless Band played it on the 
piccolo. George Baquet is also credited with transposing the piccolo part to 
the clarinet.  Possibly other clarinetists  around the country played the 
piccolo part on clarinet, in bands lacking a piccolo.

Whether an orchestration of HIGH SOCIETY with the clarinet solo in it was 
ever published I do not know.

Most of the above information was published in The JOURNAL OF JAZZ STUDIES 
back in June 1975. Earlier the derivation of HIGH SOCIETY was also discussed 
in early copies of RECORD RESEARCH.

>>>

[jeffcrom]

Part of what jazztrain quotes above reminds me of a section of Edmond Souchon's "King Oliver: A Very Personal Memoir," which was published in the Jazz Review and later in the book drawn from that magazine, Jazz Panorama. Doc Souchon was a physician, guitarist, and jazz historian, born in New Orleans in 1897. In his youth, he heard the Oliver band many times, often at Tulane dances.

Sometimes, when Joe would be playing for a private party at a home or a ball, a midnight supper would be served to the guests. In order to get the couples into line and stop the dancing, Oliver was requested to play a march to which no one could dance. He would use "High Society." It was played at a very slow marching tempo, the same tempo his band used in marching funerals and processions. It was a shuffle, easy to walk to. And the first part seemed interminable, before he broke into the chorus which has immortalized Alphonse Picou. You couldn't even do a "slow drag" to it, as it was played then. Gradually, the tempo of this tune was quickened, and it was converted into a dance tune, almost the same as we know today; the transition probably took three or four years!