Go, Red! by William Carter

Published in the "Frisco Cricket", Issue No. 8, Spring 1999

In August 1999 the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation will announce the latest release in its series of recordings: Weary Blues, a new CD of the Turk Murphy Jazz Band featuring clarinetist Bob Helm. The album contains material which until now has not been issued on CD, and several tracks which have never been issued anywhere! The following article is taken from this forthcoming CD.

Singling out one Bob Helm album as his best ever is a rash undertaking. Still, I’ll try: it’s this one.

As a clarinetist who’s listened admiringly to Bob “Red Eye” Helm for nearly half a century, I believe that his woodwind artistry reached fullest flower in the early 1950s, and that this CD perfectly exemplifies it.

The album, titled Weary Blues, solidifies Red’s well-deserved place among a rare handful of truly great traditional reedmen. (Others: Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, Pee Wee Russell, George Lewis, maybe also Edmund Hall and Benny Goodman and Albert Nicholas.)

Why?

First and foremost: ensemble play.

Ensemble is the bottom line in traditional jazz. Improvised, syncopated polyphony was the major contribution of New Orleans to the music of the world. Spontaneous, intricate cross-talk among the horns tended to get diluted from swing onward, as solos and arranged passages came to be favored. However, in the late ‘30s, a group of Bay Area musicians, reacting against the boredom of their commercial music jobs, reverted to the older, more challenging, ensemble-based jazz form.

Helm is the leading reedman in this movement. To my ears, his ensemble skill remains unsurpassed, even among today’s legions of slippery technicians.

Such skill didn’t come from nowhere. Unlike generations of what would later be termed “the traditional jazz revival,” Helm and his cohorts were not “moldy fig” idealists, but working professionals. They were not trying to turn back the clock, idealize simplicity, or contest still-unborn bebop. While they drew inspiration and, especially, repertoire, from recordings made by leading New Orleans players of their own or a slightly earlier generation, their work also had deep continuity. It had internal, musical, personal continuity because their playing evolved out of what they had already been doing for years in places like the dime jig dance halls. It formed a link in an unbroken chain of roughhewn ragtime-jazz dating back to the Barbary Coast saloons just after the turn of the century—a lineage that included such figures as pianists Sid Le Protti and Paul Lingle.

In other words, classic jazz has now been alive and well and living in San Francisco for around a hundred years.

Unlike “revivalists,” this original Yerba Buena group did not learn by playing with records and imitating others’ style. Their method was summed up in Bob Helm’s statement to writer-trombonist Jim Leigh, recently published in the Frisco Cricket, that “You learn to play jazz by playing jazz” (“Jim Remembers—Part One: Record Shops, Doormen, Old Masters,” Issue No. 2, October 1997, p. 5).

Down at the heels during the Depression, these broad-gauge professionals hung around the musicians’ union hall and waited to be called for any kind of job.

Bob Helm particularly recalls the dime-a-dance joints. The music never stopped. Each tune ran about a minute and a half, then segued into the next. While one player was taking his break, the others would shift parts to cover for him. Such improvised flexibility became an enforced course in ear training and part-playing. You had to understand the movements of all three lines.

So schooled in playing with awareness, Helm became an absolute master of what I’d call the “stitchery” of the ensemble. Seeming to hear and predict the movement of all the other parts all the time, Red shapes his own flowing lines and harmonic nuances with split-second agility. To a careful listener, the richness of the resulting Baroque embroidery can be stupefying. Helm’s cross-rhythms are thrilling—enabled, to some extent, by the straightness of the classic San Francisco lead horns, by the steady rhythm sections, and by Bob’s long familiarity with Turk Murphy’s elegantly angular trombone lines. But Bob’s genius is of course beyond such explanation. His ability to at once soar joyously, comment whimsically, and stitch in the connective tissue between the voices is without peer.

True, too, to the dancehall and show traditions on which he was weaned, Red’s gusto and whimsy are always implying how much he digs this particular tune. Contra to the tendency among 1940ish small bands in Kansas City, New York etc. to interpret a “tune” mainly as a chord sequence for long rounds of solos, the melody receives full attention in New Orleans and San Francisco.

Red’s majesty as a soloist fully complements his greatness in the ensemble. His reed cries with intense caring amid an endless exfoliation of ideas. His chops are remarkable given his personalized sound, the requisite volume vis-à-vis the Watters alumni, his 180-degree departure from the legit facility of the Noone-and-Goodman derivations. Only Bechet, perhaps, married such a high a level of technical brilliance to such an uncompromisingly individualized, cutting tone. Like every great jazzman, Helm has exactly the chops he needs to say what he has to say. Which is a lot. On this album, for instance, listen to the spot-on speed and articulation of his Shreveport Stomp. (Then ask yourself how I felt, at age twenty, replacing him to go on the road with Turk on my first professional gig!)

It was about the time the tracks on this CD was recorded that Jim Leigh used the term “X-Factor” to refer to those qualities of jazz play that remain beyond analysis. Bob has these in spades...that idiosyncratic feel for structure...those instinctive nano-second grace-note slurs, bends and pirouettes that no one could ever successfully copy or notate.

“The sound of surprise”? No doubt.

Or better: “Making a joyful sound.”