Lee Collins Volumes 1 & 2
At the Club Hangover Air Shots Vol. 1 with Ralph Sutton
PERSONNEL
Lee Collins (tpt); Pud Brown (reeds); Bert Johnson (tmb); Ralph Sutton (pno); Dale Deacon Jones (str bs); Smokey Stover (drms).
TRACKS
Panama Rag + After You’ve Gone + West End Blues + Indiana + Down In Jungle Town + St. James Infirmary + The Johnson Rag + On The Sunny Side Of The Street + Hindustan + I’ve Found A New Baby + I Thought I heard Buddy Bolden Say + Muscat Ramble + My Monday Date + Clarinet Marmalade + Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.
Recorded at the Hangover Club in San Francisco, California, USA. Tracks 1-4 Aug 1, 1953; 5-9 Aug 8, 1953; 10-15 Aug 15, 1953. – JCCD-3056 – Time 73.05 Minutes.
At the Club Hangover Air Shots Vol. 2 with Don Ewell
PERSONNEL
Lee Collins (tpt); Bob McCracken (reeds); Bert Johnson (tmb); Don Ewell (pno) and Ralph Sutton (pno 1-4); Dale Deacon Jones (str bs); Smokey Stover (drms).
TRACKS
Fidgety Feet + Chinatown My Chinatown + Basin Street Blues + Big Butter & Egg Man + Royal Garden Blues + If I Could Be With You + The Bucket’s Got A Hole In It + After You’ve Gone + Save It Pretty Mama + Original Dixie Jass Band One-Step + Fidgety Feet + St. James Infirmary + Indiana.
Recorded as per Vol. 1 : Tracks 1-4 Aug 22, 1953; 5-9 Aug 29, 1953; 10-15 Sep 5, 1953 – JCCD-3057 – Time 72.09 Minutes.
Jazz Crusade, 585 Pond Street, Bridgeport, CT, 06606, USA
Reviewed on Windows 2000 Professional, MusicMatch Credits New Grove.
A member of the Young Eagles band at the age of twelve, Lee Collins was born in New Orleans at the turn of the last century, and in 1960 he died in Chicago of a stroke after suffering badly a long period of illness. In 1924, as Jimmy Lyons of CBS Air-Shots announces when introducing the West Ends Blues track on this album, Lee joined King Oliver, and around that period he, Collins, also recorded with Jelly Roll Morton. The West End Blues number here is perhaps the Lee Collins version of it when he was with the “King” all stars, and not the well-known version by Louis Armstrong.
Ralph Sutton, in 1968 was a founder member of the World’s Greatest Jazz Band, and during the prior decade when the air shots were recorded, he was pianist at the Eddie Condon Club in New York, and who today can be frequently heard at clubs and venues in London, England.
These two Big Bill Bissonnette CDs, taken from the Dr Colin Bray collection, who writes the most informative liner notes, are a mixture of jazz and popular tunes of the day, which serve well as an historical book, identifying how expertly the British jazz artists known to me have interpreted and held true an art-form, equally impressive as any national classical music orchestra has done in plying the works over the years of the great composers of the past.
Although Lee Collins is undoubtedly the star of the recordings, special note is merited for the Pud Brown period of clarinet playing. The feel of the music will make the listener freely empathize to fix an artist with a particular tune. Piano on My Monday Date and After You’ve Gone by Ralph Sutton, Pud Brown with honk sax on The Johnson Rag which is impressive, but if the tune is dedicated to James P. then it’s out of kilter, yet, I’ll say price-less. I’ve Found A New Baby by the trombonist Bert Johnson, St. James Infirmary by trumpeter Lee Collins, and the breakneck speed of Muscat Ramble and Chinatown - how beautifully the rhythm section handles them, as can be highlighted when one listens to a modern jazz drummer, struggling in a cymbal-ride catch up stance to keep pace with a lead modern jazz saxophonist.
The eight and a half minutes of I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say is sheer delight.
Influenced by Fats Waller and Earl “Fatha” Hines, Don Ewell (Vol.2) in brief, led a five piece in St Louis, which included trumpeter, bandleader Jewey Jackson, who in 1924, was with Fate Marable on the riverboats. Don was with Kid Ory on the West Coast at time of these recordings. A few years earlier he had moved to Chicago and played with Muggsy Spanier and Sydney Bechet where he absorbed the blues into his piano style at the time.
An interesting facet of this Vol is to note the blues style clarinet on the second version of Fidgety Feet. Other repeats over the two CDs are After You’ve, Indiana and St.James. Chinatown is breathtaking. Relax with Basin Street. Nice quotes by clarinet in Royal Garden and The Bucket’s Got. If I Could - it is a dream, all seven and a half minutes of it The ODJB One-Step; the longest tune brings a Dixieland flavour to the hearings. Sound quality – it is nostalgia !!
The cognoscenti with their knowledge of the tunes, can agree that each number played and by whom over the times and at venues, is the same, but is different, and it is that phenomenon of marvel and interpretations upon which this kind of jazz endures, and will surely do so for evermore, as new Traditional jazz talent flows up and into it through the ranks.
Few will be alive today having heard Lee Collins play live in his early days, a few will be in possession of his 20s Jones and Collins Astoria Hot Eight, Victor takes, and the 1932 Bluebird Race Label re-issues, and so, much credit goes out to Jazz Crusade for giving us the opportunity to listen to these historic CBS Air Shots. Listen to them.
Ian King, Kings Jazz Review - Thursday the 15th
of June 2000