Who was Baby Dodds?
Warren “Baby” Dodds. Born 1894, died 1959. Younger brother of clarinetist Johnny Dodds. Excellent jazz drummer of the pre-swing era. Played with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, Joe Oliver. Moved between New Orleans, New York and Chicago. Helped run a taxi cab company in the latter city during the Great Depression. Tragically, in 1949, was paralyzed by a series of strokes resulting in paralysis, hindering his playing in the coming years up until his death.
So?
So this marginal figure in the history of early jazz music left behind one major curiosity:
Talking and Drum Solos, the first album of unaccompanied drums in the jazz canon. Originally released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1946 as a 10” record and later, in 2003’s expanded edition, by Atavistic,
Talking and Drum Solos joined a tradition of self-descriptive ethnomusicology. The first predecessor was probably Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who provided the origin and history of North Carolina folk songs whilst performing them for the Library of Congress’ archives. Dodds brought Lunsford’s methodology to jazz, though it would take a few years for the style to catch on. Willie “The Lion” Smith would go on to narrate his own album of period songs and recollections dating from World War I and the Harlem Renaissance on
The Memoirs of Willie “The Lion” Smith (Koch, 1968/2001), and an aging Eubie Blake soon followed with
The Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake (Columbia, 1969).
When we listen to an old piece of music, we’re inevitably saddened by our inability to fully inhabit the era from which it came; the poetry of its historicity seems to slip through our fingers. The most we can do is seek out the people who lived through it, the surviving relics of times past who, for one reason or another, seem to have remained frozen in a smoky Harlem nightclub or a backwoods Appalachian village, as if they themselves were documents in an archive. These baroque personalities give the illusion of having an entire epoch condensed into their being, and even the lives they led have become sterling works of art. And as problematic as it sounds, we are lucky to have them. Our modern griots sacrificed their own progress for the sake of transmitting to us what were most likely the best years of their lives.
What does that have to do with the music?
Everything – because it makes manifest the fact that all music is a kind of storytelling, and that things as inert as brass can be made to sing the song of history. Music is a direct and vibrant sort of cultural expression, and it requires a hybrid form like the memoir-album to communicate its power with any degree of truthfulness. What we’re dealing with is not even an oral history, but a sonic one; the history of jazz is made up first and foremost of notes. So Moses Asch tracked down Warren “Baby” Dodds to record
Talking and Drum Solos, creating a jazz narrative from an unlikely perspective, the drum: the driving force behind Dixie, yet still its most shadowy figure. There are no grand proclamations in Dodds’ reflections on his career as a drummer, just modest explanations of the techniques used in the field, as well as brief comments on contemporaries and mentors. “That guy could make things on a horn that you wouldn’t think was in it!” we’re told of Joe “King” Oliver. “If he couldn’t sing it out he’d blow it out.”
But underneath Dodds’ banalities, reading between the lines, we can hear the story of jazz being told in his often-blistering solo demonstrations. The militarism of early marches clashes with the improvisatory nature of jazz, and one can hear the movement away from the traditional brass band to the birth of a soloist’s genre. At one point Dodds demonstrates the subtle difference between a three-quarter roll and a four-quarter roll; at others he shifts into completely abstract flourishes without offering explanations. “Careless Love Blues” is a re-creation of the standard one-two marching beat, careful not to deviate from its uptempo, repetitive thrust. Ironically, it is the next composition titled “Rudiments” that is on the far more radical side of jazz drumming. Dodds’ technique is amazing, effortlessly constructing layered rhythms between an insistent bass drum and flights on the high-pitched wooden blocks, cowbells and metallic frames of his kit. Snare rolls are pushed beyond their function as groundwork and made to sing like the best solos of Louis Armstrong, to “talk” with just as much conviction as Dodds’ voice does throughout the record. The title becomes redundant, as we soon realize that
Talking and Drum Solos are in reality the same thing. Dodds is a consummate storyteller with percussion as his vehicle, in the same way that drummer Han Bennink would recapitulate jazz history on his own solo record (
Nerve Beats: Atavistic, 1973/2000). It’s not for nothing that the Dutch maverick cites
Talking as one of his favorite records, even borrowing the title of Dodds’ “Spooky Drums Nos. 1 & 2" for his own performance.
Atavistic’s reissue of
Talking also includes “twenty bonus tracks from Folkways Records’ COUNTRY BRASS BANDS OF THE SOUTH, VOLUME ONE collection, recorded by Frederic Ramsey Jr.” Just listening to a handful of these selections makes one appreciate Dodds’ innovations all the more. The drums here are functional at best; wooden, mechanical, and crude at their worst. Yet the horns are no better. Jazz had its roots in the popular army ensemble. It kept the shambling lyricism and turned it into an art of the first caliber. In this sense,
Talking and Drum Solos is more than just “a slice of history.” It’s a history in miniature, using a supreme mastery of the drumset to boil a life in music down to a mere ten inches of wax.
Baby Dodds - Spooky Drums No. 2.mp3 (190 kbps VBR, 3.2 mb)Baby Dodds - Talking and Drum Solos (Folkways, 1946/Atavistic, 2003)(Unfortunately, "Shimmy Beat/Press Roll" seems to be damaged, and I do not own this album to upload a better copy with.)
