Who Played With Louis Armstrong On That Session?

For many years a jazz historian was only as good as his music and reference library. This meant that historians with access to large music libraries definitely had an advantage. I began to grow my jazz reference library from the time I started to listen to jazz. One reason was that books about the musicians always had partial discographies in the back of them and I could always plan on discovering new recordings that I previously didn't know about. My library grew with the addition of biographies, but at that point I didn't realize that what I really needed to add to my collection was a jazz discography. When I first discovered them in the University of Virginia's music library, I knew that was what I needed. They were chock full of sessions (and of many musicians of whom I had never heard) put together by devoted music fans who'd been listening to the music much longer than I.

The discographies grew out of biographies, any documentation left by the recording companies, interviews with jazz musicians and sometimes just the "good" ears of the discographer himself. Somehow many of the best discographers were British; therefore the books are published by British press. This did not make them easier to acquire.

 Overtime, with the growth of the world wide web, it became much easier to get my hands on these volumes.  I found a source but soon realized that these 2 volumes would be the most expensive books I would buy for my library. I bought my first set, a pair of twenty year old copies of Brian Rust's "Jazz Discography," for about $125 a piece and was in heaven. Now, they only covered recorded music from 1897 to 1942, but it was a start. A few years later I bought a new updated version that also included Ragtime music and covered the same years. It was nice to have a new version; I realized that the research was still going on as new musicians were identified in old sessions and old recordings were still being found. The problems were: you were restricted to the books appendix and couldn't do any search within the text; there were never any pictures of albums in these book as they just covered the musicians, their instruments, songs, places, recording matrices and dates; and, the stopping point for most printed jazz discographies is 1942, now close to 70 years ago.

 As the Internet has grown, the world of discographies has begun to come into its own. There's not one central free source that's offering a complete jazz discography which covers the entire history of jazz. One is available by subscription run by noted author Tom Lord and I only wish I made enough money writing about music to be able to get a yearly subscription and go to town searching and learning even more. My first search would be for a list of recordings made in New Orleans between 1930 and 1940. Why those years? That's another blog to come.

 What I have discovered is that over the past ten years common jazz enthusiasts have begun to fill the void with pages paying homage to their favorite jazz musicians. They are branching out to collect all of the information about every recording and put it out there for all to enjoy. Discographies blossom on Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis. You can find them listed by labels. You can even find them not only for jazz but all types of music (Allmusic Guide). The wonderful thing is that they're growing and covering those previous untouched years after World War II. So go explore and learn who recorded together, what songs were recorded, then buy a copy and enjoy.

Musical Baseball

As we enter the peak time when the nation's attention turns to baseball, I thought it might be fun to bring music and baseball together. Popular music and baseball grew up together;  almost every year when the winner was declared a new song about the team was soon to follow. The first piece of baseball music was "The Baseball Polka" written in 1858. The most popular was "Take me Out to the Ball Game," which has been a standard since the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

Musicians, too, have been infatuated with the game. When John Phillip Sousa's band performed long summer engagements, they formed their own baseball team. Games would be played against local teams. The Sousa team normally fared pretty well. Their were also games with rival bands including Arthur Pryor's Band. Sousa participated in most of these games while he was physically able. After a while, though, games with other teams were discontinued and the band broke up into separate groups. The woodwinds played the brasses.


In the picture of the 1904-05 Sousa Band Baseball team, Sousa is the bearded man seated in the middle of the front row. His son, who was not a member of this team, is in the back row with the Nassau uniform. On July 4, 1900 the Sousa band initiated the first game of baseball ever played in Paris.

Turn of the Twentieth century African American comic, Broadway star and recording artist Bert Williams played first base every Sunday on the company team. It was widely known among the opposition that Williams was protective of his feet. If the play was going to be a close one, the opposition ran straight at Williams's toes. His reaction was to leap clear of the runner whether he had a chance to make the play or not. His always dapper partner George Walker, on the other hand, never attended or participated in these games because he felt the uniforms were poorly tailored.

In the early thirties Louis Armstrong sponsored a local semi-pro baseball team in New Orleans called the Secret 9. The picture here is of the team showing off the new "Armstrong" uniforms, caps, bats, gloves and gear that Louis purchased for them.

Among other musicians who were baseball players is Thirties bandleader Andy Kirk, avid ballplayer on a semi-pro team called the Maple Leafs. So as you sit down to watch the play-offs and then the World Series remember the marriage baseball and popular music have had since its inception.