TED DANIEL PLAYS THE MUSIC OF KING OLIVER

Zulu’s Ball: Ted Daniel plays King Oliver

Joe “King” Oliver (1881–1938) was a cornerstone figure in Jazz, especially via the prominence of the Creole Jazz Band that he led in Chicago 1922–24. These days, Oliver comes up in a few standardized narratives—all legendary but also true: Oliver shepherded protégé Louis Armstrong into his first notoriety and recordings. King Oliver somehow talked his way out of a prime 1927 offer to be the house band at the emerging Cotton Club in Harlem. Oliver’s brass embouchure was giving way through the whole arc of his recorded history, such that he surrounded himself with other promising youths to share the load of brass playing in his bands. And in the study of Jazz on records, Oliver’s Creole jazz Band has the distinction of having released a 1923 record of which one highly-prized copy has survived on the whole planet, and another one of which no copy survived.

We see King Oliver now as a breakthrough artist, and a turning-point figure who underscored the potentials of Jazz beyond just the novelty of its first blush. The Creole Jazz Band, in step with the contemporaneous New Orleans Rhythm Kings, offered a thrilling new variant in the then-very-young music called Jazz. Oliver extruded from the glorious relentless roar of collective improvisation cameo sections for the band soloists to break out and say a soulful piece. Audiences for the band in Chicago were steady; the CJB landmark 1923 recordings were popular, and the renown that had accrued to King Oliver as a pioneering brass performer spread as easily by way of his recordings. 

Edward Theodore “Ted” Daniel, Jr. (b. 1943) became known in the late 1960s for his focused energy as a trumpet player in the often explosive world of Free Jazz at its peak of creativity and prominence. He was a sideman in the bands of Sunny Murray, Dewey Redman, Sam Rivers, Andrew Cyrille, and others. Ted led small ensembles on record and in the lofts through the first half of the 1970s, then gathered dozens of the era’s most creative voices into a large ensemble he named “Energy” that played a powerful, all-thrusters-on style of collective improvisation in SoHo and elsewhere in New York City. In 2017, he stands as a survivor who remains blessedly attentive to the craftsmanship of the improvised line, and to group design as an element of Composition. 

For most of a decade now, Ted Daniel has channeled his fascination with King Oliver into the enclosed project, recorded in 2015. “I started listening to King Oliver after buying a 78 of his while on tour in England in the fall of 2009.  I became intrigued with his music, and with him as an individual; not only did I begin to listen and learn his music, but I read about his life journey. So in 2010 I decided to pay tribute by playing his music in a respectful, genuine, contemporary fashion that is unique to my musical Experience.

”The vehicle was already largely in place. “My band, the International Brass and Membrane Corps [IBMC] was formed in 2004 for the purpose of playing my original music.” Ted first met Newman Taylor Baker in the 1970s in Philadelphia, when the drummer sat in with Dewey Redman’s band. And he met Joe Daley for the first time in the early 1970s as well, in the large Crystals orchestra of Sam Rivers. The local genesis for the band at hand was 1998 when the trio of Ted, NTB and tubaist Jose Davila first joined forces. By 2004, Joseph Daley replaced Jose and violinist Charles Burnham entered the picture, and the band started to look and sound about like it does now. “Then I started up with the King Oliver direction,” narrates the leader. “I brought the music in, and they took to it right away; there was no ‘What are we doing this for?’ They embraced it without hesitation.

”There’s no shortage of full-time “trad bands” devoted to faithfully recreating the early jazz masterworks, and countless other repertory projects with the same intent. Ted Daniel clarifies for us: “This recording is by no means an attempt to Recreate 1923. It is not a ‘Trad Band’.” In fact, not too many dedicated trad bands look take on King Oliver’s music; even the most visible Oliver tributes, by alumni Red Allen and Louis Armstrong in the late 1950s, actually involved surprisingly little of King Oliver’s repertoire. 

Zulu’s Ball draws on the enduring nature of the twelve-bar blues format, but the tunes resonate differently in the hands of the IBMC. Daniel’s players cruise through soli making use of the whole panoply of tools developed since Oliver’s time. Start with the CD’s first track. We now look back across nearly a century at Oliver’s “Riverside Blues” as a primal early example of what the solo was going to mean: Three instruments come to bat individually to play a featured passage… and each time it’s the same. That is, a written line (the same one you can hear Ted play here in the last full chorus of track 1) was delivered in 1923, with only minor variations of flourish or phrasing by clarinet, trombone, and then Louis Armstrong on cornet. Oliver waxed “Riverside Blues” on two occasions, and that formula holds for both. Ted Daniel also wanted to treat the piece twice, but in versions distinct from each other and radically divergent from Oliver’s. On the track 1 “Riverside”, Charles Burnham solos on violin, then Joe Daley on tuba, before the leader and Marvin Sewell’s guitar. The other steel guitar “Riverside” on track 8 is a pared down duet, with a level of directness that King Oliver really only approached once, In a 1923 duet date with Jelly Roll Morton. “I had decided to use a guitar on the two blues and possibly one other tune that we played, but when I heard the playbacks I decided to use guitar for the whole session. The one exception is ‘Just Gone’, where the original quartet plays without the guitar.

”Not surprisingly, Zulu’s Ball pressurizes the atmosphere of these pieces in a different way, through relaxed phrasing. On “Riverside” track 1, for example, Ted elected to use a dance-inclined “shuffle” rhythm—because the music is for dancers—that refers back only as far as mid-century rhythm and blues. The Creole Jazz Band and contemporaries pointed toward a Jazz world that we have lived in for fully 80 years and more—where emphasis falls naturally on the backbeats (two and four), and full-time 12/8 is the prevailing time signature. In modern times, continuous flow from the rhythm section replaces the continuous percolation among the wind voices that was the early jazz norm.

The marching element—still part of the music’s public functionality for Oliver’s generation—has departed, and with it the need to connect to martial impulse. Take ‘Tears”: Even though the drummer evokes march music by playing a “street beat” throughout, it breathes with the demilitarized, relaxed spacing that replaced the insistent emphasis of early styles. As Ted says it, “Starting with the melody, the drums, tuba, and guitar continue the New Orleans second-line feel to the rhythm, which the drums introduced at the beginning of the piece. Joe Daley overdubs the melody on euphonium (it was the trombone line on the original recording), while violin and cornet with Harmon mute play the rhythmic background figures.” Ted Daniel has reimagined this classic—surely the greatest showcase for Louis Armstrong within the KOCJB—in a breezy and calm climate in which the leader shines in a muted solo. 

What would Oliver have made of the Zulu’s Ball reworking? It’s hard for us to know how he felt about music. Ted’s sound certainly would have swung audiences at the Lincoln Gardens in a different way from what they were used to. The converse is true about how the way Oliver’s presentation might leave Ted Daniel’s audience feeling a little steam-rolled. Absolutely none of the dialogue that surrounds music now—even the fancy words in this essay about ‘expression’, ‘artistry’ etc.—was applied to Jazz in the Twenties. To at least some degree, Oliver was a businessman in an entertainment field. What we see as impassioned and personal would have been an asset primarily for the singularity that helped Oliver’s product stand out from others’. 

King Oliver was among the first recorded jazz instrumentalists to capitalize on a legitimate, believable expression using tone color for nuance and shading rather than just novelty effects. Trouble is, all of his essential early recordings belong to the period of recording 78s acoustically, such that some of the music’s detail is lost to the format, and the rest is submerged in the robust soup of the KOCJB. Ted benefits from modern microphone placement to capture these aural shadings. His are indoor, chamber versions of Oliver’s pieces, and for Zulu’s Ball he incorporates the breadth of timbres whose creative use Oliver helped to pioneer. 

On “Mabel’s Dream” you hear Ted Daniel “emphasize the vocal sounding possibilities available to me on cornet”. He uses as muting tool a felt cloth around the bell, up until the last chorus. Oliver is famously photographed wearing a bowler hat or “derby” (one of the hatted looks that millennial hipsters haven’t quite yet revived) and it’s that name, “derby” that has stuck for this sort of brass muting, though brass players since the Coolidge administration more often use a beret. For “Working Man’s Blues” Ted articulates at the end of the tune using the plunger mute, a device that we associate with Ellington—primarily because Bubber Miley associated with Ellington after ingesting a full dose of inspiration from King Oliver. Ted reports: “I’ve always loved the cornet—more mellow than the trumpet. I was about fifteen when heard Nat Adderley playing cornet alongside Cannonball; I got a cornet and played it through high school and until I was about 21.” Most of his professional history has been made on the trumpet, though in this century he’s as likely to be on one as the other. “Switching back from trumpet to cornet was comfortable for me and I think the appropriate sound to play King Oliver’s music.  So you would have a traditional sound of the cornet playing these original melodies, but in a more contemporary musical setting. Playing this music is a balancing act of sounding traditional and contemporary at the same time.  However, it provided me with the perfect setting to play the cornet again.

”The feeling is primary: King Oliver blows for all he’s worth, but within a context of Controlled, deliberate construction. As the saying goes, it’s as serious as your life. King Oliver should be a hero for all practitioners of Free Jazz, inasmuch as he represents artistic invention at the fulcrum of grace and freedom. “Mabel’s Dream” is a key example here of how Ted injects “free” solo content into King Oliver’s frameworks. Ted’s solo on the track “Zulu’s Ball” shows us an edge of the intense, passionate cry that belongs to the volatile aesthetics of post-Oliver cornetists. The centennial of Jazz recording (in February 2017) makes this a particularly choice moment to contemplate Ted Daniel’s alloy of ancient and modern. His brand as composer still shines strong through his setting of these pieces, and Ted’s outlook on music distinguishes itself as a flavor that sits as naturally for his own compositions as when applied to this hallowed Jazz terrain.

Ben Young