Baby Dodds Trio – Jazz À La Creole – Used LP

VG/VG. 1947 recordings, originally sides for Circle Sound.  Extensive liner notes, note only covering the back of jacket, but also on cute little insert booklet.

...and it all came together down in New Orleans...delta blues, Creola, the music of local Indigenous music, and the music from the West Indies (where the percussion of African music was allowed to grow)...and this album shows the confluence...pure New Orleans, and with Baby Dodds' percussion on "Drum Improvisation" helping show the influence of the islands (or at least that what it sounds like to me).  This helps reveal much more subtle influences that show on other cuts.  While this is apparently NYC recordings, in the liner notes Rudi Blesh notes that Baby Dodds great-grandfather had drummed in Congo Square (New Orleans) in 1850, and how he'd always hated drum solos--I know exactly what he means--until he heard Dodds.  Hearing Dodds drums solos caused Blesh to start an indie record label (on a shoestring because he clearly was not a rich man) because the major labels would have no interest.  (He ran Circle Sound Inc. with Harriet Janis, and they wrote a book called They All Played Ragtime.)  Besides all the complex the history that goes into songs, Blesh points out that the joy of the music lays in the fact that both for the player and the listener, this music is for fun. -- winch