Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Joshua Henry, Brandon Victor Dixon, Billy Porter and Brian Stokes Mitchell, with Richard Riaz Yoder, in a scene from Shuffle Along.
(Photo: Julieta Cervantes)Jazz history, for the most part, has not been made on the musical stage. But Broadway is madly tapping its feet these days to a glittering footnote in jazz history called Shuffle Along, which has settled into the Music Box Theater in New York for what could be an eon. The name belongs to the groundbreaking 1921 show by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle that broke the monopoly of operettas and first brought jazz to American musical comedy.
When the original Shuffle Along came to Broadway, jazz was “trending,” as we might say now. It’s hard to know precisely what the word “jazz” might have meant then. It was still without a formal history or lucid identity—barely even a brand yet. The show’s main selling point then was that it was written and played “entirely by negroes” (sic), according to the original New York Times review.
It was something the American theater mecca had not seen for more than a decade. But few critics failed to note its new and distinct musical extract. “A breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie,” said the Evening Journal. “Full of jazz … the real thing,” noted the Evening World. And the Times pronounced it a “swinging score, “ one of the earliest applications of the word “swing” to describe jazz.
Enough of the original score was recorded at the time by Blake, Sissle, Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller that in 1976 New World Records was able to assemble something close to an original cast album. You can hear what the world believed jazz was in 1921. By the time the show closed, people were beginning to think of the 1920s as the “Jazz Age.”
More importantly, its successful run of 504 performances cleared the path for a succession of black Broadway musicals that would not only expand our understanding of jazz but put such standards as “Runnin’ Wild,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “I Must Have That Man” into the Great American Songbook.
The Shuffle Along of 1921 was a smoking-hot revue draped loosely around the story of a local mayoral election in the imaginary Southern burg of Jimtown.
While the show itself may have been forgotten soon enough, Blake’s mock campaign song for the show’s fictional hero, Harry Walton, lived on. A generation later, “I’m Just Wild About Harry” helped elect Harry Truman president. And songwriter Fred Rose slipped a homage to Shuffle Along into his 1925 jazz hit “Jimtown Blues,” a cultural reference mostly lost by the time kids were dancing to Fletcher Henderson and Tommy Dorsey’s crisp swing versions of the tune 20 years later.
The present Shuffle Along is not a revival of the original but a biography of it. Lest there be any doubt, a long and cautionary subtitle has been appended: Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. The show’s original creators (Blake is portrayed by Brandon Victor Dixon; Joshua Henry plays Noble Sissle) become characters in the new version, struggling to get their idea produced.
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“She said, ‘A lot of people are going to try and stop you,’” Sheryl Bailey recalls of the advice she received from jazz guitarist Emily Remler (1957–’90). “‘They’re going to say you slept with somebody, you’re a dyke, you’re this and that and the other. Don’t listen to them, and just keep playing.’”
Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
As Ted Nash, left, departs the alto saxophone chair for LCJO, Alexa Tarantino steps in as the band’s first female full-time member.
Mar 4, 2025 1:29 PM
If only because openings for JLCO’s 15 permanent positions appear about as frequently as sub-freezing days on the…
“The first recording I owned with Brazilian music on it was Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer,” says Renee Rosnes. “And then I just started to go down the rabbit hole.”
Jan 16, 2025 2:02 PM
In her four-decade career, Renee Rosnes has been recognized as a singular voice, both as a jazz composer and a…
