Ah, the Twenties! Can there ever have been such a decade, so endlessly discussed, pored over and analysed? Even a passing reference to this vital ten year span in our history is enough to evoke a bewildering cornucopia of visual images and impressions. We see it as a period of unparalleled hedonism, quite unlike any other, with Bright Young Things seemingly engaged in a perpetual day-and-night party, fuelled by bathtub gin and dancing wantonly to the bright, snappy rhythms of jazz.
That generation of good-timers, or what remained of it, had emerged from the First World War - the war to end wars - intent on banishing any remembrance of its untold horrors, of living for now, heedless of any further thought. Determined to overthrow the conventional mores of their day, they created new fashions styles -cloche hats, flapper dresses, plus-fours and those absurd floppy caps - and a new view of morality, too. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the era as the Jazz Age, publishing his novel The Great Gatsby in 1926, a key text for the times, encapsulating the headlong but ultimately self-destructive mood of the moment, what one writer called the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.
Its hindsight which tells us that the dancers, the drinkers, and the dinner-suited millionaires were fritting their time away, careless and carefree, oblivious to the darker forces gathering on the horizon. In October 1929, the US Stock Market crashed, bankers and highrollers lost their money, businesses closed and mass unemployment spread. The Great Depression had begun. European Fascism and the Spanish Civil War lay ahead, and the new Puritanism which had earlier led to the enacting of the Volstead Act prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquor tightened its strangle-hold. All of a sudden, the party was well and truly over.
For now, this collection, impeccably restored to pristine clarity, is our very own time machine, a way of buying into those far-off times of glitzy pleasure, when sober reality was simply not on the agenda.
Birt Firman was Musical Director for the popular Zonophone label in London in the late Twenties. He went on to the United States to do radio work for NBC, later leading dance bands in London clubs and in Monte Carlo. His Kansas City Kitty is a jaunty piece, with cymbal crashes, singing saxophones and all the usual period touches. The rhythm is clipped and proper just the thing for the dance floor. Note the xylophone counterpoint and some neat trumpet. After Youve Gone is by the black vaudevillian Harry Creamer (with music by Turner Layton) and has remained in the jazz repertoire since its first introduction. Red Nichols made his version with an all-star group and its his cornet break which peps up the ensemble. Nichols was a prominent studio musician and the most prolifically recorded white jazz bandleader of the 1920s. Influenced by Bix Beiderbecke, he continued to lead small jazz groups, usually called the Five Pennies, until his death in 1965.
In 1919, the US saxophonist Bert Ralton left Art Hickmans band in New York to travel to Cuba where he formed a group. Two years later, he was in London to lead his New York Havana Band, first at the Coliseum, and then at Savoy Hotel when the name changed to the Savoy Havana Band. The first band to broadcast from the Savoy, it soon numbered future luminaries as crooner Rudy Vallee and pianist-composer Billy Mayerl among its personnel. The bands slightly jerky banjo rhythms made their numbers perfect for the Charleston, the hottest dance sensation of the Twenties. The Charleston Chasers was a non-de-disque for another of Red Nichols myriad recording groups. The cornet lead is bell-like and clear, the writing neat yet intricate with clarinet from Jimmy Dorsey, later to become a celebrated bandleader himself. The tuba break is by Joe Tarto, a cheerful character who rasped away on his unwieldy inst