Talk: Lionel Hampton
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"died of cardiac arrest at the Mount Sinai Medical center": we have a Mount Sinai Medical Center here in Toronto, Ontario -- surely that's not the place where Hamp died?
--Bob
bjonkman@sobac.com
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Amazing what a little research will get you...
--Bob.
"Flying Home" [...] is considered one of the first rock and roll records.
Would anyone care to who thinks this? I know LH was an early influence to R&R, but Flying Home doesn't particularly seem like the 'first one'. -- User:SeanO
- Is the Smithsonian Institution authoritative enough for you? They included "Flying Home" on their album, Straighten Up and Fly Right, a collection of a dozen singles that were ancestors to rock and roll.
- I would say there are several things that make "Flying Home" fit:
- Audience reaction. People reacted as if it were something new, not just more big band music, but that saxophone solo brought them out of their seats.
- The sax solo itself, a true r&b style honker. People may have played that way before, but it is one of the first on record. It is described in What Was the First Rock and Roll Record? as one of two 1939 recordings as influential in establishing the sound, and also states that Jacquet's solo was "what many critics have called the first R&B sax solo". The book's cutoff date was 1942 and uses another Jacquet solo as the starting point for its list of 50, but "Flying Home" and "Rock Me" by Lucky Millinder are the only two songs mentioned in the book as preceding the list.
- Furthermore, the fact that the solo's form was crystallized, built in to the arrangement, and not just a sax break. After Jacquet recorded it, Arnett Cobb played it, and after Cobb, sometimes the whole sax section played it in unison. A jazz solo tends to be much more improvised than a rock and roll solo, and usually varies from playing to playing, whereas rock players find the solo that fits and play it every time. This isn't a firm rule, but it is a way that rock solos in general differ from jazz solos. Note that on both "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Rock Around the Clock" the guitar solos are played twice, note for note.
- Finally, in addition to the Smithsonian, many other historians of rock and roll also call out "Flying Home" as one of the first singles to establish a rock and roll feeling in music, including me, who wrote that sentence, and also the first rock and roll record and who saw Arnett Cobb blow the roof off Symphony Hall in Boston playing "Flying Home" with the Hampton band.
- It's pretty ironic that Hampton claims to hate rock and roll, but the fact is he was one of its progenitors. Ortolan88
Would it be possible to say "'Flying Home' is an important ancestor to rock and roll" instead? I'm assuming that "Straighten Up and Fly Right" is also included, as are some of the jump blues of Louis Jordan (and possibly something from Cab Calloway). All of them are important to the development of Rock and Roll, but I wouldn't call them the "First Rock and Roll Record". I agree with everything that you have said, BTW, I just think the attribution is too strong.
- Well, I wanted to link it to the first rock and roll record article. If you go there you will see that it is given as an important predecessor. I suppose I could mark it [[first rock and roll record|early ancestor of rock and roll]] but that seems a little bit much. Maybe I can reword it, "predecessor to the first rock and roll records" might do it. Seems a little clumsy. I think though when we look backwards, we can see it was a rock and roll record.
- Actually, "Straighten Up and Fly Right" isn't in that article yet. Lots of work to be done on that one. The most important omission is "Rock and Roll" from the first Jazz at the Philharmonic sessions.
- Plenty more to write about here. Someone just started jump blues, but there's also Western swing, hillbilly boogie, blues in country music, novelty songs, plenty, plenty more to cover.
Also, just as a point of clarification, air checks of radio broadcasts show that, at least during the 'commercial' swing era, solos were much more 'pat' (i.e.: they were played the same night after night) then we are used to in Jazz. Benny Goodman's On The Air album is a really good example of this: The air checks are usually faster, tighter, and longer than the studio recordings, but the solos are usually very similar. Of course some cats during the swing era, particularly Coleman Hawkins, were great improvisers and made it a point of 'never playing it the same twice', but they were very often the exception. -- SeanO
- Yep. That's why I drew the distinction about rock solos. In both cases, the solo is being fitted to the arrangement (and the music is more commercial). Hampton's band was definitely a jazz band. Not all the big bands were jazz bands, and not all the jazz big bands were as interested in soloing. After all, lots of solos are just playing scales and runs, so a nice well worked out pat solo would be better.
- Just FYI, I am one old fart who was actually around for a lot of this, prototypical white southern early adopter of rock and roll who has stayed with it all the way since. "My" first rock and roll record was "Drinking Wine Spodee Odee" when I was nine years old in 1949. Still rockin' after all these years. Ortolan88
