RADIO/PODCAST: "Crazy Rhythm:" Red Nichols and His Five Pennies This Week on Riverwalk Jazz

This week on Riverwalk Jazz the Jim Cullum Jazz Band tells the story of Red Nichols and his Five Pennies, illustrated with numerous historical recordings of Nichols and the ensembles he led.

The program is distributed in the US by Public Radio International. You can also drop in on a continuous stream of shows at the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound.

1920s New York was full of young jazz musicians whod rolled in from somewhere else. Ernest Loring Nichols, a redheaded kid from Utah fell into partnership with a studious-looking trombone player from nearby Long Island named Miff Mole

By 1925 Red Nichols was the man to see if you were a musician in New York and needed a job. He was equally connected to record labels needing talent and top-flight musicians looking for work. A well-schooled musician, tutored by his bandmaster father, Red could pick up a violin, sit down at the piano, or play the cornet. His cornet style has been praised for its ringing tone and springy, punchy, rhythmic drive.

When George and Ira Gershwin

Red Nichols was a skilled talent scout. His studio sessions were a magnet and proving ground for top young white jazz players. Many would go on to become star bandleaders of the Swing Era. In the late summer of 1927, Jack Teagarden had finished a gig in a society dance band at San Antonios Gunther Hotel. Impulsively, the 25-year-old trombonist hit the road for New York in a Cadillac. One warm August evening they landed in Times Square. Dropped off at a phone booth in mid-townwith his bags and instrument casethe first person Jack called was Red Nichols. Always on the lookout for something new to offer the record-buying public, Red was quick to capture Jack Teagardens soulful, blues-driven sound and playful vocals on disc.

Pint-sized with flame-red hair, Red Nichols was a go-getter with a good head for business. And he was clean and precise in his playing, a modernistalways exploring new territory. But Nichols popular success drew criticism from some who called him an entertainer rather than an artist. Critics saw his success as selling out or somehow inauthentic, not true to the spirit of hot jazz as it was played by Jazz Age cornet hero, Bix Beiderbecke

Richard Sudhalter

Saxophonist Bud Freeman

In spite of the controversy surrounding his work, Red Nichols was the most recorded and successful musician-bandleader in New York in the 1920s. He led enormously popular bandsfeaturing some of the most creative white jazz players of that time under names such as The Five Pennies, The Red Heads, and Miff Mole and His Little Molers. This voluminous output of recorded workRed appeared on about 4,000 recordings in the 1920sis recognized today as a major expansion and refinement of the harmonic and compositional possibilities in jazz.