Baby Won’t You Please Come Home
LP Everest Records FS 326
I am thinking about one of my first records, a Christmas present. It was an EP, volume two in the Jazz Museum series on Coral, then released under Frank Teschmacher’s name, but the name of the group that recorded Baby Won’t You Please in 1928 was Louisiana Rhythm Kings, and it had Muggsy Spanier on cornet.
You can trust him; he has not changed his style since then, which this record from San Francisco thirty years later shows. It’s a fine group of musicians. Earl Hines plays piano and does some fancy stuff as part of his showmanship, but I really enjoy his swing. On the trombone there is Jimmy Archey and on clarinet and bass, there are the New Orleans men Darnell Howard and Pops Foster. The drummer, Earl Watkins, gives a lot of energy to the band, and I think that you can hear that they have played quite a lot together.
As it is a live recording, there are pluses and minuses. The negative thing is that it’s hard to control the balance between the musicians, especially when the drums take over at the end, but on the plus side there is the liveliness.
In the end (and Earl Hines in his piano solo), they play the tune in a variation, doubling the bars, something that was done already in the twenties by the tunes composer Clarence Williams, among others.