Strut Miss Lizzie
LP Jazzology J-31
On the back of the sleeve of this LP that I bought secondhand there are the autographs of Tony Parenti and Max Kaminsky, and they also wrote the date, October 20, 1968. I have no idea where they played that day, but I think that those recordings were made only one or a couple of years before that. Jazzology has a policy of never mentioning the recording dates, maybe because they think that the music is timeless.
Jimmy Ryan died in 1963, and his club was closed and demolished the year before. But the band on the LP kept up the name and played six days of the week at a new location a few blocks away.
Their dixieland music is not sensational but of a high standard and enjoyable.
Parenti and Kaminsky do what we expect from them, the former playing his clarinet parts with the usual bravura and the latter with a limited trumpet style, most effective in the ensemble.
Conrad Janis is on trombone, and on piano we hear Dick Wellstood. It is a banjo-tuba band, which was not very common in the sixties, and on those instruments we hear Davis Quinn and Joe Henshaw. The last one to mention is maybe the most important, the great New Orleans drummer Zutty Singleton, who was there already at the opening of the old Jimmy Ryan’s in 1940.
Tony Parenti was the first artist to record for the producer of the present session, George H. Buck, in 1949.
The tune that they play is by Creamer-Layton and was published in 1921. One reason that it lives on is a recording by Irving Mills in 1930 where Bix Beiderbecke plays a solo chorus, one of his last.