Sho’ Is Hot
LP Herwin 109
In the beginning, the voice sounds like a radio announcer of New Orleans jazz in the 1940s, but then it evolves into something else: a kind of vaudeville number with a good trumpet playing in the back and sometimes in the foreground. The trumpet player Cicero Thomas is one of several good, almost unknown musicians on this LP. Many others remain unknown, and the other two in this trio that recorded under the name of Thomas’ Devil’s in 1929 are probably Kline Tyndall on piano and Tommy Taylor on drums. The singer is one David Cross.
I don’t know anything about Cicero, but he has some entries in Brian Rust’s “Jazz Records 1897–1942.” He accompanied Sippie Wallace and other blues singers in 1926, and in 1933 he played the third trumpet with Reuben Reeves. And in 1928–29, he made major contributions with “Walter Barnes and his Royal Creolians.”