Word: riffs
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WASHINGTON--Farm representatives charged today that the Farm Security Administration's attempts to case the manpower crisis in the South had failed "miserably" and resulted instead in drinking and other orgies by "riff-raff" laborers imported from neighboring states...
...vintage of 1925 which only a few collectors probably own. Most commendable is the wide scope of the book, although many of the examples are certainly not the best of a particular band or player's work. Almost every big band of today that ever recorded a riff is mentioned, and there are some reflections on the quality of big-band arrangements. You'll find even the Alec Wilder Octet and the Golden Gate Quartet, not usually welcomed into the jazz household, but the line had to be drawn somewhere, and the door slammed before Hazel Scott and Carmen Cavallaro...
...extra special treatment. There is some excellent saxophone moaning on the first two choruses, and Dicky Wells, or someone just as good, plays a few pleasant bars of trombone during the vocal. And just to make sure that "Harvard Blues" has a congenial mate, the reverse, one of those riff numbers which could have been named anything at all, has been entitled "Coming Out Party...
...which I have long been riding. Duke has abandoned the overwrought orchestrations he was writing a few years ago, and has reverted to arrangements more in the jazz idiom, with wider opportunities for his soloists. Last week he turned out Five O'clock Drag and Clementine, two original riff numbers arranged in the Ellington tradition of unexpected effects and frequent dissonance's, particularly in the brass section. Clementine is not the "Oh My Darling" ditty, but just another Ellington vehicle by his arranger, Billy Strayhorn. On both sides Ben Webster and Rex Stewart are presented with several grooves...
...corny, nobody plays that way any more. Give me the Andrews Sisters!" Well, there's a lot of truth that. Very few bands play the way Jimmy McPartland plays today, and more's the pity. Certainly it's an old-fashioned style; and if you prefer the stereotyped, lifeless riff tunes of Glenn Miller, Les Brown, and Artie Shaw, that's your prerogative. Me, I'll take the old stuff, and if you're on my side, you'll do well to go down to Nick's, for there you'll find the best living example of what is generally...