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194 THE INSTRUMENTS, THE SOUNDS, THE PERFORMERS
the way home from the funeral might include Aint Gonna Study War No More or When the Saints Go Marching In), blues (most of which were passed along by word of mouth, to be documented later by W. C. Handy and others), and ragtime (usually a little more complex than the others, involving two or three themes linlced by interludes, etc.). It was not until the early 1930s, when such pioneers as Coleman Hawkins and Benny Goodman showed how the treasury of jazz could be enriched by the incorporation of Tin Pan Alleys better products as media for jazz treatment, that composition per se made an appreciable step forward. Meanwhile, however, for almost a* decade, the art of writing for jazz had been given a new dimension as the pioneer arrangers went to work.
The first jazz arranger of influence and importance was Don Redman. Because he was a saxophonist in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, and because Henderson subsequently earned independent acceptance as one of the great jazz arrangers, the true proportion of Redmans contribution has been virtually ignored. Trained in conservatories in Boston and Detroit, a child prodigy and instrumentalist from the age of three, he made his first tentative efforts at composing and arranging as early as 1915.
Redman tells it in his own words: "When I was 14 or 15 I used to write things for theater groups—those nickelodeons where they had real bad shows-they would come through maybe once a month. We had seven pieces; this was in West Virginia, and we played for an all-white show. I used to write a lot of things for the shows and a song that I did for one of them a little later on eventually became popular; but being a country boy, I didn't know what to do about copyrighting it, so I lost it. It was called Prohibition Blues.
"I first came to New York with a band from Pittsburgh called the Broadway Syncopators. They didn't last long here, but we got a lot of comments on the arrangements. I was with them in 1922; the following year I joined Fletcher Henderson's band and did just about all the arrangements. When we started out there were just two saxophones—Coleman Hawkins and I—and three brass. Hawk and I were definitely the first to start playing riffs behind the solos. This was at the Club Alabam; later on, when we came |
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