The Vanguard of Classic Swing

“JUST RELAX AND PLAY,” (John) Hammond instructed them. “No engineers in sight, no flashing lights – nothing but music. Only, please keep cigarettes off the piano.” The musicians grinned and began warming up on “I Can’t Get Started.” “This is the rarest kind of jazz today,” (Nat) Hentoff informed us as we followed him and Hammond to seats in the middle of the hall. “These guys are caught in no man’s land, somewhere between the people who think jazz died with Johnny Dodds and the people who think it began with Stan Kenton.”

Thus wrote Lillian Ross in a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece, profiling a session that took place on July 1, 1954. John Hammond had become a busy man at this point, simultaneously helping to organize the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival that summer (it debuted on July 17) and continuing his work as a music critic. He’d just come from six years as vice-president of Mercury Records, where he recorded both jazz and classical artists, and a failed Benny Goodman-Louis Armstrong tour (the two leaders decided they didn’t get along).

But Hammond’s five years at Vanguard offers a snapshot of an underappreciated time and place in the history of jazz. Hammond was a fan of swing, and his earlier efforts had brought Benny Goodman and Fletcher Henderson together, and had helped raise Count Basie’s band from a provincial group into national fame, so it was natural for him to bring to the studio players working in that style. By 1953, of course, jazz was surging into other distinctive styles, but the first Vanguard session featured swing veteran Vic Dickenson as leader of a group of sympathetic sidemen.

Trombonist Dickenson, who had played with Benny Carter, Count Basie, and Eddie Heywood, among many others, was a busy freelancer at this point. He answered Hammond’s invitation by assembling septets for two sessions that included Ruby Braff, Ed Hall, Sir Charles Thompson, and Walter Page, among others. Jo Jones reunites with Basie bandmate Walter Page for Dickenson’s session two.