Jabbo Smith

His fabulous technique was better than Louis’s. We often used to criticise each other in the group and we said he was too impetuous. We took Jabbo to New York and it has been said that Roy Eldridge drew a lot of inspiration from his technique.*¹

These are the words of the saxophonist Benny Waters, discussing a musician discovered by Gunther Schuller in 1968² who is also the subject of much current thinking³. This sudden interest comes rather too late for Cladys “Jabbo” Smith to be able to benefit from it as he decided to give up playing in the summer of 1983.

As I have already indicated,⁴ Jabbo belongs to the second wave of innovators in the “classical period”. He was born in Pembroke, Georgia, on 24th December 1908. He was an orphan and at the age of six he went to the Jenkins orphanage in South Carolina where he started to play cornet, trumpet and trombone (at various times he also played bass trumpet and mellophone). It seems that he took his first steps under the direction of Gus “Rice” Aiken (a famous disciple of Johnny Dunn) and certainly started in the orphanage band. He left the orphanage in 1924, was noticed by the pianist and bandleader Charlie Johnson and worked for him from autumn 1925 until early 1928. This band became famous at the Small Paradise in New York; this is where Bill Coleman heard Jabbo and was impressed by him.⁵ According to Benny Waters Jabbo had some difficulty in getting established because he was not a union member; this might explain why, apart from the Charlie Johnson records, he was underemployed in New York for someone of his talent. Even this early in his career Jabbo was very inventive and could play something entirely new from one take to another of the same number (Ex. 1).

One of the rare sessions he did away from his employer revealed his talent: Duke Ellington called him in to record a second version of “Black and Tan Fantasy” (November 1927). The critic J. P. Daubresse says the Duke offered Jabbo a job in his band but that Jabbo turned it down because he was better payed with Johnson. In 1928 a tour with the show “Keep Shufflin’” brought him to Chicago where he immediately succeeded Louis Armstrong in the Carroll Dickerson band; this speaks volumes for him but it was also the beginning of a misunderstanding. Although his technique enabled him to play anything, he was obliged by his contract to sound much like Armstrong as possible. This was also the case with his contract with Brunswick in 1929 and it led conventional criticism to class him as an imitator and to disregard him from then on.

And yet these sides for Brunswick are important historically. Although he fulfilled his contract by sounding like Louis in the vocal parts and in a few turns of phrase on the trumpet, Jabbo kept his own identity, as anyone who listens properly will hear. His style is based on fast playing and the use of the whole register of the instrument.