Baby Dodds - Talking and Drum Solos

The pioneering New Orleans drummer Warren "Baby" Dodds, who made his name with the greats of early jazz in the 1920s, made these unusual recordings in January 1946 for Moe Asch.

Dodds was in the midst of a career renaissance sparked by a resurgence of interest in the New Orleans jazz musicians who were predecessors or contemporaries of Louis Armstrong. The winter of 1945-46 was a busy period for the drummer, who in a few months' span made records not only for Asch but for Circle and Blue Note.

The May 1946 Jazz Record, a magazine for traditional jazz fans, has Dodds on its cover (see below) and ads inside for the Circle and Blue Note releases. The magazine also has an article containing the drummer's reminiscences of his career, which I have included in the download.

The records that Dodds made for Asch were, unusually, drum solos. Four were issued on two 78s on the Disc label in 1946. In 1951 Asch packaged the 78s with some additional material and issued this LP on his Folkways label. The additional material includes a semi-incomprehensible discussion between Dodds and producer Frederic Ramsey that seems to start in the middle and proceed nowhere in particular. A recent book on Folkways quotes Ramsey as saying this was a deliberate attempt to elicit Dodds' insights on playing the drums, but I suspect it was an informal conversation that happened to be taped, and which Asch later retrieved to fill out the LP. By the way, the LP package originally included an insert that unfortunately I do not have. [Note: this is now included in the download, courtesy of Internet Archive.]

There are photos of Dodds and even a video of him on the Drummerworld site. Don't pay too much attention to the discussion about him there, though. It has the date of these recordings wrong, and the anecdote about Dodds joining Kid Ory's band is contradicted by Dodds himself in the Jazz Record article.

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