Elmer Snowden's Harlem Banjo

I have brought this post back up front because I added another selection by this Elmer Snowden quartet. Here they are  Doin' the New Lowdown, which was quite different from doing the Down Low, as we know it today. I also found the only photo I have from the session, the quality is not the best, but it was scanned from Se & Hør, a Danish TV/Radio magazine that probably no longer exists. (BTW, the depicted packet of guitar string is from Elmer's shoebox)

If you have done some browsing on this blog, you may have come across the name of Elmer Snowden. He was the listener who called me during a show at WHAT and informed me that Lonnie Johnson was in Philadelphia. I subsequently recorded Lonnie and Elmer for the Prestige label and they appeared on my WHAT-FM show.

Elmer's name is not as well known as Lonnie's, but he was a man without whom the history of jazz would be different. That is mainly because it was Elmer who brought Duke Ellington to New York, from Washington, D.C. and eventually allowed him to take over his band, The Washingtonians. That was nearly ninety years ago. More recently, fifty years ago, I suggested to Bill Grauer—my boss and founder of Riverside Records—that we do an album with Elmer.

Bill had a passion for early jazz and Elmer's name was one of those mystical once people read after blowing the dust away. Thinking of him as an old man who hadn't been heard from in several years and at this point probably had only his memories to offer, Bill suggested the kind of album one was most likely to find on Moe Asche's  Folkways label. "Have him talk about the old days and strum a few examples," he said. I knew that we could come up with an album that would surprise and delight him, so I just nodded and began thinking of a suitable group.

Click on image to enlarge

It wasn't as easy as I had thought it would be. It seemed logical to have Ray Bryant on piano, for Elmer had been a mentor to him and his older brother, Tommy, back in Philadelphia. "Elmer always booked me when he had a gig," Ray once told me. "We played weddings and all kinds of parties, and when there was no piano, Elmer had me banging on the bongos." As it turned out, two sessions with Ray's working trio didn't work out. I added Garvin Bushell and Gene Sedric on one of them, but the sound I had in mind just wasn't there, so I aborted both sessions, leaving six hitherto unissued tracks. They are probably boxed in some dark corner of a Concord Records vault. 

Then I remembered that Elmer had spoken of The Red Hot Eskimos, a trio or quartet  that he led and did rent party gigs with during the Depression. That led me to the idea of having Cliff Jackson play piano, Elmer's eyes lit up. "That's it!", he said, "Cliff knows what to do." He explained that he used to hire Jackson to front a Snowden band back in the days when business was booming and he had as many as four running concurrently. Before long, we had Tommy Bryant, Ray's older brother, on bass, and Jimmy Crawford the old Lunceford drummer moving it all along. This was the group we did our third session with, and it worked—we hit our stride, so to speak.

A few months later, I did get Elmer and Ray into the studio for a successful session, with Bud Freeman and another Snowden alumnus, Roy Eldridge, as well as Tommy on bass and Jo Jones on drums. I also did a solo album with Cliff Jackson (whose wife was Maxine Sullivan) and we did a couple of Prestige sessions at Rudy Van Gelder's studio. 

Getting back to the Riverside album, I named it "Harlem Banjo!" and Bill Grauer was, indeed, happily surprised when he heard it.  I have to confess that I never cared much for the banjo as a jazz instrument, but I had never before heard it played the way Elmer did it—he took it to another level. Well, you be the judge. Here is Running Wild from that session. I would really like to hear what you think, so please leave a comment.

Here is the second selection, Doin' the New Lowdown: