Sheryl Smith

Discovering Adrian Rollini

Jazz discovery must be different now than it was when most IAJRCers did it. Some of you got to do it in shellac, two sides at a time. You knew who you wanted to hear more of, or could do a limited amount of listening to find out. And eventually you connected with discographers and fanzines, and started helping each other find and identify what you wanted.

Me, I’m a child of the ‘60s, AKA The Age of LPs—too late for anything in 78s except reissues. And the reissues I was after then usually involved Russian bassos and Nordic tenors. I knew jazz could be quality music, but I figured it could wait. I had over a millennium of classical music to revel in, and that was my priority. This means I was on hand while John Culshaw was producing the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring—and even got to hear Georg Solti conduct some of it live. But I missed my chance to discover the first generation jazz guys on the bandstand. To all of you who’ve had that experience, all I can say is--major jones!

I’ve been exploring early hot jazz for two years now—on Internet Bazaarland, where the reissue market is thriving. Talk about audible Prozac! It gave a lift to the fizzy 20s, and to the Great Depression too. Talk about versatile! It’s a better remedy for our Lesser Depression than the raging pop folks are putting out now.

But I’m a classical baby, and it took a while to figure out how to find more of what I wanted. One would think you could type “hot jazz” and come up with something, but no: the search engines do specifics and they (sometimes) do general (browse “jazz”), but they don’t have a middle yet. I didn’t even know to look for soloists at first. In classical music your top level search is for a composer, after which you locate the piece and under that the available performances. I used the monthly Schwann catalogues, and that’s how they worked: their Artists catalogues came out much less frequently and were usually out of date. But jazz, of course, centers on performers. You can look up jazz composers (Ellington, Waller), but it doesn’t give you the big picture—and looking up a jazz piece (“How High the Moon”) gives you something like a collage of the whole gallery.

And the gallery of jazz is huge! Now it’s the CD age, where recording is cheap and storage practically free. Recorded music is issued and reissued by acre-feet, and real-time record stores stock very little. I couldn’t tell at first what kind(s) of jazz I liked—or what kinds of jazz there were. I finally got a start by taking the Ken Burns Jazz out of the library tape by tape. Many jazz fans find this a problematic program, but at least it gave me an overview of sounds, and names to go with them. It helped immensely to find out that the earlier tapes intrigued my ear quite a bit more than the later ones. So I copied down a few names, and embarked on what turned out to be a daisy-chain of discovery. Reading about hot jazz added others to the list.

Adrian Rollini turned out to be one of my favorites, but it took me a while to find that out. There isn’t much to read about him: no biography, and unless there is research already done, it may be too late to scare up the information to write one. Adrian figures peripherally in his brother Art Rollini’s autobiography, Thirty Years with the Big Bands. This talks about the family background (solidly middle-class—their father was a prosperous engraver), and gives details of Adrian for the years when the brothers lived and worked together. Adrian’s centennial, like Bix Beiderbecke’s, is 2003 (June 28), and he died in 1956, in Florida, a bit out of the way and slightly too soon to be lionized by the revivalists. I’ve spoken to one or two people who knew or interviewed him, and the impression I got was that Adrian wasn’t especially forthcoming: a ton of music, but not much talk. He was still a working musician when he died (of accidents complicated by alcohol), and if he had feelings about his career or accomplishments, his brother doesn’t mention them.

Adrian was a child prodigy on the piano. His brother says he played Chopin at age four, but doesn’t say when or how he found jazz. He found it early, though, and was with the then-famous group, the California Ramblers, in 1922. Follow Adrian through his brother’s book, and almost every time we meet him, he seems to have picked up another instrument: piano and xylophone, bass sax, goofus and hot fountain pen; third trombone, drums, vibes and the cello. He kept switching, not just instruments, but sections: not always a lead dog, but still managed to change the view. He had brilliant solos on shellac by the mid-1920s, and played and recorded with the majors of early chamber jazz: Bix and Frank Trumbauer, Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, the Red Nichols groups, etc. He even spent time in Europe as one of the stars for Fred Elizalde and his Anglo-American Band. After the crash he settled into a tap room in New York with a small combo, running a drum shop with his wife on the side, while spending the overfill of his prodigious talents and energies playing for the radio, seemingly on whatever happened to need playing. If you’ve discovered Adrian Rollini, that’s how you know him—as the most playful and promiscuous multi-instrumentalist in early jazz.

If you haven’t discovered Adrian Rollini, and want to, you can find a fair sampling of his work on CD. The trick is that most of it isn’t listed under his own name. Richard Sudhalter’s chapter on him in Lost Chords gives the names of groups that Adrian recorded with, and I hit pay dirt with those. Sudhalter’s writing is luminous, and helps the appreciation of even non-musicians like me. Adrian R. makes an indelible impression in the more familiar Bix/Tram, Venuti/Lang and Nichols sides. But reissues of the small group California Ramblers sides—the Goofus Five, Varsity Eight and Little Ramblers, along with the Fred Elizalde CD--showcase this unique talent at its sunniest. He embroiders the cat’s pajamas with his own brand of deco sparkle. When the jazz bug bit Adrian Rollini, it sank its fangs into a man with sense of wit. Other musicians played funny jazz on normal instruments; Adrian Rollini chose funny instruments to play virtuoso jazz. He’s sort of a good-time genius.

Discover Adrian Rollini, and you can’t help discovering the bass sax; he was the acknowledged god of the instrument. This ogre of the saxophone family had a reputation for intractability before AR took it up, and made it a vogue sound of the 20s almost by himself. He got a fat, crisp sound, no blurring of the pitch, and some remarkable extensions of the upper register. It’s a joy to hear him trolling along in the deepest of the deeps, swinging the band along at a remarkably jaunty pace. It’s not obvious that such an instrument will ever solo—until Adrian, and how the dark sparks fly! He’ll go skittering off on some exquisite break like a bassoon on steroids, spraying wit in all directions on an instrument that should be capable only of boffo—and does it, when required, without outgunning Eddie Lang’s guitar. His famous solos with the chamber jazz greats are rightly prized, but the small-group Ramblers’ and Elizalde sides have swathes of others just as good. Hear his inventive work in Fred Elizalde’s “Sugar Step,” an easy-loping tune that gives him room to roam—and double-time in one passage. The Goofus Five and Varsity Eight CDs have ripping solos on almost every cut: try “Lazy Weather” or “Arkansas Blues” for tasty samples.

Unto this Adrian added what might be called novelty instruments, even in comparison with the bass sax. He decided to make jazz on something called the Couesnophone: the Ramblers took to calling this a “goofus,” and the name stuck tightly enough to become official. In pictures the thing looks like a cross between a sax and a hookah—and it sounds like a harmonica, but more sonorous. The contraption grafted its name onto a Ramblers splinter group called the Goofus Five, and Adrian uses it to tickle, like one of those unrolling paper noisemakers with the feather. This is the real ya-ya 20s, the don’t-give-a-damn made audible, and Adrian spritzes it gaily wherever it seems to fit: you’ll recognize the sound once you’ve heard it, and you’ll hear it fairly often in the Rollini oeuvre. My favorite goofus pieces are “Tessie, Stop Teasin’ Me” and “Them Ramblin’ Blues”: the goofus sets the tone of these pieces, along with some raucous scat and a smear of muted cornet from the underrated and insouciant Bill Moore. No way you can get through these tunes without laughing.

Less distinctive in sound but quite as unique is Adrian’s other novelty instrument, the “hot fountain pen.” This is a one-octave arrested-development clarinet with maybe a tinge of slide-whistle in its ancestry—not easy to distinguish from a regular clarinet except in its range, and I’m not confident in my ability to identify it. Adrian uses it deftly to accent the violin on some of the Venuti sides: it’s present as a matter of record on “Beatin’ the Dog” and others. He makes frequent use of it on many Elizalde sides, including “Somebody Stole My Gal,” which seems to begin and end with hot fountain pen breaks. Part of the charm of this instrument seems lost when you can’t see it played; but even so there are solos that almost convince you that a single octave is enough.

A quirky choice of instruments for a man who could play anything. One can imagine that Adrian chose them as maximal amusement for the young dancers of the 20s—and to express his own sense of fun as well. He was the same age as his audiences, and his jazz radiates with youthful energy.

But hearing him today, there seems much more going on than period entertainment. Adrian’s musicianship and inventiveness were well beyond what most of his listeners could take in—and so, I believe, was his expressiveness. His are high-jinks that remind us how rebellious an age that actually was, how many values were overturned, how much courage was lost in the Depression that came after. The humor here isn’t mere good-time brainlessness. There’s an irreverence for the past, of emotions well-loosed, of security well-thrown away. Adrian Rollini, like all the best hot jazz, is too astringent for nostalgia. We think the 20s were naïve, but they weren’t. Post-World War I marked the first modern decade of disillusionment, and they overused alcohol to cushion the shock: alcohol is an anxiety-reducer. We have safer drugs than they had, but we’re not brave enough to force celebration through pain the way they did.

Two-beat 20s jazz got a bad rep from the four-beat era that came after. Adrian Rollini’s heart repertoire is two-beat jazz, so perhaps this attitude helps make the quality of his work a little harder to see. I don’t quite understand why this should be so: I can listen to lots of voh-de-oh-doh without tiring, but swing bands have to be special to compensate my ear for their loss of polyphony. I’m finding more quality tunes than I expected. Maybe some of the trad jazz players will find them too, and give them another chance.

But even if you don’t like the 20s sound, you might still find Adrian Rollini worth discovering. He backed off on these instruments a little when the 20s ended—but picked up the vibrophone (four mallets!), and played jazz on it in New York, while Lionel Hampton was still on the other coast, awaiting Benny Goodman and fate. He opened a tap room, and settled in with a trio throughout the 30s. And made swing-style recordings, perhaps less striking than his earlier work, but still solid Rollini, and a sparkling lot of fun. Superlative musicianship lives in the physiology: his instruments change, but the happy jazz from within remains the same.

And he left enough recordings to keep us happy too: and we all need a little extra of that. Once you discover Adrian Rollini, you won’t want to lose him again.

Book References

Arthur Rollini, Thirty Years with the Big Bands. University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Recommended Listening (CDs)

Adrian Rollini

Tap Room Swing. ASV, AJA 5424. (A well-chosen overview, typical of this label.)

Novelty Trio and Quintet. Swing Time Productions, 2010.

The Goofus Five

Vol. 1: 1926-1927. Timeless, CBC 1-017

Vol. 2: 1924-1925. Timeless, CBC 1-042

The Varsity Eight

1923-1926. Timeless, CBC 1-062

The Little Ramblers

1924-1927. Timeless, CBC 1-037

The California Ramblers

1925-1928. Timeless, CBC 1-053

Fred Elizalde and his Anglo-American Band (Best of)

1928-1929. Retrieval, RTR 79011

New York Jazz in the Roaring Twenties

Vol. 1. Biograph, BCD 129

Vol. 2. Biograph, BCD 153

Vol. 3. Biograph, BCD 154

(These are from Edison Laterals, so the running time is longer. There is some Rollini on each of the disks, but I particularly recommend Vol. 2.)