Some jazz the world almost forgot

by Jack Neely

The great irony about new technology is that it's bringing us much closer to old stuff. The compact disk, in particular, offers fresh access to music that had been forgotten so long it wasn't even much of a legend anymore: like 78's in the back of granddad's garage that we couldn't play even if we found them and cleaned them up. These recordings are now handy in a neat plastic case at the record store. Through popular compilations on CD, some songs from the dawn of musical recording are easier to find than they were when they were new. In the last 18 months alone, at least three recordings from relatively obscure sessions at Knoxville's old St. James Hotel in 1929-30 have made it onto nationally available CD collections.

I heard about this one indirectly by way of Greg Howard, our former music critic who's now a DJ in Kentucky. A few months ago he received a promotional copy of a jazz compilation called Jazz the World Forgot. Put out by the record company Yazoo, known for its blues collections, this CD comprises 23 early jazz singles from 1923-1931. Among them are some legends, like King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. Some are less famous, like the Hotentots and Roy Johnson's Happy Pals.

Visiting Howard in Whitesburg, my friend Chris Barrett picked up the CD and noticed a reference to track #18, "Postage Stomp," a dance number by Maynard Baird and His Orchestra: "Maynard Baird led a stellar dance band around Knoxville, Tennessee..."

"Just don't tell Jack Neely," Howard said.

He was kidding, I bet. Anyway, I found the CD through Disc Exchange. "Postage Stomp" is a bright, hot-footed instrumental that opens with elegant woodwinds, then makes room for a subtly unorthodox trombone solo, followed by a smooth sax solo, then the woodwinds come back in and finish it off. Not a full orchestra, but several horns with a banjo in there just for percussion, close to 200 strums a minute, as if to cram this composition into the two-and-a-half minute track. "Undoubtedly one of the band's showpiece up-tempo numbers," Yazoo's liner notes continue, the cut "is an exceptional arrangement played with precision and feeling, featuring beautiful section work by the reeds, tasteful solos, and a steady bounce to the rhythm."

With notepad in hand, I was just beginning to give the piece a serious listen when my 7-year-old daughter demanded that I dance with her. I couldn't help it. It wasn't until after she was gone to bed and I'd played the record six or seven times by myself that I could sit still long enough to pay attention to the instrumentation.

This band sounds clean and tight. The tune's of a style that was once popular, but one you never hear performed well today. If you've ever seen a Laurel and Hardy movie, think of the manic stuff you hear in the background, and you'll have an idea of what "Postage Stomp" sounds like.

From stray references in books like Encyclopedia of East Tennessee, I'd heard of Maynard Baird, but only as an anomaly of Knox-ville's radio heyday—one successful musician in 1920s Knoxville who had nothing to do with country music. I went to the McClung Collection to see what else I could find.

He was a handsome young guy from West Tennessee, they say, who landed in Knoxville around 1913 when he was still a teenager. Then, as now, teenagers had a better handle on the latest technology than full-grown-ups. Baird got a job running silent-movie projectors at the Majestic Theater on Gay Street.

It was the era that young James Agee and his dad were making a habit of the Majestic, watching cowboy silents and Chaplin comedies there. In the Majestic Theater scene in Agee's A Death in the Family, the projectionist in that small, dirty theater may have been Baird himself.

He apparently married and had kids fairly young but still roamed widely in Knoxville, listing 14 different addresses in 14 years—several of them boarding houses and cheap apartments downtown. He worked as an "operator" for small movie theaters, first the Majestic, then the Queen, then the Crystal. On the side, Baird had other passions. By 1924, Baird dared to list himself in the City Directory as a musiciana. Baird slicked his hair down, gave it a sporty off-center part, and organized a nine-piece jazz band called the Southern Serenaders. For years, they played at local dances and over the airwaves of the not-yet-legendary radio station WNOX.

After Aeolian-Vocalion set up studios at the St. James Hotel on Wall Avenue, Baird and the Serenaders recorded "Postage Stomp" on April 7, apparently among the last of six tunes they cut for Vocalion. We don't know how many copies sold, but none were nationwide hits.

That recording may have been a last hurrah for Baird's band. Some sources have them breaking up the year they cut "Postage Stomp." Music was changing, anyway—bands getting much bigger, the tempo more sophisticated.

And it was the Depression; at 40, married to a third wife who'd been a vocalist in his band, Baird was supporting five children. He got serious and became devoutly attached to the burgeoning union movement. In 1939, the former maestro of "Postage Stomp" was President of the Knoxville Central Labor Union and was soon working for labor full-time, an organizer for the AFL. He ended his career as a PR man for the AFL-CIO.

When Baird died in Knoxville in 1965, obituaries identified him as a union leader. Turntable manufacturers were phasing out the 78rpm option. Hundreds of thousands of those thick, obsolete records burst seams of cardboard boxes in garages across the country. In 1965, it might have seemed unlikely anyone would ever again pay much attention to the music on just one obscure 78: the up-tempo dance showpiece by Maynard Baird's Southern Serenaders.