On a recent Saturday, there descended upon Carnegie Hall something called a Dixieland Jazz Concert. It brought to the old stage all the great names of a great jazz era, and it also brought some memories because we hadn't had a big Dixieland concert in some years. It is a pleasure to report that this one held to tradition. The first big jazz concert at Carnegie was back before the war when Eddie Condon and Ernie Anderson put "Fats" Waller up on the hallowed stage. "Fats" did some great piano work and then cut out for the intermission. Backstage he attacked a gin bottle and decided to change from tails to tuxedo. Also from piano to organ. He played "Summertime." It seemed to hypnotize him. He played other organ solos and they all came out sounding like "Summertime." "I never knew," Oscar Levant said afterward, "how much Tchaikovsky was influenced by Gershwin."

Inflamed with their own courage and now established as concert impresarios, Ernie and Eddie, during and after the war, ran a whole series of jazz'concerts at Town Hall. Many of these were taped and radioed to the Armed Forces, and they were a potent force in building the new, young jazz audience. Things were rough at the beginning, though. "The audience at the first one was so small," Eddie remembers, "that I addressed it as. Lady and Gentleman." But the gigs caught on and were soon doing capacity. They are remembered by many of us with deep nostalgia. Part of the excitement of a Dixie concert-particularly for the promoter-is the realization that nobody knows who will be on hand or what they will play. Sometimes there are seven trumpet players; sometimes seven clarinetists and no trumpet player. It never matters much. Whoever is on hand just does the best he can.

As a matter of fact, complete lack of organization often makes for the best concert. The music is jazz as it started impromptu, creative and unschooled. It is a sure shot that once or twice during the night some group will be thrown together, will take off and rock the hall. This seems to be the way the Dixieland fan wants things. He wants things to explode off schedule.

Uncoordinated and rough-house as these bashes sometimes are, they have written a full and important chapter in American musical history. It was concerts such as the one recorded here, the most recent of the Carnegie bashes, which took jazz out of the saloon and out of the gutter. It was these concerts which forced the high-brows of the music pages to pay a little attention to the only music basically American. There came a time when the longhairs simply couldn't ignore any longer an art which sold out the concert halls.

This "Dixieland at Carnegie Hall" recording was done like the old ones. You will note that the applause and laughter comes naturally, and when it should. It doesn't have the tricky mechanical "dubbed" overtones which the practiced ear can spot on so many recorded concerts. Better yet, this concert was surely one of the best of them all. There are several reasons.

A principal reason was that in Jimmy McPartland, an articulate and knowing cornet veteran, 'the program had the best and easiest moderator available-to say nothing of the soaring McPartland horn. McPartland handled the program with the ease of a knowing veteran.

Around him, at one stage or another, Jimmy had just about every topflight Dixielander in the land. Listen to Wild Bill Davison on the outstanding "River Boat Shuffle," and lend an ear to the ageless and indestructible Pee Wee Russell as he cuts and lifts, pauses and fools you every time you think you know which way he's going. Hear Vie Dickinson do one of his very finest versions of "Basin Street," and sit still for Tyree Glenn and the whole mob as they march up and down the Carnegie aisles to "When The Saints Go Marchin' In," and the packed audience practically shakes the roof with excitement.

There is the superb drum work by Mousey Alexander, the exact background rhythms of Tommy Potter, and Gene Schroeder, the good, solid music of almost 40 other real old pros, including George Wettling, Phil Failla, Al Hall, Miff Mole and Joe Barufaldi.

It's good to have this concert on a permanent record, just as it was good to have on the stage so many of the guys who were fighting for jazz before it was fashionable and popular and a kick for the intellectuals and the cultists. It is interesting to note that today every musician on this record was steadily employed and had to "double" in the concert. It seems like only yesterday when these jazzmen, along with others, couldn't find a job anywhere.

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