Cold Dixie

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 486, 15 October 1948, Page 12

Cold Dixie

HE war between Be-Boppers and Moldy Figs hasn’t yet made headlines in this journal, but in circles where jazz is taken seriously nobody talks about anything else; Be-Bop (with or without the hyphen, or just Bop) is new, frantic, intricate, technically polished, and puts in too many notes to the bar for my own comfort. Moldy Fig is New Orleans traditional, come to us via Chicago, getting a bit careworn, the bags under its eyes a little darker and a little deeper each day, ‘the sound of its voice more and more resembling a cliché, Still there’s vitality in both of them, and their home is the U.S.A., not, I fear, England, or at least not the BBC. The other evening 3YA broadcast a quarter-hour transcription of the BBC Jazz Octet. This group set out to be Dixieland, or Moldy Fig if you like, but it had as much human vitality as a pianola grinding sadly in a refrigerator. The four wind and the four rhythm lumbered through four tunes, good old good ones, like "South," "At the Jazz Band Ball" and "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate," the announcer made some helpful historical references in a gently academic voice, and the temperature went down and down and down. At the finish I tip-toed away blowing on my fingers, wondering how many BBC Jazz Octets laid endways it took to sink the Titanic.