BOYS MEET REX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 557, 24 February 1950, Page 24

BOYS MEET REX

IKE good, small band jazz it was unrehearsed. Nobody knew what was going to happen until it happened, but, like good, small band jazz, the result was satisfying. . It started in Auckland when someone from the Aorangi telephoned 1YA with the news that Rex Stewart was on board. Stewart is an American musician who* blows a hotter trumpet than has yet been heard in person in New Zealand. He is perhaps best known out here for his recording, with Duke Ellington, of Boy Meets Horn. Don -Patton, 1YA’s_ Assistant Programme Officer and specialist in dance bands and the jazz hot, arranged to meet Stewart at the studio, and the result was a recorded interview in which Patton and K. Simich asked Stewart about his career, his travels, and his thoughts on the present .conditidn of ‘jazz. The passionate minority won’t need to be told when this interview is going to be broadcast; they will be listening to Turntable’s Rhythm .On Record session as a matter of course, but for those mildly interested, or curjous, or so actively hostile that they will suffer gladly if they think they can pick up ammunition for their cause, the time is 10.0 p.m. this Friday, February 24, and the station is 2YA. The news that Stewart was in Auckland buzzed round the’ jazz fraternity there like an urgent telegram with the wind behind it. The boys got together with a mind to hear the great man play, and perhaps play a little themselves. He did, and they did. A correspondent on the spot said Stewart displayed all the qualities of a great artist. "He showed that he had a rare imagination and a brilliant gift for extemporisation," our correspondent wrote. "Although ‘ he possessed an amazing technique, it was always used as_an unobtrusive. vehicle '

OO for his tremendous wealth of* musical ideas; mever to dazzle. His perfect phrasing and extremely subtle use of dynamic contrasts were characteristic of his playing, while his ‘muted backgrounds to solos by others were brilliantly -conceived, quite spontaneous, and in delightful taste." Stewart started to play the trumpet about 1919; and his first professional job was with a combination known as Danny Doye’s Melody Mixers, in 1921: After that he was with Fletcher Henderson for a while, then had his own twelve-piece group at a Broadway spot, and in 1934 joined Duke Ellington. The Duke was full of ideas and encouraged his sidemen to try their own ideas, too. The .band was too big to keep off written arrangements, but the members played together so well and knew each other’s styles so intimately that there was still room for a good deal of improvisation. : Since Stewart left the Duke he has been all over the place. He attended an International Jazz Festival in Paris in 1948, and last year toured Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Ger-: many and Italy. Then he set off for Australia where he attended a jazz con- vention in Melbourne which lasted. five days and was attended by about ten thousand people. He also toured country towns with the Graeme Bell band, doing a concert and playing for a dance in each place visited. He was surprised and pleased to find that the people he played for in country towns knew what they liked, and that what they liked was what he played. He had the seme enthusiasm for some of the musicians he heard in Auckland. "They're Keen and right on the beam," ‘ie said. "There are men here who could sit in with a band anywhere in the world and play.") Stewart doesn’t see Bop and the future of jazz bound up very closely. He admits the technical skill needed to play Bop, and he respects the younger musicians who go in for it, but hedoesn’t think it will last because it doesn’t have any melody. A relaxed mam himself, he likes his music fairly calm and melodic. Musically, he is more at home on the Mississippi Delta than in Chicago or New York.