Bryce Edwards and Mike Davis
‘Hot Combination: The Cliff Edwards / Red Nichols Project’
Birdland
September 1

In 1925, a remarkable jazz tradition was launched. On January 14 at New York, the no. 1 singer in all of American music, Bessie Smith, teamed up with a dynamic young trumpeter from New Orleans, Louis Armstrong, who was rapidly proving himself the greatest soloist and improviser in creation. They recorded five tracks together, beginning with a masterpiece rendition of what was a standard even then, “St. Louis Blues.”

Not only did Smith and Armstrong create a definitive and immortal version of the most venerated of all jazz classics, they inspired the tradition of a major instrumentalist collaborating on an equal footing with a great singer. In 1937, Billie Holiday recorded roughly 16 titles that co-starred her perfect musical soulmate, Lester Young, the innovative tenor saxophone stylist; in 1963, a great tenor colossus of a later generation, John Coltrane, got together with an outstanding baritone, Johnny Hartman, to give us a masterpiece of an album.

There’s another great vocal/instrumental collaboration that jazz fans should know about — one that is going to be celebrated this Monday at Birdland by a multi-talented young singer-instrumentalist, Bryce Edwards, in tandem with a brilliant trumpeter, Mike Davis.

Between October 1925 and December 1926, one of the leading singers of the jazz age, Cliff Edwards, a vaudeville and Broadway headliner, recorded roughly 24 titles with a prominent cornetist and bandleader, Loring “Red” Nichols. Although not as well known among jazz fans as the other collaborations mentioned, these are remarkable titles, well deserving of centennial attention.

In his time, Edwards (1895-1971) was considered an entertainer rather than a serious musician, but he would make significant contributions to the long-term development of American music. Billed as “Ukulele Ike,” Edwards was the first hugely popular singer-player, accompanying himself energetically on that instrument in such a way that inspired a national vogue for it. In addition to which, Edwards scatted and improvised vocally on dozens of recordings years before Ella Fitzgerald and even Armstrong.

Edwards was a pivotal figure of the jazz age who introduced three of the best-known standards in the Great American Songbook: “Fascinating Rhythm,” in the 1924 Broadway show “Lady Be Good”; “Singin’ in the Rain,” in the early movie musical “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” and, in a later part of his career in which he supplied Walt Disney’s “Pinocchio” the voice of Jiminy Cricket, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

One hundred years after his pinnacle, Edwards is far from forgotten; Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen is a major fan.

Nichols (1905-65) was an essential soloist of the era, playing in a lilting and lyrical yet at the same time hard-driving style that made him a stylistic brother to Bix Beiderbecke. Yet he was even more valuable to jazz history as an organizer and general factotum.  

There was a recording boom in the 1920s, and Nichols was at the center of it: He either directed or played on, in some estimates, at least 500 sessions or 4,000 individual tracks, ranging from full-scale dance and concert orchestras to some of the hottest small groups of a very hot era. In particular, he presided over a series of sessions with an ensemble billed as Red Nichols and His Five Pennies that represents some of the purest and greatest jazz ever captured on wax.

Nichols worked with other major singers, including Sophie Tucker and, on several occasions, Bing Crosby. Likewise, most of Edwards’s earlier recordings feature the singer primarily accompanying himself with his own ukulele in a way that’s highly satisfactory. Still, the two dozen or so sides recorded by Edwards and Nichols together bring the music to the next level. Although released as Cliff Edwards and his Hot Combination, the group is essentially Nichols’s Five Pennies, including a pioneering trombonist, Miff Mole, and a future swing era superstar, Jimmy Dorsey, on alto saxophone.  

On such future standards as “Dinah” and “Sunday,” they achieve a synergy that’s remarkable for that era or any era; the singer and the players inspire and supercharge each other. “I’m Tellin’ the Birds – Tellin’ the Bees (How I Love You)” features an early interlude by the legendary violin-and-guitar duo Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang. Throughout, there’s an exuberance that’s unique, not to mention a wicked sense of humor, as on Irving Berlin’s landmark waltz, “Remember,” wherein Edwards role plays as both halves of a romantic couple in a comic dialogue with himself.

Bryce Edwards and Mike Davis are uniquely suited to this centennial celebration of the Hot Combination sessions of 1925 and ’26. Mr. Davis has an encyclopedic knowledge of early jazz trumpet and cornet styles, and has made a specialty of the music of Beiderbecke and Nichols.  

For his part, Mr. Edwards understands the contributions of Cliff Edwards — no relation, by the way — better than anyone performing over the last hundred years. He’s certainly the only contemporary artist who not only understands what “eefing” is — Cliff Edwards’s unique term for his own early scat singing — but can actually do it.