Colin Hancock’s Jazz Hounds With Catherine Russell
‘Cat & the Hounds’
Turtle Bay Records

Catherine Russell
Birdland
Through September 6

When I was new to the music, all the standard histories of jazz were keen to dismiss what they derisively referred to as the “Vaudeville Blues” singers of the Jazz Age. I remember one line in particular but don’t remember who said it, that “most of this music is of little jazz, or even blues, interest.” 

If it’s any consolation, they also dumped on big-band vocalists and jazz-influenced pop singers of subsequent generations — Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday were practically the only singers of the 1920s and ’30s to get any respect. 

A lot of this was inherently sexist: When invading British rockers arrived in the 1960s, they carried the torch for guitar-banging Mississippi bluesmen, but larger-than-life ladies who wore fascinators and feather boas were deliberately overlooked. 

Hopefully that’s changed in more recent histories of American music. At least two major contemporary artists, singer Catherine Russell and multi-instrumentalist Colin Hancock, have made it a point to celebrate the legacies not only of the unchallenged Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, but also Ida Cox, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, Eva Taylor, Alberta Hunter, Rosa Henderson, Esther Bigeou, the mystical Victoria Spivey, and more.

Now Ms. Russell and Mr. Hancock have joined forces on one of the most remarkable releases of the year if not the decade, “Cat & the Hounds,” which she has been launching this week with a five-night run at Birdland.

For me, the centerpiece of the project is “West Indies Blues.” If ever there was a perfect tune for Catherine Russell, this is it. “West Indies Blues” is jointly credited to the composer, publisher, and producer Clarence Williams, the prolific songwriter Spencer Williams, who though not related was also roughly from New Orleans, and Edgar Dowell, who’s also credited with other early songs in the Williams catalog.  

“West Indies Blues” was made into a jazz classic by two other New Orleanians, violinist and bandleader Armand J. Piron, who led the most notable big dance orchestra at the dawn of jazz in the Crescent City, and singer Esther Bigeou.

This is one of many tunes, from the period and since, that alludes to the blues in the title and the mood of the lyrics — somebody complaining about something — though not, as Mr. Hancock points out, in actual blues form. It’s ideal for Ms. Russell because not only is she well steeped in the 1920s classic blues tradition, she’s also to the manor born in that her father Luis Russell (1902-63) was born in Panama, came of age musically in New Orleans, and was at the center of the New York jazz boom. Thus Ms. Russell has a direct familial connection both to 1920s jazz and blues and Pan-American musical traditions. 

“West Indies Blues” is a direct predecessor to the calypso-styled jazz numbers of the 1940s, like Louis Jordan’s “Push-Ka-Pee She Pie (The Saga Of Saga Boy)” and especially Nat King Cole’s “Calypso Blues.” In these songs and others, the sophisticated urbanites essentially poke fun at their more rustic country cousins.  “West Indies Blues” tells of a lowly elevator operator who dreams of returning to his Jamaican homeland and becoming “a great big man, like my friend Marcus Garvey,” thus aligning itself with the Calypso tradition of topical humor in a caustic reference to the controversial civil rights leader. 

The Russell-Hancock version is perhaps even more impressive than the Piron-Bigeou original; they blast out the infectious beat, which is powered by guest star Vince Giordano on bass saxophone. It uses a whole new, utterly irresistible two-beat dance rhythm that was scarcely heard from again.

The topical spirit pervades three other songs on the set that comically gripe about the difficulties poised by new technology. “Panama Limited Blues” opens with Jerron Paxton simulating a slowing locomotive with his harmonica, and finds Ms. Russell bemoaning how the choo-choo took her man away in the same spirit as W.C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues.”  

“Telephoning The Blues” has her calling her man and realizing, “Could there be another woman there?” Her low-down feeling is perfectly captured by moaning trombonist Dion Ticker, whose tone is so blue that he fully requires the use of two different mutes at the same time to produce it. 

“Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama” is pure low-tech comedy, in which Ms. Russell is joined by Mr. Paxton singing. In this Punch-and-Judy-style duet, written by Andy Razaf and James P. Johnson for the team of Butterbeans and Susie (Jody and Susan Edwards), the two hurl rhyming insults back and forth at each other. The opening line rhymes “indoor chauffeur” with “low-down loafer” and goes on to include double entendres such as “Elevator Papa, you always want to go down.” 

Then, too, there’s another specialty of the ’20s: the dance song, as represented by “Cake Walkin’ Babies from Home” and “Everybody Mess Around.” As performed by Ms. Russell and the Hounds — the others are veteran clarinetist Evan Christoper, pianist Jon Thomas, drummer Arnold Johnson, and Kerry Lewis on tuba — these odes to the goddess of Terpischore resonate as pure syncopated euphoria. 

The band’s name, incidentally, comes from early 1920s bands led by Mamie Smith and Johnny Dunn, among others, and makes for a good pairing with Ms. Russell’s nickname, Cat. There’s only one drawback to the Jazz Hounds album: At 12 tracks and 37 minutes, it’s over far too quickly. 

In that respect, you might say that the album has a lot in common with Catherine Russell herself, in that it’s short but awesome.