'Gennett Suite' celebrates a century of Indiana legacy in recorded jazz

Among the more unlikely places for the new musical genre called jazz to have made a significant entrance was a piano factory with a small recording studio in Richmond, Indiana. Yet a century ago, Gennett Records won its place in history by bringing to the small town near the Ohio border some of the most significant figures in American popular music in its burgeoning jazz form, all under the provincial Starr Piano Company's umbrella. The music had burst onto the cultural scene in New Orleans and Chicago, and was soon to win its most prominent home in New York City.

Among Gennett's early captures on record was Louis Armstrong's first recorded solo, on "Chimes Blues" with the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band in 1923. It gave exposure as well to Indianapolis' own Hoagy Carmichael and provided an early niche for the short-lived Iowa cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

These figures get adequate recognition in Brent Wallarab's "Gennett Suite," a centennial tribute designed for the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, which played it at the Jazz Kitchen Sunday evening to a receptive, even adoring, audience. A wish for more representation of Jelly Roll Morton in the suite is perhaps not out of place; the final part  now turns its attention more to Carmichael. Wallarab brings forward in fresh costuming music closely associated with Carmichael, Beiderbecke, and the Oliver-Armstrong alliance. 

Brent Wallarab and Mark Buselli founded BWJO in 1994.

The arrangement of new textures and harmonies in old music, linked to a succession of solo spotlights for many of BWJO's excellent players, bridged the decades magnificently. Original settings are honored to some degree, but a 21st-century perspective is embedded throughout.

In solos, there are historically steeped showcases for pianist Luke Gillespie in particular. I also enjoyed how co-founder Mark Buselli kept his flugelhorn solo out of bop and post-bop territory in channeling Beiderbecke. Like any pioneer, of course, Bix foreshadowed later developments. It's still amazing to me to listen to "Singin' the Blues" (a later non-Gennett recording not comprised in this suite) and catch flashes of modernism, including the cutest "break" of the era, within a set harmonic framework. Wallarab has the wisdom to see how the new music of a hundred years ago sends its prophetic notes into our own post-pandemic world. And I'm satisfied with the suite's avoidance of the corny spoken shout "Oh, play that thing!" at the climax of King Oliver's "Dippermouth Blues." "Gennett Suite" belongs firmly to our own time as well as to the enduring power of cultural tradition.

The work has been more than four years in the making, and was developed by Wallarab in his capacity as professor of jazz studies at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. So the educational aspect of the project has now blossomed into a fully professional, and soon widely available, document. Recordings of the suite on CD and vinyl are promised for public release later this spring.

It adds to the distinguished BWJO discography as well as to a celebration of the Hoosier jazz legacy. Everyone can then spread their own shouted or spoken "Oh, play that thing!" over anyplace in "Gennett Suite" when they play the recording.