First Song - At the Jazz Band Ball

This is jazz. This is jazz. Pure authentic jazz improvised over the air by great jazz artists in person. Rudy Blanche, who writes and narrates each program as a famed jazz critic, and author of the recent book Shining Crumpets, a colorful history of this American music.

Each week at this time he'll bring you through the improvisations of celebrated jazz artists, a solid half hour of this music, and scenes from its history. So here is another section of this is jazz and your narrator, Rudy Blanche.

Our new program, This is Jazz, brings you the American folk music that began with a street marching band, then developed into a dance music, and overnight, with no one realizing it grew up into a fine art that is perhaps America's most original contribution to world culture.

We used to apologize for jazz, the kinds of chains, for in the clear, beautiful, brassic strains of its free improvisations, the whole world has found something American and something to wonder at as an artistic creation.

We used to be a little bit apologetic too about jazz being used for dancing instead of waltzes I suppose. But now we see that dancing helped to shape the musical form of jazz and to maintain its vitality.

Celebrated jazz players are sitting here in the studio with me today, the trombonus George Brunies and the clarinetist Albert Nicholas and the cornettis Muggsy Spaniard, a famous trio of jazz horns. And making up our stellar rhythm section are baby dogs at drums, pops foster bass, and Danny Barker guitar and Charlie Queener as our guest at the piano.

For their first number we have chosen a jazz tune that celebrates the dancing that has always gone with jazz. The jazz band ball. At the height of the dancing craze that was sweeping America nearly thirty years ago, the