Also this issue: Here We Are Now -Patrick Rapa The Hangman James Lewes is documenting a very perishable part of the local rock scene. -Patrick Rapa Where They Were Then From Studio to salon to saloon, old-heads recall the scene they can¹t exactly remember. -A.D. Amorosi Punk Calling Diary of a man in a local band (or two) in the early 䢔s. -179Frank Blank² Moriarty Getting to the point the bryn mawr club knows where it¹s going, and where it¹s been. -Mary Armstrong Those were the frickin¹ days Rolling stone¹s david fricke remembers the main point -Patrick Rapa The Lowdown Peaks, valleys and what finally put a fork in The Low Road. -Lori Hill Deep Thoughts with The Low Road

October 17-23, 2002

cover story

Hot Again

Two South Philly jazz pioneers of the 䡘s and 䡢s end up in a box.

by A.D. Amorosi

Before the Hot Club of France -- the elegant violin twirlings of Stephane Grappelli and the gypsy jive of acoustic guitarist Django Reinhardt -- made jittery Parisienne jazz a worldwide enterprise in 1933, there was Giuseppi Venuti and Salvatore Massaro, two boyhood South Philadelphia friends who put the swing-jazz burners on high to begin with.

And though they would come to work with early blues and jazz legends Lonnie Johnson, Red Nichols, the Dorsey Brothers, Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, and Bix Beiderbecke, it was together as Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (or variations like their Blue Four or their All-Star Orchestra) that these men revolutionized jazz playing, be it through their frenzied unified rhythms, their primal need to solo or their wild improvisational flights of fancy. Each man on his own -- despite what history occasions -- was the first great of his given instrument, its first soloist, its first superstar.

I know this, not only because I am ardent fan and student, but because the stuff of Venuti and Lang is very nearly in my blood. It's not often I get an opportunity to say, in true dago fashion, anything like "you know who my father is?" or "Know who my grandfather was?" While I dearly love the former, I never knew the latter, my grandfather Louis, or his brother-in-law (my namesake) Angelo Gaudiosi. These men both swung with Venuti and Lang as well as played with Al Jolson, Bing and Bob Crosby -- and in the case of my grandfather, leading peg-panted orchestras at The Tower, The Carmen, The Mastbaum and The Million Dollar and Steel piers in Atlantic City, hawking the rights to his once-patented violin tricks (like putting a full glass of water on his violin to create an organ effect) along the way.

Now Venuti and Lang's finest moments are collected on the new The Classic Columbia and Okeh Recordings of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang 1926-1933 (Mosaic) box set. While the detailed notes ring rapturously about Lang and Venuti's sidemen, there's many a gig where players go unattributed. Blame time and the absence of great notation.

"We never thought anything of that stuff," says my father, Alfonso, a singer and tenor saxman, too, well-versed in Philly jazzlore. "One was my uncle, the other my dad. Who thought about taking notes?"

Mosaic was able to capture just enough of the twosome's history to make these eight CDs a wild ride with a wilder story. Two guys from the Eighth and Fitzwater area, the terra cotta-tiled James Campbell Public High, led two different lives. Venuti, an eccentric practical joker, Lang, a reserved humble clinician -- both with exquisite timing and innovative improv-ideas -- revolutionized the small-group sound of jazz and pre-Texas-swing as well as the jazz violin solo and the blues-based guitar single-string solo. Their equal love of classical, opera and traditional Italian tunes of their youth gave both a wide berth in which to play, with warmth and humor, the popular stammering cornball tunes of their time, composing slippery tracks like "Cheese and Crackers" and "Satan's Holiday" far too futurist for their years.

These Columbia and Okeh Sessions kick first with the initial rush of 1926's recorded meetings: the daring weird duets, jittery hillbilly jazzers and swinging sweetly, serene, self-penned 78 r.p.m. shuffles of "He's The Last Word," "Black and Blue Bottom" and "Stringing the Blues." Tunes like the plucked-chicken chime of "Melody Man's Dream," the speed-riffing "The Wild Dog" and the magnificently arch "Penn Beach Blues" set the tone for most of what Lang and Venuti accomplished.

These initial discs are proof positive of why the duo would become the toast of grand bands from Bessie Smith to The Der Bingle, from Paul Whiteman's bright big band to gigs moonlighting for the slight-country-swing of the singing Ponce Sisters in the early '30s. (If their "hey nanee nanee and a hot-cha-cha" doesn't grab you, man, you're dead.) The box set's two hundred tunes document myriad recording sessions (including Venuti's vivid colorings for orchestras led by Jack Pettis and Lang's languid guitar for Frankie Trumbauer). It also captures valuable solo moments, like Lang's numerous blues sides with black blues master Lonnie Johnson, Venuti's own later-day Rhythm Boys and Blue Five sides as well as his trickbag full of novelty tunes like the literal "Joe Venuti Clowning Record." Still, it's their duet-only sides that make for the most remarkable jazz listen: two red hot young men with hotter Italian blood, making music equal to the love and laughter they shared with family and friends like my own family.

The Classic Columbia and Okeh Recordings of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang 1926-1933, available only at Mosaic Records, 35 Melrose Place, Stamford, Conn., 203-327-7111, www.mosaicrecords.com.