Cookie’s Gingersnaps: Sweet, Hot, and St. Cyr

Jeff Barnhart:  Hal, we’re both very fortunate to have busy performing/traveling schedules this month so we’ve pared down the number of tunes we’ll explore. As we’ll see, there’s an inverse relationship between the low quantity and high quality of these sides. We have four tunes recorded in a single day in Chicago, June 22, 1926, by a septet called Cookie’s Gingersnaps! Three immortals were on this session—Freddie Keppard on cornet; Jimmie Noone on clarinet; Johnny St. Cyr on banjo—with the remainder comprised of alto saxophonist Joe Poston, trombonist Fred Garland, Kenneth Anderson on piano and drummer Andrew Hilaire. Hal, when you suggest music from a group of which I know very little, I start digging into the history books! I’d never associated the smooth, facile sound of Jimmie Noone’s clarinet with the raw sound of Freddie Keppard, but I discovered that they were recording together as early as January 1924, when they recorded six sides in a lone session for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, as part of the eleven-piece outfit Doc Cook and his Dreamland Orchestr