Bryan Wright’s Rivermont label has released many rewarding recordings featuring hot jazz combos, ragtime, and novelty ragtime pianists, bands from the 1920s, and other miscellaneous projects. Recently Rivermont really dug deep into the vaults, compiling reissues of very obscure music with the second CD in their Irving Aaronson series plus a disc from a band led by Tom Clines.
To most 1920s jazz collectors, the name of bandleader-pianist Irving Aaronson is perhaps most significant for being listed alphabetically at the beginning of many jazz discographies. His recordings have rarely been reissued and the group’s output has often been dismissed. Artie Shaw, who spent a few months in 1930 playing with the band, when asked by me years ago about the Irving Aaronson group, commented that many of its musicians were jokers and that it was largely a comedy band.
But as Wob-A-Ly Walk 1928-1932 (the second of three scheduled CDs that will reissue all of the music from the orchestra) shows, the group was actually a solid dance band that could play jazz in spurts, even if its occasional comedy falls flat today.
Irving Aaronson’s Commanders were quite popular in the years before the Great Depression. While nearly every one of their recordings features a vocal, often by several of the musicians including Phil Saxe, most are fairly harmless and some include a bit of hot scatting. Solos
