Sandy Brown Jazz

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Jazz As Art

Red Nichols
Feelin' No Pain

When you listen to music, you sometimes conjure images in your mind. Our 'Jazz As Art' series invites you to listen to a piece of jazz and as it plays, scroll down the page and see which of the pieces of art I have chosen comes closest to the pictures in your mind. Hopefully, this will introduce you to recordings and art works you might not have spent time with before.

(I think this only really works if you spend time with each painting)

As most readers will know, 'Red Nichols and his Five Pennies' were often more than 'Five'. Cornet player and bandleader Ernest Loring Nichols said that the name was simply a pun on "Nickel", since there were "five pennies" in a nickel. "That was only a number we tied in with my name", Nichols once explained. "We'd generally have eight or nine [musicians], depending on who was around for the session and what I was trying to do."

Born in Utah, Red moved to New York playing with The Syncopating Seven and then the Johnny Johnson Orchestra. There he met trombonist Miff Mole who would become a close friend and when he started his own band, Red had Miff Mole on trombone and Jimmy Dorsey on alto sax and clarinet. Amongst other musicians who played for a time in his bands in the following decade were Benny Goodman (clarinet), Glenn Miller (trombone), Jack Teagarden (trombone), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Joe Venuti (violin), Eddie Lang (banjo and guitar), and Gene Krupa (drums).

This version of Feelin' No Pain was recorded in 1927 with Red Nichols, Miff Mole, Pee Wee Russell, Lennie Hayton (piano), Dick McDonough (guitar), Adrian Rollini (bass sax and goofus) and Vic Berton (drums). There are other recordings with different line-ups but this is the one best known to me. Pee Wee Russell's clarinet is often noted but I enjoy Adrian Rollini's bass sax solo as I do Miff Mole's trombone played against Adrian Rollini's goofus, and Red Nichols brings in a short, clean solo showing the influence Bix had on his playing.