Sam Wooding

This early American jazz bandleader's choice of career objectives is the principal reason he is not the household word among jazz fans like some other bandleaders of his generation. There are many critics who feel that things would have been very different for Sam Wooding had he not become one of the first wave of American expatriate jazz musicians living in Europe. If he had instead stayed on in America and gotten in on the raging domestic big band scene, odds are likely he would be as well-known as his contemporaries Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Instead, Wooding's activity had a different sort of impact on jazz history, and arguably just as an important one. By focusing on the European continent, he became one of the most authentic purveyors of the new big band jazz sounds available to the European concert public, and indeed was creating music head and shoulders above the efforts of any of his competitors in this market. He furthermore pushed jazz into some completely new territory, where it picked up a fanatic following, as this exciting music is known to do. In 1926, Wooding was one of the first jazz artists to visit Russia, leading the orchestra that was part of the Chocolate Kiddies revue. This tour turned out to be historic for the history of not only jazz but live music performance in general in the communist regime. Having blown away Lenin and Stalin, Wooding went to Spain a few years later where his band actually cut some sides for the country's official Parlaphone label without managing to ruffle the feathers of the dictatorship. Self-taught for the most part, Wooding began playing piano professionally around 1912. His eventual assault on the clubs of New York City was interrupted by a more important offensive known as World War I. This was where...