The Red Heads

Unlike a wide-eyed, nostalgia-fed pop vocal trio who recorded for Epic during the middle 1950s as Somethin' Smith & the Redheads, the jazz band known to the record buying public during the mid- to late 1920s as the Red Heads was not a knot of neo-vaudevillians topped with brick-tinted ivy league crew cuts. The individual whose hair color inspired the name of the jazz band in question was Utah-born cornet and trumpet man Red Nichols, one of the busiest sessionmen of the entire era. After someone at Brunswick dreamed up the name Red Nichols & His Five Pennies, other record companies followed suit by inventing different handles for bands of variable mass and density led or co-led by Nichols; on Columbia his group became the Charleston Chasers, while Cameo, Romeo, and Lincoln identified them as the Alabama Red Peppers; on Apex they were the Ten Blackbirds, and on Domino, the Six Black Diamonds. When a similar group recorded for Edison, trombonist Miff Mole shared more than nominal leadership of Red & Miff's Stompers. And whenever the band's recordings appeared emblazoned with the Oriole, Pathe, Perfect, or Melotone logos, they were billed as the Red Heads. During the years 1925-1927, the Red Heads cranked out a healthy supply of hot instrumentals while serving as a skilled backup band for pop vocalists Cliff Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Frank Gould, and Arthur Fields. In addition to Nichols and Mole, a thorough assessment of instrumentalists who recorded under the banner of the Red Heads includes Nichols' second chair trumpeter Leo McConville; cornetists Brad Gowans and Wingy Manone; clarinet and sax handlers Jimmy Dorsey, Fud Livingston, Bobby Davis, Fred Morrow, Alfie Evans, and Jimmy Lytell; pianists Arthur Schutt and Rube Bloom; guitarists Dick McDonough and Eddie Lang, and...