Time to take a journey to the land down under. At least, that was the land of Florrie Forde’s formative years. By the time she had reached age 21 she left her native Australia for London. Her impact upon the London stage was immediate and caused her to be drawn up into the world of early recorded music. Forde would make her first record in 1903 and keep right on going. In the 1920s, she formed her very own traveling revue. She would pass away in 1940 at the age of 64. Though her stage presence is not visible in her recorded work, her powerful voice certainly is.
This song will forever hold a special place for me. It was this song, used in the background of a YouTube video, that piqued my interest into this whole time period. While its timing (1919) is just a teeny bit outside the realm of my primary interest, it’s close enough. After all, it speaks heavily of jazz music. The song is an assertion that jazz can, and should be a global movement, not simply confined to one region or country. The song opens with “they say you must go to Dixieland, if you want to hear a real jazz band”. Forde spends the rest of the song proving that notion, quite, quite wrong. The meat of the lyric is essentially a list, noting that an ordinary orchestra contains all the instrumental makings of the hot fresh sound that jazz represented. The song demonstrates that the jazz sound of the time was like a well mixed stir-fry. Individually, the ingredients may be fine and good. Put them together, as the song does towards its conclusion, and you’ve got a dynamite combination. The instrumentation itself may not be reaching the heights of later compositions, but the song seems to grasp that jazz would not be an idle player in the world of music. It is rare that entertainment demonstrates such prescience. Perhaps the composers knew that the world was primed for a party in the wake of the Great War and other crises.
Music Through the Mists of Time 