Teddy Bunn
(b. Theodore Leroy Bunn, 1909; Freeport, Long Island (NY) - d. July 20, 1978; Lancaster, California)
Teddy Bunn Biography
Teddy Bunn; Rediscovering A Great Jazz Guitarist, by John S. Wilson
Teddy on Film
Teddy Bunn Biography
It has been suggested that true blues artists must come from the Deep South. In powerful refutation of this notion stands Teddy Bunn, born and raised in the Long Island town of Freeport, 25 miles from Manhattan. Not even New Orleans own Lonnie Johnson played blues with greater conviction. Like Johnson, Bunn spent much of his career providing backing for such blues singers as Spencer Williams, Victoria Spivey and Trixie Smith and, again like Johnson, he was chosen by Duke Ellington as a guest soloist to add an authentic blues feeling to recordings of a few of the Duke’s sinuous jungle-jazz numbers.
While Johnson’s career was devoted almost wholly to blues and blues-oriented jazz, Bunn’s had another dimension. In the words of fellow guitarist Albert Casey, “He swung! That group he was in, the Spirits of Rhythm, was the swingingest group I ever heard.” Bunn and the other four Spirits were highly popular fixtures of New York’s 52nd Street, “Swing Street,” for several years in the ‘30s. The crowds were attracted by the Spirits’ uninhibited antics-the Mad Monks of Rhythm, they came to be called-and by singer Leo Watson’s surrealistic scatting. But musicians and serious jazz fans came to hear Teddy Bunn.
Bunn’s style was unique. Most jazz guitarists of the ‘30s, strummed chords in the rhythm section; a few of the more gifted, like Dick McDonough or Bernard Addison, played a complex combination of chords and single notes when they took their usually brief solos. But Bunn, working out of a blues tradition and playing mostly in small groups where he was accustomed to extended solos, developed a percussive single-string style that anticipated the electronically amplified “horn style” Charlie Christian was to introduce at the end of the decade.
In addition to his distinctive style, a technical idiosyncrasy set Bunn apart from his contemporaries. Most jazz guitarists strike the steel strings of the carved-top, F-hole guitar with a plectrum, or pick-a flat, triangular piece of tortoise shell or plastic made in varying thicknesses. They use a heavy pick for orchestral rhythm work and a lighter one for more delicate solos.
Bunn did it all with his right thumb. And, says guitarist Carmen Mastren, “he used to break strings and borrow new ones from me, so you know he wasn’t holding back.” If further evidence was needed, there was Bunn’s thumb, which bore what one guitar aficionado described as “a callus the size of a golf ball.”
Bunn’s unusual technique, which produced an extraordinary rich, mellow tone, was self-taught. He was born in 1909 into a highly musical family; his father played accordion; his mother the organ and his brother the violin. Despite the abundance of family talent, Teddy received only rudimentary instruction from his parents on his chosen instrument. Nevertheless, he made progress on his own, and before he was 20 he landed his first professional job, accompanying a calypso singer. From there he moved on to accompanying blues singers and then to a short tour with the Ellington orchestra as a temporary replacement for banjoist Freddie Guy.
Unable to read music, Bunn found the exacting arrangements of the Ellington orchestra something of a trial. “Duke would start the music on the piano and I never knew what he was going to go into,” Bunn recalled years afterward. “I have a good ear, you see; also I got a kind of an ‘ahead’ sense. I can tell what the other guys are going to do a moment before they do it-at least most times. When I’m wrong, oh boy, what a lot of faking I do!”
Oklahoma Stomp | mp3 | 654KB
In the early ‘30s Bunn played with a novelty band, the Washboard Serenaders, and became friendly with Leo Watson, a scat singer who often sat in with the Serenaders and who doubled on drums, trombone and the ukulele-like tiple. By 1933 Watson had joined the Sepia Nephews, a string ensemble that played in white theaters, with white bandleader Ben Bernie’s big band. Soon Bunn joined the Nephews and both he and Watson stayed on after the group split with Bernie. The Nephews became the Harlem Highlanders and began playing club dates wearing kilts. Eventually, they were booked into Kelly’s Stables, and they changed the name of the group to the Spirits of Rhythm.
“My happiest days were with the Spirits of Rhythm,” Bunn once recalled. In addition to Bunn and Watson-described by one critic as “the man who sings in shorthand”-the group featured the Daniels brothers, Doug and Wilbur, on tiples, and percussionist Virgil Scoggins. Scoggins had been a dancer, and on the road, when complaints from fellow hotel guests had kept him from practicing his steps, he began beating them out with his hands on his suitcase. “After a while,” said Bunn, “he found he was a better drummer than a dancer and figured using the suitcase would save him buying a drum outfit. So he ties a piece of brown paper around the case, gets himself a couple of whisk brooms-right away he’s a drummer.”
Ralph Watkins, the co-owner of Kelly’s Stables, also had fond memories of the group that filled his club every night. “They were like a house band,” he said, “I remember one night when Judy Garland, who was just a kid then, came in and flipped over Teddy Bunn. As long as she was in New York, she came in every night.”
From the Stables, the group went to the Onyx and then to the Famous Door. Bunn left for two years in 1937 to play with the John Kirby band (“Worst mistake I ever made,” he said later) and when he returned to the Spirits, The Street was already losing some of its vitality. The group played a residency at the New York World’s Fair in 1940 and then moved to California, where for the next ten years they repeatedly broke up and re-formed.
Bunn fronted his own group, the Waves of Rhythm, in 1944 and led other small groups on the West Coast for the next decade. He continued to record regularly, most often as a blues accompanist for singers like Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, and in the late ‘50s toured briefly with a rock and roll show.
In 1971 he suffered a mild stroke, followed by a series of heart attacks that left him partially paralyzed and blind. He struggled nevertheless to regain some of his playing ability-of the blindness he said, “I never could read the notes anyway”-and when he died in 1978 he was still hoping to play professionally again.
Bunn’s sound and style were entirely his own. He was, first and foremost, a superb blues player, but he was also at ease playing popular songs or jazz numbers. Until Charlie Christian appeared, Bunn was the leading single-string guitarist. And it is evidence of his lasting stature that even after Christian, his position as a giant of the guitar was never in question.
Source: Giants Of Jazz; The Guitarists, biography and notes on the music by Marty Grosz and Lawrence Cohn, Time-Life Records, 1980.
Teddy Bunn
Rediscovering A Great Jazz Guitarist
By John S. Wilson
The guitar was primarily a rhythm instrument in jazz until Charlie Christian brought the electric guitar into the jazz mainstream in 1939 when he came out of Oklahoma to join Benny Goodman. In the big bands that dominated the 1920's and 30's, it was difficult for an acoustic guitar to be heard as a solo instrument, which was one reason the banjo was favored over the guitar until electrical recording arrived in the mid-1920's.
But even with the advent of electrical recording, there were very few notable guitar soloists in the pre-Charlie Christian days. Carl Kress and Dick McDonough soloed on rhythmic novelties, the blues singer Lonnie Johnson accompanied himself on guitar and often played solos, Al Casey's guitar helped to drive Fats Waller's little recording group and Eddie Condon and Freddie Green (of Count Basie's orchestra) became famous for never playing solos. From the perspective of more than half a century, the only jazz guitarists of the 20's and 30's who established a lasting prominence were Salvatore Massaro, a child of Italian immigrants who called himself Eddie Lang, and the Belgian gypsy Django Reinhardt, each of whom had a distinctive single note style.
However, a third guitarist, Teddy Bunn, deserves to be ranked with Lang and Reinhardt. Some of the evidence - certainly the most convincing evidence in Bunn's brief discography - can be found in two single-disk albums in the superb series of reissues from the early Blue Note catalogue released by Mosaic Records - ''The Complete Recordings of the Port of Harlem Jazzmen'' (Mosaic MR1 108), and ''The Pete Jonson/ Earl Hines/ Teddy Bunn Blue Note Sessions'' (Mosaic MR1 119).
Unlike Lang and Reinhardt, who recorded prolifically and with their names prominently displayed, Teddy Bunn's recording career was slight and relatively obscure. He was known best as a member of a novelty group called the Spirits of Rhythm, which, from 1933 to 1941, recorded a total of 10 78-r.p.m. sides. The Spirits were a quintet whose members did a lot of exuberant singing while playing tiples, which look like large ukuleles, as well as guitar (Teddy Bunn), drums and occasionally string bass. Between the oddity of the tiples and the presence of Leo Watson, an amusing and imaginative scat singer who was one of the tipplers when he was not drumming, Bunn's guitar was largely relegated to supporting roles.
He also recorded, usually without credit, as a sideman with blues singers and washboard bands and he was in occasional recording sessions with Duke Ellington's orchestra and with groups led by Lionel Hampton, James P. Johnson, Hot Lips Page, Tommy Ladnier, Mezz Mezzrow, Johnny Dodds and Billy Kyle.
The recording studio spotlight finally fell on Bunn in April and June 1939 and in March 1940, when he made the Blue Note recordings in these two Mosaic albums.
Aside from four selections with a quintet that he later recorded for an obscure West Coast label, the only records that carry Bunn's name as a leader are four unaccompanied guitar solos that are included in Mosaic MR1 119. The Port of Harlem Jazzmen, heard on Mosaic MR1 108, is a sextet in which Bunn played guitar as part of a four-man rhythm section for the full group and for several quintet selections that feature the trumpeter Frankie Newton, the trombonist J. C. Higginbotham or the clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet.
Blues Without Words | mp3 | 716KB
Although Bunn was 69 years old when he died in 1978, this is the extent of his work on records. So it is scarcely surprising that his name does not ring bells of recognition. Yet hearing his unaccompanied guitar solos on Mosaic MR1 119 - particularly ''King Porter Stomp'' and ''Guitar in High'' - one is awed not only by the freshness of his playing after half a century but by his imaginative virtuosity.
Guitar In High | mp3 | 753KB
''King Porter Stomp'' was composed in the 1920's by Jelly Roll Morton as a piano solo and became a big-band hit in the 1930's when Benny Goodman played Fletcher Henderson's arrangement of the tune. Bunn's performance derives from Morton's piano version, but, as it develops, it suggests the characteristics of Henderson's big-band arrangement. As Stanley Dance points out in his notes for the album, Bunn used his thumb instead of a pick, as Wes Montgomery was to do a couple of decades later. It is a technique that enabled him to produce strong, biting lines that have some of the broadness of a big-band attack. But Bunn is also able to use this same technique with amazing lightness in the very fast, light-as-a-feather lines of a piece called ''Guitar in High.''
Bunn's basic style, particularly with the Spirits of Rhythm, was the blues. Two of his unaccompanied solos are slow blues, laced with gentle, atmospheric humming and a little singing in a soft, high-pitched voice that suggests some of the women who sang the blues in the 20's and 30's. A different pillar of his strength as a guitarist appears on the Port of Harlem Jazzmen album when he is the primary accompanist to Sidney Bechet's soprano saxophone on ''Summertime,'' the recording that brought Bechet the recognition that had been eluding him throughout most of his career (he was 42 years old when he made the record).
Bechet's enormously forceful musical personality usually overwhelmed all the musicians playing with him. In this case, three of the four accompanists - Meade Lux Lewis, piano, Johnny Williams, bass, and Sidney Catlett, drums - are little more than an almost subliminal rhythmic pulse. But Bunn is as coequal with Bechet as another musician could ever be - decorating, extending and playing against Bechet's lines, providing shading and color that give Bechet's solo the setting that it needs. The rest of the Port of Harlem album is made up of strong, dark blues performances lightened by Bunn's gently coaxing guitar and Frankie Newton's singing trumpet lines.
Source: Recordings; Rediscovering A Great Jazz Guitarist, by John S. Wilson, New York Times, January 3, 1988.
Teddy Bunn on Film
Jackie Greene and The Five Spirits Of Rhythm
Film Soundtrack
Soundie “Alabamy Bound”
1941, Hollywood, California
Jackie Greene (vocal ala Eddie Cantor), Wilbur Daniels, Douglas Daniels (vocal), Teddy Bunn (el-guitar, vocal), Leo Watson (percussion, vocal), unknown (vocals, piano, trumpet)
Alabamy Bound – Soundie
Note: pre-recorded soundtrack
Sweetheart of the Campus
Film Soundtrack
1941, Hollywood, California
Leo Watson (ukulele, vocal), Douglas Daniels (tiple, vocal), Teddy Bunn (el-guitar, vocal), Wilbur Daniels (bass)
Tom Tom The Elevator Boy
Note: pre-recorded soundtrack
Teddy Bunn Biography
Teddy Bunn; Rediscovering A Great Jazz Guitarist, by John S. Wilson
Teddy on Film