Fidgety Feet

The ODJB's entire aesthetic can be summarized in two words: fidgety feet. This wasn't contemplative music. It wasn't art music. It was music engineered to make your body move whether your brain approved or not, and in 1918 America — a country simultaneously fighting a world war, battling a flu pandemic, and debating whether women should vote — the physical release of dancing to something anarchic was practically medicinal.

Fidgety Feet is the ODJB at maximum velocity. The tempo is punishing. Eddie Edwards's trombone smears underneath like a straggler trying to keep up with a sprinter. Tony Sbarbaro's drums — and I use the term loosely, since his kit consisted of a snare, a bass drum, a woodblock, and whatever else was within arm's reach — provide a rhythmic foundation that's more enthusiasm than precision. And somehow it works. The energy papers over every rough edge.

There's a theory among jazz historians that the ODJB's appeal was partly sociological. In 1918, middle-class white Americans were looking for permission to let go — to move their bodies in ways that Victorian propriety had forbidden, to make noise, to be slightly uncivilized. The ODJB provided that permission in a package that was safe because it was white. A Black band playing the same music in the same venues would have been shut down. The ODJB got a recording contract. That's not the band's fault, exactly, but it's the context that makes their success meaningful and complicated.

Fidgety Feet was covered by dozens of bands in the 1920s, each one adding their own regional flavor. By the time the swing era arrived, the tune had been played so many ways in so many cities that it had essentially become folk music — owned by everyone and no one, which is how the best jazz has always worked. LaRocca would disagree. LaRocca disagreed with everything.