Palesteena

Palesteena — a phonetic mangling of 'Palestine' — was part of a brief American pop music craze for vaguely Middle Eastern themes that swept through Tin Pan Alley in the early 1920s. The Ottoman Empire had just collapsed, the British were carving up the Levant, and American songwriters who couldn't find Palestine on a map were cranking out songs about it because exotic sells. The ODJB jumped on the trend because the ODJB jumped on every trend, and the result is their most peculiar recording.

The melody has a sinuous, chromatic quality that's meant to evoke the Eastern Mediterranean and mostly evokes a New Orleans band trying really hard to sound foreign. There's a snake-charmer effect in the clarinet that Larry Shields executes with his usual technical brilliance and absolutely zero cultural sensitivity. The whole thing is a period piece in the most loaded sense of the term — it tells you exactly what 1920 America thought about the Middle East, which was: very little, and most of it wrong.

And yet the musicianship transcends the concept. Shields's clarinet work in the middle section is genuinely inventive — he abandons the pseudo-Eastern gimmick and just plays, and what comes out is some of the most fluid improvisation the ODJB ever captured. The band loosens up when they stop trying to be something they're not, which is a lesson most musicians learn eventually and some never do.

Palesteena was one of the ODJB's last recordings before internal tensions — LaRocca's ego, mostly — tore the band apart. By 1925, they were done. LaRocca retreated into construction work and paranoid obscurity, spending decades writing letters to newspapers about how everyone had stolen his music. The other members scattered into session work and obscurity. Palesteena is an odd final chapter for the band that made the first jazz record — a novelty song about a place they'd never been, played by musicians who were better than their material.