Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra
1925
Sugar Foot Stomp is Henderson's reworking of King Oliver's Dippermouth Blues — the same tune, the same solo structure, but arranged for a ten-piece orchestra instead of a seven-piece New Orleans band. The transformation is instructive. What was intimate and earthy in Oliver's version becomes grand and polished in Henderson's. The three-chorus cornet solo that Oliver played with a plunger mute is here assigned to Armstrong, who plays it open, full-throated, and with a power that makes the original sound like a whisper.
Don Redman wrote the arrangement, and it's a blueprint for everything big bands would do for the next twenty years. The saxophone section plays harmonized riffs behind the soloists. The brass section punctuates with accented chords. The rhythm section drives with a four-beat pulse that replaces the two-beat feel of New Orleans jazz. Every element that defines the swing era is present in embryonic form on this 1925 recording. Redman was the architect. Henderson was the contractor. Armstrong was the demolition crew that tore down the old building to make room for the new one.
Coleman Hawkins plays tenor saxophone on this recording, and while he's not yet the dominant figure he'd become in the 1930s, you can hear the beginnings of his approach — a heavy, vibrato-laden tone that treats the saxophone as a solo voice rather than a section instrument. Before Hawkins, the saxophone was furniture. After Hawkins, it was a protagonist. Sugar Foot Stomp is one of the recordings where that transition begins.
The jump from Oliver's Dippermouth to Henderson's Sugar Foot Stomp is two years and an entire aesthetic revolution. In 1923, jazz was a small-group, collectively improvised music rooted in New Orleans tradition. By 1925, it was becoming an arranged, section-driven, soloist-featured music rooted in New York ambition. Both versions are valid. Both versions are jazz. The argument between them is the argument jazz has been having with itself ever since.
Recording: Fletcher Henderson Orch (78 rpm, 1925). Public domain (US sound recording published 1925). Source: https://archive.org/details/1925-USA-Archives-1925-05-29-Fletcher-Henderson-Orch-Sugar-Foot-Stomp