THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504140196
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
If you never heard Al Brenneman play the cornet, you missed one of the major pleasures of life in Tidewater. If you've never heard the kind of Dixieland music Al loved to play, you've missed one of the major pleasures of life in general.
Al died a couple of weeks back. That hurts on a personal level, but it's doubly sad because Dixieland is a fading art form. All but a few of the younger players who ought to be coming along are headed in other musical directions. I guess they figure Dixieland is for old codgers who keep the rhythm by tapping their canes on the floor.
For that matter, maybe you don't know what Dixieland is. It's a descendant of the jazz that came out of New Orleans about the time of World War I. You take a tune and feed it into a trumpet or cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano and drums. The trumpet takes charge of the melody. The clarinet harmonizes high and the trombone harmonizes low.
The band plays the tune together, then each man plays a solo and then there's one more all-together chorus. They're not reading music. They're improvising, sound flowing right from brain to lips and fingers. In the hands of amateurs, Dixieland can be chaos. In the hands of professionals, it's mellow magic.
Especially professionals like Al. When he played slow and sweet, the tone welled out of his horn so rich and round that you felt like you could somehow go swimming in it. And when he played an up-tempo number, the tricky, gliding phrases were fireworks for the ear. If you ever watched him play the fast numbers, though, you didn't just hear his enthusiasm; you saw it. Both feet beat out the tempo, and his whole body pitched in.
His stamina always amazed me. He'd hit 70 when bad health finally silenced his horn, but almost to the last, he sounded as fresh at the end of the evening as he did at the beginning.
Younger guys might need a breather. Al's fingers would be dancing impatiently on the valves of his horn, ready for the next call to action.
He was born in Norfolk, brought up in South Norfolk and worked as a band teacher in South Norfolk and Virginia Beach schools. It must have been a pleasure to be his South Norfolk neighbor. Edwin Jones was. He told me that when Al was in school, he'd sit on his front stoop on Jefferson Street and practice. After a bit, Jones would go over and sit down next to Al to listen close up.
If Al had pushed himself to work for it, he could have had a national reputation. He didn't. He settled for the Tidewater music scene, and his gutty, gladsome horn was a driving force in local bands for a lot of years. Not only his horn, but his voice. Al would start off singing the old ballad ``I Don't Know Why I Love You Like I Do.'' Then he would slip into accurate imitations of popular singers of the 1940s and '50s performing the song. Al could be a one-man chorale.
He was never better than when he launched his version of master trumpeter Louis Armstong singing and playing ``It's a Wonderful World.'' Al had captured Armstrong's gravelly vocal tones and audiences reacted like kids given keys to the candy store.
One of the musicians who played with Al locally is Bob Gibble of Western Branch, a really fine trombonist. I asked Bob what made Al so good and he laughed. ``There's no way I can tell you,'' he said. ``Some players work hard and practice hard, and they're good, but that's it. A few guys, like Al, have something extra, something special. It can't be defined. It's like what Louis Armstrong said about swing: ``If you gotta ask what it is, you ain't got it.''
Now Al is gone and there's one less Dixieland cornetist. The only Dixieland trumpeter I know of left in Chesapeake is our city attorney, Ron Hallman. He started playing Dixieland when he was so young his mom had to drive him to his jobs. Watch him, soft-spoken and dignified at City Council meetings, and you might never guess he can raise the roof on a fast trip through ``Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home.''
But none of us who love Dixieland see or hear the next generation of the musicians who will keep the tradition alive. Granted, Dixieland might not be your kind of music. One person's melody can be the next person's malady. Some of the rock schlock I hear on the radio makes me want to yank my hearing aids and bless my deafness until the final, foul chord. Still, Dixieland is a great American art form, born here and nurtured here. It ought not die.
C'mon, young guys with horns. Ask your music mentors about Dixieland. Not to replace what they're teaching you, but to throw a little more spice in the mix. Listen to the good stuff on records and you'll find out why the saints go marching in two-stepping to the righteous sound of Dixieland. by CNB