Ford Dabney’s Syncopated Orchestras
‘After Midnight’
Archeophone Records

The career of composer, pianist, and bandleader Ford Dabney represents one of those Pangea moments in our culture where American music was essentially just one thing while also being many things at once: It was ragtime and it was blues, it was show tunes and musical theater, it was Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, it was marching band music and it was dance music. Also, it was almost — but not quite — jazz.

Dabney (1883-1958), who is the subject of a comprehensive new two-CD collection of his recorded works, “Ford Dabney’s Syncopated Orchestras ‘After Midnight,’” reached his pinnacle in the late teenage years.  

He was prominent as both a songwriter and a recording artist as the director of one of the most popular African-American dance orchestras of the World War I era, and yet those two pursuits rarely overlapped. Of the 48 tracks included here, only one is Dabney’s own composition, and it’s far from his most famous work.  

That best-known by a wide margin of Dabney’s own songs is “Shine,” first published in 1910 and later re-tooled for the swing era. “Shine” was a jazz standard for multiple generations — the great dancer John W. Bubbles offers a monumental performance in the 1943 MGM musical “Cabin in the Sky” — though in recent decades it’s possible to view the song as either a vintage indicator of racial pride or one of unspeakable political incorrectness, or, somehow, both.

Apart from the excellent audio quality of the material — especially considering that everything included was recorded between 1917 and 1922 — one of the major assets of the new Archeophone package is the booklet, which contains a detailed biography of Dabney by Tim Brooks, perhaps the definitive scholar of early (pre-electric) recording and Black artists in particular. Brooks recounts Dabney’s early days at Washington, D.C., his coming of age musically at turn of the 20th century Midtown Manhattan — well before Harlem became a Black enclave — and his years working internationally, mostly in Haiti but also France and Germany, between 1904 and 1907.

Dabney’s most productive years were his 30s, during which he collaborated extensively with another pioneering Black bandleader, James Reese Europe, as well as the most popular dance team of the moment when American music and dances began to conquer the world, Vernon and Irene Castle, not to mention the original tsar of Broadway and musical theater, Florenz Ziegfeld. 

In the teens, Europe and Dabney worked together off and on, and between the two of them they became the first to capture the essence of African American music — then principally ragtime and more than a hint of the blues — and distill it into the framework of the large-scale dance orchestra.

Long before Europe’s tragically early death at 39 in 1919, Dabney had gone off on his own, leading his Syncopated Orchestra for Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, a late-night event that played nightly in the Roof Garden Club at the top of the Amsterdam Theater after the famous “Ziegfeld Follies” shows. Dabney worked with the producer between 1913 and 1921, the years that might be considered the very height of the producer-impresario’s popularity and power.

It was probably because of the association with Ziegfeld that Dabney was offered the opportunity to make records, becoming one of the first Black bandleaders to do so. Perhaps ironically, the set begins with one of the premiere recordings of another jazz standard by a Black composer — which also is not sufficiently politically correct to be performed widely in the 21st century, “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” by Shelton Brooks. 

As Tim Brooks notes, to really appreciate Dabney’s orchestra, compare one of its recordings to one of the same songs by any of the more typical super-stiff military marching bands popular in that era; the Syncopated Orchestra gives out with a swagger that truly approaches jazz.  

Some of its most entertaining pieces are trombone-centric novelties, like “Sally Trombone,” “Miss Trombone (A Slippery Rag),” “Lassus Trombone,” and even “Slidin’ Sid,” on which the orchestra sounds like a circus parade band on amphetamines. The trombones and the rest of the ensemble dance around each other with vigorous energy, in a back-and-forth pattern, continually shifting tempos and in general anticipating the next century of jazz musicians playing in call-and-response mode.

They play pop songs with considerable gusto, like a post-World War I favorite, “How Ya Gonna Keep Em Down on the Farm,” and Irving Berlin’s lesser-known “When My Baby Smiles.” They also provide excellent accompaniment for Arthur Fields, a vaudeville vocalist with an impudent, playful attitude reminiscent of the young Eddie Cantor, on four tracks including “Spanking the Baby” and war-specific titles like “You’ll Find Old Dixieland in France.” 

As Mr. Brooks points out, these cuts are early and rare examples of white and Black performers working together. The Syncopated Orchestra also set a precedent in terms of a Black band playing for white dancers, though it’s hard to imagine casual dancers of any race being able to keep up with these blisteringly fast tempos.

The set ends on a somewhat frustrating note; Dabney made his final session in 1922, with three titles that come tantalizingly close to what we would come to think of as big band jazz, one of which was his own variation on a standard military theme, “Bugle Call Blues.” The orchestra plays with a spirit that exceeds the early New York hot bands, even Fletcher Henderson, and approximates that which we hear in the few New Orleans big bands that recorded, like A. J. Piron’s. 

In a recent column on “The Honest Broker” on Substack, jazz chronicler Ted Gioia observes that Dabney “could have been the first jazz star” if he had only been slightly younger, like Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, or even Louis Armstrong, who gave us one of the definitive performances of Dabney’s “Shine.”  Or, likewise, that could’ve happened had he been able to keep recording and keep pushing his music ever more in a jazz direction.

He lived for nearly 40 years after his final session, apparently very well due to his ongoing royalties from “Shine” — thank goodness here’s one Black songwriter who apparently wasn’t ripped off by a white publisher. His music has never sounded better than is heard on this package; it’s all here for anyone who wants to listen, or, if you can get your hands on enough Red Bull or any other energy-boosting substance, dance to it.