I think it is a brush and I enlarged and color changed it the best I could. It is not a stick that is for sure.

David

I'm not going by recordings as a time-line, 510: black bands were ignored and didn't get recorded until years after the Chicago boom, so it's not a reliable source to go by. I'm not looking at films for the evidence, either: the 20s was still the age of silent-cinema, so not much point. Even then, the white artists still got all the attention. I'm using books, mainly interviews with artists who were there at the time. They're the experts (so long as their memories were intact at the time of interview). Google book searches have also been useful to trawl scans of stuff that isn't at my fingertips.

Yes, I posted Fly Swat patents, but they were used for fly swatting. As has been established, swats were used by drummers on drum kits before the drum manufacturers moved in, but not widely (I'm not saying they weren't at all) until the jazz-boom in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

If you can find evidence to the contrary, then that would be great, I'm all ears/eyes.

If you click on the link in my previous post with the photo there is a caption that reads: "Small school (normal school?) orchestra with winds and percussion, 1910s. This was typical instrumentation for this period." If that was a “typical” school orchestra then schools may have been using brushes as a learning tool (probably volume control but allowing the drummer to still practice using the same technique as using sticks) and would have been rather common then.

For clarity, when I spoke of Silent movies I was referring to the bands that accompanied the movie live as the movie goers every day watched the show etc.. There maybe books to read about these innovative musicians too. Remember the use of traps includes an item you can see on Baby Dodds bass drum with King Oliver, the Slap Stick. Slapstick of course became the genre name of some of those silent movies. So photos of old theatre bands may reveal brushes in the drum kit. Cowbells too.

Thanks for entertaining my thoughts!

Regardless of what the photo shows (I honestly couldn't say), what you've outlined is a plausible scenario and deserves investigation. I started searching google books, but got sidetracked.

This is really interesting:

1916 Swat the Fly campaign

"swat the fly" campaigns seemed to occur regularly throughout the summer months, for public health reasons. It suggests an abundance of fly-swats during the jazz boom, at any rate.

http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI8703262/

http://www.robertleeson.com/swatthefly/swat.html

Just a side note...

OK, I found the original source of that Zutty Singleton quote. There's no preview for this book, but, bit-by-bit, I managed to prise this info from the clutches of Google book search (a hell of a lot of work, I can tell you!)

Following from The book of jazz, from then till now: a guide to the entire field‎ - Page 125

Leonard G. Feather - Biography & Autobiography - 1965 - 280 pages:

'The use of wire brushes in place of drumsticks enabled the drummer to achieve a softer, smoother, more legato sound that was especially effective on ballads. The date of origin of the brushes is in doubt, though white musicians certainly used them during World War I. "The first pair of brushes I ever had", says Zutty, "were sent from Chicago by Manuel Perez to Louis 'Old Man' Cotrelle [sic], the drummer from Piron. I studied Cotrelle's work a lot during the early days. But Cotrelle didn't care about brushes, so he gave them to me and those were the first pair of brushes I ever saw in my life. Before that, you had to get your soft effects just by controlling your touch with the sticks.’

Tony Sbarboro (Spargo), who reached New York with the Original Dixie Land Band in Feb 1917, attests that he had never seen a pair of brushes before this time.'

From Humphrey Lyttelton's The Best of Jazz (I'm currently reading it):

'It is also true that the ODJB [Original Dixieland Jazz Band] was the first New Orleans Band to cause a worldwide sensation - it overwhelmed New York in 1917, London in 1919 - and start a craze that was to be the hallmark of a decade.'

Plenty of biogs about the ODJB online, including at redhotjazz. They got all the initial acclaim, but were soon forgotten about when the true artists of New Orleans jazz started recording a few years later.

From Redhotjazz:

In 1915 he [Manuel Perez] left New Orleans and played with Charles Elgar's Creole Orchestra at the Arsonia Café in Chicago, and with the Arthur Sims Band in Chicago.

From the notes in the back of Louis Armstrong, in his own words: selected writings

[Cottrell] 'Performed in Chicago with Manuel Perez, 1916 to 1918'

Either side of this time span, Cottrell was in New Orleans. So, he was sent the brushes either in 1915 or, more likely, sometime after 1918. This pretty much confirms that there was no school of brush-playing in New Orleans prior to 1915/1918...and that there was in Chicago (for one of those dates). It also shows that there was a school of players in New York in 1917.

Still more digging to do, but slowly we're getting to the bottom of this (from the jazz perspective).

William Ludwig 1922 article

Click on the first in the list of results. Only a brief mention of the Jazz Brush, but the whole article is an interesting read.

From the same book:

Fly-swatter articles

Scrub-brush anyone?

Hi,

Howzabout the rute?

Bunches of twigs (switches and rutes included) seem to have some musical history behind them and a relationship with brushes. Following up on this angle, I tripped across the rute being used by Mahler in symphonies 2 and 3:

http://www.mahlerarchives.net/archives/mahlerorchestration.html

Probably not commercially made (but I was dead wrong on Dodds etc).

thanks for all your work,

Patrick

Gerry – I’ve got about 200 books regarding music history and more in my personal library and would be happy to check them for info you might need I’ve read them all at least once and refer back to them often. I’ve already casually thumbed through some looking for stuff about brushes but haven’t found anything that expands your findings yet.

I would be happy to check something specifically for you if needed.

Here are a handful of titles about early Jazz that may interest you. The last four of these are autobiographies. I have many other Jazz titles from different eras in my library too.

1. Jazzmen – Frederic Ramsey & Charles Edward Smith

2. Chicago Jazz a cultural history 1904 – 1930 – William Howland Kenney

3. Pee Wee Russell – Robert Hilbert

4. Satchmo – Louis Armstrong

5. Really The Blues – Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow

6. Crazeology – Bud Freeman

7. A life In Jazz – Danny Barker

I never realised that rutes had that much history! Coincidentally, shortly after reading your post I came across the following snippet (page 265, fifth one down: tamburo grande):

Link

That one sounds fascinating!

I'm not sure if the info exists for what I'd like to find out: basically, when and where the first school of brush playing developed (obviously it wasn't New Orleans). I tried researching rag-time drummers in the New York area and Charles 'Buddy' Gilmore seems to have been hugely influential on the white, jazz drummers who followed in his wake. Nothing to link him to brushes, though.