Music: Young Stylist, Old Style

Six nights a week, Ralph Sutton, a gangling young (28) man in horn-rimmed spectacles, ambles across the bandstand of Eddie Condon’s Greenwich Village jazz foundry and quietly joins the piano. He may ripple out a relaxed version of It’s a Lovely Day Today or wander placidly through Bix Beiderbecke’s jazz classic, In a Mist. Then he changes his pace. As Sutton explains it, “When the crowd gets with me, I begin bearing down.” Sutton, bearing down on such ragtime standards as Ballin’ the Jack or Maple Leaf Rag, delivers some of the solidest gutbucket piano being pounded out today.

Sutton decided what a jazz piano should sound like when he first heard some Fats Waller records as a Howell, Mo. grade-school boy. Employed in the six-man dance band which his father led as a weekend hobby, twelve-year-old Ralph soon began disorganizing the outfit with Waller-style chords and riffs plus a smattering of local St. Louis ragtime. At 19, his swinging, loose-jointed beat and limber wrists got him a job as pianist with Jack Teagarden’s band. In 1942 he was drafted. Since the war he has wandered in & out of Manhattan jazz clubs, earning a reputation as the new leading exponent of oldtime jazz piano.

Last week out-of-town ragtime fans got a chance to hear a solid sample of Sutton’s style.

Commodore issued a characteristic Sutton set (2 sides LP) ranging from the gentle syncopation of four seldom-heard Beiderbecke piano transcriptions to the solid honkytonk bounce of Three Little Words. Columbia followed up a Sutton record issued in its Piano Moods series last fall with Sutton playing eight Fats Waller tunes (2 sides LP) as they had not been played since the late great Negro pianist bubbled through them himself.

Other new pop records:

Make a Wish (Victor; 10 sides 45 rpm). One tune sounds pretty much like another in Hugh Martin’s monotonously gay musical setting for Molnar’s The Good Fairy.

Josephine Baker (Columbia; 2 sides LP). A cross section of the French songs that made the daughter of a St. Louis washerwoman the toast of Paris, including J’ai Deux Amours, C’est Lui, La, Petite Tonkinoise.

Guy Lombardo Souvenirs (Decca; 2 sides LP). Old favorites (Confessing Soon, Somebody Loves Me) reduced to the elemental Lombardo formula that after 25 years keeps right on making fox trots and waltzes painless for U.S. dancers.

Come on-a My House. A hectic Armenian Hurry On Down with strange and wonderful words by Wild William Saroyan. (Kay Armen; King), (Rosemary Clooney; Columbia).

It Never Entered My Mind (Andrews Sisters and Gordon Jenkins; Decca). Bittersweet lyrics, as only the late Lorenz

Hart could write them, given a plaintive updating by Patty Andrews and Bandleader Jenkins.

Chesapeake and Ohio (Lindy Doherty; Capitol). A new novelty chugs along the tracks cleared by such crack trains as the Chattanooga Choo Choo and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

I Wish I Had Never Seen Sunshine (Mary Ford and Les Paul; Capitol). Melancholia, country-style, with notably morose lyrics. Sample:

I wish I had died as a baby

And then I’d have never known you.

I’m in Love Again (April Stevens; Victor). Miss Stevens cuddles up to a languorous old Cole Porter tune already creeping back onto bestseller lists.

Body and Soul (Buddy de Franco; (M-G-M). A bright new band that specializes in startling orchestrations expertly counterpointed by its leader’s high-riding clarinet.