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Roarin' 20s: Red Nichols' Stompers - Sugar, 1927

2,959 views · Published 30 April 2014 · 3:26 · Indexed 12 November 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2014 · Music

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Red Nichols' Stompers - Sugar, Fox Trot (Yellen - Ager) with Vocal Refrain, HMV 1927 (UK)

NOTE: Ernest Loring ("Red") Nichols was a distinguished American jazz musician and bandleader of the 1920/30s. Having been a child prodigy and multinstrumentalist, he was best remembered in his long career as a fine clarinetist and cornetist. Born in Utah, he started his career as teenager in a local dance band, yet after its collapse he joined the Johnny Johnson orchestra, with which he came to New York in 1923. When he met a trombonist Miff Mole, they became inseparable for the next decade. In 1926 their first jazz-dance band was founded, which Miff Mole named "Red Nichols and his Five Pennies" - the play of words based on a pun on "Nickel," since there were "five pennies" in a nickel. Actually, the band was consistent of a various number of musicians, up to nine, occassionally undergoing a total exchange of its members. So changed the names of Red Nichols' bands, who also recorded as The Arkansas Travellers, Miff Mole and His Little Molers, The Charleston Chasers, Red Nichols Stompers. The band started out with Mole on trombone and Jimmy Dorsey on alto sax and clarinet. Other musicians who played for a time in his bands were Benny Goodman (clarinet), Glenn Miller (trombone), Jack Teagarden (trombone), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Joe Venuti (violin), Eddie Lang (banjo and guitar), and Gene Krupa (drums) -- a veritable Who's Who of important white jazz musicians. Between 1926-32 the recordings were made for Brunswick exclusively, with individual sessions for Victor. In later years,  Red Nichols recorded also for Bluebird, Variety and Okeh, yet his heyday during the swing era was over. He played occassionally with other bands, including Bob Hope and His Orchestra and Glen Gray's Casa Loma.  In 1940 he left the scene to join the army service, yet shortly after the war was ended, he created the new Five Pennies band and began playing in small clubs in Los Angeles area. Soon the little club dates were turning into more prestigious bookings at the chic Zebra Room, the Tudor Room of San Francisco's Palace Hotel, and Pasadena's posh Sheraton. He toured Europe as a goodwill ambassador for the State Department. Nichols and his band performed briefly, billed as themselves, in Quicksand, a 1950 crime film starring Mickey Rooney. In 1965, during his concerts in Las Vegas, Red Nichols died from a heart attack in his hotel room.

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