Frank Victor - Part II
Stringin’ Along With Annabelle and Etude I
In a wonderful interview with Frank Victor in Swing Magazine from June of 1935 (1), The author reveals that one of Victor’s compositions listed in the article is privately dedicated to Eddie Lang, Victor’s mentor and instructor. Though it is not stated which composition is dedicated to Lang, I strongly suspect it to be Stringin’ Along With Annabelle.
Stringin’ Along With Annabelle
Published in 1933 by Al. Rocky Music Co., Stringin’ Along With Annabelle is easily the most melodic and by far longest of the four compositions reviewed here. This piece can be found in Mel Bay’s Masters of the Plectrum Guitar. The form is A-B-C-A-Trio (D)-A-Coda in the keys of A major and D major. You may be looking at the previous sentence and wonder what I mean by “Trio”. Well, Victor’s use of the word Trio here is a most revealing telltale about early jazz form and writing.
Trio - Now you may recall from Part 1 a brief discussion we had about tempo, in particular, the use of march-tempo in translating the tempo indication of “Jig Tempo” from the piece Frets and Strings to an actual BPM (120 approx is what we came up with). The keystone here is march, specifically the American march, which was an antecedent to ragtime, and which was an antecedent to jazz. The Trio section comes to the American march as a holdover from classical music where it was the main section of a minuet, scherzo, or march. In late 19th century marches it was considered the main melodic section of a march and was also the most contrasting (2). Here it serves only as a contrasting section (especially the fourth bar of the Trio) made up of block chords and one bar of triplets. What we should be made aware of here is the continued influence of late 19th century form on popular and jazz song-form of the mid 30s.
Taking into account Rob McKillop’s comments from Part 1 of this review, we can again see the strong tenor/plectrum banjo influence of Victor’s early years on his later writing and playing.
I mentioned before that I believed Stringin’ Along With Annabelle was dedicated to Eddie Lang and here is why. First, the name, Stringin’ Along With Annabelle, is very similar in name to Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti’s first recording together, Stringing The Blues. Ok, that’s a stretch. Second and lastly, the coda section contains scale run that is very Eddie Lang-ish. Why is this scale run a clue? Well, mainly because this type of run is uncharacteristic of Victor when you look at his other written works. Your opinion may differ; if it does, please comment.
Etude I
Published in 1936 by Radio City Guitar Studio, Etude I, is exactly that, “a short piece or considerable difficulty designed to provide practice skill for perfecting a particular musical skill” (3). This composition can be found in Mel Bay's Masters of the Plectrum Guitar. The particular skills here are some complex chord fingerings making up the A section and a few large string skips in the C section. The form is ABBCB in the keys of G major and D major. Aside from interesting chord movement in the A section the piece lacks any real melodic ideas. But, it is a study piece and so it’s focus is on honing a skill.
The A section really comes across more as a long intro. It is played at a moderate tempo (100 bpm approx.) with a ritardando on the fourth and eighth measures. The rest of the piece, starting with the B section, is played at Tempo di Blues which to my readings state around 60 bpm. I felt 60 bpm was way too slow and prefered the 80 bpm range. I found that treating the moving bassline as the melody and trying to imitate how it would be played on a string bass really gave the song a swinging pulse. The C section moves through several chord changes alternating between bass note then chord at first in quarter notes before moving to arpeggios in a forced dotted 8th note rhythm. The last four bars of the C section return us to eight bars of the A section with the piece ending on a Gmaj chord.
This concludes my review of Frank Victor. If you would like to learn more about him I highly recommend reading the article in Swing Music referenced here. You can find the link to it below as reference 1.
2. American March Music, wikipedia.com
3. Etude, wikipedia.com
