The Complete Pathe Recordings

Between 1926 and 1928 Jimmy Lytell recorded some eighteen solo titles for Pathé, usually accompanied by piano and banjo or guitar. They show steady development, keeping pace with the increasingly sophisticated harmonic and melodic vocabulary of the time, while remaining curiously inert rhythmically. His phrasing is quite foursquare, tidy patterns that always conform to the two - and four-bar phrases of the songs and invariably land on the downbeat of a bar. Its effect is comparable, perhaps, to that of a prose passage constructed entirely of declarative sentences in subject-predicate-object order. There are moments when the ear longs for a subordinate clause, alternation of phrase lengths, anything asymmetrical. No one at Pathé could have expected that these records would have scholars like Richard Sudhalter waxing eloquent nearly 75 years later. Nor were they created as limited editions for collectors. Like almost everything else from the Twenties that we now enshrine in discographies and on our shelves as genuine 'Jazz,' Jimmy Lytell's clarinet solos were musical inventory, produced because Pathé calculated that the records might sell.