I edited and cut this video, then published it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOdMfU3S0Zc . Thanks to the Austrian ORF I could copy an old VHS to DVD in best quality, possible - on my machine. This is the Barrelhouse Jazzband located in Vienna in the 1960s of the 20th century: Heinz Feix (b), Peter Hoffmann (p), Otti Kitzler (t), Horsti Bichler (dr), Alfons Wuerzl (cl) and Norbert Vas (tb) are the musicians. They perform three pieces of Jazz, which were very popular in the 1920s: 1 is called Where Am I?, the second is the Flat Foot Floogie, the third on the Shimmy Sha Wabble.
Vienna - Barrelhouse Jazzband
This kind of Jazz focuses on entertainment, it was played in the cafés and bars, but also on the streets in the Deep South. The Barrelhouse Jazzband Vienna was honored for best classical Jazzband in the sixties, as were some of the musicians: Horsti Bichler, the drummer, and my daddy, Otti Kitzler playing trumpet and English horn. The BHBJ refers to the Chicago Style and Dixieland. They published several CDs, recently, and earlier a single and the famous Pferdeplatte.
Here I found something about the Flat Foot Floogie at Ethnopoetics including the lyrics. Jerome Rothenberg writes about lyrics:
"While the initial focus of ethnopoetics was on orality and performance, the discourse turned as well to the visible aspects of language — writing & inscription — both as a persistent contemporary concern & as an often unacknowledged kingpin of a revitalized & expanded ethnopoetics. In an age of cybernetic breakthroughs, the experimental tradition of modernist poetry & art has expanded our sense of language in all its forms, the written along with the oral. In doing this, it should also have sensitized us to the existence of a range of visual/verbal traditions and practices, not only in literate cultures but in those also that we have named "non"- or "pre"-literate — extending the meaning of literacy beyond a system of (phonetic) letters to the fact of writing itself." (Rothenberg: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/visuals.html).
Popularizing the Shimmy in America tells its story. The shimmy was a new kind of dancing dating back to 1910, and "One of the most talked-about dances of the time was `the shimmy`."(Bryant, Rebecca 2002 at JStor: American Music). This site explains a little bit more, where this kind of dance comes from: http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3shimy.htm: The shimmy goes back to "Haitan Voodoo" with shales of hips and shoulders. In this text one might stumble over the expression of sheet music, which is self-explaining: It denotes music, which was, for the first time, written on paper. Blues and Jazz were before delivered orally, or should I say early? There is another piece of music relating to the ability of dance, it is called I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, here are the lyrics and sound, Satchmo played it, too.
The best way to learn about Jazz is to listen to the music: Listen to the sounds and try to get the lyrics. There are lots of internet sites about Jazz. Here are related links:
All About Jazz: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/
Big Band Database: http://nfo.net/
Jazzology: http://www.jazzology.com/jazzology_records.php
Chicago Jazz Archive: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/cja/
