Not 'The King of Jazz' by any stretch but Whiteman brought the music to the masses and made a few really good jazz records. Image from Bix Beiderbecke Resources: A Bixography.
Lately there have been a lot of interesting blog posts around but I found this one buried in The Bixography Forum. These guys take their Bix seriously and it's great to read the determination to factually account for the man's life. Anyway, evidently restoration work is beginning for Universal's 'King of Jazz'. Any of you Lantz fans out there will know the film opens with Oswald in color (see below), Whiteman and one of the great all-time monkeys! If this is going ahead it sounds like Universal is doing the right thing. Hopefully they will use restraint in the use of high contast for the final release: a process used to bring out the performance of hi-def sets (on Blu) but can eliminate background information on certain vintage films where that level of sharpness is not possible. A prime example would be the recently issued Criterion 'Island of Lost Souls'. The print they've located looks great though.
Whiteman was known everywhere in the 20's & 30's. His iconic potato-head made an appearance in Iwerks' 'The Soup Song', Krazy Kat's "Out of the Ether", and numerous others. Here he is in the Fleischer Studios April 36 issue of 'The Animated News'.
But to get back to why Paul Whiteman was called 'The King of Jazz' see below for a clear explanation...
And wouldn't this make a terrific bonus feature: The Big Broadcast (1932). It was part of the Paramount feature package (that included 'Island of Lost Souls') acquired by Universal and contained a nice roster of jazz and popular performers, many of whom also made appearances in Fleischer cartoons, including Cab Calloway (performing a killer 'Kickin' the Gong Around'), Bing Crosby & Eddie Lang (in one of his few screen appearances), The Boswell Sisters and others.
In historical context the stereotypical shoeshine bit on 'Dinah' is pretty queasy stuff (sociologically speaking I have written here before these were primitive times) so I felt I should give a fair warning about the clip below. But out of that particular context, it's a reasonably tight performance of the song. Crosby clearly absorbed a lesson from Armstrong and gave a distinct twist all his own. Whoever it is playing the rag must have been a jazz drummer as his terrific timing & accents denote a professional level. Of course the song, 'Please', played a prominent role in 'Betty Boop in 'Snow White'' a year later and many years later would be credited by John Lennon as partially inspiring the first Beatles hit 'Please Please Me'.
