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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZCHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LOWER BASIN STREETNBC radio show and 'jazz' band organized in 1940 led by Henry 'Hot Lips' Levine. The broadcasts were chiefly notable for guests such as Leadbelly, Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter and Jelly Roll Morton. Dinah Shore was a regular. Some of the broadcasts have been issued commercially, notably on the Crabapple label. The band also recorded commercially for RCA Victor. It was probably an NBC publicist who proposed Levine's nickname, 'Hot Lips'. In July and November 1940 the band, an octet billed as Dr. Henry Levine's Barefoot Dixieland Philharmonic, recorded for RCA with Bechet and Shore; in May 1941 Earl Hines was on board. In June of 1941 there were recording sessions with Lena Horne, the band now called The Dixieland Jazz Group of NBC's Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. In August and September it was Levine And His Dixieland Octet (some sides released under Shore's name); in February 1942 And His Strictly From Dixie Jazz Band, with vocalist Linda Keene. During this period the band also made four Soundies, under the generic name Dixieland Jazz Band. Jazz fans followed the broadcasts for the guests; they never rated the band very highly, but it was popular radio entertainment. A column in the February 1946 issue of Pickup (a British jazz magazine, forerunner of Jazz Journal) included this item, probably written by Stanley Dance: 'One of the latest "Metronome" cracks against Jelly Roll is that "Ferdinand was far more of a bull than a monarch at the keyboard". We wonder if the memory still rankles of how, when he guest-starred on "The Chamber Music of Lower Basin Street" (American edition), Jelly Roll ignored time-cues and played well over his allotted time, with the result that a special arrangement of the blues by the present assistant editor of "The Metronome", featuring Dinah Shore no less, just didn't get played.' Laurie Wright's book Mr Jelly Lord (1980) quotes this item without comment, pointing out that the assistant editor of Metronome at the time was Leonard Feather. Jazz journalist Feather was also a songwriter who disliked Morton, once describing him in the Los Angeles Times as one of the 'Ten Most Overrated' figures in jazz history, and in 1946 (it is worth noting) the war in jazz between the Trads and the Mods was also getting started. On the 1940 broadcast, Morton played 'Winin' Boy Blues', the performance lasting 2:47 minutes, after which the announcer (Gene Hamilton) called for an encore, whereupon Morton played 'King Porter Stomp', the solo lasting 1:41 minutes. At the end of the show, Hamilton said that radio listeners had requested that Levine's group play his closing theme, 'Basin Street', in its entirety; with Hamilton's intro this takes about 3:30 minutes. Dinah Shore had earlier sung 'Rockin' Chair'; nowhere in the broadcast was she announced as singing anything else. There is no evidence that Morton caused any problems. The item in Pickup, published nearly five years after Morton's death, was apparently a canard.
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