***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
This Week in Texas Music History, a jazz artist starts the long road to bebop from a Dallas hotel.
On October 24, 1902, jazz bandleader Alphonso Trent was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Influenced by W. C. Handy, Trent formed his first band in 1923 and in 1925 relocated to Dallas, where the Alphonso Trent Orchestra became the house band of the Adolphus Hotel. This was a high-profile engagement with their performances broadcast on radio via WFAA and reaching far beyond the region, among the first Black bands to receive such coverage.
In the mid-Twenties, Trent toured Texas extensively, with dates at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, the Galvez Hotel in Galveston, the Rice Hotel in Houston, and Governor Miriam Ferguson’s inaugural ball in Austin. Trent’s high profile riled the Ku Klux Klan, who threatened the band’s appearances at the Adolphus, but his popularity overpowered their disdain. The group recorded some during this period, but Trent’s influence owes more to his live performances and broadcasts that set the standard for the Southwest’s hot “territory bands” of the Twenties and Thirties.
Trent mentored up-and-coming jazzmen like guitarist Charlie Christian and fiddler Stuff Smith. Saxophonist Buddy Tate said that Trent’s group was then “outplaying Duke [Ellington]. . . If they would have kept going they would have been as big as Duke or any of them.”
Though Trent didn’t keep going, his uptempo, blues-inflected style did impact jazz history, as Southwestern bands like Walter Page’s Blue Devils were filled with Trent acolytes. When those North Texans and Oklahomans migrated to the musical mecca of Kansas City, they revolutionized dance bands there and influenced the likes of Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and the first notes of jazz’s bebop turn. And it’s hard to imagine a jazz without that, a new tune that starts when Alphonso Trent takes center stage at the Adolphus Hotel in 1925. Alphonso Trent and His Orchestra, “St. James Infirmary”
Sources:
Bradley Shreve in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Alan Govenar and Jay Brakefield. Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2013 [1998].
David Oliphant. Texan Jazz. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Alphonso Trent entry in The Syncopated Times https://syncopatedtimes.com/alphonso-trent-1905-1959/
