Earl Fuller - Legacy

Legacy

Outside of enthusiasts of early jazz and vintage record collectors, Earl Fuller is a forgotten figure. He has not been regarded well by mainstream jazz experts; Gunther Schuller's evaluation of the Fuller Band in the seminal survey Early Jazz was couched in mostly negative terms. However, there are listeners who are attracted to the "crude sort of excitement" that Schuller also alludes to, and overall their recordings are more violent and chaotic sounding than even the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Some post-modern scholars refer to its like as "punk jazz," a kind of early jazz with a nihilistic aesthetic akin to the punk rock movement in England in the 1970s. The one inescapable factor of Earl Fuller's legacy is that he played a major role in popularizing jazz in New York City; Ted Lewis' "clown band" may have been one of the first groups to play something that could be regarded as instrumental jazz in New York, and by incorporating their act into his high profile show at Rector's, Fuller exposed the new sound to the very clientele that would take to it most ardently. Moreover, like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Fuller's groups were among the first artists to record pieces that have become standards, such as W. C. Handy's Beale Street Blues.

Apart from Ted Lewis, Teddy Brown and George Hamilton Green, musicians who worked in Fuller's various groups included Sig Behrendson (who sometimes filled in for Raderman), Willie Creager, Ben Selvin, Joe Green, Joe Kayser, Joseph Samuels and Ted Weems. Variety states that of the band Fuller took on tour of the United States "many of the men later formed the basis of the late Ben Bernie's first stage band."