Harry Reser & his Six Jumping Jacks

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Harry F. Reser (17 January 1896 - 27 September 1965) was an American banjo player and bandleader. Born in Piqua, Ohio, Reser was best known as the leader of The Clicquot Club Eskimos.

Reser was regarded by some as the best banjoist of the 1920s. He played with midwestern dance bands, relocating to Buffalo, New York in 1920. Arriving in Manhattan the following year, he became an in-demand session musician during the early 1920s.

In 1925, he found fame as the director for NBC's Clicquot Club Eskimo Orchestra, continuing with that weekly half-hour until 1935. At the same time, he also led other bands using pseudonyms. He played "Tiger Rag" and "You Hit the Spot" in the musical short Harry Reser and His Eskimos (1936).

Reser remained active in music for the rest of his life, leading TV studio orchestras and playing with Broadway theatre orchestras. In 1960 he appeared with Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee and Buster Keaton in "A 70th Birthday Salute to Paul Whiteman" on TV's The Revlon Revue. He wrote several instructional books for the banjo, guitar and ukulele. In 1965 Reser died of a heart attack in the orchestra pit of the Broadway stage version of Fiddler on the Roof just prior to a performance. He was Inducted into the National Four-String Banjo Hall of Fame in 1999. Tom Stacks was the lead singer, drummer, and sound effects man for many of Harry Reser's late 1920's jazz and novelty bands that included "The Six Jumping Jacks" and "Harry Reser's Rounders" (Reser would use many of the same musicians and simply change the names of the bands so that he could work for several companies at once). Stacks' unusual voice has been described as having a "built in smile" and also as being "what a man would sound like if his voice box remained in adolescence while the rest of his body matured."

Stacks sang with joyous enthusiasm on hundreds of late 1920 recordings. His rendition of "Horses" displays his ability to make the most out of the comic elements in a novelty song while also keeping up with the rapid fire tempo of Reser's band that nearly leaves him breathless. Stacks could also sing ballads in a lovely, heartfelt tenor, as evidenced in his versions of "Avalon" and "What a girl! What a night!" Stacks was diminutive and just barely weighed 100 pounds. Stacks died in a Chinese restaurant fire in the early thirties. He returned to the burning building to try to recover his drum set and died in the inferno.Amazon.com

Not only was Harry Reser the most accomplished plectrum banjo player in the 1920s, he probably led more bands than just about any other musician of the era. Each of his groups focused on a different segment of the pop music spectrum, such as hot jazz (The Jazz Pilots), smooth dance music (The Tuxedo Orchestra), or in the case of the Six Jumping Jacks, novelty songs. Reser and bandmates were topnotch instrumentalists and even when they played silly songs like "I Love the College Girls" or "Cock-a-Doodle, I'm off My Noodle," they never treated the music as a joke. The arrangements are always inventive, the ensemble playing is tight, and the solos are hot. Reser in particular plays the banjo with a surprising amount of subtlety, and on a few tracks he reveals himself to be an excellent guitarist as well. Even though these tracks were recorded in 1927 and 1928, the sound on the CD is outstanding, with none of the pops and crackles that can mar reissues of old 78s. The songs of Harry Reser's Six Jumping Jacks will never be mistaken for high art, but they do capture the giddy spirit of the 1920s perfectly. And because of the skill of the musicians they can be listened to over and over again, which is not something you can say about many novelty songs. --Michael Simmons