THE BOOK WAS 
DRENCHED 

Text fly book 



168158 



> m 

73 



A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 



Also by Barry Ulanov 



THE INCREDIBLE CROSBY 
DUKE ELLINGTON 



A History of 



JAZZ 



in America 




BARRY ULANOV 



THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK - 1955 



COPYRIGHT 1950, 1951, 1952 BY BARRY XJLANOV 
PUBLISHED BY THE VIKING PRESS IN FEBRUARY 1952 

SECOND PRINTING MARCH 1954 
THIRD PRINTING OCTOBER 1955 

PUBLISHED ON THE SAME DAY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA 
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED 



Parts of this book appeared 

in abbreviated form in Metronome. 




PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC. 



CONTENTS 



Preface ix 

1. What Is Jazz? 3 

2. Ancestors 9 

3. The Negro Synthesis 18 

4. The Blues 26 

5. New Orleans 35 

6. Figures of Legend and Life 49 

7. Louis 70 

8. Across the Tracks 79 

9. Diaspora 90 
10. T7?e /drzz Age 98 
n. Chicago ii 7 

12. B/* 128 

13. Neitf F0r& 141 

14. Tfce Crash 156 

15. Dz/e Ellington 174 

1 6. Swing 185 

17. The Sidemen 201 

1 8. Pianists 2 1 3 

19. Figures of Transition 235 

20. Singers 247 

21. JB<?p 267 



Vll 



viii CONTENTS 

22. The Progressives *9 2 

23. Cool Jazz 3 l6 

24. Evaluation 33 6 
Glossary 349 

355 



PREFACE 



The opening words of chapter one of this book describe the Amer- 
ican scene as Henry James saw it from the vantage-point of Europe. 
That point must also be acknowledged as the source of perspective 
for American jazz: it was from there that our music was first seen 
in its vastness and energy as a cultural contribution of a major order. 

Anybody writing about jazz in the United States must be apprecia- 
tive of the early efforts of the Europeans, the documentary labors 
of its first chroniclers, Hugues Panassie and Robert Goffin, and the 
creative enthusiasm of its first serious audiences in England and 
France and elsewhere on the Continent. 1 am especially aware of my 
own indebtedness to Messrs. Panassie and Goffin, whose books showed 
me, when I was a college freshman, that there was order and mean- 
ing in the colorful confusion of jazz, and to the European de- 
votees, who latterly demonstrated to me that the abandon of the 
jazz audience could also be creative and discerning. Finally it re- 
mained for some Roman musicians in the summer of 1950 to pose 
some of the questions and in the following summer for some bebop 
artists on the island of Mallorca to answer others which both ques- 
tions and answers have informed much of the structure of this book. 

I do not mean in any of this to diminish the contributions to jazz 
of the American critics and the audiences at home, but simply to 
indicate an order of precedence, both general and personal. Else- 
where in these pages I have attempted some recognition of the special 
importance of John Hammond and George Simon to jazz in the 
United States, without indicating, as I should like to do, the instru- 
mental part those generous men played in my career. In the same way, 
as friend and as colleague, I shall always be deeply obliged to Helen 
Oakley, Bob Bach, Barbara Hodgkins, and Leonard Feather. Finally, 
many of the insights which may be present here were gained under 

ix 



x PREFACE 

the tutelary guidance of jazz musicians themselves, among whom I 
am especially grateful to the following: Duke Ellington, Billy Stray- 
horn, Toby Hardwick, the late Chick Webb, Red Norvo, Woody 
Herman, Lennie Tristano, Mildred Bailey, Stan Kenton, Roy El- 
dridge, and John LaPorta. 

BARRY ULANOV 



A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 



Chapter 




WHAT IS JAZZ? 



In The American Scene, Henry James said of American cities, "So 
there it all is; arrange it as you can. Poor dear bad bold beauty; there 
must indeed be something about her . . . !" The same can be said of 
American jazz. 

On the surface there is disorder and conflict in jazz. No common 
definition of this music has been reached. It resists dictionary defini- 
tion, and its musicians splutter nervously and take refuge in the 
colorful ambiguities of its argot. Nonetheless, its beauty can be 
probed; its badness can be separated from its boldness. The process is 
a difficult one, as it is in any art, and in jazz two arts, the composing 
and the performing arts, are joined together. But if one goes beneath 
the surface and does not allow the contradictions and the confusions 
of appearances to put one off, much becomes clear, and the mystery 
at the center is seen to be the central mystery of all the arts. 

The cortex of jazz consists of several layers, alternately hard and 
soft, complex in structure, and hard to take apart. It is compounded 
of the history of the music and of the many styles of jazz. At first the 
history seems disjointed and the styles contradictory. One marks a 
confounding series of shifts in place and person and style. One finds 
a music dominated by Negroes in New Orleans, by white musicians 
in Chicago, by important but apparently unrelated figures in New 
York. One discovers a disastrous split in jazz inaugurated by the swing 
era and intensified during the days of bebop and so-called progressive 
jazz. But then one looks and listens more closely, and order and con- 
tinuity appear. 

Americans have long been wedded to the boom-and-bust cycle, 
and their culture reflects that dizzying course. Jazz is not like that; it 
has no cycles; it doesn't spiral. Whether you adopt the approach of 
the economic historian, the cultural anthropologist, or the aesthetic 



4 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

philosopher, you will not find an easy reflection of a theory in jazz. 
While much of America crises and ecstasies and even a moment or 
two of exaltation has found its way into jazz, the history of jazz is 
a curiously even one, chaotic at any instant, but always moving ahead 
in what is for an art form almost a straight line. 

For most of its history, jazz, rejected in its homeland, has had 
consciously to seek survival, conscientiously to explain and defend 
its existence. From its early homes, the Ozark hills, the Louisiana 
bayous, the Carolina cotton fields, the Virginia plantations, through 
the New Orleans bordellos and barrelhouses to its latter-day efflo- 
rescence it has been alternately condemned and misunderstood. Vari- 
ously banned and bullied and sometimes cheered beyond its merits, 
jazz has led a lonely life but a full one. It is still with us and looks to 
be around for quite a while. 

No matter what the fortunes of jazz, its nucleus has remained con- 
stant, little touched by extravagances of opinion, sympathetic or un- 
sympathetic. The nucleus of jazz as differentiated from its cortex 
contains its nerve center, its source of life, and here arc its mystery 
and meaning. The nucleus of jazz is made up of melody, harmony, 
and rhythm, the triune qualities of the art of music which, as every- 
body knows, can be fairly simply defined. In bare definition, melody 
is any succession of notes, harmony any simultaneity of tones, 
rhythm the arithmetic measure of notes or tones. In closer exami- 
nation, melody appears as a vast variety of things, ranging from 
so simple a tune as "Yankee Doodle" to the complexity of one of 
Arnold Schoenberg's constructions. In more detailed analysis, har- 
mony shows up as a vertical ordering of a Bach fugue, or a tight 
structuring based entirely on whole tones in the impressionism of 
Debussy. But bewildering as the complications of melody and har- 
mony can be, they are easier to analyze and verbalize than rhythm or 
any of its parts, and rhythm is the most important of the three in jazz. 

Before attempting a synoptic definition of jazz as a noun (or dis- 
cussing the misuse of "jazz" as a verb and "jazzy" as an adjective), 
and of the various corollary terms that explain the meaning of this 
music, it might be instructive to examine definitions by musicians 
themselves. The following definitions were made by jazz musicians 
in 1935, when their music was undergoing a revival as a result of 
the then current vogue for the jazz that went by the new name of 
swing. Benny Goodman was a great success, and jam sessions had be- 



WHAT IS JAZZ? 5 

come public again. Musicians themselves found it difficult to define 
"swing/* by which of course they merely meant the 1935 version of 
jazz, which wasn't very different from the 1930 or 1925 music. Let 
us examine the definitions. 

Wingy Manone: "Feeling an increase in tempo though you're still play- 
ing at the same tempo." 

Marshall Stearns and John Hammond (jazz authorities) and Benny 
Goodman: "A band swings when its collective improvisation is rhythmi- 
cally integrated." 

Gene Krupa: "Complete and inspired freedom of rhythmic interpreta- 
tion." 

Jess Stacy: "Syncopated syncopation." 

Morton Kahn and Payson Re: "Feeling a multitude of subdivisions in 
each beat and playing or implying the accents that you feel; that is, if the 
tune is played at the proper tempo, so that when you're playing it, you'll 
feel it inside." 

Glenn Miller: "Something that you have to feel; a sensation that can be 
conveyed to others." 

Frankie Froeba: "A steady tempo, causing lightness and relaxation and 
a feeling of floating." 

Terry Shand: "A synthetic cooperation of two or more instruments 
helping along or giving feeling to the soloist performing." 

Ozzie Nelson: "A vague something that you seem to feel pulsating from 
a danceable orchestra. To me it is a solidity and compactness of attack 
bv which the rhythm instruments combine with the others to create within 
the listeners the desire to dance." 

Chick Webb: "It's like lovin' a gal, and havin' a fight, and then seein' 
her again." 

Louis Armstrong: "My idea of how a tune should go." 

Ella Fitzgerald: "Why, er swing is well, you sort of feel uh uh 
I don't know you just swing!" 

These musicians were looking for a new set of terms that would 
catch the beat* so basic to jazz; they were stumped for the words to 
describe the kind of improvisation necessary to jazz. 

In the simple, compressed, sometimes too elliptic vocabulary of the 
jazz musician, one learns a great deal about the music he plays. One 
learns that "jazz" is a noun, that it is not American popular music 
(as it has often been thought to be), that the jazz musician is most 
interested in the rhythmic connotation of the word and in little else. 
If you tell him that some say the term comes from the phonetic spell- 



6 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

ing of the abbreviation of a jazz musician named Charles (Charles, 
Chas., Jass, Jazz), he is not in the least interested. If you tell him that 
there is a great deal of substance to the claim that the word comes 
from the French word jaser to pep up, to exhilarate he may nod 
his head with a degree of interest but ask you, "What about the beat?" 
You will learn from the jazz musician that "swing" is no longer a 
noun, in spite of the fact that it was first so used in the title of a 
Duke Ellington recording in 1931, "It Don't Mean a Thing if It 
Ain't Got That Swing," which gives it a kind of ex cathedra endorse- 
ment. You will learn that "swing" is a verb, that it is a way of 
describing the beat, even as Ellington's title for another tune, "Bounc- 
ing Buoyancy," is a description of the same beat, even as the term 
"jump" is, even as "leaps" is, even as the description of jazz as "music 
that goes" is, even as in the thirties the compliment of "solid" to per- 
former or performance was like "gone," "crazy," "craziest," "the 
end," and "cool" today. They are descriptions of the beat. 

From an examination of jazz musicians' own words, it is possible 
to glean the subtle, unruly, and almost mystical concept of the jazz 
spirit, or feeling, or thinking it is all these things and is so understood 
by the jazz musician himself. The jazzman has his own way of get- 
ting at the center of his music, and thus he formulates his own musical 
language. Also he converts the musical language into a verbal dialect 
of his own. In his own set of terms, musical and verbal, he thinks, he 
feels; he rehearses, he performs; he scores, he improvises; he gets a 
beat. 

To get that elusive beat, a jazzman will do anything. Without it, 
he cannot do anything. With it, he is playing jazz, and that is a large 
and satisfying enough accomplishment. When a jazzman picks up a 
familiar tune, banal or too well-known through much repetition, 
and alters its rhythmic pattern in favor of a steady if sometimes 
monotonous beat, and varies its melodies and maybe even changes its 
chords, he is working freely, easily, and with as much spontaneity 
as he can bring to his music. That freedom, ease, and spontaneity 
brought him to jazz; within those determining limits he will find a 
place for himself or get out, or join one of the bands whose frightening 
parodies of jazz are so often more popular than the real thing. It is 
by his formal understanding of certain definite values that the jazz 
musician has conceived, organized, and developed his art. It has been 
hot; it has become cool. It has jumped and swung; it has sauntered. 



WHAT IS JAZZ? 7 

It has borrowed; it has originated. It has effected a change, a literal 
transformation; inherited conventions have gradually been restated, 
reorganized, and ultimately restructured as a new expression. It may 
be that jazz musicians have simply rediscovered a controlling factor 
in music, the improvising performer. Without any awareness of what 
he has done, the jazzman may have gone back to some of the begin- 
nings of music, tapping once more the creative roots which nourished 
ancient Greek music, the plain chant, the musical baroque and its 
immediate successors and predecessors. We know that seventeenth- 
and eighteenth-century composers were improvisers and that when 
they brought their scores to other musicians they left the interpreta- 
tion of parts to the discretion of the performers, even as an arranger 
for a jazz band does today. 

But the jazz musician has brought more than procedures, com- 
posing conceptions, and improvisation to his music. Techniques have 
been developed that have broadened the resources and intensified the 
disciplines of certain instruments far beyond their use in other music. 
Colors have been added to solo instruments and to various combina- 
tions and numbers of instruments that are utterly unlike any others 
in music. New textures have emerged from a conception of tonality 
and of pitch that is not original but is entirely fresh in its application. 
The improvising jazz musician has a different and more responsible 
and rewarding position from that of his counterparts in earlier an and 
folk music. The rhythmic base of music has been reinterpreted, mak- 
ing the central pulse at once more primitive than it has been before in 
Western music, and more sophisticated in its variety. 

This, then, is how one might define jazz: it is a new music of a 
certain distinct rhythmic and melodic character, one that constantly 
involves improvisation of a minor sort in adjusting accents and 
phrases of the tune at hand, of a major sort in creating music ex- 
temporaneously, on the spot. In the course of creating jazz, a melody 
or its underlying chords may be altered. The rhythmic valuations of 
notes may be lengthened or shortened according to a regular scheme, 
syncopated or not, or there may be no consistent pattern of rhythmic 
variations so long as a steady beat remains implicit or explicit. The 
beat is usually four quarter-notes to the bar, serving as a solid rhyth- 
mic base for the improvisation of soloists or groups playing eight 
or twelve measures, or some multiple or dividend thereof. 

These things are the means. The ends are the ends of all art, the 



8 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

expression of the universal and the particular, the specific and the 
indirect and the intangible. In its short history, jazz has generally 
been restricted to short forms and it has often been directed toward 
the ephemeral and the trivial, but so too has it looked toward the 
lasting perception and the meaningful conclusion. Much of the time 
jazz musicians have sought and obtained an unashamed aphrodisiac 
effect; they have also worshiped in their music, variously devout 
before the one God and the unnamed gods. Like poets and painters, 
they are of all faiths, their doctrines are many; but they are united 
in one conviction, that they have found a creative form for them- 
selves, for their time, for their place. 

At the opening of the Gradus ad Parnassum, the dialogue offered 
as a study of counterpoint by Johann Josef Fux in 1725, the music 
master Aloysius warns the student Josef: "You must try to remem- 
ber whether or not you felt a strong natural inclination to this art 
even in childhood." The student answers: "Yes, most deeply. Even 
before I could reason, I was overcome by the force of this strange 
enthusiasm and I turned all my thoughts and feelings to music. And 
now the burning desire to understand it possesses me, drives me almost 
against my will, and day and night lovely melodies seem to sound 
around me. Therefore I think I no longer have reason to doubt my 
inclination. Nor do the difficulties of the work discourage me, and 
I hope that with the help of good health I shall be able to master it." 
Several jazz musicians have read Fux, even as Haydn and Beethoven 
did, though perhaps with less immediate application. They have, 
however, echoed the pupil's "strange enthusiasm"; that, these jazz- 
men said, was their experience, their "burning desire." Following the 
"inclination," jazz musicians have not had much of the help of good 
health; some of them have flaunted their doggedly unreasonable 
living habits and suffered the personal and public consequences of 
the habits and of the flaunting. All this their music has reflected, and 
sometimes it is noisy and grotesque as a result. More often it has a 
fullness and richness of expression. Slowly, clearly, the music is 
maturing, and, for it and with it and by it, so are the musicians. 




ANCESTORS 



According to legend, the beat which is at the center of jazz, as well as 
a fringe of decorative melody, came over to the Americas from West 
Africa in the slave ships. This tradition holds that the American Negro 
shaped jazz by imposing a heavy layer of his native jungle chants 
and rhythms upon the European materials he found in the land of 
his enforced adoption. For some years now a crew of industrious 
anthropologists and social scientists has been hard at work trying 
to make this story stick. It is a seemingly impressive story, buttressed 
with footnotes, interlarded with quotations from German authorities, 
generously sprinkled with the commonplaces of academic preten- 
sion; it confirms the average man's impression of the Negro as a jungle- 
formed primitive whose basic expression is inevitably savage; it sits 
well with the editors and readers of the country's chi-chi magazines, 
where this conception of jazz finds high favor. From the point of 
view of jazz musicians themselves, however, the theory distorts the 
facts out of all resemblance to the true history of the music that has 
been played as jazz, by jazzmen, since the end of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Whatever its merits as myth, it doesn't fit with the facts of the 
music itself. It won't do. 

The impetus for this interpretation, it seems to me, lies within the 
musical tastes of the men who make it. In the case of some writers, 
a devotion to the music of Jelly Roll Morton, Baby Dodds, Jimmy 
Yancey, George Lewis, and their singing and playing contemporaries, 
clearly informs the detailing of jazz history. But is this kind of writ- 
ing purely informative, or is it prejudiced, based on personal taste? 
In the case of anthropologists like Melville J. Herskovits, the highly 
placed and indefatigable chief spokesman for this line of inquiry, a 
professional interest in Negro culture governs the approach to jazz. 
In addition, that taste for and appreciation of the recherche^ the re- 

9 



10 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

mote, which is the inevitable development of a specialized knowledge 
in this instance, the specialized knowledge of African music has 
been the spur to some questionable activity in the field of jazz history , 
and to some curious, unmusical identifications in jazz performances. 
It is vital in understanding the issue to realize the large part that the 
cultural anthropologist plays in our academic life. Coupling his re- 
sources with the genuine discoveries of the clinical psychiatrist and 
the less certain speculations of the amateur psychoanalyst, the cultural 
anthropologist has made vast attacks upon his own world as well 
as on the surviving remnants of antecedent societies. One of the re- 
sults is the concept of an African music lodged in the unconscious 
of American Negroes. "It must be emphasized," Rudi Blesh writes in 
Shining Trumpets, "that Dodds has no first-hand knowledge of Afri- 
can drumming and music. He thinks of himself, on the contrary, as 
a 'modern' jazz-drummer and evolves all of his effects directly from 
the unconscious." Much of Herskovits's argument in his book, The 
Myth of the Negro Past, offers eloquent testimony to the stubborn 
strength and beautiful variety of African culture (however con- 
sciously or unconsciously induced), of which the Negro anywhere, 
as direct inheritor, and the rest of us, as subsidiary heirs, may very 
well be proud. 

Certainly the African background of the first jazz musicians played 
some part in their music. But one must remember that they were at 
a considerable remove from "the Dark Continent." The music they 
fashioned in New Orleans, where jazz began, was an elaborate com- 
pound of many folk strains, few of them bearing more than an echo, 
a distant one, of Africa. In Andre Gide's 1927 and 1928 journals, 
Travels in the Congo, one may find a very exciting and surely reliable 
description of African music as it sounds to the Western ear in this 
case an unusually sensitive ear, one trained to a point of high amateur 
proficiency in music. The jazz Africanists offer him as an exhibit; I 
should like to do so also. 

Gide describes a dance performed by the race of the Massas. He 
is very impressed by the natives of this country. He finds them 
"robust, agile, and slender." Watching them dance, he finds that 
they have nothing in common "with the slow, gloomy circling in 
which certain colonials pretend to see an imitation of sexual acts, and 
which, according to them, always ends in an orgy." Nonetheless, the 
dance, as he describes it, ends in a kind of intensely animated trance: 



ANCESTORS 1 1 

In the moonlight it ceased to be lyrical, and became frenzied demoniac. 
Some of the women looked possessed. One old woman executed a solo 
in a corner by herself. She went on like a lunatic, waving her arms and 
legs in time to the tom-tom, joined the circle for a moment, and then, 
suddenly giving way to frenzy, went off again to a solitary place, fell 
down, and went on dancing on her knees. A very young girl almost at 
the same moment left the circle, like a stone shot from a sling, made three 
leaps backwards, and rolled in the dust like a sack. I expected spasms and 
hysterics; but no, she lay a lifeless mass, over which I bent, wondering 
whether her heart was still beating, for she gave not a sign of breath. A 
little circle formed around her; two old men bent down and made passes 
over her, shouting out I know not what strange appeals to which she 
made no answer. But the tom-tom seemed to wake her; she dragged herself 
along, forced herself to dance, and fell down again for the last time on 
her side, her arms stretched out, her legs half bent, in an exquisite pose 
and nothing succeeded in stirring her from it. 

This is not the kind of dancing that is done to jazz; whatever 
frenzy has been present in jazz dancing is much closer to sexual 
orgy than the African trance. Likewise, the music that Gide describes 
is vaguely related to jazz, but is by no means the same thing; it has only 
a general resemblance to many different kinds of primitive music, 
European as well as American. So, too, the intensity that leads to 
trance resembles a whole variety of frenzied folk dancing in Western 
culture the Italian tarantella, flamenco dances in Spain, the czardas 
in Hungary, and a whole set of Russian peasant and Cossack dances. 
Africans have no monopoly on religious ecstasy or secular joy mani- 
fested rhythmically. This is not to deny the vitality and beauty of 
their culture, but rather to give it its own place in the pantheon of 
Western culture. 

Gide attempted to transcribe some of the music of the Massas; the 
next day, reflecting on his transcription, he had doubts and summed 
up one of his impressions of African music: 

In thinking it over last night, it seems to me that I transcribed yesterday's 
tune wrongly and that the intervals are greater than our tones, so that 
between C and the dominant below there is only one note. It may seem 
monstrous that I should not be certain of it. But imagine this tune yelled 
by a hundred persons, not one of whom sings the exact note. It is like 
trying to distinguish the main line among quantities of little strokes. The 
effect is prodigious and gives a polyphone impression of harmonic rich- 
ness. The same need makes them put beads on the wires of their little 



12 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

"pianos" a horror of the clean sound a need to confuse and drown its 
contours. 

Superficially, this might appear to be consonant with descriptions 
of jazz and the experience of listening to it. But there is never any- 
thing in jazz, not even at its most primitive, that suggests a tune yelled 
by a hundred persons; whatever delicacies of pitch and liberties of 
intonation, there is never a chaotic cacophony such as Gide describes, 
in which not one of the hundred or so persons sings an exact note. 
In the same way, the description of beaded piano-wires suggests jazz 
honky-tonk piano; but the honky-tonk piano was the result of the 
poor equipment of brothels and barrelhouses, not of a "need to con- 
fuse and drown . . . contours." 

A comparative analysis of African and American music does not 
yield clear parallels. For one thing, jazz is a measured music, the 
structure of which depends upon fixed beats, occurring in rhythmic 
patterns as unmistakable and immediately identifiable as the pulse of 
a metronome. African drumming, submitted to the most painstaking 
of auditions, simply does not break down into a structured rhythmic 
music; there are shifts of time and points and counterpoints of rhythm 
that make accurate notation impossible. As for the melodic qualities 
and quantities of African music, these too are shaped by a tonal 
and rhythmic conception entirely outside the Western diatonic tra- 
dition. To speak of the blue notes the flattened third and seventh 
as they are inflected against their natural position within a fixed key, 
or the alterations of pitch of jazz singers or instrumentalists, or their 
swooping glissandos, as American developments of African music is 
to talk unlettered nonsense. The basic chordal and melodic and 
rhythmic structure of the blues and of the jazz that has developed out 
of the blues is firmly within the orbit of Western folk music. There 
is far more of the sound of jazz in Middle-European gypsy fiddling 
than there is in a corps of African drummers. 

One cannot and one should not, in the heat of a forensic rage, dis- 
miss the real contribution of African Negroes to jazz. Without look- 
ing to the mysterious reaches of the unconscious, one can find a con- 
siderable administration of rhythmic discipline imposed by Southern 
Negroes, whether of the first or third or fifth American generation, 
upon the music they found around them. One must understand, how- 
ever, using one's own tutored listening, that the music they found 
was basic to the music they made. One must know something of the 



ANCESTORS 13 

music of the English and Scottish settlers in the Atlantic states in 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the Irish and German in 
the nineteenth, of the French who preceded the Negroes to the Loui- 
siana Territory. All this music, some of it stately and consciously 
composed according to the dancing customs of the aristocracy, some 
of it expressing acceptance of class position and some expressing pro- 
test, was compounded of a mixture of cultures. 

A detailed summary of sources indicates again and again the 
breadth, the depth, and the grandeur of the ancestry of jazz. One 
can no more neglect the Protestant hymn tune than the Morris dance, 
no more underestimate the effect of the spiritual on dozens of vaude- 
ville circuits around the United States than the vestiges of African 
ceremonial in Congo Square, New Orleans. These evidences, gleaned 
from listening to the music, make clear that New Orleans was the in- 
eluctable starting-point for a story that is orderly for all its academic 
confusion, American because of its polyglot origins and develop- 
ment a tapestry of impressions and expressions that becomes the 
richly textured history of jazz. 

The long reach in time and space of the African slave trade was 
the first factor in that history. It started in 1442, as best we can assign 
a date, when the Portuguese voyager Antam Gonsalvez brought ten 
Africans to Lisbon to save their souls. The trade was reinforced by 
Columbus a half-century later when he dispatched five hundred In- 
dians from Central America to Spain, suggesting they be sold in the 
markets of Seville. Voyagers, travelers, admirals, and pirates all sup- 
ported the trade, helped it expand, made it a vital part of European 
social and industrial life for three and a half centuries. Both Queen 
Elizabeth and her Spanish opponent, Philip II, invested in it; the Holy 
Roman Emperor, Charles V, and Bonnie Prince Charlie added to their 
riches by means of it. Sir Francis Drake and John Paul Jones, the 
naval vessels of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, 
and Holland carried cargoes of tightly packed black men, women, 
and children to be sold as slaves. In 1807 the slave trade was legally 
prohibited in England and the United States. The Danes had outlawed 
it in 1 802 ; the Swedes followed suit in 1813, the Dutch in 1814, France 
under Napoleon in 1815, the Spanish in 1820. But an outlaw trade 
replaced officially sanctioned commerce in Negroes: Western seas 
still were the graves of hundreds of slaves who died en route to 
the Americas; high prices were still being paid for able hands $1100 



14 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

in New Orleans markets, $350 in Cuba, where smugglers had made 
them plentiful, $25 to $50 worth of rum or gunpowder or cloth on 
the Guinea coast. 

The slaves brought their African melodies and tom-tom beats on 
the bottoms of tubs and tin kettles. The Puritans brought their 
emasculated versions of the Italian, Dutch, and English madrigals. 
During the Civil War in England the Puritans had destroyed organs, 

in order to remove these Romish traces from the churches and vet 

.' 

prevent taverns from using them for profane purposes. But concerts 
remained popular under the aegis of Oliver Cromwell himself, and 
psalm-singing was indulged in with an intensity that approached in- 
decency. In the New England towns of the Puritans church organs 
were again banned; they were "the devil's bag-pipes." In Plymouth 
congregations were without musical instruments save the deacon's 
pitch-pipe, and psalms were sung from memory. Children's noisy 
contributions to psalmody were silenced with birch rods, but neither 
statute, religious proscription, nor physical punishment could cramp 
the creative musical spirit. And other assaults on the ascetic service 
were forthcoming: trumpets and drums were introduced into 
churches to serve the function of bells, and the jew's-harp was a 
popular instrument even in church. 

In eighteenth-century Boston and Salem, and in similar cities and 
settlements, the minuet was the music of dancing assemblies and 
festooned balls. Cotillions were danced to English country tunes. 
Lower down in the class structure, fancy and fatiguing fiddling ac- 
companied dancing at weddings and in taverns. There were jigs from 
Ireland and reels from Scotland and a merriness that often went the 
whole night through. In New York there were long rows of houses 
of entertainment of all kinds on the Bowery, and an ease of musical 
conscience too, since Dutch Calvinism had made its peace with the 
things of this world. In Philadelphia the worldly found their weal in 
the suburbs, where Quaker restrictions did not hold so strongly. In 
Charleston the Huguenots enacted strict Sunday blue laws, but danc- 
ing and singing remained integral parts of daily life in town and 
country, at private balls and public taverns, as they also did in Mary- 
land and Virginia and Georgia. 

The organ was brought back into church in 1700 in Port Royal, 
Virginia, and at about that time at the Swedish Gloria Dei Church in 
Philadelphia; in 1713 an organ was installed in the Anglican King's 



ANCESTORS 15 

Chapel in Boston. There were able and successful choirs in the mid- 
eighteenth century in New York (Trinity) and in the Moravian settle- 
ment at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (the College of Music). In Charles- 
ton too there was a St. Cecilia Society after 1762, which organized 
an orchestra and sponsored indoor and open-air concerts, and Caro- 
linians saw the first opera performed in the colonies, the English poet 
laureate Colley Gibber's Flora, or Hob-in-t he-Well. In Philadelphia 
Francis Hopkinson, who signed the Declaration of Independence, 
represented New Jersey in the Continental Congress, and as chairman 
of the Navy Board probably designed the American flag, became the 
first known native American composer. His lovely song, "My Days 
Have Been so Wondrous Free," was a hit in 1759. And two years 
later Newark-born James Lyon collected psalm tunes for the Presby- 
terian church of which he was a clergyman, and added some of his 
own composition. That collection, named Urania after the heavenly 
Venus and muse of astronomy, established Lyon as the second Amer- 
ican composer. In all the thirteen colonies part-singing and harpsi- 
chord playing were growing in popularity. 

A secular spirit joined to patriotism emerged in the new music. 
"Yankee Doodle," originally a French-and-Indian-War song prob- 
ably designed as a British gibe at the shabby American soldier, under- 
went countless variations after it was proudly appropriated by the 
Revolutionists. In 1778 Francis Hopkinson wrote "The Battle of the 
Kegs," a satirical song based on an incident in Philadelphia during the 
Revolution, and there were innumerable songs dealing with the more 
serious battles, the Boston Tea Party, and the Revolutionary heroes. 
After the war patriotic songs signalized the emotional and intellectual 
realization of sovereignty. "Hail, Columbia," by Francis Hopkinson's 
son Joseph, was written in 1798 to appease both political factions in 
the first presidential administration ("Firm united let us be, Rally- 
ing around our Liberty"). "The Star-Spangled Banner," written dur- 
ing the War of 1812 by Francis Scott Key while he was detained on 
a British frigate during the night bombardment of Baltimore's Fort 
McHenry, was inspired by the resistance of the American garrison 
and the sight of the flag still unfurled and waving at dawn. "America" 
("My Country, 'Tis of Thee") was written in 1 83 1 by Samuel Francis 
Smith to a tune he had found in a German music book he was un- 
aware that the British had used it for "God Save the King." 

While many art songs have exactly the same characteristics and 



16 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

similar word-of -mouth histories, it is chiefly the popular song, almost 
by definition, which endures through its quick adoption by the 
musically illiterate who form the bulk of singing populations. The 
English ballads were quickly naturalized in Virginia and neighboring 
states. Moving through the Southern mountains, retaining an ener- 
getic rhythmic motion, a touching variety of emotion, and sprightly 
Elizabethan diction, the ballads became other things the blues, 
spirituals, hillbilly songs. The ballads "Barbara Allen" and "Chevy 
Chase" were variously adopted and adapted, changed, chastened, or 
made ribald, as basic strains in a folk tradition must be. In the same 
way, "Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?" moved into the colonies 
and stayed with us until it received ultimate canonization as a jazz 
song, a base for improvisation. 

"Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre" is an example of export and import 
trade in music: the tale of this French nursery-song hero goes back 
to the Middle Ages, can be found in the chansons de geste, the verse 
romances based on the deeds of Charlemagne and his paladins, com- 
posed from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries and sung in 
cloisters, chateaux, and marketplaces. In England, Malbrouk's tune, 
which also has medieval antecedents, was coupled with such familiar 
sets of lyrics as "For he's a jolly good fellow" and "We won't go 
home until morning," which in turn became attractive to Americans. 
In the United States one of the best known of many, many versions 
is that hurled about by the voices of Rotary and Kiwanis members, 
"The bear went over the mountain" and needless to say the tune 
also filtered through a generation or more of jazz. 

In American cities of the early nineteenth century the songs were 
chiefly those fashioned abroad. Dr. Thomas Arne, from whose masque 
Alfred comes the melody of "Rule, Britannia," wrote many songs, 
some operas and oratorios (his famous patriotic song made him the 
butt of Richard Wagner's comment that the whole English character 
can be expressed in eight notes). In America, as in England, his songs 
were among the most popular in the decades immediately following his 
death in 1778 both his most pallid ballads and his attractive settings 
of Shakespeare lyrics ("Under the greenwood tree," "Blow, blow, 
thou winter wind," etc.). "Auld Lang Syne" was one of many Scottish 
songs to become popular, along with "The Bluebells of Scotland," 
from which hundreds of piano and violin students suffered. From Ire- 
land came Thomas Moore's "The Last Rose of Summer" which has 



ANCESTORS 17 

been fading annually since 1813, but not in popularity and also his 
"The Minstrel Boy" and "The Harp That Once Thro' Tara's Halls," 
another student "piece" of invidious association. "Silent Night," writ- 
ten for Christmas Eve, 1818, in the Austrian village of Arnsdorf by 
Franz Gruber and Joseph Mohr, was a great seasonal favorite. The 
American John Howard Payne's words and the Englishman Sir Henry 
Bishop's music made "Home, Sweet Home" an immediate hit, and 
it, like many another popular song in this period, was interpolated in 
operas, such as The Barber of Seville, where it was sung in the lesson 
scene. Carl Maria von Weber's "Invitation to the Dance" was a great 
favorite in the 18205 and survived long enough in popular affection 
to appear as Benny Goodman's theme song, "Let's Dance," in 1935. 
"The Old Oaken Bucket," written by an American poet and set to 
a Scottish tune, and "John Peel" ("D'ye ken John Peel?"), over from 
England, moved from the family parlor to the glee club, where both 
have long remained. 

In the hills and mountains, down on the farm and up on the river, 
another transformation was taking place, an unconscious naturaliza- 
tion of the European musical inheritance that led to the blues and jazz. 
In the Southern Appalachians they were singing: 

Blow your horn and call your dog, 

Blow your horn and call your dog, 

We'll go to the back woods and catch a ground hog. 

Rang tang fiddle de day. 

In the Southern Highlands they were singing "Frankie and Albert" 
("She killed her man, who wouldn't treat her right"); this was to 
become "Frankie and Johnnie," and later one of Duke Ellington's 
most persuasive sets of variations on the blues. In Mississippi they were 
singing a song of hard times: 

Come listen a while, I'll sing you a song 
Concerning the times it will not be long 
When everybody is striving to buy 
And cheating each other, I cannot tell why. 
And it's hard, hard times. 

There were tales of God and tales of man, tales of lovers who were 
knotted and more who were not. The themes were clear, the music 
was all around, to be imitated and absorbed and changed by a new 
poet, a new singer, the American Negro. 



Chapter 3 




THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 



Whether slave or free man, the Negro in the nineteenth century was 
thought of as a child, happy on his feet, facing misery with a joyful 
chant, a Little Black Sambo whose major interest was in pancakes, 
not panaceas. But the Negro back in the hills and on the plantations 
was fleshing his music with his own aches and pains, his own unhappi- 
ness and his few moments of jubilation, compounded of sensual ecstasy 
and occasional religious exaltation. First came the work song not 
the spiritual, not the joyous song. 

The Negro didn't respond to the backbreaking labor of slavery 
with a jubilant shout. Such music as he created in the cotton fields and 
in the warehouses and on the levees was at the command of his masters. 
As Duke Ellington put it, in looking back over the history of the 
music of which he is such a distinguished representative, "At this 
point we encounter a myth which must be exploded. Fearful of the 
silence of these groups of blacks, their masters commanded them to 
raise their voices in song, so that all opportunity for discontented 
reflection or plans for retaliation and salvation would be eliminated." 
The best surviving examples of the work song are not from the plan- 
tations but from railroa^ workers and men in the levee camps and, 
most pitiful of all, the chain gangs. There are hollers of the kind that 
Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) brought into the night club and the 
concert hall, such as the "Steel Laying Holler" "Aw right, aw 
right. Everybody get ready. Come on down here, come on boys. 
Bow down. Aw right, up high, aw right. Thow'ay." There are chants 
of tie-shuffling and tie-tamping; there are brief epics of wrecks, and 
of enormous distances encompassed by railroads taking the workers 
far from home. 

From the levee camps came the shack bully holler and the holler of 
the levee camp "Cap'n, cap'n, you mus' be cross; six 'clock in hell 

* 18 



THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 19 

*fo' you knock off." In the levee camp too there was talk of getting 
into town, where a measure of barroom joy and main-street hell- 
raising was afforded the emancipated Negro after the Qvil War. 
Many of the songs of the seventies and eighties celebrated the good 
times in town. On the plantation, lyric characterization was given the 
plant enemy, the boll weevil "The boll weevil is a little bug f urn 
Mexico, dey say; he come to try dis Texas soil and thought he'd better 
stay, a-lookin' for a home, just a-lookin' for a home." Later there were 
songs about the prodigious exploits of Negroes, some of which be- 
came the legend of John Henry. There were plaints about the difficul- 
ties of Negro life. There were celebrations of animals like the ground- 
hog and the horse; there were celebrations of drinking exploits, of 
sexual conquests, and of the interrelation of the two when love came 
to be like whisky. Simile and metaphor were drawn from the things 
the Negro saw and heard. All these in later evolutions became the 
natural material of blues lyrics. 

Along with the secular songs grew the Negro spirituals. The more 
kindly slave masters and overseers, feeling perhaps in some way 
responsible for the plight of their black charges, and themselves of 
a religious nature, taught the Bible to the oldest and wisest of their 
slaves. As they had done with the facts of plantation and levee and 
chain-gang life, these slaves, as Duke Ellington says, "studied the 
Book of Wisdom and set to music words of comfort and hope, which 
year after year were handed down to their colored brethren." But 
the setting to music of the Word of God, however fresh the setting 
may have been to the Negro doing it, was not always to tunes of his 
own devising. The long line of music which had developed in America 
from the days of the Puritans was the Negro's inheritance; he 
reached unconsciously into the treasure of the white man's music. And 
while the Negro was building his religious music, so was the white 
man. A comparison of the so-called white spirituals and the so-called 
Negro spirituals shows enormous exchanges of melody, rhythm, and 
lyric. Early in the twentieth century Cecil Sharp, in his collection of 
some five hundred songs of the Southern Appalachians, demonstrated 
the broad content of American folk songs and the depth of their Brit- 
ish ancestry. But later G. P. Jackson in three books, White Spirituals 
in the Southern Uplands (1933), Spiritual Folksongs of Early America 
(1937), and White and Negro Spirituals (1943), showed the equally 
large part played by America's own makers Negro and white 



20 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

poets, musicians, protesters, accepters, singers of life. In Jackson's 
books the borrowings of the Negro arc made clear; but so too is the 
extent of his transformation of white materials, and of his own distinc- 
tive creations. Especially during and after the Civil War did the 
Negro fashion a music of his own. Pressed into Southern armies, 
Negroes had much to worry and complain about and to narrate in 
their songs. The triangle, famous in the drama and the novel, became 
a dominant concern: like his master, the Negro often left a wife or 
a sweetheart at home; like his master, the Negro often lost his wife 
or sweetheart to another man here was the material of song. And 
then there was coming home, a feeling as full, as plagued by doubts, 
alternately as joyous and grievous as all the other homecomings 
stretching back to Ulysses. 

While the Negro was fashioning his own music, the white man 
was looking on; and as the Negro had borrowed from him, he bor- 
rowed in turn from the Negro. Our first record of the white man's 
awareness of the Negro's music appears late in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Letters describe Negroes playing their fiddles in Maryland 
taverns or strumming their banjos, made of flat gourds and strung 
with horsehair, before their cabins. The homemade instruments of 
the Negro are described in some detail, the tambo, bones, quills, fife, 
triangle; and so are the Negro rowing songs, among them the few 
real African strains found in America, most of them transformed into 
the dialect and diction of Creole, the French-Spanish patois to which 
Louisiana Negroes added some African inflections. In 1795 a young 
man named Gottlieb Graupner came to America. He arrived in 
Charleston from Hanover, Germany, listened to banjo music and 
Negro songs, and learned. In 1799, donning blackface, he introduced 
himself as "The Gay Negro Boy" in an interlude between acts at the 
Federal Street Theatre in Boston. This was the beginning of Negro 
minstrels and minstrelsy. Though Graupner left his burnt cork be- 
hind in 1810 when he organized the Boston Philharmonic Society as 
a kind of reaction against the "fuguing" tunes of William Billings, 
which suggested jazz syncopation more than they did classical music, 
minstrelsy had made a beginning and it was here to stay for quite a 
while. 

Thomas "Jim Crow" Rice, a white man with a sensitive ear, heard 
an old Negro hostler singing one of the horse songs of his people in 



THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 21 

a stableyard one day in the early 18305. From this Negro's repeated 
refrain, Rice's nickname and a whole tradition arose: 

Wheel about, turn about, 

Do jis' so, 
An 7 ebery time I wheel about, 

I jump Jim Crow. 

Rice used the song and its refrain as a kind of interlude in The Rifle, 
a play about backwoodsmen. It was immediately successful and was 
changed from interlude to afterpiece, and other Negro melodies and 
dances were threaded through the play. In blackface, Rice made 
popular "The Long-Tailed Blue," a ballad narrating the story of the 
wearer of the coat, a story of trials and tribulations. Later he added 
happier variations on the coat theme. To the hostler's song, with all its 
lyric embroidery, and "The Long-Tailed Blue," Rice added studies 
of a variety of Negroes the dandy, the plantation worker, the flat- 
boat man, and the singer. He took his program to London, where he 
was a huge success. In 1842 the development of the Negro character 
was still further expanded when Dan Emmett, an Irish backwoodsman 
with a face that was almost a caricature of the stock Yankee, gathered 
three other Yankees to play the fiddle, the tambo, the bones, and the 
banjo, made end men and interlocutors of them and dressed them all 
up in that long-tailed blue. The full-sized minstrel show was born. 
To group singing was added a walk-around by the chorus the 
minstrel-show equivalent of the Greek choral ode and some of the 
rhythms of the Negro spiritual and, later, of the blues began to make 
their ways into minstrelsy. 

Daniel Decatur Emmett, who was the subject of Dixie, an engaging 
Bing Crosby motion picture, was the author of "Dixie's Land," best 
known as "Dixie," "Written and Composed Expressly for Bryant's 
Minstrels by Dan D. Emmett, Arranged for the Piano Forte by W. L. 
Hobbes." The song was first sung in public in 1859. Emmett was a 
Northerner and didn't intend to write a war anthem. For the South 
the song became a tearful reminder of the Confederate Army; for the 
North it evoked distant times and places, the longest trip away from 
home that many had ever made. "Dixie's Land" was the name origi- 
nally invented by some Negro slaves sent to Charleston by Johaan 
Dixie, to describe their original owner's farm on Manhattan Island. 



22 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

"Dixey Land" was an alternate name for Dixie's Line, the Mason and 
Dixon Line established in 1769 on the basis of the surveying by two 
English astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, separating 
Pennsylvania from Maryland and Virginia. Before the Civil War 
Dixon's Line came to mean the line that separated the slave states from 
the free states. But Dixie was also an Americanization of the French 
word for ten, dix, which was printed on New Orleans ten-dollar 
bills. All these meanings and overtones of meanings became a part 
of the single word Dixieland, which from before 1917 to the present 
has designated a music essentially New Orleans in character. 

Before Dan Emmett, and until some years after his death in 1904, 
minstrelsy was a major form of American entertainment. There were 
the Virginia Minstrels and the Kentucky Minstrels, the Congo Melo- 
dists who became Buckley's New Orleans Serenaders, the Ethiopian 
Serenaders, the Sable Harmonizers, the Nightingale Serenaders, and 
the great names that linger on for the quality of their music and their 
performances, Maclntyre and Heath, Lew Dockstader, and Dan 
Bryant. Popular among the minstrel singers was a tune that originated 
in the work of one of the first of the black-faced impressionists, Bob 
Farrell, although the claim is sometimes made that another early 
blackface minstrel, George Washington Dixon, composed it. The 
tune is "Zip Coon," now better known as "Turkey in the Straw." No- 
body now alive remembers when "Zip Coon" or "Turkey in the 
Straw" was not the musical symbol of life on the farm, of the country 
hick, of animal noises, of everything rural in America. But popular 
as this and other "coon songs" were and are, much more successful 
in the nineteenth century were the songs written for E. P. Christie 
and others by Stephen Collins Foster. 

Stephen Foster, born in Pennsylvania, little-traveled in the South, 
shows the distance a composer of "Negro songs" could get from the 
Negro. Almost all of Foster's lovely melody seems to be based on the 
music of minstrelsy. So thoroughly had the antecedents of white and 
Negro music in America been absorbed by the minstrel composer, so 
effectively had the Negro's own music been imitated by white com- 
posers for blackface singers, that, r 1 though most of the music written 
for minstrel shows seems weak and ineffective beside the Negro's own 
music, minstrelsy provided an abundant source for the songs of 
Stephen Foster. Whatever their remove from the Negro himself, 



THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 23 

Foster's songs do approach the simple beauty and rhythmic vitality 
of the Negro's music. 

Like W. C. Handy, who sold his "Memphis Blues" outright soon 
after it was composed, Stephen Foster disposed unprofitably of most 
of his early songs. u Oh! Susanna" was in effect donated to the Cin- 
cinnati publisher W. C. Peters. "Old Folks at Home" went to the 
minstrel E. P. Christie for fifteen dollars, for which sum Christie also 
bought the right to claim the writing and composing of the song, 
although Foster did receive royalties and credit for it before he died. 
The tragedy of Stephen Foster's life and there is sufficient nobility 
in his music to grant his failure such stature is not entirely due to 
his early unforeseeing disposal of his songs. Some years before his 
death he was earning a sizable income for a composer in the middle 
of the nineteenth century. When he died in New York in 1864 he 
had been long separated from his wife and family, his habits were dis- 
solute, he was without food or funds and had been perilously ill for 
quite a while. He died after suffering a cut in his throat when he 
fainted across the washbasin of his room in the American Hotel on 
the Bowery. When he died he was six months short of thirty-eight. 
He had thirty-eight cents in his purse, and a small piece of paper on 
which he had written the possible title or opening line of a song, 
"Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts." 

For considerably less than the emolument of a Jerome Kern, Irving 
Berlin, or George Gershwin, he left an edifice of song which only 
such later popular composers could challenge, and even their impres- 
sive efforts don't achieve the nearly uniform quality of his almost two 
hundred songs. Through almost all those songs run the melodic line 
and rhythmic accent of the American Negro, from whom Kern, Ber- 
lin, and Gershwin and all their contemporaries, successors, followers, 
and imitators borrowed copiously. "Oh! Susanna," "De Camp Town 
Races," and "Away Down Souf" suggest the lilt and beat of ragtime 
and much other early jazz. The enduring "Old Folks at Home" and 
"My Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Black Joe" have a plaintiveness, 
within an infectiously accented rhythmic frame, which suggests the 
blues. The ease with which "Old Folks at Home," under its later and 
more familiar name, "Swanee River," fits the ensemble and solo needs 
of the Jimmie Lunceford and Tommy Dorsey jazz bands in arrange- 
ments by Sy Oliver is not happenstance. The cheer with which ar- 



24 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

rangers greeted "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," when that 
song written by Foster to his wife was available to them during the 
absence of ASCAP music from the air, indicates some of its relation- 
ship to jazz. 

Before, during, and after the Civil War there were more songs 
like those Stephen Foster wrote, but without the quality of his work; 
however, they do have the warmth of melody and tricks of rhythmic 
accent that suggest nothing so much as jazz. "The Arkansas Traveler" 
and "Listen to the Mocking Bird" have been taken up by jazz bands. 
Septimus Winner, who wrote "Listen to the Mocking Bird," also did 
"Ten Little Injuns," which later became known as "Ten Little 
Niggers," to the discomfort of Negroes and many white men. He 
was one of the many who created new words for "Dixie," beginning 
with the line, "I'm captain of a darkie band." His long life stretched 
from 1827 to 1902, and his contributions, published under the pseu- 
donym of Alice Hawthorne, range from "Listen to the Mocking 
Bird," which was published as a "Sentimental Ethiopian Ballad," to 
the more exaggerated sentimentality of "Whispering Hope" and 
"What Is Home Without a Mother?" But only his Bird is fit to rank 
with such masterpieces of the fifties as "Jingle Bells," "Pop Goes the 
Weasel," and "Skip to My Lou." 

The Civil War produced "Maryland, My Maryland" and two ver- 
sions of the tune earlier known as "Glory Hallelujah" "John 
Brown's Body" and Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the 
Republic." But nothing out of the war, with the possible exception 
of the partisan version of "Dixie," approached the song by the 
Irish bandmaster Patrick Gilmore, "When Johnny Comes Marching 
Home." To those whose first inkling of the driving quality of the 
marching Johnny was Glenn Miller's recorded performance of it, it 
may come as a great surprise to learn that the song was written in 
1863. And although most people who heard Benny Goodman's record 
of "When You and I Were Young, Maggie" realized that that song 
was not contemporary with the swing era, few realized that it went 
back to 1866; its form follows so exactly that of the popular song 
of the twentieth century that it is hard to place it much before World 
War I. 

The spiritual really came alive in the decade from 1870 to 1880. 
In 1871 the Fisk Jubilee Singers, out of Nashville's Fisk University, 
one of the first and still one of the best institutions of higher learning 



THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 25 

for Negroes, made their first concert tour. Thereafter in their jaunts 
around America and in the concert tours of other Negro institutions 
like the Hampton Institute, such songs as "Deep River/' "Go Down, 
Moses," "Heaven," "Little David, Play on Your Harp," "Swing Low, 
Sweet Chariot," and "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child" were 
standard parts of a growing repertory. These began to appear in 
popular song collections, to be sung in parlors, on the concert stage, 
and in cabarets. The Negro had found a voice all his own; his music 
challenged in popularity Sir Arthur Sullivan's "The Lost Chord," 
which first reached the United States in 1877, and the enormously 
successful songs from H.M.S. Pi?iafore and The Mikado. The Negro 
spiritual was accepted along with Johann Strauss's waltzes. By the 
end of the nineteenth century it was even admitted that Negroes sang 
their own songs as well as or better than whites. Although there was 
no one individual Negro composer of great public note, Negroes as 
a whole were granted the high quality of their musical contributions. 
There was more to come than the minstrel-show version of Negro 
music; but while the full vigor of his instrumental and vocal perform- 
ance was still to be heard and accepted, the Negro was now something 
more than a happy child. 




~er 4 




THE BLUES 



When the spiritual was transformed into the blues, the content shifted 
some; the emphasis was less on man's relation to God and his future 
in God's heaven, and more on man's devilish life on earth. All of the 
musical antecedents of late nineteenth-century song were summed up, 
however indirectly, in the blues. The spiritual was the dominant strain, 
but the work song, the patriotic anthem, minstrel words and melodies, 
and all the folk and art songs sung in America were compounded 
into the new form. 

There is an interesting parallel to the blues in Byzantine music. Like 
the Byzantine, the music of the blues has its line of identifiable sources. 
We can show that Byzantine music derives from Syrian, Hebrew, 
and Greek sources, but, as scholars have come to understand in the 
twentieth century, it is essentially an independent musical culture. In 
the same way we can now understand that the blues is a form complete 
in itself, whatever its clearly marked origins, especially notable for its 
balance of intense feeling and detachment. This balance is the dis- 
tinguishing mark of most of the great blues, of the fine blues singers, 
and of every sensitive jazz performer since the emergence of the blues. 

In the popular song, the evolution of which is at least as long as 
that of the blues, there is no such balance, and the distinction between 
form and content is easier to make, since the major concern of 
popular-song composers and writers has usually been commercial. As 
one cannot in the blues, one can take for granted the verbal content 
of the popular song, chiefly a series of approaches to love, happy and 
unhappy, ecstatic and disastrous, chiefly sentimental, though some- 
times, in the hands of rare masters, compassionate. 

Most popular songs contain a verse of eight measures, which intro- 
duces the working situation, melodically and verbally, and a chorus, 
which is usually thirty-two measures long. The thirty-two-bar chorus 

20 



THE BLUES 27 

is usually divided into the following simple pattern: the first eight 
bars state the basic figuration or theme; then these first eight bars are 
repeated, completing the first half of the song; then follows the eight- 
bar bridge or release, in which a considerable variation on the theme 
is effected (here there is usually a change of key, rhythm, and general 
phrasing) ; and then in the last eight bars there is a return to the orig- 
inal statement, a recapitulation. All of this adds up to a pattern that 
can be most easily remembered as A-A-B-A. 

The first eight bars of the ordinary thirty-two-bar chorus usually 
can be broken down into two four-bar phrases in which the second 
four bars merely repeat the first with a very slight harmonic variation, 
so that the form can be stated thus: A-A'-A-A'-B-A-A'. 

The variations on the basic A-A-B-A pattern of the thirty- two-bar 
chorus are numerous. There are such obvious but infrequently used 
variations as the sixteen-bar chorus, usually nothing more than an 
eight-bar theme and an eight-bar release (A-B); or a twenty-bar 
chorus (A-B-A); or sometimes a chorus longer than thirty-two bars, 
as a more complicated content seeks rudimentary form. All of these 
variations reinforce and redefine the basic thirty-two-bar popular- 
song chorus. 

The basic blues form is a twelve-bar chorus, in which an initial 
four-bar statement is repeated with slight melodic and harmonic 
changes in the second four bars and then again with more significant 
variation in the last four bars. The lyric form of this chorus can be 
compared, as Richard Wright has put it, to a man walking around a 
chair clockwise (the first four bars), then walking around it again 
counterclockwise (the next four), and then standing aside and giving 
a full judgment upon it (the last four bars). 

Harmonically the blues follows a simple chord pattern, that of 
most Western folk music. The first four bars are usually based upon 
the chord of the tonic (the first note of the scale); the second four 
bars are usually based upon the chord of the subdominant (the fourth 
note of the scale); the last four bars are usually based upon the chord 
of the dominant (the fifth note of the scale). 

The blues melody derives from the blues chords, but it has a tonal 
concept all its own, based on the blues scale, which consists of the 
ordinary scale plus a flattened third note and a flattened seventh note, 
which are known as the "blue notes." Thus, in effect, you have a ten- 
note scale because both the natural form of the note and its flattened 



28 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

version arc retained in the blues. In the key of C major, for example, 
the blues scale runs (>D~E[?-E-F-X3-A-Bb-B--C; the flattened third 
is E flat and the flattened seventh is B flat. 

This tonal content causes jazz's characteristic assault on pitch. 
From the flattened third and seventh notes of the blues scale, struck 
against or before or after the natural evaluations of those notes, conies 
a whole complex of pitch variations. Perhaps the most immediately 
comprehensible example of what Raymond Scott calls "scooped 
pitch" can be heard in the playing of alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges 
with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Johnny does what so many other 
jazz musicians do, but his meticulous technique makes the practice 
much more understandable, as he moves from some division of a tone 
up to a note or by some division of a tone away from it. He may be 
anywhere from a quarter to say a sixteenth flat in approaching a given 
note; the same tone divisions may mark his departure from the note, 
sharpening the note. In the same way jazz singers slide into or away 
from a note, coming in sharp or flat, departing flat or sharp. The 
mastery of these musicians and singers is such that they do not produce 
glissandos, agonized slides over a series of notes, which obliterate all 
tonal distinctions. For all the apparent casualness, the seeming hit-or- 
miss nature of their playing or singing, they know what they are 
doing, and after a while you come to know too. 

Most blues melodies use either the first five notes of the ten-note 
blues scale, or the second five; that is, again using C major as our 
demonstration key, a blues tune runs from C to F or from G to C 
(if it runs from C to F the flattened note is E; if from G to C the 
flattened note is B). 

Typical examples of the blues, the best examples with which to 
start to become accustomed to the curious harmonic and melodic 
character of this music, "are the records of the early blues singers. It 
is difficult to get their records today, but some of Bessie Smith's best 
sides are or will be available on long-playing records. In "Cold in 
Hand Blues" and "You've Been a Good Old Wagon," you get perfect 
examples of Bessie's singing an E flat against an E natural in the ac- 
companiment, or a B flat against a B in the accompaniment; the E flat 
example is on "You've Been a Good Old Wagon," the B flat on "Cold 
in Hand Blues." And the two individual sides also illustrate the char- 
acteristic limited melodic range of the blues; "You've Been a Good 
Old Wagon" is built on the first five notes of C major, "Cold in Hand 



THE BLUES 29 

Blues" on the second five. (Incidentally, on these sides you get the 
additional pleasure of listening to Louis Armstrong in 1925 when he 
was still playing cornet and was at the peak of his early style.) 

Variations in the blues form are possible, both in its chord structure 
and in melodic line. Passing tones (tones out of the immediate har- 
mony, not in the chords at hand) can be used to supplement the five 
fundamental notes of either half of the blues scale, as the ornaments 
of a melody or as integral parts of it. Instead of following the con- 
ventional division of the twelve bars of the blues into three repetitious 
four-bar segments or phrases, each division of four bars may vary 
considerably from the preceding phrase. The blues may be broken up 
into two-bar instead of four-bar phrases, so that in one blues chorus 
there will be six phrases instead of three. You may get two-bar 
phrases with two-bar fill-ins, as in Duke Ellington's "Jack the Bear/' 
where the piano plays the essential two-bar phrase and the band plays 
the two-bar fill-in. 

From the two- and four-bar phrases of the blues came the riff, 
which was the outstanding instrumental device of the so-called swing 
era. The riff is a two- or four-bar phrase repeated with very little 
melodic variation and almost no harmonic change over the course of 
any number of blues choruses. 

Blues melodies are often exquisitely simple. In Ellington's "C Jam 
Blues" the four-bar main phrase consists of only two notes, G and C. 
The first two bars (or riff) are all on G; in the third bar the C is 
introduced in a slurred pair of eighth-notes. "C Jam Blues" is worth 
careful listening, to hear how ingeniously this seemingly empty pair 
of notes becomes a fresh, swinging blues. 

Generally the blues bass is played in unaccented four-quarter time, 
the best example of which is the "walking bass." If you listen care- 
fully to the Ellington recording of "C Jam Blues," you will hear a 
definitive example of the walking bass i 234/1234/1234, over 
and over again, with brilliant chord or key changes to make room for 
the progression from tonic chord to subdominant to dominant, from 
C to F to G seventh over a series of scale-like phrases. Another very 
effective bass for the blues is the rolling octave bass, which consists 
of dotted eighths and sixteenths, syncopating up and down octaves. 

"Stride piano," the particular pride and joy of Fats Waller and, 
before him, of innumerable ragtime pianists, comes from the blues. 
The trick in the stride bass is to play a single note for the first and 



30 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

third beats of the bar, and a three- or four-note chord on the second 
and fourth beats. The effect when the stride bass is poorly played is 
plodding and corny; but when this kind of piano is played by a Fats 
Waller or an Art Tatum the result is exhilarating. 

The blues is usually played in unaccented four/four time or with 
stride accents, but it does, in one of its most prominent varia- 
tions, make a departure from this structure. The variation? Boogie- 
woogie, of course. Boogie-woogie, contrary to the general impression, 
is merely a piano blues form which on occasion has been adapted for 
orchestral use. It goes back to ragtime and hasn't changed very much 
since its first appearance. It represents nothing more than a jazz con- 
version of the traditional basso ostinato device, the pedal-point or 
organ-point reiteration of a basic bass line. In boogie-woogie eight 
beats to the bar are usually emphasized, with single notes or triplets, 
following the fundamental harmony of the twelve-bar blues form. 
More conservative than most blues performers, boogie-woogie pian- 
ists almost never depart from the original key and usually play in the 
key of C. Cleverly orchestrated, the obstinate bass suggests the clas- 
sical passacaglia form. As boogie-woogie is most often played, by such 
broad-beamed performers as Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson and 
Meade Lux Lewis, it is confined in its ornament to trills and tremolos 
in the right hand, and constricted rhythmically and harmonically. 

Although the blues is the base, harmonically, melodically, and 
even to a degree rhythmically, of jazz as we know it today, it did 
not appear on paper under its proper name until 1912. Jazz was on 
the threshold of its formative years as an art and of its widespread 
recognition. It was given a considerable push on its way in the first 
published blues, W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues," written originally 
as a campaign song for E. H. Crump, a mayoralty candidate in Mem- 
phis in 1909. Though Crump was a reform candidate, William Chris- 
topher Handy's "Mister Crump" certainly didn't indicate that; the 
words were, if anything, a mockery of the candidate's reform prom- 
ises: 

Mister Crump won't 'low no easy riders here; 
Mister Crump won't 'low no easy riders here; 
I don't care what Mister Crump won't 'low, 
I'm gonna bar'l-house anyhow; 
Mister Crump can go an' catch himself some air! 



THE BLUES 31 

"Easy rider" meant, and still does, a lover or pimp who hangs on to 
his woman parasitically; "barrelhouse" is a rough saloon, literally a 
house where barrels of liquor are tipped on end; used as a verb, it 
indicates spending a rough evening or day or life, or as here the 
music that reflects all of that. The tune written for these words in a 
sixteen-bar form a cross between the blues and the popular song 
choruses but essentially the former became the * 4 Memphis Blues" 
in 1912. In 1914 Handy published his "St. Louis Blues" with its pro- 
vocative Tangana rhythm, which is a kind of habanera or tango beat 
consisting of a dotted quarter, an eighth-note, and two quarter-notes. 

All of these the adroit balance of feeling and detachment in words 
and music, the formulation of a distinctive melodic line based on its 
own tonal concept, pliability as instrumental and vocal music show 
why the blues has been the most enduring and persuasive of jazz 
forms. 

Contrary to the average conception of the form, the blues claims 
all creation as its subject, ranging impressively from Mississippi floods 
to New Orleans maisons to the WPA and war and peace and other 
problems. But the blues is not only a music for melancholia. There is 
great joy in the blues too, a joy that sometimes retains a strain of 
nostalgia or carries a thread of yearning for money, for romance, for 
the moon. The joy is still there, however, and so too is the great cry 
that identifies these songs as songs of the times. Floods and floozies, 
unrequited love and unemployment, the blues describes them all. 

The twelve-bar form we know as the blues came into its vigorous 
own in the early years of this century. Up and down the Aiississippi 
though its major sources were in New Orleans the blues was sung 
and played by the Negro musicians of 1910 and 1920 and 1930. To 
white America, in showboats, in New Orleans and Chicago and New 
York night clubs, the Negroes brought their tales of weal and woe. 

The blues was the base of the early great recordings of Louis Arm- 
strong, whose trumpeting genius formed, in turn, the base for most 
of the hot jazz that came afterward. His early records are magnificent 
examples of the blues and the vitality of its composers and lyricists 
and performers. Unlettered, morally but not musically undisciplined, 
the wild musicians of Louis's, Kid Ory's, and King Oliver's bands 
created great jazz, great music "Gully Low Blues," "Wild Man 
Blues," "Potato Head Blues" out of the happy chaos of the New 



32 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Orleans Negro quarter before and during and after World War I. 
These blues tell you much about the life and times of the fabulous 
men who made that music. 

The chronicle of the blues goes on through the great singers: the 
five Smiths Bessie, Clara, Trixie, Mamie, and Laura; Ida Cox, Chip- 
pie Hill, Ma Rainey. This impassioned history gives you rough, un- 
trained voices with a majesty and a power that have scarcely been 
equaled by the finest of Wagnerian singers. These women were some- 
times impoverished, rarely comfortable financially. They sang for 
gin and rent money, and their masterpieces appeared on the so- 
called "race" labels of the record companies. Their records were thus 
bought mainly by their own people, and few of these singers reached 
the tiny affluence which would have given them a fair life. Only 
Bessie Smith scored financial success, largely because Frank Walker, 
then Columbia Records' race record director, saved her money for 
her. 

At first you may dislike the harshness of Bessie's voice and of the 
voices of the other Smiths and Ma Rainey. You may be put off by 
the sometimes monotonous melodies. But, if you listen carefully, you 
will find a richness of vocal sound and of verbal meaning too. You 
will discover a touching stoicism in the face of disaster, touching 
because there are fear and sorrow in the laments of Bessie Smith or 
Ma Rainey, and passion as well but all laughed or shouted away. And 
in the laughter and the holler you may discern the wisdom of the 
Southern poor Negro or white which puts the facts of nature in their 
proper place, which refuses to be overwhelmed by physical or mental 
torture. One feels these things, the blues singer says, but one can do 
nothing about them. And so she communicates the torture, but al- 
ways with philosophical detachment. This is a vigorous and vital 
music; it calls a spade a spade, a flood a flood, and unemployment an 
unpicturesque evil. Along with spades, floods, and unemployment the 
sexual relations of man and woman are seen as both glorious and in- 
glorious. 

The rewards of fealty to the blues have come slowly. W. C. Handy, 
who wrote the enduring "Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues," was 
not well off until his near-blind old age, when the stream of royalties 
from those blues classics began to flow* in. Billie Holiday, perhaps the 
greatest of present-day blues singers, is a moderate night-club success, 
singing in the boxes and holes and caverns of New York, Philadelphia, 



THE BLUES 33 

Chicago, San Francisco, and Hollywood. Billie's trueness to the blues 
is a cornerstone of her greatness. While she sings a pop tune with 
artistry, shaping a shabby phrase so it gleams as it never did before, 
she does just as well in the blues, in the basic jazz songs, which she 
sings with unmistakable conviction. "Fine and Mellow" and "Billie's 
Blues" are among her best songs, along with the evergreens of jazz, 
such fine songs as "The Man I Love," "Body and Soul," "Them There 
Eyes," and "Porgy." 

The people who like the way Billie and other blues singers sing 
will follow them wherever they go, to after-hours joints in Harlem, 
to squalid little clubs in downtown New York, where the liquor tastes 
like varnish, where the prices, unlike the decor, are right out of the 
Waldorf and El Morocco. 

Few other singers combine the attractions of Billie Holiday, who 
is not only a singer with a sumptuous style, but also a remarkably 
beautiful woman. There are other brilliant blues singers. There is 
Big Joe Turner, a fabulous fellow from Kansas City, who matches 
the stature of the men he shouts about in the blues. There is Jimmy 
Rushing, Count Basic's singer. It was his barrelhouse figure that in- 
spired the song "Mr. Five by Five." Jimmy knows a thousand old 
and new blues, to which he has added countless variations of his own. 
One of the best of these is "Baby, Don't Tell on Me": 

Catch me stealin', Baby, don't you tell on me, 

If you catch me stealin', Baby, don't you tell on me, 

I'll be stealin' back to my old-time used-to-be. 

Thought I would write her, but I b'lieve I'll telephone, 
Thought I would write her, but I b'lieve I'll telephone, 
If I don't do no better, Baby, look for your daddy home. 

He ends the blues with the amusing line, "Anybody ask you who was 
it sang this song, tell 'em little Jimmy Rushing, he been here and 
gone." 

Jack Teagarden, a big burly Texan with an infectious Panhandle 
accent in his singing, has always been associated with the blues. One 
of the few white men to attain distinction in the form, he lapses into 
the twelve-bar chorus of the blues as a matter of course. He is identi- 
fied irrevocably with W. C. Handy's "Beale Street Blues" and the 
lovely "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," which was the theme song 



34 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

of his big band of short but often distinguished life. He improvises 
beautifully with his trombone or his delicate baritone voice, making 
up words to ungainly measures when that is necessary, culling his 
rolling blues phrases from the cowhand. Such effective syllabifications 
as "mam-o" for mamma ,"fi-o" for fire, and u Fath-o" for Paul White- 
man (known to his familiars as Pops or Father) are Teagardenisms. 
Coming late to an engagement one night, he jumped onto the band- 
stand, where his orchestra was already playing. Noting the severe ex- 
pression on the face of the manager of the place, he improvised this 
blues: 

Comin' through the Palisades I los' my way; 
Comin' through the Palisades I los* my way; 
Thought I was back on the road, workin' for MCA. 

Jack's plaint is at a large remove from the vital central themes of 
the blues, but it indicates clearly how much a part of jazz the form 
had become by the late thirties. It was the blues that the instrumen- 
talists played and the singers shouted and wheedled that sent jazz 
around the United States and across the world. It was the blues that 
Louie Armstrong played so persuasively and Bessie Smith sang so 
movingly that served jazz so well when it came to its Diaspora. There 
was, after all, something to disperse. 




fer 5 




NEW ORLEANS 



Much has been written, colorful and full of enthusiasm, flamboyant 
and full of condemnation, about Story ville, from 1897 to 1917 the 
district of New Orleans marked out by statute for licensed prostitu- 
tion. Like so much that has been written about jazz, a lot of this has 
been full of half-truths and whole truths out of context. It would be 
a gross distortion to say that Alderman Story's city within a city 
reflected nothing but high moral purpose on the part of the New 
Orleans legislators who founded it. It would be gross injustice to 
suggest that they were accepting the several filths of flourishing vice 
as a cheerful necessity. This district represents simply the first and the 
last attempt to license prostitution in an American city a Catholic 
city following a procedure made famous by many Catholic cities 
in Europe, most notably Paris, which didn't find it necessary to close 
its legally recognized brothels until after World War II. Whatever 
the merits of this solution to the problem of the oldest profession, for 
sixty years the attractions of Storyville and its antecedent quarters 
rivaled those of the cemeteries and the restaurants of New Orleans, 
and for almost half of that period music, side by side with loose 
ladies, soothed savage breasts. 

The ordinance of March 10, 1857, which licensed prostitution, 
merits some close examination. In the words of the New Orleans 
Common Council's Ordinance Number 3267, "an Ordinance con- 
cerning Lewd and Abandoned Women," the specter of illicit though 
legalized sex comes immediately alive, for all the flat phrases and 
legal dryness. In the first of sixteen sections, the districts in which "it 
shall not be lawful for any woman or girl, notoriously abandoned to 
lewdness, to occupy, inhabit, live or sleep in any one-story house or 
building, or the lower floor of any house or building," were named. 
In the second section, it was declared "that it shall be the duty of all 

35 



36 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

police officers, policemen and watchmen to arrest any girl found in 
contravention of the foregoing section," and the punishment, "not 
less than thirty days' imprisonment," was set forth. The third and 
fourth sections defined the taxing and licensing system, which gave 
legalized prostitution budgetary importance; they deserve quotation 
in their entirety: 

No. 1086. (3). That it shall not be lawful for any woman or girl, notori- 
ously abandoned to lewdness, to occupy, inhabit, or live in any house, 
building or room situated within the limits described in the first section of 
this ordinance, and not in violation of, or prohibited by the said section, 
without first paying in to the city treasurer the tax imposed by this ordi- 
nance, and procuring from the mayor of this city a license to inhabit or 
live in or occupy a house, building or room within said limits as aforesaid 
nor shall it be lawful for any person to open or keep any house, building, 
dwelling or room within the limits of this city for the purpose of boarding 
or lodging lewd and abandoned women, or of renting rooms to such 
women, without first paying the tax hereinafter levied, and procuring 
from the mayor a license so to open and keep a house, etc., as aforesaid, 
Every person failing to comply with the provisions of this section, shall 
pay a fine of one hundred dollars for each and every contravention, and 
in default of payment shall be imprisoned not less than thirty days. One 
half of the fine shall be for the benefit of the informer. Provided, that 
nothing herein contained shall be so construed as to authorize the issuing 
of licenses to occupy or inhabit any one-story house or building or the 
lower floor of any house or building situated within the limits described 
in the first section of this ordinance. 

No. 1087. (4). That an annual license tax of one hundred dollars be and 
the same is hereby levied upon each and every woman or girl notoriously 
abandoned to Icwdness, occupying, inhabiting, or living in any house, 
building or room within the limits prescribed in the first section of this 
ordinance, but not in contravention thereof and an annual tax of two 
hundred and fifty dollars upon each and every person keeping any house, 
room, or dwelling for the purpose of renting to or boarding lewd and 
abandoned women, which said tax shall be payable in advance of the first 
day of February of each and every year. 

The fifth section authorized the mayor to grant licenses, and the 
sixth prescribed fines for breaches of the peace by "any woman or 
girl notoriously abandoned to lewdness, who shall occasion scandal 
or disturb the tranquility of the neighborhood." In the seventh it 
was declared "that it shall not be lawful for any lewd woman to fre- 



NEW ORLEANS 37 

quent any cabaret, or coffee-house, or to drink therein, under the 
penalty of not less than five dollars for each and every contravention, 
or of being dealt with as provided by the act concerning vagrants, at 
the discretion of the recorder before whom she may be brought." 
The eighth section served to alleviate the fears of those who suspected 
that sisters under the skin would be little concerned by differences 
of the skin: 

That it shall not be lawful for white women and free women of colour, 
notoriously abandoned to lewdness, to occupy, inhabit, or live in the 
same room, house or building; nor for any free person of colour to open 
or keep any house, building or room, for the purpose of boarding or lodg- 
ing any white woman or girl notoriously abandoned to lewdness, under 
the penalty of not less than twenty-five dollars for each and every con- 
travention; in default of payment, the person so contravening shall be im- 
prisoned not less than thirty days. One half of the fine shall be for the 
benefit of the informer. 

Those who rented or hired houses, buildings, or rooms off-limits 
to prostitutes were ordered to be fined, if a petition signed by three 
"respectable citizens residing within the vicinity of any house, or 
building" should state "under oath" that the house, building, or room 
"is a nuisance," and that "the occupants thereof are in the habit of 
disturbing the peace of the neighborhood, or in the habit of commit- 
ting indecencies by the public exposure of their persons, etc.," and 
"it shall be the duty of the mayor" to order the ejection of such 
offenders from the premises. 

It was then provided that all such houses, buildings, dwellings, or 
rooms "shall at all times be subject to the visitation of the police of 
this city. ... It shall not be lawful for any woman or girl notori- 
ously abandoned to lewdness, to stand upon the sidewalk in front of 
the premises occupied by her, or at the alleyway, door or gate of such 
premises, nor sit upon the steps thereof in an indecent posture, nor 
accost, call, nor stop any person passing by, nor to walk up and down 
the sidewalk or banquette, nor stroll about the streets of the city in- 
decently attired, under the penalty of not less than ten dollars for 
each and every contravention." 

The last four sections of this extraordinary ordinance deal with 
obstructors of this law, the enforcement of it by the police, the date 
when it was to go into effect (February 2, 1858); and, finally, all 
laws contrary to this one were repealed. 



38 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

It was only in 1897, in a new ordinance sponsored by Alderman 
Story, that a specific district was set up to limit prostitution geo- 
graphically. The earlier ordinance had restricted only operations, and 
had actually given the brothels and unaffiliated whores an unmistak- 
ably large swathe through the city in which to work. It was, then, 
from 1897 to 1917 (when the Secretary of the Navy shut down all 
red-light districts) that tourism descended upon prostitution in New 
Orleans and jazz came alive. 

The district, a sizable chunk of New Orleans, was at first open to 
Negroes and mulattos, at least in certain sections, and they brought 
their trade and their music with them. In the last eight months of 
organized Storyville a restricted Negro district about half the size 
of Storyville proper was established. But for most of the two im- 
portant decades Negro and white women, Negro and white musi- 
cians, worked side by side. Here in what their owners and residents 
invariably called palaces, chateaux, and maisons, in what are accu- 
rately named honky-tonks, in saloons, and in all the other entertain- 
ment places except perhaps the "cribs," the tiny dwellings of the 
cheapest prostitutes jazz was played. The well-placed white man in 
New Orleans looked down upon Storyville, publicly regarded it as 
a civic disgrace, whatever his private behavior; but at Carnival time, 
and especially on the day of Mardi Gras, this Orleanian lost none of 
his propriety and gained much in warmth by joining with the district 
in a celebration long since world-famous. The white Carnival had its 
King Rex, and the Negroes their King Zulu and their music, easily 
the most distinguished contribution to the jubilant festivities. 

Visitors to the city, coming into the Southern Railroad Station on 
Canal Street, saw as much of Storyville as those who arrive in New 
York by way of One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street see of up- 
town Manhattan. The view, just before arriving at the station, was 
of honky-tonks and cribs and palaces. Not far from the station one 
could visit the main saloon, the Arlington Annex, of the unofficial 
mayor of Storyville, Tom Anderson, who made this barroom, adjoin- 
ing his Arlington Palace, his city hall. Anderson was the boss of the 
district, a member of the state legislature, the owner of a chain of 
saloons, and the head of an oil company. He was also the main in- 
stigator of that group of worthy Storyville citizens who pooled their 
resources and produced the official dkectory and guidebook of 



NEW ORLEANS 39 

Storyvillc, The Blue Book, which could be bought for twenty-five 
cents at the Arlington Annex after 1895. 

The Blue Book was not the first of the guides to the bordellos, their 
madams and working personnel. In the i88os and 18905 there was a 
weekly paper, the Mascot, which in its "society" column provided a 
sort of unofficial directory to what it called the "dames de joie." This 
was surely one of the strangest columns ever to appear in a newspaper* 
Some examples of its news items are: 

Miss Josephine Icebox has been presented with a pair of garters and a 
belt made out of the skin of the cobra di cappello that escaped from the 
Wombwell menagerie, and was killed by a street car. The present was 
made to Miss Josephine by her lover in gratitude for having been saved 
from seeing snakes. 

It is confidentially asserted that an heir is expected by her most gracious 
majesty, Queen Gertie. It is conjectured that the prince will have red 
hair. . . . 

Mrs. Madeline Theurer has gone out of business on Barracks and Rampart 
streets. Mrs. Theurer enjoyed the good wishes of the ladies in the social 
swim. Although the lady has deemed it advisable to close her Barrack 
street chateau, still she will not abandon the profession entirely, but in- 
tends, in the near future, opening up in new quarters. It is safe to say that 
Mrs. Theurer can brag of more innocent young girls having been ruined 
in her house than there were in any other six houses in the city. . . . 



In 1895 th 6 Mascot reported in this column that "the society ladies 
of the city can now boast that they have a directory." It went on to 
explain: 

In no other city in the Union can the dames de joie make a similar boast. 
Within the past week a little book, styled "The Green Book, or Gentle- 
men's Guide to New Orleans," has been freely distributed. In it are all 
the principal mansions de joie in the city (white and colored). The names 
of the madames of the house are given, as also are those of all the angels, 
nymphs and fairies. The color and nationality of the darlings are stated. 
Twenty thousand copies of the guide will be distributed during Mardi 
Gras. The price is twenty-five cents. The publisher's name does not appear. 

It's colorful. It's amusing. It is also a picture of depravity, in which 
humans are reduced to inanimate things for sheer pleasure. Some 
jazzmen succumbed to the several lures of their surroundings; most 



40 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

didn't. Some became pimps, increasing their income from music by 
their industrious procuring; most were content to be paid for play- 
ing the music they loved. It cannot fairly be concluded that jazz must 
live in such an atmosphere. At times jazz has thrived on vice and 
vice has lived luxuriously upon it. Music has always accompanied 
debauches; it has not necessarily reflected or condoned them. 

Jazz musicians on the whole would probably prefer to live in a 
healthier environment than Storyville provided. Their wholesale de- 
parture from New Orleans after World War I was perhaps an attempt 
to find such an environment, as well as a search for new employment. 
The former was much less successful than the latter, but the struggle 
of sensitive jazzmen to achieve dignity has never ceased, and it has 
succeeded more often than the legends and the newspaper chronicles 
have ever suggested. 

In 1895 or 1896 the first Blue Book appeared, and, shortly after, 
The Lid, Hell-o, and The Sporting Guide "of the Tenderloin-District, 
of New Orleans, La., where the four hundred can be found. " The Lid 
explained itself: "No doubt you have read all about the 'lid' so it 
will be useless for one to further describe it. This little booklet is 
gotten up expressly for those who belong to that order of 'lid de- 
stroyers' who believe in making life as strenuous as one possibly can 
without injury to himself or pocket." Hell-o, through Tom Anderson, 
writing under an apposite pseudonym, stated: 

To keep my friends from saying mean things while trying to get a con- 
nection with their girls that is to say a telephone one, I have compiled 
this little book entitled u Hell-O" please don't misconstrue the name and 
read it backwards. 

Thanking you for your patience, I remain, 
Yours, 

"LITTLE SALTY" 

The Sporting Guide explained: "This volume is published for the 
benefit of the upper Tour Hundred' who desire to visit the Tenderloin 
District with safety and obtain the desired pleasure accruing from 
beauty and pleasure, which can be accomplished by following this 
guide." 

But the most famous of the guides was The Blue Book, which was 
published regularly until 1915. In The Blue Book appeared advertise- 
ments for Tom Anderson's Annex, Cafe and Restaurant ("never 



NEW ORLEANS 41 

closed, noted the states over for being the best conducted cafe in 
America, private dining rooms for the fair sex, all the latest musical 
selections nightly, rendered by a typical Southern darkie orchestra"), 
cigars, glassware and crockery, an attorney, a drugstore, a taxi com- 
pany ("If you want to learn all the live places, while making the 
rounds, call up . . ."), beers and sparkling waters, Turkish baths, 
candies, an electric piano, the "king of piano tuners/' all kinds of 
whisky, gin, wines, and a laundry. 

The opening pages of several editions of The Blue Book set the 
tone of what it called the "Queer Zone": 

PREFACE 
"Honi Soit Qui Mai y Feme" 

This Directory and Guide of the Sporting District has been before the 
people on many occasions, and has proven its authority as to what is doing 
in the "Queer Zone." 

Anyone who knows to-day from yesterday will say that the Blue Book 
is the right book for the right people. 

WHY NEW ORLEANS SHOULD 
HAVE THIS DIRECTORY 

Because it is the only district of its kind in the States set aside for the fast 
women by law. 

Because it puts the stranger on a proper and safe path as to where he may 
go and be free from "Hold-ups," and other games usually practiced upon 
the stranger. 

It regulates the women so that they may live in one district to themselves 
instead of being scattered over the city and filling our thoroughfares with 
street walkers. 

It also gives the names of women entertainers employed in the Dance 
Halls and Cabarets in the District. 

There is a certain wry humor about the quotation from the escutcheon 
of the British Royal Family, "Evil be to him who evil thinks." But 
the third page, opposite the advertisement for Tom Anderson's 
Annex, gets right down to "Facts"! 

THIS BOOK MUST NOT BE MAILED 

To know the right from the wrong, to be sure of yourself, go through 
this little book and read it carefully, and then when you visit Storyville 



42 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

you will know the best places to spend your money and time, as all the 
BEST houses are advertised. Read all the "ads." 

This book contains nothing but Facts, and is of the greatest value to 
strangers when in this part of the city. The names of the residents will 
be found in this Directory, alphabetically arranged, under the headings 
"White" and "Colored," from alpha to omega. The names in capitals are 
landladies only. 

You will find the boundary of the Tenderloin District, or Storyville: 
North side Iberville Street to south side St. Louis, and east side North 
Basin to west side North Robertson Street. 

This is the boundary in which the women are compelled to live, accord- 
ing to law. 

Thereafter the promises of the third page are fulfilled. First there 
is an alphabetical list of white prostitutes; then two pages of "Forty- 
five Late Arrivals"; then a page devoted to octoroons (only nine of 
these), with the two great landladies of the jazz era, Countess Willie 
Piazza and Miss Lulu White, in capitals; then an alphabetical list 
of two hundred and thirty-four colored prostitutes; finally a list of 
nine cabarets, with their dames de joie. 

The dead seriousness of the neatly molded simple declarative sen- 
tences of The Blue Book makes quotation an almost irresistible temp- 
tation. Several examples, however, suffice to give the flavor of the 
advertisements for Storyville's landladies, the madams whose mater- 
nal interest in jazz surrounded its early musicians with a comfortable 
and sympathetic atmosphere and audience. Miss Lulu White's in- 
dependently issued four-page "souvenir" booklet, published for her 
"multitudes of friends," and Countess Willie Piazza's ad in the sixth 
edition of The Blue Book are especially important for jazz. Lulu 
White, who ran the Mahogany Hall, a four-story house with tower 
and weathervane, found immortality in Louis Armstrong's "Mahog- 
any Hall Stomp." She offered details of the hall's construction: 

THE NEW Mahogany Hall, 

A picture of which appears on the cover of this souvenir was erected 
specially for Miss Lulu White at a cost of $40,000. The house is built of 
marble and is four story; containing five parlors, all handsomely fur- 
nished, and fifteen bedrooms. Each room has a bath with hot and cold 
water and extension closets. 

The elevator, which was built for two, is of the latest style. The entire 



NEW ORLEANS 43 

house is steam heated and is the handsomest house of its kind. It is the 
only one where you can get three shots for your money 

The shot upstairs, 

The shot downstairs, 

And the shot in the room. 

She also included her autobiography: 

This famous West Indian octoroon first saw the light of day thirty-one 
years ago. Arriving in this country at a rather tender age, and having been 
fortunately gifted with a good education it did not take long for her to 
find out what the other sex were in search of. 

In describing Miss Lulu, as she is most familiarly called, it would not be 
amiss to say that besides possessing an elegant form she has beautiful 
black hair and blue eyes, which have justly gained for her the title of the 
"Queen of the Demi-Monde." 

Her establishment, which is situated in the central part of the city, is 
unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New 
Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant places in this or 
any other country. 

She has made a feature of boarding none but the fairest of girls those 
gifted with nature's best charms, and would, under no circumstances, have 
any but that class in her house. 

As an entertainer Miss Lulu stands foremost, having made a life-long study 
of music and literature. She is well read and one that can interest anybody 
and make a visit to her place a continued round of pleasure. 

She said that, "in presenting this souvenir" to her "friends," it was 
her "earnest desire" to "avoid any and all egotism," and added, 
"While deeming it unnecessary to give the history of my boarders 
from their birth, which would no doubt, prove reading of the highest 
grade, I trust that what I have mentioned will not be misconstrued, 
and will be read in the same light as it was written." Finally she men- 
tioned the fact that all her boarders "are born and bred Louisiana 
girls," and signed her words: "Yours very socially, LULU WHITE." 
Countess Willie offered entertainment. 

COUNTESS WILLIE PIAZZA 

Is one place in the Tenderloin District you can't very well afford to miss. 
The Countess Piazza has made it a study to try and make everyone jovial 
who visits her house. If you have the "blues," the Countess and her girls 
can cure them. She has, without doubt, the most handsome and intelligent 



44 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

octoroons in the United States. You should see them; they are all enter- 
tainers. 

If there is anything new in the singing and dancing line that you would 
like to see while in Storyville, Piazza's is the place to visit, especially when 
one is out hopping with friends the women in particular. 

The Countess wishes it to be known that while her mansion is peerless in 
every respect, she only serves the "amber fluid." 

"Just ask for Willie Piazza." 

PHONE 4832 MAIN 

317 N. Basin 

The Countess apparently was the first to hire a pianist, and there is 
a story, perhaps apocryphal, that his name, self-adopted or conferred 
by the customers ("club boys"), was John the Baptist. Another of 
the Countess's pianists was Tony Jackson, a showmanly musician 
who brought vaudeville into the brothel, and after 1908 became an 
established name in New York. He will be forever associated with his 
song, "I've Got Elgin Movements in My Hips with Twenty Years' 
Guarantee." Lulu White could also boast some fine pianists, notably 
Richard M. Jones, who died during the 1940$ in Chicago, and 
Clarence Williams, who when he came to New York probably 
brought more of New Orleans with him than any other man, in his 
song-w r riting, record-making, and public performances. The most 
famous of the Anderson Annex pianists was Ferdinand Joseph (Jelly 
Roll) Morton, the Gulf port, Mississippi, musician, who will be re- 
membered as long for his spoken jazz narratives as for his piano- 
playing and composing. 

Lulu White's Mahogany Hall and adjoining saloon, at the corner 
of Bienville and Basin Streets, makes a good starting point for a tour 
of the area where jazz flourished from the late i88os to 1917. Right 
before us, as we face south, is the Southern Railroad, a stretch of 
tracks leading along Basin Street to the terminal on Canal. A block 
east, on Iberville, is Tom Anderson's Annex, and back of it, on Frank- 
lin Street, the 101 Ranch, which had changed by 1910 from a kind 
of waterfront saloon, though some distance from the river, into one 
of the most impressive of the jazz hangouts, where King Oliver and 
Sidney Bechet and Pops Foster and Emanuel Perez played some of 
their strong early notes. Billy Phillips, owner of the 101, opened the 
Tuxedo Dance Hall diagonally across from the Ranch. The Tuxedo 



NEW ORLEANS 45 

was the scene of many police raids and ultimately of Phillips's kill- 
ing. Freddie Keppard played his driving cornet at the Tuxedo, and 
later Johnny Dodds was the featured clarinetist and Oscar Celestin 
led the band named after the hall, the Tuxedo Band, which in a later 
edition was still playing on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in 1951. 
Two blocks away from Lulu White's, at Liberty and Bienville, was 
the Poodle Dog Cafe a name used in city after city; it was popular 
from 1910 through the early twenties as far north as Washington, 
D.C., where a cafe of the same name was the scene of Duke Elling- 
ton's first piano-playing job. North one block and east another, on 
Iberville, was Pete Lala's Cafe, much patronized for the music as well 
as the barrels of liquor, and where, at one time or another, Kid Ory 
and King Oliver and Louis Armstrong led bands. Lala also owned 
"The 25" club, a block down from the Tuxedo, another of the some- 
time jazz places. 

Down the railroad tracks, as one goes away from the center of 
town on Basin Street, are cemeteries. Up Iberville and Bienville and 
Conti, going north, are cemeteries. If you follow the tracks, past the 
cemeteries, past St. Louis Street and Lafitte Avenue, you reach what 
is now called Beauregard Square, where now squats the Municipal 
Auditorium, graced with flowers and grass shrubbery. Now, in season, 
there are band concerts and rallies and public events of all sorts here. 
In 1803, Fort St. Ferdinand, built by the Spaniards on this spot, was 
destroyed in an attempt to wipe out yellow fever, thought to be 
caused by the stagnant water of the moats and the abundant filth of 
the city's ramparts. The park which replaced the fort was at first 
used as a circus ground, then enclosed with an iron fence and made 
into a Sunday-afternoon promenade ground and pleasance for Or- 
leanians. For the city's Negro slaves, granted a half-holiday every 
Sunday, the new park was a wonderful gathering-place. Named 
Congo Square, the great open area was used by the Negroes for 
games, for singing to the accompaniment of tom-toms, for Voodoo 
ritual and ceremony. Here such of Africa as remained passed into 
Negro Creole life in America. Here were uttered the strange chants, 
the curious sounds, the ancient cries of the tribes, transformed, 
subtly but unmistakably, by French and Spanish culture: "Pov piti 
Lolotte a mourn" softly, not clearly; "Pov piti Lolotte a mown" 
more firmly now, and clearer to the ear, repeated like the first line 
of the blues; then, twice, "Li gagnin bobo, bobo" the second time 



46 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

with a variation, "Li gagnin doule"; then, again, the first line, sung 
twice; and finally, "Li gagnin bobo, Li gagnin doule" The hypnotic 
effect must have been irresistible. The affinity with the remaining 
traces of Voodoo in Haiti, and in the rites of the Candomble in 
Brazil is unmistakable music, incantatory words, and dancing. The 
dancing, before the half-holiday celebrations ceased during the Civil 
War, attracted its share of tourists to sway and be moved in spite 
of themselves by the hypnotic beat. 

The bamboulas, huge tom-toms made of cowhide and casks, were 
the bass drums, pummeled with long beefbones. Bamboo tubes pro- 
duced a skeletal melody. Staccato accents were made by the snapping 
together of bones the castanets. An ass's jawbone was rattled; 
the instrument is still used in Latin-American music and is known 
as the guajira, a word that means "rude" or "boorish," "rustic" or 
"rural" in present-day Cuban Spanish. Many Negro instruments, 
rhythms, and dances came to be used in Central and South America, 
leading eventually to the rhumba and the conga, the samba and the 
mambo, in Cuba, Argentina, and Brazil, where, as in New Orleans, 
music developed in numbers of Congo Squares, half-holiday games 
and chants and dances. The effect of Congo Square was twice felt 
in jazz; once directly, as it filtered through the tonks and the bar- 
relhouses, the Story ville parlors and ballrooms; again indirectly, 
when bebop musicians went to Cuba to reclaim their earlier heritage. 

By the end of the i88os New Orleans Negro musicians were no 
longer playing jawbones, hide-covered casks, or bamboo tubes. As 
they grew more interested in the meaning and mechanics of music, 
they became more interested in the white man's instruments, which 
offered broader, fuller expression. These men, like many members of 
the American Federation of Musicians today, were part-time instru- 
mentalists, who by day cut hair or served food or lifted bales or 
ran errands, but by night or on Saturdays or Sundays, for special or 
ordinary celebrations, played the instruments of the white man. The 
instrumentation of jazz at the end of the nineteenth century was 
in a sense conventional, although it was not the dance-music instru- 
mentation familiar to most Orleanians. For the string trio (heard 
even in brothels) and the larger polite organization of bows and gut, 
Negro musicians substituted brass-band horns, cornet and clarinet and 
trombone, with an occasional roughening contributed by a tuba. 
Rhythm came, naturally enough, from drums and the string bass 



NEW ORLEANS 47 

(more often than the tuba), and sometimes from the piano. These 
were the logical instruments, for the first large contribution to the 
new music was made by marching bands. 

They marched (without the bass and piano) to wakes and from 
them in Negro New Orleans. They marched for weddings and for 
political rallies, when they were summoned away from their ghetto 
precincts. They marched again and again, just to march, for the 
pleasure of the members of the fraternal organizations and the secret 
orders with which their culture abounded. There were always plenty 
of other parades too for the Fourth of July and Labor Day and 
Jackson Day and Carnival, for funerals and during election cam- 
paigns. And when the bands got going and the beat became irresisti- 
ble, the followers, chiefly youngsters, fell in, dancing behind the 
musicians and keeping up the friendly, informal infernality. The 
bands played all the standard hymns, such as "Rock of Ages" and 
"Nearer, My God, to Thee" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and 
they made of some of them immortal jazz compositions, lifted for- 
ever from the parade or the funeral to the night club and the record- 
ing studio and the concert hall. And such a transfiguration as they 
turned out of "When the Saints Go Marching In" deserved the larger 
audience it finally found for its humors, at once delicate and assault- 
ing, satirical and deeply religious. There were the "Saints" and the 
"Rock" and the "Soldiers" to move the deceased nearer to his God 
as he was brought to his resting place in the special section of the 
cemetery reserved for Negroes. Once he was interred, the music 
changed. "Didn't He Ramble?" the bandsmen asked rhetorically and 
followed the tale of a rambling townsman with their freely im- 
provised, booming, blasting choruses, one after another, leading from 
the "Ramble" to Alphonse Picou's polka-like "High Society" and 
Jelly Roll Morton's tribute to a fellow Mississippian pianist, King 
Porter, after whom "King Porter Stomp" was named. Maybe they'd 
finish off with a rag, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf" perhaps, or the 
most famous of all, "Tiger Rag," fashioned from an old French qua- 
drille. Whatever they played, the bands blew a mighty sound along 
the streets and through the alleys and into the squares of New Orleans. 
And when they were finished with parades they played for dances, 
little and big, and they brought with them into the makeshift and the 
more solidly constructed ballrooms and into the parks all the atmos- 
phere of the marching band. Thek dances looked and 



48 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

like the big ballroom blowouts of the twenties and thirties in Harlem 
at the Savoy or the Renaissance, or in Chicago or St. Louis or any 
other town where Negroes gathered to listen and to dance to their 
music. 

Jazz was absorbed into Negro New Orleans and passed on to 
interested whites. It was taken up with that mixture of casual ac- 
ceptance and rabid enthusiasm that is always found when an art form 
becomes an integrated part of a culture. Whole bands were hired to 
advertise excursions on the river, picnics by the lake, prize fights, 
and dances; whole bands were lifted onto furniture wagons, bass, 
guitar, cornet, clarinet, and drums, with the trombonist's slide hang- 
ing behind as he sat on the back edge, feet hanging down, slide hang- 
ing down, forming the "tailgate" of the wagon. Music was every- 
where in the last years of Story ville and the first years of jazz. 



Chapter 6 



FIGURES OF LEGEND 
AND LIFE 



They marched right up the streets, all the streets, and marched right 
down again. In the course of their spectacular strolls, New Orleans 
marching bands built a large and imposing repertory of music, much 
of which is still with us. For the music there had to be musicians; 
there w r ere many, all kinds, all qualities, some of them personalities. 
Inevitably, it's the personalities who stick out, whose reputations re- 
main, whose performances thread their way through the memories 
of men old enough to have heard them. But even in the memory 
borderland of fact and fancy, some musicians stand out for good 
reasons and must be accepted as the first vital figures of jazz. Others 
remained vigorous long enough between the two world wars to be 
heard and judged by a later generation. From these two sources 
other men's memories and our own listening emerges a large impres- 
sion of the first jazzmen, one that has both logic and continuity. 

Claiborne Williams w^as a cornctist and an entrepreneur. He was 
available for all occasions. Under his leadership were musicians who 
could play cotillion music for those Negroes who wanted to imitate 
white dances. But under his leadership too, cornetists, trombonists, 
clarinetists, drummers, and bass players marched and played the 
music of marching jazz. Constituting itself the St. Joseph Brass Band, 
this second and more important of the Claiborne Williams organiza- 
tions offered one skillful jazz cornetist, William Daley, an impressive 
all-around drive, and the fine reliable sound of its leader's cornet. 

The Williams bands flourished in the i88os; so did those of John 
Robechaux. Robechaux was a drummer and, like Williams, a leader 
of several outfits. He booked his sweet band as he found demand. 
In the Excelsior Band, of which he was simply a part, there were 
two renowned clarinetists, the brothers Louis and Lorenzo Tio, who 
taught the music they played. At the turn of the century the Excelsior 

49 



50 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

featured two of the outstanding musicians of this era, clarinetist 
Alphonse Picou and cornetist Emanuel Perez. 

The St. Joseph and Excelsior bands, two of the best of the 1 880 
crews, were close enough in time to the twentieth century to leave 
an identifiable mark. It must not be supposed, however, that these 
were the first or the only bands to march the New Orleans streets 
before 1900. These men followed others, whom they surely would 
have acknowledged if they had lived long enough to document 
their era. It is unfortunate that George Cable and Lafcadio Hearn, 
whose writing captured so much of New Orleans Creole life in the 
18705 and 1 88os, were not more interested in music, but the suggestion 
of its existence is always implicit and sometimes explicit in their 
books and articles. 

In the years after Cable's and Hearn's era, from about 1895 to 
1907, Buddy Bolden's Ragtime Band set the style. To begin with, he 
had Woody Warner on clarinet, Willie Cornish on valve trombone, 
Jimmie Johnson on bass, Brock Mumford on guitar, Louis Ray on 
drums, and himself on cornet. For the proper occasions he even 
sported a violinist, Tom Adams. They all were loud musicians, and 
they were vigorous, but they could play a pretty tune. Most im- 
portant of all, they sported a brilliant cornet, the heroic voice of 
jazz, and to play it they had a leader fully armored in the personality 
that fitted the instrument. 

Buddy Bolden's band fixed New Orleans instrumentation, the 
combination of one or two cornets, clarinet, trombone, bass, guitar, 
and drums, which was to set the sound patterns for jazz for years 
to come. Bolden, known as "the Kid" and "the King," was the early 
version of that indefatigable character so well known to later musi- 
cians who have grown up on their instruments through Saturday 
night functions and occasional midweek balls: he was an organizer, a 
man who always knew where a "gig," a one-night job, could be 
found. He played for picnics and for dances, for carnival crowds, 
for the strollers in the parks. When work was scarce for his own 
little band, he would move his three horns and three rhythm instru- 
ments into a bigger band with less permanent personnel and play 
with them for a night or a week, as the job demanded. The story 
persists that his lungs were so powerful that when he sat himself 
by an open window and barreled notes through his cornet his music 
could be heard for miles along the river. He was variously gifted: 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 51 

cornetist, barber, editor and publisher of The Cricket, a gossip- 
mongering paper. His personality left an unmistakable imprint on 
the music that followed his; wherever he played in New Orleans, at the 
Tintype or Economy or Love and Charity, Big Easy or Come Clean 
dance halls, at picnic or parade, he drove his band through its paces 
and into the heads of musicians listening to him. In 1907 or 1908 he 
drove himself insane, as the word-of-mouth history has it, running 
wild at a parade. He was committed to an asylum and died there in 
1931 or 1932 at the age of about seventy. 

Buddy Bolden's band set the instruments and perhaps the harmonic 
and melodic order as well. To the cornet was assigned the lead part, 
the line identified as the melody; the trombone, particularly after 
the slide instrument replaced the valve horn about 1900, was a 
languorous counter-voice, punctuating the melody with character- 
istic smears and oozes; the clarinet, in vigorous contrast to the sus- 
tained trombone slides, maintained a hopping, skipping position, em- 
broidering decorative runs about the other lines. The rhythm instru- 
ments drums, bass, and guitar made up the engine that powered 
the jazz machine: their function was to keep the syncopated beat 
going in regular almost inflexible alternations of weak and strong ac- 
cents. 

All of this added up to what has been described as polyphony, 
something of a misnomer for the crude counterpoint of New Or- 
leans jazz, since polyphony requires the simultaneous combination 
of several voices, each of a clear individuality, and the music which 
Bolden, his contemporaries, and his successors played was generally 
a sturdy mixture of the simplest variations on the key melodies, each 
man only tentatively for himself, and the end product dependent upon 
the chords to such an extent that the texture was more dominantly 
harmonic than melodic. What they did do, and apparently with 
great contagious gusto, was to administer just that touch of brash- 
ness, just that breath of spontaneity, just that drive, which together 
were to convert minstrelsy and worksongs, Congo Square blasts and 
cotillion refinements, into jazz. Early jazz had something less than 
polyphony or counterpoint, as we understand those terms in their 
original context something less and something different but on 
at least one level it had something more too. 

Polyphonic music is a music of melodic lines played against each 
other; it moves from simple canonic forms, best illustrated by rounds 



52 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

such as "Three Blind Mice" or "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" 
to the enormously complicated and sophisticated maneuvers of eight- 
part double fugues. In every case this music is conceived horizontally. 
While its great baroque exponents, such as Bach or Buxtehude, 
worked well within a harmonic frame, their linear thinking deter- 
mined the shape and substance of their music. None of this can be 
said for the so-called New Orleans polyphonists. However much 
their present-day admirers may wish to confer contrapuntal glory 
upon their favorites, the music of New Orleans at its pre-ipiy best 
appears to have been conceived harmonically, executed harmonically, 
and to have proceeded from the same concern for chords which, in 
a far more informed and organized fashion, has dominated the music 
of swing and bop. 

What appears to be a kind of rough polyphony in early jazz is 
an improvised voicing of cornet, clarinet, and trombone not very 
different from the scoring of two altos, two tenors, and a baritone 
in the present-day dance band, although the sonorities may be coarser 
in New Orleans jazz, the over-all texture thinner and tougher, the 
harmonic freedom considerably less. The linear concept in the jazz 
of Storyville and environs was contained in the polyrhythms, the rich, 
ingenious pitting of one time against another in the two hands of the 
piano or in two or more instruments. But New Orleans jazzmen did, 
and their imitators and leftovers continue to, pull most of their 
melodies out of the blues chords and a small stockpile of related 
standard tunes. Whether they are playing a solo with organ harmony 
in the background, or pushing a ride-out chorus to its obstreperous 
end, their harmonic thinking is vertical, and their notes follow a 
chord pattern. When, upon occasion, they may seem to those of their 
critical supporters who^are also enthusiasts for atonal music to have 
scooped pitch and moved away from the confines of key and modula- 
tion, it is probably nothing but the clumsiness of a performer with 
an insufficient knowledge of his instrument. 

Freddie Keppard is a musician to place beside Buddy Bolden. Here 
we have a figure more of life than of legend, although the perform- 
ances that gained him his early reputation were all before jazz was 
recorded. When he got to Chicago he did record, in 1923, 1926, and 
1927. In the 1926 records, with Jimmy Blythe's Ragamuffins and his 
own Jazz Cardinals in the first case backing Trixie Smith and in 
the second with Papa Charlie Jackson as vocalist one can gather 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 53 

what he sounded like and perhaps some of the quality of Buddy 
Bolden's playing too. Through something less than high fidelity re- 
cording come the thrust and the exuberance, the rough tone, the 
rhythmic lift that pushed jazz into exultant being. Keppard dropped 
the violin for the cornet because he never learned to read music, 
but he had that grasp of the cornet that makes so much of the early 
music impressive. It would be silly to say, as some have of jazz musi- 
cians of this kind, that because he was unlettered he was a better 
musician, but there is no denying that some of the dramatic colors of 
jazz entered the music because of the lack of formal discipline in 
men like Freddie Keppard. 

Freddie Keppard was the cornet mainstay of the great Olympia 
Band. Through most of its years, from its founding in 1900 to 1911, 
Keppard's cornet kicked the Olympia Band into powerful life. Beside 
him sat Alphonse Picou, embroidering clarinet lines around the cornet 
and trombone, Picou who made the clarinet part of "High Society" 
such a classic that thereafter it was played unchanged even by the 
most free-swinging improvising clarinetists. Picou is a fine example 
of the continuity of New Orleans jazz. His teacher was Lorenzo Tio, 
and, like Tio, he sometimes played clarinet in performances of 
French opera. His successor in the Olympia's clarinet chair was 
Louis de Lisle Nelson, known as Big Eye. Some of the tunes that 
Picou wrote, such as "Alligator Hop' 7 and, the most famous of them 
all, "Muskrat Ramble," were later played by Nelson, and together 
they set the style that was to be expanded and embellished and car- 
ried across the country by Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Jimmy 
Noone. 

The valve trombone in the band was played by Joseph Petit, who 
was also the manager of the Olympia, a sizable saloon on Elks Place 
across Canal Street from the railroad terminal. He was later replaced 
by Zue Robertson, a relative of Buddy Bolden's and enough of a 
musical personality to influence many of his successors on his in- 
strument, the slide trombone. The two most notable drummers of 
the Olympia, John Vean, known as Ratty, and Louis Cottrell, known 
as Old Man, introduced, one the first four-beat bass drum part, the 
other a more technical understanding of drums and drumming. 

The journeys of Freddie Keppard take us to two of the other 
very important bands that thrived before the closing of Storyville. 
In 1911 the bass player Bill Johnson organized the Original Creole 



54 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Band, with Keppard and other Olympia musicians for its beginning. 
By 1913 the Original Creole Band had extended its vaudeville tours 
to cross-country proportions; for five years the band toured, reach- 
ing a substantial majority of the forty-eight states, going as far west 
as California, as far north and east as Maine. The band was notable 
for its cornet player, the redoubtable Keppard, and for a succession 
of clarinetists, starting with George Baquet, the only man in the 
band in his time who could read music. Baquet's skill was especially 
notable in the lower register, in which he carried the brunt of 
melodic responsibility. Keppard, a man with a large drinking and eat- 
ing capacity, was a bustling showman on the stage; he could match 
Baquet's low notes on the cornet and then begin the first of many at- 
tacks on the high register which culminated in those screeching 
passages for dogs' ears played by Duke Ellington's trumpeter Cat 
Anderson and Stan Kenton's Maynard Ferguson. Baquet later was 
replaced by Big Eye Louis Nelson and Jimmy Noone, the last of 
whom was perhaps the most impressive not only of this trio of 
clarinetists but of all the New Orleans performers on that instru- 
ment. Keppard, in the course of his years with the Original Creoles, 
reported in to New Orleans from time to time. On some of those 
trips he would sit in with the Eagle Band, with which he appeared 
off and on from 1907 until about 1915. It was the most important 
of his New Orleans attachments, outside of the Olympians and the 
Creoles, although he was also heard to advantage in his occasional 
appearances with other bands around town and during his longer 
employment with the pianist Richard M. Jones at George Few- 
clothes' Cabaret and with his own band at Pete Lala's Cafe in 1915. 

In its time, the Eagle Band made room for many of the most per- 
suasive of New Orleans jazz voices. Its clarinetists included the 
talented son of Picou's teacher, Lorenzo Tio, Jr., Big Eye Louis 
Nelson, and, best of all, Sidney Bechet. Its cornetists, in addition to 
Keppard, included at various times Mutt Carey and Bunk Johnson. 
Bunk, whose immediate earlier work was with the Superior Band, 
from 1905 to 1912, led his musicians through the full range of jazz 
jobs. When they played a dance, they advertised, "The Eagle Boys 
fly high," and indeed they did, at Saturday night dances at the 
Masonic Hall, in their weekday and Sunday marches, and out of 
town at such places as Milneburg on Lake Pontchartrain, where 
there were good times out of doors, some of which were caught 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 



musically in the famous "Milneburg Joys." Never did the Eagle 
Band expand its size for its marching engagements; always you could 
hear the dancing lines of Lorenzo's or Sidney's clarinet, of Mutt's or 
Bunk's cornet, of Jack Carey's or Frankie Duson's trombone. Of 
them all, the men who established the firmest reputations were Sid- 
ney Bechet and, in recent years especially, Bunk Johnson. Bunk was 
rediscovered in 1938, when Louis Armstrong suggested that one of 
the writers for that invaluable symposium, Jazz?nen, look him up to 
find out more than was known about early New Orleans jazz. William 
Russell found him in New Iberia, a small town near New Orleans, 
with his Jazzmen colleagues bought Bunk a new set of teeth, and 
listened long and sympathetically to his stories. In the next few 
years Bunk recorded, appeared on the West and East Coasts, and 
made a successful run at the Stuyvesant Casino in New York in the 
fall of 1945 and the winter of 1945-1946. 

Known as "Bunk" long before the extravagant estimates of his 
prowess began to appear in the women's fashion magazines, and 
before the editors of Jazzmen bought him a lien on posterity along 
with his new teeth, William Geary Johnson had joined King Bolden 
at the age of sixteen. He brought a second cornet into play in the 
jazz ensemble and, if his mid-forties appearances can be trusted, a 
variety of restrained brass sounds. He was born in 1879, and his 
career extended from 1895 to 1931, with a revival from 1942 until 
1 949, when he died. In his earlier days he toured the South, the 
West, and the Atlantic States with minstrel shows and circus bands, 
played in several New Orleans outfits, and undoubtedly had some 
influence on most of the cornetists coming up in the Crescent City 
from the beginning of this century until the red-light district was 
shut down in November 1917. It is questionable that Louis Arm- 
strong was his proud student, as has been claimed; not until Louis 
had been asked many times did he credit Bunk with even a mild 
tutorial interest in his blowing. Louis, always an agreeable questionee, 
was satisfied with what he regarded as the facts until interrogated to 
a standstill by Johnson cultists. For him, as he always said, it was 
Joe Oliver. "That was my only teacher; the one and only Joe 
Oliver." 

Bunk's return to performance in 1942 brought listeners at least 
some quality of the music of which he had been an important part in 
his youth. It also served the enthusiasm of listeners who had inevitable 



56 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

limitations of age and place, who promptly linked Bunk and Buddy 
Bolden in a cornet pairing of equal importance with that of King 
Oliver and Louis Armstrong. As Morroe Berger cautions in his 
article on "Jazz Pre-History and Bunk Johnson," "It is difficult to 
find ample justification for such categorical pronouncements." Berger 
goes on, in a discerning analysis of the size of Johnson's contribution, 
to point out that "in emphasizing Bunk's position in jazz history, the 
members of Bunk's admiration society naturally ignore that of early 
jazzmen who have some claims of their own." It must be remembered 
that Bunk Johnson was an old man when he reappeared on the jazz 
scene. It must also be remembered that Bunk had some glittering 
cornet contemporaries, not only Louis Armstrong but Freddie Kep- 
pard, Emanuel Perez, King Oliver, and Oscar Celestin. King Oliver 
we have been able to hear on records, and Oscar Celestin not only on 
records but in person he was still playing in New Orleans in 1950. 

Joseph Oliver was born in 1885. In 1900 he was a capable cornetist 
and was prominently featured in a children's brass band. On one of 
its tours he got into a nasty fight which left him with a scar on his 
face for life. The little brass band with which young Joe played 
made fair money, because in those days the interest in novelty bands 
was large in New Orleans and the near-by South. The way for nov- 
elty outfits had been opened by Emile Auguste Lacoume, Sr., better 
known as Stale Bread, who was a zither player. Stale Bread played 
with the Brunies Brothers and Rappolo, and in the late years of the 
last century he led a "Spasm Band," so called after the sound of its 
toy and improvised instruments: the harmonica, the zither, a bass 
formed out of half a barrel with clothesline wire for strings and a 
cypress stick for a bow, a banjo with four strings constructed from 
a cheesebox, a soapbox cut down to make a guitar, and anything 
from tin cans to barrels for drums. In 1903 Stale Bread had to leave 
the legitimate riverboat band he was then leading (which featured 
Lawrence Vega on cornet) because of an eye infection that blinded 
him. 

After the early brass-band years Joe worked as a butler and 
doubled as a cornetist with marching outfits like the Eagle and On- 
ward brass bands, in the second of which he shared solo cornet 
honors with Emanuel Perez. When he worked with these bands he 
paid a substitute to buttle for him. 

Sometime after 1910 Joe made his way into Storyville and played 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 57 

with a variety of bands. One night he stood on Iberville Street, 
pointed across the street to Pete Lala's Cafe, where Freddie Keppard 
was playing, and farther down the street to the spot where Perez 
was entrenched, and blew the blues. Loud and true he blew and loud 
and clear he shouted, "There! That'll show them!" This exhibit of 
lung power and daring established Joe Oliver's majesty, and from 
then on he was "the King." King Oliver moved into Lala's with a 
band that featured Lorenzo Tio on clarinet, Zue Robertson on trom- 
bone, Buddy Christian on piano, and Zino on drums. By 1918 King 
Oliver was a major name in New Orleans jazz, and shortly after that 
he brought the name and the music for which it stood to Chicago; 
it was one of the most important moves in jazz history. 

Oscar Celestin has, like Bunk Johnson, benefited from his longevity. 
As a cornetist he has been content with simple straightforward me- 
lodic lines, which demonstrate nothing like the invention of a Louis 
Armstrong or a King Oliver, none of the drive of a Freddie Keppard 
or Mutt Carey. Nonetheless, in the records he made on trumpet 
from 1924 to 1928, and again in his recent work, there has been a 
sufficient command of the sweetness of his two horns, trumpet and 
cornet, and an ease with jazz accents which make his long leadership 
of the band at the Tuxedo Cafe in Storyville quite understandable. 
With that band at various times were the clarinetists Lorenzo Tio, 
Jr., Sam Dutrey, Johnny Dodds, and Jimmy Noone; Johnny St. Cyr, 
the guitarist who later worked with Louis Armstrong, and the pianist 
Richard M. Jones. Armand J. Piron, an indifferent fiddler, was also 
a sometime violinist with the Tuxedo Band. More distinguished 
than Piron himself was the personnel he recorded with in 1923 and 
1924 in New York, such able New Orleans musicians as the Junior 
Tio, the trumpeter Peter Bocage, the trombonist John Lindsay, and 
the drummer Louis Cottrell. 

Of the remaining Negro cornetists of this period, two deserve 
more than passing mention. Thomas Carey, known as Papa Mutt or 
simply Mutt no compliment to his visage had a lasting association 
with the Eagle Band and played with various small combinations 
around Storyville. In eight record sides made with the trombonist 
Kid Ory for Rudi Blesh, from 1944 to 1946, Carey shows some 
vitality, if a limited invention, entirely understandable in a man whose 
playing years go back to the beginning of this century. Emanuel 
Perez played cornet with the Onward Brass Band, which goes back 



58 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

to 1892 according to most estimates. He also played with the Im- 
perial Band, which was in existence during the last four years of 
the Onward Band, from 1909 to 1912, and in 1900 he sat beside Picou 
in the Excelsior Band. Those who heard him said that his playing 
demonstrated the evolution of jazz out of the first formal marching 
bands, that though he was essentially a traditional brass-band cornet- 
ist, he evinced considerable jazz feeling in his placing of accents. 
Of the generation before Louis Armstrong's, he apparently con- 
tributed much to the development of jazz styles on cornet. 

Edward Ory, known as "Kid" for as long as he has been playing 
professionally, is singularly famous among New Orleans trombonists, 
and deservedly so. He made his jazz beginnings as an eleven-year- 
old member of a kids' "string band" in La Place, Louisiana, where he 
was born on Christmas Day, 1889. Later, when the child musicians 
were able to buy instruments to replace their homemade ones, the 
Kid was a professional and a distinguished one. On trips to New 
Orleans after 1905, he sat in from time to time with the Buddy Bolden 
band until Bolden was committed to the asylum. An eager student, 
Ory pursued his music formally and informally, studying with 
private teachers, hanging around New Orleans's best musicians, jump- 
ing in with both feet in 1911 when he brought some of his La 
Place colleagues with him to stay in the big city. In 1915 he took 
over the band at Pete Lala's Cafe and, with the important cooperation 
of his musicians, made it perhaps the finest small crew in the city. 
Joe Oliver was his cornetist, and Sidney Bechet played clarinet for 
him; Henry Morton was on drums, and Louis Keppard on guitar. 
When Joe left for Chicago he was replaced by Louis Armstrong. 
When Sidney Bechet left to go on tour, Johnny Dodds took his 
place. The standards were high. They stayed high until Ory left 
for California in 1919, "following the Original Creoles' drummer, 
Dink Johnson, who had established his Louisiana Six out there. Ory's 
band, by then known as Kid Ory's Brown-Skinned Jazz Band, did 
well enough around Los Angeles until 1924, but it didn't receive 
half the acclaim that the Kid's groups did after 1942, first playing 
under Barney Bigard, then with Bunk Johnson, earning a radio 
contract on Orson Welles's West Coast show of 1944, ultimately al- 
ternating between Los Angeles and San Francisco, where he became 
a jazz fixture. 

Between the first Ory excursion on the Coast and the second, 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 59 

there were several notable engagements. In 1924 Kid Ory joined 
Louis Armstrong in Chicago for a short stay and some distinguished 
records, the justly famous Hot Five and Hot Seven sides of 1925 to 
1927. The list of Ory's and Armstrong's collaborations is a list of the 
most significant records of the years encompassed. "Wild Man Blues," 
"Potato Head Blues/' "Gully Low Blues," "Dry's Creole Trom- 
bone," "Struttin' with Some Barbecue," "Hotter Than That," and 
"Savoy Blues" to scoop up a 1927 handful demonstrate the ease 
of the soloists and the staying power of the New Orleans forms. 
There were refinements, and these are evident in the very first 
records of Louis and Ory together in 1925 and 1926, "Gut Bucket 
Blues" and "Come Back, Sweet Papa"; there arc longer, better sus- 
tained solos; the texture of the ensemble has changed, moving from 
a concerted grouping to more of a background for solos; but the 
essential pull of cornet, trombone, and clarinet is there, handsomely 
taken up by Louis, Ory, and Johnny Dodds. Ory left Louis to play 
with King Oliver, Dave Peyton, Clarence Black, and the Chicago 
Vagabonds, in that order, but neither in those appearances nor with 
his own bands in the forties, after he left retirement, does he show 
the cumulative power his solos always had with Louis. What he's 
never lost is the definitive slide notes clearly out of a trombone 
which the instrument had to have in New Orleans jazz, and the neatly 
filed short melodic phrases copied by a whole generation of trom- 
bonists. 

Ory's clarinet confrere in the Armstrong days in Chicago was 
Johnny Dodds, to some the finest clarinetist in jazz, to others anath- 
ema. A native of New Orleans, a veteran of the Eagle, Tuxedo, 
and Ory bands there, he started his recording activity in 1923 with 
King Oliver. It reached an early peak with Louis, and was extended 
until June 1940, two months before he died, with various com- 
binations of musicians under his own leadership. One of his best 
known couplings, "Wild Man Blues" and "Melancholy," shows off 
one of his most able devices, the alternation of rows of skipping 
notes and long sustained tones. Both tunes appeared again on Decca, 
eleven years after the first recording, which was made for Bruns- 
wick in 1927 with Louis, Earl Hines, and other Armstrong musicians. 
The 1938 sides, separately issued, were made with three members 
of the John Kirby band (trumpeter Charlie Shavers, drummer 
O'Neil Spencer, Kirby himself on bass), with Louis's ex- wife Lil 



60 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Armstrong on piano, and Teddy Bunn on guitar. It may be heresy 
to Dodds enthusiasts to say so, but there is a striking advance in the 
second recordings over the first. Dodds plumbs his chalumeau register, 
the lower range of the clarinet, with a touching melancholy, and 
moves his two-beat accents in beside the four-beat mastery of Shavers 
with no loss of style and a considerable gain of beat. He was forty- 
six when he made these sides and obviously capable of further devel- 
opment. 

When it was that Sidney Bechet ceased development it would be 
hard to say, but unless one has an addiction for his jazz rather than 
an affinity, it must be admitted that at some point there was an end 
to his musical growth, and possibly at an early point. Perhaps his 
very early blossoming as a soloist accounts for the fixing of his 
style and ideas and playing patterns and sound at some mid-point 
in his career. He was a sometime guest with Freddie Keppard's band 
in his native New Orleans when he was eight, and a year later 
became a protege of the clarinetist George Baquet. When he was 
thirteen he was playing with his brother's band and at seventeen he 
joined the Eagle Band. A year later he toured Texas with Clarence 
Williams and returned to New Orleans to join the Olympia Band 
under King Oliver. Chicago was next, in the summer of 1917, and it 
provided a series of jobs, with Freddie Keppard at the De Luxe 
Cabaret and with Tony Jackson at the Pekin. He went to Europe 
with Will Marion Cook's mammoth concert orchestra in 1919, 
stayed three years, then after three years around New York he re- 
turned to the Continent to stay until 1930. In Europe he led the 
orchestra at different times in three editions of The Black Revue, and 
toured Russia with a band that included the New Orleans trumpeter 
Tommy Ladnier. From 1928 on he was in and out of the Noble Sissle 
orchestra, in the United -States and in Europe, until the end of 
1938. Afterward, renowned as a clarinetist and soprano saxophonist, 
he played with his own little bands and made a variety of records for 
a variety of minor and major labels, but he certainly did not offer 
a variety of ideas. 

No such repetition constricts his early records. With Clarence 
Williams' Blue Five from 1923 to 1925, Bechet played something ap- 
proaching a long melodic line, scooping pitch on his two instruments 
in the way that Johnny Hodges later polished. Some of Bechet's 
best work appears on the Clarence Williams records that featured 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 61 

Louis Armstrong on cornet and Charlie Irvis, who later joined Duke 
Ellington, on trombone. There is some persuasive reed blowing on 
"Mandy Make Up Your Mind" and "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking 
for a Bluebird," some of it on soprano and some of it on the sar- 
rusophone, an instrument of the oboe family named after the French 
bandmaster Sarrus, who introduced it into the military band, where, 
except for such occasions as this one, it fortunately has remained. 

Perhaps the most famous of Sidney Bechet's many records are 
those he made in 1932 with a band he called the New Orleans Feet- 
warmers. He and Tommy Ladnier match styles and tremolos effec- 
tively in the u Maple Leaf Rag," "Shag," and "I Found a New Baby." 
Teddy Nixon's trombone fits, and the rhythm section gets an ap- 
posite beat on these and the other three sides. Here, for some of us, 
Bechet's contribution to jazz ceases, and thereafter his quivering 
course through blues and the standard tunes of the jazz repertory 
becomes difficult listening. For others a fair-sized audience in the 
United States and a majority of jazz listeners in Europe his mastery 
was never more evident than in the years after World War II when 
his vibrato bounced careeningly through every performance. But 
it is no reflection on his appreciable contribution to reed styles to 
report that his latter-day oscillations set some people's teeth on edge, 
never so much as in his One Man Band record, in which he played 
clarinet, soprano and tenor saxes, piano, bass, and drums through 
"The Sheik" and "Blues of Bechet" for Victor. 

Last of the clarinet masters of the first two decades of the twentieth 
century, and possibly the best, is Jimmy Noone. Born on a farm 
outside New Orleans, he came to his instrument later than Bechet, 
but early enough, at the age of fifteen, to develop a considerable 
skill by 191 3, when he was nineteen. His teachers were Sidney Bechet 
and the Tio brothers, all of whom he replaced in different bands as 
he came of playing age and they moved around, in and out of New 
Orleans. He was in the Tuxedo Band for a while and played with 
Richard M. Jones at Fewclothes'. He played with Armand Piron's 
polite orchestra in the war years of 1917-1918, when Storyville had 
closed down, but earlier he had got his full playing experience in 
that quarter with the bands already mentioned, with Kid Ory, and 
with his own band at Frank Early's cabaret, where he shared leader- 
ship with the cornetist Buddy Petit. He toured briefly with the 
Original Creoles and was one of the first of the important Orleanians 



62 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

to settle in Chicago, where he joined King Oliver in 1918, Freddie 
Keppard briefly in 1919, and then Doc Cook's Dreamland Orchestra. 
In the fall of 1926 Jimmy took his own band into the Apex Club, 
earlier known as The Nest, in this year a club of some social distinc- 
tion. While there he made twelve sides with Earl Hines on piano, 
Joe Poston on alto saxophone, Bud Scott on banjo, and Johnny 
Wells on drums. Eight of these fine 1928 performances have been 
reissued in the Brunswick Collectors Series and offered as "a perfect 
insight to an important period in American music Chicago style" 
Technically these are Chicago records they were made there; they 
use Chicago musicians by adoption, such as Earl Hines; they include 
saxophone, unheard of in New Orleans and proscribed after the 
Diaspora in so-called New Orleans combinations, not by the musicians 
themselves but by their critics. Actually these records are among the 
best presentations of the abiding procedures and playing atmosphere 
of New Orleans jazz. Without any brass, the clarinet and alto com- 
bination, with a decisive rhythm-section beat behind it, leads bright 
ensemble figures ("Apex Blues," "I Know that You Know," "Four 
or Five Times," "Monday Date"). Jimmy weaves his clarinet around 
his ensemble, in and out of alto statements of the theme, in and out 
of the ensemble ("Sweet Lorraine," "I Know that You Know," 
"Every Evening"). On several of the sides, notably "I Know that 
You Know," he puts down a series of fast runs, scalar ascents and 
descents, rehearsing the same figure over and over but with little 
changes of chord or key and larger changes of register, all of which 
suggest the Picou of "High Society," the Dodds and Bechet of in- 
numerable performances; but he never fails in invention or tech- 
nique as other players do. Like Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone re- 
corded off and on through the twenties and thirties, made some sides 
with Louis Armstrong (accompanying the blues singer Lillie Delk 
Christian), and some with modern musicians in Chicago for Decca. 
Like Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone had the adaptability to fit with 
Charlie Shavers' trumpet and Pete Brown's alto; his new versions of 
the "Apex Blues" (called "Bump It" in 1937), "I Know that You 
Know," and "Four or Five Times" have all the cohesion of the old 
ones made nine years earlier, and a new drive that came in with 
swing as well. In November 1943, five months and three days before 
he died, he made four sides for Capitol in one of recording director 
Dave Dexter's impressive attempts to catch the fine older men of jazz 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 63 

before it was too late. Working with Jack Teagarden on trombone, 
Billy May on trumpet, Dave Matthews on tenor saxophone, and a 
rhythm section of Joe Sullivan, Dave Barbour, Artie Shapiro, and 
Zutty Singleton, in up-tempo and ballad performances, Jimmy showed 
still the big, pure, and lovely tone, the controlled vibrato, neither 
too fast nor too slow, the same intelligent use of such devices as the 
trill and the register jump, the same facility over all the clarinet's 
range. No wonder he had such hordes of imitators, from Frank 
Teschemacher and Benny Goodman to Woody Herman, Joe Marsala, 
and Pee Wee Russell. 

There were few pianists in New Orleans jazz of the quality of 
Keppard, Oliver, Armstrong, or Noonc. There were, as a matter of 
fact, few pianists. The marching bands and the bands who played 
the advertising wagons couldn't use a pianist; the cabaret bands didn't 
want one very often. The major contributions of keyboard artists 
were made first in the bordellos and later wherever ragtime per- 
formances were in favor. Of the latter, more must be said in the 
history of the New Orleans migrations. From the bordellos a few 
men emerged: Richard M. Jones, who also led his own band at 
Fewclothes' but made his larger impression later on in Chicago; 
Tony Jackson, who found his place as a singer and pianist in New 
York; the first boogie-woogie crew, who must have influenced the 
second wave of C-major tremolists, the famous Chicagoans; and 
Ferdinand Joseph (Jelly Roll) Morton, who talked at least as well 
as he played piano and talked himself into a major role in jazz 
history. 

The words and the music, the legend and the life of Jelly Roll fill 
a compendious series of Library of Congress records now trans- 
ferred to Circle long-playing records as The Saga of Mister Jelly 
Lord and a book taken from them Alan Lomax's Mister Jelly 
Roll. As the notes for the records have it, "the composite length of 
The Saga of Mister Jelly Lord is over seven hours the length of 
three grand operas, five full-scale musical concerts, or fifteen com- 
plete symphonies and it consists entirely of the talking, piano- 
playing, and singing of one man. . . . This would seem to signify 
that this one man was one of wide and varied genius, a man of tower- 
ing stature in his field." It would rather, and it seems to me that it 
does, signify that Jelly Roll Morton was around a long time, 
played some, learned some, and talked more. He is an important ex- 



64 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

hibit; through his talking and playing much of our knowledge of 
Storyville life and musical times is substantiated, broadened, put to 
rights. He was something less than a great pianist; we can't even be 
sure he was an original one, so much of what he claimed as his own 
was obviously public domain in jazz or other men's doing. There 
was, for example, that famous 1938 article in Downbeat, in which he 
pre-empted the whole field for himself. It began: "It is evidently 
known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of 
jazz, and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1901, many 
years before the Dixieland Band organized." He went on to ex- 
plain that the first stomp was his, u written in 1906, namely 4 King 
Porter Stomp.' " When he "happened to be in Texas" in 1912, and 
one of his "fellow musicians" brought him a copy of the "Memphis 
Blues," he discovered that u the first strain is a Black Butts strain all 
dressed up," that is, the "strictly blues'" of "a Boogie-Woogie player," 
and that the second strain was his ("I practically assembled the 
tune"). 

Jelly Roll's extravagances and exaggerations need no examination, 
or very little. They tell us more about the man than the music, show 
some of his humor and more of his pathos. But sandwiched in be- 
tween the wild personal history and the overworked claims are much 
of the color of jazz and the mutual impact of jazz and Jelly Roll 
Morton. He was, as the Germans who have taken to writing about 
jazz would say, echt New Orleans, a real live Storyville piano player. 
He was born in New Orleans in 1885, brought up in Gulf port, Mis- 
sissippi, and early turned to music at seven, he said, working out on 
the guitar, and right afterward studying and playing the piano, "then 
considered the female instrument," Jelly Roll explained. With a cer- 
tain diffidence he admitted that he was "always called a freak of a 
pianist" but hastened to~add that he "always managed to pull the 
crowd any place I played." From him comes documentary evidence 
of the conscious use of French and Spanish materials, the shaping of 
an old French quadrille, much played in the Vieux Carre, into the rag 
known as "Tiger," the "mixture of Spanish with Negro ragtime," 
which, he said, "sounded great it seemed to the world, because when 
I played I was almost mobbed, people trying to get a peek at me." 
Where he played was Gulf port at first, then, on his return to New Or- 
leans in 1909, wherever his two immediate mentors, Richard M. Jones 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 65 

and the St. Joseph Brass Band cornetist Sullivan Spraul, could find a 
job for him. In the year of his return he became the solo pianist at 
Tom Anderson's Annex and stayed, with side trips to Alabama, 
Georgia, and points north of New Orleans, some as far away as 
Chicago and Seattle, until 1915, when he moved to California. He 
stayed on the Coast until 1923, then spent five years in Chicago and 
seven in New York. He ran his own night club in Washington from 
1936 to 1938. He returned to Los Angeles in 1938, to remain until his 
death in the summer of 1941. 

Jelly Roll recorded off and on from 1922 to 1940. He made his 
epochal Library of Congress records in May 1938 epochal in the 
precise sense of the word: they recorded an epoch of jazz in which 
Jelly Roll's part was at first important. He saluted the Gulfport pianist 
King Porter in the "King Porter Stomp," which, in one form or 
another, had staying power in jazz until the forties, quickly and bril- 
liantly adopted as it was by the first swing bands Benny Goodman's, 
for example, and later Harry James's. He transformed the "Miserere" 
from Verdi's // Trovatore into a workable jazz piano piece, perhaps 
the first conscious attempt to "jazz the classics." He set an Indian 
song to jazz, and many a French and Cajun tune was rolled off his 
keys. Playing cards were "jazzed" in his "Georgia Skin Game," and 
innumerable blues and rag variations were named and catalogued as 
his compositions such tunes as "The Pearls," "Turtle Twist," and 
"Red Hot Pepper"; the latter, pluralized, named his most famous 
recording combinations from 1926 to 1930. 

As a pianist he offered revealing insights into Storyville keyboard 
practice. The much discussed polyrhythms of ragtime found effective 
expression in his hands three beats against four, dotted eighths and 
quarters against quarter-note accents, triplets against an even four or 
a syncopated two. One encounters enough uncertainty in identifying 
these rhythms in traditional terms to make clear the subtleties of the 
style; these are only suggestions of the contrasts in time. With this 
considerable rhythmic skill, however, went something less engaging, 
a plunking insistence on the beat, a reiterative melodic line that some- 
times ragged rather than sparked a phrase, and a very limited harmonic 
imagination. If Jelly Roll Morton's understanding of jazz had ob- 
tained, and no other had developed, as his most ardent admirers seem 
to wish, jazz would have remained in a tight vise, of which the most 



66 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

striking example would be the ragged riffing of the least inventive 
swing musicians whose simple-minded recitals of two- and four-bar 
cliches helped to bring their own era to an untimely end. 

Other men must be included in this group of sturdy Negro musi- 
cians. There is the trombonist George Filhe, whose first appearances 
go back at least to 1892, when he was twenty, who played with the 
Onward Brass Band, the Peerless, and the Imperial, and got to Chicago 
early, in 1915, In Chicago Filhe had his own band for a while, worked 
with such men as Emanuel Perez, Bcchet, and the junior Tio, and 
contrasted his low-register looping and smearing with Bab Frank, 
who played the instrument for which "High Society" was originally 
designed, when it was a straightforward marching piece the piccolo 
and played it hot. Filhe made all the logical New Orleans connec- 
tions Carroll Dickerson, Dave Peyton, and King Oliver then re- 
tired when jazz retired from prominence, along with so much else, 
in 1929. 

A trombonist to go along with Filhe is Zue Robertson, who retired 
a year later, in 1930, after a wonderfully varied career. Zue, christened 
Alvin, was born in 1891, started on piano, switched to trombone at 
thirteen, did about a year on the road with Kit Carson's Wild West 
Show in 1910, and played with most of the New Orleans jazzmen 
in the Olympia Band and with the touring Original Creoles, with his 
own band in Storyville, with Freddie Keppard, Bab Frank, the perky 
piccoloist, and Jelly Roll Morton in Chicago, and with King Oliver 
and Dave Peyton. From 1926 to 1929 Zue played piano again, and 
organ, at Harlem's distinguished theaters, the Lincoln and the Lafa- 
yette. 

Two men used with special distinction the horn or tortoise-shell 
plectrum to pluck banjo and guitar strings in New Orleans jazz 
Johnny St. Cyr and Bud Scott. St. Cyr is the redoubtable rhythm 
man who kept such a fine beat going for Jelly Roll Morton's Red 
Hot Peppers and Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Seven; he proved 
then, as Allan Reuss and Billy Bauer did later with Benny Goodman 
and Woody Herman, that the plectrum beat is fundamental to a jazz 
rhythm section for sound, for evenness of accent, and to draw the 
other rhythm instruments together. Bud Scott, like Zue Robertson, 
did a lot of traveling on the road, was an important member of Kid 
Ory's first California band, and reaches back to the legendary music 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 67 

to Buddy Bolden, with whom he played when he was in his teens, 
in about 1906, to the Olympia Band, Freddie Keppard, and Jelly Roll. 
In Chicago he was with King Oliver and recorded with Jimmy 
Noone. In California he was an important part of the sporadic jazz 
revivals of the forties. 

There have been lots of bass players, but none so famous as Pops 
Foster on what used to be called the string bass to distinguish it from 
the wind bass, the tuba, and sousaphone, which at first were used 
more frequently than the stringed instrument outside New Orleans. 
George Foster was born in 1892 and early learned to play the 
bass from his sister Elizabeth, after starting to play the cello. He was 
much in demand for advertising wagons, marching bands, and cabaret 
outfits; he put in time with the Eagle and Magnolia bands, Freddie 
Keppard, and Kid Ory, whom he later joined in California. Pops was 
one of the riverboat musicians who brought New Orleans music 
north, a sometime St. Louis musician, and for many years with Luis 
Russell's band, which became Louis Armstrong's after 1935 r ^ e rec " 
ognized leader of his profession. In the swing era too he was much 
on call for records with other men who were in demand at recording 
studios: he was reliable, he put down a good walking beat, he had 
learned to read music. 

Pops's opposite number on drums, a popular recording musician 
much in demand in the thirties, is Zutty Singleton, who has long for- 
gotten the Arthur James that originally preceded his surname. Zutty's 
genial qualities, his unfailing good humor, his big bass drum boom, 
paraded through a hundred sides or more, with Jelly Roll Morton, 
Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Red Allen, Mildred Bailey, Roy 
Eldridge, and his own recording band in 1935, I 94i an d '944- Born 
in 1898 in Bunkie, near New Orleans, Zutty began to play around 
the big town after the big time was over, but he played with some 
of the big men, with Big Eye Louis Nelson and John Robechaux's 
band, with the Tuxedo Band and the most famous of the riverboat 
leaders, Fate Marable. In Chicago he was with Jimmy Noone and 
Louis Armstrong among others, and with Roy Eldridge's memorable 
little band at the Three Deuces in 1935 and the next year. In New 
York he played with Fats Waller in 1931, with Vernon Andrade's 
popular Harlem band, and with Bobby Hackett downtown at Nick's. 
In Los Angeles Zutty has played with everybody who wanted to set 



68 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

a two-beat syncopation on the snare drums beside the bass drum four, 
and with more modern jazz musicians as well. He has again and again 
opened his capacious memory to part-time and full-time jazz historians 
and kept alive all-night sessions, scheduled and impromptu, as much 
with his good New Orleans humor as his good New Orleans time. 
He has no inflated opinion of the New Orleans music he has listened 
to and played, nor does he put it disparagingly in its place. He is one 
of the few direct links with the great city and its early great jazzmen 
who realizes that a beginning is a beginning, that this was an unusually 
good beginning, but that what came after was often good too and 
sometimes better. 

There is some of the same graciousness and perspicacity in the other 
famous New Orleans drummer who began in and went out from 
Storyville Warren Dodds, Johnny's younger brother, best known 
as Baby because of that familial connection. Baby Dodds is older than 
Zutty by two years and closer to the first important bands by perhaps 
a decade. His playing experience before the 1917 closing order in- 
cluded stints with Willie Hightower's band, with Papa Oscar Celes- 
tin's band at the 101 Ranch, and a quartet at Fewclothes' Cabaret. 
His associates were some of the brilliant musicians and more of the 
less striking, whose skills must have been fair, judging by the work 
of one of them, Kid Shots Madison, a cornetist who came to promi- 
nence in the thirties and forties when a generation of young enthusiasts 
began once more to listen to New Orleans jazz on the spot. Baby 
Dodds was in the Eagle Band in its late years, worked the boats with 
Marable and Chicago with King Oliver, and during the last twelve 
years of his brother Johnny's life was with him most of the time. He 
played with Louis's wife LiPs band, with Louis and Kid Ory and 
Bud Scott, with Jimmy Noone, and with his own band. His recording 
activity has been large &\d full and, on the whole, impressive in the 
tradition that sets rim shots and gourd and bell noises on a par with 
the regular beat and sees perhaps as much comedy as drive in the 
central member of the rhythm section. In 1947, as a member of Rudi 
Blesh's broadcasting band, he played in a two-part radio battle of 
bands opposite a group that I organized. He listened with interest 
when he wasn't playing, and asked serious and probing questions of 
the finest of bebop drummers, Max Roach. He complimented not 
only Max but Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lennie Tristano, and 
Billy Bauer. Much of the time that the modern musicians were play- 



FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 69 

ing he just looked up and across the studio at them with a smile on 
his face and a warm expression in his eyes, as if to say what he later 
almost put into words, that he was proud to be a musician in the same 
music, that there were no terrifying differences between the old and 
the new, that good jazz was good jazz. 



(Chapter 




LOUIS 



In the second and third decades of this century musicians arose in 
New Orleans who transformed patterns, enlivened chords, extended 
the length of the melodic line, and intensified the central rhythmic 
drive of jazz. At least one of them, Louis Armstrong, demonstrated 
the individual splendor available to a sufficient talent in a restricted 
music. It is as a background for Louis and his successors that early 
New Orleans jazz has its most lasting interest. 

It is not to disparage the achievement of the generations of Buddy 
Bolden, Bunk Johnson, and Freddie Keppard that I praise Louis Arm- 
strong. His contribution is such, however, that it eclipsed the perform- 
ances of his predecessors for many years. Without granting Louis 
the stature of William Shakespeare, it could be suggested that he 
arose from his background and learned from his predecessors as 
Shakespeare picked up the threads of Tudor drama. One can go too 
far with such analogies, but here there is a clear parallel. Individual 
greatness is not entirely self -generated. To understand Louis and ap- 
preciate his music, one must understand and appreciate the men who 
preceded and taught him. 

Louis Armstrong's first big noise as a public performer was made 
on New Year's Eve in 1913 when he shot a pistol into the air in cele- 
bration of the coming year, which was to mark the opening not only 
of the First World War but of the career of the first major figure in 
jazz history. Louis's coming-out party was held at the New Orleans 
Waifs' Home, where he was sent for shooting off the pistol. 

Louis's dates are easy to remember; they all coincide with major 
events. He was born on July 4, 1900; he was incarcerated in 1914; he 
led his first band in 1917, the year the United States entered the war 
and also the year that the New Orleans red-light district was shut 
up by order of the Secretary of the Navy. Like George M. Cohan be- 

70 



LOUIS 71 

fore him, Louis was a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on Independence 
Day. Cohan exploited his birthday for all it was worth and it was 
worth a great deal in his illustrious career as musical chronicler of 
American patriotism. Louis has never paused in public to think over 
the significance of his birthday, but the date is a happy coincidence, 
and it is still more significant that that particular July Fourth was in 
the year 1900. For at the turn of the century jazz was rising slowly, 
laboriously, from its mangy manger, the sporting houses and muddy 
streets of New Orleans. 

When young Armstrong burst upon the scene with a bang from 
his pistol, twelve and a half years later, he wanted to make a bigger 
noise than anybody else. It's questionable whether he did that night, 
but certainly he did when he began playing cornet in New Orleans 
bands a few years later. He made the biggest noise any single instru- 
mentalist ever made in jazz; he made almost all the noises and riffs 
and tunes and tone progressions that shaped jazz and made it a legiti- 
mate art form instead of just parlor entertainment in New Orleans 
houses of joy. 

At the city's Waifs' Home, Professor Peter Davis taught him to 
play the bugle for the Home's formal occasions, and then the cornet 
in the Home's brass band. And so, barely in his teens, Louis did just 
what all the adult jazzmen incubating jazz in New Orleans did. With 
his musical colleagues at the Home, Louis joined in performing a 
juvenile version of basic New Orleans jazz. He played for funerals 
and for basket parties; he marched up and down the city's streets 
and parks, "taking up," as he says, "all kinds of collections," matching 
the beat of the clinking coins with two and four to the bar. The Bol- 
dens and Johnsons and Olivers played for a living; Louis played for a 
penance, but it finally earned him a better living. 

Sitting in his comfortable parlor in his home in Queens, New York, 
years later, Louis looked back over this part of his life and laughed. 
With very little solemnity and considerable humility he reviewed the 
basic facts, stated some vital opinions, and cleared up some myths 
and legends. 

"Yes," he said, "it was Professor Davis taught me to blow cornet. 
I used to hang around Bunk and the other guys, but they were too 
busy to pay much attention to me. I never took a lesson from any of 
them." 

He learned the lines and planes of jazz from the first king of jazz, 



72 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Joe Oliver. "J oc Oliver taught me more than anyone he took up his 
time with me. If there's anybody who should get any credit that is, 
if there is any please give it to the great master of the olden days 
Joseph King Oliver. . . . Yass Lawd. . . . There's the man that's re- 
sponsible for my everything in the world of Swing-Jazz-Hot-Ragtime 
or any kind of music you might call it. ... Joe used to call himself 
my stepfather, because I was like a son to him, he said. He sure acted 
like a father to me." Joe lived up to his self-assigned role with an 
enlightened musical paternalism for which jazzmen ever since have 
had cause to be thankful. 

What was Louis's first professional job? 

"If you count them honky-tonks, then it was Madranga's, at 
Franklin and Perdido Streets, a real honky-tonk, with Boogers on 
piano and Sonny Gobee on drums." 

"It was all honky-tonks, one after another," until 1917, when a 
drummer "who was also a good businessman," Joe Lindsay, organized 
a little band with Louis. "We got all of King Oliver's extra work; Joe 
was looking out for his boy." 

Then Joe left town, journeyed up the river to Chicago on the trip 
that jazz historians regard as epochal, the trip that started jazz on its 
way from the Crescent City to all the other cities of the United States. 
Louis took his place with the band that Oliver had led and left be- 
hind, the band that had been the King's and trombonist Kid Ory's. 
"It was kicks," Louis says. "Playing Joe Oliver's cornet parts made 
me feel important." 

Louis Armstrong was important, then as later. Most of musical New 
Orleans was aware of his size as a jazz musician, greatly appreciative 
of the strength and clarity of his tone, the drive of his beat, and the 
resourcefulness of his melodic invention. He carried all these jump- 
ing assets from band to band: a year with Ory; another in Fate 
Marable's crew, playing the riverboats; then the Jaz-E-Saz Band 
with Picou and Sam Dutrey and Pops Foster and Baby Dodds; many 
months at the Orchard Cabaret in the French Quarter with Zutty 
Singleton's band ("I was the leader," Zutty says, "but Pops was teach- 
ing us all"); a year with Luis Russell and Albert Nicholas and Barney 
Bigard, among others, at The Real Thing, a cabaret on Rampart Street 
("The music was almost as much fun as Ory's cooking," Barney 
says, extending Louis a compliment just short of the ultimate). Then 
Louis was ready for his own hegira up the Mississippi to Chicago. Joe 



LOUIS 73 

Oliver sent for him to play in his band. Louis felt that he was ready. 

"In those early years none of us bothered about reading; a good ear 
was enough. But by the time I got to Joe's band I could see those 
notes; "I was advancing," Louis recalls with pride. He joined the 
King Oliver band in Chicago at the Lincoln Gardens Cafe in July 
1922, playing with Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Honore Dutrey on 
trombone, Bill Johnson clunking the banjo, Lil Hardin on piano, and 
Baby Dodds paradiddling and doodling on the drums. Louis himself 
played second cornet to Joe Oliver's first. Word got back to Louis's 
mother, Mary Ann Armstrong, that Louis was sick and didn't have 
a very good job. She rushed up to Chicago to see for herself. "One 
night I was sitting on the stand, blowing, when who should I see, 
coming through the jitterbugs, but Mary Ann. When she saw what 
a fine job I had and how big and fat and happy and healthy I was, she 
cried. She spent the rest of the night right on the stand with us and 
we all missed cues and muffed stuff, we were so happy." 

In 19:3 Louis recorded many sides with the Oliver band, playing 
the blues ("Sobbin'," "Riverside," "Canal Street," "Weather Bird," 
"Camp Meeting," "Working Man," "Krooked," and "Dipper- 
mouth"), and the stomps ("New Orleans," "Southern," "Chatta- 
nooga"), and the rags ("Snake," "High Society"). On the "Sobbin' 
Blues" he even got to play slide whistle; on the others he usually 
played second cornet back of Oliver's lead, an alternately delicate 
assist and blasting support. 

Like the proverbial second fiddler, however, Louis began to feel 
a little out of things with King Oliver, even with the solos he got upon 
occasion. He was glad to accept Fletcher Henderson's offer in 1924. 
"I had my own part for a change. 1 enjoyed it. It was fine." Louis 
really rolls off that "finnnnnnnne" when he recalls joining Smack. He 
left Chicago gleefully for New York and stayed with Smack for much 
of 1924 and most of 1925, adding a voice of such authority to the 
illustrious Henderson band that the records made during his tenure 
have properly come to be known as Fletcher's Louis Armstrong 
Period. Three of the best of some forty sides he recorded with 
Fletcher are in the Columbia album of Henderson reissues "Sugar 
Foot Stomp," "What-Cha-Call-Em Blues," and "Money Blues. There 
you can hear the lusty Louis who sat and blew beside Don Redman, 
Coleman Hawkins, Buster Bailey, and Big Green a powerful sound 
for the time, a handsome suggestion of things to come. 



74 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

"When them cats [the Henderson musicians] commenced getting 
careless with their music, fooling around all night, I was dragged, 
man. I went back to Chicago/* Four more years of Chicago, four 
hectic, hurried years of Windy jazz. He went back to a band at 
the Dreamland Cafe and to studying music with renewed interest 
and vigor and attachment. The interest and vigor and attachment 
were due partly to the leader of the band, Lil Harclin, with whom he 
studied and whom he married. His earlier marriage, to smart little 
Daisy Parker in New Orleans, had been short-lived, although he still 
sees Daisy on trips back home. 

From 1925 to 1929 Louis was a very busy man in Chicago. He was 
a recording name now. His sides with Smack and a batch with blues 
singers Bessie and Clara and Trixie Smith and Ma Rainey and Coot 
Grant and Maggie Jones and Sippie Wallace and Josephine Beatty 
and Eva Taylor and Virginia Liston, his work with Clarence Wil- 
liams' Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies had made him a name. 
He was entitled to his own recording band. First the band was Lil's, 
LiPs Hot Shots: then it was Louis Armstrong's Hot Five in 1925 and 
1926. It had the same personnel: Louis and Lil, Johnny Dodds, Kid 
Ory, and Johnny St. Cyr. It became the Plot Seven in 1927, with Pete 
Briggs on tuba and Baby Dodds added. It was the Hot Five again later 
in '27, and in '28 it reached its peak as a quintet, with Earl Hines and 
Zutty Singleton. 

In '26 and '27 Louis played a lot of trumpet. He was a part-time 
sideman with the large orchestra at the Vendome Theatre which 
Erskine Tate led, and with Ollie Powers, and then, in the spring of 
1926, he joined Carroll Dickerson's equally big band at the Sunset 
Cafe at Thirty -fifth and Calumet, which Joe Glaser owned. Earl 
Hines was on piano, and this is where he and Louis and Zutty formed 
their close musical and social partnership, a lasting association of 
sounds and ideas. It was at the Sunset too that they formed the busi- 
ness partnership with Joe Glaser which eventually made them all 
a lot of money. Louis took over the band at the Sunset when Dick- 
erson left. Then he had a short try with his own Hot Six at the Usonia, 
where "We went in business; we went out of business." The attempt 
to buck the newly opened and successful Savoy Ballroom started on 
Thanksgiving Day of 1927; it flopped his Hot Six died a cold death. 
Louis capitulated to the Savoy and Carroll Dickerson, rejoining the 
latter at the former. While he had unquestionably lost some cachet 



LOUIS 75 

in reassuming his status as somebody else's featured soloist, his recor2to 
were in such demand, there was such a commanding quality to his 
obbligatos for blues singers and choruses alone, that he was always 
on call for special jobs. He made numerous side-trips on Sundays to 
St. Louis, for a couple of days at a time to New York's Savoy Ball- 
room and to other places, to make extra money as an "Extra-Special 
Attraction One Night Only the Great Louis Armstrong!" 

In the spring of 1929 Louis or Pops or Satchmo or Gatemouth or 
Dippermouth, as he was variously called, depending on the juniority 
of the speaker or the degree of admiration for the cornetistV capacious 
lips and a number of the boys decided to cash in. They elected Louis 
leader and cut out for New York in a caravan of battered cars, Louis's 
Ford with glistening yellow wire wheels leading the procession. They 
arrived in time to greet the stock market crash. 

When they got to the big city the only work they could find at 
first was a job substituting for Duke Ellington at the Auburn Theatre 
in the Bronx. Duke's bass man, Wellman Braud, set that. But they 
didn't have to struggle. Shortly afterward, with a band hastily en- 
larged, came an engagement at Connie's Inn uptown, where they 
played through the first months of the depression. Then on to Cali- 
fornia Louis's first trip West to front Eddie Elkins' band, with 
Lawrence Brown on trombone, and "a little kid, a seventeen-year-old 
cat named Lionel Hampton, on drums." 

The next year, 193 1, Louis made his first trip back to New Orleans 
since leaving in 1922, with "a great band, a bunch of cats I picked up 
in Chicago on my way back from the Coast." They played the 
Suburban Gardens, an aptly named spot on the outskirts of town. ("I 
did my own radio announcing and everything!") He hit New York, 
played some dates as a single, recorded with Chick Webb's band for 
Victor. Then back to the Coast to take over the band led by alto 
saxophonist Les Hite, the same one Elkins had led, at the Los Angeles 
Cotton Club. 

This was 1932. In the summer of that year Louis went to Europe 
for the first time, then came back to New York after four months to 
do some more work as a single out of Chicago and New York. The 
next summer he went back to Europe with his third wife, Alpha, to 
stay until January 1935. Europe was a success, with one sad experience 
at the Holborn Empire Theatre in London, where Louis split his lip 
?nd played through one whole show, his shirt front covered with 



76 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

blood. "Mmmmmmmm, my chops was beat." He left behind at least 
one record he wants to hear again, his two-sided "On the Sunny Side 
of the Street." During the Nazi occupation of France Louis heard that 
Hugues Panassie had buried a large number of records as a precaution; 
he said, "That cat'd better unbury that record. If I tried a million 
times, I'd never make a 'Sunny Side' as good as that one." 

Leonard Feather, reminiscing years later about Louis's trips to 
Europe, wrote: 

There are few musicians in jazz history who owe more of their fame to 
Europe than Louis Armstrong. Though Louis was a big name in his own 
country for many years before his first transatlantic trip, nothing that had 
happened to him over here could compare with the wild acclaim that 
greeted him when he first poked his personable head around the edge of 
the curtain on a memorable first night at the London Palladium in the 
summer of 1932. ... Nobody knew what kind of a band Louis would 
have with him. All they knew was that this almost mythical American 
figure, whose voice and horn had enlivened a Parlophone record every 
month or so, was coming miraculously to life. As it turned out, the band 
assembled for Louis was nothing and nowhere. Later on he toured with 
two other combinations, one an all-white group which included most of 
the clique of Scottish musicians, many of whom for some mysterious 
reason were hipper than the Englishmen. Louis and Alpha were lionized 
wherever they went. . . . 

Louis's success in Great Britain was not entirely unqualified [however]. 
One noted and dyspeptic critic, Hannen Swaffer, wrote a bitter diatribe 
in a London daily describing how the "veins in Armstrong's neck stuck out 
like a gorged python" while he played, and failed to understand how peo- 
ple could consider that his performance of "Tiger Rag" was music. . . . 

Louis did a lot more through his visits than merely play a couple of suc- 
cessful tours. He paved the way for the other great American Negro 
musicians who came over in the following five years; he stimulated the 
interest and raised the standards of English musicians who need their en- 
couragement at first hand rather than through records. He made countless 
friends and made the same impression on everyone he met, that here was 
a man who, not blessed with the educational qualifications of the more 
fortunate, made his way in life through a combination of great artistry and 
a heart of unalloyed gold. 

When he got back to the States Louis picked up Luis Russell's 
orchestra and for the next ten years, with one or another variation 
of the original personnel, he toured America from coast to coast, from 
the downtown Connie's Inn in New York to the California Cotton 



LOUIS 77 

Club. In various sojourns on the West Coast he was featured in sev- 
eral movies, including Mae West's film Every Day's a Holiday, Going 
Places, Pennies from Heaven with Bing Crosby, Cabin in the Sky, 
Atlantic City, and New Orleans. Orson Welles, an ardent Louis fan, 
once had an idea for a film biography of Louis, but it never materi- 
alized. 

He made many records for Decca after 1935, most of them good. 
His band has been everything from awful to good, but he himself has 
almost always been wonderful, a musician's musician of taste and 
extraordinary skill, whose exquisite trumpet tone, easy melodic varia- 
tions on the melodies at hand, and marvelous gravel-throated singing 
style remain the identification of a large and original jazz personality. 
Occasionally, for one reason or another, Louis has not sounded ab- 
solutely right. At one point it was because he was kicking away sixty- 
five pounds and, in coming down from 230 to 165, he suffered pain 
and a resultant lack of physical control. At another time it was "beat- 
up chops" again. At one memorable point, the 1944 Esquire concert, 
it was poor matching of musical styles his against Roy Eldridge's, 
Art Tatum's, and Colcman Hawkins' and poor physical condition. 
But even at that concert, as records will attest, there were Armstrong 
moments. There will always be, as long as that inspired Satchel- or 
Dipper- or Gatemouth wraps itself around a horn. 

And there will always be warm friendships in his life, deep family 
loyalty, and a close attachment to those who have been good to him. 
Two joes retain his greatest respect and admiration: Joe Oliver, who 
sponsored him musically, sponsored and fostered and fathered him; 
and Joe Glascr, his employer of the Sunset Cafe days in Chicago in 
1926 and 1927 and from 1935 on his manager and one of his closest 
friends. "I can confide in him," says Louis; "I can trust him. He was a 
wonderful employer twenty years ago; he's a great manager today." 
The feeling is mutual; Glaser swears by Louis; he would do just about 
anything for him, a kind of dedication that most people who get to 
know Louis well sooner or later feel toward him. 

Good friends, good food, easy living these simple but not always 
easily attainable comforts command Louis's life, and over them all 
looms music. He loves playing it and singing it. And he loves talking 
about it, running over his own experiences and discussing all kinds of 
music with infectious enthusiasm in his rumbling, syllable-crumbling 
bass voice, with rich diction and ready laugh. But Louis is loath to 



78 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

choose an all-star band, not at all sure that there are "bests" on any 
horn. "Fm not drastic, like some of the critics," he says. "Each of the 
cats has his style, and there are lots of wonderful ones, lotsa styles 
that send me." He likes Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter on alto; 
Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins on tenor; Benny Goodman, 
Artie Shaw, and Prince Robinson (a "fine cat from the old school") 
on clarinet; with Carney ("of course") on baritone; Teagarden and 
George Washington on trombone; Tatum and Wilson and Earl Hines 
("Pops") on piano; Al Casey and Lawrence Lucie on guitar ("that's 
all I've heard"), and Pettiford ("a very good man") on bass. On 
drums, "there's a million." 

Trumpet? "You know what King Oliver said to me? 'You gotta 
play that lead sometimes. Play the melody, play the lead, and learn.' 
And that's what I like to hear, sometimes anyway. Some of that fan- 
tastic stuff, when they tear out from the first note and you ask your- 
self 4 What the hell's he playing?' that's not for me. Personally, I 
wouldn't play that kinda horn if I played a hundred years; you don't 
have to worry about my stealing those riffs. So you see, I like a trum- 
peter like Shelton Hemphill, with Duke. He takes his music serious. 
He's the best first man of our race, best we have. Then there's Red 
Allen. And, because I believe in going ahead, all right, there's Roy 
[EldridgeJ. I really give Roy credit; he's trying to lead 'em all." 

What about the musicians Louis played with when he first started? 
How would they stand up today? How do they stand up today? 
"Most of us," Louis says, "the musicians of that time, couldn't stand 
the gaff today the pace is too fast for 'em today. They wouldn't 
hold your interest now the way they did then. You can't go back 
thirty years, man. It's all right for a novelty. But missing notes and 
not caring nothin', not a damn, about 'em, you can't play music like 
that nowadays. Take me back thirty years I could play that stuff 
with one finger! Why, I'd live forever! Rut why should I go back? 
I want to stay up with the times. Every once in a while I lay an old- 
fashioned phrase on 'em, but music's better now than it used to be, it's 
better played now. Whether it's arranged or improvised, the music 
of today is way ahead of what it used to be. We've advanced a lot 
since the early days. Music should be played all kinds of ways, any- 
way. Symphonic stuff, beautiful things, everything goes. If there are 
people who want to omit arrangements, omit scored backgrounds, 
omit any kind of music, you tell 'em I said, 4 Omit those people!' " 




ACROSS THE TRACKS 



When you hear a battered old upright piano clanking away in a bar- 
room scene in a Western motion picture, you're probably listening to 
ragtime. This is the music so long thought to be directly responsible, 
all by itself, for jazz. This is the music that was actually a part of 
jazz. This is the music that Jelly Roll Morton and all the piano pro- 
fessors played in Storyville. This is the music that Buddy Bolden 
played and that another one of the fathers of New Orleans jazz, Papa 
Jack Laine, picked up and shaped into a tradition all its own. 

Ragtime isn't very difficult to understand, though sometimes it is 
difficult listening for ears trained to another kind of jazz. Basically, 
it's a series of syncopations, syncopations on the off beats, the weak 
second and fourth beats of the bar, by the right hand against syncopa- 
tions emphasizing the strong beats, the first and third of the four in 
the bar, in the left hand, syncopations that don't stop, that keep going 
and changing and moving ahead from the first bar of a ragtime per- 
formance to the last. Ragtime is essentially a piano music. It was picked 
up by all the other instruments and moved around to all the voices of 
the jazz band, but it started on the piano, and it achieved its greatest 
distinction as piano music. 

The genesis of ragtime is the same as the beginning of all of jazz 
in hymns and hunting songs, spirituals and coon songs, minstrelsy 
and marches. But the place in which it had its most significant early 
impetus was not New Orleans; it was played in the "tenderloin," the 
red-light district, the "sporting men's" home of another town. The 
town was Sedalia, Missouri, a Western town by Eastern standards, 
with a main street that was convertible from agricultural commerce 
by day to sporting life by night. The man who more than any other 
was responsible for the quality and success of ragtime was Scott 
Joplin. 

79 



80 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Scott Joplin, who settled in Sedalia in 1 896, published more than 
fifty ragtime compositions, but he is best known, now as during his 
lifetime, by the second to reach print, his "Maple Leaf Rag." Both this 
and the first to be published, "Original Rags," came out in 1899. 
Joplin wrote a variety of music songs that suggest Stephen Foster's 
ballads, waltzes, what he called a "Mexican Serenade," and music for 
the slow drag, the dance evolved by Negroes to be done to ragtime 
as well as an instruction book called School of Ragtime. An intelligent 
man and proud of his heritage, he called one of his rags, "The Chrysan- 
themum, an Afro- American Intermezzo." In 1903 his first opera was 
performed in St. Louis. Called A Guest of Honor, it was described by 
its composer as "A Ragtime Opera." In 1911 his unperformed opera, 
Treemonisha, was published by John Stark, his publisher and patron 
and good friend. A three-act opera, it retains the Aristotelian unities: 
it takes place during the morning, afternoon, and evening of one day; 
all of it is laid on a plantation in Arkansas; and it has one story line. 
The narrative, which Joplin identified in parentheses on the title page 
as a Story Fictitious, is of a Negro couple named Ned and Monisha, 
who deal intelligently with their freedom after the Civil War. The 
title refers to a baby found by Monisha under a tree before her cabin, 
named after herself and the tree, who is educated and grows up to be 
a leader of her people. 

Scott Joplin died in 1917, the year Storyville was closed and rag- 
rime lost its following, a year pivotal in the large and the small for 
the American people. In the years before Joplin's death in the Man- 
hattan State Hospital in New York, a generation of able ragtime 
pianists grew up: Tom Turpin, Louis Chavuin, Ben Harney, Scott 
Hayden, James Scott, and Luckcy Roberts, the flashy ragtimer Duke 
Ellington imitated so successfully that traces of the imitation still 
remain in his playing and gestures. Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jack- 
son, who figured in other aspects of the jazz story, were essentially 
adept ragtime pianists. James P. Johnson, the New Jersey boy who 
grew up to be a considerable jazz pianist and Fats Waller's teacher, is 
entirely in the ragtime tradition. The list is long and impressive, and 
the music these men wrote and the way they played other men's 
music are still part of jazz, at this point so subtly interwoven with 
the music of the modern players who did not grow up as ragtimers 
that it can be identified only as contrasting rhythms, one of the abid- 
ing graces of jazz form. 



ACROSS THE TRACKS 81 

There were special places that ragtime pianists made their playing 
homes; two were the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia and the Rosebud in 
St. Louis. As the Royal Gardens Cafe in Chicago was immortalized in 
the "Royal Garden Blues," and as the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem was 
immortalized in Edgar Sampson's "Stompin' at the Savoy,'* so Scott 
Joplin made the Sedalia club famous in the "Maple Leaf Rag" and 
the St. Louis cafe famous in his "Rosebud March." In these places and 
others ragtime players fashioned their repertory, one that was played 
and made a permanent part of jazz by white musicians. Joplin's 
"Maple Leaf Rag" and Joseph Lamb's "Sensation Rag" are two of 
the most famous rags still played by Dixieland musicians. Eubie Blake, 
one of the most talented of the musicians to be influenced by Joplin 
and Lamb and the other ragtime composers, wrote the score for the 
enormously successful all-Negro musical of 1921, Shuffle Along. 
Noble Sissle, later famous as a band leader, constructed a superb rag- 
time lyric for one of the songs in that show, "I'm Just Wild About 
Harry," which has the lilt and drive of the great rags. 

The first distinguished white band in New Orleans, the direct pred- 
ecessor of the more famous Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was Jack 
Laine's Ragtime Band, which was gathering musical ideas and skill 
and an audience at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning 
of the twentieth, at the same time the music after which it was named 
was maturing. Laine, who was born in 1873, and his son Alfred en- 
listed at one time or another up through the First World War the 
talents of just about all the white jazzmen in New Orleans and en- 
virons. His Reliance Brass Band, and later his Ragtime Band, played 
carnivals, marches, just about all the functions a band that could keep 
you dancing or marching could play. Two Negroes, Dave Perkins 
and Achille Baquet, wandered into the Laine band for long periods, 
but were apparently so white of skin and so blue of eye that they 
passed unnoticed except as musicians. It was with Laine's band that 
the famous Dixieland tune, "The Livery Stable Blues," emerged; then 
it was known as "Meatball Blues." They also played the ragged 
quadrille called "Tiger Rag"; they called it "Praline," after the famous 
New Orleans sweet and bumpy raggy candy. It was Laine's outfit 
that got most of the "advertising-wagon" work; its ragtime accents, 
its blary sound, told all New Orleans about a forthcoming prize fight, 
about a restaurant, about a dance, about a Sunday night social, about 
some new kind of food or furniture. And the "tailgate" trombonist 



82 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

was always perched on the back seat of the advertising wagon, tossing 
his slide out behind the other musicians so he wouldn't hack their 
necks or spear their eyes in the cramped quarters behind him. 

Papa Laine, in 1951 a handsome white-haired man in his seventies, 
still remembers his hectic, happy life of four and five decades ago. He 
was a kind of small-town Meyer Davis, leading some bands, contract- 
ing others. At one time he had two or three brass bands going for him 
and several outfits that played for dancing. He ran a minstrel show at 
times and played music for the circus. He himself was a drummer; 
Lawrence Vega was his cornetist, Achille Baquet his clarinetist, 
Dave Perkins his trombonist; Morton Abraham played the guitar, and 
Willie Guitar played the bass. In his Reliance Band he had the famous 
clarinetist Alcide Nunez, known as "Yellow" to his intimates be- 
cause of his complexion, not his character. These musicians are re- 
membered with affection by Laine, their leader, and by others who 
heard them: Vega for his felicity of phrase, sweetness of tone, and 
drive; Baquet for his punchy staccato playing; Perkins for that brash 
style which came to be known as barrelhouse or gutbucket; Abraham 
for his poignancy, possibly out of his Mexican background; Guitar 
for his wit, on and off the bass, some of which may have been coin- 
cidental, such as the fact that he lived on Music Street. In 1951 Nunez 
was still known around Chicago, where he had come in 1914, for his 
blues and ragtime skill on the clarinet. 

A band which consisted largely of ex-Laine musicians and which 
preceded the Original Dixielanders to Chicago was Brown's Dixie- 
land Jass Band; as early as 1915 it played at the Lambs* Cafe in the 
Windy City. This band was a direct outgrowth of an outfit that 
backed the old vaudeville act of Frisco and McDermott; it was Frisco 
who sold the Brown band to Chicago cafe owners. In Tom Brown's 
outfit Larry Shields made his -first Northern appearance and demon- 
strated some of the wooden-toned clarinet authority that later became 
quite famous with the Original Dixieland group. The six-piece band, 
in addition to the clarinet (first Gus Mueller, then Shields) and the 
leader's trombone, consisted of Ray Lopez on cornet, Arnold Loyo- 
cano, who doubled on bass and piano, and the drummer Bill Lambert. 
Most important, it was with this band that "jazz" emerged as a term 
to describe the semi-raucous, always rhythmic, and quite infectious 
music these men played. When the band came to Chicago, directly 
from New Orleans, the word "jass" had a semi-sordid sexual conno- 



ACROSS THE TRACKS 83 

tation. Chicago Musicians Union officials decided that the competi- 
tion was neither necessary nor tolerable. They thought that labeling 
this group a jass or jazz band would be a very successful smear. But 
their attempt to disparage the Brown band failed; the term caught on, 
and Brown's Dixieland Band became Brown's Dixieland Jass Band, 
an exciting purveyor of a new kind of music with a new name as 
virile as the sounds it described. 

When Yellow Nunez came up to Chicago in 1916 he brought up 
most of the future members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band: 
Dominick James (Nick) LaRocca on cornet, Eddie (Daddy) Ed- 
wards on trombone, Henry Ragas on piano, and Anton Lada on 
drums. The band played briefly at the Casino Gardens in Chicago, 
and during this engagement Nunez and Lada left the band because of 
a disagreement over money, and perhaps because they thought they 
were better suited to a band entirely their own. 

Lada and Nunez sent to New Orleans for a trombonist (Charlie 
Panelli), a banjo player (Karl Kalberger), and a pianist (Joe 
Cawley). They took their new musicians with them to the Athenia 
Cafe, where they ran at least half a year in 1915, then came to New 
York to play at Bustanoby's Restaurant, at Thirty-ninth Street and 
Broadway. In New York they took the name of the Louisiana Five 
and made a series of records for the Columbia, Emerson, and Edison 
companies. Some were in the laughing tradition, "Be-Hap-E" and 
"Clarinet Squawk"; some were closer to sorrow, "Blues My Naughty 
Sweetie Gives to Me" and "Weary Blues." The Louisiana Five boasted 
an able clarinetist in Nunez and an unusually well-equipped drummer 
in Lada. After the Five disbanded, in 1924, Lada went on to write 
some fine Dixieland songs, to spend five years in Hollywood as musi- 
cal director of two radio stations, and then to settle down as a song- 
writer and reminiscent musician. 

When Shields joined up in place of Nunez, the Dixieland Jass Band, 
first at the Schiller Cafe, then at the DeLobbie Cafe, was all set except 
for an exchange of drummers, Tony Sbarbaro (Spargo) for Johnny 
Stein, who had been the first replacement for Lada. With Daddy Ed- 
wards as manager and Nick LaRocca as musical guiding hand, the 
ODJB made off for New York and the glamorous Reisenweber's just 
off Columbus Circle, replacing the Brown band, which was first of- 
fered the job. The ODJB was an immediate success. Dancers found 
its music infectious, party givers found jass to their liking as a noisy 



84 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

background for noisy drinking and talking. The Victor and Aeolian 
companies both recorded the band. 

Its first two Victor record sides, made in February 1917, summed 
up the band's music: there were the inevitable "Livery Stable Blues" 
(nee "Meatball") and "Dixie Jass Band One-Step." A few days 
later, the band had the date at which its best-known recording, Nick 
LaRocca's "Tiger Rag," was made. There were also the "Ostrich 
Walk," "At the Jazz Band Ball," "Sensation Rag," and "Skeleton 
Jangle," all classics today, all still played wherever musicians indulge 
in Dixieland. At later record sessions in 1918, before it went to Europe, 
the band originated its famous "Clarinet Marmalade," "Fidgety Feet," 
and "Barnyard Blues." No other tunes that came out of its members' 
heads ever hit again like these. It had only one other record side that 
was quite such an epoch-making affair, and that was some years later 
when the declining band recorded "Margie," with "Palesteena" over- 
leaf. 

There were changes in this band before it left for Europe. Pianist 
Henry Ragas, who was, in one of the unfortunate jazz traditions, an 
enormous drinker, died in his hotel room in February 1919, and was 
replaced by several men, who in turn made way for J. Russell Robin- 
son. Daddy Edwards had no eyes for Europe, so Emil Christian took 
over his trombone role. 

The band got to England in March 1919, and was featured in the 
musical Joy Bells, which was otherwise noteworthy only for its most 
successful song, "The Bells of St. Mary's." The band played at places 
like Rector's and the 400 Club and became something of a pet diver- 
sion of London society. 

When it came back to New York after nearly two years of Eng- 
land and Paris, the band began to struggle some and to make a 
few changes of style and personnel. At last the saxophone made its 
appearance, played by Benny Krueger, who doubled on alto and tenor 
saxes. The Dixielanders went commercial in the most invidious sense; 
they were soon a "true fox trot band." They played what was popular 
and what was successful, and by the time they got to the Balconades 
on Columbus Avenue at Sixty -sixth Street in 1923 they were more 
distinguished for their old tunes, which they still played, though with 
little of the old energy "Tiger Rag," "At the Jazz Band Ball," "Jazz 
Me Blues" and of course the "Livery Stable Blues" than they were 
for the actual quality of their performance. Frank Signorelli, who 



ACROSS THE TRACKS 85 

figured in bands of some jazz importance for the next ten years, re- 
placed Russell Robinson on piano; Larry Shields and Nick LaRocca 
went South, where they found Robinson on the police force, and 
Daddy Edwards followed them shortly after and wound up coaching 
various athletic teams at the New Orleans YMCA. Just before the 
Dixielanders broke up, Bix Beiderbecke wandered into the Balconades 
and heard them play the tunes that he was to play and reinvigorate in 
the following years. 

The Original Dixieland Band had not been a great success in its 
home town, New Orleans, which is why it assumed the "Dixieland" 
tag rather than the name of its home town. This name has ever since 
been associated with music that is more or less a direct product of 
their performances. What they played was often deliberately funny, 
imitating animal sounds in the "Barnyard Blues," human sounds in 
most of the other pieces. Theirs was a kind of comedy drama without 
dialogue, but full of amusing, identifiable sound, marked for farcical 
conflict and belly-laugh climax. It is today a good deal less contra- 
puntal in its structure, and it has lost its drive because the greater 
jazzmen who followed discovered that playing a straight unaccented 
four-to-the-bar gets a much better beat than the weak-and-strong 
playing, the so-called two-beat, of the Dixie musicians. With the ex- 
ception of the Luncef ord two-beat, which wasn't even vaguely Dixie- 
land but depended on dotted strong beats anticipations, as they are 
called for its drive, two-beat jazz has lost its fire. It sustained musi- 
cians for about ten or twelve years after the dissolution of the Original 
Dixieland Jazz Band and then collapsed of its own inherent rhythmic 
weakness. 

But today, if one listens to the records of the Original Dixieland 
Band without prejudice, it is almost impossible to deny the extraor- 
dinary vitality and the linear strength of the music that went along 
with the comedy. Regarded only historically, the records are excit- 
ing. They reflect the contagious conviction of the five musicians; the 
skill of a facile clarinetist, Larry Shields, in the Picou tradition, with 
surer technique and larger musicianship; and above all, close attention 
to the oldest business in music, that of setting melodic line against 
melodic line. With none of the sophistication and very few of the 
resources of the baroque masters who created their intricate counter- 
point out of the heritage of the Gregorian chant, the New Orleans 
boys nonetheless understood the essential strength of linear writing. 



86 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

When, through the din of pre-electric recording, you hear LaRocca's 
cornet play the melody lead, Shields echo it an octave higher, Ed- 
wards underscore it an octave lower, and the piano give it a kind of 
ground bass, you feel the essential strength, the musical trueness of 
this form. Relying on trite melodies, the Dixielanders were fortunate 
in having the blue notes of the blues and the intense steadiness of 
rhythm that has always characterized good jazz. These things, ex- 
pressed in a rough counterpoint, make the Original Dixieland Jazz 
Band still hearable today, in spite of the crudities of such originals as 
the "Tiger Rag" and the inanities of "At the Jazz Band Ball" and 
"Jazz Me Blues." 

The New Orleans Rhythm Kings came up to Chicago four years 
after the Original Dixielanders. They differed very little from the 
Original Dixieland Jazz Band; their music was much the same, their 
ensemble drive was much less, but two of their soloists were more 
gifted than any of the Dixielanders. Paul Mares was the leader of the 
band, which opened in 1921 at Friars' Inn on the near-north side of 
Chicago, a couple of blocks away from Michigan Avenue and the 
Art Institute. Mares was the leader, but no star. His outstanding men 
were Leon Rappolo, the clarinetist, and George Brunies, the trom- 
bonist. Mares played trumpet, Jack Pettis played the saxophones 
chiefly C-melody Elmer Schoebel was the pianist and arranged such 
of the numbers as were arranged, Lew Black played banjo, Steve 
Brown bass, and Frank Snyder drums. The band played at Friars' Inn 
for more than two years, and before it was finished as an organization 
it had the distinction of bringing Ben Pollack into the band picture 
as its drummer and offering numerous examples in each of its instru- 
mentalists to the distinguished jazz musicians who grew up in Chicago 
in the next decade. Today the Rhythm Kings' records offer little but 
Rappolo's clarinet and Brumes' trombone; the ensemble sounds weak 
and the inspiration lags. When you realize that these musicians played 
together for four years after the last vigorous performances of the 
Original Dixieland group, it is no compliment to them to mark the 
lack of originality. Remaining members may take great pride, how- 
ever, in the fact that they nurtured Leon Rappolo and played with 
Brunies when he was at his best. 

Leon Joseph Rappolo was born in New Orleans on March 16, 1902, 
the son of a concert artist, the grandson of a clarinetist, and from the 
very beginning a character about whom legends inevitably grow. He 



ACROSS THE TRACKS 87 

started as a violinist and switched to clarinet in emulation of his 
grandfather; he took some lessons and at fourteen decided he was 
good enough to play in a pit band. He ran away from home to prove 
his professional stature, and joined the band that was playing for 
Bea Palmer's act on the Orpheum Circuit; she was one of the big names 
of 1916 vaudeville, and her husband-pianist, Al Siegel, has since been 
associated with a large number of successful popular singers only 
vaguely related to jazz. Rappolo was found by the police of Hatties- 
burg, Mississippi, and, in accordance with his parents' orders, brought 
back to New Orleans. There, a few years later, he played at the 
Halfway House with Albert Brunies' band, which trained one 
Brunies brother after another but none of brother George's quality 
on various jazz instruments. In this band Leon started and, after 
his trip to Chicago, ended. With the Halfway House orchestra he 
played some guitar and snare drum as well as clarinet, and he quickly 
won the admiration of all the musicians he played with and many 
he didn't. Just before the New Orleans Rhythm Kings opened at 
Friars' Inn they persuaded Rappolo to join them, and he stayed with 
them a couple of years until, sick in mind and wandering in responsi- 
bility, he went back to New Orleans to join the Halfway House or- 
chestra of Albert Brunies again. After a brief stay, it was obvious that 
a mental hospital was the only safe place for Rappolo, and he was 
incarcerated in one until his death in 1941. 

The legends about Rappolo are numerous and just about all un- 
proven. The best known is about his performance on telephone wires 
while a friend listened, his ear on one of the poles, applauding each 
well-turned telephone-wire phrase. From stories like this and from 
Rappolo's unquestionable clarinet authority, engendered by a large 
tone and a sense of phrasing, came an enormous reputation. Fortu- 
nately we have some recorded proof of Rappolo's skill to sustain it. 

We don't have anything but a few oldsters' words for the alleged 
brilliance of Emmett Hardy, the trumpeter and cornetist who played 
briefly with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings at Friars' Inn, and on 
riverboats, where they say he was Bix Beiderbecke's strongest and 
most direct influence. The influence apparently lay in Hardy's pre- 
ciseness and sweetness of tone and soft attack all qualities of Bix's 
playing. 

George Clarence Brunies, who was born two years before Rappolo 
in New Orleans, also came of a musical family. He joined the New 



88 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Orleans Rhythm Kings when the band started in 1919, and stayed 
with them through their most important years, leaving them in 1923, 
two years before the last records of this group were made. From the 
very beginning his style was molded by an enormous tone, made 
burly by his pulverizing slide technique and his cheek-contorting 
blowing. For twelve years, from 1923 to 1935, Brunies languished in 
the Ted Lewis band, never, even at its best, a jazz orchestra of any 
distinction. Finally, with the success of the hit song "The Music Goes 
Round and Round" at Christmastime in 1935 an d the subsequent sen- 
sation that Benny Goodman caused, ushering in the big-band "swing" 
craze, there were jobs again for the New Orleans tailgate artist in 
legitimate jazz bands. With the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, at the 
beginning of his career, as later, Brunies made funny noises with his 
horn and topped the infectious caterwaul with a clown act in which 
he slid the trombone over its various positions with his foot, lying 
on the floor to do it and thereby performing a feat that was as amus- 
ing, and as successful musically, as Joe Venuti's nimble bowing of the 
four strings of the fiddle at once. In later years, guided by a numer- 
ologist, Brunies changed the spelling of his first name, dropping the 
final e, and removed the e in his second name, to end up with the 
name of Georg Brunis. His playing remained unchanged, blowzy as 
ever, funny as ever, and just as strongly dependent upon a two-beat 
rhythm. 

The line between the humor of these Dixieland musicians the 
ODJB's animal imitations or George Brunies' clowning and pure 
corn is a very thin one. To the undiscriminating ear it is sometimes 
difficult to tell the difference between the clumsy, grossly syncopated 
excesses of the clarinetists Boyd Center and Fess Williams and the 
trumpeter Clyde McCoy, on the one hand, and the dramatic, some- 
times touching, sometimes -amusing two-beat cadences of Shields, 
Rappolo, or Brunies. There are two kinds of music, however, of which 
the pseudo-Dixieland, really corny musicians are entirely incapable. 
None of them can ever achieve the poignancy, the searing pathos of 
a first-rate Dixieland ballad or blues, the kind of torch that in later 
years was carried by Jack Teagarden on trombone and Bobby 
Hackett on cornet and trumpet. None of them, not even Spike Jones, 
who knows better and is satirizing rather than imitating Dixieland, 
is capable of the lilting humor of Dixieland at its best, when it is 
burly and boisterous and wonderfully ribald all at once. George 



ACROSS THE TRACKS 89 

Brunies* tailgate flatulence is amusing in those ways. Whole choruses 
of ODJB records and ensemble sections of New Orleans Rhythm 
Kings records are delightful in such a fashion, in knockdown and 
dragout choruses, at the ends of performances, the so-called ride-outs, 
and again in the turbulence and tumult and general good humor of a 
well-performed "Clarinet Marmalade 7 ' or "Jazz Band Ball' 1 or "Os- 
trich Walk." These are the qualities that the white New Orleans musi- 
cians had, which became the Dixieland canon: humor sometimes 
tongue-in-check, sometimes burlesque, and a pleasant nostalgia that 
sometimes became a more meaningful sorrow. Whatever the final 
limitations of their style, the music that these musicians brought to 
Chicago was rich in at least two of the eternal emotions. 




DIASPORA 



Thou . . . shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth. (Deuter- 
onomy 28:25.) 

The kcelboats couldn't have done it. They were only forty to eighty 
feet long and seven to ten feet across, and they had very few passenger 
cabins when they had any at all. It took three or four months to get 
upstream from New Orleans to Louisville, though the return trip 
could be made in a month. The keelboatmen of the first decades of 
the nineteenth century were characters all right; they flung them- 
selves against the river, they danced, they fiddled, they flirted, they 
fought anybody and everybody Indians, river pirates, and towns- 
men. They produced a great legendary figure, Mike Fink, the king 
of the keelboatmen, and they carried one of the important early 
strains of American music a long way. The keelboatmen did well by 
the boating songs and the levee songs, but there weren't enough of 
them, and their boats were too small, to carry a freight as heavy as 
jazz, or even its musical ancestors, the spirituals and the worksongs 
and the minstrel melodies. But the steamboats were big enough and 
went far enough often enough; they were the logical vehicles of jazz 
dispersion. 

When the New Orleans left Pittsburgh for the Gulf of Mexico, in 
1811, the steamboat arrived on the Mississippi River. By the middle 
of the 18205 a hundred or more steamboats were chugging along the 
Mississippi and the other rivers of the Middle West. By the late 18305 
the steamboat route reached along the upper Mississippi to what is 
now St. Paul; excursions became popular all along the Mississippi 
splendid day's outings, more varied and energetic in their entertain- 
ment than any other obtainable. Depending on which excursion you 
took and from where, you might see Indians and the beginnings of 
new settlements, and if there wasn't adequate entertainment on the 

oo 



DIASPORA 91 

boat you could always go ashore to dance and sing and laugh or watch 
others do so. The Mississippi steamboats were handsome; they had 
their own distinctive architecture and interior decoration. Mark 
Twain, whose Life on the Mississippi fixed the riverboat forever in 
American literature, was fervent about the look of the boats. The 
cabins were hospital-white, with that antiseptic shine that only sailors 
know how to get, carried right down to the porcelain knobs on all 
the doors. There were filigree work and gilt, the glittering prisms of 
chandeliers, and in the ladies' cabins, as Twain described them, "pink 
and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravish- 
ing pattern of gigantic flowers." Although frayed a little here and 
there, not quite so glittering, the white streaked a bit, most of this 
luxury was preserved in the steamboats of the first decades of the 
twentieth century, and businessmen who took the long trip or families 
who boarded for short excursions still expected remarkable enter- 
tainment and got it. 

The names of the first New Orleans jazz musicians to play the 
riverboats are unknown today. But sometime about the end of the 
first decade or the beginning of the second of the twentieth century, 
a band we know something about began to play the boats. The leader 
was "Sugar Johnny," a powerful cornetist whose playing in all senses 
of the word sent him to early retirement and obscurity. He was done 
for by drink and ladies and those loud bursts of sound that only the 
most disciplined brassman can get away with. He had two capable 
men, Roy Palmer on trombone and Laurence Dewey on clarinet; 
Louis Keppard on guitar, Wellman Braud on bass, and Minor Hall 
on drums. Braud was a St. James, Louisiana, boy who had played 
violin in string trios at the Terminal House and Tom Anderson's 
Annex in Storyville. Hall not to be confused with the other famous 
New Orleans drummer of that name, Fred "Tubby" Hall made his 
biggest splash a few years later with King Oliver's band in Chicago; 
he was nicknamed "Ram." Sugar Johnny's band settled in Chicago 
in 1916, after doing its share of the vaudeville circuit, and added, on 
piano, Lil Hardin, a smart young woman from Memphis who had 
come to Chicago to finish the work in music she had begun at Fisk 
University and had been lured away from her classical studies by 
jazz. 

The biggest of the riverboat orchestras, and the most important for 
jazz, was put together in St. Louis by the pianist Fate Marable. Essen- 



92 A HISTORY OF JAZZ EN AMERICA 

tially a dance and show band, Marable's often made room for the 
most distinguished of New Orleans musicians Louis Armstrong, 
Pops Foster, Johnny St. Cyr, Baby Dodds, and Picou. Known at 
times as the Jaz-E-Saz Band, this group swung vigorously down the 
river. Davey Jones, who played the mellophone, a curious combina- 
tion of French horn and cornet, moved around that sweet and soft 
instrument almost as fast as Louis Armstrong did on the cornet. Percie 
Sud is recalled by Duke Ellington as a cornetist who "ended up by 
stealing everybody's stuff, so slick was he," but Louis played too 
much to steal more than fragments. One of the stories about Louis's 
playing with Marable, almost certainly true, was that he used to start 
playing his choruses at Alton, Illinois, fifteen miles out of St. Louis, 
and would still be playing them when the boat tied up at the St. Louis 
dock. Boyd Atkins, who played soprano sax and clarinet with Fate 
for a while, is famous for his authorship of "Heebie Jeebies," which 
he and Lionel Hampton freshened in later years, and for at least one 
record side with Louis Armstrong, his riverboat colleague, "Chicago 
Breakdown," on which he played the soprano. 

All the strands were tied together in Chicago. The riverboats 
brought one crew of New Orleans musicians; others came and went 
by other means, and eventually settled down. Before Sugar Johnny's 
group settled down at the Dreamland Cafe, George Filhe, the New 
Orleans trombonist who in 1913 had arrived in Chicago as a cigar- 
maker, organized a six-piece band at the Fountain Inn in 1916. Like 
so many of the other bands of the period, Filhe's group played at the 
Arsonia Cafe after it had finished its regular job at the Fountain. In 
1916 Emanuel Perez took a five-piece band into the Deluxe Cafe on 
State Street near Thirty-fifth, the crossroads of the jazz world in 
Chicago. After hours Perez's New Orleans quintet played at the Pekin 
theater-cabaret, up on State near Twenty-sixth Street, home for 
fifteen years before that of every kind of Negro entertainment the 
drama, the musical revue, vaudeville, dance bands, and singers and 
jazz groups. The best of these bands, the one that really set the jazz 
pace, was the one that the bass player in the Original Creole Band, 
Bill Johnson, formed in 1918. 

The Original Creole musicians found themselves in Chicago in 1918 
after a long tour with the Toivn Topics Revue, which the Shuberts 
had sent on the road. They had had all they could take of the road 
and, like musicians in dance bands many years later, looked around 



DIASPORA 93 

for jobs that would permit them to remain in one place, namely 
Chicago, for a long time. Johnson found a job at the Royal Gardens 
Cafe on Thirty-first Street near Cottage Grove. He took two men 
who had played with the Original Creoles, Jimmy Noone and trom- 
bonist Eddie Venson, added pianist Roddy Taylor and New Orleans 
drummer Paul Barbarin. Then he sent down to jazz's home town for 
his cornetist, Joe Oliver. Oliver was an after-hours doubler too; in 
the early morning he went into the Dreamland Cafe, where he played 
with Sidney Bechet and Weldon Braud and others come up from the 
Crescent City. In 1920 Oliver made the famous move to the Dream- 
land with Johnny Dodds and trombonist Honore Dutrcy, the bass 
player Ed Garland, Fate Marable's drummer Minor Hall, and the 
pianist who had joined Sugar Johnny in Chicago, Lil Hardm. In 192 i, 
in California, where Oliver spread the jazz word, Baby Dodds re- 
placed Hall on drums. In the middle of 1922 Louis Armstrong left the 
Jaz-E-Saz riverboat band to settle down with King Oliver; with him, 
jazz came to stay in Chicago. 

They were all there. Freddie Keppard and Jimmy Noone were 
playing together at the Royal Gardens in 1920, and two years later 
joined Doc Cook, originally Charles L. Cooke, about a mile north 
at the Dreamland Cafe. In 1922 there were a lot of fine bands around 
the south side of Chicago, the Negro section. At the Red Mill Cafe 
trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, trombonist Roy Palmer, and pianist 
Teddy Weatherford, Earl Hines' idol, were the better half of a six- 
piece band. Bands that never recorded, like Junie Cobb's, with the 
clarinetist Darnell Howard, later a fixture in the Earl Hines band and 
in Chicago clubs, were playing viable jazz in the New Orleans tra- 
dition. Trumpeters very well spoken of by those who heard them, 
such as Bobby Williams and Willie Hightower, Bob Shaffner and 
Cliff Matthew, were carrying on the heroic traditions of New 
Orleans cornetists, were receiving something like adulation from their 
friends, but never a record contract. W. C. Handy and Jelly Roll 
Morton joined forces long enough about this time to make some 
Midwestern tours out of Chicago, but not to record. 

At the ballrooms and the parks and the municipal pier, indoors and 
outdoors, big bands were playing concert music and dance music and 
giving the New Orleans soloists their share of free rides. Charles 
Elgar's Creole Band played the Dreamland Ballroom for five years 
until 1922, and when he moved on to the Green Mill, on the north 



94 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

side, Doc Cook took over with men like Freddie Keppard and Jimmy 
Noonc in his band. Cook, who had been in charge of the music at 
Riverview Park from 1918 to 1921, stayed four years at Dreamland 
before moving on for a little more than three at the White City Ball- 
room, where he was the object of the musical affection of most of 
the young white jazzmen growing up in Chicago in the decade be- 
tween 1920 and 1930. But the biggest of these big band leaders was 
Erskine Tate at the Vendome Theatre from 1918 to 1929. His musi- 
cians' names read like a roll call of the best in Chicago in that decade: 
Freddie Keppard and Louis Armstrong and two other celebrated 
trumpeters, Ruben Reeves and Jabbo Smith; pianists Teddy Weather- 
ford, the man to whom he meant so much, Earl Hines, and Fats 
Waller; clarinetists Darnell Howard, Buster Bailey, and Omer Simeon. 
The swinging Vendome syncopaters took over the stage for shows 
as long as two hours between movies and showed their audiences 
how a band as large as fifteen pieces could retain the improvisatory 
spirit of New Orleans jazz. Some of that quality is evident in the 
single record made by the band in 1926, "Stomp Off, Let's Go/* and 
"Static Strut." 

Along with the brilliant Negro jazz bands, from 1914 on the found- 
ing fathers of white Dixieland were playing around Chicago. First 
there was Tom Brown and His Jass Band; then came the Nunez-Lada 
group, and shortly afterward the Original Dixieland Band. Full 
fruition of this music came when the original members of the New 
Orleans Rhythm Kings met clarinetist Leon Rappolo in Davenport, 
Iowa, and succeeded in bringing him with them to open at Friars' 
Inn. 

After the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, one more white band held 
the stage as jazz made its way from the brothel to the box office. This 
was the Wolverines' Orchestra, organized in late 1923. It played in 
New York in 1924, at the Cinderella Dance Hall, at which time Bix 
Beiderbecke, its star, went over to the Balconades to hear the Original 
Dixielanders, and Red Nichols went over to the Cinderella to hear Bix. 
But their story is a part of Bix's and must be dealt with later, in that 
context. 

The blues singers came through Chicago from time to time too, 
and sometimes stayed for long runs. Probably more than any other 
group, these singers sent jazz down the main streets and back lanes, 
into the front parlors and hall bedrooms of America. Looking at them 



DIASPORA 95 

and listening to them, it wasn't hard to see and hear the majesty so 
often imputed to these women. Almost as soon as they began to record 
in 1923, they found a huge audience, sympathetic, moved, if not al- 
ways aware of the size of the contribution. 

Mamie Smith was the first to record, in 1920, with Johnny Dunn's 
Original Jazz Hounds, a fair group with a singer who was better 
than fair. But Ma Rainey, who didn't come to records until 1923, was 
the first of the giants and the mother of them all. She was thirty-seven 
in 1923 and a veteran of the tent shows, the cabarets, and the meeting 
houses, all the places where one sang on the Negro circuit. A plump 
woman with a rich, round voice, Gertrude Rainey never left the 
meaning of her blues lyrics to the imagination. She banged home her 
sad, usually sexual tale, when she was u Countin' the Blues," chanting 
the Frankie and Johnny saga in "Stack O'Lee Blues," pointing out 
that "Yonder Comes the Blues," singing about such varied boy friends 
as those in "Titanic Man Blues," "Icebag Papa," or "See See Rider," 
the famous Negro characterization of a male low-life, that no-good 
who battens on women. 

Ma Rainey had a pupil who, not uniquely, eclipsed her teacher. 
Ma found this pupil, Bessie Smith, on one of her trips with a travel- 
ing show through Tennessee. Student and teacher worked well to- 
gether; the result was the most magnificent of all the blues voices. 
From Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith learned the intricacies of blues singing, 
the carefully placed two-bar fill-ins and introductions, the little 
melodic variations, the tricks of voice and rhythmic accent, the twists 
of phrase with which to untwist the double meanings. Bessie was not 
shy before the crudest facts of life, but she had more to sing about. 
Her heart went into the plaints addressed to God ("Salt Water Blues," 
"Rainy Weather Blues," "Back Water Blues," "Cemetery Blues," 
"Golden Rule Blues") and to man ("Mistreatin' Daddy," "Careless 
Love," "Do Your Duty," "Sweet Mistreater," "A Good Man Is Hard 
to Find"). Perhaps the most famous of her records is the two-part 
"Empty Bed Blues," full of an almost terrifying loneliness. But no 
one record is Bessie's best; of her more than one hundred and fifty 
records, more than half are masterpieces. In a voice that, differently 
trained, would have been superb in opera, she often gives the stature 
of art to commonplace blues. And for her, too, some of the best musi- 
cians of the twenties and early thirties played their very best: Louis 
Armstrong, Joe Smith, Jimmy Harrison, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher 



96 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Henderson, James P. Johnson, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman 
all appear behind her and stay tastefully though inventively back of 
her. The suggestion of awe in their playing is understandable: Bessie 
Smith in a recording studio, as on a stage, was the Empress of the 
Blues her publicity called her. She strode the boards the way she rode 
her voice, with that overwhelming certainty that only the very great, 
no matter what the field, can assert. Her death in 1937 in Mississippi, 
when there was some doubt about taking her to a white hospital, 
echoed the tragedy of the lives she had sung so imperially. 

There were four other Smith girls, none of them relatives of each 
other or of Bessie, who sang the blues and sang them well: Clara 
Smith, Laura Smith, Trixie Smith, and the first of them, Mamie Smith. 
Ida Cox, like Ma Rainey, made many records with Lovie Austin, the 
woman pianist, and her Blues Serenaders; Ida deserves the implied 
compliment. Bertha Hill, better known as u Chippie," was accorded 
the handsome assistance of such musicians as Louis Armstrong, 
Johnny Dodds, and Richard M. Jones; her throaty extravagances were 
also deserving. Not quite as much can be said for the other singers of 
the blues who were supported by fine jazz musicians such women as 
Sippie Wallace, Lillie Delk Christian, Alberta Hunter, Victoria 
Spivey, and Ethel Waters. The first records made by Ethel Waters, 
in 1924 and 1925, are more distinguished for the backing by the lovely 
cornet of Joe Smith, with sometime solos by such men as Buster 
Bailey and Coleman Hawkins, than they are for her singing. Her real 
quality can be assayed by her 1932 record with Duke Ellington, "I 
Can't Give You Anything but Love" and "Porgy," in which her rich 
tones and insinuating vibrato make good tunes into better. There is 
more of the same on the coupling she made in 1933 with Benny Good- 
man, "I Just Couldn't Take It, Baby" and "A Hundred Years from 
Today." The kind of thing she does in these records, and that Ade- 
laide Hall did in hers with Ellington, is the result of the application 
of the blues personality to the ballad. Softened some, and a good deal 
more sentimental, jazz appeared in the popular song. It infiltrated so 
much of the entertainment world that it became difficult to tell where 
jazz left off and commerce began. In singing popular ballads, many 
jazz singers balanced their musical accounts and made listening to 
trivial songs a pleasure. 

The great commercial overhauling of jazz was only suggested and 
barely begun in the early twenties. Nevertheless, it was by increasing 



DIASPORA 97 

transfusions of box-office plasma that jazz made its way around the 
country. For about another decade the best of the instrumentalists 
were able to maintain their integrity because their music was still 
taking shape. The Chicago youngsters who roamed the South Side 
in search of jazz instruction were able to exploit much of what they 
learned when they played in clubs run by gangsters and other over- 
lords of the Prohibition era who were not too commercially demand- 
ing. In the same way, New Orleans musicians far from home in Cali- 
fornia and New York brought a fresh commodity to audiences who 
demanded little to go with their liquor except the beat and the new 
sound, which these musicians undeniably had. Still the big bands were 
growing, the bands that sweetened their jazz or made it symphonic, 
and musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, seeking fairly profitable and regu- 
lar employment, had to join them. The synthesis of the various New 
Orleans jazz strains was being made with that same curious combina- 
tion of backroom secrecy and brazen outdoor openness that attended 
the making of bathtub gin and open-still corn whisky. The Jazz Age 
was upon us, and nobody but the court jesters of the period, the jazz- 
men who played the music after which it was named, had any glim- 
mering of what it was about. 




THE JAZZ AGE 



Jazz was written about in the 19205 chiefly as a symbol, a symbol 
and a symptom and a handsomely crunchy epithet with which one 
could dismiss either the era itself or one group of its volatile citizens. 
The group was not always the same. Sometimes it was the inhabitants 
of Fitzgerald's Princeton and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and long, sleek 
cars. Sometimes it was T. S. Eliot and/or Irving Berlin, who were 
interchangeable in several of the jazz categories of the time. Some- 
times it was John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, E. E. Cum- 
mings, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice. 
Sometimes the Italian Futurists. Sometimes the Jews. Sometimes the 
radio industry. Only occasionally was it the Negroes (also only oc- 
casionally granted the dignity of a capital N). And every now and 
then "Jazz" meant the music itself, but only every now and then, 
for the music itself was not much discussed. Jazz was not to be 
analyzed; it was to be accepted as an American symbol, as the 
American symbol, and what it symbolized was unmistakable 
". . . as unmistakably American as the sound of a jazz band." The 
simile was H. L. Mencken's. 

As early as 192 1 cries of "Enough," "No more!" and "Jazz is dying" 
were raised in all quarters, from the musical magazines to the literary 
weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. Clive Bell summed up the literary 
attitude succinctly in his piece, "Plus de Jazz" which appeared in his 
American outlet, the New Republic, in 1921. "Plus de Jazz!" No 
more jazz! Bell attributed the exclamation to an obscure journalist 
sitting with "perhaps the best painter in France" and "one of the 
best musicians . . in a small bistro on the Boulevard St. Germain." 
Bell recorded the talk among the three because "Jazz is dying, and 
the conversation ... is of importance only as an early recognition 
of the fact." Yes, he added, "Jazz is dead or dying, at any rate and 

98 



THE JAZZ AGE 99 

the moment has come for someone who likes to fancy himself wider 
awake than his fellows to write its obituary notice." Whereupon he 
modestly did so, listing the characteristics of the deceased: ". . . a 
ripple on a wave ... its most characteristic manifestation is modern 
painting [butl only the riff-raff has been affected." 

"Italian Futurism," Bell declared, "is the nearest approach to a pic- 
torial expression of the Jazz spirit. The movement bounced into the 
world somewhere about the year ign.lt was headed by a Jazz band 
and a troupe of niggers [sic], dancing. Appropriately it took its name 
from music the art that is always behind the times. . . . Impudence 
is its essence, . . . impudence which finds its technical equivalent in 
syncopation: impudence which rags." Then he cited "the determina- 
tion to surprise" and its "grateful corollary thou shalt not be 
tedious," acknowledging the brevity of "the best Jazz artists" as 
"admirable," reminiscent "of the French eighteenth century." How- 
ever, "Jazz art is soon created, soon liked, and soon forgotten. It is 
the movement of masters of eighteen." No irony or wit is in jazz, 
but "childish" fears and dislikes "of the noble and the beautiful. . . . 
Niggers can be admired artists without any gifts more singular than 
high spirits; so why drag in the intellect?" Bell admitted a ten-year 
domination of music and literature by jazz and again cited the Italian 
Futurists as the only painters to have been affected by the movement, 
evidenced in "their electric-lit presentation of the more obvious 
peculiarities of contemporary life and their taste for popular actuali- 
ties." 

In underlining the impudence, determination to surprise, and 
brevity of jazz, Bell touched upon genuine qualities of the art. In 
suggesting that the Futurists were its pictorial representatives, he 
was on less secure ground and his "electric-lit" image did not support 
his argument as effectively as would have a description of the 
adumbral lines which surrounded Balla's dogs and Marinetti's figures, 
the syncopated movement of the Futurists. 

He had an easier time with Stravinsky. "Technically, too, he has 
been influenced much by nigger rhythms and nigger methods. He 
has composed ragtimes. So, if it is inexact to say that Stravinsky 
writes Jazz, it is true to say that his genius has been nourished by it." 
And "the Jazz movement has as much right to claim him for its own 
as any movement has to claim any first-rate artist. Similarly, it may 
claim Mr. T. S. Eliot a poet of uncommon merit and unmistakably 



100 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

in the great line whose agonizing labors seem to have been eased 
somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning 
muse." Eliot's jazz qualities, it appears, are his "demurely irreverent 
attitude," his prim insolence, his "playing the devil with the instru- 
ment of Shakespeare and Milton," his provocative use of the emotion 
of surprise "like Stravinsky, he is as much a product of the Jazz 
movement as so good an artist can be of any." However, "Eliot is 
too personal to be typical of anything, and the student who would 
get a fair idea of Jazz poetry would do better to spend half an hour 
with a volume of Cocteau or Cendrars. In prose I think Mr. Joyce 
will serve as a, perhaps, not very good example; . . . with a will, he 
rags the literary instrument: unluckily this will has at its service 
talents which though genuine are moderate only." Virginia Woolf 
"is not of the company" but "Jazz has its master" in Stravinsky, "its 
petits maitres Eliot, Cendrars, Picabia, and Joyce . . . and les six 
. . . chaperoned by the brilliant Jean Cocteau." 

In sum, Bell offered two major conclusions: (i) "He, at any rate, 
who comes to bury Jazz should realize what the movement has to 
its credit, viz., one great musician, one considerable poet, ten or a 
dozen charming or interesting little masters and mistresses, and a 
swarm of utterly fatuous creatures who in all good faith believe 
themselves artists." (2) "The age of easy acceptance of the first 
thing that comes is closing. Thought rather than spirits is required, 
quality rather than colour, knowledge rather than irreticence, intellect 
rather than singularity, wit rather than romps, precision rather than 
surprise, dignity rather than impudence, and lucidity above all things: 
plus de Jazz" 

Waldo Frank made the broadest sweep in his outline of the jazz 
movement. "Jazz music" (jazz was still an adjective to its derogators, 
only occasionally a nounj, said Frank, "is the art which is part re- 
flection and apology of our chaos and part rebellion from it." He 
cited Irving Berlin and asserted in the next sentence, "Alike is the 
poetry of T. S. Eliot. . . . Aristocratic sentiment, a vague oriental 
wisdom are subtly disarrayed to bear the mood of a meager modern 
soul. Aesthetically and culturally, there is little to choose between the 
best of Berlin and 'Mr. Prufrock' or 'The Waste Land.* " Frank 
went on in his 1929 Rediscovery of America and here the prefix 
should be removed, for these were surely initial discoveries, if not 
inventions: "In this group also belong the works of John Dos Passos 



THE JAZZ AGE 10 

and John Howard Lawson. . . . Lawson is as satisfied to let h 
characters shout Revolution, as Al Jolson to mutter Mammy." , 
remarkable comparison, quickly succeeded by another: "A bett( 
performance, but still of the same class, is the 'Him' of E. E. Gun 
mings. ... In this play, as in his lyrics, Cummings has found fc 
the popular dance and jazz an equivalent in terms of the highest in 
pressionistic art of Europe" hence, really, no equivalent at al 
"The nostalgia of T. S. Eliot and Berlin is feeble; it is the refraii 
dissolved in our world, of early nineteenth-century romantics (Muss< 
and Nerval Schubert and Robert Franz). ... Of this class ak 
is the rhetorical art of H. L. Mencken. To understand his appeal or 
must think of Jolson shouting Mammy, of Miss Brice's Yiddish Ir 
dian, of the vaudeville performer, Cummings, who at the sight of 
girl in a bathing suit, tears off his shirt, devours his straw hat an 
breaks a grand piano. . . . The art of Sinclair Lewis is of this famili 
. . . His tune is plaintively self-suffering, rather than sadistic." 

Frank explains it all. "Its dominant trait justifies calling it 'tb 
family of jazz'; for the trick in the jazz dance or song, the ja2 
comic strip, the jazz vaudeville stunt, of twisting a passive reflex t 
our world into a lyrical self-expression is in all these arts. Eliot an 
Berlin, Cummings and Lewis have the same appeal. The fact ths 
some have a small audience and some a large, is due to a mere di 
ference in their idioms: another proof of the essential likeness of a 
American 'atoms' high-brow or low. Devotion to our chaos unde; 
lies and directs the shallower rebellion from it. Servitude is perhaj 
the precise word. In ideal and emotion, these men are measured b 
the dissolute world from which they yearn to escape. Their nostalg 
is but the perfume of decay. Their art reflects what they hate b< 
cause they are reflections; its lyric glow is our world's phospho; 
escence." 

One could describe Eliot's "demurely irreverent attitude" and h 
"mood of a meager modern soul" in support of one's vigorous assc 
ciation of his poetry and the jazz movement, but the actual direc 
influence of jazz on his working method was never delineated, thoug 
there were few stronger influences in his rhythms. From The Wasi 
Land: 

O O O O that Shakespehcrian Rag 
It's so elegant 
So intelligent. 



102 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Only occasionally did Eliot indicate so strongly the early source of 
his rhythms of ragged futility. No other poem reflects the influence 
as clearly as The Waste Land, but surely the last lines of "The Hollow 
Men" are a kind of jazzed-up nursery rhyme: 

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper. 

The use of lower-case letters, set in jagged lines, words broken 
in halves and quarters to maintain a regular beat, suggests a taste 
for jazz syncopation on the part of E. E. Cummings, if something 
less than the full-scale avowal of jazz faith with which Waldo Frank 
debited him. 

Hart Crane, who wrote most of his cryptic descriptions of modern 
tragedy in a slum bedroom overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, with 
jazz records spinning a comparative consonance to his verbal dis- 
sonance, shows no immediate musical influence, but one of his most 
frightening images springs from the "family of jazz" and its me- 
chanical apparatus: 

The phonographs of hades in the brain 
Are tunnels that rewind themselves . . . 

When Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay used the music, they 
called it by its name. It runs through Sandburg's verse in syncopated 
rhythms, repetitive patterns, obviously drawn from jazz; it appears 
at its clearest and worst in the crude sentimentality of his "Jazz 
Fantasia." Lindsay, at his best, managed what Louis Untermeyer 
called "an infectious blend of rhyme, religion, and ragtime." He 
loved to chant his own poetry and left directions as marginal notes 
for his long poems, indicating either dramatic action or the rise and 
fall and emotional quality with which he wanted various sections 
to be read or sung or chanted. He snapped his rhymes, exterior and 
interior, with the one-two precision of a Dixieland band's marching 
beat; he rolled his vowels with the fervor of a revival meeting, hav- 
ing taken much inspiration from both bands and musicians and re- 
vivalist singers and shouters. His Negro Sermon, "Simon Legree," 
concluded on a jazz note: 



THE JAZZ AGE 103 

And old Legree is fat and fine: 
He eats the fire, he drinks the wine 
Blood and burning turpentine 
Down, down with the Devil; 
Down, down with the Devil; 
Down, down with the Devil. 

His Study of the Negro Race, "The Congo" ("Being a memorial to 
Ray Eldred, a Disciple missionary of the Congo River") opens like 
a jazz lyric; its rhythmic refrain acknowledges a New Orleans source: 

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, 

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, 

Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, 

Pounded on the table, 

Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, 

Hard as they were able, 

Boom, boom, BOOM, 

With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, 

Boomlay, boonilay, boomlay, BOOM. 

Then, on the next "Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM," an explana- 
tion: 

A roaring, epic, rag-time tune 

From the mouth of the Congo 

To the Mountains of the Moon. 

Directions for the reading of "The Daniel Jazz" cite "a strain of 
'Dixie' " and "a touch of 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' " And the 
form suggests the blues as the work spins itself out in a series of 
tercets directly related to the lyrics Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey 
sang. 

Whatever Lindsay's failures, one of his conspicuous successes was 
his keen understanding of the primitive jazz forms, his adaptation of 
the devices of the spiritual, the folk song, and the blues, sprung on 
the meter of the jazz band. 

The Negro poets who won such a large audience for their work, 
good, bad, and indifferent, in the intense days of the so-called Negro 
Renaissance, smack in the middle of the twenties, also caught some 
of the feeling for jazz that was so much a part of their lives. Most 
of them accepted it cheerlessly, as most of them accepted the world 



104 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

of prejudice into which they had been born. James Weldon Johnson, 
the senior member of the group, told a rough tale in his three books, 
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Black Manhattan, and 
Along This Way, published in 1912, 1930, and 1933, respectively 
told it with compassion and concern for oppressor as well as op- 
pressed. In his poetry he caught some of the rhythmic movement of 
his own people, especially in the seven sermons in verse that make 
up his 1927 volume, God's Trombones, but here, as in his song- 
writing collaborations with his musician brother, J. Rosamund John- 
son, his most direct influence was the spiritual, for he came of the 
generation that felt its strongest tie to the old South, its first American 
home, in the spiritual. 

There was more of the new Harlem in Claude McKay, a Jamaican 
who came to the United States in 1912, rose through the occupations 
available to Negroes (Pullman portering, waiting on table, acting 
as busboy and kitchen helper) to a position of some importance in 
the radical literary movements of the twenties, most prominently as 
associate editor of The Liberator. His novels, Home to Harlem (1928) 
and Banjo (1929), caught some of his new home and its instruments; 
a sonnet, written in 1921, "The Harlem Dancer," said much about 
the clubs in which jazz was played in New York: 

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes 
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; 
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes 
Blown by black players upon a picnic day. 
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, 
The light gauze hanging loose about her form; 
To me she seemed a proudly swaying palm 
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. 
Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls 
Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise, 
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls, 
Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze; 
But looking at her falsely smiling face, 
I knew her self was not in that strange place. 

The writing was self-conscious, adorned with bromidic ornament, 
flushed with social protest, an almost academic demur which every 
Negro was expected to file in his creative activity, whether he wrote 
novels or poetry, painted, composed music, or simply flung his hips 



THE JAZZ AGE 105 

at his partner's pelvis as they laced legs and raced feet around "The 
Home of Happy Feet," the Savoy Ballroom uptown in New York, 
or its opposite number of the same name in Chicago. 

Aaron Douglas, who was the official graphic artist for the New 
Negro movement, spilled blacks and whites and grays across his 
lithographs in cartoon-like action, setting a lynch rope carefully 
over the heads of an undulating dancer and a saxophonist whose 
body was twisted in imitation of the dancer. Langston Hughes com- 
mented with expert bitterness on the relations of the white man and 
the Negro in his novel, Not ivithoztt Laughter (1930), which could 
best be explained both the title and the story by a line from the 
introduction to his second volume of poems, Fine Clothes to the 
Jeiv (1927): "The mood of the Elites is almost always despondency, 
but when they are sung people laugh." 

Hughes' first book was the traditional slim volume of verse, The 
Weary Blues, published in 1926. He used the A-A-B blues lyric form 
for all it was worth, and a lot more, converting its three-line sim- 
plicity into a six-line stanza, and killing some of his best lines with 
approximations of Negro dialect that suggested Ku Klux Klan cari- 
catures and motion-picture and theater stereotypes far more than the 
writing of a sensitive Negro poet. At his best he caught some of the 
most winning irony of the migrant Negro, properly expressed in the 
blues structure: 

Once I was in Memphis, 

I mean Tennessee, 

Once I was in Memphis, 

I mean Tennessee, 

But I had to leave 'cause 

Nobody there was good to me. 

His pictures of jazz life were less adroit, missing the understatement 
that sparked his most distinguished blues of weariness. The usual 
people: 

Charlie is a gambler 

An' Sadie is a whore. 

Play that thing, 

Jazz band ! 

Play it for the lords and ladies, 

For the dukes and counts, 

For the whores and gigolos . . . 



106 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

The usual sounds: 

So beat dat drum, boy! 

He made that poor piano moan with melody. 

The usual message: 

To keep from cryin' 

I opens ma mouth an' laughs. 

You know that tune 

That laughs and cries at the same time. 

Won't be nothin' left 
When de worms git through. 

Critic Russell Blankenship called him u a jazz singer crooning in 
modern parlance the old, old woes of the black man. Much of his 
poetry sticks in one's memory just as a haunting jazz phrase flashes 
again and again into the mind." 

Countee Cullen, the most sophisticated in background, in use of 
words, in choice of subject, of the Negro poets, left no "haunting 
jazz phrase," but he did manage some startling images, notably the 
tree in the South. 

(And many others there may be 

Like unto it, that are unknown, 

Whereon as costly fruit has grown.) 

It stands before a hut of wood 

In which the Christ Himself once stood 

And those who pass it by may see 

Nought growing there except a tree, 

But there arc two to testify 

Who hung on it ... we saw Him die. 

Its roots were fed with priceless blood. 

It is the Cross; it is the Rood. 

With the last lines of The Black Christ, written at the very beginning 
of 1929, Countee Cullen ended the era of the New Negro. With 
poetry such as this, the Negro's work was within a few volumes 
of being accepted as something less than freakish; literacy was no 
longer quite so remarkable, even in this subject people. But recogni- 
tion of the Negro's most effortless product, his least self-conscious 



THE JAZZ AGE 107 

expression, was still a long way off in 1929. His flowing articulation 
was only aped and mimicked and distorted by the white man until 
well into the thirties; Benny Goodman and the Swing Revolt waited 
another six years. 

Typical of the cold shoulder and rough treatment accorded jazz 
in the twenties, as a musical expression rather than a symbol of futility 
and fashion, was the attitude of Paul Rosenfeld. After James Huneker, 
only Rosenfeld had the equipment and the equilibrium, the ease and 
the warmth, necessary to receive all the arts in America at once 
all but jazz, that is. In his Port of New York, Rosenfeld paid eloquent 
attention to the 1924 arts and artists, fourteen of whom he toasted 
in as many chapters and an epilogue, as evidence of "the movement 
of life in America ... an America where it was good to be." In 
his Musical Chronicle, covering activity within the art of notes and 
chords from 1916 to 1923, the principal interest was European, radiat- 
ing from the music of D'Indy, Bloch, Casella, Milhaud, Strauss, 
Mahler, Prokofiev, Bartok, and Schoenberg, among others, with a 
nod in the direction of one of Rosenfeld's favorite American com- 
posers, Leo Ornstein. When he summed up the philosophy of the 
first book and the narrative of the second, in a brief volume in Lip- 
pincott's One Hour Series, An Hour with American Music, Rosen- 
feld made a definitive statement about jazz. His feeling was so strong 
that he opened his book with a seventeen-page castigation of jazz, 
the first of eight chapters and almost an eighth of the book. 

"American music is not jazz," Rosenfeld wrote. "Jazz is not music. 
Jazz remains a striking indigenous product, a small sounding folk- 
chaos, counterpart of other national developments." He explained 
what music is "the representative work, say, of Bach and Beethoven, 
Mozart, Wagner and Brahms, primarily is what jazz from the begin- 
ning is not: the product of a sympathetic treatment of the sonorous 
medium. Music is a chain of temporal volumes released by sensitive 
manipulation of an instrument. ... In works like the last sonatas 
and quartets of Beethoven, the fantasias and fugues of Bach, Tristan 
und Isolde of Wagner, the logic is so universal that we have the 
impression these pieces existed since the beginning of the world, 
and must persist till doomsday." The product he recommended 
might possibly be "still small in worth," Rosenfeld admitted, "But 
it exists; it swells. New creative talents appear with every year; and 
while they may yet seem uncertain and anything but overwhelming, 



108 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

they have added a new interest and excitement to life, filling it with 
the vibrance of gathering powers." He was describing the music of 
Edgar Varese, Carlos Chavez, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and 
Roger Sessions. Yet every one of his words could be applied just as 
well to the jazz musicians and singers whose careers and art were just 
then taking shape. In the light of the subsequent performances of 
the composers he named who were working in classical forms, and 
of the jazzmen working at the same time toward the organization of 
a new music, it could more convincingly be said that the hot musi- 
cians had surely "added a new interest and excitement to life, filling 
it with the vibrance of gathering powers," while their confreres, 
working in more traditional forms, out of borrowed molds, created 
no more than "a striking indigenous product, a small sounding folk- 
chaos, counterpart of other national developments." 

The twenties were the Wander jahre for jazz. There were no im- 
portant jobs anywhere, and everywhere people mistook Paul White- 
man and Irving Berlin and Al Jolson and Ted Lewis and Cole Porter 
and Vincent Lopez for jazz artists. Fletcher Henderson pieced to- 
gether enough work as an accompanist for blues singers, a composer 
of sorts, and an arranger of more than sorts to rise above failing 
record companies and the mistaken impressions of white audiences. 
He had a band of considerable strength by 1924, one that set a 
style and made a lot of reputations and came most completely into 
its own under the aegis of Benny Goodman and an entirely different 
set of musicians when Benny built the Kingdom of Swing around 
Fletcher Henderson's music in 1935 and 1936. Duke Ellington com- 
muted from Washington, D.C., to New York until he managed to 
strike a Harlem club-owner's fancy in 1923, and a substitute's job 
at the Cotton Club in 1927 finally made fact of what had been four 
years of Harlem fancy. 

Louis Armstrong had been building a reputation since 1922, when 
he made his debut in Chicago with Joe Oliver's band at the Lincoln 
Gardens, until 1928, when he came to New York to stay. He was 
something of a legend among musicians and enough of a name among 
Negro and white followers of jazz to draw crowds wherever he 
played. The Immerman brothers, who ran Connie's Inn up in Harlem 
for white tourists, put him at the head of Luis Russell's band. Be- 
tween 1922, when Satchmo left New Orleans, and 1928, when he ar- 
rived in New York, he had accomplished much. 



THE JAZZ AGE 109 

Fletcher Henderson, Duke, and Louis dominated the jazz of the 
twenties along with pianist Earl Hines and a few youngsters out of 
Chicago and near-by Midwestern towns and cities. The youngsters, 
most of them anyway, were helped along by their connections with 
the big names of the time, the pseudo-jazzmen with whom the music 
of jazz was irresistibly associated in the twenties. Bix Beiderbecke 
made a reputation of a sort as a cornetist with the Wolverines from 
1923-1925. He was helped along by his brief hitch in Chicago with 
Charlie Straight's band at the Rendezvous, and a lot more by the 
year he spent with Frankie Trumbauer's band in St. Louis, which 
ended with the hiring of both Bix and Tram (Trurnbauer) by Jean 
Goldkette for the hot section of his sweet-and-hot combination. A 
year with Goldkette, who had a name, and Bix was hired by Paul 
Whiteman, who had the biggest name of them all. 

Paul Whiteman, called "Pops," sometimes called "Fatho'," played 
a paternal role in the jazz of the period, a role he was highly con- 
scious of and which his associates and employees accepted so com- 
pletely they called him by his two nicknames as automatically as 
they called Charles Lindbergh "Lindy," Clara Bow the "It Girl," 
George Herman Ruth "Babe," and Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan 
"Texas." In the late twenties his fatherly domain included some of 
the most distinctive sounds in jazz, those produced by Bix, by Jimmy 
and Tommy Dorsey, Joe Vcnuti, and Eddie Lang. His singers in- 
cluded the Rhythm Boys, the threesome from which Bing Crosby 
emerged, and Mildred Bailey. And those of his musicians who were 
not distinguished jazzmen at least had a large reputation as such; 
Red Nichols and Frankie Trurnbauer were more famous as record- 
ing artists than the talented musicians they hired to play under them, 
but it was for the performances of Bix, Venuti, and Lang that dis- 
criminating people bought and held on to Nichols and Trurnbauer 
records. Whiteman needed the subsidiary reputations of his musicians 
and singers to maintain his holding-company position as King of 
Jazz, but it wasn't Bix or Nichols or Trumbauer, Bing or Mildred 
Bailey who built that position for him, and none of them did much 
more than fill out the gigantic shadows cast by the Fatho's Gar- 
gantuan figure. The man who succeeded in making Whiteman 
King of Jazz was just as synthetic a jazz musician, but his music was 
compounded of a substance immediately and unyieldingly engag- 
ing to the American people. From February 12, 1924, when George 



110 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was introduced by Whiteman at New 
York's Aeolian Hall, the two men were indissolubly associated in 
the public mind. Their positions at the heads of their professions 
were assured, the bandleader's for at least another eleven years, the 
composer's for more than a quarter of a century. 

Whiteman, who had made his first trip to Europe in 1923, was 
well aware of the snob appeal added to his music by that successful 
tour only three years after starting his band. For the Aeolian Hall 
concert he underscored that appeal many times. The auditorium it- 
self was, of course, one of the two major concert halls in New 
York, consecrated, like Carnegie Hall, to classical music. But merely 
bringing jazz into more respectable surroundings wasn't enough; it 
had to have the right sponsors. These were more easily forthcoming 
than Whiteman had at first hoped. "While we were getting ready 
for the concert," he explained in 1926 in his book, Jazz, "we gave a 
series of luncheons for the critics, took them to rehearsals and ex- 
plained painstakingly what we hoped to prove. . . ." What they 
hoped to prove was "the advance which had been made in popular 
music from the day of discordant early jazz to the melodious form 
of the present, . . . [that] modern jazz . . . was different from the 
crude early attempts that it had taken a turn for the better." The 
critics were doubtful, at the rehearsals anyway, but a long list of 
distinguished musicians, financial and literary figures, doubtful or 
not, were willing to lend valuable aid. "I trembled," Whiteman said, 
"at our temerity when we made out the list of patrons and patronesses 
for the concert. But in a few days I exulted at our daring, for the 
acceptances began to come in from Damrosch, Godowsky, Heifetz, 
Kreisler, McCormack, Rachmaninoff, Rosenthal, Stokowski, Stran- 
sky. We had kindly response, too, from Alda, Galli-Curci, Garden, 
Gluck and Jeanne Gordon. Otto Kahn and Jules Glaenzer agreed to 
represent the patrons of art on our roster and the prominent writers 
we asked were equally obliging. These included: Fannie Hurst, 
Heywood Broun, Frank Crowninshield, S. Jay Kaufman, Karl 
Kitchin, Leonard Liebling, O. O. Mclntyre, Pitts Sanborn, Gilbert 
Seldes, Deems Taylor and Carl Van Vechten." 

According to Whiteman, the concert cost eleven thousand dollars 
and he lost "about seven thousand dollars on it. ... I didn't care. 
It would have been worth it to me at any price." He was quite right. 
The sugar coating which had been carefully applied to all the jazz 



THE JAZZ AGE 111 

on the program and there wasn't much to begin with went down 
well with the audience there that night and with the critics. Popular 
songs like "Whispering" and "Limehouse Blues," "Alexander's Rag- 
time Band" and "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," a suite of four 
serenades written for the concert by Victor Herbert, dance versions 
of "The Volga Boatmen" and "To a Wild Rose," with symphonic 
outbursts between choruses such music was custom-tailored for 
any audience. There was nothing "crude" about it, nothing strident 
to betray its origin in the "discordant early jazz"; there was no 
mistaking Whiteman's point; he had proved what he had hoped to 
prove "the advance which had been made in popular music . . . 
to the melodious form" of Berlin, MacDowell, Herbert, and Gersh- 
win. 

The Rhapsody in Elue^ along with four piano numbers composed 
or arranged and played by Zez Conf rey, represented the most serious 
attempt to concertize jazz. Conf rey, whose listeners found most 
engaging the tinkly trills and rippling arpeggios of his "Kitten on 
the Keys," simply adapted some of the more obvious bravura em- 
bellishments of Liszt, Leschetizky, Tausig, and other nineteenth- 
century composers of musical melodrama to a few of the more ob- 
vious devices of ragtime. Gershwin, who went along with Confrey 
in his mating of the surface tricks of two musical forms, was a little 
bolder in his selection. The Rhapsody shows some influences from 
the early writing of Debussy, and Ferde Grofe, who orchestrated 
Gershwin's piano score for him, went farther along Impressionist 
lines; that brought Gershwin's classical line almost up to date for 
New York's audiences and critics, to whom Stravinsky was frighten- 
ing and Schoenberg unthinkable in 1924. To justify his image "in 
blue" Gershwin employed the blues scale from time to time, dipping 
into flattened thirds and sevenths, against their natural intonation or 
directly after, and suggesting the blues thereby; Grofe added more to 
the jazz conviction of the Rhapsody with his use of the brass smears 
and "dirty" reed inflections then much favored by jazz musicians. A 
merger of jazz and the classics had been effected, as far as White- 
man and his audiences were concerned, and the press looked on as 
cheerfully as it did at the acquisition of new companies by Standard 
Brands and General Foods, or the combination of automobile manu- 
facturers into industrial empires like General Motors. 

The Herald's W. J. Henderson said, "Mr. Gershwin's composition 



112 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

proved to be a highly ingenious work, treating the piano in a man- 
ner calling for much technical skill and furnishing an orchestral back- 
ground in which saxophones, trombones and clarinets were merged 
in a really skillful piece of orchestration. If this way lies the path 
toward the development of American modern music into a high art 
form, then one can heartily congratulate Mr. Gershwin on his dis- 
closure of some of the possibilities. Nor must the captivating clever- 
ness of Zez Conf rey be forgotten. . . ." For the Tribune's Lawrence 
Gilman, "Mr. Whiteman's experiment was an uproarious success. 
This music conspicuously possesses superb vitality and ingenuity of 
rhythm, mastery of novel and beautiful effects of timbre." But 
"How trite and feeble and conventional the tunes are, how senti- 
mental and vapid the harmonic treatment." Deems Taylor of the 
World criticized "the occasional sacrifice of appropriate scoring to 
momentary effect and a lack of continuity in the musical structure" 
but found "at least two themes of genuine musical worth" and "a 
latent ability on the part of this young composer to say something 
in his chosen idiom." Olin Downes, in the Times, had much to say 
for "remarkably beautiful examples of scoring for a few instru- 
ments," for music that was "at times vulgar, cheap, in poor taste, but 
elsewhere of irresistible swing and insouciance and recklessness and 
life; music played as only such players as these may play it like 
the melo-maniacs that they are, bitten by rhythms that would have 
twiddled the toes of St. Anthony." Gilbert Gabriel of the Sun thought 
the Rhapsody justified its title because of "a degree of formlessness 
in the middle section. But the beginning and the ending of it were 
stunning. The beginning particularly, with a flutter-tongued, drunken 
whoop of an introduction that had the audience rocking. Mr. Gersh- 
win has an irrepressible pack of talents." 

The success Gershwin" had tasted in 1919 when Al Jolson sang 
his song "Swanee" in the musical comedy Sinbad was very large 
financially, gratifying theatrically, but not of the quality or the size 
of the fame and favor he enjoyed after the Rhapsody. His Concerto 
in F, wTitten to Walter Damrosch's commission and first performed 
by that conductor with the New York Symphony Orchestra in 
1925, bore the marks of its piecemeal composition: Gershwin had 
written more than he needed, and he chose and rejected measures 
on the basis of a performance of the manuscript by musicians he 
hired to run it through for him in a theater rented for the occasion. 



THE JAZZ AGE 113 

Like the Rhapsody, the Concerto was most moving in passages de- 
voted to the nostalgic tunes Gershwin turned out with facility. Its 
orchestration, Gershwin's own, took another step from the dance 
band toward the symphony orchestra. He essayed his most adven- 
turous step in An American in Paris, four years later, in which the 
lessons the composer had learned from intense listening to the music 
of Ravel and les six were poorly applied to an undistinguished set 
of themes using French taxi horns and another fine blues melody. 

Constant Lambert, contemplating the effects of symphonic jazz 
ten years after the Rhapsody in Blue had made its debut, summed 
up his impressions by running down Gershwin's work. "The com- 
poser, trying to write a Lisztian concerto in jazz style, has used only 
the non-barbaric elements in dance music, the result being neither 
good jazz nor good Liszt, and in no sense of the word a good con- 
certo. Although other American composers, and even Gershwin 
himself, have produced works of greater caliber in this style, the 
shadow of the Rhapsody in Blue hangs over most of them and they 
remain the hybrid child of a hybrid. A rather knowing and unpleasant 
child too, ashamed of its parents and boasting of its French lessons." 
It would be hard, as well as unnecessary, to dispute Lambert's disap- 
pointed dismissal of this progenitor of a large musical family, one 
of the members of which was Vladimir TostofTs Jazz History of 
the World, played at one of Jay Gatsby's "intimate" large parties. 
"When the Jazz History of the World was over, girls were putting 
their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls 
were swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups, 
knowing that someone would arrest their falls." However much the 
meager nature of Gershwin's music may have eluded critics and 
audiences trained to listen to traditional composers, its effect upon 
them was essentially the same as Vladimir TostofFs Jazz History of 
the World's upon the Great Gatsby's swooning girls. Within a few 
years an annual Gershwin concert was a certain sell-out at the 
Lewisohn Stadium summer concerts of the New York Philharmonic 
Orchestra, and then at other summer concert series around the coun- 
try. 

There were other Gershwins, other Tostoffs. Without exception, 
they were siphoned off by the movies and radio, in both of which 
the demand for new composers and arrangers was insatiable. Al 
Jolson's The Jazz Singer in 1927 put words and music in the mouths 



114 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

of screen actors and actresses and set a sound track alongside the 
flickering frames. Scales were ascended and descended as flights of 
stairs were ascended and descended, great pseudo-jazz crescendi ac- 
companied the swelling of tears, sudden mock-syncopated sforzandi 
announced dramatic twists and turns. The scoring was brighter and 
larger and infinitely more varied than the tinny adaptations of 
Rossini, Waldteufel, and Ethelbert Nevin with which organs and 
pianos had set scenes and closed them, described everything from 
the pop of Lon Chaney's limbs in and out of their sockets to the 
smack of a Theda Bara kiss; but nothing in the opulence of the new 
movie music could hide its essential likeness in emotional and tonal 
range to the music of the movie console. Subtlety was simply out 
of the question. In 1928 it was estimated that twenty million people 
went to the movies every day, and, right or wrong, twenty million 
people were not interested in the delicate perceptions of cinema jazz 
composers. 

Radio listeners were not so numerous as moviegoers in 1928, but 
the development of the communication channels Guglielmo Marconi 
had discovered was as impressive to chart as attendance at the film 
palaces. From 1920*5 few thousand sets, crudely put together by 
home engineers, the industry had filled demands for seven million by 
1928. From 1920*5 one station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, the number of 
transmitters had grown to close to a thousand eight years later, even 
after Congress had withdrawn many licenses because of practice 
"not in the public interest." There were millions of sets, many more 
millions of listeners; the blare of a prizefight commentary, the scream 
of a murdered woman in a detective drama, the yawp of political 
speeches, and wow of static were almost commonplace sounds in 
American homes. Even more familiar sounds to radio listeners were 
the voices of popular singers and the lilt of dance bands; in the early 
days of broadcasting, music, and particularly popular music, was the 
standard fare. The time on ten small stations in 1928 was divided 
this way: of a total of 294 hours, 28 were devoted to talks, 77 to 
serious and semi-serious music, 1 89 to what was then called ^syncopa- 
tion." On ten large stations, the proportion inclined even more dizzily 
in favor of "harmony and rhythm": of 357 hours in toto, 56 went to 
talks, 42 to "classics and semi-classics," 259 to the music of such 
exotic organizations as the South Sea Islanders, the A. & P. Gypsies, 
the Anglo-Persians, the Cliquot Club Eskimos, the Ipana Trouba- 



THE JAZZ AGE 115 

dours, the Happiness Boys, Rudy Vallee, and Roxy and His Gang. 
The quality was poor, the pretension bold, the confusion abundant. 
"All over the country the trombones blare and the banjos whang 
and the clarinets pipe the rhythm," Charles Merz, in The Great 
American Bandwagon, described radio in 1928. "Oom-pah-pah, oom- 
pah-pah, I got the blue-hoo-hoos, I got the blue-hoo-hoos, I got the 
oom-pah-pah, the oom-pah-pah. ... If it is true that from twenty 
to thirty million Americans are listening in on the radio every eve- 
ning, then for a large part of that evening they are listening in on the 
greatest single sweep of synchronized and syncopated rhythm that 
human ingenuity has yet conceived. This is our counterpart of the 
drum the black man beats when the night is dark and the jungle 
lonely. Tom-tom." Twenty years later such a description of the 
music of Ipana and Cliquot Club, of Roxy, Vallee and A. & P. 
Gypsies seemed silly. But jazz was not jazz in the twenties; it was 
everything else. 

Jazz was "the hopeless comment of the 'Beale Street Blues' " to 
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, when he substituted the real thing 
for the cotillion orchestra and polite quartet that accompanied high 
society drags. But above all, jazz was the new anthem for Fitzgerald, 
a rallying cry for millions of Jazz Age Americans, as the song written 
by the ancestor after whom he'd been named had aroused hundreds 
a hundred and fifty years before. Jazz achieved its meaning in the 
pages of Fitzgerald's novels and in a few of the lines between lines 
of the social and literary arbiters of the time. It wasn't understood 
by its listeners, most of whom preferred the synthetic product of 
Paul Whiteman, the nasal reductions of Rudy Vallee, the tinkly 
distillations of toothpaste troubadours, to the ruder, richer, more de- 
manding, and often more delicate music of the men who really played 
jazz and the women who sang it. A chronicle of jazz in the Jazz Age 
not only can but must, much of the time, neglect the music itself, 
for the music itself remained virtually undiscovered until the Swing 
Renaissance of the middle thirties, when Salvation Army stockpiles 
and cellar bins yielded the considerable beauty sometimes slipped, 
more often slugged, into record grooves by Duke and Smack and 
Pops, by Bix and the Dorseys, a blues singer named Bessie Smith, 
and a kid clarinetist out of Chicago named Benny Goodman. 

Jazz was hopeless comment, unmistakably American; it was impu- 
dence, it was Stravinsky, Eliot and Joyce, Irving Berlin and E. E. 



116 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Cummings; the refrain of early nineteenth-century romanticism dis- 
solved in our world, the perfume of decay, an autumn wind high in 
the lonesome treetops, "a roaring, epic, ragtime tune," more often 
Gershwin than Ellington; the symbol of an era caught between 
illusion and disillusion, an ode to futility, and unmistakably the 
sound of Americans. Futility was the subject of odes in the twenties, 
and jazz played the tunes of despair and destruction of a culture 
passing with elaborate gestures into desuetude. But just on the brink 
of limbo, with something really hideous, the Great Depression, be- 
fore them, the American people followed a jazz spiritual's advice, 
to "look down, look down, that lonesome road," and discovered in- 
sight where earlier there had been only insult, perception in perdition, 
wealth, in the most vivid of popular song images, amid poverty. 
There was valuable self-criticism along with the withering contempt 
of the nay-sayers; there was valid self-respect along with the will- 
ful exaggeration of the yea-sayers. If one could forget that Bruce 
Barton had made Jesus the founder of modern business and the 
Apostles the first great advertising men, one could look back to a 
literature that was coming alive, rising impressively out of the sloughs 
of adolescent despair. If one could distinguish H. L. Mencken from 
Jolson shouting "Mammy," the girth of Whiteman from the dimen- 
sion of Armstrong, take jazz directly rather than in symphonic syn- 
thesis, then one could hear a vital native music making the first 
grunts and sighs of meaningful communication on the level of art. 
"Out of a picture-frame," Paul Rosenfeld said, and it is permissible 
to add, out of some magazines and a few books and a pile of phono- 
graph records, "there comes an intimate address to the American in 
us. ... We may not know it; but the long prelude to the new 
world is over; the curtain is about to be rung up." 



Chapter 11 




CHICAGO 



The most far-reaching and positive contributions to jazz in the 
twenties were made in Chicago. One must go there to see and hear 
what had become accepted, and to discover how the changes that 
were being made took shape all around the confounding, clumsy, 
crudely elegant, and brilliantly shabby town. 

First of all, of course, there was the diaspora the early attempts 
at migration from New Orleans, most of them doomed; the later 
trips up the river when finally Louis Armstrong made the music stick. 
After 1910, the Original Creole Band came; it returned before 
World War I and made a small impression, mostly on local musi- 
cians who weren't as good as their competitors from the South. 
Jelly Roll Morton was making a career for himself, some of it 
musical, during various stays in Chicago. Sugar Johnny and Minor 
Hall, Roy Palmer, Wellman Braud, and Lil Hardin played around 
town, apart and together. Sidney Bechet and King Oliver and Paul 
Barbarin played at the Dreamland Cafe and the Royal Gardens. 
Freddie Keppard was a distinguished representative of "N'Oryins," 
one of the few who did not play at any time with the big bands. 
Some of the big bands were minstrel shows organized as orchestras, 
some of them theater orchestras; some of them, like their successors 
all over America, were mixed outfits that played all kinds of popular 
music. Louis Armstrong put in some time with Carroll Dickerson and 
Erskine Tate, who led two of the biggest; and Sidney Bechet orna- 
mented Will Marion Cook's thirty-six-piece band, which also featured 
twenty banjos! 

King Oliver and Louis Armstrong played together and separately, 
and together and separately made the most decisive impact upon 
Chicago musicians. When Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Earl 
Hines also began playing in Chicago, the influence was complete, 

117 



118 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

and jazz in Chicago was set to go the several ways that New Orleans 
performers at their best suggested and invited. 

The key year in many ways for Chicago musicians was 1922. 
That was the year Louis joined King Oliver; it was the year that 
Bix Beiderbecke began to play around Chicago at various little 
joints; the New Orleans Rhythm Kings were ensconced at Friars' 
Inn; Muggsy Spanier was blowing around town, a kid with talent, 
sitting in with established older men and with other talented young- 
sters; the Goodman kids, Benny and Harry, were beginning to show 
some jazz skill and were earning money from time to time on their 
instruments, Benny most notably as an imitator of Ted Lewis; and 
finally, in this impressive list, five students at Austin High School 
on the West Side put themselves together as a band Jimmy McPart- 
land on cornet, his brother Dick on banjo and guitar, Jim Lannigan 
on piano and bass, Bud Freeman on C-melody sax, and Frank Tesche- 
macher on clarinet. Before many years had passed they were joined 
by the Goodmans, Dave Tough (whom they picked up at Lewis In- 
stitute), Floyd O'Brien (whom Dave Tough picked up at the Uni- 
versity of Chicago), Mezz Mezzrow, Fud Livingston, Jess Stacy, Jack 
Teagarden, Red McKenzie, Eddie Condon, Joe Sullivan, and Gene 
Krupa. These musicians were all part of the Chicago picture at one 
time or another; to attempt to separate the pure voices from the 
contaminated, as u Chicago style" enthusiasts have so often done, is to 
end up with all of Frank Teschemacher's bad notes and crippled 
phrases and none of the drive that he and his Austin Gang associates 
communicated so attractively. 

Tesch is alternately a bore and an unforgivable noise in many of 
his recorded performances, but simultaneously he is a "swinging 
fool," to use an expression which, like the music, sprang as much from 
his playing as anybody "else's in the late twenties and early thirties 
when the beat began to take over and big bands became the inevitable 
consequence of the fascination with heavy time. Well, the big time 
was Tesch's, and Benny Goodman picked it up as much from him as 
from the general drive around him. The big time was also the Austin 
kids' and their friends'. Two-beat music was moving out for a lot of 
musicians; the sure way to prove it is to listen to the records made 
by the Chicago Rhythm Kings and the Cellar Boys, to the Charles 
Pierce sides and the Chicago dates played by Red McKenzie and 
Eddie Condon. The new jazz was in steady four/four time, or moving 



CHICAGO 119 

toward it, away from the heavy syncopations of weak and strong 
beats. The new jazz that was Chicago's jazz was compounded of many 
strains, so many strains that even the old beat had to change to make 
way for them, and the bands had to get bigger and the music had to 
face a period almost as much of torture as of joy before the accom- 
plishment which made a good deal of it, if not all, worth while. 

It was Tesch who turned a bunch of enthusiastic record listeners 
into jazz musicians. The Austin gang used to spend its spare moments 
across the street from the high school at a drugstore called Spoon and 
Straw. Four of the five high school boys were violinists of a sort; 
Lawrence Freeman, Bud to his friends, wasn't sure whether he was a 
tap dancer or a drummer. All of them were positive that some of the 
most exciting music they had ever heard was on the records of the 
New Orleans Rhythm Kings, which they listened to with an atten- 
tion they never paid to their high school teachers. These records were 
impressive sides that Rappolo, Brunies, and their associates had made 
in the studios of the Starr Piano Company in Richmond, Indiana, for 
the Gennett label. Tesch convinced his fellow schoolboys that "Tiger 
Rag" and "Tin Roof Blues" and u Shimme Shawabble" were within 
their reach. He showed them how much he could do with "Clarinet 
Marmalade" and "The Maple Leaf Rag" and convinced them that 
there was something they could do too. When Dave Tough, who 
really was a drummer, showed Bud Freeman that his instrument was 
the C-melody saxophone and not the traps, they had formed a band. 

The band the kids made, with Dave North now on piano, they 
called the Blue Friars, after the inn which was the playing home of 
their idols, the Rhythm Kings. They picked up a few jobs around 
town and in the summer of 1924, their first playing year as a group, 
they went to work at Lost Lake, not far from Chicago. When they 
came back to Chicago in the fall, there were no jobs until Jimmy 
McPartland found a promoter, Husk O'Hare, to front them and to 
find them work. O'Hare was no musician but he got them work, in- 
cluding some time on radio station WHT, where they were known 
as O'Hare's Red Dragons. When they went to work at the White 
City Ballroom, where Doc Cook later took over with his big band, 
they took the name of Husk O'Hare's Wolverines, after the band 
with which Bix was making his reputation. They added Dave Tough's 
friend Floyd O'Brien on trombone, and filled out the band for Satur- 
day night performances with Mezz Mezzrow or Fud Livingston 



120 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

which gave them a three-man saxophone section. What they played 
together was obviously more than ordinarily effective jazz; most of 
the good jazz musicians around Chicago came in at one time or another 
to listen, to enthuse, and to encourage. The band returned the com- 
pliment in whatever time they could find before or after work; they 
went all over town, listening to Louis and Jimmy Noone and Johnny 
Dodds, to Bix when they could, to Earl Hines, and to all the other fine 
musicians who were making Chicago the center of jazz in the 19205. 

On weekends the band opposite them at White City was Sig Myers' 
Orchestra. Not distinguished as a whole for its personnel or per- 
formance, the Myers band did have Arnold Loyocano, who had 
originally come north from New Orleans with Tom Brown's band, 
on bass, and Muggsy Spanier on cornet. Muggsy, christened Francis, 
was the man. Born in Chicago on November 9, 1906, by 1924 he had 
done a vast amount of gigging around and playing short and long 
engagements with first rate jazzmen. He had teamed up for a while 
with Bix and had listened with an avid ear to Joe Oliver, Keppard, 
and Louis, all of whom influenced his driving cornet. When Jimmy 
McPartland left to take over Bix's job in New York with the original 
Wolverines, Muggsy Spanier replaced him with O'Hare's Wolverines. 
Jimmy, a cornetist of lovely tone and matching ideas, was the only 
logical man to replace Bix; Muggsy, a cornetist of searing tone and 
punchy phrase, was, as it turned out, the only logical man to replace 
Jimmy. 

After the White City job Tesch and Muggsy took most of the 
band into the Midway Garden, a few blocks away at Sixtieth Street 
and Cottage Grove. Jim Lannigan and Bud Freeman joined Art Kas- 
sel, who led a commercial outfit, in which tinkly sounds passed for 
jazz; however, it offered some compensation besides money to its new 
musicians in the men who sometimes played with the band, such men 
as the Rhythm Kings* pianist Elmer Schoebel and bass player Steve 
Brown, and clarinetists like Danny Polo and Benny Goodman. Jess 
Stacy joined Muggsy and Tesch one night, and they had a fine new 
pianist. Jess came from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where he had 
worked in a music store, listened with rabid attention to Fate Mar- 
able's band, with Louis and the Dodds brothers, when it came to 
town on the steamboat Capitol, and later had played on the Capitol 
himself with Tony Catalano's lowans from Davenport. Jess, a quiet 
and sensitive musician, followed the Chicago pattern in his listening 



CHICAGO 121 

to and learning from Earl Hines. All of Tesch's band listened and 
learned; as often as possible they sat in with the great jazzmen, where 
they played or where they lived. 

Muggsy arid Tesch jammed frequently with Wingy Manone and 
Eddie Condon. Wingy, born Joseph Manone in New Orleans in 1904, 
picked up the name by which he is best known when an early accident 
took one of his arms. After a wandering trumpet career in the South, 
he came to Chicago in 1924 and settled down at the Cellar, where he 
was often joined in jam sessions by other jazzmen. Condon, born a 
year later than Wingy in Goodland, Indiana, came to Chicago ten 
years later with the family he saluted so amusingly in nis autobiog- 
raphy, We Called It Music. He started playing the banjo before he 
got to high school, and by the time he hit the upper grades he 
was already playing jobs. In 1921 he went to stay with his brother 
Cliff in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the day after he arrived he went to 
play with a band led by Bill Engleman, who was a businessman but 
liked music so much he had a dance band. Then Eddie moved on to 
Waterloo, Iowa, where one Hollis Peavey wanted "to play jazz 
music" and needed a banjo for the band he was forming. Eddie played 
up and down the northern Mississippi Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa 
with Peavey 's Jazz Bandits and then was offered a job in Syracuse, 
New York, playing with Bix Beiderbecke and Pee Wee Russell. It 
was an exciting assignment; through Bix's playing Condon first real- 
ized the size of jazz. Just before they left Chicago, Pee Wee and Eddie 
accompanied Bix to the Friars' Inn, where Bix sat in. Then, says Eddie, 
"It happened." He suddenly realized that all music was not the same, 
"that some people play so differently from others that it becomes an 
entirely new set of sounds." After the Syracuse job Eddie came back 
to Chicago, a veteran at seventeen, to play with various groups around 
town, with college boys, with the Austin gang and others who joined 
Wingy Manone at the Cellar, at the Three Deuces, at all the other 
places where white musicians were allowed to play. 

Joe Sullivan became the regular pianist with the Chicago musicians. 
At seventeen, in 1925, he had already picked up a substantial musical 
education at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and in speakeasies, 
smoky back rooms, musicians' amateur and gangsters' professional 
ginmills. He had a keen ear and a honky-tonk touch, and he soaked 
up the several piano-playing traditions of the New Orleans profes- 
sors and the Sedalia and St. Louis ragtimers, Earl Hines' piano trans- 



122 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

formations of trumpet styles, and the alternately dapper and delirious 
rumbles of the boogie-woogie pianists. In Joe's playing, so vital a 
part of the so-called Chicago-style records, all these strains met and 
were woven into a handsome jazz tapestry. 

Boogie woogie was at its vigorous best in Chicago in the middle 
twenties. Jimmie Yancey, in a sense the founding father of boogie 
woogie, had settled down in Chicago after a singing and dancing 
career that took him as far as a command performance before King 
George in London. He was much in demand for rent parties, those 
paradoxically joyous occasions when eviction was eluded by passing 
the hat to sympathetic celebrants. He rolled all around the town, on 
his feet and on the piano keyboard, and picked up a lot of imitators 
and a few capable students. Pine Top Smith, who learned his tremu- 
lous trade from Yancey, gave the whole species a name in his 1928 
recording of u Pine Top's Boogie Woogie." In that famous record he 
gave the chords of the tonic and the dominant a noisy ride and in his 
accompanying patter explained a dance that was to be perf ormed to 
the music, with an audible leer to his words, making clear the sexual 
meaning of the music. There is no question that the atmosphere in 
which boogie woogie was played was stimulating to the gonads, but 
it is difficult to hear the atmosphere in the music, except with verbal 
suggestion. In spite of its rolling rhythms and multiple climaxes, 
boogie woogie is essentially a virtuoso exploitation of the polyrhythms 
of ragtime, a series of bass rumbles and treble tremolos that sometimes 
mask melodic and harmonic commonplaces. There is charm and 
humor in the playing of Yancey, Pine Top, and their successors, but 
not necessarily a sexual enchantment. There is also a kind of bordello 
flavor in the playing of Pine Top and such of his contemporaries as 
Will Ezell, "Speckled Red" (Rufus Ferryman), Montana Taylor, 
Hersal Thomas, Romeo Nelson, Turner Parrish, Cow-cow Daven- 
port, Jimmy Blithe, Lemuel Fowler, and the still-active "Cripple 
Clarence" Lofton. But in the best of them, Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, 
Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson, the abiding quality is of a tricky 
and witty pianism. 

Ammons and Lewis were both drivers for the Silver Taxicab Com- 
pany in 1924, both apprentice blues pianists, both beginning to get 
the boogie-woogie beat. They both played the house parties and the 
jug celebrations; they both were formidable pianists and rent-party 
entertainers. Ammons became a band pianist as well as a soloist and 



CHICAGO 123 

made lots of trips into the South, on one of which he brought the 
Chicago transformation of Storyville piano back to its home ground, 
New Orleans. Lewis drifted away from music and became a car 
washer in a Chicago South Side garage. Both were rediscovered in 
1935, when John Hammond, single-handed, brought boogie woogie 
back and, with Ammons' help, found Lewis in a garage. Both were 
brought back to records in January 1936, Albert with his fine Club 
De Lisa band, Meade Lux Lewis as a piano-celeste and whistling 
soloist. In these records they demonstrated their rhythmic skill, show- 
ing how much could be done within the rigid confines of boogie 
woogie. Listening to them, one could hear the triumphant part played 
in jazz by rhythm. Listening to them, one could hear the massive in- 
fluence of rhythm upon musicians in Chicago in the twenties. 

Rhythm was the boss in Chicago jazz. Under the successive minis- 
trations of the New Orleans immigrants and the West-Side natives, 
jazz moved from a few fixed syncopations to a wealth of rhythmic 
devices. The accents within the jazz measure moved from two weak 
and two strong to an even four. Phrases, choruses, whole performances 
were better integrated because of the rhythmic change. It was almost 
as if these jazzmen, building a new art, were aware of rhythm as the 
Irish poet William Butler Yeats understood it: 

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the 
moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and 
awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an allur- 
ing monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state 
of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of 
the will is unfolded in symbols. 

The Chicago musicians never articulated their understanding of 
rhythm in quite such terms, but there was in them as in Yeats a kind 
of belief in the mysticism of "the beat." Without ever falling into the 
trance of the African tribe or the Irish poet, they were able to free 
their minds from the pressure of musical consciousness, in order to 
do as Yeats suggested the artist do "seek out those wavering, medi- 
tative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagina- 
tion, that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and 
only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty." The beat be- 
came a second nature; it did hush with u an alluring monotony" and 
hold awake with variety. The rhythmic breadth of the Chicago musi- 



124 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

cians can be heard in the first records made together by Muggsy and 
Tesch. 

Charles Pierce was a South-Side butcher in Chicago who loved jazz 
and implemented that love by using the money he made from meat 
to support a first-rate jazz band which played weekends and made 
records. In October 1927 Pierce took Muggsy and Tesch and seven 
other musicians, including himself on saxophone, into the Paramount 
Studios in Chicago to make their memorable "Bull Frog Blues," "China 
Boy," and "Nobody's Sweetheart." On all these sides there is a drive, 
the rhythmic integration stringing solos together. There is more of 
the same on the November and December dates made by a more 
select group of musicians. Under the name of the Jungle Kings, 
Muggsy combined with Tesch, Mezz Mezzrow on tenor sax, Joe 
Sullivan, Eddie Condon, Jim Lannigan on tuba, George Wettling on 
drums, and Red McKenzie as the vocalist, to make "Friars Point 
Shuffle" and "Darktown Strutters' Ball." Wettling was a well-trained 
and experienced drummer from Topeka, Kansas, who had studied 
some of the finer technical points of jazz with Mezzrow in Chicago. 
McKenzie was a St. Louis bellhop who played a comb with tissue 
paper over it and made appealing noises alongside the kazoo played by 
Dick Slevin and the banjo played by Jack Bland in the Mound City 
Blowers, with Frankie Trumbauer on alto sax on some of his record 
sides, and Eddie Lang on guitar on others made in 1924. Unfortu- 
nately, none of McKenzie's happily influential singing appears on 
these records. 

Red McKenzie, a dapper little man whose tongue was cogent with 
words as well as with hair combs, had come to Chicago, with his Blue 
Blowers as a novelty threesome, in Gene Rodemich's successful 
band. In that year, 1924, Isham Jones, the most able and best equipped 
of the leaders of sweet balnds, got the Blue Blowers a Brunswick re- 
cording date, and Brunswick took them from there to Atlantic City, 
where Red met Eddie Lang. The Blue Blowers played the Palace 
in New York in the summer of 1924 and then went to London to play 
a date at the Stork Club there. Back in America, Red did pretty well, 
playing around the country. A friendly, amusing, and talented man, 
he made many friends, among them recording officials. He arranged 
the first date on Okeh for Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Lang, and Frankie 
Trumbauer, the date at which they recorded their inspired "Trum- 
bology" and their lovely "Singin' the Blues." He also arranged their 



CHICAGO 125 

date for Paramount in October of that same year, 1927, and, in Decem- 
ber, the Okeh date made by McKenzie and Condon's Qucagoans. For 
that last date Jimmy McPartland was back, having had a couple of 
years' run with the Wolverines, of which he became nominal leader 
in 1925, and having played a great deal around Chicago, using many 
of the original Blue Friars musicians. Bud Freeman, by this time an 
adept at tenor sax, Tesch, Joe Sullivan, Jim Lannigan, and Gene Krupa 
joined Condon but not McKenzie, who neither played nor sang on 
any of the sides. 

They played "Nobody's Sweetheart" again, as well as "Sugar," 
"China Boy," and "Liza." They played with the ebullience inevitable 
at such a reunion of musicians. Standing on soapboxes, they poured 
all they had learned into the recording microphone, and it was much. 
The beat was almost an even four-four; the ensemble was both fluid 
and clean. Gene Krupa, then just moving into the select circle, was 
a native Chicagoan who showed at eighteen, as later, a considerable 
technical skill but a heaviness as well. Frank Teschemacher, who 
scored several of the ensemble passages, showed, especially in the bril- 
liant middle passage of "Nobody's Sweetheart," that he was moving 
along in his jazz ideas and had gone past the point at which only un- 
scored improvisation was acceptable. 

There was more of the same spirit and skill and progress in the next 
date made by these musicians, on the fourth of April, 1928, under the 
name of the Chicago Rhythm Kings. The personnel differed in the 
substitution of Muggsy for Jimmy, Mezz Mezzrow for Bud, and the 
addition of McKenzie as a vocalist. Again the ensemble and the solo- 
ists worked brilliantly together; again Tesch's thinking dominated 
the sides. Here Tesch's inspiration, as well as his occasional clumsiness, 
can be heard; here is his uninhibited drive which carried every other 
musician along with him. And on these sides, too, is Red's appealing 
voice, that languorous vibrato, that refashioning of the ballad line 
which could make even of a pallid melody a touching, poignant tune. 

Recording was opening up in the second half of the twenties; the 
record companies were finding an ever-increasing audience for their 
wares. In 1926 sales of records in America reached a dizzying new 
high of 151,000,000 disks. In Chicago, on June twelfth of that year, 
the Consolidated Talking Machine Company (Okeh Records) cele- 
brated the phenomenal success of records with a "Cabaret and Style 
Show" at the Coliseum. For about ten thousand people, Okeh's Chi- 



126 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

cago recording manager, the pianist Richard M. Jones, gathered to- 
gether the stars of his label. There were the big bands Carroll 
Dickerson's Sunset Cafe Orchestra, Charlie Elgar's Arcadia Ballroom 
Band, Dave Peyton's Peerless Theatre Orchestra, Doc Cook's Dream- 
land Ballroom Orchestra, Erskine Tate's Vendome Syncopaters. Al 
Wind brought down his Dreamland Cafe band, King Oliver the 
Plantation Cafe Orchestra, and Louis Armstrong led his Hot Five 
through an actual recording as the climax of the evening, after Butter- 
beans and Susie, Lillie Delk Christian, Chippie Hill, Lonnie Johnson, 
and Richard M. Jones had demonstrated their individual talents as 
singers and instrumentalists. Earlier in the year there had been an 
"Okeh Race Records Artists Night" at the same Coliseum. In Septem- 
ber 1927 twelve recording bands played a glittering program until 
five o'clock in the morning at Riverview Park Ballroom. The record 
industry's success had built a large and clamoring audience for jazz. 
When, in 1928, Tesch, McKenzie and Condon, Joe Sullivan, Jimmy 
McPartland, Bud Freeman, Jim Lannigan, and Gene Krupa went to 
New York to play with Bea Palmer, it was natural that they should 
record with a variety of bands. Tesch made his remarkable "Shim- 
Me-Sha- Wabble" and u One Step to Heaven" with Miff Mole's or- 
chestra, with Red Nichols on trumpet, Miff on trombone, Sullivan, 
Condon, and Krupa. Then Condon made a date under his name with 
Tesch, Sullivan, and Krupa. Finally Tesch was invited to play with 
a band assembled under the famous recording name of The Chocolate 
Dandies, consisting of Nat Natoli on trumpet, Tommy and Jimmy 
Dorsey, Don Redman, George Thomas, Frank Signorelli, and Stan 
King. He appeared on one side, the famous "Cherry," playing tenor 
sax. 

With the records came fame of a kind, and with the fame a variety 
of job offers. Jimmy McPartland joined Ben Pollack, who had also 
snared Benny Goodman some years earlier when Benny was playing 
in California. Jim Lannigan joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 
which recognized his ability on the bass. Tesch went to work with 
Jan Garber's Guy-Lombardo-style band, no fair berth for his talents, 
although he later made two good sides with Ted Lewis, along with 
Muggsy Spanier and George Brunies. When the depression came in 
1929, the great years of Chicago jazz were over, although Tesch con- 
tinued to play until his death in 1932. With the coming of radio the 
name-band era inaugurated during the peak recording years was fully 



CHICAGO 127 

under way. Popular tunes, novelty acts, and the bands associated with 
them had caught the public's fancy, and there wasn't much of an 
audience for the little groups that played the big jazz. Tesch spent 
most of the last three years of his life playing with bands like those 
of Garbcr and Lewis. 

In the last years of the Hoover administration there were still some 
jobs, still some record dates. In October 1929 Tesch made two sides 
with Elmer Schoebel and his Friars Society Orchestra, playing "Co- 
penhagen" and "Prince of Wails." The next year, in January 1930, he 
made "Wailin' Blues" and "Barrelhouse Stomp" with the Cellar Boys, 
Wingy Manone's band, with Bud Freeman on tenor sax, Charlie Mel- 
rose on piano and accordion, and George Wettling on drums. Two 
years later, in January 1932, he was playing in a little band under the 
trumpeter Wild Bill Davison. But he was not long for the band or this 
world. One night he and Wild Bill were driving to work in a leisurely 
fashion. A truck crashed into their car, throwing Tesch clear of the 
machine but killing him on the spot, while Wild Bill was only dazed. 

Tesch's earlier colleagues accepted his death as an inevitable trag- 
edy. Cruel fate, they felt, had killed the man as it had killed his music 
three years earlier. 



(Chapter 12 




BIX 



Many of the great men of jazz died prematurely, but almost all 
of them had brought their music to maturity before they died. Not 
so Bix Beiderbecke. Bix lived twenty-eight years, and even before 
he died he had passed into legend. There was something about the 
little round horn in the little round face, something about the quality 
of his tone and the character of his melodic ideas that hit all the men 
who played with him and many who listened so hard that they 
awarded him a kind of immediate immortality. But he did die young 
and only half-grown as a musician. 

By 1938, when Dorothy Baker's highly fictionalized and best- 
selling life of Bix, Young Man 'with a Horn, was published, he had 
taken on some of the qualities of a minor god, and to many musicians 
he was and still is jazz incarnate. The last paragraph of Young Man 
'with a Horn begins, "The sun was in Rick's face," as if to indicate 
that when he died a kind of special light shone down from Heaven 
for him, and as Rick had this golden quality in the book, so did his 
progenitor's playing, according to the hosts of musicians and fans 
who have kept the name of Bix Beiderbecke alive. To see them sit 
around a phonograph and listen to beat-up copies of old Paul White- 
man records on which Bix plays, or to some of Bix's own records in 
even worse condition, is to watch men transfixed. 

Leon Bismarck Beiderbecke ("Bix" was an abbreviation of his mid- 
dle name) was born in Davenport, Iowa, on March 10, 1903. From a 
background that was steeped in music, Bix caught the fervor early. 
He came of a wealthy German-American family, which was in the 
lumber business. His sister was a pianist, and his mother played both 
the piano and the organ; Bix took piano lessons as a matter of course, 
and his parents fondly believed he would be a concert pianist. When 
his Uncle Al, a Davenport band leader and cornetist, visited his family, 

128 



BIX 129 

Bix insisted on being taught the rudiments of the horn. Uncle Al didn't 
take him seriously, but Bix bought himself a cornet and began to play 
it anyway. 

Like the Chicago kids who congregated at the Spoon and Straw, 
Bix had an ice-cream-parlor headquarters, Maher's, where he could 
usually find his cornet when he had absent-mindedly misplaced it. All 
his life Bix was absent-minded. As Eddie Condon later recalled, he 
was always losing his cornet or stepping on it "I can't remember 
how many horns he'd run through." He even dressed absent-mindedly, 
and often had to borrow a coat or a tux because he had forgotten his 
own. Condon described his old friend as "a guy with a nonchalant, 
almost vacant look on his face, with his hat way back on his head, 
just about ready to topple down." 

At high school in Davenport, Bix thought and dreamed cornet when 
he wasn't playing one. When he had the horn in his possession, he 
sped out to Poppie Gardens, near Geneseo, Illinois, in his Ford tour- 
ing car, to sit in with the Carlisle Evans band and, even in those begin- 
ning days, impress them. When the riverboat Capitol steamed into 
Davenport, Bix would jump on board and get up steam himself on 
the calliope. When Louis and the Dodds boys played he listened in- 
tently, then went home to try out their ideas for himself. Emmett 
Hardy, who played in some of the white riverboat bands, was also 
an influence, contributing, some say, the concept of sweet round tone 
that Bix made into a vital jazz trumpet and cornet tradition. 

His parents, no longer quite so set on a concert career for him, sent 
Bix to Lake Forest Academy in the Chicago suburb of the same name 
in 1921. He spent almost a year at Lake Forest, and before he left 
had aroused something more than the academic interest of the head- 
master. He was the creator and leader and star of the school band, 
and widely popular among the students, but he was out before the 
school year was out. He used to sneak downtown when he could to 
play with musicians and soak up some of the gin they left. He was 
outstanding as a music student, but wasn't interested in any other 
subject. He spent much of his time on campus listening to Original 
Dixieland Jazz records and particularly picking out Nick LaRocca's 
cornet solos. Before he was asked to leave school he knew most of 
the standard Dixieland jazz numbers and many of LaRocca's original 
ideas. 

Shortly after leaving Lake Forest he took his first professional job, 



130 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

on a Lake Michigan excursion boat that traveled between Chicago 
and Michigan City (for a while this band had young Benny Good- 
man, in short pants, playing a little clarinet) . From the excursion boat 
job and others around Chicago came the personnel of the Wolverines, 
a small outfit which followed the amended Dixieland instrumentation 
a tenor saxophone added to the basic horns, cornet, clarinet, and 
trombone. 

Founded by pianist Dick Voynow, the Wolverines adopted their 
name for a job they got late in 1923 at a roadhouse near Hamilton, 
Ohio, the Stockton Club. Bix played cornet, Jimmy Hartwell was 
the clarinetist, Al Gande the trombonist, and George Johnson played 
the instrument foreign to New Orleans jazz, the tenor. The rhythm 
section consisted of Bobby Gillette on banjo, Min Leibrook on bass, 
and Bob Conzelman (soon replaced by Vic Moore) on drums, in 
addition to Voynow. 

The Wolverines with Bix achieved a degree of popularity at Mid- 
western university dances and did fairly well in some theaters around 
Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, as well as at odd dance halls and ball- 
rooms. Their Stockton Club job came at the beginning of one of the 
noisiest and bloodiest of the Prohibition gang wars. A fight among 
bootleggers and their gun-happy friends started at the club on New 
Year's Eve 1923. To cover the frightening clamor, the Wolverines 
played "China Boy" loud and furious for more than an hour. The 
story of Bix's succession of relaxed choruses in this bloody and roaring 
setting is a major part of his legend. 

At the University of Indiana the band was so popular it played 
ten weekends in a row, giving pleasure to many, especially to Hoagy 
Carmichael, who was an undergraduate there, and, as a member of 
the campus band, was beginning his own career as pianist, singer, and 
composer. On one of the band's appearances at the university, Hoagy 
got them to play at the Kappa Sigma house on the afternoon of the 
evening they were to play for the fraternity dance. Bix didn't pick 
up his cornet for more than four notes a break in a chorus of the 
"Dippermouth Blues," King Oliver's classic but such four notes! 
Hoagy, describing the great moment, exults: 

The notes weren't blown they were hit, like a mallet hits a chime, and 
his tone had a richness that can only come from the heart. I rose violently 
from the piano bench and fell, exhausted, onto a davenport. He had com- 
pletely ruined me. That sounds idiotic, but it is the truth. I've heard Wag- 



BIX 131 

ner's music and all the rest, but those four notes that Bix played meant 
more to me than everything else in the books. When Bix opened his soul 
to me that day, I learned and experienced one of life's innermost secrets 
to happiness pleasure that it had taken a whole lifetime of living and 
conduct to achieve in full. 

When Vic Berton, who was a drummer and hooker around Chi- 
cago, heard the Wolverines, he quickly booked them into theaters in 
the Indiana-Kentucky circuit and got them a two-month job at the 
Municipal Beach Pavilion in Gary, Indiana, where many Chicagoans 
could hear them. During this engagement Bix concentrated as much 
on piano as on cornet. Before the band went to the beach, in 1924, it 
made its first records in a crude studio in Richmond, Indiana; the 
walls were of boards, electrical connections stuck out everywhere, 
and a large horn protruded through a velvet drape under the ornate 
letters which proclaimed the studios those of Gennett Records. In 
March the band made "Jazz Me Blues" and "Fidgety Feet," in May, 
"Oh, Baby," "Copenhagen," "Riverboat Shuffle," and "Susie." Bix's 
eloquent performances stuck out on those records like the plugs and 
the wire on the studio walls. When the summer was over the band 
made three more sides, "I Need Some Pettin'," the title of which em- 
ployed a newly coined name for a very old practice; the transformed 
quadrille "Tiger Rag," a New Orleans and Chicago jazz classic; and 
the tune that celebrated a place, "Royal Garden Blues." 

In October 1924 the band made its entry into New York, one that 
was hardly triumphal. It played at the Cinderella Dance Hall off Times 
Square, then as in later years the acme of ten-cents-a-dance emporia. 
Bix left the band while it was in New York, but not before Red 
Nichols had come to pay homage with his ear and later with his cornet, 
and not before Bix had made some more records with the Wolverines, 
two with George Brunies on trombone, "Sensation" and "Lazy 
Daddy," two without him, "Tia Juana" and "Big Boy," on which 
Bix played piano. 

Bix went from the Wolverines in New York back to Chicago, 
where he played some with the Charles Straight orchestra and jobbed 
around town a bit. (The exchange was even. Jimmy McPartland went 
from Chicago to New York to join the Wolverines.) He played an 
Indiana prom with the Jean Goldkette band. He did a week at the 
Riviera Theatre in Chicago, billed with Frank Quartel; the two of 
them played trumpet and concertina as the Pepper Boys. Their act 



132 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

was right in the old vaudeville tradition; Bix sat at the bottom of the 
stage and blew up to Frank, or vice versa. They did as much posing 
as playing. Bix was doing his serious playing where he did his listen- 
ing, at the Apex where Jimmy Noone and Earl Hines were, at the 
Sunset Cafe where Louis was, at the clubs and theaters where Bessie 
Smith sang, and at all the other places where you could hear and 
sometimes play with the great men. There is a story about a night 
when Bix and Louis played a Battle of Cornets over on the South 
Side. After hearing Bix, the story goes, Louis put down his horn and 
cried, saying he could never play like that. 

In the course of his happy wanderings around Chicago Bix made 
a couple of sides with some friends, Min Leibrook and Vic Moore from 
the Wolverines, the trombonist Miff Mole, the composer-pianist Rube 
Bloom, and the man most insistently paired with Bix after this date 
in December 1924, Frank Trumbauer. Under the name of the Sioux 
City Six, they did "I'm Glad" and "Flock o' Blues" for Gennett. In 
March of the next year Bix and Tommy Dorsey and the clarinetist 
Don Murray took a rhythm section with them into the Gennett studio 
to do "Davenport Blues," in honor of Bix, and "Toddlin' Blues." 

In September 1925 Bix joined Frank Trumbauer's band at the 
Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis. For almost a year he made at least a 
hundred dollars a week; this was big money for him and good money 
for most musicians of the period when a hundred dollars had a large 
negotiable value. With Trumbauer he formed a lasting musical at- 
tachment; they made many records and personal appearances com- 
bining Bix's cornet and the leader's C-melody or alto saxophone. With 
Trumbauer, Bix played concerts and explored some of the resources 
of French Impressionist music, which influenced his piano playing 
and writing considerably, though not his cornet. He began to fool 
around with short piano pieces, pastiches strongly reminiscent of 
Debussy and Ravel; some of these later emerged as "In a Mist," 
"Flashes," "In the Dark," and "By Candlelight"; of these he recorded 
only "In a Mist," also known as "Bixology," which he did as a piano 
solo. 

The French Impressionist composers and their American disciples 
and imitators made a great impression upon Bix's generation of jazz 
musicians. When Frank Trumbauer recalls his days with Bix he re- 
members the Impressionist music. 



BIX 133 

Not a young man with a horn. Not responsible for the many literary 
attempts to describe a beat-it-down, jivin' cat, that everyone might think 
constituted the immortal personality of the Bix that I knew. 

Bix was an intelligent young man, a fast thinker, and well versed in 
many things, and, much to the surprise of many people, he was an ardent 
student of Debussy, Stravinsky, Cyril Scott, and Eastwood Lane knew 
their symphonies like most jitterbugs knew their Goodman, studied them 
and loved them and, strange to say, understood them, We sat for many 
hours, with Bix at the piano, playing his conception of Eastwood Lane's 
Adirondack Sketches, of which "The Land of the Loon" was his favorite, 
and also mine, and if you have heard "In a Mist" or "Candlelight," you 
can readily realize the musical influence inspiring his work. 

When Frank recalls Bix's playing he describes it in Impressionist 
terms, reminiscent of the outdoor scenes of Manet and Renoir, sug- 
gestive of the warm natural colors of the poet Paul Verlaine, What- 
ever his execut'on in words, Frank's intention and Bix's is the 
same as that of the Impressionists. 

To describe in print the work of Bix is almost like trying to describe 
the color in the beautiful flowers that we see all around us, or the beauti- 
ful clouds we sec in the sky, or the varicolored leaves in the fall [which] 
make an impression so indelible on our minds. Still, these things relatively 
have an association with anything artistic. You just can't measure it with 
a yardstick. 

It was another sixteen years before the impact of Impressionism 
was again so directly felt in jazz. Much of the music of radio and 
movie studio orchestras in the twenties and thirties sprang from 
Debussy and Ravel and their American imitators. Paul Whiteman's 
so-called symphonic jazz and Andre Kostelanetz's swollen scores bor- 
rowed from Impressionist sources. So did the music Johnny Richards 
composed for Boyd Raeburn's band in the mid-forties, and Stan 
Kenton's tone poems for piano and orchestra are in the same tradi- 
tion. But improvised jazz with a steady beat didn't go right to Bix's 
inspiration, the Impressionists, until the formulators of bebop did 
their first playing at Minton's in 1941. It's interesting to speculate 
upon Bix's possible arrival at music like bop perhaps a full decade be- 
fore Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker if he 
had kept his health and lived. 

In the spring of 1926 Jean Goldkette offered both Bix and Frank 



134 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

jobs in his large orchestra, and the offer was too good to turn down. 
It was a good band, for a semi-symphonic dance band, and it offered 
a musician the freedom to blow some of the time, Bill Challis's know- 
ing arrangements, and some capable colleagues, as well as the money. 
Don Murray, a fair clarinetist, was the reed soloist. Ray Ludwig and 
Fred Farrar played able trumpet, and Sonny Lee played somewhat 
better trombone he was soon to be replaced by just as good a man, 
Bill Rank. Steve Brown, the Original Dixielander, was on bass, and 
Irving Riskin, whom everybody called Itzy, played the piano and 
made the jokes. Chauncey Morehouse was the drummer and he justi- 
fied his imposing names in his complicated approach to the hides. 
Later he fooled around with a scale full of tuned drums and mastered 
the talking and singing scalar beats. 

Bix was growing rounder all the time, in face and body and cornet 
sound. He was the natural leader of the jazz group Goldkette sported 
within his big sweet band and enough of a pianist to be featured in 
the sweet outfit too. Of the two sections, the jazz was clearly the 
better, with Bix and Frank, Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, Sonny Lee, 
Ray Ludwig, Itzy, and Chauncey. But on records it was the big 
band that drew attention. Bix played on all the records from the fall 
of 1926 to the fall of 1927 but took only two solos, on "Slow River" 
and "Clementine (from New Orleans)." On such sides as "My Pretty 
Girl" his legato cornet could be heard through the staccato jerks and 
snorts of the ensemble, and his fans listened hard for those moments 
of grace. 

On "Clementine" Bix's colleagues almost matched him. Eddie 
Lang, the guitarist, had come to the band from his native Philadelphia 
via the Dorsey Brothers' Scranton Sirens, the Mound City Blue 
Blowers, and a variety of gigs around Atlantic City and New York; 
he was a quiet man with" a loud guitar voice, well trained musically 
as a violinist and well equipped intuitively. Eddie's swinging plucking 
stayed close to Bix in style and authority through the Goldkette 
months. So did the swooping fiddling of Joe Venuti, like Lang an 
Italian who had grown up in Philadelphia. Joe's birth at sea en route 
to the United States was a splendid subject for his quick and un- 
stoppable wit, which was both loud and funny in its articulation. He 
had joined his four strings to Eddie's six in Philly, then had moved 
with his compatriot to the Scranton Sirens, and had come to Gold- 
kette just before Bix. 



BIX 135 

Another of the considerable Goldkette talents was Danny Polo, a 
clarinetist of wide playing experience who joined up for the February 
1927 records. Danny's playing then was strictly Story ville notes of 
short valuation tied together in skipping phrases reminiscent of Picou, 
suggestive of Dodds and Bechct. New Orleans was the major influ- 
ence then; the Trumbauer alto sax hopped and skipped and jumped, 
and so did Don Murray's clarinet and the Goldkette reeds as a team. 
Frank Teschemacher's drive had not yet been heard enough nor 
understood nor imitated. 

Bix's roommate when they were both playing for Goldkette was 
the pianist Itzy Riskin. Itzy's firmest impression of Bix was of a great 
musician and a great person, not of a virtuoso cornetist. "He was the 
most easy-going guy I ever met. ... As long as I knew him, I never 
heard Bix say a bad word about anybody! Even without his playing 
you could love and admire him for that alone. . . . He certainly was 
the greatest natural musician and the grandest guy any of us will ever 
know." 

About Bix's ability on the cornet, Itzy had qualifications. "There 
were probably scores of cornetists who, technically speaking, could 
play rings around Bix, but there never has been one or will be one 
who can approach him when it comes to innate musicianship on his 
horn." But Itzy made a philosophical judgment. "After all," he said, 
"there's a big difference between being a straight, perhaps almost 
soulless instrument, and a person whose very soul breathes music 
that's translated so beautifully through the medium of a horn. Bix's 
heart was far ahead of his lips." As further evidence, Itzy offered 
Bix's piano playing: 

That Bixian feeling pervaded through the man's piano playing as well. 
His improvisations were the most moving passages I've ever heard. I re- 
member one night in an Indiana cafe after work when Bix hit a chord that 
was so beautiful that somebody (I think it was Hoagy Carmichael) became 
so excited that he threw a chair at him! 

Funny thing about Bix's piano playing: he could play only in the key 
of C and he had great difficulty in reading something which he seldom 
bothered to do anyway. And don't get the idea that Bix was the greatest 
reader in the world when it came to cornet, either. He was, I should say, 
only an average reader, if that. 

While the Goldkette band was in Cincinnati Bix's failings as a sight- 
reader or any other kind of reader of music were embarrassingly 



136 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

demonstrated. Bix and some of his colleagues were invited to listen to 
a band of youngsters who were proud of the accuracy of the tran- 
scriptions of Goldkette records their talented arranger had made. 
There the records were, note for note, right on the nose. After they 
had played a while they asked Bix to sit in. Bix agreed, as Itzy said, 
"in his usual gracious manner." The performance went along, and 
Bix sounded fine with the imitation Goldketters until they came to a 
jazz cornet passage. Bix stopped. The band stopped. He couldn't make 
anything out of the notes before him. The notes were his, notes he 
had improvised and which the arranger had copied down accurately, 
but Bix couldn't read what he himself had created. 

Bix was an unorthodox cornetist. Self-taught, he followed his own 
dictates in fingering the horn, and he raised all the parts written for 
his instrument from its own key, B flat, to the piano key, the simple 
center and beginning of the evolution of keys, C major. Even if he 
had been able to read well, his need to transpose everything into C 
would have played havoc with his playing, and if he had mastered 
the problem of sight-reading, his fingering would have gotten in his 
way. Too, his C-major predilection gave him a concept of pitch that 
verged on the twelve-tone formulations of the Schoenberg school of 
composers. He thought in terms of the C-major octave and the acci- 
dentals, sharped or flatted notes; it was inevitable that he should warm 
to the augmented chords and whole-tone scale of Debussy and Ravel, 
steps toward the eventual dissolution of fixed tonality, of thinking 
in terms of key. 

The Goldkette band broke up in 1927 too many prima donnas 
and too many expensive musicians; it was almost impossible to meet 
the payroll. Though Goldkette himself continued to lead bands in 
late airings out of Chicago, and to make some additional appearances, 
his great years were ovfcr. Adrian Rollini, the bass saxophonist and 
fountain-pen virtuoso (he actually played jazz of a sort on a made- 
over fountain pen), took many of the ex-Goldkette musicians to New 
York for the opening of a new club, the New Yorker. Bix, Venuti, 
Lang, the pianist Frank Signorelli, Chauncey Morehouse, Bill Rank, 
and Fred Farrar went into the club, which lasted for all of two weeks. 
When it closed they all joined Paul Whiteman, who was better able 
than Goldkette to support such well-paid names. Bix went into the 
four-man trumpet section, sitting with Charlie Margulies, the techni- 
cian of the group, with Henry Busse, whose speech with a German 



BIX 137 

accent seemed to be reflected in his playing accents, and with Goldy 
Goldfield, the roly-poly little man who was the comedian in the band. 
Bix was paid three hundred dollars a week apart from records, a lot 
of money then or now as a regular salary for a musician. 

Bix made many records with the Great White Father; on some you 
can hear him play beautiful solos; on others his lovely tone stands out 
as brass lead; on still others he is unnoticeable. He pops up for mo- 
ments just as Whiteman's other stars do. On "San" and "Aiississippi 
Mud," "From Monday On," "You Took Advantage of Me," "Sugar," 
"Coquette," "Changes," "OF Man River," and "Back in Your Own 
Backyard," Bix played with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, 
and Joe Venuti again. On "San" he and the Dorseys all played trumpet. 
On some of his forty-five sides with the band Bix did not try; the 
quality of the songs varied a great deal. On about a third of the sides 
he was working with songs that had already or were to become jazz 
classics, tunes especially notable for their chords or melodic lines, 
tunes easily adaptable to solo or ensemble jazz. These are the songs 
noted, in which the quality of his associates was brought into play 
alongside Bix, and the Whitcman band justified its reputation and 
income. 

A portion of Whiteman's "Sweet Sue," a twelve-inch record, gives 
us one of Bix's best solos. After a muddy concerted ensemble, a treacly 
celeste and violin, and a whispered tenor vocal, Bix sails in with 
authority and full rhythmic spread, but with all the measured sweet- 
ness that doesn't change the mood so much as enhance it. But one 
can't go to the Whiteman or the Goldkette records to hear the Bix 
about whom Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Trumbauer, and Itzy Riskin 
raved. This man appears on the Frankie Trumbauer records for Okeh 
and on his own sides for the same label. Under Trumbauer's leader- 
ship he made over forty sides, some of which have become jazz clas- 
sics. These include the 1927 "Singin' the Blues," the exquisite "I'm 
Coming, Virginia," "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," and "For 
No Reason at All in C," on which Bix played both cornet and piano. 
On "Wringin' and Twistin' " he again played the two instruments in 
a trio that included Trumbauer and Eddie Lang. On "Cryin' all Day," 
a neglected Trumbauer record, all of the simple, handsomely con- 
structed beauty of Bix's cornet moves solemnly in solo and more 
vigorously in the ensemble. Of the records he made under his own 
leadership in 1927 and 1928, six are first-rate of their kind: "Royal 



138 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Garden Blues," "Goose Pimples," "Thou Swell," "Louisiana," "Wa- 
da-da (Everybody's Doing It Now)," and "Ol' Man River." On all 
of these records the prevailing spirit and style is Dixieland, in which 
Bix's soft tone and subtle phrasing stand out almost as much as a 
glockenspiel would; but there is no doubt that Dixieland jazz was what 
Bix liked and what he wanted to play, whether or not his own style 
was best suited to it. On "Sorry," "Somebody Stole My Gal," "Thou 
Swell," and "Since My Best Gal Turned Me Down" Bix can be heard 
at his Dixie best. 

Bix was a heavy drinker. There are stories of great bouts, of great 
drunks and great hangovers. After a couple of years of Whiteman, 
he was often an unreliable musician. Whiteman sent him on a cure at 
the end of 1929. He was out of the band for a year but at full salary. 
As Trumbauer explained, praising his old boss, "in the case of illness, 
not only Bix, but various other members of his organization too 
numerous to mention, received full salary, and this group includes 
myself, for all the time off, and were met with a hearty handshake 
and *I hope you're feeling better' when they returned again to the 
Whiteman fold." But the cure didn't cure Bix. He returned to the 
band for a short w r hile, then left again, trying as unsuccessfully to 
play radio jobs as he was trying to quit drinking. He had never been 
a fast reader, and there was just enough in radio to be played at sight or 
at second seeing to keep him from relaxing and indeed from playing 
satisfactorily. At times he was in such poor health he could play noth- 
ing faster than half-notes his lips wouldn't function. By the spring 
of 193 1 he was a physical if not a mental wreck. He played the Camel 
cigarette radio program one night and couldn't make it and never 
played it again. He played four nights with the Casa Loma orchestra 
and didn't do much better. From the piano in his room in the Forty- 
fourth Street Hotel he led many drunken parties, improvising, imitat- 
ing, and playing lots of music. Babe Ruth was sometimes in attend- 
ance; he was close to Bix and affectionate about his cornet playing 
as Bix was about Babe's ball playing. As many musicians as could 
squeeze into the room gathered there. 

In 1930 he made his last recordings, five led by Hoagy Carmichael 
and another three under his own name with Joe Venuti, Benny Good- 
man, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Dorsey, and Gene Krupa. Of the Car- 
michael sides, two feature Benny Goodman, one Tommy Dorsey and 
Duke Ellington's growl trumpeter Bubber Miley, one Bud Freeman 



BIX 139 

on tenor sax, one Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet, one Jack Teagarden on 
trombone; Eddie Lang was the guitarist and Gene Krupa the drummer 
on most. The Carmichael sides include two of Hoagy's most famous 
songs, "Rockin' Chair" and "Georgia on My Mind." The other three 
sides were indifferent novelties sparked by Teagarden, Jimmy Dorsey, 
Venuti, and Lang. 

Bix kept busy through the spring and early summer of 1931, audi- 
tioning for a European job and making promises to himself to 
straighten out. But he never did straighten out. In June 1931, his 
health ruined by drinking, he insisted on playing a job at Princeton, 
which was too much for him. He came down with a severe cold. It 
deepened into pneumonia. On August 7, 1931, he died. 

Paul Whiteman paid an expansive tribute to his former employee 
a number of years after Bix's death. "Bix was not only the greatest 
musician IVe ever known but also the greatest gentleman I've ever 
known/' Whiteman said. "But hang it, I can't tell you why." Maybe, 
he continued, it was because "Bix was just one marvelous guy, quiet, 
unassuming, never worrying much about anything, and taking every- 
thing as it came." Whiteman explained that Bix was extremely polite. 
When he came down from the stand he'd exclaim to the kids waiting 
there to greet him, "Well, how's everything down there?" And he'd 
accompany the words with his warm, almost bashful smile. He was 
nice to everybody. "Despite his greatness, he was anything but a big- 
headed, fluff -you-off fellow." That was part of his great gentleman- 
liness. There was also the dimension of his musicianship. "Somehow 
or other he gave you the impression that he was constantly striving 
for something that was just out of his reach. His continual search- 
ing for some sort of ultimate created almost a mystic halo about him 
it gave you the feeling that here was a genius who knew of something 
beautiful to strive for and that, even though he might never reach it, 
he was far above you merely because he could sense that beauty for 
which he was reaching. . . . And I just can't describe that tone, those 
notes and phrases, and, least of all, the feeling with which he played. 
To me, there's never been a soloist like him, and let me tell you, I'd 
give my right arm if I could live to hear another Bix. I think my arm's 
safe, though!" 

Extravagant? Perhaps. But all the reports check. Compare White- 
man's words and Trumbauer's and CarmichaePs and Riskin's. Speak 
to one of Bix's intimate friends, such as Jimmy McPartland, who 



140 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

knew him well off and on during the great playing years from 1924 
to 1931. Jimmy in those days could drink as much as Bix; in 1951 he 
still could play as well as Bix, not just in imitation of him. Jimmy 
doesn't reach so obviously for the unreachable, but the sound is Bix's 
and the ideas come from some of the same sources. u That was the 
only way for us," Jimmy said. "Maybe we thought we saw it when 
we were drunk. Sometimes we even heard it when we played. It was 
elusive, beyond our grasp, but we knew it was there and we knew that 
it went something like that like the way Bix played it." That way 
was a fertile compound of a jazz beat and a round and beautiful tone 
that never accepted a distorted sound or a rough edge on a note as 
real. It was one of the important ways of jazz. It brought into the 
music a concern for constructed beauty that was as attractive on the 
surface as within. 



Chaph 



eri3 




NEW YORK 



For a long time New York has been a symbol to a large proportion 
of Americans of all that's wicked and woeful in the world. For almost 
as long it has been the center of art in America, but, its decriers will 
tell you, only because of its banks and bankers. Gotham is one of 
New York's many names, and Gotham was a village in England whose 
people were proverbial for their follies. Wall Street is one of New 
York's many streets, and Wall Street is an avenue whose people are 
proverbial for their moneybags some of them worn right under the 
eyes. But New York has other names and other streets. 

To the jazz musician the dearest of the names for the big town is 
the Apple; the apple has been for centuries a symbol of special en- 
dearment as well as Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden. New 
York is the apple of many a musician's eye. Most cherished of New 
York streets for musicians was Fifty-second Street, the street for 
many years. And there are other sanctified thoroughfares: Lenox and 
Seventh Avenues for several blocks here and there uptown in Harlem, 
where the various ballrooms have been or are ensconced; One Hun- 
dred and Twenty-fifth Street, where the bands have blown at the 
Harlem Opera House and still blow at the Apollo; Broadway, where 
the big presentation houses give stage room to a fair share of jazz, and 
Birdland carries on still for forlorn Fifty-second Street. All of this 
adds up to a considerable hot geography; jazz has had several homes 
in Gotham. For more than thirty years jazz has matured in New York, 
and for twenty of the thirty with growing distinction. 

A detailed examination of New York jazz does not yield a "style" 
in the sense that chroniclers have defined the styles of New Orleans 
or Chicago or Kansas City jazz, and yet something very close to a 
music that is New York's own emerged in the forties and fifties. The 
movement that is variously labeled "progressive" or "modern" or 

141 



142 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

"new" jazz is a New York movement. Its motion spins from the early 
steps of musicians in Kansas City and St. Louis, Chicago, Tulsa, and 
Pittsburgh, but its permanence was established in New York. Here 
bop was born; here Lennie Tristano made his home and organized 
his school; here the sounds we lump together and call "cool," because 
they are so relaxed and restrained, so unlumpy, found adherents and 
skilled representation. Jazz musicians came to New York to make ex- 
periments and stayed, and so did the principle of experimentation in 
jazz. The keynote of jazz in New York has been experimentation. 

But first an audience had to be found. Traditionally the leader of 
American cities in the arts, as well as in population figures, New York 
was a sad fourth or tenth or twentieth in taking up jazz when that 
ill-clad, ill-housed, ill-fed music first offered itself. 

While Gotham had had vision in spotting new writers and painters, 
and had even extended a sort of refuge to the modern classical com- 
posers, it was purblind to the efforts of the Original Dixieland Jazz 
Band and King Oliver and the other pioneers in jazz. These men did 
all right in their native New Orleans, and then all the way up the Mis- 
sissippi River to Chicago. But New York was content with a desultory 
ragtime and the music of revues and operettas. 

In Harlem there were a few men of distinction who knew how to 
kick a tune and why, who played in the bordellos and the boites 
the first not nearly so numerous as in New Orleans, the second not 
nearly so glamorous as in Paris. Bubber Miley, who is credited as the 
inventor of the growl style of trumpet playing, was playing uptown 
at the beginning of the 19205. Jimmy Harrison, a gifted trombone 
player, was around. So were Edqar Sampson and Benny Carter. 
Charlie Johnson was beginning his fifteen-year engagement at Smalls' 
Paradise, with a band that sheltered most of the great names in Harlem 
at one time or another. 

But downtown it was Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin and 
"Typhoon," "foxiest of fox trots." The Original Dixieland Jazz Band 
came to Reisenweber's in 1917 and played the "Tiger Rag" and the 
"Sensation Rag" and the "Ostrich Walk." But in 1917, though they 
were regarded as "interesting" attractions, Nick LaRocca's trumpet 
and Larry Shields' clarinet didn't catch New Yorkers' fancies particu- 
larly. The band's records sold; "Livery Stable Blues" went over a 
million copies; you still get worn ODJB disks in scrap drives. But it 
was London, not New York, that really went wild over the New 



NEW YORK 143 

Orleans gang. When they finished their tour abroad they came back 
to more receptive audiences. 

Then Harlem really woke up. Mamie Smith was singing the blues 
with a fine little band at the Garden of Joy, One Hundred and Fortieth 
Street and Seventh Avenue, atop a huge rock. Count Basic was play- 
ing piano in a little band at Leroy's. Tricky Sam was playing trom- 
bone at the Bucket of Blood. And there were the pianists: James P. 
(Johnson), Willie the Lion (Smith), and Seminole, "whose left hand 
was something to listen to," Duke Ellington says. Fats Waller was a 
baby musician then, in the early 1920$. Bessie Smith's imperial com- 
mand of the blues was being established in Harlem theaters and cafes. 

Clarence Williams came to New York after the First World War 
and published songs ("Royal Garden Blues," for example) and got 
himself a couple of record dates the Blue Five and he was in. W. C. 
Handy and William Pace organized a record company Black 
Swan and got themselves a great star, Ethel Waters, and then a 
pianist, Fletcher Henderson, and then a bandleader Fletcher Hen- 
derson again and they were in, for a while anyway. 

Before Ethel Waters there were two Negro entertainers who cap- 
tured New York, Bert Williams and Florence Mills. In a sense, Wil- 
liams set the style. He was the minstrel man; though Negro, he per- 
formed in blackface. His characterizations satisfied the stereotyped 
public conception of the Negro: he was the "darky" from the "Deep 
Souf"; he was "coal black Joe." That he was also a great deal more 
escaped the notice of most of his audiences. After all, he came from 
the West Indies, whence came so many servants and day laborers and 
that funny corruption of the British accent. After all, he wore tattered 
clothes and a beat-up stovepipe hat and huge bedraggled shoes with 
flapping soles. He was respected, he was a headliner, but nobody ex- 
cept his own people and a few sensitive whites made a serious attempt 
to understand him and his background and what he was doing. It 
was not much bruited about that his grandfather had been the Danish 
consul in Antigua, where Williams was born, and that his name was 
his grandfather's. His large audiences at the Ziegfeld Follies from 
1910 to 1919 did not know that he studied with the brilliant panto- 
mimist Pietro during summers in Italy. Few knew that he had at 
least a passing skill on all the musical instruments. But he was a suc- 
cessful comedian, even in the Negro musicals of 1903 (In Dahomey), 
1906 (Abyssinnia), and 1909 (Mr. Lode of Koal). When he made 



144 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

his debut in the 1910 Follies, the same edition of the Ziegfeld beauty 
contest in which Fannie Brice made her first appearance away from 
burlesque, he found an attentive audience but few admirers who 
penetrated the fa9ade of what the dramatic critic Bide Dudley called 
a "slouch Negro." 

Critic George Lemaire described Bert Williams' u great art, his 
sureness of vocal method and his perfection of pantomime": 

He had very eloquent hands, which even the grotesque cotton gloves 
could not hide. 

I am sure that if Bert Williams had suddenly found himself deaf and 
dumb he would have been able to command the high place that he held 
in the theater just the same, because of his thorough mastery of pantomime. 
I have seen him silently rise from his chair, while a group of us were sitting, 
and go to a door, admit a lady in gesture, order a whole dinner, with 
various bits of comedy to the waiter, pay the check and escort her out. 
It would be a perfect gem in its completeness. He could turn his back on 
his audience and convey more than thousands of actors can do with every 
trick known to show business. 

Heywood Broun detailed one of Bert Williams' great narratives, a 
ghost story: 

We could see the old Negro feverishly turning the pages of the Bible. The 
cats from the fireplace took form before our eyes. Sparks dripped from 
their jaws and wind howled outside the cabin. All this was built by a tall 
man, his face clownishly blackened with burnt cork, who stood still, in 
the center of the stage, and used no gesture which traveled more than six 
inches. The first cat came out of the fireplace and paused to eat some live 
coals. It was a friendly little cat. The next cat, the size of a Saint Bernard, 
ate some coals, spat out the sparks, and said, "When are we gwine to 
begin?" The third cat, as big as a Shetland pony, and slobbering fire, 
made the same inquiry, to which the other two replied, in unison, "We 
cain't do nothin' till Martin comes." At which point the old preacher said, 
"When Martin gits here, you tell him I was here, but I'm gone." 

His skills were handsomely framed in the Ziegfeld Follies by such 
lovely ladies as Lilyan Tashman, Ina Claire, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, 
and Marion Davies. In his last Follies, in 1919 dated for the next year 
as all the Ziegfeld Follies were his co-stars were Eddie Cantor, W. C. 
Fields, Eddie Dowling, Marilyn Miller, Charles Winninger, Ray 
Dooley, Van and Schenck, and Fannie Brice. Even in such select com- 



NEW YORK 145 

pany he shone; through the outrageous dialect and the ridiculous 
get-up spoke the melancholy voice of the American Negro. 

In the early twenties Florence Mills was the enchanting symbol of 
the spells Negro entertainers could weave over white audiences in 
New York. The "Little Blackbird," as she was known in Harlem, 
came downtown with the variously attractive Noble Sissle and 
Eubie Blake musical, Shuffle Along. The cast was exciting, the sing- 
ing and dancing different from anything hitherto heard or seen down- 
town, but only the individual stars, the team of Miller and Lyles, and 
Florence Mills, duplicated their uptown success. Fbrence Mills 
brought her graciousness and warmth to another all-Negro revue, 
Dixie to Broadway, in 1924; its seventy-seven performances almost 
tripled the run of Shuffle Along on Sixty-third Street. She became 
the great attraction at the Plantation Club at Fiftieth Street and 
Broadway, where Duke Ellington heard her. Later, w r hen Duke came 
to write three Portraits of Great Negro Personalities of the Theater 
Bert Williams, Bill Robinson, and Florence Mills he saved the 
softness and the sweetness for her, rescoring Bubber Miley's lovely 
melody, "Black Beauty," which had served Duke as a piano solo, for 
Harold Baker's rich trumpet and the full band. 

Ethel Waters first came downtown as Florence Mills' substitute. She 
was twenty-three in 1923, when she moved into the Plantation and 
almost single-handedly made u Dinah" into a kind of national anthem. 
She has often told the story of her childhood, most recently in her 
autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow. Illegitimate, part of a 
large family, impoverished almost to extinction, she had the worst 
of Chester and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has summed up her 
experience in three sentences: "I've stolen food to live on when I was 
a child. I was a tough child. I was too large and too poor to fit, and 
I fought back." Her formal education was in the hands of nuns; her 
informal in the back streets frequented by prostitutes, and later, 
when she was sixteen, in a second-class Philadelphia hotel where she 
worked as chambermaid and laundress for $4.75 a week. Talked into 
going on the stage by two neighborhood boys, she made her first 
appearances singing the blues in Negro theaters. After an apprentice- 
ship in the Negro clubs through the South, she found a series of club 
jobs in Harlem, where she made a considerable reputation for her- 
self, not only with her nominal Negro audience but with white pub- 



146 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

crawlers who came uptown a few to admire, more to gape and to 
get drunk. She described her work in those years for the columnist 
Earl Wilson: "When I was a honky-tonk entertainer I used to work 
from nine until unconscious. I was just a young girl and when I 
tried to see anything but the double meaning in songs, they'd say, 
'Oh, my God, Ethel, get hot!' " The serious songs, as she explained, 
were all for Florence Mills. When she moved to the Plantation, she 
took advantage of the new opportunity, not so much to sing "serious 
songs" as to add her distinctive throb to the torchy ballads then in 
vogue. 

When Ethel Waters, capitalizing on her Plantation Club success, 
took a band out on the road to accompany her in one-night and 
longer appearances, she sent for Fletcher Henderson. He was the 
logical man to organize the band; he knew everybody who was any- 
body worth speaking of musically, and besides most of the good 
musicians played for him sooner or later. He had them on the record 
dates he led or supervised; they played for him either at the Rose- 
land Ballroom or at the Club Alabam, both on Broadway. 

Fletcher, son of a Cuthbert, Georgia, schoolteacher, had studied 
chemistry at college. But music was irresistible to him; and his com- 
mand of the piano and of all the forms of jazz and popular music 
was equally irresistible to those who heard him and hired him when 
he came to New York just after the First World War. In 1919 he 
went into Roseland for the first time; he kept coming back until 
1935. When the Black Swan record company, for which he had 
done all kinds of odd accompanying and supervising jobs, broke 
up, he moved his several talents into other record studios. With some 
of the brilliant men of his dance band, cornetist Joe Smith, trom- 
bonist Big Charlie Green, clarinetist Buster Bailey, ban joist Charlie 
Dixon, he accompanied Ma Rainey on the Paramount label. Alone 
or with one or more of his musicians, he backed Bessie Smith on 
almost fifty of her epochal Columbia sides. Alone, he made three 
piano solo sides for Black Swan, and then ten times as many orchestra 
records for the same label and for Emerson, Edison, Paramount, and 
Puritan. 

With his Club Alabam orchestra he began his properly famous 
series of recordings for Vocalion and associated labels. His trumpets, 
Howard Scott and Elmer Chambers, were notable chiefly for their 
contributions to the concerted ensemble drive. The rest of his per- 



NEW YORK 147 

sonnel reads like a Who's Who of Harlem jazz for the next two 
decades. Charlie Green played the trombone funny trombone, less 
like Kid Ory than like George Brunies. Don Redman fitted his long 
face and little body beside the suave figure of Coleman Hawkins; 
his alto sax was the brilliant counterpart of Hawk's tenor. Fletcher 
led the band from his piano, his moon face and gentle smile a trade- 
mark. The rhythm section consisted of ban joist Charlie Dixon, 
bassist Bob Escudero, and drummer Kaiser Marshall. On and on the 
records came. Louis Armstrong filled out the trumpet section in 
1924, and in the same year Buster Bailey added his clarinet to the 
saxes of Don and Hawk. The next year the two Smiths, Russell and 
Joe no relation replaced Chambers and Scott; when Louis left, 
the brass was reduced to a two-man trumpet section until Rex 
Stewart joined in the spring of 1926. At the end of that year Jimmy 
Harrison came in on trombone. In 1927 Don Redman left, not to 
be replaced satisfactorily until the next year when Benny Carter 
became Fletcher's star soloist. When Benny joined the band Joe 
Smith was out, suffering from the paresis that killed him at an early 
age. Bobby Stark was the new trumpeter. Benny Morton was in on 
trombone for a while and was later replaced by Claude Jones; neither 
recorded with the band in 1929 there wasn't much record work 
either before or right after the crash. The New Orleans trumpeter 
Tommy Ladnier was in for a while too, in 1926 and 1927. 

No one record of this great Henderson era deserves to be com- 
mended above the others, though the eight sides reissued by Colum- 
bia in its series of Hot Jazz Classics albums offer a fair sampling of 
the quality of the band. In that album the inevitable sweetness of 
Joe Smith's cornet and trumpet can be heard on "What-Cha-Call- 
Em Blues 7 ' and "Snag It," although there is a better representation 
of his sound and ideas in his recording of U I Want a Little Girl" with 
McKinney's Cotton Pickers. Louis's participation in the Henderson 
band can be sampled in the aforementioned blues, in the superb 
vehicle he fashioned along with King Oliver, "Sugar Foot Stomp," 
and in "Money Blues." In the last, the size and splendor of Coleman 
Hawkins on the saxophone can be heard, as well as on the 1927 "Hop 
Off" and in two sides made with the 1932-33 edition of the band, 
"King Porter Stomp" and "Can You Take It?" On those sides, with 
the exception of the last, Bobby Stark's searing trumpet rides through 
along with Hawk, suggesting some of the characteristic drive of 



148 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Henderson's brass section. More of the same can be heard, with 
Rex Stewart, Charlie Green, Joe Smith, Hawkins, and Fats Waller 
featured, in Fletcher's own composition, "Stampede." 

Drive was the overwhelming point of Fletcher Henderson's music. 
And there was plenty of competition to establish the point, each 
soloist vying with the others in half-serious and sometimes dead 
earnest instrumental battles. Fletcher scored his arrangements to give 
the same quality to section choruses, so that brass and reed phrases 
sounded like spontaneous solo bursts. With this band, the exciting 
reiteration of two- and four-bar phrases, usually built on a blues pat- 
tern, became a basic big-band jazz formula. All of this drive and 
reiteration had become ordinary jazz currency by the time swing 
appeared, but none wrote it better than Fletcher, which is why 
Benny Goodman sent for him when the Goodman band was on its 
way to success. 

Few bands afterward could boast such soloists. Don Redman 
poured his perky personality into his alto; Benny Carter gave that 
instrument breadth and inimitable variety. Rex Stewart, like Big 
Green, was a humorist, but he could also play with the vigor that 
Bobby Stark showed or the sweetness of Joe Smith. Jimmy Harrison 
and Benny Morton were stylists; for them the trombone was some- 
times witty but more often poignant. 

The great figure in the Henderson band was Coleman Hawkins. 
Until Lester Young came along with Count Basic, there was only 
one way to play tenor sax, the way Hawk played it. Just two men 
recaptured the Hawkins flavor, Chu Berry and Ben Webster; to 
them came naturally the Hawkins sound, audible breathing and great 
swoops of swollen phrase tied together with a languorous vibrato 
that gave their tenor jazz both piquancy and power. Hawk's suave- 
ness of appearance and smoothness of language cried for Continental 
appreciation, which they received when he moved to Europe for 
five years in 1934. He spoke in a round deep bass-baritone voice, 
usually using few words but carefully pointed. When he wanted to he 
could be charming; he was also capable of a high seriousness, and his 
conversation sometimes took a learned musical turn. He began to 
study cello in 1912 at the age of five, after rudimentary piano in- 
struction by his mother. At nine he took up the tenor saxophone, 
and in three years at Washburn College in Topeka, Kansas, he was a 
zealous student of all the technical branches of music harmony, 



NEW YORK 149 

counterpoint, composition. Surely his early mastery of the cello in 
St. Joseph, Missouri, where he was born, played a significant part in 
the development of that large lovely mellow tone he affected on the 
tenor. Certainly his playing experience at Washburn and with local 
bands in Topeka was an excellent preparation for his first professional 
job of consequence with Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, whom he 
joined in Kansas City in 1923. He spent about a year accompanying 
Mamie, one of the blues-singing Smith girls, playing alongside trum- 
peter Bubber Miley and making with him and others dozens of sides 
for Okeh backing Mamie. In 1924, when Mamie's Jazz Hounds ar- 
rived in New York, Hawk joined Fletcher. 

Smack, as Fletcher has been called since his college days, when 
he had a roommate named "Mac," had a remarkably well-educated 
band. Don Redman was born in 1900 at Piedmont, West Virginia; 
he picked up the trumpet at three, played in a kids' band at six, and 
began to study the piano at eight. At Storer College he studied all the 
instruments and, like Hawk, addressed himself seriously to the prob- 
lems of traditional music. He studied some more, privately and at 
conservatories, in Boston and Detroit before he joined Fletcher 
Henderson in 1925. 

Benny Carter, who replaced Don Pasquall, who had replaced Red- 
man, was also a college man. Benny was born in New York City 
in 1907, went to Wilberforce University, where he did not specialize 
in music but did play in the college band led by Fletcher's pianist 
brother, Horace. His professional experience before joining Smack 
included a short stretch with Duke Ellington. Buster Bailey, chris- 
tened William in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1902, was a music student 
in high school, and later, when he moved to Chicago, had several 
private teachers, the most important of whom was Franz Schoepp, 
the Chicago Symphony clarinetist who also taught Benny Goodman. 
Before joining Fletcher, Buster played with W. C. Handy 's orchestra 
and the Vendome Theatre orchestra under Erskine Tate for three 
years from 1919 to 1922. Trumpeters Rex Stewart and Bobby Stark 
were both fine musicians and conversationalists; their early education 
and experience, in Washington and New York respectively, peppered 
their rich talk of music and musicians. 

Fletcher Henderson and his musicians made a large niche for 
themselves in jazz history. They also helped bring New York alive 
to jazz. 



150 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Duke Ellington helped too. He came to New York in 1923. He 
and Sonny Greer, "a very fly drummer," as all his Ellington asso- 
ciates called him, and Toby Hardwick came up to New York from 
Washington, D.C., with Wilbur Sweatman's band, one of the first 
important colored organizations. The work wasn't so good or so 
regular, and there was a lot of free time for free playing at the 
uptown cafes. Duke used to walk the streets with a pianist named 
only Lippy ("Lippy had heard so much piano that he couldn't play 
any more"), and James P. and Fats and the Lion, and walk and walk 
and ring doorbells. Lippy would get the bunch into homes where 
there were pianos. And they would play. All night long they would 
play, Duke and Fats and James P. and the Lion. The days, when they 
should have earned money, were not as good as the nights, when 
they didn't want to earn money but just wanted to play and did. 

Duke went back to Washington until, a few months later, he was 
able to reorganize his own band for a short session at Barren's in 
Harlem. Then came the Hollywood Club, downtown, in September 
of 1923. Its name was soon changed to the Kentucky Club, the South 
having a certain cachet on Broadway in night-spot names, because 
the South was where the music came from and Broadway was wak- 
ing up to the music. After four years at the Kentucky Duke was a 
name on Broadway. The Cotton Club was the next step, and Duke 
was a name in America. There were records for Victor, under the 
band's right name, and for Columbia and Brunswick and Melotone 
as the Jungle Band, and Joe Turner and His Men, and Sonny Greer 
and His Memphis Men, and the Harlem Footwarmers. There was 
radio, first over WHN locally in New York and then, with a nod 
of thanks to Ted Husing, over CBS, throughout America. New 
York was finally aware of jazz, and the great jazz was beginning to 
come from New York. * 

The white bands of distinction were later in arriving. Paul White- 
man played the Palais Royal from 1920 to 1923, but that wasn't the 
great Whiteman band, it was only the first. Paul Specht had some 
pretty good men in his popular outfits, and Red Nichols was with 
George Olsen. Vincent Lopez was ensconced at the Hotel Penn- 
sylvania from 1919 to 1924. And there was a lot of good booking 
time and money for the bands that rented out by the evening; that's 
where Meyer Davis broke in, and that's how Jan Garber got his 
start. Fred Waring was just emerging with the Pennsylvanians. And 



NEW YORK 151 

from the same state came the Scranton Sirens, with two boys who 
blew more than any sirens New York had ever heard Tommy and 
Jimmy Dorsey. Eddie Lang came into that crew after a while too, 
to play some magnificent guitar. 

From these groups and others some great men were poured into 
the record vats. Red Nichols took over, and so did Phil Napoleon; 
the trumpeters led the record dates then; they played the instrument 
of jazz authority. Napoleon's Original Memphis Five (1923 to 1928) 
played some fair-to-middling music, with Jimmy Lytell's clarinet 
and Frank Signorelli's piano impressive, and Milfred Mole (better 
known as Miff), a Long Island boy, a talented, well-trained trom- 
bonist. Miff had a couple of dates himself, with his Molers, which 
was the toothsome name they thought of for pick-up crews he led. 

But over and above Napoleon and Mole, as leaders, there was 
one great white record-dater, Ernest Loring Nichols. The Nichols 
group was called the Five Pennies. With penetrating music, the 
Nichols band called the turn on New York and American jazz for 
many years after 1925. The Dorseys and Fud Livingston and Miff 
were among Red's first recruits. Then, in later years, came Benny 
Goodman and Joe Sullivan and Jack Teagarden and Glenn Miller, 
as the Ben Pollack band, on from Chicago in 1927, contributed its 
share. Nichols made so many records that nobody up at Brunswick 
or its successor, Columbia, ever really knew exactly how many, or 
whether they were all issued, or if not, where some of those dis- 
carded masters were. Nichols became a great name on records; his 
Pennies incubated the jazz bands of ten years later; the fairly tight, 
routinized Nichols sessions set the style for the men who stepped out 
of and away from these dates to become the biggest bandsmen of 
them all, Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman 
and Glenn Miller. 

There was lots of music in Red Nichols' home in Ogden, Utah, 
where he was born in 1905: his father was a professor of music at 
Weber College. Red's first instrument was the cornet, which he be- 
gan to play at the age of four; at five he was good enough to play 
in public. He left the Culver Military Academy in Indiana, where 
he had studied some music, to play trumpet in the George Olsen 
band. He left Olsen to join Johnny Johnson and come to New York 
to play at the Pelham Heath Inn in 1923. When Johnson went to 
Florida, Red took over the band, which had some fine jazz musicians 



152 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

in it. He started to record with Sam Lanin's Red Heads, named after 
the Nichols sorrel top, in February 1925, and later, without Lanin's 
sponsorship, the band became known on records as the Redheads. 
The head work was impressive: there was Red's head, pianist Arthur 
Schutt's, Jimmy Dorsey's, and Miff Mole's. Miff had made his in- 
strumental beginnings on the violin and then the piano and had 
played trombone with the Original Memphis Five for a couple of 
years before he and Red put their heads together in such dance bands 
as Johnny Johnson's, Sam Lanin's, Roger Wolfe Kahn's, and all the 
Nichols organizations, on and off records. Miff's was a sensitive 
melodic style; his sweet phrases complemented Red's more vigor- 
ous lines handsomely, adding variation to the New Orleans-Chicago 
trumpet-trombone patterns. Miff was the old man in the band, 
twenty-six when they first began to record; his was a steadying and 
an enriching influence. 

Red Nichols' records are the counterparts in distinction and quan- 
tity of Fletcher HendersonVsides. Under many recording names, Red 
introduced some of the most distinguished white jazz musicians to 
a large listening public. Besides the Redheads, and his most familiar 
recording group, Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, Red led bands 
under the names of the Louisiana Rhythm Kings, the Wabash Dance 
Orchestra, the Charleston Chasers, the Hottentots, the Midnight 
Airdales, the Arkansas Travelers, Red and Miff's Stompers, The 
Goofus Five, and the New York Syncopaters. The dates Miff Mole 
led were signed Miff Mole's Molers. 

Pee Wee Russell, born Charles Ellsworth, Jr., in St. Louis in 
1906, came from the University of Missouri and Chicago small bands 
to make his first appearance on records with Red in 1927 in "Ida" 
and "Feelin' No Pain." Babe Russin came from Pittsburgh, Penn- 
sylvania, and engagements with the California Ramblers and Smith 
Ballew, to play tenor sax with Red Nichols. Adrian Rollini, nominally 
a bass saxophonist, introduced his "goofus" on the same date on 
which Pee Wee first recorded. The goofus, which was adopted as 
a recording name for dozens of sides, was a Rollini invention, a 
kind of toy instrument with the look of a saxophone and the sound 
of a harmonica or concertina. Dick McDonough and Carl Kress 
were Red's regular guitarists and set a high standard for all future 
rhythm sections; Eddie Lang made many sides with Red too, setting 
a standard for solo guitar that was not even approached again until 



NEW YORK 153 

Charlie Christian appeared with Benny Goodman's Sextet. The Chi- 
cago musicians appeared often with Red: the drummers Dave Tough 
and Gene Krupa, the pianist Joe Sullivan, and the tenor saxist Bud 
Freeman. The Dorsey Brothers also popped up on many sides, es- 
pecially Jimmy, who surely made his most lasting contribution on 
Nichols' records, playing a kind of darting, devilish, driving clarinet. 
Fud Livingston, a clarinetist much like Jimmy Dorsey in his play- 
ing manner, and Benny Goodman were frequently featured. When 
the trumpet section was enlarged for records, Manny Klein and 
Charlie Teagarden added their mellifluous sounds. Arthur Schutt 
made his first record appearances on piano with Nichols and estab- 
lished a lasting reputation as a technically facile and generally re- 
sourceful pianist, a reputation which led him to Hollywood studio 
bands. But the biggest and the best of Red's associates, apart from 
Miff, was Jack Teagarden. 

Welden John Teagarden was horn in Vernon, Texas, in 1905, 
of a part-Indian family. He began to play trombone when he was 
seven, worked some with his father in the cotton-gin business and 
as a garage mechanic in Oklahoma City, then went to San Angelo, 
Texas, to work as a motion-picture projectionist. In his time off 
from the projection booth he played with local bands, sitting in on 
jam sessions as often as he could find them. He moved to San An- 
tonio, Texas, to play with a band at the Horn Palace, and then in 
1921 joined Peck Kelly's Bad Boys in Houston, playing with the 
legendary leader-pianist, Pee Wee Russell, and Leon Rappolo at 
various times. He was a happy man with a feeling for jazz that 
amounted to an addiction; he used to carry around Louis Arm- 
strong's records of "Cornet Chop Suey" and "Muskrat Ramble" in 
his instrument case or under his overcoat, and would play them any 
time he got within sight of a phonograph. He loved to play and 
played with such contagious warmth that audiences loved to hear 
him. With Willard Robison's band in Kansas City and with his 
own outfit in Wichita Falls, Kansas, with Doc Ross and with the 
St. Louis bands of Herbert Berger and Johnny Youngberg, Jack 
blew his lusty jazz and his melancholy ballads. There were always 
lots of jokes and lots of liquor and such incidental good times as 
that ride down Santa Monica's streets when the Doc Ross band was 
known as Ranger Ross's Texas Cowboys and Jack gave credence to 
the name by his secure seat in the saddle of a white horse, his trom- 



154 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

bone over the pommel and his chaps bright red. When Jack came to 
New York in 1927 he was immediately snapped up for records by 
Willard Robison, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Sam Lanin, and Red Nichols. 
In 1928 he joined the Ben Pollack band but continued to record with 
Red as often as possible. The Red Nichols records would be a sig- 
nificant ornament in jazz if only for Jack's salubrious trombone 
solos. 

The quality of the various Red Nichols recording outfits can be 
established by listening to the sides in the albums Decca has issued 
in its Brunswick Collectors Series, now transferred to long-playing 
records. These include the justifiably famous "Ida," "Peg o' My 
Heart," "Indiana," "Dinah," "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble," and "Tea for 
Two." On "The Sheik of Araby" Jack Teagarden demonstrates his 
way with melodic improvisation in two choruses after he has inter- 
rupted a saccharine singer. Benny Goodman swings through "China 
Boy," "The Sheik," the "Wabble," "Indiana," "Dinah," and also 
enlivens "Peg"; Jimmy Dorsey warms "Buddy's Habits," "Bone- 
yard Shuffle," "Washboard Blues," "That's No Bargain," "Tea 
for Two" and "I Want to Be Happy." Teagarden is on all eight 
sides of the first volume, and needless to say, Red is on all the sides. 
The size of Red's contribution must not be measured only by the 
quality of the musicians he brought to records or by the effective, 
sketchy ensemble writing or by the generally fine performance of 
his musicians; Red's own playing is a considerable part of the ac- 
complishment of these records. For reasons difficult to ascertain, his 
playing has often been disparaged. But the most casual hearing of 
his records makes clear why he was given so many record dates, be- 
came so popular, and drew so many distinguished musicians to play 
with him. He played ballads with a sweetness that suggests Bix 
Beiderbecke, although it is not of that unique excellence. He plowed 
his way through jazz figures with a brass authority and rhythmic 
integrity worthy almost of Louis Armstrong. He was neither a Bix 
nor a Louis, but he was close enough to each to deserve high praise, 
and both as a soloist and a leader he maintained jazz standards over 
hundreds of sides that few other recording musicians could equal. 

As the twenties became the thirties, New York took over for the 
nation in earnest. Jean Goldkette came through with his band, the 
first really big one with good musicians in it, Bix Beiderbecke and 
Bill Rank and Frank Trumbauer and Don Murray. Jean Goldkette 



NEW YORK 155 

left New York with precious few of the good musicians. Paul 
Whiteman took most of them, including Bix and Bill and Frank. 
Wingy Manone came up to New York with Jack Teagarden. Jack 
Teagarden left New York with Ben Pollack and he too ended up 
with Paul Whiteman. 

Paul Whiteman had sensed that there was something up around 
1924, when he gave the Rhapsody in Blue concert at Aeolian Hall. 
From then on he recruited from the jazz ranks and organized a more 
capacious and varied music. From his big outfit, which never played 
much besides the abortive product they used to call "symphonic 
jazz," there came the little bands that made the records, Bix's and 
Frankie Trumbauer's. The New York jazzmen all played with Nich- 
ols, and were joined by such itinerant Chicagoans as Gene Krupa 
and Joe Sullivan and Pee Wee Russell and Bud Freeman, who had 
left Windy City jazz followers in their debt for a lifetime and come 
to settle in New York. 

An attitude, if not a style, was born and prospered. There is an 
identity to New York jazz at least comparable with that of the New 
Orleans and Chicago product, perhaps more striking than that of 
Kansas City. The vivid coloring of the New York music is not alone 
from jazz, as it comes close to being in the Kansas City picture. It 
has been so much around and about, like the sidewalks and the lamp 
posts, as almost to escape notice and elude chronicling. Clearly, how- 
ever, New York is central to this history: without it, some major 
jazz causes would have had minor effects, and this music would have 
been without its constantly experimenting laboratory. 




r 14 




THE CRASH 



The future of the United States looked more than good in 1928; 
according to the members first of Calvin Coolidge's cabinet and 
then of Herbert Hoover's, we were entering a "new economic era." 
The fantasy life of the nation was peopled with millionaires and set 
in country clubs and great manor houses, and since so many did get 
rich quick there was no reason why everybody couldn't. But on 
Tuesday, October 29, 1929, in the course of 16,410,030 transactions, 
the average prices of 50 leading stocks fell almost 40 points. Thou- 
sands who had bought on margin were not able to support their 
purchases in the unprecedented and frantic unloading of stocks, and 
they were wiped out. The country was entering a five-year period 
of deep depression, and although the dreams were of manor houses 
and country clubs, reality refused to adjust itself to fantasy. Keeping 
pace with zooming unemployment, the slums grew larger and jazz 
musicians found themselves without jobs. 

The full flush of American fantasy life was not really discovered 
until the depression. Escape was the order of the day from 1929 to 
1934. The detective story, which had done very well from 1926 to 
1929, did much better from 1930 to 1934. Sound had been added to 
motion pictures in 1926' and in 1927 dialogue had been added in 
Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. In 1932 the three-color process called 
Technicolor was as much a reality as the sound track. With words 
and music and color, motion pictures were able successfully to 
circumvent "problems." American audiences wanted no part of their 
troubles when they sank into movie-palace horsehair, nor did they 
want a music that deserted their narcotized retreats. America wanted 
the music that was played in the country clubs of its dreams, and 
it got it. 

There had been successful purveyors of country-club music, soft, 

156 



THE CRASH 157 

sometimes sedate, sometimes bouncy, before the depression. Art 
Hickman gained a large following with that kind of music during 
the years of the First World War. Isham Jones and George Olsen 
led such bands, and Paul Whiteman began his career with such an 
outfit in Hickman's bailiwick, California, in 1919. Vincent Lopez 
added what seemed to be a virtuoso exploitation of the piano to the 
festivities; Ted Lewis did business with a battered top hat and a 
tooth-clenched, insistent question, "Is everybody happy?"; Ben Bernie 
led his band with a cigar and through his Broadway talk made his 
audiences feel they were a part of the glamorous life of show business 
in New York. There was showmanship in these bands and innocuous 
well-sugared sound, but never so sweet as when Guy Lombardo and 
Rudy Vallee took over in the first years of the depression, 

Guy Lombardo began his career in London, Ontario, where his 
Italian parents presented him with almost enough brothers to fill out 
a dance band. He found his first audiences through a Cleveland radio 
station and built his huge following through radio when he was en- 
sconced a few years later at the Granada Restaurant in Chicago. 
There was some appeal in the name of the band, the Royal Canadians, 
a happy bit of nomenclature in the days when H.R.H. the Prince 
of Wales was almost as popular as His Honor, the princely James 
J. Walker, Mayor of New York City. There was more appeal in 
the music itself, a shrewdly mixed anodyne topped with a generous 
helping of saccharine saxophone. There have been many explana- 
tions of the sound of the Lombardo saxes that the reeds are in- 
geniously notched by the saxophonists, that a special kind of paper 
is inserted under the reeds; several disgusted musicians have suggested 
that the bells of the saxophones are filled with everything from 
warm milk and melted butter to thick molasses and corn whisky. 
Guy himself insists that his success comes from his choice of songs, 
songs whose abounding sweetness or novelty tricks assure their 
catching on with the public. But the writing for and playing of his 
saxophones must be credited as the chief causes of his commercial 
glory. Insensitively sharp and out of tune, yes, but also soft and at 
least on the edge of mellowness, the Lombardo saxophones effected 
a change not only in popular taste but in jazz as well. Few bands 
were untouched by the Lombardo sounds after Guy's opening at the 
Hotel Roosevelt in New York in 1930. Although they rejected his 
ricky-ticky beat with distaste and made great fun of his flea-bite 



158 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

cymbal-beat codas, Harlem bands adopted his saxophone voicing al- 
most to a saxophone man. Louis Armstrong did not hesitate to name 
Guy Lombardo's as one of his favorite bands. 

The enormous favor which Rudy Vallee enjoyed after 1929 re- 
sulted from his satisfying the same would-be country-club audience 
that Guy Lombardo serenaded. The Vagabond Lover, as Rudy came 
to be known, rested with a more conventional merging of violins 
and saxophones, a gentle joining of related colors that soothed audi- 
ences and supplied his megaphone murmurings with a subdued back- 
ground. Like Lombardo's, Rudy Vallee's success came through his 
radio broadcasts, and radio saved him later when there was no longer 
a public clamor for "crooning" and his considerable skill as a con- 
ferencier could take over. The emphasis he and others put upon his 
college background at the University of Maine and at Yale was almost 
justified, for he analyzed his depression audiences and the music they 
wanted with the cool precision of a good academic mind and the 
equally cool practicality of a good businessman. Of jazz he said: 

I knew that the vogue for "hot" bands was really appreciated only by 
musicians and by a few individuals who were interested in "hot" band 
arrangements and who at places where these bands performed were of a 
nature to allow this music to work them into a frenzy of dancing. I knew 
also that to play "hot" music one must have brass. Although I do enjoy 
this so-called "hot" music, when properly rendered, and get as great a 
kick as any musician out of Red Nichols, Frank Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, 
Eddie Lang and other masters of that style, 1 realized that it was over 
the heads of the vast majority of people who, after all, are those who buy 
the records and sheet music. 

Of the choice and performance of his repertory, he said: 

The clever orchestra leader is he who makes his program up of a few 
sweet soft tunes, with occasional vocal choruses among the instrumental, 
followed by a wild peppy tune, played ever so softly, because pep is not 
volume^ and loud raucous notes have never delighted the ear of anyone. 

He kept all of these things in mind when he moved from the Heigh- 
Ho Club to the Villa Vallee and from the smaller vaudeville circuits 
to the Palace Theatre and ultimately the Paramount Theatre, "the 
theater that had always been my goal to appear at, once we had en- 
tered into showdom." 
As a result of Rudy Vallee's spectacular success, the vocalist be- 



THE CRASH 159 

came a necessary adjunct of a dance band, even one that was primarily 
concerned with improvised jazz. At first all dance-band singers imi- 
tated Vallee's use of the megaphone, which he painstakingly ex- 
plained he used only because, "although my voice is very loud when 
I speak or shout, yet when I use it musically it is not penetrating or 
strong, and the megaphone simply projects the sound in the direction 
in which I am singing." One of those w T ho adopted the megaphone 
was Will Osborne, who was helped considerably by Rudy himself. 
Others, because they were unable to imitate Vallee or because they 
had singing personalities of their own or, in a few cases, because 
they had the taste and skill, extended the range of crooning and 
converted what was essentially an enfeebled and sometimes nasalized 
singing style into something closer to the jazz tradition. Such singers 
were Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo, who in 1931 competed with 
each other for the public's fancy over the rival CBS and NBC radio 
networks. The fullness of their baritone voices and the richness of 
their intuitive untrained musicianship were handsomely employed in 
the exploitation not only of the plug songs of the moment but also 
of the tunes which were beginning to become classics in jazz and 
popular music. Bing had lived and worked with Bix Beiderbecke and 
the other distinguished musicians of Paul Whiteman's jazz days. 
Russ had played violin in the Gus Arnheim band at the Cocoanut 
Grove in Los Angeles when Bing was singing there. Their natural 
voices were so much alike that at times they were indistinguishable 
from each other. Their personalities, however, were not the same: 
the Crosby charm was compounded of an irrepressible wit and a 
romantic undertone, the collegian's balance of the comic spirit and 
seriousness; the Columbo enchantment was all romantic to fit his 
dark attractions, much like those of Rudolph Valentino. Bing Crosby 
went on to become the most magnetic musical personality America 
ever had. Russ Columbo died young, when a hunting gun he was 
cleaning went off accidentally and killed him instantly. The effect 
of their jazz-inspired singing was to act as a kind of reagent to the 
dominating treacle of Guy Lombardo and Rudy Vallee in the early 
thirties. 

Ben Pollack arrived in New York at about the same time that Rudy 
Vallee did, in 1927. Rudy had graduated from Yale; Ben had gradu- 
ated from Chicago and California jazz, by way of the New Orleans 
Rhythm Kings and countless dance bands. Gil Rodin joined the 



160 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

first Pollack band in California at the Venice Ballroom when Ben 
took over Harry Baisden's orchestra; Gil nurtured the Pollack band 
through its tumultuous Chicago days, bringing Harry and Benny 
Goodman into the organization and acting as referee in numerous dis- 
putes between the two Bens. Pollack himself was responsible for 
bringing Glenn Miller up and for maintaining a driving Dixieland 
beat he had developed in his days with Paul Mares, Leon Rappolo, 
and George Brunies. He had been one of the first drummers to drop 
the novelty effects, the cowbells and the gourds and the wood-blocks, 
to concentrate on keeping the rhythm steady and the beat inspiring. 
All of Ben Pollack's band benefited from his craft, his extensive 
and intensive experience, and his good taste. As a result, his Chicago 
band, at its peak at the Southmoor Ballroom, was a swinging wonder 
even without Benny Goodman, who had left to rejoin Art Kassel, 
with whom he was always sure of enough money and regular work 
to support his large family. Benny rejoined, after some of Gil Rodin's 
typical persuasive eloquence, in time to make the first records with 
the Pollack band. Glenn Miller, who was impressed with the sound 
of the Roger Wolfe Kahn band, convinced Pollack that the addition 
of two violins would make an effective ornament for the first sides, 
and Al Beller, Ben's cousin, was hired along with Victor Young, the 
lantern-jawed prodigy who rose very quickly as arranger, composer, 
and leader of record dates, after his short stint with Pollack. Those 
first two sides were in fact an uninteresting capitulation to Glenn's 
commercial instinct, but thereafter not a Pollack side was recorded 
without some fine solo jazz. 

Just before the band got to New York, after stays at the Rendez- 
vous and the Black Hawk in Chicago, Benny Goodman, his family 
obligations once more on his mind, along with his differences with 
the sturdy little drummer-leader, left again, to join Isham Jones. In 
New York Gil Rodin again went on the prowl for good musicians 
and this time came up with two of the players who had impressed 
him so in the Charles Pierce and McKenzie-Condon recordings, 
cornetist Jimmy McPartland and saxophonist Bud Freeman. Jimmy 
remained with Pollack for several years; Bud left after a few months. 
The quality of the band's personnel, however, remained uniformly 
high. When Glenn Miller decided that he wanted to play at New 
York's Paramount Theatre with Paul Ash, who had briefly fronted 
the Pollack band in Chicago, and wouldn't go to Atlantic City for 



THE CRASH 161 

the band's Million Dollar Pier engagement, Jack Teagarden was 
hired. The Pollack musicians were jamming musicians, and they sat 
in with little bands all over New York. On one of their jaunts around 
Manhattan Island they heard Jack for the first time, playing with 
Wingy Manone, with whom he had made the migration to New 
York from Texas. They decided Teagarden was a must. So was 
Frank Teschemacher, who was in town between jobs. And Benny 
Goodman came back again, the lure of New York having overcome 
his latest reticence to play with Pollack. On that Atlantic City job, 
the Pollack saxes thus w r ere the three reed giants of the Austin High 
gang: Benny, Tesch, and Bud. When Gil Rodin had recovered from 
a tonsillectomy, however, Tesch left the band to go back to Chicago. 

The Pollack band was a playing band. Whether at the Million 
Dollar Pier or at the Park Central Hotel or the Silver Slipper in 
New York, it had few considerations except those of jazz. The band 
played all the tunes that Vallee sang and Lombardo mellowed, but 
with the vitality and the freshness that musicians like Benny Good- 
man, Jimmy McPartland, and Jack Teagarden could not help bring- 
ing even to the sleaziest tunes. When they weren't recording for 
Victor with their leader, Jack and Benny and Jimmy were making 
records for Perfect and Cameo under the name of the Whoopee 
Makers, and for Brunswick with song publisher Irving Mills, who 
labeled the band organized to exploit his tunes as his Hotsy-Totsy 
Gang. They also made sides with Jack Pettis, the tenor saxophonist 
who had been a member of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings with 
Ben Pollack. Through all these many sides the Chicago organization 
of jazz sounds obtained; following the practice of the ODJB and 
the Rhythm Kings, of the various Teschemacher outfits and Bix's 
little bands, it was each man for himself in the ensemble and all 
by himself when his solo came up. Without any permanent arranger 
of Fletcher Henderson's caliber, the Pollack musicians, whether play- 
ing with Ben or as a recording collective, relied chiefly on their own 
large individual talents. The big band arrangements were simply 
skeletons to be filled out by the soloists, and so by the most elemen- 
tary conversion of soloists' phrases to band sections, the Pollack 
orchestra, and Bob Crosby's band after it, managed to retain all the 
small Dixieland band flavor with two and three times as many musi- 
cians. 

The Ben Pollack band developed into the organization Bob Crosby 



162 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

later fronted when swing became the thing, after Benny Goodman 
and Jimmy McPartland had left. Both musicians quit when they 
were heavily censured by Pollack for leaving dust on their shoes 
after a handball game they had played on the Park Central roof 
just before the nightly show at the hotel. They were replaced by 
two men Jack Teagarden recommended, his cornetist brother Charlie 
and clarinetist Matty Matlock, who was then playing with a band 
in Pittsburgh. Ray Bauduc had come in on drums when Ben decided 
he wanted only to front the band, because he said he was "sick and 
tired of having people come up to the band and ask when Ben 
Pollack's going to come in." Nappy Lamare had been taken out of 
a small relief band at the Park Central when Dick Morgan, Pollack's 
original guitarist, quit. Eddie Miller, who had been playing alto with 
Julie Wintz's band, took over Babe Russin's chair; Russin had been 
in for a short time in place of the original man in the chair, Larry 
Binyon, and then decided that, like Glenn Miller, he didn't want to 
leave New York. So the nucleus of the Bob Crosby band was formed 
when Ben Pollack went out on the road in 1933. Charlie Spivak and 
Sterling Bose joined on trumpets, and Joe Harris came in on trom- 
bone when the band was playing at the Chicago Chez Paree. After 
a New England tour the band came back to Billy Rose's huge 
Casino de Paree, went down to the Hollywood Dinner Club in Gal- 
veston, Texas, and ended up at the Cotton Club in Los Angeles, 
where it broke up on November i, 1934; Ben made some noises 
about cutting down the brass section and finally decided that he 
wanted to settle down in California. 

The best arranger Ben Pollack ever had writing for him was 
Don Redman. The ex-Henderson alto saxophonist had been with 
McKinney's Cotton Pickers in Detroit in 1927; in 1928 and the next 
year he provided a fine batch of manuscripts for Pollack. As few 
others in the history of jazz, he was able to satisfy the fantasy-minded 
public's conception of melodious dance music and at the same time 
to provide jazz musicians with swinging figures upon which to im- 
provise. As few others during the dog days, he kept jazz alive. 

When William McKinney asked Don Redman to come out to 
Detroit in 1927 to take over the musical direction of his band, the 
Cotton Pickers were best known as a show band. They cut up a 
great deal and made some stabs at glee-club arrangements but had 
little in the way of musical distinction. Don took over at the Grey- 



THE CRASH 163 

stone Ballroom, following the Jean Goldkette band when it went 
on the road. He brought Bob Escudero (bass, tuba), Cuffey David- 
son (trombone), and Prince Robinson (sax) into the band, and added 
his muscular arranging touch to a library badly in need of reshaping. 
The showmanship of the band remained a great asset, but it was 
put on a musical footing. 

The earliest records made by McKinney's Cotton Pickers show 
the band's sharp coming of age under Redman. The fine jazz it was 
beginning to play is obvious in "Alilneberg Joys"; its supply of 
ballad manuscript from Redman is illustrated by "Cherry." Soloists 
of great quality were still limited at this point, however, except for 
the trombone of Claude Jones, Don's own supple efforts on alto and 
clarinet, and the tasteful, resourceful trumpet of John Nesbitt, who 
was also an able arranger. When Joe Smith joined, the band assumed 
importance, ranking with Duke's and Fletcher's. On "Gee Ain't I 
Good to You" you can hear some typically lovely Joe Smith cornet 
and a typically simple and charming vocal by Don, and you can 
appreciate Don's always maturing arranging powers. His scoring for 
the saxes was growing more colorful, his brass was beginning to 
sound like the powerhouse sections of the swing bands. 

The Cotton Pickers did good business at the Greystone. They did 
so well, in fact, that when they had to fulfill recording dates with 
Victor in New York or Camden only Don and Joe Smith were per- 
mitted to leave the band. So Don started organizing recording dates 
in New York under the name of McKinney's Cotton Pickers, and a 
couple of times as the Chocolate Dandies, featuring such stellar jazz- 
men as Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Fats Waller, the Dorsey 
Brothers, and Tesch. He hastily put together arrangements for these 
men, and some fine records were made. "If I Could Be with You One 
Hour Tonight" and "Baby, Won't You Please Come Home?" made 
in 1930, with their lovely sax chorus introductions, illustrate the pat- 
tern of the Redman arrangement. Just about always he opened with 
a chorus by the saxes, prepared the way for the vocal with a trumpet 
or trombone solo, scored some easy riffs back of the singer, and 
either carried the singer to the end of the arrangement or climaxed 
the vocal with a clean rideout ensemble chorus. "Rocky Road," one 
of the best of the McKinney records, departs interestingly from this 
pattern. Like "I Want a Little Girl," it is a superb showcase for 
the talented trumpet of Joe Smith, who plays on this side in his 



164 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

vaunted growl style. Redman himself sings one of his most appeal* 
ing vocals and plays a fine alto chorus. The whole gets a fine beat, 
building to its key saxophone chorus after the middle vocal. There 
are beautiful or provocative moments on almost every McKinney 
record made under Redman's musical direction. He tried out every 
sort of scoring, soloists against one or two or three sections, guitar 
introductions, celeste interludes, straight ballads or ballads with a 
spirited rhythmic background. Don himself played and sang his 
high-pitched, infectious vocals just often enough to be marked as 
an all-around musician of distinction. As a result of such scoring 
and playing, the forceful McKinney Cotton Pickers of 1928 to 
early 1931 were to all who heard them at the Greystone in Detroit, 
or on records, an inspired band. 

While at the Greystone with McKinney, from 1927 to 1929, Don 
was also doing some arranging for the Ben Pollack and Louis Arm- 
strong bands and some recording with the latter organization in 
Chicago. Don made a routine of traveling to the Windy City once 
every week or so to bring in a new arrangement for Pollack and to 
rehearse it with the band when it was in town; after several hours 
with Pollack he would rush over to work with Louis at the Savoy 
Ballroom, and then to record with the seven-piece Armstrong Savoy 
Ballroom Five. Louis recorded three originals of Don's, "Save It, 
Pretty Mama," "Heah Me Talkin' to Ya" and "No One Else but 
You." 

Since he was doing all this work for other leaders, Don decided 
in 1931 that he wanted his own band. A man of quick decision, he 
picked himself and his horn up and left McKinney forever; he also 
left behind him a fine home in Detroit. The Cotton Pickers never 
again sounded so good, even during their brief moment under the 
recording supervision of Benny Carter. 

For the nucleus of his new band Don took over the Horace Hender- 
son orchestra. He had added to it several times in several sections 
by the time he opened at Connie's Inn for his first engagement in 
October 1931. When he made his first sides in September and October, 
the band was an impressive organization, showing the subtleties 
and size of Redman's growth as arranger and leader. These initial 
sides were the bizarre u Chant of the Weed," the powerful "Shakin* 
the African," and the delightful "I Heard" and "Trouble, Why Pick 
on Me." Few of the subsequent records by the Redman band ever 



THE CRASH 165 

eclipsed the popularity and success of "Chant of the Weed" and 
"I Heard," but almost all of Don's recorded work achieved respect 
and admiration among fellow musicians, and he continued to pro- 
duce work of even quality. The saxophone choruses remained ex- 
perimental, distinguished by difficult but delightful unison and har- 
monized voicings. 

Soon after its formation the band played several weeks of the 
Chipso air commercial with the Mills Brothers and then toured the 
country as part of the Mills Brothers unit. Harlan Lattimore was Don's 
vocalist from 1931 through 1935 and made a few appearances later 
on. Lattimore was an excellent baritone; his warmth and phrasing, 
mixed with Bing Crosby's singing manner, set the style that has 
since become accepted for all male singers with a band that has any 
jazz feeling. Harlan projected his feeling with taste and never muffed 
the meaning of words or music to exhibit one of his vocal elabora- 
tions. "Underneath the Harlem Moon," "Tea for Two," "If It's 
True," "Lazybones," and "Lonely Cabin" were his hits. On them 
you hear his languorous vibrato articulated in handsome masculine 
tones. 

The chief soloist of the Redman band, outside of Don himself, 
was Benny Morton. His soulful trombone and flow of ideas domi- 
nated record after record made by Redman until 1937. His sweet 
tone and subdued playing complemented the style of Sidney De 
Paris on trumpet excellently. Bob Carroll on tenor, Claude Jones on 
trombone, Shirley Clay on trumpet, Edward Inge on alto, and 
Horace Henderson and Don Kirkpatrick on piano were other solo- 
istic assets of the band. 

Don was reunited with Ben Pollack when they both played Billy 
Rose's theater-restaurant, the Casino de Paree, in 1934. By then 
the Redman band had seen its best years; it retired almost exclusively 
to theaters, with one last year at the downtown Connie's Inn that 
later became the Cotton Club, and some one-nighters. But Don's 
writing remained consistent. He developed his swing choirs, the first 
to sing "jive" lyrics against the straight background of standard 
songs ("Stormy Weather," "Exactly Like You," "Sunny Side of the 
Street," "The Man on the Flying Trapeze") with Benny Morton 
supplying the straight backgrounds on trombone. A short session 
with the short-lived Variety label of Irving Mills produced the best 
of his swing choir work, and some work before and afterward for 



166 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Vocalion also showed the inspired Redman arranging pen at work. 
In its last two years, 1938 and 1939, and into part of 1940, his band 
recorded for Victor and Bluebird, showing off fewer soloists, more 
and more complicated writing. The saxes played tremolo; Don fea- 
tured himself on alto a great deal to make up for the absence of 
soloists; the trombones and trumpets were assigned complex figures. 
The final results of all this were oblivion for the band and the emer- 
gence of Don Redman as full-time arranger for other leaders. In 
1938 he arranged the famous recording of "Deep Purple" that went 
so far to establish the Jimmy Dorsey band as a jukebox favorite. 
He did "Hold Tight" for Jimmy, and a great many numbers for 
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as some for Charlie 
Barnet, Jimmie Lunceford, Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring, and Harry 
James. Several of Count Basic's best arrangements were Don's. 

The men who worked for Don say that no matter how you came 
into one of his bands, you left a musician. They seem sure that he 
carried enough in his head to fill the books of another twenty or- 
chestras, and that the music he wrote and arranged and led was 
consistently ahead of its time. This diminutive man, who began his 
musical career as a cornetist at three, saw his way through a half- 
dozen instruments, as many bands, and the most varied abilities and 
activities; Don Redman was a style-setter and a pacemaker in jazz. 

A career parallel to Don Redman's and similarly important in the 
preservation of jazz was that of Chick Webb. He was perhaps the 
greatest of jazz drummers, a gallant little man who made his con- 
tribution to jazz within an extraordinary framework of pain and 
suffering. His musical contribution ranks with that of the other 
great jazz dead: Bix, Tesch, Bunny Berigan, Chu Berry, Jimmy Har- 
rison, Tricky Sam, Jimmy Blanton, Charlie Christian. His gallantry 
ranks high in jazz. His life carried him through the first years of 
the swing era; his music, along with that of Duke Ellington, Don 
Redman, and Ben Pollack, carried jazz through its deluge. 

Chick Webb was born crippled, but that didn't seem to bother 
him and it very rarely bothered others. He was born on February 
10, 1909, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a poor family, a family- 
conscious family; Chick remained close to his mother and grand- 
father for most of his life. 

His first job was peddling papers, when he was nine. He was al- 
ready following the parade bands around Baltimore and saving up 



THE CRASH 167 

for his own set of drums. When he finally got the drums he evolved 
a set of exhibitions which could be counted upon for a good Satur- 
day night return, say a dozen dollars. The first steady drumming 
job to come Chick's way, after he had worked the Chesapeake Bay 
excursion boats for some time, was with the Jazzola band. The 
Jazzola band was not much musically, but it was important for two 
of its men, Chick Webb and John Trueheart, the guitarist. Chick 
and Trueheart met in the Jazzola band and remained close friends 
ever afterward. When Trueheart left for New York Chick wanted 
to go badly. But his friend returned quickly, out of luck. They 
decided to try again, together. 

In New York Trueheart, luckier this time, got an out-of-town job, 
while Chick moseyed around town. He got to know Bobby Stark. 
And that fine trumpeter got to know Chick's drumming and got 
Chick a job in the band he played with, Edgar DowelPs. Chick clicked 
and sent for Trueheart. The two of them made sixty dollars apiece a 
week "a fortune!" said Chick, who saved all but ten dollars of it 
weekly. Then the band broke up, and Chick was out of work for a 
year. 

Playing Sunday sessions at Smalls' Paradise with Toby Hardwick, 
Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, and Duke Ellington, Chick began to 
get around among the topflight musicians. Duke and he spent a lot 
of time together, and when the Ellington sextet landed its Kentucky 
Club job Duke found an opening at the Black Bottom Club for Chick 
to lead his own band. But Chick refused; he just wanted to play, not 
lead. Johnny Hodges wouldn't hear of the refusal, and Chick found 
himself leading a band. 

The first Chick Webb band was a quintet: Trueheart on guitar, 
of course, Hodges on alto, Don Kirkpatrick on piano, and Bobby 
Stark on trumpet. The band played an engaging, relaxed jazz. After 
five months Duke helped it to another job at the Paddock Club, this 
time with a payroll for eight. Elmer Williams came in on tenor sax, 
to stay with Chick for many years, and one Slats, a fine trombonist, 
joined up. This was 1928. 

Chick Webb's Paddock Club band didn't read music but it cut the 
Fletcher Henderson and King Oliver bands in one-night Battles of 
Music at the newly opened Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. It impressed 
the listeners so much that although it was booked for a year it played 
on and off at the ballroom for ten. There were changes during that 



168 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

important decade, but the quality of Chick Webb's music on the 
Savoy stands remained constant. No matter what he played elsewhere, 
there was a certain meaning for Chick in the ballroom called "the 
Track" because it looked like a racetrack and this was Chick's 
musical home. He left the ballroom after his first year and stayed 
away for almost two years before coming back under Aloe Gale's 
aegis; but after he came back he never left for such a considerable 
period again. 

After some time on the road in 1928 Chick and his band went into 
the Rose Danceland at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street and 
Seventh Avenue; they were a success. They stayed a year and a half, 
until Chick received an offer for a try at vaudeville. The try flopped. 
The band was badly presented in a setting that wasn't right for it. 
Chick wanted to go back to the Savoy, which had refused the band 
after its road tour because Chick insisted on adding men. Chick strug- 
gled for more months than he liked to remember. Fletcher Henderson 
"borrowed" Trueheart and Bobby Stark for an audition, and only 
Trueheart returned. The band broke up, but still Chick didn't give 
up. He had his choice of big bands to play with: Duke, Smack, any 
band he wanted, but he wanted his own band. Everybody recognized 
his drumming greatness; Chick by this time recognized his own lead- 
ing talent and he was determined to express it. 

A number of fine musicians recognized that leading talent too, and 
persuaded Chick to pick up sticks in front of them: 1 oby Hard wick, 
Hilton Jefferson, Elmer Williams on saxes; the legendary trombonist 
Jimmy Harrison; Louis Bacon, Louis Hunt, and Shad Collins on 
trumpets; Elmer James on bass; Trueheart and Kirkpatrick. The new 
Chick Webb band won Moe Gale's favor, and he booked it into the 
Roseland Ballroom, where it did very well. After something more 
than a year there, Chick went out on the road again, and Claude 
Hopkins went in. Hopkins was a smash hit with his tinkling piano 
and Lombardo-like band, and the management insisted on his stay- 
ing. Benny Carter joined Chick's band, then left it, taking a number 
of its men, and Chick was discouraged and struggling again. His band 
was out of work for seventeen months and very low in spirits. Then 
Jimmy Harrison died. Chick didn't know where to turn. Fortunately 
the Savoy did. They signed him up again, and in 1930 Chick Webb 
was safely ensconced once more at the big ballroom at One Hundred 
and Fortieth Street and Lenox Avenue. 



THE CRASH 169 

Things began to break for Chick. He went on the road once more, 
with the Hot Chocolates revue touring company. The band seemed 
really set for big and important things, with an effective personnel, 
some fine arranging, and the unique encouragement that a full stomach 
and new clothing give. 

The next time Chick went back into the Savoy he went back for 
good. He went back determined to build the best orchestra ever. He 
went back with a good band that got progressively better. Edgar 
Sampson joined up on alto, and the saxes consisted of Pete Clark, who 
took most of the clarinet solos as well as lead alto, Sampson on alto, 
and Elmer Williams on tenor. The trumpets were Renald Jones, Mario 
Bauza (lead), and Taft Jordan; Sandy Williams was on trombone, a 
fixture with the band until Chick's death; Elmer James was on bass, 
Joe Steele on piano, and Trueheart on guitar. Sampson's joining the 
band meant a lot. It meant a full-rime arranger, for one thing. Origi- 
nals like "Don't Be That Way," "When Dreams Come True," "Blue 
Minor," and "Stompin' at the Savoy" sprang from Sampson's fertile 
pen, and Chick was really on his way. Edgar Sampson became the 
band's official greeter. If you came up to the Savoy during those 
years from 193 i to 1935, ^ e was t ^ ie man y ou could talk to most easily, 
the musician who'd explain to you about the music the band played, 
about the men who played it, and anything else you might have 
thought of to bother a working musician. Sampson's good nature and 
his freely extended good will earned him the affectionate nickname 
of "the Lamb." 

For years the commercial attraction with the band was Taft Jordan, 
a dark man whose infectious grin popped on and off with the rapidity 
of an alternating neon sign. His big stock in trade was imitating Louis 
Armstrong, with a gravel voice and a relay of his own tricky gestures. 
He capped this with trumpet solos phrased Louis-like. Taft at his best 
was a compelling trumpeter. You can hear him playing on Chick's 
delightful theme, "Get Together," and singing and playing much 
like Louis on "On the Sunny Side of the Street." 

Sandy Williams and Bobby Stark, inseparable friends and constant 
companions, kidded everybody all the time, kidded on and off the 
stand, kidded without respect for convention or propriety, and kept 
all the boys laughing all the time. As a trombonist, Sandy offered a 
powerful barrelhouse tone and jabbing phrases that punctuated Samp- 
son's tunes with brilliant effect. When Bobbv ioined the band the 



170 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

trumpets really picked up as a team; his incisive, inspired solos sup- 
plied a necessary bite. 

When John Kirby was with the band, during most of 1934 and 
part of the following year, the rhythm supplied the Webb band was 
at its best. Chick laid down a consistent bass beat that he rarely de- 
parted from, and decorated it with superb brushwork. Trueheart's 
musicianship was of a piece with his personality, unpretentious but 
firmly grounded in the principles of good guitar playing. His shyness 
never permitted him to take a solo, but few were his equal in giving 
a rhythm section definition. When Trueheart was forced out of the 
band in 1936 by a lung condition verging on tuberculosis, Chick saw 
to it that for more than a year and a half, as he convalesced, he re- 
ceived his regular salary. Trueheart was more than Chick's good 
friend and the band's fine guitarist. He stomped off tempos for the 
band at the beginnings of all numbers. He had much to say in organ- 
izing "head arrangements," the on-the-spot compositions of the whole 
band, and helped to put together sets. Much of the direction and 
execution of the Chick Webb band of the middle thirties, just before 
it became famous, should be credited to John Trueheart. 

Elmer Williams was the finest soloist Chick ever had on a saxo- 
phone. His booting tone and well-organized ideas helped put the sax 
trio of the early years on a footing with the brass. You can hear some 
short but effective Williams tenor on "Don't Be That Way" and "On 
the Sunny Side of the Street." After Elmer left the band, at the end 
of 1934, came Ted McRae, a youngster with a pretty tenor tone, who 
added an effective voice but just wasn't in the same class with Elmer. 
Altos never meant too much in Chick's bands, except in the early days 
when Johnny Hodges was playing for him. Edgar Sampson played 
good section sax and added a friendly solo every now and then. In the 
late years Hilton Jefferson was again in the band, an impressive, pene- 
trating, flowing lead man. Hilton had been in for a short while in 
1934, but his major work with Chick was in 1938 and 1939. Louis 
Jordan was a fair alto soloist, somewhat stereotyped in his ideas but 
contagiously enthusiastic and always driving. Wayman Carver on 
flute and later Chauncey Haughton on clarinet were effective solo- 
ists, whose best work was done with the short-lived small band Chick 
put together in imitation of Benny Goodman's chamber groups. The 
combination, called the Little Chicks, was made up of clarinet, flute, 
bass, drums, and piano. 



THE CRASH 171 

At an amateur night at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem one Wednes- 
day in 1934, Chick came down to see if anyone of genuine vocal 
ability might pop up. His vocals were being handled in the quivering 
tenor made popular uptown by the work of Orlando Robeson with 
Claude Hopkins' band. Chick's boy was Charlie Linton, and no par- 
ticular distinction attached to his imitative work. So Chick sat through 
some ordinary singing, dancing, and comedy until a nervous but per- 
sonable girl came on to sing "Judy," a popular song then. She moved 
the audience and she moved Chick. Fie decided Ella Fitzgerald was 
the girl for him and hired her forthwith. 

Chick brought Ella home to live with him and his wife. He clothed 
her, directed her life, brought her along with the band, and built 
everything around her as the long-sought, at-last-found commercial 
attraction the band needed. Here was a naturally gifted singer with an 
extraordinary feeling for singing the way a good jazzman plays, im- 
provising, first rhythmically, in later years melodically. She had a 
little girl's natural stage presence and great communicable warmth. 
Ella Fitzgerald gave the final push needed to make the band the real 
success it soon became. 

The end of 1937 was the beginning of Chick's peak period. Van 
Alexander was writing catchy arrangements, and the band's records 
were moving up. Ella was a big attraction, and Moe Gale got Chick, 
Ella, and the Ink Spots a sustaining program on NBC, "The Good 
Time Society," which stayed on the air almost half a year. The brass 
section was becoming famed as a unit. The boys in the band referred 
to Taft, Mario, Bobby, Sandy, and Nat Story (the second trombone) 
as the Five Horsemen. Crowds collected around the bandstand at the 
Savoy to hear them get off and to clamor for Taft's exhibitionistic 
"St. Louis Blues" and "Stardust," for Chick's fantastically driving solo 
on "Tiger Rag," for encore after encore from Ella. 

Chick wasn't much of a reader, though he could follow a score, 
having taught himself the rudiments of sight-reading. As a musician, 
however, he was remarkable. He'd always stand at the side during 
rehearsals of new numbers and have section bits, figures, solos played 
over and over again until he was familiar with every bar in every 
arrangement. On the stand, if a musician or a section muffed some- 
thing, he'd turn around and hum the right passage correctly, note for 
note, to the single or group offenders. After an exhilarating night of 
playing, if he was pleased with a solo, he'd walk up to somebody in 



172 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

the band, say Sampson, tug at his jacket pocket which was about 
where Chick reached up to and begin, "Say, Sampson, did you hear 
that solo of Sandy's?" and, sliding a mock trombone with his hands, 
he'd sing over the whole solo in question. It might have been eight 
or thirty-two bars, improvised at the moment, but Chick's phenome- 
nal musical memory kept it with him. 

In early 1938 Chick Webb's band went into Levaggi's, a restaurant 
in Boston that had never before booked a jazz band, much less a 
colored one. The band did well. It came out of Levaggi's for one- 
nighters and theaters and went back for the early summer. When it 
returned it was an established band. u A-Tisket, A-Tasket," Ella's gen- 
eral idea for a swing-nursery rhyme, particularized by Van Alexan- 
der, had swept the country, and Chick's and Ella's record had been 
the brush that swept it. On the back of "A-Tisket" was "Liza," a 
fortunate coupling that showed off Chick's drumming and helped 
make the little man almost as famous as his singer. In August the band 
went into the New York Paramount Theatre. The future was as- 
sured. The scuffling was over. 

But Chick was sick. He'd been sick for sixteen years and wouldn't 
admit it. Tuberculosis of the spine, seriously complicated by a misery- 
making case of piles, was moving through his small hunchbacked 
body. When the band went into the Park Central Hotel in New 
York the first colored band ever to play it in December 1938 
Chick was in bad shape. When it left that spot for the Paramount 
again, in February 1939, Chick was so sick he used to faint after shows. 
But he still wouldn't admit it. "I'm gonna be so well in another couple 
of months," he'd say. The band went off on an ill-advised tour of 
one-nighters, just after it had played its last New York date under 
Chick at the Apollo. Chick was so sick he almost always appeared 
with a literally gray face. But he was looking forward to a stationary 
summer spot. "Besides," he said, "I've gotta keep my guys working." 

The last engagement Chick Webb ever played was on a riverboat 
just outside of Washington. He was so miserably ill then that he had 
to be rushed to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore "just for 
a check-up," Chick insisted. He wouldn't let his publicity man give 
the news to the press. "I'm tired of them always reading about me 
being sick in bed," Chick said. 

He was operated upon on the ninth of June, 1939. The doctors 
knew he wouldn't live and marveled at his ability to hold on through 



THE CRASH 173 

the week until the sixteenth. Chick was determined to live. But finally 
he realized his condition. On Friday he told his valet to "go home 
and get some sleep, 'cause I know I'm going." The valet tried to 
argue with him. But Chick knew the answer that always quieted his 
faithful valet-chauffeur and assistant-in-chief. " Ain't I the boss?" he 
asked. The valet went home. 

At eight o'clock on the evening of the sixteenth, with his relatives 
and close friends around him, Chick asked his mother to raise him 
up. Raised, he faced everybody in the room, grinned, jutted his jaw, 
and announced cockily, "I'm sorry! I gotta go!" and died. 

Chick Webb left a formidable musical record behind him. He left 
vital memories and strong affections, but most of all he left a tradition 
of faith in his men and the music they played, of faith in himself and 
responsibility to all who worked and played with him, a tradition of 
musicianship and leadership. 



Chapter 15 




DUKE ELLINGTON 



When one generalizes in writing or talking about jazz, one must al- 
ways make an exception of one man. Whether the generalization is of 
time or place or prevailing attitude, it rarely fits the special case of 
Duke Ellington. In the first years of his career he and his musicians 
played the blues, and his particular piano style was clearly ragtime, 
but the total effect of the music he wrote and played at the time can- 
not be so neatly categorized. He took a serious beating in the years 
leading up to the depression, but he sailed serenely through the most 
bedeviled years in the modern era when jazz and its musicians were 
taking an unholy cuffing. He profited by the enthusiasms and redis- 
coveries of the swing era, but he had long been recognized as a serious 
musician by the time Benny Goodman came along. As a composer 
of large stature and the leader of an incomparable organization of 
talented individuals, he had been favorably received almost from the 
day he stepped into the Cotton Club in December 1927. The achieve- 
ment was unmistakable; no such transformation of the basic and ele- 
mental in jazz had ever before been effected. 

Duke started out to be a painter and achieved sufficient distinction 
in the medium in high school to be offered a scholarship to Pratt In- 
stitute in New York. But in 1917, before he turned eighteen, he left 
high school; in just a few months he would have graduated, but the 
lure of music was too much to be denied. To begin with he was 
strictly a ragtime pianist, imitating the flashy look of Luckey Roberts 
as he lifted his hands in wide arcs from the keyboard, imitating the 
striking sound of all the ragtime pianists he heard around his native 
Washington. He had not had much training beyond a few lessons at 
the piano from his mother, which began at the age of seven, and 
some instruction in the rudiments of music by Henry Grant, his 
music teacher in high school, who noticed that the boy had a fresh 

174 



DUKE ELLINGTON 175 

interest in melody and an originality in his harmonization of tunes. 
Duke learned more playing his first job at the Poodle Dog Cafe, 
where he composed his first tune, "The Soda Fountain Rag." When- 
ever possible he used to play at a local lodge hall with the other 
youngsters in his part of town who were learning the obvious and 
the devious ins and outs of improvised jazz. Among his associates at 
the True Reformers Hall in 1917 and the next two years were Toby 
Hardwick, who was playing bass fiddle then, Arthur Whetsel, the 
cornetist, who was a premedical student at Howard University, and 
the banjoist Elmer Snowden. Whenever possible Duke played one of 
the five pianos in Russell Wooding's huge band, a strictly commercial 
organization that had little use for Duke's fanciful ideas. His great 
fun was playing with the little bands, the gig outfits that played the 
choice one-nighters that popped up from time to time, especially on 
weekends, around Washington. He played with such bands as those 
led by Lewis Thomas, Daniel Doy, and Oliver Perry, better known 
as Doc. Duke learned much from all of them, but most from Perry, 
who was most encouraging. While playing with Doc, Duke put an 
ad in the telephone book explaining that he was available, like Doc 
and Thomas and Doy and Meyer Davis, for all sorts of musical en- 
gagements. Duke got his share of jobs and began to shape his per- 
sonnel; he shifted Toby Hardwick to C-melody saxophone, and 
moved Whetsel, Snowden, three brothers named Miller, and a 
drummer behind him. William Greer, known variously as Little Wil- 
lie and Sonny, came to town to play at the Howard Theatre in the 
pit band and soon after quit to join Duke. Then they all quit Wash- 
ington to join the bandleader Wilbur Sweatman in New York; Sweat- 
man had sent for Sonny, but Sonny wasn't being sent for unless he 
could bring Toby and Duke along with him. The job with Sweatman 
was short-lived once again Duke's irrepressible improvisation got 
him fired but the Ellingtonians had discovered New York, and 
Washington was never again more to them than the place where they 
were born and did their first playing. 

In 1923, the year after the frustrating experience with Sweatman, 
four of them were sent for again, this time by Fats Waller, who had 
met them when he played with a burlesque show in Washington in 
the spring of that year. Duke went back up to New York with Toby, 
Sonny, Whetsel, and Snowden; their anticipations were high. When 
they got to New York they found bad news awaiting them: there 



176 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

were only promises, no job. But then the singer and mistress of cere- 
monies, Ada Smith, stepped in. Known as Bricktop the name under 
which she later opened a very successful nightclub in Paris she had 
a reputation and she had connections. She got the boys a job at a 
night club run by a politician and man-about-Harlem, Barron Wilkins. 
Barren's was a sumptuous and select uptown club, patronized by the 
downtown great of show business, by Harlem's own Bert Williams, 
and by Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion. Barren's was in a 
basement at One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street and Seventh 
Avenue but, according to the musicians who began to drop in regu- 
larly to hear the Washingtonians, Duke and his boys raised the roof. 
They played much rousing jazz and won their followers that way; 
they kept them with their soft and subtle transmutations of blues and 
ragtime phrases. Their clothes matched the rough jazz; their person- 
alities, especially their speech, were more like the handsomely fash- 
ioned quiet music they played. They were naturals for Broadway 
with such an intriguing combination of the loud and the soft in music 
and manner; six months after they opened at Barron's they moved 
into the Hollywood Cafe at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway. 

At the Hollywood they were once again taken up by show folk. 
Once again their variations on traditional jazz themes caught hold. 
The variations were more spectacular at the Hollywood, which 
shortly after their arrival was renamed the Kentucky Club. They had 
a solid rhythm section, with the addition of silent, self-assured 
guitarist Freddie Guy. They had what they called a "jungle-istic" 
voice in the trombone of Charlie Irvis, who growled gruffly and sug- 
gestively on his horn, using a large bottlecap for a mute. Playing at 
a place called the Kentucky, playing jungle-istic music, they were 
ripe for the attention of Bohemia and Park Avenue, then both sud- 
denly enthusiastic about "the talents of the Negro rooted, they 
thought, in the jungle. 

Bubber Miley joined up in late 1924 with his extraordinary variety 
of growls, more reliable and controllable than Irvis's, with the aid of 
a plumber's plunger as a mute. Bubber had a ready smile and a 
chortling laugh and got both into his trumpet playing. He was a 
New Yorker who had grown up with Bobby Stark, Freddy Jenkins, 
and Benny Carter in the rough setting they called the Jungle on Sixty- 
second Street, but James Miley had learned a lot about the South 
from his mother and had listened long to the music of Southern 



DUKE ELLINGTON 177 

Negroes. From a spiritual, a hosanna, that his mother had sung, he 
constructed the lovely melody which was his solo in his own "Black 
and Tan Fantasy," one of the first great successes of the Ellingtonians. 
From the sound of trains and the conversations in them, from the 
sound of organs and choirs and Negro churches, from the general 
hubbub of night clubs and the particular cries and grunts of night- 
clubbers, from anything and everything he heard around him, Bub- 
ber made his music. Duke was making what he called "conversation 
music" and was well aware of its potential qualities, and he knew 
too that his best talker was Bubber Miley. Bubber set the style which 
Joe Nanton enlarged when he joined the band for its short stay at 
the Plantation Club between engagements at the Kentucky, in the 
spring of 1926. 

They called Joe Nanton "Tricky Sam," in amazed admiration of 
the ease with which he got out of hard work. He joined several months 
after Cootie Williams, replacing Charlie Irvis; they were both set the 
task of imitating the eminent growlers who more than anybody else 
gave the Fllington music its striking identification. Tricky was a 
charmer with a high-pitched voice and a stream of facts, gleaned from 
the World Almanac and other reference works, with which he was 
glad to amaze you once you broke down his shyness. Cootie was a 
handsome man who had come to New York from Mobile, Alabama, 
in 1928 with Alonzo Ross's band, and had played briefly with Chick 
Webb. He had a husky bass voice that sometimes sounded like the 
trumpet growls he was learning to master. Both Tricky and Cootie 
made magnificent contributions to the records Duke was beginning 
to make in large numbers in the late twenties. Bubber continued to 
make records with Duke after he left the band, so that Cootie wasn't 
heard until early 1929 by the large audience that was buying Elling- 
ton records. Tricky began to record with the band as soon as it moved 
to the Vocalion label in late 1926, after it had made a series of rather 
ordinary sides for Perfect, Gennett, and Blu-Disc. 

From the first Vocalion side, the band's theme, "East St. Louis 
Toodle-oo," its own special qualities were apparent. The "Toodle-oo" 
was Bubber's, a definitive demonstration of his growing melodic line, 
here a kind of middle-tempo plaint in which the accents were those 
of speech a mildly demonstrative, elegantly phrased speech. The 
Ellington musicians knew that "Toodle-oo" was something special, 
and they recorded it again and again, for Vocalion, for Brunswick, 



178 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

for Columbia, for Victor. They knew that Bubber's "Black and Tan 
Fantasy" was a musical achievement too, and they gave it several 
plays in different recording studios. The appropriately named "Fan- 
tasy" shifted mood several times, chiefly to make room for the various 
plunger effects of Bubber and Tricky. In all of the Ellington versions 
of this adventure in musical and, be it admitted, racial colors, the 
original pattern was followed: the melodic phrases fashioned by Duke 
and Bubber gave way to growl solos by Bubber or later by Cootie 
Williams or, still later, by Ray Nance, then by Tricky; the growl 
solos gave way to the ironic quotation of the theme of the Funeral 
March movement of Chopin's B-flat-minor piano sonata. The con- 
cluding bit of Chopin was Duke's bitter-sweet racial philosophy. To 
him, as to so many children all over America, it was the melody 
usually sung with the words, "Where will we all be a hundred years 
from now?" 

Harry Carney joined the band in June 1926, on a one-nighter just 
outside Boston, and used his high school playing experience to great 
effect in the enlarged saxophone section, first as an alto saxist, then 
as the best of the baritone saxophonists, when Duke recorded for 
Victor in October of that year. On two sides, "Creole Love Call" and 
"The Blues I Love to Sing," the saxes played lovely obbligatos for 
the lovely soprano voice of Adelaide Hall, whose wordless vocal on 
the "Love Call" was almost an obbligato in itself. Adelaide Hall made 
only two other sides with Duke, tunes from the Blackbirds Revue 
in 1933, but her measured amatory acrobatics were enough to make 
her 1927 collaboration with Duke a jazz classic. 

The band recorded first as Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club 
Orchestra, then dropped the cabaret identification, but when it was 
such a signal success as a last-minute replacement for King Oliver at 
the Cotton Club uptown In 1927, it became obligatory to name its 
new playing home on records. Under the names of Duke Ellington 
and His Cotton Club Orchestra, the Whoopee Makers, the Harlem 
Footwarmers, Six Jolly Jesters, the Ten Blackberries, and simply 
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, it recorded steadily, regularly, 
and wonderfully from 1927 to 1932. There were significant additions 
to the band, most notably in 1928 when Barney Bigard, Johnny 
Hodges, and Freddy Jenkins joined up. Barney, who was born in 
1906 in New Orleans, had studied with the great New Orleans 
teachers, the Tio brothers, had played with King Oliver and Charlie 



DUKE ELLINGTON 179 

Elgar in Chicago after leaving New Orleans, and had also put in some 
time with Luis Russell before joining Duke, with whom he stayed 
twelve years. His impeccable clarinet playing in person and on such 
record sides as "The Mooche," "Blue Light," "Subtle Lament/' and 
more particularly "Clarinet Lament" gave the New Orleans concep- 
tion of his instrument a new life and a varied expression. Johnny 
Hodges, born the same year as Barney, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
had played some around Boston and with Chick Webb before joining 
Duke, had listened assiduously to the playing of Sidney Bechet, and, 
with Ellington, developed an alto and soprano saxophone sound with 
which to express ideas like Bechet's. Called "Rabbit" by the Elling- 
tonians because of his amusing facial resemblance to a bunny, 
Johnny's playing suggested nothing so cute, though he was capable 
of a delightful lilt when it fitted. Essentially, however, his was the 
band's elegant voice; with an awesome technical ease and an incom- 
parable beauty of saxophone sound, he traveled up and down and 
around melodic lines, scooping pitch in his own unique way, but 
never, in those days, lapsing into empty sound. Freddy Jenkins the 
band called "Posey" because of his elaborate gestures and grimaces 
when he took a solo. He was a left-handed trumpet player with a 
real gift for soft muted solos and a flashy talent too on hand cymbals, 
which he used as a clattering commentary in the band's more ef- 
fervescent moments. 

While Duke was at the Cotton Club he and his band made a movie 
short subject called, after the music it featured, Black and Tan Fan- 
tasy, in which the mood of Bubber's piece was made visual with a 
considerable use of low-key lighting. In 1930 the band journeyed out 
to Hollywood to play a part in Amos and Andy's first movie, Check 
and Double Check, and to feel individually insecure in the simulated 
atmosphere that surrounded the two black-faced white men, even 
though the players were treated as visiting celebrities on the RKO 
lot. They were celebrities: in Europe their records were being listened 
to and written about as works of art; in the United States, when jazz 
was given critical attention, Duke was always singled out along with 
Louis Armstrong to exemplify the best of the native music. By 1932, 
when Lawrence Brown and Ivy Anderson joined the band, "hot col- 
lectors," as those who were building jazz record libraries were being 
called, were getting into vigorous arguments over the merits of the 
new additions and that of 1929, Juan Tizol. Lawrence, who had 



180 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

studied science at Pasadena Junior College and played with the Les 
Hite band when Louis Armstrong fronted it, was a further confirma- 
tion of Duke's growing taste for a languorous and luxurious music 
which had first been demonstrated when Tizol was hired. Tizol was 
a Puerto Rican who played the valve trombone with symphonic 
brilliance; he sweetened the sound of the brass section and also 
brought into the band Latin-American rhythmic accents, not in his 
trombone playing but in his shaking of the maracas, the rattling gourds 
which several other Ellingtonians quickly picked up. The addition 
of Lawrence brought the band a musician who could play sweet or 
hot, whose vast technique and big tone permitted him to extract any 
and all the possible playing effects from the sides of his trombone, 
from beautiful ballads to bumptious two-beat jazz. There could be 
no doubt about the over-all quality of the Ellington orchestra after 
the additions of 1932. The individual musicianship and colors of his 
six brass, four saxes, and rhythm gave Duke for the first time an ade- 
quate palette with which to express his matured ideas. Now, too, he 
had a singing voice always there, always ready, always good. 

It was Ivy Anderson's fortune to have a voice and a personality 
that fitted an orchestra and an era so tightly that she was and will be 
remembered as long as the music and the time are remembered. Her 
life, like her songs, was a medley, a puzzling mixture. She was born 
in Oklahoma and educated at a convent in California, and she was as 
sophisticated a singer as jazz has produced. She had had some serious 
vocal coaching and sang in night clubs and revues, including Shuffle 
Along. With her neat coiffure, her impeccable clothes, her refined 
and delicate features, and her exquisite manner went an improper, 
rough voice, an impudent gesture, a sardonic smile that, in bewilder- 
ing combination, tumbled audience after audience into her lap in the 
course of eleven years with Ellington. 

She sang first, briefly, with Anson Weeks's band, and was featured 
at the Grand Terrace in Chicago. Then she joined Duke Ellington in 
February 1931. She left the Duke in 1942, suffering from asthma, the 
condition which killed her seven years later at the age of forty-five. 
After leaving Duke she worked irregularly; she made her final appear- 
ance in New York to raise the last few dollars necessary to buy an 
apartment house in Los Angeles, which was to have been her security. 

Since her departure there have been many other singers with Duke, 
some of merit, some just barely able to discharge their vocal respon- 



DUKE ELLINGTON 181 

sibilities, but good or bad, successful or not, none has ever replaced 
Ivy. Her sound on records was such that she made certain words and 
phrases indelible: "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing," 
"Stormy Weather," "My Old Flame," "Oh, Babe! Maybe Someday," 
"It Was a Sad Night in Harlem," "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm," 
"A Lonely Co-ed," "Killin' Myself," "I Got It Bad and that Ain't 
Good," "Rocks in My Bed" those are Ivy's songs. They are her 
songs not because she sang them first with Ellington, but because she 
embraced them, hugged them tight, possessed them, and then shared 
them with her listeners. 

Ivy sang "Stormy Weather" in the Cotton Club Parade of 1933, 
as they called the annual show at Harlem's most important night 
club; she also sang "Raisin' the Rent," "Happy as the Day Is Long," 
and "Get Yourself a New Broom." These fine songs, written by 
lyricist Ted Koehler and composer Harold Arlen, were typical 
of the music Duke recorded when he wasn't recording his own 
brilliant compositions. His chief provender, however, during the 
Cotton Club years, were his own three-minute masterpieces. His 
soloists made many contributions in the way of little figures, two- 
to eight-bar phrases, around which Duke could score a whole com- 
position. "Sophisticated Lady," for example, the famous coupling on 
records with "Stormy Weather," was mostly Toby Hardwick's tune, 
which Duke whipped into a thirty -two-bar chorus and made into a 
smash hit. Bubber's lovely "Black Beauty" was material both for the 
band and for a charming piano solo in which Duke wove tricky, 
raggy, endlessly inventive variations around the Miley theme. Harry 
Carney contributed "Rockin' in Rhythm," an extraordinary rhythmic 
exercise like Duke's own "Jubilee Stomp," "Saratoga Swing," and 
"Saturday Night Function." In the six minutes of the two sides of 
"Tiger Rag," the band sounded more like Fletcher Henderson's than 
Duke Ellington's, but the solos by Freddy Jenkins, Barney, Carney, 
Johnny Hodges, Bubber, and Tricky were Duke's voices and sounded 
like nobody else's. There were the mood pieces, in which plaintive 
melodies were given apposite sonorities, soft clarinet, low muted 
trumpet, restrained growls inflected as if they were heartfelt sobs. 
"Misty Mornin' " and "When a Black Man's Blue" are typical of the 
mood pieces; "Mood Indigo" is the most famous of them, with its 
exquisite combination of trumpet and trombone, both muted, and 
the clarinet in its lowest register. On the two sides of the twelve-inch 



182 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

recording of "Creole Rhapsody/' Duke served notice that he was 
not forever to be content with the three-minute form. Still, through 
the thirties, Duke's medium was the ten-inch record, and to it he 
adapted all his composing ideas and skills. It is difficult to think of 
such tightly molded pieces as "Echoes of the Jungle," "The Mystery 
Song," and "Blue Ramble" as anything longer or shorter than they 
are; each orchestral statement, each solo is precisely where and as 
long as it should be. 

Duke's success was almost without limits; certainly no jazz band 
of this quality sold so many records or pleased so many audiences. 
To most jazz musicians there was a kind of infallibility about the 
Ellington band; they regarded each new record as a definitive musi- 
cal pronouncement. But Duke himself was not satisfied: there had 
been too many business complications; his organization had got too 
large for comfort; he wasn't at all sure that he had achieved any- 
thing much. Short of quitting, there seemed only one expedient 
measure, a trip to Europe. In the spring of 1933 the Ellington band 
embarked for England, where it spent many weeks before a brief 
appearance in Paris. Everywhere he went Duke was received with 
such adulation and ceremony that it was inevitable he should rub 
noses (figuratively) and indeed play some jazz (literally) with two 
future Kings of England, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. 
The European trip gave him confidence again, made him realize that 
if his music could please discriminating audiences and stir contro- 
versy it was more than a complicated means of making a living. He 
came back to the United States set to double or triple his activity. 

In the autumn of 1933 Duke took his band south for its first trip 
into the world of rigid double standards. To everybody's delight, the 
band was received as it had been in Europe. The marks of racial dis- 
crimination were unmistakable, but the band was not affected much 
more than it had been in England, where there had been one or two 
minor incidents. 

After this very successful Southern tour, Duke went out to Holly- 
wood to make a couple of movies for Paramount and to play at Sebas- 
tian's Cotton Club, where Lawrence Brown had got his start in the 
Les Hite band. In the mystery-musical film, Murder at the Vanities, 
the band played its own variation on Coslow's and Johnston's varia- 
tion on Liszt's "Second Hungarian Rhapsody," renamed "Ebony 
Rhapsody." In short appearances in Mae West's Belle of the Nineties 



DUKE ELLINGTON 183 

it took two lovely songs, "Troubled Waters" and "My Old Flame," 
and made them lovelier with the help of Ivy Anderson. The band 
also played some fine music in a short film, Symphony in Black, which 
apart from the Ellingtonians was nothing more than a rehearsal of 
Negro stereotypes. 

On the way out to the Coast, in Chicago, the band recorded Duke's 
musical trainride, "Daybreak Express," which integrated railroad 
sounds and music more successfully and less synthetically than the 
French composer Arthur Honegger did in his famous "Pacific 237." 
Some of the success of the swinging express was its necessary compres- 
sion to fit the three-minute record form; once again Duke took ad- 
vantage of a mechanical limitation. Another important recording made 
in Chicago was "Solitude," which, coming so soon after "Sophisticated 
Lady" and rivaling the latter's success, added much to the public's 
conviction that Duke was one of its favorite composers of popular 
songs. After Hollywood, in the fall of 1934, Duke made one of his 
many switches from one record company to another, back to Bruns- 
wick from Victor. He recorded "Solitude" again, "Moonglow," a 
song based on one of his own figures but accruing royalties for an- 
other composer, Toby's lovely "In a Sentimental Mood," and two 
brassy little triumphs, "Showboat Shuffle" and "Merry-Go-Round." 
In September 1935 he reached the magnificent climax of his first 
decade of recording with the two records of a four-part composition, 
"Reminiscing in Tempo." 

The title, u Reminiscing in Tempo," is a clue to the piece's con- 
struction. It rambles rhythmically over a series of related melodies. In 
it Duke reminisces about jazz and the places in which jazz can be 
played and all the things that can be done with jazz. He also solilo- 
quizes, as he has explained, beginning the ramble "with pleasant 
thoughts." Then, he says, "something gets you down." The end comes 
when "you snap out of it, and it ends affirmatively." Something did 
get Duke down; his mother had died in May of the same year. Some- 
thing did snap him out of it; the coming of the swing era brought 
Duke a larger audience and, if possible, a more intense interest in 
every twist and turn and divagation of his music. "Reminiscing in 
Tempo" was greeted with an astonishing furor of praise and con- 
demnation. Some found Duke's reminiscing inflated, even pretentious, 
a lamentable departure from the three-minute form in which he had 
been so notably successful. Others, those who crowded the Urban 



184 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Room of the Congress Hotel in Chicago in the spring of 1936, those 
who wore out copy after copy of the two-record "Reminiscing," 
cheered the adventurousness of the work and listened long and hard 
enough to discover more expansive and better-developed form in all 
the qualities that had endeared Ellington to them. 

It was for this second audience that Duke ordered his concertos, 
three minutes in length but, like "Reminiscing in Tempo," more am- 
bitious in form. Barney's concerto was "Clarinet Lament"; Cootie's, 
"Echoes of Harlem." When the first two concertos did well, Duke 
fashioned two others, "Trumpet in Spades" for Rex Stewart, who 
had brought his perky cornet into the band in 1934, and "Yearning 
for Love," which didn't exhibit Lawrence Brown's capacious talents 
nearly as well as the earlier "Sheik of Araby" or the later "Rose of the 
Rio Grande." For his disapproving, mildly disaffected fans, Duke 
provided a series of good old-fashioned jam sessions, "In a Jam," "Up- 
town Downbeat," "Harmony in Harlem," and revived his very earliest 
jazz pieces, "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" and "The Birmingham 
Breakdown," to both of which he affixed the adjective "new." 

Swing had come along in 1935, apparently to stay forever. In cele- 
bration of the enthusiastic jazz revival, Duke named two of his works 
"Exposition Swing" and "Stepping into Swing Society." It was diffi- 
cult to decide who had stepped into whose society, but clearly the 
Ellington musicians were at home in the new music. Other bands 
noisily claimed swing as their very own, but every musician who 
played big-band jazz knew that almost his every phrase had in some 
way been shaped by Duke Ellington and his musicians. 



Chapter 16 




SWING 



On February 2, 1932, Duke Ellington brought his Famous Orchestra, 
as the record labels have it, into a New York studio to record three 
sides. One of them became a jazz classic, "Lazy Rhapsody." One of 
them, u Moon over Dixie," had almost no interest for Ellington fans, 
then or now. One of them, "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that 
Swing," named the whole era that was to follow in three years. Ivy 
Anderson sang it with all the strength and joy which her first work 
on records had to have; in her swinging singing and the band's similar 
playing the title was handsomely demonstrated. In December 1935 
a bright little novelty record, with almost no discernible meaning 
except the implicit joy in its title and the execution of the meaning 
thereof, inaugurated modern jazz in general and the first few years of 
it in particular. The record was Eddie Farley's and Mike Riley's "The 
Music Goes 'Round and 'Round"; the era which was beginning was 
called Swing. 

Maybe it was the swing away from the worst years of the depres- 
sion that made the Christmas of 1935 the logical time to start the new 
era. Maybe the American people, or that group interested in the dance 
anyway, had had enough of Guy Lombardo and Hal Kemp and all 
the more pallid versions of jazz. Maybe this was simply proof that 
jazz would never die as long as fresh talent was available. Whatever 
the reason, it was the freshness of the music that Benny Goodman and 
his musicians played that made swing as inevitable as the success of 
"The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round" was incalculable. Benny was 
the logical man to take charge of the new music. Of all the talented 
musicians who came out of Chicago, he was clearly the most polished, 
the most assured, the most persuasive stylist. Of all the instruments 
with which one could logically front a jazz band, his was the last to 
reach public favor. Of all the clarinetists to achieve esteem, if only 

185 



186 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

among jazz musicians, he was clearly the most generally able and 
specifically facile. 

Before Benny, Sidney Bechet and Johnny Dodds and Jimmy Noone 
had established certain clarinet procedures, but none of them, in spite 
of their individual and collective ingenuities and skills, had the kind 
of sound that made Benny's success so certain. Popular success in the 
band business has, like popular success in so many other kinds of popu- 
lar culture in America, always depended upon some novelty interest. 
Benny's graceful, skillful maneuvering of clarinet keys certainly had 
such interest to dancers and listeners alike in 1935. It didn't matter 
what he played "The Dixieland Band" or "Hooray for Love," "King 
Porter Stomp" or "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town" it was 
that infectious compound of lovely sound and moving beat that made 
Benny his large audiences. Sound and beat were both fashioned over 
many years of playing experience, most notably on the records with 
Ben Pollack from 1926 to 1931, and then with various bands such as 
Red Nichols and the Whoopie Makers, Irving Mills' Hotsy Totsy 
Gang, Jack Pettis, and various combinations under Benny's own name. 
When Benny became a success as a band leader he could look back 
to a career that was traditional for jazz and had ranged over most of 
the possible styles of the middle and late twenties and early thirties. 
His playing experience moved all the way from short-pants imitations 
of Ted Lewis to every possible kind of dance, radio studio, night club, 
ballroom, and one-nighter job. None of the problems he had to face 
were new to him. 

Benny Goodman's first impact upon the country at large was the 
third hour, which Benny had all to himself, of the three-hour National 
Biscuit program which was sent over the National Broadcasting 
Company network every Saturday night. Working with most of New 
York's first-rate white jazzmen, with many of whom he had shared 
stands before, Benny put together a startlingly good band for radio. 
He had made records with the Teagardens, trumpeter Manny Klein, 
Joe Sullivan, Artie Bernstein, and Gene Krupa; his standards were 
high. In his broadcasting orchestra he had the trombonist Jack Lacey, 
the lead alto saxophonist Hymie Schertzer, Claude Thornhill on piano, 
and George Van Eps on guitar. After a dismal showing at Billy Rose's 
Music Hall, a theater-restaurant which was distinctly not the right 
setting for his kind of music, he put together a band with which to 



SWING 187 

go out on the road, and improved on his radio personnel. Gene Krupa 
became his drummer, Jess Stacy his pianist, Ralph Muzillo and Nate 
Kazebier his trumpeters. Though his saxophones and trombones were 
something less than the combinations of the best musicians that his 
previous recordings had suggested he might have, as sections they 
were well disciplined and swinging, on the whole the abiding virtues 
of the Goodman band that played the music called swing. 

"Swing," as some of us knew then and all of us know now, was just 
another name for jazz; it was a singularly good descriptive term for 
the beat that lies at the center of jazz. It certainly described the quality 
Benny's band had. With Fletcher Henderson as his chief arranger, 
Benny's music had a quality that only the very great big bands had 
had before, and it reached more people than jazz had ever dreamed 
of for an audience. Fletcher's writing was such, so tight, so adroitly 
scored in its simplicity, that each of the sections sounded like a solo 
musician; the collective effect was of a jam session. With such an 
effect, it was possible to record essentially dreary material like "Goody 
Goody" and "You Can't Pull the Wool over My Eyes" and give it 
something more than a veneer of jazz quality. A big-band style was 
set that was never lost again, as the distinguished qualities of New 
Orleans and Chicago jazz had been, at least to the public at large, 
after their peak periods. After the emergence of the Goodman band, 
all but the most sickly commercial bands tightened their ensembles, 
offered moments of swinging section performance and even a solo 
or two that were jazz-infected. Kay Kyser, in his last years as a work- 
ing bandleader, hired Noni Bernardi to lead his saxes, and Noni, who 
had played alto with Tommy Dorsey, Bob Crosby, Charlie Barnet, 
and Benny for a while, converted not only his reeds but the band 
itself from a series of ticks and glisses into a dance orchestra of some 
distinction, with jazz inflections that had some of us looking for- 
ward to each new record. When Harry James became a successful 
trumpeter-leader as a result of a crinoline and molasses version of 
"You Made Me Love You," the essential swing style was preserved 
and some first-rate jazz sandwiched in between nagging laments and 
rhapsodies and pseudo-concertos for trumpet and orchestra. Charlie 
Spivak paid occasional respects to his jazz background, and there was 
some fair jazz in the music of the Dorsey Brothers after they split up 
and led their separate bands; in the band of the ex-society leader, Al 



188 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Donahue; in radio studio groups; even in more than a few territory 
bands, those minor-league outfits that build a name and a public only 
within an easily negotiable geographical area. 

Benny's success was far more than a personal one; his influence was 
lasting; his way was others' too. When Benny turned a poor road trip 
into a jubilant roar of approval at the Hollywood Palomar Ballroom, 
the cheers were not only for his band but also for the school of jazz 
it represented. Other bands playing music even vaguely related to 
Benny's were almost equally well received for a while, and it became 
expedient to identify one's jazz as "swing." Fortunately some of the 
bands that benefited from Benny's success were deserving, and a few 
of them developed and expanded the way of playing jazz called 
"swing." 

Bob Crosby, Bing's singing younger brother, took over the distin- 
guished remnants of the Ben Pollack band in 1934, and it, more than 
any other band, large or small, brought New Orleans jazz back to 
life. Bob had as his band's centerpiece one of the best musicians ever 
turned out by that city, Eddie Miller, and, to match Eddie's tenor, 
Matty Matlock's clarinet; Yank Lawson's trumpet; Nappy Lamare's 
personality, vocals, and guitar; Bob Haggart's bass; and Ray Bauduc's 
drums. After the demise of the band the Dorseys led together in 
1935, Tommy turned soft-spoken ballads into a big business and 
Jimmy tried several things, finding their chief musical success with 
a semi-Dixie style built around Ray McKinley's drums, and box 
office appeal with alternately up-tempo and medium or slow vocal 
choruses by Helen O'Connell and Bob Eberle. Charlie Barnet, who 
had had a New York playing and recording career like Benny's, if 
shorter, moved a step beyond the others in his band's performances of 
Duke Ellington manuscript; and Woody Herman, identified like 
Charlie with the squat little Fifty-second Street bandbox, the Famous 
Door, played the blues and pops and sang standards handsomely. 

Fifty-second Street came to enthusiastic life shortly before Benny 
bowled over the Coast and then took over Chicago. The lifeblood 
in his trio and quartet, Teddy Wilson, had been an interlude pianist 
at the old Famous Door, across the street from Barnet's and Herman's 
later headquarters. The kind of performance Benny's small units made 
popular after Teddy drove out to Chicago to play a concert with 
the Goodman musicians in March 1936 was a Fifty-second-Street 
session: any number of instruments short of a big band could be com- 



SWING 189 

bined as long as the beat was steady and the time allotted solos ex- 
pansive. There were all kinds of groups along Fifty-second Street's 
two playing blocks in the thirties and early forties: Red McKenzie 
and Eddie Condon, together and apart, at first with Bunny Berigan, 
then with the cast that became Nick's permanent two-beat repertory 
company, Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Wild Bill Davison, 
George Brunies, and George Wettling; Fats Waller, before Benny 
hit and carried him along with the others who played that kind of 
music; John Kirby, an Onyx fixture with Charlie Shavers, Buster 
Bailey, Billy Kyle, and O'Neil Spencer, the Spirits of Rhythm, and 
Frankie Newton's band; singers like Billie Holiday and pianists like 
Art Tatum, who eventually became the Street's major luminaries. 
Perhaps the most significant of all the bands was the one that, even 
more than the Goodman band, typified, expanded, and carried swing 
forward Count Basic's. 

The Red Bank, New Jersey, pianist William Basic, who had started 
as a drummer, had become a Kansas City jazzman, working with 
Bennie Moten, then with his own twelve-piece band at the Reno Club. 
Benny Goodman and John Hammond heard the band out of a short- 
wave station, W9XBY, recognized extraordinary skills in the jumping 
rhythm section and the fresh patterns of Lester Young's tenor solos. 
With Benny's help, John, the most articulate and influential of the 
jazz critics of the thirties, did something about it. Basic moved to the 
Grand Terrace in Chicago, made records for Decca, and came on to 
New York's Roseland Ballroom in 1936. He picked up fans and fol- 
lowers as he went from club to record date to ballroom; the best of 
the swing styles was clearly his; the bridge to later jazz was built. 

The illustrious solo moments of the Basic band were those of 
Lester Young on tenor and Harry Edison on trumpet, but they weren't 
fully appreciated until some years after the band had passed its peak. 
The real star was what Paul Whiteman called Count's "Ail-American 
Rhythm Section" in a 1942 article in Collier's, selecting the best musi- 
cians in jazz. Freddy Greene was a guitar rock; Joe Jones' drum 
tempos and Walter Page's bass intonation were neither as steady 
nor as consistent; and Basic himself provided only piano decoration, 
albeit charming. It was a unit, however, one which took fire from 
Joe's cymbals and warmth from Walter's strings, got good guitar 
time, and was capable of sustaining a string of choruses all by itself, 
with the titled head of the band and the section tinkling on the off- 



190 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

beats. "I don't know what it is," one of the Basic veterans once said. 
"Count don't play nothing, but it sure sounds good!" 

There were others in the band who sounded good, too: Benny 
Morton, whose trombone was languorous always and often lovely; 
Dickie Wells, who made funny noises into fetching phrases on the 
same instrument; Vic Dickenson, who carried the sliding humor fur- 
ther. The famous Basic trumpeter when the band was most famed, 
from 1936 through 1942, was Buck Clayton, whose identifying grace 
was del'cacy. When joined with a subdued Lester and Dickie and the 
rhythm section for a Cafe Society Uptown engagement, Buck's 
muted trumpet set the style for the small band within the large and 
pointed to Basie's major achievement: the ability to keep the roar 
implicit and the beat suggestive. At other times, it was all ebullience, 
a gen'al fire stoked by rotund Jimmy Rushing's robust blues shout- 
ing, the brass section's stentor and the saxes' strength. Men like the 
late Al Killian, of the leathery lungs, passed through the trumpet 
section. Tab Smith, an insinuating alto saxist of the Hodges school, 
replaced Earl Warren, the band's original ballad singer and lush reed 
voice, for a while. Several tenors tried at various times to duplicate 
the furry sound of Hershal Evans, who died early in the band's big- 
time career most notably and durably Buddy Tate. Jack Washing- 
ton was a baritone player of some distinction and power, the key 
quality of an organization that for a while blasted every other band 
out of the way. 

Jimmie Lunceford's showy musicians moved into prominence ear- 
lier than the Basie musicians and moved out earlier. With the death 
of Lunceford in Oregon on July 12, 1947, the last edition of a once- 
great organization, already fading badly, was washed out completely. 
But the style remains, firmly embedded within the grooves of a select 
number of phonograph records. 

Jimmie, a Fisk University graduate, recruited the nucleus of his 
first band at a Memphis high school, where he was an athletic in- 
structor. He picked up Sy Oliver in the early thirties and his style 
was set, never to vary importantly until his and his band's demise. 
That style, sooner or later, influenced almost every important band 
in jazz. It was the most effective utilization of two-beat accents dis- 
covered by any jazzman; it made a kind of impressive last gasp for 
dying Dixieland, with its heavy anticipations, its almost violently 



SWING 191 

strong and whisperingly weak beats, its insistent, unrelenting syn- 
copation. 

There were about eight years of prime Lunceford, beginning with 
the Cotton Club engagement the band played in 1934, ending with the 
exodus from the band of Willie Smith in 1942. At first the band 
played flashy, stiff instrumental in the Casa Loma manner, such Will 
Hudson specials as "White Heat 1 ' and "Jazznocracy." These and 
other Hudson pieces were used in turn by Glen Gray's Casa Loma 
Orchestra, a group of Canadian musicians who excited some en- 
thusiasm in the year just before Benny Goodman took over, more be- 
cause of their shrewd balance of ballads and mechanical jazz than 
because of any real musical quality. When Sy Oliver became Jimmie's 
chief arranger in 1935, the parade of two-beat specials most irre- 
sistibly associated with LunceforcTs name began: "My Blue Heaven/' 
"For Dancers Only," "Margie," "Four or Five Times," "Swanee 
River," "Organ Grinder Swing," "Cheatin' on Me," " Taint What 
You Do," "Baby, Won't You Please Come Home," etc. Bill Moore, Jr., 
showed up to replace Sy when the latter left to join Tommy Dorsey; 
Bill left a vital impression on the band's books with his "Belgium 
Stomp," "Chopin Prelude," "Monotony in Four Flats," and "1 Got It" 
(the last backed on records by Mary Lou Williams' sensitive "What's 
Your Story, Morning Glory"). 

Coupled with the instrumental style of the band, which, much 
as it emphasized its hacking two-beat, depended upon section preci- 
sion, was a singing manner. Jimmie's boys whispered, wheedled, 
cozened, rather than sang. Out of the first husky efforts of the Lunce- 
ford Trio (Sy, Willie, guitarist Al Norris) grew the individual vocal- 
ists, Oliver and Smith, Joe Thomas, later Trummy Young. Their 
rhythmic attack at a low volume held a brilliance of innuendo which 
never failed to grab an audience's attention (for example, T rummy's 
"Margie," Sy's "Four or Five Times," Willie's "I Got It," Joe's 
"Baby, Won't You Please Come Home" and "Dinah") as Jimmy 
Crawford's brilliant drumming grasped its pulse. 

The band's soloists were always secondary to the arrangements in 
Luncef ord's heyday, but some genuinely distinctive individual sounds 
did emerge from the group. Trummy Young played a wistful trom- 
bone. Willie Smith's agile, enthusiastic alto remains the most in favor, 
but there are tenormen who swear by Joe Thomas's soft tone, and 



192 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

those of us who followed the band eagerly in the mid-thirties remem- 
ber with pleasure the solo trumpeting of Eddie Tompkins, who was 
killed in war maneuvers in 1941. Eddie can be remembered for other 
things, too: when the trumpet section consisted of his horn, Sy's, and 
first Tommy Stevenson's, then Paul Webster's, it was a high-flying 
unit, not only in the screeches it sometimes played in tune, but in its 
instrumental gymnastics, in its wild flinging of its three trumpets into 
the air in perfect unison. 

At its zenith, Lunceford's was the show band, whether in its mili- 
tary formations on the stage or ballroom stand, in its multiple dou- 
bling of instrumentalists as singers, or its comparatively precise per- 
formances. Even after it passed from the serious consideration of 
musicians and critics as a contemporary jazz outfit, its old records 
retained interest, its old appearances stirred a nostalgic tear. Jimmie 
never did much more than wave a willowy baton, smile tentatively, 
and announce the names of his soloists and singers, but he held title 
to one of the genuinely distinctive swing bands. 

Some of the powerhouse quality of the Lunceford band was picked 
up by its most slavish imitator, Erskine Hawkins and the Bama State 
Collegians. The self-styled Gabriel of the trumpet never did as much 
with the youngsters he brought from Alabama State University to 
New York as he might have. But he was luckier than most of the men 
who brought flashy outfits into New York for one or two or a dozen 
appearances in the late thirties and early forties, to leave an impression 
of crude strength and undeveloped talent and no more; he at least 
made enough of a reputation to be confused with Coleman Hawkins 
by some of the unknowing; he had a hit record grow out of one of his 
band's original works, "Tuxedo Junction." The Jeter-Pilar band 
came in from St. Louis several times and always charmed its listeners, 
but never had the soloists'* or the scores to make the charm linger. The 
Sunshine Serenaders came in from Florida and made a lot of attrac- 
tive noise, but never with an identity all its own. The Harlan Leonard 
band blew in from Kansas City, and its breezy airs and brassy com- 
petence, coupled with the booming impression of the Jay McShann 
band and Count Basie, gave the impression for a while that there was 
such a thing as a Kansas City "style." But when these were compared 
with the Andy Kirk band, so very different really, so much more 
timid, so much more a matter of Mary Lou Williams' writing and 
playing talents, the style disappeared along with the comparison. 



SWING 193 

There was more of the Kansas City style if Leonard and Mc- 
Shann and Basic were representative of it in bands that had rarely if 
ever seen the Missouri metropolis. The massive Mills Blue Rhythm 
Band, bumping along behind the solos of Red Allen on trumpet and 
J. C. Higginbotham on trombone, was an example of this sort of 
jazz. Willie Bryant's swinging group of 1935 and 1936, with first 
Teddy Wilson, then Ram Ramirez on piano, with Puddin' Head 
Battle on trumpet, had much of the same spirit, some of it because 
of its leader's sprightly announcing and singing wit. The minor out- 
fits Billy Hicks and his Sizzling Six, Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans, 
Buddy Johnson's band all had it in varying measure. Cab Galloway 
bought it when he began to fill out his sections with men like Milton 
Hinton on bass, Chu Berry on tenor, and Cozy Cole on drums in 
1936 and 1937 and then Jonah Jones on trumpet a few years later. 
When Cab began to buy manuscript from men of the quality of Don 
Redman, he had a band to compete with Basie and Lunceford and 
even Ellington. If his box office could have matched his budget, if his 
personal public and the new band's following could have been 
coupled, his contribution to jazz history might have equaled his flam- 
boyance and his fervor as a singer. 

The white bands got the first swing customers; the Negro outfits 
followed close behind. About the same time that Basie was emerging 
as a national figure, so were the bands at the Savoy Ballroom in 
Harlem Teddy Hill's and Chick Webb's; so was Jimmie Lunceford, 
with his precision scoring and precision musicians; so was the band 
that Jimmie followed at the old Cotton Club, Duke Ellington's. 
Duke was almost as much in demand for rhythm and hot-club con- 
certs as Benny; his experiments, such as the four-part "Reminiscing 
in Tempo," were the subject of violent controversy among musicians 
and aficionados; his tone colors were adopted by all kinds of bands 
and musicians. Along with the Negro bands themselves, individual 
Negro musicians and singers were beginning to be accepted, even 
with white bands. Benny Goodman added Lionel Hampton to his 
trio and made it a quartet. Later, in the first of several reorganizations 
of personnel after short-lived retirement, Benny took on Cootie Wil- 
liams and Sidney Catlett, and Charlie Christian was his featured 
guitarist and perhaps the very best musician he ever had. 

Artie Shaw showed himself something more than an imitator of 
Benny when he signed Billie Holiday as his singer, and, though this 



194 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

was not an altogether successful arrangement, the hiring of Lips Page 
for Artie's comeback band in 1941 and Roy Eldridge in another 
return edition in 1944 proved entirely satisfactory on all counts. 
These were instances in which Artie's threats to revolutionize jazz 
and the business attendant upon the music leaped beyond words into 
inspired deeds. It was not always that way, partly because Artie's 
attempts at the sublime were undisciplined, partly because the sublime 
was not always accessible, even to the impeccably disciplined of jazz. 

The first attempt, after an early success as a radio studio and job- 
bing clarinetist in New York, was with a combination of solo jazz 
instruments, rhythm section, and string quartet. In various combina- 
tions in 1936, it failed commercially, and musically too, because of a 
certain protective pallor that approached indifference. The new few 
editions of the stringless Shavians led to a simple swinging skill by 
1938, best illustrated for the public by the fabulously successful 
recording of "Begin the Beguine," best demonstrated for musicians 
by the authority of soloists like Georgie Auld on tenor, Les Robinson 
on alto, Chuck Peterson and Bernie Privin on trumpet, and Artie him- 
self on clarinet, with a formidable assist the next year by young Buddy 
Rich on drums. Then in the fall of 1939 Artie ran away from a choice 
engagement at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, ran to Mexico 
because, he said, he was sick of the spectacle and the corruption of 
the jazz business. In a few months he was back with a lot of strings and 
at least one shrewdly chosen Mexican song, "Frenesi," which made 
his lush fiddle sound popular on records. With the strings, Artie made 
a variety of attractive dance records through 1942. With Billy Butter- 
field at first, then with Roy Eldridge; with Johnny Guarnieri on 
harpsichord at first, then with Dodo Marmarosa on piano, Artie 
recorded some small band jazz, riffy but fresh. The first group of 
small band sides made in ^1940, the second made in 1945, joined to the 
1938-1939 big-band jazz, represent Artie Shaw's swing contribution. 
Like his own playing, these alternately move and plod, occasionally 
catch fire and hold the torch brilliantly. 

The accomplishment of the swing era, 1935-1940, is difficult to eval- 
uate. Its achievement was of the magnitude of that in the New Orleans 
period. It found an audience for every variation on what was essen- 
tially the New Orleans-Chicago theme with an added Kansas City 
seasoning, and although some of the less talented and more backward 
recipients of the success Benny Goodman brought them made ungrate- 



SWING 195 

ful critical noises, they were restored to jazz life in the process. No- 
body, least of all Benny himself, thought that a conclusion had been 
wrought and an end to the development of jazz accomplished. Some, 
as a matter of fact, musicians and audiences both, suddenly became 
aware of music outside jazz and became humble about the hot music, 
the improvisation, the beat. But, whatever the limitations, the 
cliches, and the hollow repetitions, a new vitality had been discovered, 
continuity with Chicago had been established. Such was the convic- 
tion of vitality that, in 1950, when jazzmen were casting around again 
for a renewal of their forces and an enlargement of their audiences, 
they looked back with excited interest at the swing era whatever 
the term "swing" itself meant, whatever the countless kinds of music 
that had masqueraded under its name. 

Confusion surrounded the use of the two terms "swing" and 
"jazz" as soon as swing became popularly accepted. There was one 
school of thought, of which critic Robert Goffin was the most rabid 
exponent, that believed "swing" denoted the commercialization and 
prostitution of real jazz, that it had partly supplanted jazz, and that 
it consisted only of written arrangements played by big bands, 
whereas jazz consisted only of improvised music played by small 
bands. Another school of thought held that good jazz, whether 
played by one man or twenty, must have the fundamental quality of 
swing, a swinging beat, and could therefore legitimately be called 
swing, and that despite the different constructions put on the two 
terms by some critics, both words stood for the same musical idiom, 
the same rhythmic and harmonic characteristics, the same use of syn- 
copation. Confusion regarding the meaning of the word "jazz" de- 
veloped even among musicians themselves. A leader of a big band, 
telling you about his three trumpet players, for instance, would say, 
"This one plays the jazz," meaning that the man in question handled 
the improvised solos. Yet many musicians began to use the adjective 
"jazzy" to mean "corny," and some of them began to narrow down 
the meaning of the noun "jazz" to denote corn. 

Before the word "swing" became popular there was none of this 
confusion. Fletcher Henderson and others played arrangements with 
big bands more than twenty years before the official arrival of swing 
as a jazz style, and nobody thought of calling his music anything but 
jazz. Yet during the swing era the same kind of music played by big 
bands was considered by the Goffin school to be something apart 



196 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

from and interfering with jazz just as, still later, the same type of 
critic deplored bebop and cool jazz and disparaged these developments 
in the evolution of jazz as departures from and betrayals of the pure 
tradition. 

The truth is that there is absolutely no dividing line between swing 
and jazz. Roy Eldridge hit the crux of the matter at the height of the 
controversy. "Difference between jazz and swing? Hell, no, man," 
he said. "It's just another name. The music advanced, and the name 
advanced right along with it. Jazz is just something they called it a 
long time ago. I've got a six-piece band, and what we play is swing 
music. It's ridiculous to talk about big bands and small bands as if 
they played two different kinds of music. I play a chorus in exactly 
the same style with my small band backing me as I did when I was 
with Gene Krupa's sixteen pieces." 

Fletcher Henderson agreed with Roy, though he made a slight 
distinction: "There is a certain difference in the technical significance; 
swing means premeditation and jazz means spontaneity, but they still 
use the same musical material and are fundamentally the same idiom. 
To say that a swing arrangement is mechanical whereas a jazz solo 
is inspired is absurd. A swing arrangement can sound mechanical if 
it's wrongly interpreted by musicians who don't have the right feel- 
ing, but it's written straight from the heart and has the same feeling 
in the writing as a soloist has in a hot chorus. That's the way, for in- 
stance, my arrangement of 'Sometimes I'm Happy' for Benny was 
written I just sat down not knowing what I was going to write, 
and wrote spontaneously what I was inspired to write. Maybe some 
arrangements sound mechanical because the writers studied too much 
and wrote out of a book, as it were too much knowledge can hamper 
your style. But on the whole, swing relies on the same emotional and 
musical attitude as jazz, "or improvised music, with the added advan- 
tage that it has more finesse." 

Many devotees of earlier jazz, whose nostalgic yearnings for the 
old idols of a dying generation involve an indiscriminate contempt 
for anything modern, claimed that swing musicians paid too much 
attention to technique and too little to style, that the fundamental 
simplicity of jazz was lost in the evolution of swing. Theirs was an 
unrealistic argument. It is true that much of Louis Armstrong's great- 
ness lay in the pure simplicity of his style and that he often showed 
a profound feeling for jazz without departing far from the melody; 



SWING 197 

it is also true that such swing stars as Roy Eldridge, whom most of 
the fans of the old jazz despised, made vast technical strides and played 
far more notes per second in their solos. But it is true too that there 
were times when Louis's playing was complicated, and there were 
New Orleans clarinetists whose music was just as involved and tech- 
nical as some of the jazz played by later musicians. More important, 
really good jazz musicians of any period or style have never used their 
technique as an end in itself; they use it as a means to achieve more 
variety, more harmonic and rhythmic subtlety in their improvisa- 
tions. If somebody like Jelly Roll Morton had been blessed with a 
technique even remotely comparable with Earl Hines' or Art Tatum's, 
he would undoubtedly have been a far finer pianist, and it wouldn't 
have changed him from a jazzman into a swingman, because basically 
there is no difference between the two. 

Most people who like jazz of any style, school, or period admire 
Duke Ellington, whatever their reservations. Do they consider his 
music swing or jazz or both or neither? If the devotees of early jazz 
were to follow their theories through consistently and logically they 
would have to say that an Ellington number was swing while the ar- 
ranged passages were being played, but as soon as a man stood up to 
take a sixteen-bar solo, it became jazz. If, as so often happened with 
the Ellington band, a solo that was originally improvised was so well 
liked that it was repeated in performance after performance until it 
became a regular part of the arrangement, then would it still be jazz? 
The question becomes even sillier when you realize that music such 
as Charlie Barnet's, Hal Mclntyre's, and Dave Matthews 7 , and that 
of other prominent swing musicians, written in exactly the same 
idiom as Ellington's, sometimes using identical arrangements and 
sometimes entirely different arrangements in the same style, was 
passed off or ignored by these jazz lovers as "commercial swing" of 
no musical interest. 

Since the word "swing" was accepted by the masses and couldn't 
be suppressed, it might have seemed logical to let the term "jazz" 
fade out of the picture entirely and to call everything swing from 
1935 on, whether it was Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Eddie 
Condon, or Duke Ellington. But that word "jazz" has a habit of 
clinging. It has figured in the title of almost every book written on 
this type of music, from Panassie's Le Jazz Hot on; an important ex- 
ception, curiously enough, was Louis Armstrong's book, Swing 



198 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

That Music. Louis, although he has always been one of the chief 
idols of the nostalgic jazz lovers, liked the new word and used it 
frequently in preference to "jazz." Of the distinction between the 
two terms, he said, "To tell you the truth, I really don't care to get 
into such discussions as these. To me, as far as I could see it all my 
life, jazz and swing were the same thing. In the good old days of 
Buddy Bolden, in his days way back in nineteen hundred, it was 
called ragtime music. Later on in the years it was called jazz music, 
hot music, gutbucket, and now they've poured a little gravy over it 
and called it swing music. No matter how you slice it, it's still the 
same music. If anybody wants to know, a solo can be swung on any 
tune and you can call it jazz or swing." 

Benny Carter, always a thinking musician, expressed essentially the 
same sentiments in different words, in an ordered argument: "I don't 
think you can set down any hard and fast definition of either 'jazz' 
or 'swing.' Both words have been defined by usage, and a lot of 
people use them in different ways. For instance, a lot of musicians 
use the word 'jazz' to denote something that's old-timey and corny. 
As I understand it, though, 'jazz' means what comes out of a man's 
horn, and 'swing' is the Reeling that you put into the performance. 
Well, the jazz that comes out of the horn happens in so-called swing 
performances too. So even if 'jazz' and 'swing,' as words, do mean 
two separate things, as musical elements they're very often combined 
in one performance, and to talk about swing having replaced jazz, 
or followed it, is just nonsense." 

Red Norvo wanted to junk the old word. "The word 'swing' 
doesn't signify big bands playing arrangements that's the most ob- 
vious thing in the world. My records with the Swing Sextet and 
Octet had no arrangements, but they were swing, just the same as 
other records I made which did have arrangements. 'Swing,' to me, 
stands for something fresh and young, something that represents 
progress. Jump is another good name for it, too. I certainly hope it 
isn't jazz we're playing, because jazz to me means something ob- 
noxious, like that Dixieland school of thought." 

Lionel Hampton was differently concerned about the names people 
called his music. In his years with Benny Goodman (1936-1940) he 
was content with "swing," particularly when used as a verb to 
describe his own performances with the Goodman Quartet and those 
of the various groups of musicians who recorded under his leader- 



SWING 199 

ship in the distinguished jazz series he made for Victor. Both Lionel 
as an individual and his pickup bands swung. So did his first big 
band, organized in late 1940 partly because of his own spectacular 
drive; partly because of his guitarist, Irving Ashby, a much more 
sparkling musician then than later with the King Cole Trio; partly 
because of Lionel's other soloists, especially the violinist Ray Perry. 
Later editions of Lionel's band intensified this concern of his with 
the beat. The band that played a concert at Symphony Hall in 
Boston in the winter of 1944 and at Carnegie Hall in New York in 
the spring of 1945 was an overwhelming organization which swamped 
the thirty-odd strings Lionel gathered for the concerts and almost 
accepted discipline. But in spite of a few subdued solos from the 
gifted but generally noisy tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb and a 
dynamically versatile brass section, all the music ultimately gave way 
to wild exhibitions by the many drummers who passed through the 
band and by Lionel himself. It was engaging for a while, but after a 
few years of the frenzy of "Flying Home,' 7 "Hamp's Boogie Woogie," 
and "Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" one could listen only for the occasional 
moments of Milt Buckner's chunky piano chords or a random sax 
or brass solo of distinction. Lionel called his music "boogie woogie," 
"rebop," "bebop," or "swing," as the fashion suggested, but at its 
best it was only the latter, and at its worst it was a travesty of the 
other styles, if any representation of them at all. Finally, those who 
were interested in music came only to hear Lionel play vibes and 
were best satisfied with his slow, insinuating ballads, especially his 
big-band "Million-Dollar Smile" and the lovely set of solos with 
organ and rhythm accompaniment, released by Decca in 1951. 

The music that will longest be associated with Hamp is not his 
own band's, in spite of its charged moments, but rather the combina- 
tions of other men's musicians he led in the Victor studios in Holly- 
wood, Chicago, and New York from 1937 to 1940. His first date fea- 
tured Ziggy Elman, and so did his last significant session but one 
before recording with his own men. Ziggy was typical: he was a 
lusty trumpeter with a personality perfectly attuned to the manners 
and might of swing. Cootie Williams was another of the same stripe. 
So were Red Allen and J. C. Higginbotham, Benny Carter, Chu 
Berry, Johnny Hodges, King Cole, and Coleman Hawkins, on their 
instruments. There was the memorable "One Sweet Letter from 
You," with Hawk, Ben Webster, Chu, and Benny Carter. There 



200 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

was "On the Sunny Side of the Street," to some still Johnny Hodges' 
best side. There was Ziggy's best playing on records, whenever he 
appeared with Lionel. Finally, there was the electrifying Hampton, 
welding the disparate personalities, topping the unified groups, epit- 
omizing an era and its way of joining talents and styles. 

Lionel Hampton has always found a large audience for his music, 
the combination of audiences that made swing. As few other band- 
leaders after the swing era, he held that combination of audiences. 
But within a decade after his band made its first appearance, it was 
no longer of musical significance as a band; its final effect upon jazz 
as with most of the important swing bands was the effect of its 
soloists, especially Hamp himself. 





w 




THE SIDEMEN 



If it accomplished nothing else, the swing era produced one lasting 
effect. The enthusiastic acceptance of the new cause by college and 
high school youngsters and their immediate elders focused attention 
on the sideman. 

All jazz bands, large and small, have a nominal leader and sideman. 
As with the word "jazz" itself, the origin of the term "sideman" 
cannot be accurately traced, but its meaning is obvious. Like so 
much of jazz nomenclature, it is a descriptive word: inevitably the 
members of a jazz band sit to the left and to the right of center, a 
center sometimes occupied by a playing leader, sometimes by the 
drummer or a whole rhythm section. When sidemen take sides, left 
or right, in a big band, they fall into solo or section chairs and 
are prepared to take up a set of varying chores. In a small band 
everybody is a soloist. When swing came along its enthusiasts began 
to pay attention to the least members of the bands for which they 
had enthusiasm. The hot men, as they called the soloists, moved in 
an aura of acclaim hitherto reserved for a very small number of 
acknowledged great. The effect was cumulative and retroactive: hot 
collectors sifted through their records to find unappreciated beauties 
in a trumpeter here, a clarinetist there, a drummer somewhere else. 
Bix Beiderbecke, the biggest sideman jazz has known, was redis- 
covered; the records on which he had played suddenly became 
valuable collector's items. On records and off, in one-nighter and 
ballroom and hotel appearances, new bands were listened to avidly, 
with the hope that some new genius would pop up in brass or reed 
or rhythm sections. The apotheosis of the sideman was complete. 

A considerable impetus to this new interest in the sideman was 
provided by the writing of two men. John Henry Hammond, Jr., 

201 



202 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

who had learned much about jazz as a record collector in his years 
at Hotchkiss and Yale and more in his trips from Connecticut to 
New York to hear the sizable jazzmen in person, had become an 
indefatigable writer and organizer of jazz record dates by 1935. In 
his short-lived jazz column in the Sunday Brooklyn Eagle he set a 
model for all future writers about jazz. With fervent adjectives 
and accurate judgment, he called attention to the fine musicians 
playing with Fletcher Henderson and with Benny Goodman. He 
helped Teddy Wilson to get the Brunswick contract which accounted 
for perhaps the most significant series of jazz record dates in the 
swing era. He was almost personally responsible for the emergence 
of Count Basic's remarkable band from a Kansas City night club. 
Some of the best musicians of the period owe their professional ex- 
istence to his efforts. 

George Simon joined the staff of Metronome in 1935, fresh 
from Harvard and the little jazz band he had led from the drums in 
the New England houseparty territory. George went to work with 
a special interest in the complexities of the large band and the abilities 
of its musicians. He set up a rating system for bands, based on the 
report-card letters A to D, and the words which preceded his rating, 
"Simon Says," became famous among musicians. George's reviews set 
a style in jazz criticism; a summary of the basic qualities of a given 
band, its musical style and commercial appeal, would be followed 
by a painstaking analysis of each of the sections, paying equal atten- 
tion to the sound of, say, the saxophone section as a whole, to the 
lead alto saxophonist, and to the jazz soloists, be they alto and tenor, 
or two tenors, or alto, tenor, and baritone. He revealed the inner 
workings of a jazz band to his readers, stressing the large responsibility 
of the musicians who never took a solo but whose work, good or 
bad, was so important a part of the ultimate effect of a band's per- 
formance. He emphasized the delicate balance of the scored arrange- 
ment and the improvised performance, making less mysterious and 
more meaningful the electric effect of the Benny Goodman band and 
other swing outfits. 

In the band which Benny took across the country in the fall of 
1935, to score such a resounding success at the Palomar Ballroom 
in Hollywood in early 1936, there were at first few stars. Benny's 
band was the perfect example of the brilliant coordination of in- 
dividuals to make up sections and sections to make up an orchestra 



THE SIDEMEN 203 

that the first jazz critics were writing about. Bunny Berigan made 
some records with Benny but didn't go out on the road with him. 
Nate Kazebier, who played the trumpet solos, was not of Bunny's 
stature, but he did have a pleasant tone and his solos swung. Joe 
Harris, who had come over from the disbanded Ben Pollack orches- 
tra, had an attractive barrelhouse edge to his trombone playing. Dick 
Clark was a fair tenor, but it was rather the sax team, with Toots 
Mondello's or Hymie Schertzer's rich lead alto sounds, that gave 
this instrument distinction in the Goodman band. Gene Krupa made 
interesting faces as he chewed his gum and sweated his way through 
drum solos, but much as these intrigued fans they were less im- 
portant than the overwhelming drive of the rhythm section as a 
whole, especially contributed by Jess Stacy's piano and Allan Reuss's 
guitar, and taken up by the whole band; this drive gave to Benny's 
music its distinguishing quality. Jess was a fine soloist too, and Helen 
Ward contributed throbbing ballads suggestive in style of Ethel 
Waters' best singing, and finally there was the superlative clarinet 
playing of the leader. 

Benny's best work, however, was not with the big band, but with 
the trio he formed with Teddy Wilson and Gene, and with his 
quartet, formed when Lionel Hampton joined on the vibraphone in 
the summer of 1936 in Los Angeles. In the trio and quartet records 
Benny's Chicago training and Teddy's vast experience, reaching 
from Tuskegee study to Detroit, Chicago, and New York playing, 
made the difference. Teddy had worked in the Erskine Tate, Jimmy 
Noone, Benny Carter, and Willie Bryant bands, and had accompanied 
the Charioteers, the most musicianly of the vocal groups of the 
thirties. Teddy had a style essentially his own, compounded of some 
of the staccato elements of Earl Hines' piano playing, the various 
drifts of other men's ideas which inevitably make their way into the 
jazz soloist's playing machinery, and a way of fashioning fill-in 
runs of his own between phrases that gave his every performance 
lift and integration. His precise articulation on the keyboard proved 
just the right complement to Benny's swooping cadences and sweeps 
across the clarinet registers. Lionel Hampton, a Louisville, Kentucky, 
boy who had grown up in Chicago and had played exclusively in 
Los Angeles before joining Benny, added a ringing vibraphone note 
to the chamber unit of the Goodman organization and a power-drive 
on vibes and drums all his own. None of the many records these 



204 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

musicians made together, with Dave Tough replacing Gene for eight 
sides and Lionel drumming on one, was bad. 

Gordon Griffin, better known as Chris, joined Benny in the spring 
of 1936; Ziggy Elman joined in September of the same year; and 
before the year was out, in December, Harry James filled out the 
trumpet section. That trumpet section, with first Murray McEachern 
and then Vernon Brown on trombone, a succession of tenor saxo- 
phonists ( Vido Musso, Babe Russin, Bud Freeman, and Jerry Jerome), 
Jess on piano, Gene and then Dave Tough on drums, and an in- 
spired leader, made the band great. No single record caught the 
enormous impact of that band, although the two-sided twelve-inch 
"Sing, Sing, Sing" and such ten-inch instrumental as u Bugle Call 
Rag," "Somebody Loves Me," "Roll 'em," "Sugar Foot Stomp," 
"Don't Be that Way," and "Big John Special" suggest its quality. 
There is more of it in the four twelve-inch long-playing sides, issued 
in 1950, of the Carnegie Hall concert of January 16, 1938. Most of 
that concert is on those records, which capture with remarkable 
fidelity the band itself, Jess Stacy's five lovely choruses in "Sing, 
Sing, Sing," and the inspired collaboration of musicians from the 
Count Basic, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman bands, and Bobby 
Hackett a collaboration that thrilled all of us present that glittering 
night. This was Benny's achievement, the matching of equal talents 
on all the jazz instruments with little concern for box office and 
much for musicianship. To a greater or lesser degree, insofar as they 
matched that achievement, other bands and musicians made a per- 
manent or transient impression during the swing era. 

During these years a bandleader did not have to be much con- 
cerned with box office; as long as his musicianship and that of his 
sidemen were better than average, the box office was his. Benny 
provided the spark; those "who followed kept it going, and they 
spread their collective light over all three jazz audiences the first 
and perhaps the last time that phenomenon has occurred. The three 
jazz audiences are made up of groups of varied size and commercial 
importance. The first, usually called by musicians who cannot reach it 
"the great unwashed," consists of members of America's middle-class 
majority, those whose entertainment consists chiefly of novelty, 
whose escapist predilections were so much in the ascendant during 
the depression years. The second group, mixed in quality and source, 
but essential for jazz success, is the compromise group; it will take a 



THE SIDEMEN 205 

certain amount of musical quality, prides itself on its intellectual 
broadmindedness, likes to dance the latest dance and to be au courant 
with the latest musical idea, but must have that idea presented to it 
as a novelty. This group requires less thick sugar coating than the 
first and will often be receptive to music which is anathema to the 
first, but for all practical purposes the appeal to both is the same. 
The third and last group, the group which has kept jazz alive 
through its worst days, consists of the diehard fans, college boys 
and those slightly older, who combine analytical skill with taste, 
know what they want and where to find it, and make it possible for 
the experimental jazz musician to find an audience if not a living. 
Somehow, in the swing years, all three of these groups combined to 
form a large and generally appreciative audience for jazz. Sometimes 
members of the first group showed an interest in the finer points of 
jazz and even looked for the distinguishing marks that separated 
quality from quantity. The new jazz titillated musical nerves that 
had been drugged almost into insensibility by what the jazz musician 
calls the Mickey Mouse and "cheese" bands, the purveyors of pre- 
digested pap. For half a decade it jostled the huge numbers of the 
first and second groups, made some into jitterbugs, others into at 
least mildly comprehending listeners, and made it possible for the 
skilled jazzman to play with pleasure and for profit and to build a 
reputation more or less commensurate with his talent. 

The wide acceptance of a free jazz expression brought into jazz, 
for several years at least, a new growth of styles and development 
of stylists. There was a self-confidence abroad, as a result, that 
turned small jazz musicians into medium-sized ones and medium- 
sized ones into great ones. Sidemen who without this general encour- 
agement would never have thought of becoming bandleaders tossed 
other men's music and jobs aside and went out with their own bands 
sometimes to lose thousands of dollars, occasionally to make many 
more thousands of dollars. Woody Herman fronted a group of musi- 
cians from Isham Jones' sweet dance band who had decided to form 
a cooperative organization. The Herman band's greatest distinction, 
until new blood took over and turned it into perhaps the best of all 
the white bands in the mid-forties, was Woody's profound feeling 
for a torchy vocal. There were also such soloists as Joe Bishop, who 
played the fluegelhorn sweetly, and Neal Reid, whose trombone 
accents were amusingly guttural. 



206 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

In the Bob Crosby band, Eddie Miller played the clarinet a bit 
and sang some, but more important, his tenor saxophone lines, in 
their organized length and smooth, unvibrating line, anticipated the 
mature conception of that instrument that developed in the early 
days of bebop, as a result of Eddie's and Lester Young's and Bud 
Freeman's pioneering. Throughout its history the Crosby band fea- 
tured Matty Matlock on clarinet, Nappy Lamare on guitar, Bob 
Haggart on bass, and Ray Bauduc on drums, as well as Eddie. At 
various times it had such biting Dixieland trumpeters as Yank Law- 
son and Muggsy Spanier, and the extraordinary trumpet variety that 
Billy Butterfield provided. From 1938 to 1940 Irving Fazola enriched 
the band with his exquisite clarinet tone and perhaps the most pol- 
ished concept of the New Orleans reed tradition. Warren Smith 
and Floyd O'Brien were variously responsible for the barrelhouse 
trombone sound, and the piano, important to the band after Bob 
Zurke joined in 1936, grew less honky-tonk when Joe Sullivan came 
in in 1939 and a good deal less so when Jess Stacy brought his suave 
keyboard ministrations in to replace Joe. The Crosby band was 
easily the best of those which consciously and occasionally con- 
scientiously endeavored to keep the New Orleans and Chicago tradi- 
tions alive in the late thirties. 

Several of the men Tommy Dorsey featured in the years from 
1935 until December 1939, when the band was revised along power- 
house lines suggestive of Jimmie Lunceford's band, were authentic 
Dixieland and Chicago voices too. At different times such trumpeters 
as Max Kaminsky, Bunny Berigan, Pee Wee Erwin, and Yank Lawson 
kept a spirited conception alive in a band that had been dedicated 
to more commercial pursuits by its leader. First Joe Dixon and then 
Johnny Mince challenged Benny Goodman's clarinet leadership 
with a more distinctly Dhdeish line than any Benny ever played 
once he took out his own band. Dave Tough joined Tommy a few 
months before Bud Freeman did, and left a few months earlier, last- 
ing from the early spring of 1936 to the end of 1937. The most ex- 
citing moments in the Dorsey band's performances before its revision 
in style apart from Tommy's tonal mastery of the trombone surely 
belonged to Dave and Bud. They imparted to Tommy's small band, 
the Dixie outfit he called the Clambake Seven in cheerful adoption 
of the term used by jazz musicians both in annoyed disparagement 
of a poor jam session and in warm approbation of a good one a 



THE SIDEMEN 207 

freshness and a fervor which cut through the trivial material that 
was on the whole the Seven's basic feed. Brother Jimmy, elder of 
the two Dorseys, made over the remnants of the Dorsey Brothers* 
band into an effective accompaniment for Bing Crosby on his radio 
program and a fair commercial Dixieland band, which was at its best 
in such novelties as u Parade of the Milk-Bottle Caps" and "A Swing 
Background for an Operatic Soprano." Freddy Slack played some 
ingenious boogie-woogie piano for Jimmy, and Ray A4cKinley, a 
two-beat drummer with Ray Bauduc's kind of skill, kept the weak 
and strong accents in good order, especially when he took some of 
Jimmy's musicians into Decca's Los Angeles studios and made four 
knock-down-and-drag-out sides in March 1936. 

There was some Dixieland flavor in the music of the Red Norvo 
band, but, as always with Red, it had the individual identification of 
a richly talented, always experimenting, always developing musician. 
Kenneth Norvo, nicknamed after his red hair, had, like so many jazz 
musicians, started as a pianist, but in high school he became a xylo- 
phonist. He joined a touring Chautauqua organization when he was 
seventeen and then went into vaudeville with a band called the Col- 
legians. He did a stretch in Chicago with Paul Ash's theater band 
and then went into vaudeville for himself. After short stints with his 
own band in Milwaukee and as part of a radio-station band in 
Minneapolis in 1928, he played with Victor Young and Ben Bernie 
for a while in Chicago, then did more than a year at NBC as a 
member of its Chicago studio band. In 1931 he joined Paul White- 
man and stayed with him for three years, after which time he ex- 
tended his repertory, married Mildred Bailey, and formed plans 
for his own band. Red had made xylophone solo records accom- 
panied by such men as Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, had led 
two first-rate pick-up bands through two different sessions, and 
had brought the nucleus of his medium-sized dance band to records 
first under his own name, then under the name of the Len Herman 
Orchestra, then as Ken Kenny and His Orchestra, then under the 
name of his trumpeter Stew Fletcher on several different labels be- 
fore he inaugurated the superb series recorded for Brunswick from 
1936 to 1939. At first the band featured the delicate sounds made by 
Stewie, Herbie Haymer on tenor saxophone, Red, and his incom- 
parably gifted singer, Mildred Bailey. Then Hank D'Amico joined 
to fill the saxophone section to the full complement of the thirties 



208 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

quartet size and to add a lovely clarinet voice. Through this change 
and the eventual addition of a second trombone, the imaginations of 
Red and his sometime trumpeter and sometime arranger, Eddie 
Sauter, were allowed full play. The beat of the band was essentially 
in two, but the harmonic transformation of such familiar tunes as 
"I Know that You Know," "Liza," "Remember," and "Russian 
Lullaby" bore no resemblance to Dixieland. Eddie's sometimes witty, 
sometimes brash, usually gentle, and always unhackneyed arrange- 
ments showed the mark of discipline derived from such composers as 
Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Bartok, mixed with and expressed through 
a distinctly American personality. Out of his fresh manuscript, solos 
baped delicately into place and Mildred's voice arose with that ex- 
traordinary grace of phrase and impeccable intonation that regularly 
distinguished her singing. She and Red were billed as Mr. and Mrs. 
Swing and justified the sobriquet not with the volume which audi- 
ences were coming more and more to expect of a swing band in 
the late thirties but with the subtlety and sagacity of their rhythmic 
ideas. 

The resolute Dixielanders of the period found their haven at Nick's, 
first on the west side of Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, and 
then across the street, when the crowds it attracted enabled the 
titular owner of the two-beat emporium to build new quarters at 
Tenth Street and Seventh. Here Eddie Condon led the band he called 
the Windy City Seven or the Chicagoans or simply his own, always 
featuring the wry squeaks and sometimes amusing departures from 
pitch of Pee Wee Russell's clarinet, usually with George Wettling 
on drums, Brad Gowans or George Brunies on trombone, Artie 
Shapiro on bass, and Max Kaminsky on trumpet. Here Bobby 
Hackett made his New York debut, startling audiences with the ac- 
curacy of his imitations of Bix Beiderbecke on the cornet, the in- 
strument to which he had switched in Boston after leaving his native 
Providence and his first instrument, the guitar. His soft sound and 
melodic imagination, so much like Bix's, stood out on the first records 
that Milt Gabler made for his own label, Commodore, named for his 
music shop, international headquarters for serious jazz record col- 
lectors. Though Bobby's colleagues on those first Commodore dates 
were such eminent Nicksieland musicians as Brunies, Pee Wee, Bud 
Freeman, Jess Stacy, Artie Shapiro, Wettling, and the redoubtable 
Eddie Condon, with Jack Teagarden added for three sides, it was 



THE SIDEMEN 209 

his playing that made the records of more than passing significance. 
When Bobby made his own dates, with some of the same musicians, 
for Vocalion, it was he who once again dominated the performances. 
One doesn't slight even such a musician as Jack Teagarden if one 
points to Bobby's commanding authority on these records; so power- 
ful an echo of Bix, with almost as rich a melodic gift, was hardly 
to be expected so soon after his death. Even after Bobby joined 
Horace Heidt for a little less than a year and Glenn Miller for 
longer, between 1939 and 1942, his deft melodic variations, up and 
down and around figurations, and always with continuity, were of 
unceasing sweetness and high style. 

Bunny Berigan was another trumpeter with overtones of Bix in 
his playing, but his style was essentially his own. He plumbed the 
lower depths of the trumpet and found an expansion of ideas in his 
bottom notes that no other trumpeter was able to use to such ad- 
vantage. Bunny, who died at the age of thirty-three in 1942, started 
to play the trumpet in Fox Lake, Wisconsin, where he was born. 
His grandfather came home one day with a trumpet, handed it to 
Bunny, and said, "Here, this is you. Play, you!" Bunny's first jobs 
in his teens were with local bands, and it was with one of them that 
Hal Kemp, when he was passing through Wisconsin in 1928, heard 
Bunny. A year and a half later Hal sent for Bunny to join his band, 
the best of the treacly outfits that served depression fantasies; it 
employed an effective series of reeds, played by its saxophonists in 
imitation of a Debussyan sound, and also boasted a fine pianist and 
arranger, John Scott Trotter, who later joined Bing Crosby as per- 
manent conductor and arranger. Bunny played with Paul Whiteman 
during one of the Whiteman band's many appearances at the Biltmorc 
Hotel in New York in the early thirties, and then began to gig around 
New York with a band that played college and society engagements. 
He graduated, with many of his associates of those bands, into radio 
work. He did a lot of recording in 1933 and 1934 with the inventor 
of the goofus, Adrian Rollini, who was much in demand at the 
record studios. He recorded the famous "Mood Hollywood" with 
the Dorsey Brothers in 1933 and with them, too, accompanied Mildred 
Bailey on eight fine Brunswick sides in the same year. In 1935, his 
big year as a part of pick-up recording dates, he made the memorable 
four sides that the Casa Loma band's arranger, Gene Gifford, ar- 
ranged and led, with Matty Matlock, Bud Freeman, Claude Thorn- 



210 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

hill, Dick McDonough, Wingy Manone, and Ray Bauduc. In 1935 
he also made Glenn Miller's first date, with the fine trombonist Jack 
Jenney, Johnny Mince, and Eddie Miller; with Jack and Johnny, 
Chu Berry, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, George Van Eps, and 
Artie Bernstein, the bass player, he made, under the leadership of 
Red Norvo, four sides, including the superb coupling of "Bug- 
house" and "Blues in E Flat."* With Benny Goodman that year he 
made just under two dozen sides, among them "King Porter Stomp," 
"Jingle Bells," "Stompin' at the Savoy," and "Blue Skies," on all of 
which he takes brilliant solos. In 1935 anc ^ J 93^ Bunny was also a 
staff musician at CBS, for which he led a series of jazz units, the 
most famous of which was the group known as Bunny's Blue Boys. 
He was a featured performer on the Saturday Night Swing Club, 
which went on the CBS network in 1936, one of the best jazz programs, 
sustaining or sponsored, ever to become a regular feature on a radio 
network. He was part of many radio and record bands accompanying 
singers but none so impressive as Mildred Bailey, one of whose 
Alley Cats he was, with Johnny Hodges and Teddy Wilson, on the 
four sides recorded under John Hammond's supervision for English 
distribution; and Billie Holiday, whom he accompanied on four sides 
in 1936, with Artie Shaw and Joe Bushkin. That was the year he was 
also a Fifty-second-Street regular, appearing at Red McKenzie's club 
and sitting in at other places, showing off his long and large and 
almost unquenchable drinking and playing capacity. At the end of 
1936 Tommy Dorsey was looking around for someone skilled enough 
to give his brass section the proper lift; logically enough, he settled 
on Bunny Berigan. Bunny settled on the Dorsey specialties like one 
of the early pioneers; he made "Marie" and "Song of India," "Melody 
in F," "Liebestraum," and "Who'll Buy My Violets" into his own 
vehicles, making it possible for jazz fans to endure the glee-club 
chattering in tempo that sold the records to millions. While with 
Tommy, Bunny continued to make records under his own name; 
these and his fetching performances on the Dorsey sides made him 
a record name, and he soon took advantage of his fame by forming 
his own band. In that band, which opened at the Pennsylvania Hotel 
in April 1937, were some fine young musicians: the talented arranger 
and pianist Joe Lippman; a jumping tenor saxophonist down from 
Canada, Georgie Auld; one of the very best of bass players, Arnold 
Fishkin; a couple of fine trumpet players, Benny Goodman's brother, 



THE SIDEMEN 211 

Irving, and Steve Lipkins; and a veteran drummer, George Wettling. 
Bunny joined Victor's select swing circle; his records enjoyed a 
full-size publicity campaign along with those of Benny Goodman, 
Tommy Dorsey, and Fats Waller. With those eminent recording 
stars, he contributed two sides to the twelve-inch album A Sym- 
posium of Swing, one of the most ambitious efforts of the time to 
capture the full flavor of a jazz band^Ko that album Bunny brought 
his inimitable singing and playing of 'THCan't Get Started" and "The 
Prisoner's Song." Thereafter he had almost two years more of re- 
cording for Victor, but less and less success. He continued to play 
beautifully, made a lovely Beiderbecke album, playing some of Bix's 
own tunes and others associated with Bix, and was generally impres- 
sive in person too. But drink, as it had for so many other jazz musi- 
cians, was beginning to do for Bunny. He was irritable, subject to 
roaring arguments; his musicians and he were not getting along to- 
gether. In February 1940 he junked his band and rejoined Tommy 
Dorsey. For six months he was an ornament of the band and helped 
Tommy regain some of the popularity he had begun to lose. But 
six months was all that an irritable Bunny and an always high- 
tempered Tommy could take together. When they broke up there 
was nothing left to do but start a band again, and Bunny went 
back to the road. He was in no condition to manage the strain and 
stress of one-nighters; his constant refuge was the bottle. There were 
several breakdowns and a siege of pneumonia in Pennsylvania before 
his band came in to play a job at Manhattan Center in New York 
on June i, 1942. Bunny didn't play with his band; he was in Poly- 
clinic Hospital, dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Benny Goodman, who 
was playing at the Paramount Theatre, brought his sextet over to 
Manhattan Center to help out. Bunny's friends went to visit him at 
the hospital, among them the bass player Sid Weiss. Bunny looked up 
at Sid, a slight little man. "And they tell me Pm sick," he said. 
"Looks like you should be here instead of me." That was the after- 
noon after the job at the Center. That night Tommy Dorsey, who 
was playing at the Astor Hotel, received a call from the hospital. 
He rushed over there. He looked at Bunny and knew the trumpeter 
hadn't long to live; actually it was a matter of hours. 

Another musician of great dimensions, who died shortly before 
Bunny, was Leon Berry, better known as Chu; he was killed in 
an automobile accident in 1941, while he was on his way from one 



212 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

Cab Galloway engagement to another. Chu had joined Cab in the 
summer of 1937 after working in a series of bands, with all of whom 
his playing was something close to magnificent. He was, along with 
Roy Eldridge, one of the stars of the Teddy Hill band, which 
alternated with Willie Bryant and Chick Webb in 1934 and 1935 
at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Earlier Chu had come to New 
York from West Virginia by way of Chicago, had played with 
Sammy Stewart at the Savoy and with Benny Carter, his "favorite 
saxophone player over anybody." Later he moved with Roy into 
Fletcher Henderson's last important band, the Chicago outfit of 1935 
to 1937. With Roy, Chu made four sides for Commodore that rank 
among the greatest of jazz records, the ten-inch "Sittin' In" and 
"Forty-six West Fifty-two," and the twelve-inch "Stardust" and 
"Body and Soul." With Galloway he made a solo record, all his, of 
"A Ghost of a Chance," which to many people is the definitive ex- 
ample of tenor saxophone playing, a series of beautifully integrated 
melodic variations on the tune, with that rich tone and steady beat 
which Chu had in common with Colcman Hawkins and Ben Web- 
ster. 

There was a kind of somber, dramatic magnificence to the end 
of the swing era; death achieved it. In 1939 Chick Webb died. In 
1941 Chu died. In 1942 Bunny Berigan, Charlie Christian, and Jimmy 
Blanton died. In 1943 Fats Waller died. The era called "swing" died 
with them. The United States was at war, and some of its best jazz 
musicians were in the services. Jazz was going through almost violent 
changes of idea and execution. With death and destruction a certain 
perspective was gained. The war years were consecrated to reminis- 
cence and critical evaluation. It was possible as never before in the 
history of jazz to see and hear where they all fitted in the singers 
who were beginning to draw the largest audiences for themselves; 
the pianists who set so many and reflected as many more of the basic 
styles; the sidemen who contributed so much, through solos and 
teamwork; the figures of transition in whose hands the old music 
was left and the new music was born. 



/O; 

U/iapter 18 




PIANISTS 



In the development of jazz the solo talents of a few individual in- 
strumentalists have contributed much. The names of some of these 
men stand for distinct styles and stages in the progress of jazz: 
trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie; trom- 
bonists Lawrence Brown, Tricky Sam, Teagarden, Bill Harris, 
J. J. Johnson; saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Lester 
Young, Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Lee Konitz; clarinetists 
Benny Goodman and Buddy DeFranco; drummers Gene Krupa and 
Sidney Catlett; bassist Jimmy Blanton; guitarist Charlie Christian. 
But when we come to pianists there is trouble; there is nothing 
orderly about the development of the pianists as jazz instrumentalists. 

For one thing, there are too many of them. The early history of 
jazz produced only a handful and not too startling a group at that. 
From New Orleans we had Jelly Roll Morton and some of his con- 
temporaries. Ragtime established James P. Johnson. But nothing es- 
pecially important musically happened to jazz on the piano until 
the music got to Chicago and Earl Hines was heard in his proper 
context, the Louis Armstrong recording bands. This was more like 
it, and very pleasant to listen to. Then Joe Sullivan, Jess Stacy, and 
Fats Waller arrived, and, within their bands, Duke Ellington, Fletcher 
Henderson and his brother Horace, and Count Basic. 

Then, an avalanche: Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Mary Lou Wil- 
liams, Nat Cole, Johnny Guarnieri, Joe Bushkin, Mel Powell, Nat 
Jaffe, Erroll Garner, Dodo Marmarosa, Jimmy Jones, Andre Previn, 
Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Paul Smith; not to mention the local 
boys who have stayed local, such as Detroit's brilliant Bobby Steven- 
son, New Orleans' variously talented Armand Hug, and Chicago's 
Mel Henke; and not to mention the boogie-woogie pianists. 

213 



214 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

The list is astonishing in its length and, with the exception of the 
last big group of indefatigable primitives of boogie woogie, in its 
quality. Analyzing the records of these men carefully, with as little 
personal prejudice as possible, one can see clearly not merely that 
jazz is rich in good pianists, pianists of wit and wisdom and experi- 
mental audacity, but that it has produced more titans on the piano 
than traditional music has in this century. Try to make a similar list 
of really distinguished concert pianists. I don't think it will be half 
as long. Then play the records of the pianists mentioned in the pre- 
ceding paragraph, forget the comparisons, and sit back to enjoy a 
parade of luxurious sound, jazz at its best so far, promising profundity, 
on its way to full musical maturity. 

Earl Hines plays a firm, vigorous piano that has been effectively 
apostrophized as "trumpet style." It's more accurately described as 
"trumpet-with-band style" because, while Earl is establishing the 
trumpet's melodic line with his right hand, he is setting up large 
ensemble chords with his left, splashes of counterrhythms, flashing 
tremolos, sometimes suspending the beat with that characteristic 
ringing pedal tone. He strikes out with full chords far removed from 
the C-major and C-seventh fundamentals of blues piano. But in all 
of his career, almost from his first appearance in 1925, at the Club 
Elite in Chicago, he has been the greatest force in shaping the forms 
and style of jazz piano and pianists. 

It is hard to name a pianist of any importance in jazz, no matter 
of what school, who hasn't been influenced by Hines. Teddy Wilson, 
Mary Lou Williams, Art Tatum, Nat Cole, Jess Stacy, Mel Powell 
have all been more or less under the Father's influence. Fats Waller 
was a school unto himself, but most of Fats's associates and imitators 
have been strongly swayed by Hines; their playing constantly re- 
flects his style. 

When this most important of jazz piano stylists began his musical 
studies in Pittsburgh in 1915, he was a trumpeter, then a pianist, but 
never thought of becoming a dance-band musician. His father was 
a trumpeter, his mother a pianist and organist. Earl used to play on 
chairs all around the house, and when his mother could no longer 
stand the monotony of chair tones she switched him from Duncan 
Phyfe and Sheraton, sofa style, to a piano, ragtime style. 

At nine Earl wanted to be a trumpeter, but his mother saw to 
it that he was given piano lessons. After four years of private tutoring 



PIANISTS 215 

his keyboard proficiency was such that he was invited to give con- 
certs around town, at schools and small halls. 

"They gave me ten dollars and a box of handkerchiefs for a con- 
cert," Earl recalls, "and they said, 'He's great.' I had to learn sixty 
or seventy pages of music for each concert and work like a dog for 
ten bucks, some linen, and some kind words. It didn't look like a hell 
of a career, and so, at sixteen, I cut out/' 

He broke in at a Pittsburgh night club, after school, playing nine 
months at the Leader House as accompanist for singers, as inter- 
mission pianist for the club, which didn't have other entertainment 
and consequently relied heavily on the inventiveness and imagination 
of such of its random entertainers as young Hines. After a couple 
of years of gigging around the Smoky City, Earl left for Chicago 
and what he hoped would be greener fields. There it was that he 
really began his career; there he shaped his style and worked in 
association with most of the great musicians of the time the late 
twenties and all the thirties. There he himself became a great jazz 
musician. 

The Club Elite Number Two, at Thirty-fifth and State, one of a 
chain of night clubs that were more elite in name than in clientele, 
was his first employer. He opened there with a small Pittsburgh 
combination, featuring Vernee Robinson, "one of the fine hot fid- 
dlers of the time," Earl says. He stayed for about a year. Of this 
period Earl recalls most vividly the steady expatriation of distin- 
guished contemporaries. 

"An awful lot of good jazzmen went abroad then," he says, "guys 
whoVe never been heard from since. A guy like Teddy Weather- 
ford, for example. A fine pianist. He went over to Europe, played 
all over the Continent, then went to China. He died in India. I cer- 
tainly wish I could have heard him again." 

In 1926 Earl joined Carroll Dickerson at the Entertainers' Club. 
The Dickerson band played forty-odd weeks on the Pantages vaude- 
ville circuit, hitting as far west as California, then returned to Chicago 
and went into the Sunset Cafe. That's where Louis joined the band, 
choosing what Earl calls "the younger set" in preference to King 
Oliver's New Orleans emigres, who had made overtures to Arm- 
strong to rejoin them. 

When Louis took over the Dickerson band, Earl became its musical 
director. With musicians like Louis and Earl, Big Green on trom- 



216 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

bone, Darnell Howard on clarinet, Stumpy Evans ("one of the 
great tenor players," according to Earl), and Tubby Hall on drums, 
this was an impressive band. Then Louis, Earl, and Zutty Singleton 
formed a friendship and musical association that seemed indissoluble. 
"It got so," Earl says, "that you couldn't hire one of us without the 
others." The three of them, trumpeter, pianist, and drummer, formed 
the base for what are clearly the best records Louis ever made, the 
Okeh series that included "West End Blues," "Skip the Gutter," and 
"A Monday Date" (Hines' composition); and the series highlighted 
by "Basin Street Blues," "Beau Koo Jack," "Heah Me Talkin' to Ya," 
"Tight Like This," and "Weather Bird." The first set was made in 
June 1928; the second, in December of the same year. 

During this time, 1927 to 1929, w r hen Louis had moved up to the 
Savoy Ballroom (Chicago's, not New York's), Earl moved across 
the street from the Sunset to the Apex Club to play piano with Jimmy 
Noone. With that style-setting clarinetist, Earl made the memorable 
file of 1928 Apex Club Orchestra records for Vocalion, eight sides 
of which were later reissued in Jimmy Noone's Brunswick Collec- 
tor's Series album. 

After a little less than two years of the Noone band Earl "got 
tired of the hours and the work. Too hard, man, too hard." The 
QRS Piano Roll Company was taking a flier in the record business 
and they invited Earl to record for their new label. He went and did 
eigfht sides. And they, "not knowing what it was all about, released 
all eight at once. Oh, it was a panic!" But the sides were fine, all Hines 
originals: the inevitable "Monday Date," the brilliant "Blues in 
Thirds," "Panther Rag," "Chicago High Life," "Chimes in Blues," 
"Stowaway," "Just Too Soon," and "Off Time Blues." 

In 1928 Lucius Venable Millinder, better known as Lucky, was 
organizing a show for the-Grand Terrace, a new Chicago night club. 
He searched around for a band for the place and could find none 
with a big enough name and enough talent, so he wired frantically 
to Hines in New York to come back to Chicago and build him a 
band. Earl went and stayed twelve years. Whenever he went on the 
road, from 1928 to 1940, he was always sure of his share of the moneys 
that were paid other bands at the Grand Terrace, for he became 
the club's chief attraction and also its over-all booker and musical 
supervisor. 

In a dozen years at the Terrace and several after that, Earl made 



PIANISTS 217 

a sheaf of wonderful records and some not so good for Brunswick, 
Decca, and Bluebird. Such jazz luminaries as trumpeter Walter Fuller, 
clarinetist and fiddler Darnell Howard, tenor saxophonist Budd John- 
son, tenor and arranger Jimmy Mundy, trombonist Trummy Young, 
drummer Wallace Bishop, trumpeters Freddy Webster, Ray Nance, 
Pee Wee Jackson, Shorty McConnell, Charlie Allen, and Dizzy 
Gillespie were, if not all Hines discoveries, at least musicians who 
seemed to discover themselves when they went with the Father. 

The "Father" tag, by the way, was bestowed upon Farl by radio 
announcer Ted Pearson, a knowing jazz aficionado, who came down 
to do a broadcast one night at the Grand Terrace. Although older 
than most of his men, Earl was neither by temperament nor physical 
constitution the parent of his band musicians in the way that Paul 
Whiteman, who was known as "Fatho" to most of his regular em- 
ployees, was. The name was only a presumption of musical paternity 
which Pearson made for Earl at the time, but one that stuck and 
grew more appropriate over the years. 

The Father started Herb Jeffries on his singing career; he went to 
Detroit to get Herb for the Grand Terrace. "Georgia Boy" (Arthur 
Lee Simpkins) was a Hines discovery, as were Ida James, Valaida 
Snow, and Ivy Anderson. Earl remembers when Duke was looking 
for a vocalist and cast about at the Terrace for a girl. Duke sent 
for somebody, but it was decided among the GTers that this girl 
wouldn't do, and they told Ivy to go. But Ivy wouldn't. She said she 
wouldn't audition for anyone, damned if she would. She was finally 
persuaded to go on stage at the Regal, where Duke was playing that 
week, to see what the colored audience at the South Side theater 
would think. She broke it up and was hired on the spot. Ivy played 
the Oriental Theatre, downtown, the next week, and from then on, 
of course, was Duke's star singer. Billy Eckstein (as he spelled his 
name then) and Sara Vaughn (as she spelled hers) were Hines stars 
before Billy organized his own band. The Palmer Brothers, the de- 
lightful male vocal group, are other Hines alumni. 

Over the years, Earl says, "I've always had a funny ambition, to 
do something like Waring and Whiteman along jazz lines. Groups of 
singers, large bands, every kind of instrumentation and scoring pos- 
sible." It isn't that he ever actually wanted to give up his regular 
type of band, a bona fide dance crew spotted with fine brass and reed 
and rhythm soloists. He simply feels that the size and scope of pop- 



218 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA 

ular music are broadening enormously all the time and that the 
future may permit more orchestral experimentation. 

Hines has four favorite records out of all that he has recorded.