121 596 



My 

Life in JAZZ 



by MAX KAMINSKY 
with V. E. Hughes 




HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS 

New York, Eranston, and London 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ. Copyright 1963 by Ate Kwthisky and V< K. Hugfrit* 
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of Ms 
book may be used or reproduced in any wanner whatsoever without written 
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles 
and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 
4$ East &rd Street, New York if, N* K, 



FIRST EDITION 

ON 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 63-10602 



To my sons, Sam and Matty 



MY LIFE 

in JAZZ 



Chapter 1 



It all started back in 1921 when our sixth-grade carpentry 
teacher told us we could make anything we wanted the last 
month of school before vacation. Radio was just coming in then, 
but nobody sat around waiting for Atwater Kent to go into mass 
production. People bought the parts and made their own re- 
ceiving sets, following the instructions in the daily newspapers. 
The minute I caught sight of one of these diagrams from the 
Boston Globe on the teacher's desk I lost all interest in making 
the usual table or bench, and I set to work on a radio. 

My family, a large one, was crammed into the first-floor apart- 
ment of a three-family house on Greenwood Street in Dorchester 
then, but my mother had fixed up a bedroom for me in the attic 
where I had all the space and privacy I needed for my radio 
project. The first set I tried to make a primitive device called a 
loose-coupler set made out of two oatmeal boxes, one fitting 
inside the other to act as a condenser was a failure. I still have 
the scar on my hand where the chisel slipped. The next crystal set 
I attempted was successful, but the only station in operation 
then, KDKA in Pittsburgh, was not on the air all the time, and 
usually all I could find to tune in on were code signals. Then, 



2 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

when I made a one-tube radio about a year later, I hit pay dirt. 
The first sound I heard when I turned it on was Ted Lewis's 
band playing 'Tiger Rag." It was like finding diamonds, if you 
like diamonds. 

But it was the little crystal set that was the start of it all. I had 
always wanted to play the trumpet, and from the time I was 
seven or eight I had been pestering my sister Mary's husband, 
Henry Pollack, who played trumpet in a symphony orchestra, 
to give me lessons, but he would just take hold of my chin, pry 
open my mouth, and say, "Wait a couple of years till you get 
your second teeth." The radio succeeded where all my pleas, 
and even my second teeth, had failed. Henry, eying the crystal 
set the way I eyed his trumpet, said if Yd make a radio for him 
he'd give me a cornet. The first time I blew it I got that sound 
out of it. The next morning I woke at dawn, hopped out of bed, 
and played "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton" on my new cornet, 
reading the notes. Fll never forget how nice it sounded to me. 

I was the youngest of seven children, four girls and three boys, 
and I was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, on Labor Day in 
1908, one of twins. The following winter my twin sister died of 
pneumonia, while I, who'd had the same illness, lingered on in a 
coma. My mother wrapped me in blankets, clasped me in her 
arms, and rushed outside, where she paced back and forth in the 
snow until the cold air revived me. Both my mother and 1 sur- 
vived this cure, my mother living to be nearly ninety. 

My parents had emigrated to America in the iBfto's, front 
different villages in the south of Russia, when they were 
scarcely out of their teens. They met and married in Boston. 
My father owned a grocery store most of his life in America, 
and we were poor most of the time. When I was three years 
old we were living in Roxbury in an old tenement on William 
Street in the heart of the colored section. On Sundays my sister 
Rose would take me to the colored church to hear the gospel 
singing, and I still remember the street cries of the Negro push- 
cart men on summer nights, as they hawked their wagonloads 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 3 

of watermelon or fresh-caught crabs. I also remember my mother 
in desperation spraying the inside of the old wooden cupboard 
underneath the sink with kerosene and putting a match to it to 
burn out the roaches. We lived by kerosene light then; when we 
had gaslight a few years later we thought it was a marvel. 

I was four when I first heard the song "Jada," and I was so 
thrilled by it I couldn't wait to sing it to my sister Rose, who, 
with my brothers Sy and Morris, worked after school in Pa's 
grocery store, so I took a nickel from my mother's purse, 
dragged a kitchen chair out to the hall telephone, called up 
Rose and sang the song to her. Rose and I were always especially 
close. 

Shortly afterward we moved out to the suburbs in Dorchester, 
which was a nicer neighborhood and closer to the Jewish section, 
where my four sisters, now in their teens, could meet eligible 
young men. I loved our house on Morton Street. There was a 
deep stretch of woods in back of the house, with gnarled old 
oak trees perfect for climbing and a marsh thick with skunk 
cabbage and punk and cattails, where I used to roam by the hour 
with my homemade slingshot and bow and arrow. I never went 
into the woods without this arsenal, but it never occurred to me 
to shoot at the birds or squirrels, and they never bothered me 
either. I loved the peace and the solitude I found there. I was 
forever lugging home cardboard boxes of acorns which would 
be so full of maggots inside of a few weeks that I'd have to 
throw them out, but I never got over the idea that there must 
be something wonderful you could do with acorns besides grow 
trees. 

In the summertime I lived for my cart, made of a plank of 
wood and the wheels and axle of an old baby carriage. I'd coast 
all day long up and down Blue Hill Avenue, and when my 
mother tired of calling me in for lunch she'd fix up a salmon 
sandwich in a paper bag and lower it down to me on a string. 
Hauling the cart up and down the three flights to our top- 
floor apartment did such damage to the hall plaster that the 



4 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

owners of the house complained to my parents, and my father 
eventually moved us to another house on nearby Greenwood 
Street, where we could live on the first floor in peace. 

The Dorchester Tigers, a baseball team of teen-age boys in 
the neighborhood, made me their mascot when I was eight. They 
bought me a uniform and carried me around on their shoulders 
and let me sit on the bench with them, but it never occurred 
to me that the Tigers to a man were so nice to me because of 
my pretty sisters. Dorchester at that time was mainly a mixture 
of Jewish and Irish families, and the Tigers would have to break 
up many a fight when the Irish kids started stoning the 
synagogues, which were very poor ones, quartered in empty 
stores. From the time I was in second-grade grammar school I 
was attacked by a gang of Irish kids on my way ro school every 
day, and as early as the age of seven I automatically learned to 
protect myself. As soon as they started toward me I'd grab 
some bricks there always seemed to be bricks lying around in 
the streets in those days and let them have it, and they'd turn 
tail and run. The trick was not to show fear in any way. I used 
to lie awake nights and figure out how to fight, and I had learned 
very quickly to attack first and ask questions later- I had no one 
to turn to for advice. In those days there wasn't much talking 
in families; everyone was on his own. 

Around this time, when I was eight years old, I was friends 
with a boy who lived on the floor below us on Morton Street* 
His family were devout Holy Rollers and they roused the neigh- 
borhood every night with their thumping and moaning and 
wailing. He was a nice kid, though, and I used to tag along with 
his family every Friday night to the shul, which was in art empty 
store front, just to be with my pal. One Friday night three new 
boys came in, and one of them, a big kid named Jackie Marshard, 
began acting tough and making a racket, mocking rhc Holy 
Roller family. No one told him to quiet down, but I couldn't 
stand to have him make fun of my friend and his odd family, so 
I spoke up. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 5 

"Why can't you show a little respect for the house of God," 
I said piously. 

Jackie looked me over coolly and said, "Come on outside, 
wise guy, and I'll show you some respect." 

Well, I was stuck with it. This kid was two heads taller, but 
I didn't want my friend to think I was yellow. 

When we went outside it seemed to me that the whole con- 
gregation and everyone on the block was gathered around, but I 
didn't waste any time counting the house. I hit Jackie fast and 
knocked him out with one punch. His older brother Harry 
caught him as he was going down. I couldn't believe I had done 
it and neither could the crowd. There was a second of stunned 
silence, and then they burst into cheers, and while they were 
cheering I got the hell out of there before Jackie could get up 
and start over. It was four years before he caught up with me 
again. 

Within a month after I had my cornet I rounded up every 
kid in the neighborhood who played an instrument and tried to 
get them excited about having a band. The feeling to play was 
so strong in me that I couldn't wait till I learned my instrument, 
I had to have a band at once. I had been brought up in a house 
filled with music all my sisters played the piano, and my 
brother Morris was already playing violin in a band and I just 
seemed to know instinctively how a band should sound. The kids 
I enlisted would run wild through my house until my mother 
would lose patience and throw us out, and some would come 
once and never show up again, but after a while I managed to 
find a pianist, drummer, trombonist, saxophonist, and banjo 
player who were interested, and then I worked them hard trying 
to keep us in tune and in time. All I could think about was my 
cornet and my band. We'd chip in a couple of pennies apiece 
and each week we'd buy a stock arrangement of a song, and in 
a couple of months I began looking around for bookings. Then, 
just as I had the band in shape, my drummer moved away. I was 
moping along the sidewalk one evening after supper, worrying 



<J MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

about where I was going to find a new drummer, when I found 
myself face to face with Jackie Marshard. It was dark and he 
hadn't seen me for four years, but he recognized me instantly. 

"You!" he yelled in awful triumph. 

I had heard of a Harry Marshard who played the drums, but 
until I found myself trapped by Jackie I hadn't associated him 
with my fight years ago. Now I had to think fast. We were both 
twelve, but Jackie had grown even bigger and I wasn't much 
taller than I had been four years ago. 

"Sure, I'll fight you again," I said easily, "but first I know a 
way you can make some money." 

This made him pause for a minute, and while he was hesitating 
about hitting me right away, I talked fast about the band contest 
on Friday night at the Sarah Greenwood School for which there 
was a $2.50 prize, and I offered Jackie the job of playing drums 
for me. 

"I don't know how to play the drums," he said, beginning to 
circle around me. "Come on, put up your mitts." 

"It's easy," I said quickly. "Listen, all you have to do is borrow 
your brother Harry's drums and I'll teach you how to play 
them." 

It took a lot of persuasion before he finally agreed, and then 
only on the condition that we were to fight right after the job. 
The next night he showed up at my house with his brother's 
drums and I taught him to play a waltz and a fox trot. The waltz 
was easy, but the fox trot was something else again. He never 
was able to keep real good time, but I soon found out that what 
he lacked in musical ability he made up for a millionf old in busi- 
ness sense and personality. 

We won first prize in the contest that Friday night. As we 
were leaving the stage one of the kids in the band accidentally 
pulled loose the snare drum. It fell to the floor with a loud noise, 
and Jackie made a much louder noise about the snare drum being 
broken, 

"That'll cost two-fifty for a new snare," Jackie said, cool as 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 7 

you please. The snare drum wasn't even scratched, let alone 
broken, but Jackie spoke with such overwhelming authority 
that without a word I handed the prize money over to him and 
walked off the stage. Outside I told the other boys in the band 
and they accepted it too. We all knew that Jackie's family was 
poor; his father had died when he was young and his mother 
worked hard to support the four children, and I guess we felt, 
what the heck, let him have the money if he feels so strongly 
about it that he would act like that. We felt a kind of embarrass- 
ment that kept us all silent. 

Years later, in 1936, when I was working in the Little Club 
in New York, Jackie came in one night to see me. He was well 
on his way to success as a society band leader and he was upset 
to find me working "in a dive like this," as he put it, and 
insisted that I come in with his band. We talked about it again 
the next day and I finally agreed to come back to Boston and 
work for him after I had finished my date at the Little Club. 
Before he left me Jackie said that the main thing is money: 
"Money is the most important thing in the world." I couldn't feel 
like that, even if he was right, but he was so certain about it 
that I could find no words to tell him that life couldn't be the 
way he had figured it out to be; that life was for everyone and 
all things, not just for him and his money. 

Well, after Jackie took the whole $z.5o prize money that 
night he never said another word about fighting me again, and 
he was sold forevermore on the music business. The next week 
I arranged for the band to play at the Shawmut Theatre in 
Roxbury, where they staged a battle of music every Friday night 
The manager of the theatre, Harry Goldstein, thought my idea 
of a kid band was a perfect gimmick, and he told us we'd batde 
the winning band. This group, which won regularly every 
week, was a band of professional colored musicians led by a 
white violinist named Lou Lissack. The prize money was 
fifty dollars a fortune. 

I named my band the Six Novelty Syncopaters and for our first 



8 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

appearance I had the kids dress up in tramp outfits. Not only that 
we played lying on our backs, I don't know how much 
syncopating we did, but we were novel, and we brought down 
the house. I even made little music stands for us, with JAZZ 
printed on them. When I heard the applause for our three 
numbers "Yearning," "Dearest," and "Last Night on the Back 
Porch" I was sure we had won hands down, 

"It's a draw!" the manager announced when he had the 
audience quieted down, "so we'll split the money between Lou 
Lissack's band and the Six Novelty Syncopaters." 

I couldn't believe my ears. 

"I'll take the fifty dollars or nothing!" I said hotly. 

Luckily, "Sock" Sochin, my piano player, had the presence of 
mind to step up and accept the twenty-five dollars before I 
could say another word and spoil it all for us, but I was so cer- 
tain we had been gypped that I was burnt up all week, and 
events later proved I was right. 

The manager told us to come back next week, and after 
several Fridays of calling the contest a draw, he decided to 
have Lou Lissack take over my band and call it the Lou Lissack 
Shawmut Syncopaters. 

"We're being taken," I said bitterly to the boys. "They're 
stealing our own band from under our noses!" But we didn't 
know what to do about it. Harry Goldstein bought us sailor 
suits and had our picture taken for the billboard, and we became 
a regular Friday-night feature all that winter under Lou Lissack's 
leadership. In the summer Lissack and Goldstein decided to run 
a dance and they had us kids out hustling to sell tickets on street 
corners and on trolleys and trains. We even played in an open 
truck to advertise the dance, which was a sellout, 

"Meet me at the theatre tomorrow at noon," Lou Lissack told 
us afterward, "and I'll have your share of the money for you-" 

We waited outside the theatre all afternoon until five o'clock, 
when Lou finally showed up sporting a brand-new plaid suit 
and carrying a shiny new violin case. He looked surprised to see 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 9 

us, but without batting an eye he told us there was no money 
left for us. 

"Go on home, kids, your mothers will be looking for you," 
he said over his shoulder as he ducked inside the stage door. We 
turned and shuffled home, and none of us, not even Jackie, said 
a word. That he could do such a thing so terrified us that we felt 
lucky to get away with our skins. 

We never went back to the theatre, and that summer I ar- 
ranged for a job for my band at the little beach at City Point on 
Boston Bay. We were paid a dollar a night, which was pretty 
good money for those days, and we wore the sailor suits Harry 
Goldstein had bought for us. Then came the final blow to my 
career as boy band leader. One evening while I was sitting on my 
front steps enjoying the evening breeze, Jackie and Sock came 
up to me and told me they had been talking things over and 
they had decided Jackie was to be the leader from now on. We 
had all been shaken by the Lou Lissack incident, and they felt 
Jackie would be more of a match for the Lou Lissacks of this 
world than I would. To be fired from my own band was more 
than I could take. I ran into the house and cried inconsolably 
until finally my mother came to my room and talked to me. 

"People are bad," she said, "but they're bad to themselves and 
all the harm they do is only to themselves. Wait, and you'll see 
this is true." 

I never forgot her words, but at the time they didn't bring 
back my band, and I took a job as a waiter in a summer camp at 
Gloucester for the rest of the summer just to get away from the 
fellows in the band. In the fall I went into the eighth grade and 
Jackie moved away. I didn't see him again for six months. In the 
meantime, I was getting to play more and more with professionals 
and getting to know about music and musicians, and after a while 
I was able to chalk up the whole Shawmut Syncopaters episode 
to experience. 



Chapter 2* 



By the time I was fourteen I had become known around Boston 
as a hot trumpet player and the local musicians began hiring me 
for jobs at dance halls and college fraternity houses, the only two 
places where there was any audience for hot music in those days. 
One good thing you can say for Boston, there is no scarcity of 
colleges and universities. But till now I had not even heard the 
name, let alone the music, of Bix Beiderbecke or Louis Arm- 
strong. My favorite band in those days was Pearly Breed's, which 
used to broadcast from Shepherd's Colonial Tea Room in Boston, 
with Warren Hookway on trumpet. These musicians had heard 
the recordings of Bix Beiderbecke's Wolverines and they tried to 
play jazz. I thought this was the greatest band Pd ever heard, and 
up to then it was. 

Then my sister Betty bought a phonograph, and on the "race" 
records that came with it as a bonus I heard for the first time 
Bessie Smith, Maggie Jones, Ma Rainey, James P. Johnson, Louis 
Armstrong and others of the great Negro artists* They all 
sounded wonderful to me, but I wasn't aware of any special 
difference or distinction in their music, which I swallowed as 
unquestioningly as I did Pearly Breed's music. All I remember 

10 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ II 

is my sister Betty singing her favorite blues from a Maggie 
Jones record while she dusted the furniture and mopped the 
floors: 

Miss Lizzie Green of New Orleans 

Runs a good-time flat. 

The other day I heard her say 

Things are goin' bad: 

Can't sell no whiskey, can't sell no gin . . . 

One night that fall, Elliott Daniels, who later played piano in 
Rudy Vallee's band, called me to play a dance at the YMHA. 
During the course of the evening I became friendly with one of 
the saxophone players, Sam Faber, and he asked me whom I 
liked in music. 

"Pearly Breed and Ted Lewis," I said promptly, and I was 
puzzled and a little hurt when he smiled at my answer. I met 
Arthur Karle then, too, another saxophone player, who offered 
me a job playing weekends down at Cape Cod, during the spring 
and summer of 1924. I'd have to leave school early on Friday 
afternoons, so Arthur went to the school principal, Mr. Owens, 
a distinguished, august gentleman, who to my surprise and joy 
granted me permission to do so. The musicians would come by 
for me in a Ford touring car and as soon as we were well away 
from the school they'd guzzle gin all the way out to the Cape. 
They never pressed it on me, though, and they all took good care 
of me, especially Arthur. 

One of the jobs I especially enjoyed was playing for the silent 
movies. In those days the dance halls would often put on a movie 
first as an added attraction, and we'd play for that and for the 
dancing afterward. Sometimes we'd get swinging so good we'd 
forget to keep track of the story. One time when I remembered 
to glance up at the screen I discovered we were playing "Tiger 
Rag" during a funeral scene. Every musician who has ever 
played for the silent movies seems to have had a similar experi- 
ence. The audience was so gripped with emotion that it was 



12 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

oblivious to everything but the movie, and it became a regular 
gag with the band to tear into "Hold That Tiger" whenever a 
heart-rending scene was in progress. We never had a single 
complaint. 

Then one afternoon I met Sam Faber again on the trolley and 
he began talking to me about Bix Beiderbecke. When I said I'd 
never heard of him Sam rushed me home with him then and 
there to listen to his records. "This is the time to come, while 
my father is out," he said. It seemed that his father, who had 
a very successful custom-tailor business in Boston, was deter- 
mined to make a pants cutter out of Sam, and Sam had to sneak 
out of the house at night to play in bands. 

But although I liked the sound of them, I wasn't too impressed 
when I first heard Beiderbecke's Wolverine records at Sam's 
house. I listened intently while Sam put on "Jam Me Blues," 
"Sensation Rag," and "Big Boy," but it was too much for me to 
take in all at once, and it wasn't until a year later, when I heard 
Beiderbecke in person, that I really got it, 

I was seventeen and in my third year of high school when 
Bix Beiderbecke came to Boston with Jean Goldkctte's band 
that spring of 1926. The band was to open at a dance hall in 
Newton called Nutting-on-the-Charlcs, a large rambling xvooden 
structure built over the tranquil Charles River. It was so flimsy 
that when I worked there myself later and the dancers really 
began stomping we used to wonder if the building would last 
the night. Nutting-on-thc-Charlcs was quite a romantic spot, 
with couples in canoes drifting lazily along the river, and it 
was very popular with amorous college boys as well as with the 
ones who came to dance. There has, in fact, always been great 
enthusiasm for dance bands in New England. It was in New 
England that many of the big swing bands of the thirties had 
their start, and one of the main reasons for this was the Schribman 
brothers, Charlie and Sy, who were the owners of a huge chain 
of dance halls throughout the northeast. Charlie Schribman, who 
especially loved jazz and helped it every chance he had, was 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 13 

already bringing in jazz bands way back in 1924. 

Jean Goldkette's band was one of the first white jazz bands of 
the twenties, with Beiderbecke, Bill Rank, Tommy Dorsey, 
Frankie Trumbauer, Don Murray, Doc Ryker, and Izzy Riskin, 
and their appearance in Boston was something I didn't want to 
miss. Charlie Schribman was afraid that the public wouldn't get 
it at first though, so he had two other bands on hand to ensure 
a successful engagement, which he promoted as a Triple Battle 
of Music. 

I had saved up just enough money at that time to make the 
down payment on a Model-T Ford, and on Monday, the opening 
night, I rushed through my supper, shined my shoes, put on my 
best suit, and rattled out to Newton at twenty miles an hour. Mai 
Hallett's orchestra, a very popular local band that combined 
comedy routines with dance music, went on first and nearly 
knocked itself out putting on a whole big show; then Barney 
Rapp's band, which was just coming into prominence then, did 
all its acts; and finally the Jean Goldkette band came on. Charlie 
Schribman could have saved himself a lot of worry and expense. 
They opened with "Pretty Girl Stomp," went on to "Ostrich 
Walk," "A Sunny Disposish," "Clap Yo' Hands," and ended 
with "Tiger Rag," and they were such a stunning sensation that 
when the furor died down and it was time for Mai Hallett's 
band to play again, neither his musicians nor Barney Rapp's men 
would pick up their instruments. 

"How can you follow thctt?" Mai Hallett asked plaintively, 
and the crowd wasn't bashful about letting him know they 
agreed with him. Nobody had heard anything like this music 
before. 

Neither had L It had taken my eyes to open my ears. I under- 
stood now what Sam Faber had been trying to tell me with his 
records. I just sat there, vibrating like a harp to the echoes of 
Bix's astoundingly beautiful tone. It sounded like a choirful of 
angels. When I did work up the courage to go over to speak to 
Beiderbecke during one of the intermissions, I was still so over- 



!4 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

come I could hardly get a word out. After a few minutes I 
realized it was a tossup as to who was more shy, Bix or me. He 
kept his eyes fixed on his shiny black shoes and solemnly nodded 
his round blond head at each halting word as I tried to tell him 
how wonderful the band sounded. It was like talking to an 
automated toy. Suddenly I remembered having heard that he 
liked baseball. Taking a deep breath, I blurted out an invitation 
to take him to a game the next day. At the mention of baseball, 
Bix's diffidence vanished and he straightened up and looked at 
me. 

"Sounds fine to me," he said in a soft-pitched Midwest accent. 
He told me that Goldkette had rented a house for the band in 
Sudbury, a suburb of Boston, and I arranged to pick him up there 
the next afternoon. The Model-T never touched the road all the 
way home. 

The next day I skipped school and drove out to Sudbury 
around noon. My high school career at best was a very sketchy 
one, but my mother knew what music meant to me and she 
understood I wasn't running wild. Most of the time in school 
I was so sleepy from playing late the night before that I was 
kind of vague about what was going on, and I always felt out of 
touch with my schoolmates since none of them knew or cared 
about the one thing I was interested in. I seemed to wake 
up only during music class, or when, on the stairs between classes, 
I ran across Harry Carney, who later joined Duke Ellington's 
band; I was always so glad to see him and talk about music. 

The Goldkette band was rehearsing when I arrived at Bix's 
boardinghouse the next noon, and I stood in a corner at the 
back of the room and listened to "Blue Room" and "Rivcrboat 
Shuffle" a piece Hoagy Carmichael had written for Bix and 
the Wolverines. Goldkette wasn't there; in fact, he never ap- 
peared on the bandstand; he busied himself entirely with the 
booking and managerial chores of his various bands. The ar- 
rangers Bill Challis and George Crozier led the band during re- 
hearsals. Before we left for Braves Field to watch Casey Stengel's 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 15 

Braves lose, Bix took me up to his room after rehearsal, where 
we talked for a while about music. His sympathetic interest so 
encouraged me that I asked him if he would write out a hot 
chorus of "Blue Room" for me to practice, and he obligingly 
fished a piece of manuscript paper out of the pile of sheet music 
on the littered table next to the bed and wrote out a thirty-two- 
bar chorus in about three minutes. Even in the heat of improvis- 
ing Bix was wholly aware of his sequences and afterward he 
could reconstruct exactly what he had played. When I ques- 
tioned him about a weird G-sharp that didn't look to me like it 
had any business being there, he explained about the use of pass- 
ing tones to give color or tonal accent to a phrase, and he went 
on to discuss anticipation playing notes of the melody a hair- 
breadth before the strict time. The use of anticipation, without 
rushing, which is all a part of making the music swing, was just 
getting to be understood then. 

I was terribly worried all that afternoon about how to keep a 
conversation going with Beiderbecke, but eventually I discovered 
he had no need of small talk; he seemed to be busy all the time 
with his own thoughts. Aside from music and baseball, he had 
only one other form of communication, if you could call it that; 
he'd land of turn aside and sing a little snatch from a Bessie Smith 
or an Ethel Waters blues record. "The whole song is right there 
in that phrase hear it?" he'd say suddenly. A gentle, silent man 
with a dreamy, preoccupied manner, he was one of the most 
fascinating persons to be with that I have ever known, for no 
reason that can be explained except that his playing cast such a 
spell over you that you were irresistibly drawn to him, in awe 
and gratitude and love. He felt that, of course, and he responded 
to it in his own inarticulate way. All he ever really seemed to care 
about were music and whiskey. He was a man who was always 
trying to find a piano. During intermissions Bix would remain 
on the bandstand and mess around at the keyboard for his own 
kicks. A couple of years later when I met Bix again in Chicago at 
a speakeasy called the Three Deuces, he disappeared after a 



l6 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

while and I discovered him later seated at a battered old upright 
in a comer of the darkened downstairs dining room, playing to 
an audience of empty, checker-clothed tables. I sat down at one 
of the tables and listened while he spun out notes from a silver 
spool. His piano style had the same crystal purity of tone, the 
same perfect taste, and the same melodic grace that flowed from 
his horn, but it was more impressionistic. When Bix played 
regular jazz piano he sounded exactly like Bix the same char- 
acteristic use of haunting intervals, the same exquisite hot phras- 
ing. He didn't play ragtime style, ever. Bix's modern piano pieces, 
such as "Flashes," "Candlelight," and "In a Mist," were composed 
in the same feeling as Willie the Lion Smith's impressionistic 
studies, such as "Morning Air" they were a feeling-out for a 
new form without scrapping the old. 

During one of our talks about music, Bix once told me that 
when he was playing the horn he thought like a pianist rather 
than a cornetist. He automatically and instantaneously trans- 
posed, so that while fingering the B-flat on the cornet he had it 
in his mind and ear as the A-flat it was on the piano, and I suppose 
that in his head he heard the richer harmonies of the piano tones. 
It was characteristic, too, of Bix that he never tapped his foot 
to keep time. The tempo and the swing that modeled his phrases 
funneled out like steam rising from the spout of a boiling kettle. 
Another idiosyncrasy of Bix's was that as a further moans of 
ensuring the mellow tone he loved he purposely kept his horn 
funky, never cleaning out the dried spittle that accumulates in 
the valves and mouthpiece. He had no use at all for a hard, 
brilliant sound. 

Louis Armstrong and Beiderbecke were the ones who gave a 
classical form to the crude raw material of jazz. When 
Beiderbecke was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1903, Louis Arm- 
strong was barely three years old, and jazz itself was actually 
only a few years older. Of course, it had taken the music a long 
time to become jazz nearly three hundred years of bouncing 
back and forth between the black man and the white man 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 17 

but the colored brass marching bands in the South and Midwest 
had begun to really swing their music only a short time earlier, 
a bare decade or so before the turn of the century. 

As a child of three Bix was picking out phrases from classical 
music by ear on the family piano, and as a boy he heard the 
colored jazz bands from New Orleans playing on the Mississippi 
riverboats, which docked at his home town, but it was from 
phonograph records that he taught himself to play both jazz 
and the cornet. The records from which he learned were those 
of a band of white New Orleans musicians, the Original Dixie- 
land Jazz Band, who in 1917 made the first jazz records, which 
were a sensational worldwide hit. Bix especially admired the 
cornet player in this band, Nick LaRocca, who was also self- 
taught. The O.DJ.B. band as a whole was pretty primitive and 
they played to a ragtime beat, but they did much to popularize 
the new music. It wasn't until he was in Chicago in 192 1, attend- 
ing Lake Forest Military Academy, that Bix had a chance to get 
a real earful of the Negro jazzmen, including the youthful 
Louis Armstrong, who came up from New Orleans the following 
year to join King Oliver's band. The Wolverines, a band of 
college boys from Indiana which Bix joined in 1923, was the 
first jazz band of white musicians in the Midwest. 

But back in 1926 I didn't know anything about the music and 
Bix except that they both sounded wonderful. A few days after 
the ball-game episode the Goldkette band was booked in Salem 
at another of Charlie Schribman's dance halls. It was a muggy, 
oppressive night, with a storm threatening. My brother Morris 
came along with me and at the hall we sat up in the balcony for 
a while, but the storm, when it broke, was so violent that it drove 
me down by the bandstand where I could hear, and where I 
immediately got into trouble. As soon as they saw me, the 
musicians, who were all young and enthusiastic, began urging me 
to sit in. Torn between desire and despair, I kept saying, "Later," 
in what I hoped was a casual manner. While I was wondering 
what to do, the lights blew out in the dance hall just as the band 



iS MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

kicked off with "Sunday," and in the sudden darkness I found 
sudden courage. Turning quickly to Bix, I muttered, "I'll sit 
in now." Bix handed me his horn at once. When the lights came 
on again a few choruses later, the whole band made a big thing 
about being surprised to see me on horn instead of Bix, and I 
thought my brother Morris up in the balcony would never stop 
clapping. I was so exhilarated by the musicians' kindness that 
when Bix told me they were playing in Lowell the next day I 
promptly offered to drive him there. I would have made a car 
if I didn't have one and the devil with the truant officer. 

When I arrived at the boardinghouse the following day, Bix 
was at the piano, as usual, playing a passage from a new 
symphony the musicians were discussing. Bciderbcckc's interest 
in classical music, especially the modern impressionists Debussy 
and Delius and MacDowell, and Eastwood Lane intrigued me, 
and I began listening to the Sunday symphony broadcasts to find 
out what it was all about. On the way to Lowell, Bix said, 
"Listen, Maxie, I'm going to leave the band when we finish this 
New England engagement, and I'll tell Goldkcttc to hire you 
in my place." I nearly ran into a ditch* I knew I couldn't play 
well enough to be in the Goldkette band, and he knew it too, of 
course, but this was a thoroughly typical, Bix-like gesture of 
generosity and friendship. 

By the time we got into Boston he was asking me where he 
could latch on to some gin. Though I was too young to care 
about drinking myself, I knew where to get it even during 
Prohibition, and within a very short while I got hold of a quart 
of alcohol and a quart of ginger ale. When we reached Lowell 
it was dark and I was starving. Bix was agreeable about it when I 
asked him if he minded if we stopped for something to eat, but 
he wasn't the man to let food interfere with his drinking. He 
contentedly polished off the alcohol, washing it down with 
ginger ale, while I devoured a couple of hot dogs. That night 
at Lowell he played like an angel. 

After the dance I drove Bix to the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 19 

and Bix decided that since it was so late I'd better stay with him 
overnight. I went right off to sleep with my nose buried in the 
pillow to shut out the smell of his dirty socks steaming in the 
washbasin, but I had the feeling he didn't sleep much, ever. 
That's all part of the legend about Beiderbecke he's as famous 
for all the buddies and fans who have put him up or bunked 
with him as George Washington is for having slept here, and he 
is equally famous for his avoidance of water, internally and 
externally. He had that Huckleberry Finn quality of homeless- 
ness and rebelliousness about him, but in spite of the dirt and 
the whiskey everybody loved Bix so much they just wanted 
to stick around him. I remarked to my sister Rose the next 
day, "I love the way he plays, but I can't stand the way he 
lives." 

I had another glimpse of Bix when I went to New York in 
1927 to take a lesson from Mr. Schlossberg, a famous trumpet 
teacher who taught all the great legitimate players. I used to have 
a lot of trouble with my embouchure in those days, and when I 
inquired about a teacher from Johnny Asevido, a trumpet player 
in Jacques Renard's orchestra whose control of his horn I had 
always admired, he recommended Schlossberg. When I had 
enough money saved up for a lesson I came down to New York, 
and then I found out that Paul Whiteman was recording that 
afternoon in Liederkranz Hall. I made a fast detour to East 
Fifty-eighth Street, staying to watch them record two sides 
"Louisiana" and "Lonely Melody." From the record you 
wouldn't know Bix was playing the lead. It isn't true, of course, 
that Bix couldn't read; but when he played lead horn he didn't 
bring his tone way out in front, as if it were a solo, the way 
any other trumpet would have done. He had a way of blending 
in his tone so melodically and subtly with the other instruments 
that it all came out a smooth, solid tapestry of sound. Bix had so 
many leads on this date, in fact, that Charlie Margulis, whom 
Tommy Dorsey later christened "Gabby" because he couldn't 
keep his mouth shut, became miffed and at one point things got 



20 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

a little flurried. Bix, who used speech only as a last resort, had a 
habit of tossing his horn up in the air as a silent way of letting off 
steam. When Charlie began riding him, he tossed up one of the 
gold-plated cornets Vincent Bach had given him, but being upset 
he missed it and it crashed to the floor, denting the bell 

That seemed to me a good moment to duck out and take a 
lesson from Schlossberg. About a year earlier I had registered in 
the New England Conservatory of Music for lessons from 
Herman Klepfil, who used to play first trumpet in the Boston 
Symphony. After the first two or three lessons Klcpfii told me 
he didn't think I'd ever learn to play the trumpet right, and he 
advised me to give it up, but instead of giving up the trumpet I 
gave up the lessons. After I had played a while for Schlossberg, 
he said, "You can play it. The only way to learn is just to go 
ahead and blow it out. Getting the feel of the embouchure is hard 
it just takes time." That was my one lesson with Schlossberg, 
but it was exactly what I needed to give me the confidence to 
keep at it. 

In the late spring of 1927, a year after the Goldkctte engage- 
ment, Bix came to Boston again with Paul Whitcman, who had 
taken over most of the Goldkette band when it broke up in the 
fall of 1926. The lengthening shadow of Bix's drinking was al- 
ready beginning to darken his life and he was withdrawing more 
and more into himself, but I had no way of knowing this. Four 
years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he would be dead. 

Whiteman had chartered a bus to take the band to the Cape 
for a one-night engagement. The road to the Cape wound 
through Dorchester, and as the bus rounded the curve on Scaver 
Street, Bix's cornet case was jolted loose from the shelf and fell 
out of the window without anyone noticing it. A few seconds 
later, my cousin Hy Benjamin, who was on his way to his store, 
found the case in the middle of the street, and the next day my 
sister Alice called me up to tell me that Hy had found a cornet 
in the street and to ask what they should do. 

The minute I saw the horn I knew it was Bix's* I knew he had 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 21 

a gold Bach cornet, for one thing, but mostly it was that being 
with him was such a thrilling experience that you noticed every- 
thing about him, and I felt I would have known any matchsrick 
he threw away. I dashed down in a sweat of excitement to the 
Metropolitan Theatre, where the Whiteman band was playing 
that afternoon. The band was off the stand, but the other 
musicians told me I'd find Bix in a speakeasy up the street, listen- 
ing to the ball game in comfort. He was curiously diffident when 
I told him about my cousin finding the cornet, but I was so 
elated at the remarkable coincidence that I didn't think anything 
about it. After Bix finished his drink we took a cab back to 
Seaver Street. When Bix picked up the cornet and blew a few 
golden notes, I exclaimed absurdly to my cousin Hy, "See, can't 
you tell it's his!" Later, back at the speakeasy, Bix remarked 
suddenly that a lot of kids were always stealing Frankie 
Trumbauer's mouthpieces, and it was only then that I realized 
Bix was harboring the suspicion that in some mysterious way I 
had swiped his cornet. But I was still too enthralled by the whole 
coincidence to feel brought down, or even very much aware of 
Bix's strange notion. 

He was right, though, about the extremes to which a youngster 
will be driven in his passion for the music* A few months after 
I first heard Bix play, I was working down at the Cape for the 
summer, and one Sunday night on the train going back to the 
Cape, I met Howie Freeman, a drummer from Boston, who 
immediately showed me a brand-new recording he had just 
bought of Bix's "Singing the Blues" and "Clarinet Marmalade." 

"Howie, old pal," I croaked in a voice hoarse with almost un- 
bearable longing, "let me buy it from you." I peeled dollar after 
dollar from my thin wad, but Howie wouldn't part with the 
record at any price. By the time the train pulled into my station 
I had turned from an ordinarily sane, responsible young man 
into a demon. After I had gathered up my belongings with 
sneaky casualness, I turned to say good-bye to Howie, and in 
the next second I snatched the record out of Howie's hand and 



22 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

raced off the train with it. And that night when I sat in the 
little room in my boardinghouse playing the record over and 
over, my only thought was, "It was 'worth it." Remorse did 
begin to set in a day or so later, and Howie did eventually forgive 
me. "I know how it is," he said. But in time I became so ashamed 
of my action that I hated to think of it. Another musician, one 
of the most talented jazz trombonists around, recently told me of 
a similar incident. He was around fifteen when he heard his 
first Teagarden record on a jukebox in an ice cream parlor, and 
he went so wild that he seized a chair, smashed the glass front of 
the jukebox, snatched the record and fled before anyone knew 
what was happening. He was from a well-to-do family, with no 
more excuse or explanation for his behavior than I had. 

The last time I saw Bix was in 1929, after I had returned from 
Chicago. Milt "Mezz" Mezzrow, who was very popular in 
Harlem in those days, had a booking for a band at the Renais- 
sance Ballroom and he put together a pickup group composed 
of Bix, who had just come out of the sanitarium after one of his 
alcoholic breakdowns, Bud Freeman, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy 
Dorsey, Joe Sullivan, Gene Krupa, and myself. It was quite an 
unusual thing in those days to have white musicians play for a 
colored dance, but it was a dreadful night for me. It was bad 
enough that the other musicians were older and more experi- 
enced, but the thought of playing with Bix had me so nervous I 
couldn't even speak. At one of the intermissions, when Bix came 
over and asked me what was wrong, I didn't know what to say, 
besides Helpl I don't remember Bix playing much that night 
either; it was all so mixed up with all the different styles of 
playing. 

Except for one or two other occasions, such as when I heard 
Bix play at Roseland Ballroom in New York, and at Tommy 
Dorsey's house on Long Island, this was the extent of my 
acquaintance with Beiderbecke. Few as these occasions were, 
they left an indelible impression, and I never met anyone who 
had known Bix who didn't feel the same way about the man and 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 23 

his music. Hoagy Carmichael was so inspired by Bix's music and 
friendship that he switched from a law course in college to a 
music career. Paul Whiteman summed it up best: "Bix was not 
only the greatest musician I have ever known, he was also the 
greatest gentleman." Bix's tone was so pure, so devoid of any 
tinge of sentimentality or personal ego, that it was the nearest 
thing to perfect beauty I have ever heard. Aside from the 
adulation of a tiny group of musicians and fans, he had only 
two write-ups in his life, neither of them particularly laudatory; 
his obituary in his home-town paper concluded with the opinion 
that "Bixie will be forgotten as quickly as the popular songs he 
played," and no one ever thought to even record his voice, but I, 
and all who knew him, will never get over Beiderbecke. 

Louis and Bix are the two great originators of jazz. Fm not 
arguing about Louis, this has nothing to do with Louis and his 
greatness. There was the ethereal beauty of Bix's tone, with its 
heart-melting blend of pure joyousness and wistful haunting 
sadness. There was his sense of form, his hotness, his shining 
fresh ideas, his lyricism, his swing, his perfect intonation, and his 
impeccable, matchless taste. His intervals were so orderly, so 
indescribably right, like a line of poetry. Listen to those intervals 
and try to explain how Bix could think to play like that. Whom 
did he have to hear? Bessie Smith? Louis? They knew what they 
knew, but who could teach Bix what he knew? Bix knew. 

Bix's whole background of jazz was essentially white, and his 
whole conception of jazz was based primarily on his white 
musical heritage. But that's not to say that Bix was a pale carbon 
copy of an alien Negro art. This is the point at which most 
people go astray. The point is that the Negroes did fashion a 
wholly new music, but its roots were embedded in European 
music as well as in the Negro. Without the American Negro 
there would be no jazz, and without the white man there would 
be no jazz. Jazz has never existed in Africa, and it doesn't exist 
there today. It was formed from the two musical cultures: from 
the African, which has the highest development of rhythm in 



24 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

the world, and from the European, which has the greatest de- 
velopment of harmony in the world; and it happened in America. 

And it was not only European music, but the European re- 
ligion, the Bible, that made jazz, just as it was the Bible, the 
Judaeo-Christian religion, that was the basis of all the great art 
of Europe the painting and the architecture and the classical 
music. People forget that it all came out of the church. Just as 
jazz did. Jazz's beginnings were just as respectable as classical 
music's beginnings. Jazz came from the gospel songs, and from 
the work songs and the blues, just as the European classical music 
is a blend of church and folk music. All the colored musicians 
know that their music has its wellsprings in gospel singing, but 
they forget their gospel songs are based on the Bible, and that 
the frame for their gospel songs came from the old English and 
Scottish psalm singing, from which the early Negro slaves 
learned the basic harmonies of the white man's music. The Bible 
gave those poor, bewildered, uprooted Negro people an identity 
they were God's children and they took to that Bible like a 
duck to water, and in taking to the Bible, and to the harmonies, 
they eventually came up with jazz. The American Negroes not 
only took to the Bible from the very start; they're showing the 
white man today how to live up to what the Bible teaches. 

In taking for granted the most obvious of the obvious the 
fact that without the European harmonic development there 
would be no jazz at all, no orderly frame on which to build the 
beat a very confused view of the whole situation has grown 
up. The ones most guilty of this confusion arc the ones closest 
to and most familiar with the European musical tradition the 
European jazz writers, who idealized the Negro jazz artist and 
scorned the white jazzmen as mere imitators a sort of reverse 
racial prejudice. 

An innate feeling for harmony is just as ingrained and natural 
to the white man as rhythm is to the colored. Barbershop har- 
mony is the great white American pastime. Every time a group 
of white people get together at a party they inevitably end up 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 25 

around a piano, harmonizing their hearts out. Imagine if jazz 
had been created the other way around, by white Americans 
sold into slavery in Africa. The white men would have gathered 
together in the evenings in the slave quarters and harmonized 
their troubles away with "Down by the Old Mill Stream" and 
"Sweet Adeline" and the African boss would have shaken his 
head wonderingly and said, "Man, what a marvelous gift for 
harmony those poor white bastards have. It's just born in them!" 



Chapt 



er 



The summer of 1928 seemed endless. I didn't know how to 
break out of the vacuum I was in. Here I was nineteen years old 
and though I had always had my own little way of playing, I 
still felt I couldn't play the way I wanted to. There was only 
one thing I was sure of that it was hopeless for jazz in Boston 
and when I wasn't worrying about the music, I was mooning 
away the days dreaming about becoming an aviator like Charles 
Lindbergh and having all the girls admire me, or owning a Stutz 
Bearcat and having all the girls admire me. The rest of the time 
I spent glued to my little wind-up Victrola playing the latest 
records over and over and asking myself as I listened to each 
one: Is this it? 

And as I listened and wondered, another question kept pop- 
ping up too the burning question one asks oneself at nineteen: 
What am I going to do with my life? Then one day while 
listening to one of Louis's Hot Five records, I suddenly found 
at least part of the answer. If this was the kind of jazz going on 
in Chicago, then Chicago was the place to be. I had no clear idea 
of what I expected to do there or how I'd even get there, but 
as the summer droned wearily on, just thinking the words "Pm 

26 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 2J 

going to Chicago" was like discovering a New World. 

In August I had a job in Hartford, where there was even less 
interest in jazz than in Boston. The musicians in the band used 
to laugh at me when they heard my Louis records; to them it 
was just a lot of clatter. The picture was very bleak, not to 
say pitch black, when I met Charlie Joindreau at a party given 
by some of the guys at my rooming house. After most of the 
others had left, Charlie, in a mellow mood from all the home- 
made beer, began talking about Sonny Greer, the great drummer 
in The Washingtonians, Duke Ellington's new band, which was 
playing at the Kentucky Club in New York. Charlie played 
drums himself in the pit band at the Capitol Theatre in New 
York, but he came back to Hartford every Sunday to see his 
family. When he discovered I knew about Louis and Bix, he 
reacted like a prospector who has struck gold, and he'd make a 
beeline for my room every Sunday evening to listen to records 
and talk about jazz. It wasn't long before I was telling him about 
my wanting to go to Chicago. "But I don't know anyone there," 
I ended up. 

"I do," Charlie said. It was as simple as that. The next thing I 
knew we were down at the railroad station buying two tickets 
to Chicago. 

I had been helping to support my mother and father with my 
cornet for several years now, as my father's grocery store never 
did very well and most of my brothers and sisters were married 
and had families of their own. My parents were alarmed when 
I told them I was going to look for work in Chicago, but there 
was nothing much they could say since they knew I'd send them 
whatever money I could. I packed my tuxedo, my phonograph, 
and my records, grabbed my cornet case, and caught the train 
to Chicago with Charlie Joindreau, just in time to catch the tail 
end of all the great jazz that had been played there from the 
early twenties. 

I didn't know Charlie very well. The few Sunday afternoons 
we had spent together we had talked about nothing but music 



28 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

and musicians. He was an easygoing handsome blond fellow in 
his middle twenties who didn't seem to have a care in the world, 
but on that endless train ride we got to talking more personally, 
and although he didn't go into particulars I gathered he was 
having domestic troubles. I realized then that for Charlie, going 
to Chicago was a way of running away from his troubles, which 
is why he jumped at the idea so quickly. I felt sorry for him 
because he seemed such a nice clean guy, but I never did get a 
chance to know him much better. We no sooner arrived at 
Union Station in Chicago the next afternoon when Charlie took 
off on some private business of his own. 

"I'll meet you later at the musicians' union," he called back 
over his shoulder. 

There was nothing to do but check my valise and phonograph 
at the station, look up the union's address in the telephone book, 
and wend my way down there to wait for Charlie. After a couple 
of hours, I began counting the bricks in the building across the 
street* When the union closed for the night, I was meditating 
on the problem of how many bricks a man could lay in one 
day and how long it would take to do the job. Around midnight, 
hunger drove me to a crummy little restaurant across the street, 
and I spent the rest of the night on a bench in the little park 
nearby, still mentally counting bricks. I didn't have sense enough 
to check into a hotel; all I could think of doing was to wait for 
Charlie. At dawn I had breakfast in the same little joint, cleaned 
myself up as best I could, and went back to sit on the front 
steps of the union again. When Charlie finally showed up around 
noon, looking as if he hadn't slept all night either, I was so tired 
of bricldaying that I forgot to be mad at him. 

In the course of his evening, Charlie had found out about a 
rooming house at 2400 North where we could rent a couple of 
little rooms at four dollars a week, and after we had picked up 
our bags from the station, hung up our tuxedos, and put Louis's 
"Mahogany Hall Stomp" on the phonograph, Charlie produced 
a bottle of gin. One drink later, the wonderful excitement of 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 29 

being in Chicago began to flood over me again; four drinks later, 
I couldn't see. It was my first experience in being temporarily 
blinded by bootleg gin. I began to have my doubts not only 
about Chicago, but about Charlie. 

"We'll go to the musicians' union today to look for work,'* 
Charlie announced the next afternoon when we crawled out of 
bed. 

"Great!" I croaked, surprised that I could stand up, let alone 
speak. My knees were jelly, my head was splitting, and my 
stomach was very undecided, but I could see again at least, I 
could when the room stopped whirling. 

"But first I have a little business to attend to," Charlie said, 
squinting at the mirror with a pained expression as he struggled 
with his bow tie. 

My heart sank. 

"You go on ahead," he continued, "and I'll meet you at the 
union. Honest!" he added quickly as I opened my mouth. 

I shut my mouth and took the trolley downtown to my old 
stand on the union steps. I was deep in construction problems 
again when a dapper young fellow in a majestic black derby 
strolled past me up the steps, stopped, and came back. I thought 
he was at least the owner of the Palmer House, he had such an 
imperiously elegant air about him. 

"Who," he intoned in a richly cultivated voice, "are you?" 

I told him my name, where I was from, and why I had left 
Boston. I was kind of interested in hearing the story myself 
by this time I'd almost forgotten why Fd come to Chicago. 

"Young man," he said when I had finished, "this is your lucky 
day. Bud Freeman is the name. Come with me." And taking my 
elbow, he ushered me into the union hall. 

Of all the aspiring young white musicians in Chicago in 
the twenties, I couldn't have picked a more enthusiastic and 
encouraging friend than the one Fate sent along that day in the 
person of Bud Freeman. He promptly took me under his wing, 
and more than anyone else it was due to Bud Freeman's unflag- 



30 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

ging interest and help that I got anywhere in Chicago. He not 
only got me all the work then and for years afterward, but above 
all Bud made me feel like something when I wasn't anything. 

Bud had met Charlie Joindreau earlier that summer when he 
was in New York with Eddie Condon, who was still there, and 
when Charlie came along a few minutes later it was old home 
week. After we registered at the union for temporary work 
permits, Bud jotted down our address and promised to call us 
when he had any work. The next day, Charlie took me down 
to radio station WGN to hear another of Jean Goldkette's bands, 
with Sterling Bose on trumpet and Max Farley and Bill Green 
on saxes. Sterling Bose's playing sounded marvelous; of all the 
trumpeters influenced by Beiderbecke, he was the one who 
sounded closest to Bix. Charlie stayed around to chew the fat 
with his many friends in the band so I took myself off to a movie 
and watched Ronald Colman being noble with Vilma Banky 
who, I felt sure, would bring out the noble streak in Simon 
Legree. 

Charlie wasn't in his room the next day, or the day after, and 
finally I went back to the radio station to see if the Goldkette 
men had word of him. They told me he had left for a job in 
Texas for Goldkette. The fact that he had left word he would 
send for me didn't do much to cheer me up in the meantime. 
As unreliable as Charlie was, he was my only link with home 
in this strange new city, and his desertion hit me harder than the 
bootleg gin. 

I never saw Charlie again. I guess Chicago wasn't far enough 
away for him, but neither was Texas. A few months later he 
committed suicide there. It took me a long time to get over the 
shock of it. 

After I became reconciled to the idea of being on my own 
now that Charlie had left town, I spent the next few days 
wandering around the city in a daze of bewildered excitement. 
Although I was all alone in a little beat-up room in a strange 
city with no work in sight, I felt I was living just being in 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 31 

Chicago. The signs that plastered the trolley cars and elevated 
trains advertising Chicago as "The Paris of America" kept re- 
minding me that if Lindbergh could make it alone to Paris I 
should be able to make out in Chicago. While Chicago didn't 
exactly look like my idea of Paris, I was in no mood to quibble, 
and I don't think I even noticed the miles and miles of low, ugly 
tenements huddled on the flat land under an empty prairie sky, 
or the cheap hurly-burly of the Loop, or the moody Chicago 
River winding its dark-green way through the city. I was too 
busy absorbing the bursting feeling of life in the city, engen- 
dered by the hordes of eager young people from midwestern 
farms and small towns who swarmed into Chicago by the thou- 
sands; by the multitudes of Negroes who poured in from the 
dying cotton and sawmill towns of the deep South, bringing with 
them their gospel hymns and their earthy blues and work songs 
and back-country shouts and hollers; and by the excitement 
sparked by the new writers and artists and musicians caught up 
in the ferment of discovery of themselves and of the newly 
emerging American art. In the wake of the tide of immigrants 
from the hinterlands came the gamblers, the promoters, the boot- 
leggers, and the gangsters, to make Chicago a wide-open, rip- 
roaring town, where cattlemen and hillbillies rubbed shoulders 
with poets and G men, tycoons and politicians, baseball players 
and B girls, racketeers and reformers. 

And in the midst of all this bubbling, yeasty stew, the new 
phenomenon of jazz was quietly simmering on its own burners. 
The Mississippi, the Father of Rivers, had been helping to spread 
the new music to the cities and towns that lined its shores and 
had been disgorging jazzmen, Negro and white, into Chicago 
from the South for well over a decade now. The first jazz 
band heard by the young white Chicago schoolboys who were 
to take up the torch of jazz was the white New Orleans Rhythm 
Kings, with Paul Mares, George Brunis and Leon Rappolo, who 
came to Chicago in the early twenties. When they weren't 
sneaking into die Blue Friars Inn to hear the N.O.R.K. band 



32 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

in person, these aspiring young musicians were grouped around 
a phonograph at one of the boys' homes teaching themselves to 
play, bar by bar, from the N.O.R.K. records. When they dis- 
covered King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, with the young Louis 
Armstrong on second cornet, at the Lincoln Gardens on the 
South Side, they nearly went crazy with excitement. Then Bix 
came along with a still different style, and they not only went 
wild over him, they later played and recorded with him. Along 
with all this, they also listened to the great blues singer, Bessie 
Smith, and it was from all these sources that the young Mid- 
westerners evolved their own style and feeling, which came to 
be called the "Chicago style*" 

That chance meeting with Bud Freeman opened the door for 
me into this seething world of new ideas, new sounds, and new 
thinking that was Chicago in the twenties as I began to meet 
some of these young white musicians who were to contribute 
so much to jazz Frank Teschmaker, George Wettling, Dave 
Tough, Jimmy McPartland, Jess Stacy, Gene Krupa, Wingy 
Manone, Muggsy Spanier, Benny Goodman, Rod Cless, Floyd 
O'Brien all extraordinary men, dreamers and artists. It began 
with a phone call from a fellow named Charlie Pierce, whom 
Bud had told about me. Charlie Pierce, who worked in his 
father's butcher shop when he wasn't playing alto sax and book- 
ing jobs and record dates for musicians, turned out to be a great 
big fat guy with a genial, expansive nature and a mean, swing- 
ing tone on his horn. Charlie was running regular Sunday- 
afternoon dances at the Cocoanut Grove restaurant at Sixty-third 
and Cottage Grove out on the South Side, and he hired me for 
the coming Sunday. 

There were three reeds in the band, with Rod Cless and 
Charlie Pierce on saxophone as well as Bud Freeman, and when 
we kicked off the first set with "Avalon," I couldn't believe what 
was happening. Now I knew how Lindbergh felt, only better, 
For the first time in my life I was playing with musicians who 
could swing this was like flying wthout an airplane. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 33 

Charlie Pierce had another band working during the week at 
the Cinderella Chinese restaurant at Cottage Grove. George 
Wettling, Frank Teschmaker and Floyd O'Brien were in the 
band, and if I had thought my cup was full on Sunday, it was 
now overflowing. To play with George Wettling on drums in 
those days was one of the greatest thrills I ever had. The crush 
roll of the Chicago drummers was unheard of back East, where 
they were still playing oompah and ricky-tick, breaking up the 
rhythm into choppy syncopation instead of keeping a steady 
beat you could play against. George had soaked up the rhythm 
as a kid, making the rounds of the South Side colored cabarets 
every evening on his bicycle and listening out on the curb 
to the Negro bands. And the marvel of it all was that I fitted 
in with these musicians as naturally as a baseball bat fitted into 
Babe Ruth's hands. Though barely in their twenties themselves 
these men had been deeply immersed in the music for six or 
seven years, absorbing it firsthand from the New Orleans jazz- 
men while developing their own style and feeling, whereas I had 
heard it only in tantalizing dribbles and snatches. Being wel- 
comed as one of them the first time they heard me play was not 
only like coming home, it was feeling that the candle had been 
kept burning in the window for me all those years. 

That nervous, ragged, ricky-tick beat of the white dance bands 
of the twenties that was one of the factors that had been at 
the bottom of my confusion when I listened to my records back 
home in Boston, trying so desperately to unravel the puzzle of 
jazz. None of the white musicians I heard on them could keep 
time. None of the early white popular bands had really under- 
stood the beat yet. And that was why the Chicago gang instinc- 
tively latched on to me the first time around, for ignorant and 
inexperienced as I was, I had the innate feeling of the beat and 
of playing the melody simply and purely without all the little 
flutings and corny licks that were regarded as "hot" in those 
days. When I think of those twenties bands with that dreadful 
twenties beat that Bix was usually trapped in (except when 



34 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Eddie Lang was on guitar), it's no mystery to me that he drank 
himself to death. 

Chicago was vibrating with that great jazz beat. The Negro 
pianists who congregated there in the twenties were the in- 
novators of the boogie-woogie style of playing, with its lack of 
interest in harmony and melody, but witli its marvelous rhythmic 
power and complexity. Jimmy Yancey, Pine Top Smith, Meade 
Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson were the boogie- 
woogie kings of Chicago's South Side. And Earl Hines, the 
Pittsburgh-born pianist who played with Louis Armstrong, was 
busy evolving his lean revolutionary "trumpet style" piano. 

In the following months it seemed as though every day was 
the Fourth of July. After the Sunday dances at the Cocoanut 
Grove, which were over about eight o'clock, Bud used to take 
me with him down to the Loop in a cab. Many of the taxis then 
were reconverted limousines, and their air of luxury and intrigue 
added a special zing to the thrill of hurtling along the wide, 
windy boulevards and to the anticipation of the evening ahead 
of what we thought was man-of-the-world "wine, women, and 
song" stuff. 

I don't know if it was because I was young, or if it was dif- 
ferent in those days because so few people knew about the music 
and those who did felt close to one another, but everyone seemed 
to go out of his way to be encouraging* After I'd take a chorus, 
Teschmaker would shake his head unbelievingly and say, "What 
a tone!" and I'd be torn between the elation of believing him 
and the misery of feeling I could hardly play yet. Wingy 
Manone invited me to his big apartment over on the North Side 
for many a sizzling pot of red beans and rice, gumbo, shrimp 
Creole, and huge platters of ham and eggs. Though Wingy had 
lost his right arm as the result of a streetcar accident when he 
was a boy down in New Orleans, he was a most independent 
and resourceful fellow. I have never heard Wingy refer in any 
way to his difficulty in playing the trumpet with one hand, and 
he no more let his loss stop him from playing his horn than 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 35 

he let it interfere with his hospitality. Cornetist Jimmy McPart- 
land, who had replaced Beiderbecke in the Wolverines when 
Six left the band, was always ready to give you a boost, and 
when I played a job on Christmas Eve with jazz pianist Jess 
Stacy, Jess went out of his way to make sure I reached home 
safely from the South Side, which was especially wide open on 
Christmas Eve. Stacy, growing up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 
one of the steamboat stops on the Mississippi, had early fallen 
under the spell of the riverboat jazz bands, and he was scarcely 
out of short pants before he was playing in a riverboat band 
himself. Stacy's clean, crisp style later helped swing the great 
Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey bands, but he is to this 
day nowhere as well-known as he deserves. I first met Stacy 
on a date for which Charlie Pierce had optimistically booked 
me to lead a band with Muggsy Spanier, Wingy Manone, Stacy, 
and Wettling. How I managed it I'll never know. The interest 
in jazz was so keen in those days that when a couple of the 
musicians took me to a swanky speakeasy to hear Mildred Bailey, 
the men in Spike Hamilton's band invited me out into the kitchen 
between sets to hear me play. 

Chicago was a great town for clarinets in the twenties. There 
used to be talk in those days that Teschmaker could play Benny 
Goodman off the stand. Benny was great in those days, too, but 
as great as Benny was, Tesch had it over him then. The young 
Teschmaker, who was killed in a car crash in 1932, was one of 
the leading spirits who helped mold "Chicago" jazz. Both he 
and Bud Freeman always had a highly individual, peculiarly 
personal tone to their horns, and their temperaments and 
styles were completely opposite. Tesch reminded me a good deal 
of Beiderbecke with his quiet, manly way and his complete in- 
volvement with the music, although he was much more solemn 
and serious by nature. When he wasn't practicing on the clarinet 
and alto sax, he was busy with the violin and the cornet. He 
had a soulful, Bix quality that was very musical in spite of its 
wry "toughness." It's too bad that Tesch had a phobia against 



36 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

making records; he'd freeze up in the studio, but if he had re- 
corded more he would have overcome it. 

Bud Freeman, on the other hand, was so outgoing and en- 
thusiastic that he was apt to rear back and laugh aloud from 
pure joy after taking a chorus, whether he was in a recording 
studio or at a noisy dance hall And when you heard his records, 
even the big-swing-band records of the late thirties, you knew 
that that fervent personal sound that colored the four-man reed 
section could only be Bud. Along with Fats Waller, he has one 
of the happiest sounds in jazz, with his witty ideas, his great 
biting attack and good hard swing. I guess we all got some of 
that bite from Dave Tough. Once you had played with Dave 
you had to play that hard, biting style to keep less experienced 
musicians playing on time. Nowadays there isn't such a need 
for that bite since everybody can keep time even the rock V 
rollers. The "hard-boiled" urgency so characteristic of the Chi- 
cago style was also characteristic of Chicago itself, especially in 
the twenties, just as the relaxed, easygoing New Orleans style 
came from the slower-tempoed, easygoing southern port. 

Though Tesch and his wife had only a one-room apartment, 
they had me stay over many times, putting me up on the couch 
after a late night, and we used to do a lot of talking and think- 
ing about the music into the small hours. I was always wondering 
about the two schools of jazz the Louis school and the Bix 
school and Tesch and I agreed that Bix was the one we liked 
best I knew Louis was great, but I actually knew very little 
about him then, Bix had heard a lot of Louis and Bessie Smith 
and he was getting the feeling from the colored music, but it 
came out so different and so individual that I wondered how 
this could be. Jazz was so new; we were all so interested and it 
was a wonderful, thrilling thing to us the idea of these two 
great players who were leading the way in the music. There 
never was any question of anyone else leading the way. These 
were the two giants in a whole era of great music that was de- 
veloping naturally, forming and shaping itself by the men who 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 37 

were creating it, with no critics around yet to spoil it all. None 
of the critics had ever heard this music while it was being made, 
and they never got over it. When the critics, foreign and do- 
mestic, came along a decade later and called it Art, they sub- 
stituted Art for the music, and between them they nearly 
strangled one of the best things that ever happened to keep 
people sane. It came out of America, and it was as great as even 
the electric bulb. Just imagine that the U.S. has lighted up the 
world with electricity and with jazz! 

As thrilling as it was then in Chicago, it wasn't smooth sailing 
for me in every department This was the era of Ben Hecht 
and Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, 
H. L. Mencken and Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene 
O'Neill, and it seemed to me who up to now had seldom 
cracked open a book that all the fellows in the Chicago crowd 
were on a genius kick. Dave Tough was our ringleader. The 
son of a well-to-do Oak Park physician, Dave was a brilliant, 
multitalented young man with a passion for learning. He had 
just returned from Paris and he was on fibre with the excitement 
of the new thinking that came out of the first World War. 
After playing all night, Bud and his brother Arnie, Dave, and I 
would sneak into Bu^'s house as soon as his father, who was a 
widower, left for work in the morning, and instead of sleeping 
we'd stay up all day talking about writers and literature and 
painting and music and all the great new ideas that were in the 
air. Or, rather, they'd talk and I'd listen. I never said anything; 
I came to be known for not saying anything. I didn't speak for 
years. I didn't know what to say about all this, for one thing, 
and I just wanted to hear what was going on. 

Bud was always extremely impressionable and he had the most 
sensitive aesthetic sense. Dave was more critical and probing. 
Bud was in love with the theatre and with literature, but Dave 
wanted to master everything he was interested in. I guess the 
only trouble with Bud and Dave was that they thought they 
were the only ones who felt that way, which usually happens 



38 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

with people who are so wrapped up in themselves. But it was 
wonderful for me to be around them because I wanted to know 
why I felt that way, too. I could see myself in them they ex- 
pressed all my feelings for me. America was still so young and 
new then and we all had the feeling of wanting to do something 
great. 

The Chicago crowd taught me much by telling me about the 
books and the writers, and later on, back home in Boston, I found 
the books and read them all so I could understand it better. 
Dave Tough wouldn't be in a band a week before he had the 
whole band showing up for work with books under their arms. 
He was always intrigued that I could read for enjoyment rather 
than for learning. He thought I was funny, and he'd ride me 
about it Dave had his devastatingly caustic side, too but I 
didn't let it bother me too much for I always felt there were 
other ways to learn besides from books. 

It was all very heady stuff for me, discovering there was an 
exciting new world going on in the thinking and the writing 
as well as in the music , and I soaked it up like a sponge. I didn't 
do very well in another line of intoxication, though. Not that I 
didn't like whiskey, and not that I didn't try, but my system 
didn't burn it off quickly and it would take me a whole day to 
straighten out where they'd be fine the next morning. Besides, 
I never felt I could play well when I was loaded, and that always 
brought me down. But it didn't stop me from emulating them 
in that department, too. 

It was a fast city and a fast life, a "toddlui* " town, with the 
bootleg whiskey, the gambling, the whorehouses, the reefer 
smoking, and the speakeasies, but mostly we were able to keep 
out of trouble. Almost everyone in Chicago in those days was 
sooner or later, in one way or another mostly another in- 
volved with racketeers and gangsters, but I had only one brief 
brush with the Chicago underworld when George Wettling had 
a call one afternoon to audition for a job at the Wigwam Club, 
which was run by a big-time gambler. Six of us piled into 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 39 

George's blue Nash and drove down there, and after we had 
played for about an hour the gangster removed his cigar from 
his puffy lips long enough to say the band was hired. 

"You guys be here tonight at eight," he paused, and added 
menacingly, out of sheer habit, ". . . or eke!" We broke the 
world's record for packing up our instruments and we didn't 
show up at eight that night or ever. 

In spite of all the enticements and distractions of Chicago in 
the roaring twenties, what we were interested in was playing and 
learning how to play. We played for dancing the one-step, 
the Charleston, the fox trot, the shimmy, the Black Bottom, the 
Lindy Hop and we played mainly the pop tunes of the day. 
Everybody danced in those days, and ballrooms bloomed in 
every town and city. It wasn't until I joined the Summa Cum 
Laude band in the late thirties that I learned the standard Dixie- 
land repertoire of marches and rags and blues and stomps. All the 
musicians Jimmie Noone, Earl Hines, Baby Dodds, Louis 
Armstrong, King Oliver, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds 
just played their music to enjoy it and have a good time, and 
in the first place to make a living. Several years later, I asked 
Lil Armstrong, Louis's former wife, how they all had felt about 
Louis's playing then, in the Sunset Cafe days in Chicago with 
King Oliver. "We didn't think anything about it," Lil Armstrong 
said. "He just played like that and we liked it fine, but it wasn't 
until the white folks started writing about it later on and saying 
it was so artistic that we really thought about it as unusual or 
special." But although our writers and painters and musicians 
were beginning to discover America, the public still thought 
anything not imported from Europe wasn't culture, so we were 
safe from the critics for a while. 

It wasn't until January of 1929, after I had been in Chicago 
nearly five months, that I finally heard Louis Armstrong play, 
when Wingy Manone and George Wetding took me to the 
Savoy Ballroom on the South Side. Louis was playing in Carroll 
Dickerson's band, with Zutty Singleton on drums, and there 



40 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

were two other bands, McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Tubby 
Hall's band with Kid Ory on trombone. When Louis came over 
to the table to greet Wingy and George, I was introduced to 
him. From listening to his records I already had some inkling 
of the warmth and power of the man, but I was totally un- 
prepared for that remarkable penetrating awareness underneath 
the genial, easygoing manner. All his senses seem to receive im- 
pressions of you; you feel he's not so much sizing you up as 
opening his mind to you, like a receiving set. You can't fake it 
with Louis. He can tell. 

I was just as unprepared for the full impact of his playing, 
too. When the Carroll Dickerson band went on the stand, Louis 
started off with the introduction to "West End Blues," and he 
broke the place up. He broke me up, too. I sent one quivering 
look at Wingy and George and took my leave. The sheer loveli- 
ness of Bix's tone and feeling had captured me, but the combina- 
tion of Louis's dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of 
tone so overwhelmed me that I felt as if I had stared into the 
sun's eye. All I could think of doing was to run away and hide 
till the blindness left me. 

Louis is the great creative jazz genius. He is the sum total of 
all the parts they all add up to Louis. Above all above all 
the electrifying tone, the magnificence of his ideas and the 
tightness of his harmonic sense, his superb technique, his power 
and ease, his hotness and intensity, his complete mastery of his 
horn above all this, he had the swing. No one knew what swing 
was till Louis came along. It's more than just the beat, it's con- 
ceiving the phrases in the very feeling of the beat, molding and 
building them so that they're an integral, indivisible part of the 
tempo. The others had the idea of it, but Louis could do it; he 
was the heir of all that had gone before and the father of all 
that was to come. 

Louis's singing, too, set the standard for popular ballad sing- 
ing. In the early days, his voice had little of the gravelly tones 
it acquired later; it was a sweet tenor, in perfect pitch, and it 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 41 

was from Louis's intonation, his phrasing, and his swing that 
everyone else learned how it should be done. 

This roly, rotund brown-skinned man with his marvelously 
expressive face, the comfortably broad-nostriled snub nose, the 
lips scarred from all that blowing, the wise, knowing, and in- 
nocent eyes, radiates warmth and energy like a cozy fireplace. 
But unaffected and unphony as he is, Louis has always been king. 
The white people didn't know about him for a long while, but 
he always had an enormous following among the colored people 
right from the start. He was always regal; from the very be- 
ginning the musicians, colored and white, always came to him, 
and he'd hold court wherever he happened to be backstage at a 
theatre or night club, between takes at a recording studio, or 
soaking in a steaming tub in his hotel bathroom. 

With all his genius, he has never lost his perspective. Louis 
knows who he is. Not only that, he knows who you are, and 
though he is the most approachable, most genuine person in 
the world, and though his charity is legendary, you can't mess 
with Louis. He has kept straight with himself because his trumpet 
comes first that's Louis's first law. To him his playing is a gift, 
and he'll just sit there and diink about the horn before he gets 
ready to play accepting his gift, he calls it. World-famous and 
wealthy as he has been for over thirty-five years, Louis has never 
forgotten what he wants to do just play that music and in 
doing just that he has done everything, 

In the early days, jazz wasn't considered an art, it was a song- 
and-dance music. In 1926 at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Louis 
and three other musicians, including Earl Hines, used to close the 
floor show by doing the Charleston and they really did it. 
Sometimes Louis and Zutty Singleton would do a specialty num- 
ber that broke the place up, with Zutty dressed up as a tough 
waterfront woman sashaying down the aisle to interrupt Louis's 
song. Louis had a preacher act, too; he'd call himself Reverend 
Satchmo, put on a frock coat, and deliver a mock sermon. These 
jazzmen thought of themselves as entertainers and they used 



42 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

comedy routines as a regular part of their performances. 

A week or so after I first heard Louis play, I had a letter from 
my sister Rose saying that my parents missed me and wanted 
me to come home. The last thing I wanted to do was to leave 
Chicago, but this was the first time I'd ever been away so long 
and in spite of the excitement I was a little homesick by now 
and worried about my parents. At home I found my mother and 
father living in a couple of dark little rooms in back of Pa's 
grocery store. Within a day I found a comfortable, bright little 
apartment for thirty-eight dollars a month, and my parents lived 
there until they died. 

Back on the jobs in Boston, everyone began talking about me, 
for I was no sooner on a job than I started trying to teach the 
drummer how to keep time. I was dying to play the way I played 
in Chicago but I couldn't do it in a band that couldn't keep 
time. I didn't make myself very popular, but even so, my repu- 
tation around Boston as a jazz trumpet was enhanced. 

Then, one rainy afternoon less than a month later a telegram 
arrived from Charlie Pierce. It was a fifty-word wire about a 
job at the Persian Ballroom in Chicago, giving all the particulars, 
when the job was to start, how much it paid, who the other 
musicians were, what the hours were, and saying that they'd 
send me the money for the train fare. I didn't have to think 
twice to wire back my one-word answer "YBS" which the 
musicians still kid me about 

"If it makes you so happy, go," my mother said, coming to 
the door while I packed, "only take care of yourself and don't 
stay so long this time." 

I didn't stay in Chicago very long this time and I didn't take 
very good care of myself, for as it turned out, I ended up in the 
hospital with a broken arm. Everything seemed to go wrong 
on this second trip right from the start. 

First of all, the job fell through because the Chicago union 
wouldn't let me work All the time I was in Chicago I was al- 
lowed to work only two or three nights a week, since union 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 43 

regulations require six months' residence before you can take a 
steady job. Charlie Pierce rang up NO SALE on the butcher-shop 
cash register and took out the money for my return fare, but 
Josh Billings and Dave Tough had more adventurous ideas. 
"Don't waste the money on railroad fare," they said. "Let's buy 
us a car and drive back to Boston. Who knows what we might 
run into on the way." 

The thought of Dave Tough in Boston was intriguing. A few 
minutes later, we drove out of a used-car lot in a rattletrap 1923 
Ford that must have been used for plowing. And since there were 
still a few dollars left over we drove straight to George 
Wettling's house where there was always a card game going on. 
Buying the car had lifted me out of the dumps and I came in very 
strong. 

"These guys play rough, Maxie," George said, looking 
worried. 

"So do I," I said. I pulled up a chair and they dealt me in. I 
was a card player from way back and I was full of confidence 
and in about three minutes I lost all my money. I should have 
known better. Tesch was a card shark from further back than 
I was. All he did between sets was play cards, and when we 
played at the Chinese restaurant at Sixty-second and Cottage 
Grove he used to take on the waiters and the Chinese are the 
original card sharks of all time. 

It was a very cold winter, that winter of 1929. At dawn Dave 
and Josh and I, penniless, left George's and went outside into 
the freezing night, cranked up the Ford, and wheezed over to 
Bud Freeman's house where we shivered in the car till Bud's 
father left for work. The next week we were really scratching. 
One night Dave and I drove to a friend's house at suppertime. 
His wife fixed Dave a plate of food. They didn't have much, so 
I said I wasn't hungry, but whenever she'd leave the room I'd 
grab a fork and take a fast turn eating from Dave's plate. A 
night or so later when we were trying to start up the old Ford, 
the final catastrophe struck. Frank Veneer got in the car to start 



44 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

the motor while I cranked. He made the mistake of pulling the 
spark down, making the car buck, and it crashed down on my 
arm, breaking my wrist. Josh rushed me over to his house where 
his father, who was a doctor, put it in a temporary splint before 
taking me over to St. Vincent's Hospital to have it set. 

I was really in a pickle now, with no money and my arm in a 
cast. The next day I wired my family for train fare home, ex- 
plaining about my arm. My mother and father came themselves 
and took me back home by train to Boston. 



Chapter 4 



"She won't go to Harlem in ermine and pearls. . . ." Lorenz 
Hart's lyrics, written in 1937, reflected the post-depression social 
consciousness, but in the twenties everybody went to Harlem 
society people, theatre people, literary, artistic, and sports figures, 
politicians and gamblers and businessmen and the more elite 
the customers and the more elegant their finery, the more it 
added to the merriment. For despite the drab poverty, the rotten 
housing, the menial jobs, the low pay, and the discrimination 
and segregation, Harlem was the first great chance for the 
thousands of southern Negroes who poured into New York after 
World War I, and though they were held down, they had the 
hope of better times. In the twenties, the colored people of 
Harlem were just glad to be living never mind for the moment 
about the freedom. Harlem hummed around the clock as it went 
about its business of making ends meet, and while the respectable, 
hard-working core of day-employed folk who wanted no part 
of high life or low life, especially jazz took their rest, an- 
other part of the population was up all night running their night 
dubs and speakeasies and restaurants and cooking their pigs' 
feet and fried chitt'lin's and barbecued spare ribs and brewing 

45 



46 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

their bathtub gin and corn whiskey and throwing their im- 
promptu house-rent parties and all-night card games and mak- 
ing their music. 

In this stage of their struggle, the people of Harlem were not 
only cheered and elated at the idea that they had something the 
white folks admired, they naturally welcomed the nightly flood 
of cash customers the music attracted. And though their own 
deep sense of pride and injustice burned undiminishcd, and 
though certain white artistic circles went in heavily for a kind 
of phony cultural mystique of the Negro, and though there was 
an element of titillation at the sight of black and white partners 
on the dance floor, the over-all spirit was the innocence and the 
optimism of the twenties. The Harlem musicians, who took 
special joy in astounding the white musicians, used to swing so 
hard that smoke almost came out of their horns, and the m.c. at 
the Saratoga Club used to make it a special point after each 
show "to thank the white musicians for coming up here to see 
us," although it was obvious that the shoe was on the other foot. 

Plain everyday people went to Harlem, too, to dine in the 
excellent uptown restaurants. Greenwich Village and Harlem 
were the two places to eat in those days. And though Chicago 
was the focal point of jazz in the mid-twenties, Harlem wasn't 
exactly dormant then, either. Musicians like Fletcher Henderson, 
Don Redman, and William McKinney had bands at one time 
or another in the Lenox Club, Small's Paradise, and Dickie 
Wells'. Chick Webb had a little band in The Nest before he 
had his big band jumping at the Savoy Ballroom. And the Big 
Three in Harlem in the late twenties the Cotton Club, Connie's 
Inn, and the Saratoga Club were rocking the rafters night after 
night. Although the tab at the Cotton Club was too steep for 
me ever to get in to hear Duke Ellington's band, I didn't feel 
underprivileged by having to hang out in the Saratoga Club, 
which, while not a big, fancy show place like the others, had a 
late, late show around 4 or 5 A.M., and all the musicians used 
to drop in after work to hear Luis Russell's great orchestra, with 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 47 

Henry "Red" Allen, J. C. Higginbotham, Albert Nicholas, Paul 
Barbarin, Charlie Holmes, and Pops Foster. 

Gene Krupa, who was working in the pit band of George 
Gershwin's Strike Up the Bmd, in 1929, would round up Bud 
Freeman, Dave Tough, Eddie Condon, and me on payday, when 
he was flush, and take us up to the Saratoga to hear Luis Russell's 
band swing the floor show. Dramatically handsome with that 
black shock of hair and flashing white smile, Gene was as good 
inside as he looked outside in those days, and he has never 
changed. The job in Strike Up the Band was his first big break 
in New York. Gershwin was crazy about his playing, and no 
wonder, because Gene was the first white drummer in a Broad- 
way pit band who could swing the beat so that the chorus girls 
could kick in time. 

The floor show was the big thing in those days. To hear Louis 
Armstrong swing the floor show at Connie's Inn in 1929 was 
really something. He'd get that chorus line of shapely young 
sepia-skinned girls stepping high, wide, and I mean hot. The 
next year, in 1930, Louis was appearing downtown on Broad- 
way in the Hot Chocolates revue, playing and singing "Ain't 
Misbehavin' " and getting himself known to the white world. 

But one of the greatest things going on in Harlem then was 
the piano players, who were in the throes of originating the 
Harlem stride piano style, developing it out of the old ragtime 
style by working out a richer chordal structure and a more 
flowing melodic and rhythmic line, free from the choppiness 
of ragtime. Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Willie the Lion 
Smith seemed to be running all the house-rent parties in Harlem 
in the twenties. The charge was a dollar admission for all the 
pigs' feet, home-fried potatoes, and fried chicken you could eat, 
and if you wanted more action than listening to the fabulous 
piano and drum or guitar combo, you could cut yourself into 
the card game going on in one room or the crap shooting in the 
next. Pod's and Jerry's at 1 3 3rd Street had Willie the Lion Smith 
as its regular pianist, but some time between midnight and dawn 



48 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

James P. Johnson or Fats Waller or Luckey Roberts or all three 
would come rolling in and the cutting contests would be on. 
Cutting contests are good, clean, bloodless manslaughter, com- 
mitted in the deepest sincerity. For men to whom music is a 
way of life, these contests separate the men from the boys. When 
one musician cuts another on his instrument, the loser submits 
to his master, because he is so sincere himself. "Man, you 
showed me! You really showed me tonight!" But the loser lives 
for the next session when Ae'll cut the master and be king again. 

You'd hear a lot of marvelous girl singers in the clubs along 
1 3 5th Street, too. In the course of going from table to table, a 
singer would take about fifteen choruses of a song, and the con- 
stant repetition would drive her to fool around witli the phrasing 
and the beat, thus taking the evolution of jazz singing another 
step along the way toward breaking out of the rigid confines of 
the tune. Some of the singers displayed other talents, in their 
way of picking up their tips while going from table to table, 
and some of the singers were exotic Negro female impersonators. 
One of the most renowned of these, a glamorous creature in 
polished satin and flashing jewels who called herself Gloria 
Swanson, was one of the big attractions at Dickie Wells' night 
club. 

While I was still recuperating from that ill-fated second trip 
to Chicago, Bud Freeman sent for me again to play a job in 
Binghamton, New York. Although my broken wrist was still 
in a sling, there was nothing wrong with my lip, as I explained 
to my mother while she helped me pack. At the end of our first 
week in Binghamton, the manager ran off with the money, in 
time-honored show-business tradition, leaving us stranded until 
the ever-resourceful Bud bailed us out by borrowing our fare 
home from one of his friends up there. A short time later I was 
in New York, and when I heard Louis was playing up in Harlem 
I went up to hear him. Although I had met Louis only a couple 
of times by then, he came over to my table to say hello, and in 
about two minutes I was telling him about my experience in 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 49 

Binghamton. You just naturally spill your troubles to that warm- 
hearted man, but I was completely unprepared for him to put 
his hand in his pocket and pull out some bills. "We're all en- 
tided to our ups and downs in this life," Louis said gruffly, "but 
a cat has to hold up his head. Here, pops, tuck this away." I 
kept refusing and he kept insisting until I finally agreed to a 
couple of fives on the condition that he would let me pay him 
back. It wasn't until a year later that I had the chance. I used to 
frequent a place in Boston called the Railroad Club, a boarding- 
house for professional Negroes, where I used to sit in with a 
piano player named Henry, One night while I was there, Louis, 
who was in town for an engagement, came in to catch a quick 
meal before his show, and I went over to his table and tried to 
pay back the ten dollars. Now it was his turn to refuse and mine 
to insist, until finally he growled that he'd take it on one con- 
dition "if you autograph it for me, daddy." I felt as big as 
Rockefeller as I carefully wrote my name on a ten spot, which 
Louis gravely tucked away in his wallet. 

During the course of 1929, I became acquainted with some 
of the other Chicago musicians I hadn't met there the previous 
year. Around June, Benny Goodman, who was in Ben Pollack's 
band at the Park Central Hotel, got a one-night job on his own 
to play Princeton, and Bud Freeman recommended me for the 
trumpet spot. The train from Boston arrived so early in the 
morning that I sat around in Central Park until it seemed a decent 
hour to telephone Benny and find out when and where to meet 
him that evening. Benny had hired about twenty men to play 
the job, but it wound up with only four of us who could keep 
going Dave Tough, Joe Sullivan, Benny, and me. This was the 
first date I ever played with Dave as well as with Benny, who 
turned out to be a very unassuming, plain, quiet fellow, until 
he started to play. Benny was highly complimentary about my 
playing, and when we returned to New York he put me up 
overnight at his apartment. When I woke up the next afternoon, 
limp as a wet rag, the apartment was empty. Benny had gone 



50 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

off to a rehearsal, but he had left a note enclosing a five-dollar 
bill for my breakfast and thanking me for helping out, I felt fine. 

Then a couple of weeks later I went on a tour of New Eng- 
land with Red Nichols. The only memorable thing to me about 
this job was that it was where I first met Pee Wee Russell and 
Eddie Condon. The twelve-piece band had Bud Freeman, who, 
as usual, had recommended me for the job; Pee Wee and Milt 
Mezzrow on saxes; Tommy Coonin, Red Nichols, and me on 
trumpets; Pete Peterson and Herb Taylor on trombones; Joe 
Sullivan on piano; Dave Tough; Sammy Levitan on bass; and 
Eddie Condon on guitar. 

We were out on the road for three or four weeks, playing 
dance halls and colleges. We all worked hard in this band, and 
sometimes we sounded pretty good, but there was a basic con- 
flict between Red Nichols and the band that eventually led to 
disaster. The Chicago boys couldn't read very well, it's true, 
and they did drink a lot, but even with Mezz around there was 
very little marijuana smoking going on. These men were all 
trying to make something of the band, and above all they had a 
great feeling for jazz. Red McKenzie had suggested these 
musicians when Nichols asked him for ideas, and McKenzie 
told him these were not only the best jazzmen around, they were 
out of work and available. They wanted to work but no one 
would hire them. 

To put it bluntly, Nichols loathed us and we returned the 
compliment. The Chicago musicians had been brought up on 
Louis and Jimmic Noone and Earl Hines and Johnny Dodds 
and they had all played with Beiderbecke. Red Nichols loved 
the way Bix played and he tried to copy Bix, but now he was 
playing with men who knew Bix better than he did. On his part, 
Nichols was disappointed in this bunch of renegades and was 
continually frustrated by their unrestrained, free-swinging ap- 
proach to jazz. At that time Bud was the only one who had real 
command of his instrument; the rest of us were still learning 
and we had our good days and our bad days, and, as far as Red 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 51 

was concerned, our bad ways. Pee Wee was playing third alto 
sax and he didn't have much chance to do anything in this band. 

We went on the road in two old Cadillacs reminiscent of the 
ones the gangsters used, one a seven-passenger black sedan and 
the other a touring car with isinglass windows. Our luggage 
was strapped on the running boards and we'd flip a coin every 
day to see who'd have to sit on the jump seats. One evening in 
New Hampshire we stayed overnight in some broken-down little 
cabins beside a muddy little lake, and the next morning we 
dunked ourselves in the coffee-colored water and baked in the 
sun before piling back into the cars. On the road again we ran 
into a violent thunderstorm which seemed to have the same 
itinerary, with lightning playing tag with us for miles. That 
night we were sore and stiff and painfully sunburned, and when 
we unstrapped our bags from the running boards we discovered 
that the cheap cardboard suitcases had melted and the color from 
the red sweaters we wore on the stand had stained our shirts an 
angry pink. On the bandstand that night we were a study in 
reds and pinks, and when Nichols tried leading this group of 
tired, sunburned guys who were so disgusted that they could 
barely play, his patience lasted about two numbers before he 
stalked furiously off the stand, yelling to me to take over. In a 
little while everyone suddenly woke up and began swinging, 
and when Red came back and heard us he got even madder. He 
thought we had been holding out on him, like it was a mutiny 
or something, and he took it personally. By that time we were 
all so beat none of us could think straight, and Red fired the 
whole band on the spot, and that was the end of that tour. 

There is nothing like music for making friends and for 
making hard feelings and the band was just as responsible for 
the whole fiasco as Red was maybe more so, since he was the 
leader and it was his band. A highly proficient and well-schooled 
cornetist with a great command of his horn, Red loved jazz so 
much that he turned his back on a career as a legitimate trumpet 
player. He has done a great deal for jazz, and he was one of the 



52 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

first to record some of the then unknown jazz greats, such as 
Beiderbecke, Teagarden, Teschmaker, Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, 
Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, Joe Sullivan, Gene Krupa, 
Adrian Rollini, and Glenn Miller. 

After the tour, we straggled back to New York, where several 
of us checked into the Riverside Towers, at Eightieth Street 
and Riverside Drive. Dave Tough and Josh Billings and I were 
all squeezed into Josh's room one afternoon all our rooms were 
about the size of a closet worrying about where our next meal 
was coming from, when Gene Krupa, who was living there too, 
poked his head in the door. 

"I just had a call from B. A. Rolfe," he said to Dave. "He 
needs a drummer to fill in tonight, but I can't make it. How 
about it? You can all go over" he nodded at Josh and me 
"and get a free meal out of it, too." 

"Yes!" Josh and I said in unison before Dave could open his 
mouth. "He'll take it." Dave was always fussy about whom he 
played with, and we weren't taking any chances on his turning 
it down. 

In those days the bands used to go on the stand at six o'clock 
and play for the dinner crowd, Dave and I dashed to our own 
cells to get cleaned up and at five-thirty we were sitting at a 
table at the Palais Royal, a huge Chinese restaurant, now the 
Latin Quarter, which was Paul Whiteman's old stamping ground 
in the twenties. We had ordered our dinners and were devour- 
ing the celery and black olives when Dave went up on the stand 
to play the first set, Rolfe gave the down beat and proceeded 
to lead the band the way all leaders did in the twenties, pumping 
his arms up and down with all the animation of a tin soldier, 
Dave must have played all of three bars before a look of sheer 
incredulity spread over his face. The next second he quietly laid 
down the drumsticks and walked off the stand. He resembled a 
sort of young George Arliss in those days, and he did everything 
with immense, deliberate dignity. Just as Dave had stopped play- 
ing, the waiter appeared at our table, puffing under the weight 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 53 

of the tray loaded with our dinners. Josh gave an agonized moan 
as the aroma of the sizzling steak wafted past his nose, but I 
grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of his seat. 

"Don't run, but don't take all day getting out of here," I 
whispered. 

"But couldn't you have stuck it out for just one set?" Josh 
pleaded with Dave when we were safely outside. 

Dave turned around and stared at us. "Didn't you hear them?" 
he said, his voice shaking with outrage. Though Josh and I were 
shaking with hunger, there was nothing we could say. We all 
felt a dedication in those days, beyond reasonable or practical 
considerations, for what we considered the real, true thing. 

But we were practically alone in our feeling about jazz, and 
after a couple of more weeks of pulling in my belt until it nearly 
circled me twice, I returned home at the end of the summer 
and landed a job in one of Leo Reisman's bands to play in the 
new Bradford Hotel. The people who managed the Brunswick 
Hotel, which housed the famous Egyptian Room where Leo 
Reisman had reigned as Boston society's favorite maestro, had 
just taken over the Bradford, and they asked Leo to put an 
orchestra in there. Leo was now waving his baton at the Central 
Park Casino in New York, where Mayor Jimmy Walker, Bar- 
bara Hutton, Mark Hellinger and all the high-living society of 
the glittering twenties hung out, but Leo came back to Boston 
to put the Bradford Hotel band together. About fifty musicians 
showed up to audition for the band, and while I waited for my 
turn I began planning how I could do something different to 
catch Reisman's attention, Louis Armstrong's record of "I Can't 
Give You Anything But Love, Baby" had just come out. Of 
all the beautiful things on that record, aside from Louis's won- 
derful playing, I had been particularly struck with the way the 
band had held long sustained chords behind his chorus. When it 
was my turn to audition, I asked the saxophones to do the same 
while I played the melody very simply and straight. 

"Sign him up!" Leo yelled to his manager when I had fin- 



54 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

ished. He had never heard anything like that before, and from 
then on he was fascinated with me because I had dared try some- 
thing unusual for those rimes. 

Although I had been on the road with Pee Wee Russell that 
summer, I didn't get to know him well until he came to Boston 
later that fall. The Bradford Hotel job, which was one of my 
first big jobs, paid seventy-five dollars a week, a lot of money 
in those days, and I worked there all that winter, so when Pee 
Wee decided to quit the band he had come to Boston with, I 
was able to invite him to stay at my house. 

Pee Wee was always the same a shy, mournful-looking man, 
suffering the tortures of the extremely sensitive, so that he was 
often taciturn and uncommunicative, and when he did talk it was 
the same as his playing he'd talk in sudden, swooping little 
bursts and slide in a wry remark with a shrug, crossing and un- 
crossing his long, nervous legs and hunching his bony shoulders 
or screwing up his long, sad face. My mother took one look at 
Pee Wee's skinny frame and headed for her kitchen. It never 
occurred to Pee Wee to cat when he was on his own but he 
docilely and absent-mindedly ate everything she put before him. 
Then my mother, who never touched spirits in her life, startled 
me by taking me aside and whispering, ". . . but Pec Wee is a 
man who needs his liquor," and though it was still Prohibition 
she got him his gin somehow. Pee Wee used to ask me where 
she got it, but I was as mystified as he was, and when I asked 
her she would just wink and say, "You think you're the only one 
around here has big connections?" I reported back to Pec Wee 
that it came from somebody's bathtub, but I couldn't say exactly 
whose. 

I was always a great walker, and Pee Wee used to unwind 
himself from the rocking chair with groans and whimpers and 
come along with me. Our apartment was on the outskirts of town 
on Columbia Road and there was a way of getting to the city via 
a whole series of little parks* The Franklin Park Zoo was three 
blocks away from my house, and at night the lions roared me to 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 55 

sleep. As we strolled along, Pee Wee would tell me about the 
days in 1926 when he played in Bix's band at the Arcadia Ball- 
room in St. Louis, his home town, and we'd exchange anecdotes 
about Bix by the hour. After a few months, Pee Wee took an 
apartment of his own when he landed a job at the Crescent 
Club, a speakeasy which opened from midnight to 5 A.M. I used 
to love to stop in and hear him play the pop tunes of the day 
he played them marvelously. 

By 193 r, as the reverberations of the stock market crash faded 
away and the country found itself sunk in a paralysis of fear, un- 
employment, and want, everything slowed down to a sickening 
standstill. Wall Street brokers had ceased to dive out of windows, 
the unemployed were selling apples on the streets of New York 
and standing in bread lines, the Lindbergh kidnaping, the Dust 
Bowl, and Dillinger filled the headlines, and anybody who had a 
spare dime played miniature golf to forget his troubles for half 
an hour. People stayed home at night and listened to their radio, 
or opened their windows and listened to their neighbor's radio 
if theirs was in hock, and on Saturday night everyone went to 
the movies, where Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, William 
Powell, and Clark Gable brought glamour and romance to drab 
lives. On the radio everyone listend to Amos 'n' Andy, Fred 
Allen, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and Will Rogers, while new 
young singers began sprouting up with fifteen-minute programs 
each evening and attracting huge f ollowings: Bing Crosby, Russ 
Columbo, Kate Smith, Ruth Etting, and the Boswell Sisters and 
Morton Downey and Lanny Ross. 

The top composers George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome 
Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke besides 
turning out some of the all-time great show tunes for Broadway 
musicals, began writing for the movies. But in the main, jazz took 
a nosedive along with the blithe spirit of the twenties. The public 
didn't have the heart for the never-say-die attitude of hot jazz, 
and the sweet, soothing strains of the Wayne King, Guy Lom- 
bardo, Rudy Vallee, and Fred Waring bands took over the 



56 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

scene. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took their bands 
to Europe, the young white jazzmen took jobs in the commercial 
bands, and the Harlem musicians kept their hand in by playing 
at house-rent parties. In the Midwest, however, especially around 
Kansas City, where the Prendergast mob was in power, things 
were grill romping, and the gangsters who owned the night clubs 
were hiring jazzmen like Sammy Price, Lester Young, Count 
Basie, and Jo Jones to keep things happy. 

As the months and years of 1931-32 and most of '33 dragged 
by, I even wondered sometimes if I had dreamt the wonderful 
times in Chicago and Harlem. The only way I managed to get 
through those long, lonely years was to start off the day by 
walking the mile around Franklin Park two or three times until 
I was at peace with myself and could face another day with its 
discouraging prospect of no work. Day by day I walked through 
the depression years, and I'd think to myself, "Here I am, just 
a little guy with a name like Max Kaminsky, living in Boston, 
the deadest city in the world, and the only thing I know about 
is playing the trumpet, and if I can only sweat this out maybe 
someday I can make it and people will like me in spite of my 
name and how I look." So for three years I scrambled and 
scratched and worked when I could, and the rest of the time I 
just waited, while I baby-sat for my niece Shirley. Prosperity 
and jazz were just around the corner, and along witii 
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" the other song people were 
singing in the bleak, cheerless days of the depression was "Life Is 
Just a Bowl of Cherries . . . Don't take it serious, it's too mys- 
terious . . ," 

Although I practiced a little and found places to sit in and 
play when I had no work, playing seemed to come so naturally 
that it never occurred to me to study. I remember one of my 
mother's favorite sayings: "It's very simple. If you want to do 
something, just do it," but I never thought of studying. All I 
knew about was trying to find work, and even then my mother 
had to help out sometimes. During the Jewish holidays when 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 57 

we didn't want my father, who was very pious, to know I was 
going to work, I used to stroll nonchalantly out of the house, 
my coat collar flipped up to hide my tuxedo, and as soon as I 
was safely outside I'd whip around to the side window, and my 
mother would hand me my trumpet case. We weren't really 
fooling my father, of course, but he never said anything as long 
as we did it behind his back and didn't involve him in it. 

In 1933 things were so bad I didn't get a single gig the entire 
summer. Even my father, who was always so silent that when 
he occasionally said something as ordinary as "good morning" 
a pall of nervous apprehension would fall over the house, felt 
called upon to remark one night, "No work, humm?" There 
was no reproach in it, for although my father had been against 
my becoming a musician at first, he accepted it later on. My 
jobs were a big help to my parents, and when he saw how I 
loved the music, there was never any argument about it. 

One thing I did do was to listen regularly to the Boston Sym- 
phony broadcasts on Sunday afternoons as well as to the records 
of the new classical innovators: Stravinsky, Milhaud, Bartok, 
Mahler, Schoenberg. I fell in love with Delius and used to listen 
to his Appalachia and Brigg Fair for endless hours, wallowing 
in the tender, sad yearning these pieces used to make me feel. 
But when it came to playing, this wasn't what I wanted to do. 
This music sounded new and strange in those days but jazz was 
even newer and much harder to play it was scarcely formed 
yet. The beat and the melody and harmony were still in the 
process of being welded together. 

When I did find jobs during those years, they were often out 
of town and the experience of traveling all around New England 
in all kinds of weather and playing under all kinds of conditions 
with all sorts of musicians taught me how to take care of myself 
and get along. In fact, it was usually in Boston that I'd get myself 
into trouble, like the night when I was out with Slappy Wallace. 
Slappy, a long, lanky Negro, was not only one of die greatest 
dancers IVe ever seen, he was one of the nicest guys I ever knew. 



58 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

He had all the class of Bill Robinson, with a dash of Bert Wil- 
liams' whimsey, and he was so marvelous that when Duke Elling- 
ton came to Boston he always hired Slappy to dance on the same 
bill with his band. But Slappy never could be persuaded to come 
to New York because nothing could convince him that one day 
the Atlantic Ocean wasn't going to sweep over Long Island 
and drown the city. 

Slappy was built like a question mark, a tall, loose-limbed ar- 
rangement of bone and muscle, topped with a wonderfully kind 
brown face. When he danced, his vague looseness was trans- 
formed into quicksilver, and he could make a statue smile with 
his bodily wit and grace as he ad-libbed to the music. We used 
to meet late at night after work and go to a restaurant in the 
colored section for some fried chicken while Slappy limbered 
up to the records on the phonograph. This jukebox had an auto- 
mated violin in the glass-enclosed top and when you inserted a 
nickel the bow would scrape out the tune. Slappy would take off 
to the music and the customers would throw coins on the floor, 
which he was glad to get. 

Through the years I came to know Slappy quite well. One 
night when I was in the fried-chicken joint with Russell O'Brien, 
a friend from high-school days who always loved jazz, Slappy 
invited us to come with him to visit two girls with whom he 
had worked as dancers in a night club. Their apartment was in a 
dilapidated old wooden tenement in the heart of the colored 
section, and as soon as we got there Slappy sat down on the floor 
and started strumming softly on his ukelele while the girls went 
into their show routine. This was such a decrepit old house and 
they made such a rumpus in their high heels with their tapping 
and their strutting, they shook the whole building and bits of 
plaster showered down on us from the walls and ceilings, but we 
were all oblivious to everything but the music and the dancing. 
All of a sudden the door burst open and a policeman, with half a 
dozen other cops crowding behind him, rushed in with drawn 
guns. The sight of Slappy on the floor with his uke and the girls 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 59 

halted abruptly in midstep, and Russell and me lounging peace- 
fully in a couple of rickety old chairs, drew them up short. 

"Slappy!" exclaimed the first cop. "What the hell is going 
on here?" 

"Why, I'm just giggin'!" Slappy said mildly. The policeman 
misunderstood him, however, thinking he had said, "I'm just 
kidding." 

"Well, Tm not kidding!" he said angrily. "Come on, get out 
of here, you guys, break it up!" 

Slappy and Russell and I got up fast and walked downstairs, 
and I'm telling you there were at least five squad cars down there 
and a vast, buzzing crowd of people milling around. We walked 
out like nothing happened, and here it looked like the President 
had been assassinated or something, but we didn't stop to ask 
any questions. Later on we found out that a few hours earlier, a 
few blocks away, a Chinaman had chopped up a white woman, 
and he had made quite a lot of noise doing it. The whole city 
as well as the police force was very jittery that night about any 
kind of noise, and I guess the neighbors, on hearing the whole 
commotion with the building shaking on its foundations, thought 
the same mayhem and butchery were going on in there, too. That 
little episode cured me for a while from seeking any social life, 
and I went back to my solitary walks and to driving around Bos- 
ton and talking about life till all hours of the night with my two 
buddies, Louis Rosenthal and Sidney Epstein. 

Like most young men who are ambitious or have a dream, I 
was terrified of marriage. My mother would drop hints about 
eligible girls in the neighborhood, but I avoided them like a 
Guy Lombardo arrangement, and the girls whose company I 
frequented were not the ones you'd bring home to mother. Be- 
hind the dread of getting trapped into marriage and waking up 
one day to find myself working in iny father-in-law's hardware 
store, was the yearning to have a girl of my own, but it took a 
while before I had the gratification of knowing the girls liked 
me. I had gone through an agony about my small size a few years 



60 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

earlier when I was in my teens. "What girl is going to look at a 
little half -pint like me?" I used to groan to myself in a misery 
of torment. I even went through a spell where I hated to leave 
the house. When I was around seventeen I became so desperate 
that I went to a shoe store and asked for a pair of shoes with 
built-up heels. The salesman brought out a pair of light-tan 
"yellow" shoes with sharp, pointed toes a mile long and heels 
about four inches high, shaped like the heels on cowboy boots. 

"I'll take them," I said, though I could scarcely walk in them. 
I got as far as half a block away from the store before I tottered 
into a doorway and howled out loud, "What am I doing to 
myself!" The shoes not only were lolling me, but when I had 
caught glimpses of myself limping past store windows, I real- 
ized that all you could see was a long, dazzling pair of pointed 
yellow shoes with a little blur of a person on top of them. They 
made me look five times shorter than I was. Not even my mother, 
let alone a teen-age girl, could have kept a straight face at the 
sight of me. I crawled home by way of back alleys and the min- 
ute I reached my room I took a hammer and chisel and pried off 
the heels before taking them to the shoemaker. 

"Wot happen to da heels?" the shoemaker yelled, waving the 
loathsome shoes at me. "Oh, a friend gave them to me like that," 
I muttered. "Put on a pair of regular heels and shine them with 
the darkest brown polish you have." After that experience I 
swore to myself I was going to be what I was, and the heU with 
anyone who didn't like it. 

During this time, tall, handsome Jackie Marshard, whom I'd 
come to be friends with since our boyhood fights, was working 
as a drummer for society band leaders in Boston. His striking 
Robert Taylor good looks and his outgoing personality made 
him a favorite with die society girls and their families and it 
wasn't long before he was getting offers to play for their coming- 
out parties. Jackie took to the business end of music like pretzels 
to beer, but he was a natural showman, too, and at times he was 
torn between wanting to be either a great drummer or a sue- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 6l 

cessful businessman. He always looked so blooming, with his 
immaculate clothes and his strict regimen of no smoking and no 
drinking, that it was hard to picture him struggling and scratch- 
ing the way I knew you had to in order to stay with the music. 
"You'd better go into the business end," I told him, sticking my 
hands in my pockets to hide my frayed cuffs. "You haven't the 
heart to suffer with the music. If you really wanted to be a 
musician you wouldn't have to ask anybody's advice. Nobody 
and nothing could stop you." 



Chapt 



er 



In the fall of 1933, faint signs of life finally began to stir in the 
nation. 'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" was the theme 
song when FDR took office as President and his energy began 
radiating out to the people like the sun itself. With the repeal 
of Prohibition, the speakeasy era passed into oblivion and jazz 
climbed another rung up the ladder of respectability as it freed 
itself from guilt by association with the illegality and licentious- 
ness of the bootleg era. 

Around this time Mezz Mezzrow, who had always had the 
idea in the back of his head of a big band, gathered together a 
large group of jomnen, including Pee Wee, Bud Freeman, and 
Eddie Condon. I came down from Boston, and Floyd O'Brien 
came in from Chicago. While Mezz was trying to find work for 
us, we were all so broke that three or four of us had to stay at 
Mezz's apartment up in the Bronx, and it was awful. Mezz was 
married and had a son, and I don't know how his wife stood it, 
because even I couldn't stand it. The apartment had only one 
bedroom; the rest of the sleeping accommodations consisted of 
another bed in the living room, and the floor, and there was no 
money and no food. Mezz tried very hard with this band, but 

62 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 63 

although we had a few little jobs, nothing much happened except 
for a record date in the spring of 1934, when we made "35th 
and Calumet"/"Old-Fashioned Love" and "Sendin' the Vipers"/ 
"Apologies." Mezz used a mixed group on this date, adding 
Benny Carter, John Kirby, Willie the Lion Smith, and Chick 
Webb, who used just a snare drum, a top cymbal and a high-hat 
cymbal, the same equipment the boppers use today. 

But I like to eat, and I like at least a certain amount of privacy, 
and when I couldn't take the gypsy-caravan life any longer, Mezz 
found me a room with a family on 144^1 Street. If I had thought 
it was rugged at Mezz's house, I hadn't seen anything yet. My 
room was separated by flimsy French doors from another rented 
room occupied by a Russian opera singer who bellowed his scales 
from dawn to dark, with a few folk songs from the steppes 
thrown in after supper. That did it. I told Mezz I had to quit the 
band and find work so I could get some sleep. In a few days I 
landed a job with Leo Reisman again. About five minutes after I 
received my first pay check I was packed and out of that room 
and was writing my name in the register at the Lismore Hotel 
on West Seventy-second Street. I was no sooner unpacked when 
Eddie Condon moved in with me. Eddie liked to eat, too, 
occasionally. 

Leo Reisman, who had made a cross-country tour earlier that 
year with George Gershwin, was on the air twice a week on the 
Philip Morris and Mincemeat radio shows then, and when I went 
over to the old NBC building at 7 1 1 Fifth Avenue to see if I 
could get work with him, he made me audition for him again. 
Leo never trusted anybody; for Leo you always had to audition, 
no matter how many times you had worked for him before. If 
he had been the manager of the Metropolitan Opera he would 
have made Caruso himself audition before each season. I wasn't 
a member of the New York local then, but Leo obtained permis- 
sion from the union to use me as a featured performer to play 
just the themes at the beginning and end of his programs. Leo 
used to like the way I growled, and for one of his theme songs, 



64 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

"What Is This Thing Called Love?," I had to growl only for 
about six bars at the beginning and end of the song. Sometimes 
I'd get so bored during the programs that I'd sneak in a few 
bars with the rest of the band, but whenever Leo caught me, he'd 
shake his finger ferociously and hiss, "You're playing\" 

Leo, who had been an institution as a society band leader in 
Boston during Prohibition, was perfect for die twenties. John 
O'Hara once wrote about "that minor phenomenon called Leo 
Reisman," whom he dubbed "the Spirit of Expensive Fun," and 
though the band's style, he said, was mannered and affected, it 
had a great vitality and was "rowdy after a certain polite fash- 
ion." That last phrase brings to my mind the picture of Leo 
lying on his back on the bandstand and kicking up his legs to 
mark the beat for the band a position he resorted to when he 
became tired of waving his baton. 

Leo was all dramatics, all the way. He affected the maestro 
look, with his long bushy hair which was always falling over 
his eyes, and his beat-up, crashed hats. Those were the days of 
full-dress suits and satin evening capes, but instead of a silk 
topper, Leo always wore his old, broken-down black fedora, 
an affectation that probably dated from his days with the Balti- 
more Symphony Orchestra. All the musicians looked up to band 
leaders like Leo Reisman and Paul Whiteman in those days. They 
did everything in such grand style, but Paul Whiteman was the 
greatest of them all in the twenties. Whiteman was lavishly gen- 
erous to his men; when he took over the defunct Goldkette band 
and brought them out to Hollywood to make the movie The 
King of Jazz, he arranged to have a Ford car available for each 
musician while they were there. When Beiderbccke was too sick 
to play, Whiteman kept his band chair empty in homage to 
Bix's greatness. Whiteman tried to make jazz acceptable and 
respectable by attempting to raise it to a symphonic level, and 
though this wasn't the real thing, WHteman was a tremendous 
factor in bringing it to public attention and creating interest in it. 

As for Leo, he made the Egyptian Room in the Brunswick 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 65 

Hotel a living legend of the glory of the twenties. People came 
from all over the country to see him there. He did the same thing 
for the Central Park Casino, As a kid I had always thought the 
Egyptian Room was beyond anything I could ever hope to see, 
but one day when I was about fifteen I ventured inside the Bruns- 
wick and took a peek at the fabulous room where all this music 
was being played, and for months afterward I couldn't believe 
I had actually walked into that room. It wasn't the idea of its 
elegance so much as that it was the place where the new music 
was being played. It was all so exciting, this beginning of the 
feeling of a little jazz seeping into the white man's orchestra, 
and Leo even pre-dated Whiteman. Of course, their music 
wasn't "hot," but Leo himself did have a feeling for jazz, con- 
sidering the bands of those days, especially the society bands. 
Although Leo thought the jazz of Louis Armstrong was too 
free and untrammeled, he did admire Duke Ellington for his 
wonderful dynamics and his musical sense of the dramatic. And 
he was right in that, for the Duke is the real jazz composer so 
far. He knows all about the art of orchestration and he has the 
taste and knows how to make use of all the instruments, but 
the main thing he never forgets is the real jazz feeling. 

I liked working with Leo, in any case, and I always loved 
working in New York. Leo never knew exactly how to treat me, 
or even what to call me, and since I was little he somehow hit 
on calling me Ukulele. For my part, I never knew what Leo 
was going to say or do next. One night I invited Eddie Condon 
to come down to the radio station to see the show, and after I 
unpacked my horn I ducked into the washroom to comb my 
hair. Eddie came wandering in after me, and after a minute Leo 
popped out of a booth. I'd been working for him for four months 
now but when I said, "Hello, Leo," he stared at me as if he'd 
never seen me before and exclaimed in a tone of utter astonish- 
ment, "What are you doing here, Ukulele?" and then he bustled 
out, leaving Eddie and me gaping at one another. Fve never been 
able to think of an answer to that remarkable question. I do think 



66 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

that underneath all his carrying on, Leo was a very timid man, 
afraid to trust his feelings with anyone, and he covered up his 
timidity with a brusque manner and by trying to put fear into his 
musicians. 

When the job with Leo Reisman was over at the end of Jan- 
uary, 1934, things really got rough for me, and naturally for 
Eddie, too, since the job with Leo had been paying the rent at 
the Lismore. Condon, in those days as now, was a bantam-sized, 
cocksure little guy, with an impudent Irish face, a quicksilver 
mind, and a lethal tongue. Bow-tied, debonair, tight-mouthed, and 
gimlet-eyed, he still preserves today, in a kind of pickled way, 
the jaunty looks of a perennial youth of the twenties. He al- 
ways seemed so sure of himself. All the Chicago gang always had 
that same air of devastating assurance. I used to tell them they 
were all trying to be characters in a James T. Farrell novel. 
Maybe they had to be that tough to make it. Each time I return 
to Chicago nowadays I see the city more clearly as it is and 
not through the haze of nostalgia of the past and when I look 
at those endless stretches of appallingly ugly, barren streets I 
think of the Chicago musicians as schoolboys struggling to play 
the music and holding on to it as something to believe in, some- 
thing beautiful they were starved for. The Midwcsterners, iso- 
lated on that vast, empty prairieland, have always been starved 
for culture, for art and music and architecture and learning. 
They're the great travelers, the prototype of the American tour- 
ist, in search of the beauty of the ages, the things and places and 
thoughts of mankind. They are so lonely at least they were. 
Now they have television. 

Eddie was like an owl he never came to life till the sun went 
down. If he was up and about at two or three in the afternoon, 
which was seldom, he'd be silent and morose and take refuge 
behind a newspaper or a book. As the sun set his star would rise, 
and he'd become his witty, fascinating, entertaining self. The 
cockiness and the wisecracking covered a dogged honesty, a 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 67 

loathing of sham and pretentiousness of any kind, and a pro- 
found modesty. He always had great charm for me. One flat- 
tering word from Eddie would make me feel I'd been knighted, 
and I'd keep hanging around him, hoping to hear more. When 
Eddie compliments you, you feel more than satisfied you feel 
justified. 

Eddie's special talent, aside from his devotion to jazz and his 
wonderful beat-keeping guitar, lay in organizing; he was one 
of the first to bring the colored and white musicians together on 
record dates, but there weren't always opportunities for doing 
this. Nineteen thirty-four was one of the coldest and snowiest 
of the depression winters. A snowstorm was a welcome event, 
though, because at least then the unemployed could get a job 
shoveling snow for the Sanitation Department and take home a 
couple of dollars to feed their families. On February i4th, with 
the temperature at four below, we found ourselves locked out 
of my room at the Lismore for nonpayment of rent. No fig- 
ures on a theromometer can make you feel colder than having no 
place to go and no one to take you in. After several desperate 
phone calls around midnight we finally found a Samaritan in 
Gene Krupa, who took us in on what we found out later was 
his wedding night. 

The next day Eddie took me downtown and introduced me 
to his friend Sid Jacobs, who was playing drums with Joe 
Venuti's band at Delmonico's, at Fifty-first Street and Broadway, 
underneath the old Roseland Ballroom. I sat in for one set and 
Joe hired me then and there. 

The whole experience of playing in Joe Venuti's band was 
sheer pleasure. To begin with, I never knew a finer, kinder man 
than Joe Venuti. He had that knack of making you feel he was 
on your side all the way, and he treated you royally as few men 
could. When Wingy Manone came to town that spring, I 
brought him over to the bandstand and introduced him to Joe. 

"Have him sit in with the boys," Joe said, and after one number 



68 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

he hired Wingy on the spot, adding another trumpet player to 
the band just like that. Later I got Bud Freeman into the band 
exactly the same way. 

Joe had his wild side, though; in fact, he was as wild as he 
was generous and that's saying a lot. With Joe, to feel was to 
act, and his humor was laced with extravagant violence. You 
never knew what he was going to do next, and when he did it 
you couldn't believe it. He was famous for his pretended loath- 
ing of bass players. He claimed they were always goofing off, 
and he'd try to catch them at it so he could swoop down on a 
poor guy, and with that familiar mad glint in his black eye, he'd 
seize the bass and heave it out on the dance floor. There was 
another little Jimmy Durante-type bit he was fond of doing, too. 
He'd come out with a cheap violin, and after playing it so 
beautifully that it sounded like a Stradivarius, he'd fly into a fury 
at it and smash it to bits, swearing a blue streak in vaudevillian 
broken Italian. On the golf course, when his game was going 
badly, he'd throw his clubs, his golf bags, and his caddy, if he 
wasn't nimble, into the water hazard, and if his partner wasn't 
wary he'd land there, too. On Wingy Manone's birthday, Venuti 
sent him a little box containing one cuff link, and some years 
later, on Bing's birthday, he sent Crosby, who had his own 
racing stables by then, the gift of a moth-eaten, sway-backed, 
ancient yellow nag. Once he had the sax player take chorus 
after chorus until the poor guy was exhausted. After he had 
fallen back into his seat, weak as a kitten, Joe came over and 
slapped him on the back to congratulate him. Then he took a 
key ring out of his pocket. "My car has a flat. How'd you like 
to hop outside and change it for me, kiddo?" he proposed to the 
limp musician. Enrico Caruso had made the country Faglmcci- 
conscious in the twenties, and some nights Joe would give 
way to his overwhelming desire to be a clown and would appear 
in a harlequin suit and bellow "Ridi, Pagliaccio," before a startled 
audience. The Pagliaccio of the Violin, we called him. 

But despite the constant frenzy and furor he created around 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 69 

himself, Joe Venuti was first and foremost a great artist. If he 
had played any other instrument than the violin he would have 
become one of the great jazz stars. As it is, he is one of the greatest 
jazz violinists of all time. Joe had worked in the Goldkette band 
and had played with Beiderbecke; when the Goldkette band broke 
up in 1927, he and the guitarist Eddie Lang joined the jazz band 
led by Roger Wolfe Kahn, son of the millionaire Otto Kahn, 
and later they went into Paul Whiteman's orchestra, along with 
Bix. The records Venuti made in the late twenties with the mar- 
velously gifted Eddie Lang were uniquely beautiful, and they 
were way ahead of their time. These two men were so attuned to 
each other musically that they composed as they went along as 
if they were one mind. Both men had been born in Philadelphia 
and had known each other as kids. Eddie Lang's death in 1933, 
at the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, was a great loss to 
jazz. He was one of the rare two or three musicians with whom 
Beiderbecke recorded who was equal in musicianship to Bix. For 
instance, on the Okeh record of "Singing the Blues," made in 
1925, Lang not only plays magnificent ensemble and counter- 
point to Bix's cornet; he is the only one in the band who is 
keeping time. I have never understood how Django Reinhardt 
could have been so highly praised except, of course, that he 
lived some twenty-five years longer than Lang and Eddie 
Lang's genius so neglected. And though the Django Reinhardt- 
Stephane Grappelly records did have a good flavor and a good 
sound to them, they were regarded by many musicians as merely 
hillbilly versions of Venuti and Lang. 

We worked very hard in that band, from 6 P.M. to 4 A.M., 
with two two-hour floor shows nightly, and radio broadcasts 
two or three times a night. Everybody used to go to Delmonico's 
to see Joe Venuti there was always something going on with 
Joe. Mildred Bailey was a regular visitor when she was in town, 
and Joe would put her on the air with the band during our broad- 
casts. And Joe could swing like a demon. His was the first big 
white band I know of that was really trying to swing. I loved 



70 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

the swinging feeling in this band. There weren't many trumpet 
players around then who could ad-lib the lead and swing a floor 
show, and if you could do it, there weren't many leaders who 
would let you do it. It just wasn't the accepted style in white 
bands. Of course, anything different good or bad is usually 
frowned on at first. Max Farley, the great alto sax man, was in 
that band, too, and he was writing music in the twelve-tone sys- 
tem secretly, because very few others were interested in it then. 

So I enjoyed every minute of working in Joe Venuti's band, 
and I was going with a girl who worked across the street in the 
Rockettes, and all in all, life was good. I used to walk to work 
through Central Park every evening, and when the weather was 
bad I'd hop a trolley car in front of the Lismore at Seventy- 
second Street and ride in pleasant comfort down to Fifty-first and 
Broadway. As far as I was concerned, the depression was over. 

But it wasn't over for a lot of other jazzmen, and I had my 
own private bread line outside of Delmonico's every night that 
spring of 1934. Promptly at nine o'clock, during intermission, I'd 
be at the side door with a pocketful of fifty-cent pieces for the 
out-of-work musicians waiting in the cold: Pee Wee Russell, 
Eddie Condon, Bud Freeman and his brother Arnie, Buzzy 
Drootin's brother Al, Freddy Goodman, Benny Goodman's 
brother sometimes it seemed like everybody and his brother. 
In those days you could get a good meal for fifty cents at the 
Automat, and on one occasion I was able to provide some even 
more welcome fare, when Joe Venuti had a birthday party after 
hours at Delmonico's. The waiters arranged the tables in a 
huge horseshoe, and we had great mountains of spaghetti and 
enough kegs of whiskey and gallon jugs of cocktails to get an 
army drunk. At the nine-o'clock line-up that night I tipped the 
boys off about the party, and at i A.M, Pee Wee and Eddie and 
Chelsea Quealey were waiting outside while I slipped out to 
them all the liquor I could get my hands on. One great thing 
about that club there were all kinds of handy side- and back- 
door exits. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 71 

After the party Joe Vemiti and I took one of the gallon jugs 
of whiskey sours and walked over to the Ho-Ho Chinese restau- 
rant on Seventh Avenue, where we drank the whiskey sours in 
fragile little teacups to wash down the chow mein while we 
talked over the party. Everyone had entertained, and Joe had 
behaved himself until one of the male singers sang a romantic 
ballad. This tenor was an extremely handsome guy, with a fancy 
little mustache, and all the chorus girls adored ham. In the middle 
of his song, Joe's Mack Sennett humor got the best of him and 
he let the poor guy have it with a head of lettuce right in the 
middle of high C, knocking him cold. Joe didn't like sentimental 
singers, even on his birthday. 

In the meantime, the fellows, Pee Wee and Eddie and com- 
pany, had gone back to my room at the Lismore, and that was 
the last I saw of them for four days. Since I had to work every 
night I didn't dare go up there and get loaded with them, but 
every evening I'd check by ringing my room at the hotel to see 
if they were still there. On the fourth night there was no answer 
and I decided it was safe to go home. I had to wade through 
what looked like a mountain of empty bottles and kegs, but I 
finally was able to get a good night's rest in my own bed. Some- 
times it seems I have spent half my life trying to find a place to 
sleep and the other half trying to get to sleep once I found a 
bed. 

It was in 1934, too, that I made "Home Cooking"/"The Eel," 
with Joe Sullivan, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, Floyd O'Brien, 
Eddie Condon, and Big Sid Cadett. Although I had recorded 
in 1929 with Red Nichols, and with the Chocolate Dandies as 
well as with Mezz's band, this was the first time I felt I made any 
kind of a record. I had never met Big Sid Catlett until he showed 
up in front of the Brunswick studio at 1776 Broadway, where I 
was waiting for the rest of the guys. Big Sid was so big that in- 
stead of shaking hands he simply picked me up bodily, as if I 
were a toy, and when I was on eye level with him he said, most 
politely, "Man, I'm glad to know you." It was so spontaneous, 



72 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

and he was such a nice, plain guy in such nice, plain clothes that 
he was tops with me from then on. Every time I looked over at 
Sid during the recording session and saw that grin of his, it gave 
me confidence. 

On "Home Cooking" Sid had no bass drum, just a cymbal and 
snare, but he made it sound like a full set. On the other hand, 
though he was such a big, powerful fellow, he could play very 
lightly and delicately without sounding weak. He had such 
finesse, and such an infallible sense of right time and touch, in 
such perfect swing, that he gave you a tremendous lift when you 
played with him because the time was just so right. 

One of the most difficult instruments to play is the drum, and 
one of the most difficult things to do on the drums is to shade 
them. When Big Sid was with Louis's band in 1942, I heard 
him. play the introduction to the floor show on the tom-tom 
with such shading and color that it sounded like timpani, Dave 
Tough didn't have the variety or the great facility of playing 
so many different kinds of things, but Dave had the instinct for 
keeping miraculous time and for getting the sound and the right 
volume. Most drummers have the fault of not knowing the right 
volume to play; when they play loud they get very heavy and 
slow up the beat, and when they play soft they change the time 
along with the volume. But Sidney and Dave had the ability to 
keep proper time at any volume. 

The really great drummers can play the top part of the beat 
and not rush. Most amateurs play at the bottom part of the beat, 
where it's most heavy. The beat is just a stroke of time but it has 
so many vibrations to it that the stroke can be hit at the top or 
middle or bottom. Most all the enrly jazz bands played at the 
bottom of the beat, and that's why Louis used to call out, even 
on records, "Swing, man, 5wmg!" He meant to hit it on the 
top. 

In all music the three basics are rhythm, harmony, and melody, 
but in jazz the rhythm is foremost. Without the perfect time the 
other parts can never be right. Big Sid could feed you so you'd 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 73 

play on top of the beat without rushing it that's swing. And 
rhythm in jazz is not only keeping the proper time you can 
keep perfect time and yet not swing. You can also keep perfect 
time and swing without having the right shading and taste and 
color and accent. For instance, Gene Krupa actually made Benny 
Goodman's band. He, too, knew how to feed the musicians; the 
truly great drummer knows what to play with all the different 
solos. Gene knew exactly what little different shading or color 
or tone or rhythmic figure to play behind each instrument. Jo 
Jones in Count Basic's band and Sonny Greer in Duke Elling- 
ton's orchestra both knew how each man's different style re- 
quires a different thing; they just have that instinct of knowing 
exactly what is needed, for when a musician is playing a solo, the 
more perfectly a drummer plays the beat and backs him up 
with the right kind of sound, die easier it is for the soloist to 
phrase the way he would like to. 

There are some great drummers today who can do it, like Ed 
Thigpen, Morey Feld, Charlie Persip, and Sam Woodward, now 
with the Duke. Though most of these are rated as drummers of 
the modern school, they still play that drum as it should be 
played. The drum has to be played right in any school of jazz 
or it's not jazz. For though a lot of modern musicians claim that 
they have the swing, they really don't. They have a kind of 
continuous shuffle beat, and though the time is even, the swing 
is missing. 

After Delmonico's closed for the summer of 1934 Joe Venuti 
took the band into the Brooklyn Paramount for a week's engage- 
ment. Wingy Manone sat right behind the microphone, and just 
before the curtain rose on our first show Venuti cautioned 
Wingy against swearing. 

"Promise me you won't say any of them bad words," he 
begged Wingy, 

"Why, pops," Wingy protested, "I swear I won't say no 
[obscenity, obscenity, obscenity] swear words!" The roar of 
laughter from the unseen audience, which had heard every^ 



74 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

blankety-blank word over the mike, drowned out Venuti's 
equally unprintable retort. 

When the week at the Paramount was over we went on to 
Atlantic City for another couple of weeks' work at the Steel 
Pier, and then the band broke up for the summer. I landed a job 
shortly afterward with Eddie Elkins, who had one of the big 
bands in New England in the early thirties. We went up to 
Saratoga at the peak of the August season to play at a club 
called Reilly's. Eddie Elkins wasn't in Joe Venuti's class. Few 
men are. I didn't get along with him and he didn't like me. One 
night while I was on the bandstand a phone call came in from 
my sister Rose, calling to tell me my father was very sick. I had 
to fight to get away from Elkins and the boys, who wouldn't 
believe me, and after hitchhiking rides on trucks all night, I 
reached home to find that my father had died. 

I stayed in Boston most of the next year, since I didn't want 
to leave my mother all alone after Pa's death. I played with 
Teddy Roy's band that fall and then we went into the Cocoanut 
Grove. I used to walk the three miles to the club all that winter 
wearing only a light topcoat and carrying half a cold chicken 
in my cornet case, which my mother fixed for my intermission 
meal each night. One night when Louis Armstrong was in town 
Teddy Roy invited Louis and me to his hotel room, where we 
stayed up till dawn listening to classical records. Louis would 
chuckle about how he wished he had a "hundred of them long- 
hair cats playing behind mel" 

King Solomon, one of the big-time gangsters in those days in 
Boston, owned the Cocoanut Grove. He had several night clubs 
as well as hotels and other projects in New York, too, but the 
Cocoanut Grove, for which he hired Sophie Tucker and all the 
big headliners, was the one that really gave him his kicks. He 
loved to put on his full-dress suit and greet the customers at the 
door; he was so delighted to be associated with the distinguished 
society and business people who came there. King Solomon was 
riding high until one night while on the rounds of his smaller 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 75 

clubs in the colored section of Boston, he was shot to death in 
the men's room by a couple of rival gangsters. We were given 
our notice the next day. The Cocoanut Grove was under his 
lawyer's name, and when Solomon was killed the lawyer took 
over. The lawyer died in prison years later while serving a term 
for criminal negligence in the Cocoanut Grove fire in 1942, in 
which nearly five hundred people lost their lives trying to escape 
through the one exit available. Two musician friends of mine 
died in that fire, Bernie Faisioli, the violinist band leader, and 
Ecky Watson, a trumpet player, who was one of my best friends. 
Jack Lesberg was in that band, too, and after he found his way 
out of the burning building he was in such a daze that he turned 
around and ran back for his bass. 

The loss of Ecky Watson was a tragic one for me. When we 
were still in our teens, Ecky used to come over to my house at 
night and rap on my window, saying, "Come on out now, Maxie, 
you can't just stay home all the time. We've got things to do." 
I'd sneak out the window and he'd take me to visit his friends in 
the big, wealthy homes in Boston. Ecky was a favorite of the 
society crowd, but besides his good looks he was so sweet- 
natured that everybody loved him. Goodness seemed to radiate 
from him. It's hard to think of him dying that way. 

It was around this time, just before I worked in my first swing 
band, that I had one more whirl in one of Mezz's jazz bands. 
After his first adventure with a big band, Mezz was still trying, 
and he finally landed a booking for a band in the Uptown Low- 
down Club, formerly Delmonico's, where I had worked for Joe 
Venuti. Mezz's second big band had, among others, Zutty 
Singleton, Dickie Wells, Frankie Newton, Sidney DeParis, and 
me. The two colored trumpet players, Frankie Newton and Sid- 
ney DeParis, were both six-footers, but since I was the only one 
who could read the arrangements, I played first trumpet and sat 
in the middle. Frankie Newton solved our other problem of un- 
equal height by putting an old automobile seat on my chair so 
the three of us would come out even on top. 



76 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

This was a very fine band, and Zutty always tells how Artie 
Shaw was around there all the time trying to take over the band, 
but we decided we'd stick with Mezz. We made it an absolute 
rule, though, that Mezz must not be allowed to play the clarinet. 
We permitted him to lead the band, even though Zutty would 
always call out, "Don't -fan us, Mezz, lead us!" for Mezz had a 
way of leading that looked as though he were trying to get a 
fire started. But in spite of everything, we really did swing on 
Alex Hill's arrangements. Alex didn't use riffs to make us swing. 
His ideas were closer to the ensemble work of a small band, 
though of course much simplified, and while Hill's arrange- 
ments allowed more space for each man than Fletcher Hender- 
son's arrangements, you'd have to have topnotch jazzmen to 
make them work. Alex Hill was a young colored pianist of 
great talent but he was a whiskey man for a quart of rye or 
gin he'd stay up all night and write a stack of beautiful arrange- 
ments for you and has death just a few years later was another 
huge loss to jazz. 

The Uptown Lowdown put on a big floor show every night. 
The red velvet curtains in front of the bandstand would part 
slowly and dramatically while we swung into "We're in the 
Money" to open the floor show. One of the acts was a sensa- 
tional little trio fresh out of San Antonio, with Ernie Caceres on 
baritone sax, his brother on violin, and another relative on guitar. 
Hazel Scott was playing intermission piano in the cocktail 
lounge, and this is the first time I met Hazel and Ernie. 

Our theme song, "We're in the Money," was pure wishful 
thinking. In desperation, the boss, a Mr* Fagin, had a swastika 
painted in the middle of the dance floor and had newsmen come 
in to take pictures of it for a publicity stunt. Hitler had just 
started throwing his weight around in Germany, and the idea was 
that we had a Negro-and-white band and were proving we 
didn't believe in that "superior race" baloney, but even Hitler 
couldn't get customers for us, and after two or three weeks the 
Uptown Lowdown was down and out. Even then we couldn't 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 77 

get our money, but Mr. Fagin, who was a pretty good guy in 
spite of his name, paid us off as best he could with bottles 
of whiskey. 

It was a good band, though, and if Mezz had taken it more 
seriously and didn't have all his other various enterprises going, 
he would have had a great swing band even before Benny Good- 
man and Tommy Dorsey and all the others. 



CJwpter O 



The swing era was launched in 1935 with a two-hour nation- 
wide radio show on Saturday nights called Let's Dance, which 
started Benny Goodman on his way to becoming the King of 
Swing. The time was ripe. After six years of depression, the 
American people themselves were on the upswing again, and 
a whole new generation of youngsters especially were raring to 
go. It's hard to realize that jazz had virtually not been heard in 
the land for six long gloomy years. It was there, but the popular 
bands of the day weren't playing it. All the public seemed able to 
take during those somber years was syrupy, soothing music. Up 
in Harlem, of course, they had been stomping at the Savoy all 
along to the bands of Chick Webb, Jimmie Luncef ord, Cab Gallo- 
way, Fletcher Henderson, Lucky Millindcr, and Andy Kirk, The 
white Casa Loma band had managed to hang on, too, and even- 
tually they helped set the mood for the rest of the country with 
the Riley and Farley band's big hit "The Music Goes Down and 
Around and It Comes Out Here." But it was the Benny Good- 
man band that hit the country at the right time with the right 
sound and the right tempo. The effect was electrifying. Almost 
overnight the jitterbugs, with their shoulder-length page-boy 

78 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 79 

bobs, their fashionably grimy saddle shoes, and their peg-leg, 
sharpie zoot suits began pouring out of their homes in every 
town, city, and hamlet in the nation and streaming into the dance 
halls to dance to the exciting new sound of swing, and the big 
band and dance craze built up such momentum that when 
Benny Goodman appeared at the Paramount Theatre in January, 
1937, the kids spontaneously erupted out of their seats to dance 
in the aisles. 

But even more significantly, the big swing bands turned many 
dancers into listeners, too. Although swing, like jazz, flourished 
because of a wildly appreciative dancing audience, many who 
came just to dance the Lindy or the Shag stopped to crowd 
around the bandstand to listen when the jazz soloists took off 
on a sizzling improvised chorus. It was swing that finally led the 
general public, the fans, and the critics to an awareness of the 
validity of jazz and its place in American life. But it is also sig- 
nificant that swing had been ballyhooed to the public as a "new 
music." Jazz was called old hat and swing was now the thing, 
just as in the forties bop was the new thing and jazz was once 
again out of date. 

I was playing a one-nighter at the William Penn Hotel in Pitts- 
burgh in November of 1934 when I first heard Tommy Dorsey's 
big band. It seemed as if the whole town had turned out to cele- 
brate the Pittsburgh football victory that afternoon and was now 
jammed into the two adjoining ballrooms, one containing Leo 
Reisman's band, in which I was playing, and the other Tommy's 
band. 

I had heard Benny Goodman's big new band up in Boston that 
spring and, as a matter of fact, Tommy had much the same 
kind of band as Benny's, even down to the Fletcher Henderson 
arrangements. Fletcher was always trying to get paid for the 
arrangements he made for Tommy, but he had tough going until 
Tommy became a success. 

The spring before, when Benny Goodman had been in Boston, 
I had sat in with his band. Benny had asked me to join the band 



80 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

then, but I felt I really wasn't good enough to play in Benny's 
band I just had a funny feeling about it. I can't understand it. 
I was usually so happy to get out of Boston, but at that time I 
had some good little jobs going and Benny's band, great as it 
was, just didn't excite me that much that I wanted to drop every- 
thing and go on the road with him. But when I heard Tommy's 
band that night in Pittsburgh, the new, big-band sound hit me 
for the first time. Although I had been hearing the big colored 
bands swing for years, I had never heard a white band play that 
way before. 

A few weeks later Tommy came to Boston for an engagement 
at the Normandy Ballroom, and since he had just had a run-in 
with Sterling Base, he was without a jazz trumpet. Bobby Byrnes, 
who was working for Charlie Schribman then, recommended me, 
and I sat in with Tommy's band that night. 

This was a different kind of music, and it took a little time 
at first to adjust to playing in the big swing bands. All the years 
before, we had just played songs as we felt them, but now a 
whole new era of arranged section playing was starting, and 
reading the parts and counting the rests was a completely different 
feeling from the free-swinging improvisation I had been used to. 
It was a big thing to get used to sitting in a band and playing 
for a while and then just sitting there waiting for your turn to 
play again. And this was a different land of arranged music, 
which thanks to Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Count 
Basic, Duke Ellington, and all the other Negro band leaders who 
had figured it out years ago enabled the big bands to swing. 
Formerly the big dance bands would have one section playing 
at a time, so that the arrangements were really a series of section 
solos, but with five saxes playing instead of one, and none of 
them swinging. But now, with one section playing a different 
rhythm or harmony in counterpoint against another section, and 
with the rifling of phrases, and by using jazzmen who gave the 
music a hot, driving tone, the whole band swung. 

After a few nights of learning how to apply myself to play in 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 8l 

this band I joined Tommy Dorsey in January, 1935, and stayed 
with him for one unforgettable year. 

Working with Tommy Dorsey was like cooking on a hot stove 
that might explode at any moment and always did. In the first 
place, Tommy was very hard to work for because he played very 
difficult trombone solos. The concentration and control needed 
to play in that high register was a terrific strain on him, and 
sometimes Tommy couldn't rise to it and he'd get mad. And in 
the second place, Tommy was always getting mad. His tempera- 
ment was so volcanic and his rages so explosive that you could 
almost smell the sulphur and brimstone. No one was safe. In the 
heat of battle Tommy had a truly magnificent unconcern for 
consequences; he took pleasure in the fight for the sheer love of 
fighting, and as mad as you could get at him, it was hard to stay 
mad because he got over it so quickly, with no trace of animosity. 
Both Tommy and his brother Jimmy were natural-born scrap- 
pers. When they had their own Dorsey Brothers orchestra they 
fought around the clock. It was a perpetual Three Stooges slap- 
stick comedy. Tommy would kick off the beat. Jimmy would 
growl, "For chrissakes, always the same corny tempo!" Tommy 
would snarl, "Oh, yeah! And you always play those same corny 
notes!" Jimmy would leap up, snatch Tommy's trombone and 
bend it in two. Tommy would seize Jimmy's sax and smash it on 
the floor, and the fight was on. Jimmy now had his own band on 
Bing Crosby's radio show and Tommy was trying to make it 
alone. 

Tommy's most regular scapegoat in this band was the hapless 
guitar player, who bore the brunt of Tommy's frustration when- 
ever Tommy made a mistake in his solo. Tommy couldn't even 
hear the guitar from where he was standing, but when Tommy 
fluffed a note he'd turn around and scream at the guitarist, blam- 
ing it all on him for playing the wrong chords. I often thought 
the real reason Tommy used to get so furious at this particular 
guy was that when the bus pulled into a town early enough in the 
day, this fellow used to run out and get a day job washing dishes 



82 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

or working at a garage or delivering orders for a grocery store 
until it was time to go on the bandstand at night. It 'was hard 
to like him. The rest of us were so tired we could hardly drag 
ourselves around, but this guy apparently never slept, and he 
made us all feel as if we were pampering ourselves. He didn't 
last too long. But everybody felt the scorch of Tommy's temper; 
he played no favorites. The trombone section sat right in front 
of Tommy, and one afternoon as the curtain went up on a con- 
cert we were playing at Duke University, one of the trombone 
players, a new guy who didn't have much experience, thrust his 
slide out so far in an excess of anxiety to make good that it slid 
off his horn and sailed into the footlights. The poor guy just sat 
there looking at Tommy in cold horror. It broke us up, but 
Tommy was livid. This poor fellow didn't last long, either. 

But as much of a terror as he was on the stand, of all the 
band leaders there was no one who was such a great sport off the 
stand. Tommy did everything big; he thought big, played big, 
fought big, and spent big. He was a great man not only for 
parties but for reaching for the check. After giving us hell all 
night on the stand he'd take the whole band out for food and 
drinks, and even when he was struggling and hard up for dough 
he'd blow hundreds of dollars a week buying meals for the 
whole band. He was just as generous with his fans. When we'd 
play five shows a day at the big theatres, there were always at 
least a dozen or more devoted fans who would stay in their seats 
from the opening morning show until the last show was over at 
midnight. By the afternoon, Tommy, concerned about their 
health, would send the bandboy out for trayfuls of chicken 
sandwiches and malted milks to be distributed among them. 

That first year he had such hard going that he was on the verge 
of giving up the band at least once a week. We did one-nighters 
from Canada to Texas, traveling around in a dilapidated, anti- 
quated school bus with back-breaking wooden seats and no 
heater, and on cold nights while rattling over the hills of Penn- 
sylvania and Vermont and New Hampshire we'd make a fire 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 83 

right on the floor of the bus with newspapers, racing forms, pawn 
tickets, old letters, laundry lists, and practically anything not 
nailed down. Those hills! There were many, many times when 
the bus couldn't make those hills, so we would all climb out, 
slipping and sliding and cursing the cold, the hills, the bus, and 
the music business, and we'd push that damned bus up the hill. 
When the driver would start nodding from fatigue Tommy 
would take over the wheel himself and we'd rattle along through 
fog and blizzards and rain and detours to the next one-night 
stand, three or four hundred miles away. One night in Penn- 
sylvania we were so cold that Tommy stopped the bus at a 
general store in a little coal-mining town in the Alleghenies 
where we bought woolen socks, caps with ear muffs, mufflers, 
and big heavy coat-sweaters, buttoning the sweaters on over 
our overcoats, and pulling the socks on over our shoes. But bone 
weary, exhausted, and miserable as I was, I'd think to myself: 
This is still better than being stuck in Boston playing for those 
society bands. 

The one-nighters were murderous. You'd get through playing 
a college prom or a dance hall at i A.M., grab something to eat 
before climbing into the bus and riding all night in that frigid 
torture chamber until anywhere from eight to eleven the next 
morning, stumble out of the bus into some ratty little hotel, fall 
like a corpse onto a bed until it was time to get up and rehearse, 
and then you'd eat, shave, bathe, put on your band uniform 
and play again until i A.M., and then repeat the whole routine 
day after day, week after week, month after month. If we 
arrived at a hotel before 6 A.M. we'd have to sit in the lobby until 
eight o'clock before checking in so we wouldn't have to pay for 
an extra day. For the first few days you didn't mind the grind, 
but after a week or so the continuous strain of not being able 
to stretch out on a bed and grab a solid block of sleep became a 
torture to your body. You'd get rigor mortis from the straight 
wooden seats and your whole body throbbed all over with the 
sensation you feel when your foot goes to sleep. And on top of 



84 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

being numb from cold you were dirty and crummy and itchy; 
sometimes we'd carry dirty laundry around for two weeks before 
we stayed in one place long enough to get it done. And you'd 
begin to ask yourself, if you were still on speaking terms with 
yourself, why in the name of sanity you were doing this, but 
some wild faith kept you going with the idea that it would all 
turn out as the band leader promised you, that if he ever made 
it he'd "never forget you guys who are the ones who really made 
it for him," and he'd see that each one of you got a nice, big, 
fat slice of the bacon when you reached the top. And when the 
bandleader made it, you never even got the rind. 

Another factor that kept you going was that there were some 
wonderful players in those bands, the best jazz players around. 
Bud Freeman, Joe Dixon, Dave Tough, and Axel Stordahl, who 
played third trumpet and sang with the Pied Pipers as well as 
writing arrangements, were with me in that band, and I held on 
as long as I did just to get a chance to play with Dave Tough. 
No one could play like that in those days, except some of the 
great colored drummers like Big Sid Catlett, but it was hard 
for a white man to get the chance to play with them, except on 
record dates, in those days when segregation was still very strong. 

We did one-nighters at colleges and dance halls in New 
England and the Middle West from January to late spring, when 
we went into the Lincoln Hotel in New York. We also played 
the jazz concert put on by Joe Helbock and David Ross at the 
Imperial Theatre in New York in 1935. This was a big step to- 
ward the jazz concerts that have since become so popular. 
There were only a few small jazz groups around then, such as 
Stuff Smith's band and Wingy Manonc's band, both of whom 
had small combos working on Fifty-second Street, and they 
were on the bill, but the concert was composed mainly of the 
big swing bands, such as Bob Crosby's and Artie Shaw's and 
Tommy Dorsey's, in which so many of the jazzmen were then 
working. It wasn't like the later jazz concerts, where the in- 
dividual jazzmen themselves were featured. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 85 

Then came more one-nighters down to Atlantic City, a week 
in Tybee Beach in Savannah, Georgia, and then on to the Club 
Alamo in San Antonio for the month of July, and the Baker 
Hotel in Dallas for the next month. While we were at the Club 
Alamo we had another job three hundred miles away in Dallas. 
Fred Waring had been doing a weekly broadcast for the Ford 
Motor Company at the Texas Centennial and when he went on 
vacation we substituted for him all that July, doing extra re- 
hearsals all week long for the radio show and then getting on a 
train early in the morning on the day of the show and riding 
three hundred miles in the blistering Texas heat in an un-air- 
conditioned train to Dallas, playing the show, and then riding 
the three hundred miles back to San Antonio. At the end of the 
month Tommy paid us eighty dollars apiece for the month's 
work. Dave Tough, who had to take cabs to get his drums to 
and from the rehearsal each day, and to and from the train, said 
it wasn't that he minded the salary, it was just that he couldn't 
afford it it cost him more than that for cab fare. Tommy made 
some money out of the radio show, but he needed it and so he 
kept it. 

But we were young and rugged in those days, and the extra 
work spurred us on to extra play so that we could relax. While 
we were in Dallas we checked into the country club instead 
of staying at a hotel so that we could play eighteen holes of golf 
at dawn after we finished working all night. We'd top off the 
golf game with some refreshing slices of ice-cold watermelon 
soaked in gin before we tumbled groggily into bed. As a solution 
to the problem of unwinding from tension it was rather drastic, 
but we liked it. 

That fall in Philadelphia we shared the bill at the Nixon 
Grande Theatre with a colored band called the Sunset Royals. 
Their arrangement of "Marie" was so great that I used to stay 
around after our show just to hear them play it. After I men- 
tioned it to Paul Weston he called Tommy in to listen. Tommy 
got it right away and asked Paul to make an arrangement of it, 



86 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

which Paul did, incorporating the Sunset Royals' vocal idea, too, 
and the piece became a regular part of our repertoire, without, 
of course, a by-your-leave to the Sunset Royals. By this time, 
though, I'd had enough of the one-night stands, the friction 
within the band, being cold and tired and breaking my back 

on those wooden seats I was fed to the teeth with the whole 



thing. When we played Hamilton, Ontario, on a snowy night in 
March, 1936, and then rode all the way back to New York right 
after die date to play the Roseland Ballroom the following night, 
it was the last straw. As soon as I saw New York I knew this 
was the end of being on the road for me. I quit. I'd had a fight 
with Tommy a week before, and so I quit and he fired me 
simultaneously. Tommy could get mad in a puff, of course, and 
I have a quick temper and a big mouth on occasion myself 
usually the wrong occasion. Bunny Berigan replaced me, and 
shortly afterward Tommy recorded "Marie." I always felt it 
was Bunny's great solo, rather than the commercial idea of the 
vocals, that made that record such a hit. And then, just when it 
seemed Tommy couldn't keep the band going another day, 
Edythe Wright, his vocalist, introduced him to some businessmen 
who were putting on a radio show for Raleigh cigarettes and 
Tommy landed the band spot and was on his way to fame and 
fortune, and I went back home to Boston. 

After a few weeks of my health routine of plenty of sleep 
and long walks and no smoking and drinking, I felt like a human 
being again, and the rest of the summer of 1936 I worked around 
New England until September, when Pee Wee wired me about 
a job at the Famous Door on Fifty-second Street. Pec Wee was 
working there with Louis Prima, who was going out to 
California and taking Pee Wee with him, so Pee Wee recom- 
mended me for Louis's spot. I was up in Bar Harbor with one of 
Jackie Marshard's society bands, and since it was the end of the 
season up there, there was no sweat about coming on to New 
York to take the job. It was always exciting to get new jobs 
especially playing jazz, and especially in New York. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 87 

Like most of the other clubs on Fifty-second Street, the 
Famous Door was on the street floor of a brownstone house and 
upstairs on the first floor there was a big foyer with built-in 
leather seats lining the walls, and beyond that were the bath- 
rooms. After playing the first set the first night, I went upstairs 
to the washroom. A stately young colored girl in a white evening 
dress sitting alone in a corner of the deserted foyer threw me a 
half-timid, half-scornful look when I appeared in the doorway. 

"What are you doing here all alone?" I asked her, surprised. 

When she told me her name was Billie Holiday and that she 
was working there, too, singing with the Teddy Wilson trio, I 
remembered that I had seen her up in Harlem a few years before, 
singing and waiting on tables at the Alhambra Grill, where 
we used to go to hear Bobby Henderson's fine piano. The 
fact that I had heard her uptown made us good friends because 
she was a colored girl downtown in the white section and she 
felt good knowing I knew about Harlem, and when I heard her 
sing again I knew why I had remembered her name. She really 
sang in those days. Her voice was the blues, but she could make 
you feel so happy, too. In her peak years, between 1935 and 1941, 
her stunning sense of phrasing and tempo were still completely 
unself-conscious and die unaffected sweet-sadness of her voice 
could make you ring with joy as well as sorrow. A large, fleshy, 
but beautifully boned woman with a satin-smooth beige skin, she 
always possessed an air of hauteur, not only in her manner but 
in the arch of her brow, the poise of her head, and the dignity 
of her carriage, but her haughtiness hid a shyness so vast that she 
spoke in practically a whisper. When she talked to musicians, the 
subject was usually her mother, to whom she was devoted. There 
was nothing wild about her in those days; there was nothing 
showing then but the terrible, proud shyness; and even in her 
most turbulent, tortured days later on, she was always basically 
what she had been then an uncompromising, devastatingly 
honest kind of girl, and always, in the deepest sense, a lady. Her 
sobriquet, Lady Day, suited her exactly. Whatever led her to 



88 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

self-destruction was also there: a bitterness not simply the 
bitterness of her color or life, but the bitterness that often seems 
to go with singular talent and that drives a Eugene O'Neill, or a 
Bix Beiderbecke, or a John Barrymore or a Charlie Parker to 
destroy himself with drink and drugs and excess. If Bix Beider- 
becke had been a Negro they would all have seized on that as 
the underlying cause of his drinking himself to death. 

As a singer Billie had few physical mannerisms. She held her 
arms in the position of a runner ready to sprint, scarcely moving 
them except occasionally to snap her fingers in a lazy, leisurely 
movement. Like Bix, all the hotness and intensity and con- 
centration were inside so that she rode a song with the languid 
grace of a native boy riding a surfboard. Billie had the gift of 
expressing the perfect mood of a song, happy or sad, rollicking 
or blue. The basis of her phrasing was the beat, and she didn't 
distort the melody, but the stress and accent and meaning she 
gave the words just somehow made the song larger than life- 
size. I've always felt that the whole new form sprang complete 
in her mind with the first note she sang of any song. The art of 
improvising lies in the sense of structure, in the ability to build a 
new story out of the bricks and mortar of the original song. Most 
so-called or would-be jazzmen can play a thousand ad-lib notes 
and not say a thing; not rearrange or conceive of them so that 
they tell a new story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Billie 
was a master architect. 

Billie had just started recording with the great Teddy Wilson, 
who had a contract with Brunswick to record pop tunes for the 
jukebox market. Teddy would put together bands of the finest 
jazzmen: Johnny Hodges, Roy Eldridge, Harry Carney, Buck 
Clayton, Ben Webster, Bunny Berigan, Jo Jones, Benny Good- 
man, and of course, the fabulous Lester Young and BilKe would 
sing the vocals for such songs as "Them There Eyes," "All of 
Me," "These Foolish Things," "Why Was I Born," "A Fine 
Romance," "I Cried for You," "I Can't Get Started," "The 
Very Thought of You," and once Billie had sung them, they 



Y LIFE IN JAZZ 89 

lever sounded right again when other singers did them. 

But Billie wasn't known at all yet to the general public and 
lone of the customers at the Famous Door paid much attention 
o her. Jazz was only barely beginning to catch on and jazz 
lingers weren't in vogue yet. At that time, in the late thirties, the 
)nly people who went to night clubs were people with money, 
nostly society people and celebrities of the sports and show- 
business worlds, not the general public or the expense-account 
jociety, like today. The first Saturday that I worked at the 
famous Door, the society people I had played for in Bar Harbor 
iust the weekend before came in and there I was again. Since the 
Drdinary person couldn't aff ord night-clubbing in those days, and 
since night clubs were about the only place where you could 
hear jazz, the public had little chance to learn about it until 
the swing bands became popular. 

I didn't stay at the Famous Door very long because the club 
didn't want to pay me much. A week after I left, they sent me 
the train fare to come back, but I wasn't keen about the idea, 
and the next night when I ran into Bobby Hackett we went to 
a bar and got drunk and I gave Bobby the money and sent him 
in my place. But they didn't dig his playing then. Finally, they 
got Bunny Berigan to come in and he took over the band and 
did well with it. Eddie Condon and Joe Bushkin were in the 
band, too, and on Sunday afternoons all the other jazzmen in 
town would drop in and jam with them. Within a few years, 
Bobby Hackett, who had started out on the guitar, developed 
into one of the greatest of the lyrical jazz trumpets, with a special 
genius for playing a ballad. His expression, tone, and taste are 
perfection. 

Around November of 1936, I was back in New York again, 
playing at the Onyx Club, in a small band with Jack Jenney on 
trombone. I also had a job playing in the pit band at the Radio 
City Music Hall, and at 1 1 P.M., when I finished the last of the 
five daily shows at Radio City, I'd rush over to the Onyx and 
play there till 3 or 4 A.M. For the Christmas stage show at the 



90 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Music Hall they had several colored couples do the Lindy, which 
was the newest excitement downtown then, and they hired me 
to play "One O'Clock Jump" for the dancers. It was very 
funny trying to play for these dancers with this huge, concert- 
size orchestra that couldn't swing. And that wasn't all that was 
funny about the show. The subscribers and regular customers 
always turn out for the first new show at Radio City, and when 
the old dowagers saw the colored girls being tossed up in the 
air during the more imaginative moments of the Lindy, they 
raised the roof to the manager, who saw to it that the girls put 
on panties after that. I sat next to the lead trumpet, who drank so 
much that his colleagues would literally have to guide him to his 
seat, but loaded as he was he could play like a son of a gun. In 
the course of the show, there was some very difficult circus music, 
and sometimes when we came to this part he'd lean over to me 
and mumble, "Take it, pal/' I'd just stare blankly at him, and 
after muttering something highly uncomplimentary about il- 
literate and undependable jazz musicians, he'd shakily lift his 
horn to his numb chops and play it perfectly. 

A few months later, around March of 1937, I had another 
call from Pee Wee Russell, who was back in New York, to work 
at another night club on Fifty-second Street the Little Club. 
In addition to Pee Wee and me we had George Troup on 
trombone and Joe Bushkin on piano. George was the first one 
besides Tommy Dorsey that I ever heard play the trombone 
in the high register that Tommy later became famous for. 
When the club had changed hands and its name it used to be the 
original Onyx Club it had become more of an entertaining night 
dub, with singers, strippers, comedians, and dancers, and we 
pkyed for all the acts. At a rehearsal one afternoon, one of the 
dancers handed Pee Wee, who was heading our four-piece band, 
a special arrangement for a forty-piece orchestra. It must have 
cost the poor girl a couple of hundred dollars to have the ar- 
rangement made, but it was almost worth it to see the expression 
on Pee Wee who was trying to play, read, and direct all at 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 91 

the same time when we had to sit there and silently count bars 
in the places where the French horns and flutes and violins were 
supposed to play. I finally told the poor kid we'd play "Lime- 
house Blues" and she could make up the dance as we went along. 

This job lasted only a couple of weeks, and then I was out of 
work again. Luckily, Tommy Dorsey, who was in town at the 
Hotel New Yorker, needed a trumpet player to substitute for 
Lee Castle, and he asked me to join the band again for this en- 
gagement. By this time Tommy had begun to be f airly successful, 
but I didn't get the kick out of playing with this band that I 
had with his earlier band. Yank Lawson and Charlie Spivak were 
doing the New Yorker job, too, and with Yank doing all the 
jazz trumpet work, which was all arranged around him, there 
was much less for me to do now. During the New Yorker en- 
gagement Tommy had a record date. One of the sides was "The 
Hawaiian War Chant" on which Yank Lawson played so 
wonderfully, but Tommy was very nervous and hard to please 
that day, and after we had completed three sides, he was so 
disgusted he wanted to knock it off for the day. But Charlie 
Spivak persuaded him to make one more side so we'd have a 
whole date out of the session. We made "Boogie Woogie," which 
was a take-off on Pinetop's "Boogie," recorded back in 1928. 
Howard Smith was the pianist and arranger. We just slammed 
it out, in a hurry to get it done with, and as occasionally happens 
in the music business, the sleeper side of "Boogie Woogie" turned 
out to be Tommy's biggest seller; at one time it was supposed 
to be the biggest seller of any record ever made. 

Glenn Miller came in one night at the New Yorker and when 
we finished the set he called me over to his table. "Why are you 
playing third trumpet in Tommy's band when you could be 
playing first trumpet in my band?" he wanted to know. I was 
highly flattered, but I wasn't too tempted. Miller's band was 
too straight and commercial for my taste, and I decided to turn 
the offer down. 

My luck was still coming in strong, though, for when I finished 



92 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

subbing in Tommy's band it turned out that Benny Goodman 
needed a substitute for Chris Griffin, who had a sore lip, so I went 
in with Benny at the Pennsylvania Hotel. Benny was riding high 
then, with Gene Krupa, Harry James, Ziggy Elman, and all his 
other great sidemen. Benny liked me and was thinking again of 
taking me on permanently, but in the meantime Artie Shaw 
needed a trumpet player, too. 



Chapter / 



It was a Sunday, my night oft at the Pennsylvania Hotel. I 
was living at the Markwell Apartments on West Forty-ninth 
Street at the time, directly across the street from the Plymouth 
Hotel, where Artie Shaw was staying. Around two o'clock in 
the afternoon I had dragged myself out of bed for some break- 
fast, but I was so tired that I had just thrown myself down on 
the bed again for another nap when Artie's manager came over 
from the Plymouth Hotel to ask me to help them out by playing 
a job for Shaw up in Bridgeport that night. I told him I was too 
beat to make it, and when he came back again a half hour later, 
I turned him down again. Jazz trumpets were still not plentiful 
yet and I was the only one they knew who could fill in on short 
notice, but I explained I was working for Benny and had plans 
for making good so I could join his band, if only I could get a 
little sleep. Just as I was dozing off again, he was back knocking 
at the door, and since there didn't seem to be any way to get 
rid of this guy, I finally got up, packed my horn, and followed 
him downstairs into the bus that was waiting across the street, 
thinking to myself as I wearily climbed over Shaw's fifteen-piece 
band to the back of the bus, "Well, here I am on the road again." 

93 



94 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

I had met Artie Shaw at a party at Gladys Mosier's apartment 
one night around 1929 when I was doing some club dates in 
New York and Artie was playing in town with Irving Aronson's 
Commanders. Gladys and Babe Rusin's sister, Sunny, were 
among the first of the girl pianists around in those days. It wasn't 
much of a party; nobody had any money and we sat around talk- 
ing and playing records and drinking corn whiskey from Bumps 
and Crumps, a bootlegging establishment in one of the old 
brownstones up in Harlem where for a dollar you could buy 
a gallon of this homemade fire water. The first drink of the 
stuff was the worst taste you ever tasted, but after three or four 
drinks it tasted fine. 

As soon as Artie and I began talking about jazz we became 
buddies, and whenever I was in town after that we'd go up to 
Harlem together to hear the real thing. A couple of years later, 
in the early thirties, when Artie was working in the CBS house 
band and playing some club dates on the side, we were both 
hired by Leo Reisman to play a coming-out party at the Biltmore. 
Leo carried on in his special eccentric way all evening, lying 
down on the bandstand and swinging up his legs and hollering 
"Yeah!" when things got rolling. This was the closest we ever 
came to swinging in society bands. During an intermission Artie 
and I talked about how dreary and banal this kind of music was. 
Artie had a strong desire to play jazz and of course there was 
hardly any place to play it then. At the end of the evening we 
went over to Artie's apartment on Fifty-seventh Street for more 
talk. Artie was always interested in learning and improving him- 
self I believe at the time he was taking courses at Columbia 
University in journalism or writing and his apartment was 
loaded with records and books. When I spotted a whole collec- 
tion of Louis's early recordings in his huge library of symphonic 
music and jazz records, I was done for, and we sat around till 
morning playing the records and talking. I told him that some- 
day I'd like to have a band that was a combination of a small 
jazz band and a string quartet. A jazz band is very similar to a 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 95 

string quartet, with its fugues and counterpoint and theme de- 
velopment and variations and its voicing; except, of course, that 
in a jazz band it's mainly ad lib. And although the instrumenta- 
tion is different, the voicing is very similar, only it's the trombone 
instead of the cello that plays the fifth of the chord, and the 
clarinet the third and the trumpet the melody in place of the 
first and second violins. 

Later on Artie organized his first band, with Lee Castle on 
trumpet and George Wettling on drums, and in 1935 he played 
the jazz concert at the Imperial Theatre at which I had played 
with Tommy Dorsey's band. Artie's band consisted of two small 
bands, one a jazz band and the other a string band, full of violins 
and cellos, and he played some original clarinet pieces that were 
very good. He had studied composing and he was always very 
clever at writing original things. Shaw's band was the hit of the 
concert. On the strength of the reviewers' praises he got some 
bookings, one of them at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, across the 
street from the Baker Hotel, where I was working in Tommy's 
band. 

When Artie's manager talked me into getting on that bus to 
Bridgeport, the band had been getting very little work and Shaw 
was in a great deal of financial trouble, but I didn't know any 
of this at the time, of course. The job at the Bridgeport Ritz 
Ballroom was hard going for me, since I didn't know the book 
and I was beat, but Artie seemed to like it and he had me ride 
back to New York with him in his car so we could talk. Or 
rather, he talked and I listened while Artie turned on the old 
charm, with his marvelous laugh and his wonderful way of mak- 
ing you feel he was a real friend. When Artie gave you that 
special friendship deal, he could get almost anything he wanted 
because he could make you feel so good. He reminisced about 
the times we had gone up to Harlem and about the time he had 
come up to my room on i44th Street, where the Russian opera 
singer had kept me awake all day, and how he had been so struck 
with my new Schick electric razor. Electric razors had just come 



96 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

out then, and he had never seen one before. 

But I felt I wanted to stay with Benny this time and learn his 
book and play in his band, so I put Shaw off. When Chris Griffin 
returned to work a day or so later, Benny said he wanted to talk 
to me about joining the band. In the meantime, Shaw kept after 
me. He said he had a few dates that would help him if only I'd 
come in with him. Somehow he made me feel so good that I 
became convinced that instead of being just another trumpet 
player in Benny's band, I'd have the chance to play more with 
Artie, since he was offering me the lead trumpet spot. And the 
fellows in his band liked me, and my ego wanted me to be in his 
band and be liked for playing well, so before I knew it I was in 
Artie's band. 

Artie was looking for someone to give him the one big idea, 
the big break. I had a fair name then, and I had ideas and was 
experienced, while most of his men were beginners. It was a 
very immature band at the start and had no definite style. The 
players became very great later on Tony Pastor, Chuck Peter- 
son, Les Robbins, Cliff Leeman, etc. but at that time they were 
unseasoned and inexperienced. Their worst trouble was learning 
to play in tune, and except for Tony Pastor, they didn't know 
much about jazz or swing, Tony, who had always loved jazz, had 
always wanted to play in a big band like this, and he was a great 
factor in the band with his playing and his easy-going, humorous 
style of singing. 

I played two or three nights with Shaw and was still struggling 
with the book and trying to get the band to play on pitch, since 
it's up to the lead trumpet to carry the band and give it a tone 
and set the time. Then, on the fourth day, when we played at 
the Connecticut State Teachers College, things began to happen. 
We arrived in New London about nine in the morning, and as 
soon as I left the bus I had two or three drinks all I ever needed 
to knock me out. Then I checked into the hotel and slept like 
a log till it was time to play for the affair. By then I was fairly 
familiar with the book; I have to play something new for a couple 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 97 

of days and mull it over, and then I can make it mine. That after- 
noon when I started to swing those parts, making them sing out, 
the whole band settled down, as cozily as a kid in a featherbed, 
smack into the right pitch, and suddenly it was a great new band. 

That afternoon made me king with Shaw and the men, and 
after the job that night Shaw offered me sixty-five dollars a week. 
His men were getting forty-five dollars. Now I began to rack 
my brains to think of ways to help Artie get off the ground 
with his band. I asked Shaw why we didn't work more often 
than two or three nights a week, and he said his agent couldn't 
get more bookings for him; when I discovered he had the same 
agent as Benny Goodman I advised him to change agents at 
once, since this one couldn't develop Artie in competition with 
Benny, and he did so. Then the girl singer left the band, and I 
recommended Billie Holiday as her replacement. If we get 
Billie, I said, she'll make us. We were playing a date in New 
York then, and I called up Billie and told her to meet me in the 
lobby of the Plymouth Hotel at one o'clock. When I introduced 
her to Artie he hired her on sight, without auditioning her. Billie, 
all excited, raced home to pack because we were leaving for 
Boston that afternoon. All the way to Boston I had to keep 
selling Artie on Billie, though, as he had begun to worry about 
not having heard her sing. That evening Artie was late showing 
up at the rehearsal, and since I used to lead when he wasn't there, 
I started the band on a new arrangement we had to try out for 
"Yesterdays." I asked Billie to sing the clarinet solo part to fill 
in for Artie. Billie stood up in front of the mike, listening sort 
of dreamily while we played the song through once, and on the 
second time around she came gliding in, in the nick of time, like a 
lazy ball player starting to lope around the bases but taking his 
own good time because he knows that ball he just hit is never 
going to stop sailing. While she was singing, Artie walked in, 
and he just stood there. He couldn't believe she was that good. 

As Boston was my home territory, I knew exactly what Artie 
should do. I told him to see Sy Schribman about playing the 



98 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Roseland State Ballroom two nights a week, and about going on 
the radio once a week, and above all, I said, we must rehearse all 
the time. He did everything, even to playing the blues on the 
radio broadcasts. I wanted a half hour of blues, but we finally 
compromised on fifteen minutes. It was an unheard-of thing in 
those days for a white band to play fifteen minutes of blues. We 
worked out some riffs and other things as we went along, and 
everybody got a chance to play ad-lib solos on the blues. We 
rehearsed day and night, playing dates around New England 
through the Schribman office during the week, and playing the 
Roseland State Ballroom every Friday and Saturday night, with 
a broadcast from there each Friday. The band began to improve. 
We'd get on that bus and ride sixty to two hundred miles and 
climb on that bandstand and start swinging like mad. We still 
didn't draw much of a crowd, but more and more people began 
talking about the band, and the broadcasts were slowly making 
the band known nationally. The blues sessions especially began 
to cause a lot of notice. 

Then came the night we played opposite Tommy Dorsey's 
band at the Dartmouth prom. Tommy's band was the star attrac- 
tion, but by this time our band had unity and fire. We didn't have 
the fineness and the great pitch of Benny Goodman's band be- 
cause Benny's band had more experienced men and had been 
together a long time, which is what makes a band. But we had a 
great swinging band with a wonderful feeling of everybody 
wanting to play and, of course, Artie could always swing better 
than Tommy Dorsey ever could. As beautifully as Tommy could 
play, he was never much of a swing man. And while Tommy's 
band had a lot of great soloists and a lot of polish, it didn't have 
that exciting, infectious feeling of guys wanting to play. 

Tommy opened the prom, starting off with his theme, 
"Getting Sentimental Over You/' Now, Shaw's theme song, 
''Nightmare," was a powerful one with a haunting wildness to it, 
and when our turn came we gave it all we had when we opened 
up. I had worked hard to make the band into a strong, first-set 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 99 

band. After we finished the theme, the Dartmouth gym was in 
an uproar of cheering. We actually blew Tommy off the stand. 
He was a man who was always mad about something, but that 
night he was so burned up that he grabbed his horn and stalked 
off the stand. Tommy wasn't one to take a losing game; he'd 
never trained himself to lose, even though this sort of musical 
battle of the underdog band blowing the first band down had 
a long tradition behind it. 

Later on we had our turn to lose to Bunny Berigan, whose 
band was even less known than ours at the time we played 
against him. Bunny's band cut us, although it wasn't as obvious 
as it was with Dorsey, and not many besides the musicians 
realized it. Bunny was a strong player and could weld a band into 
a unit, but he had tough breaks. Just when he was coming up fine 
and was booked to open the Ritz Carlton Roof in Boston, the 
hurricane of 1938 blew the bandstand off the hotel roof and 
the job was canceled. That about finished poor Berigan, but at 
least it took a hurricane to do it. 

It was wonderful being in Artie's band in those days. I was 
fascinated with the problem of trying to make something out of 
the band, and all wrapped up in playing in it. There was a 
double-barreled thrill to playing in the big bands of the thirties. 
Though the lack of room to improvise and the pressures toward 
conformity were always a big drag after a while, big-band jazz, 
or swing, as it was called, had a fascination all its own, with its 
excitement and challenge and its tremendous power, and the few 
times I had the chance to do it I never felt as good as when I was 
playing in front of a big band. I love to play strong like that, 
for one thing. It's a good feeling, and having a big live band 
right behind you backing you up with those big fat solid chord- 
sounds so that you don't have to do it all yourself is a great spur 
musically. 

In the swing era, though there were nearly a hundred big 
bands, there were only four or five great white bands. Of course, 
a good deal of the music of the swing-band days was tasteless, 



100 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

raucous, and unmusical, and, of course, you can't get the truly 
great hot jazz in a big band that you can in a six- or seven-piece 
band with great soloists improvising collectively. In the big band, 
the arranged riffs had to take the place of ad-lib ensemble. But 
these swing bands were making the evolution from the kind of 
music before that from the society bands and "Mickey Mouse" 
bands of the Wayne King and Sammy Kaye type to a more 
sophisticated symphonic conception, but still different, and still 
in the new jazz tradition, because it swung. The whole idea of 
the big-band era was actually another offshoot of Louis Arm- 
strong's genius in interpreting a contemporary pop tune into 
something that swung. When Louis came East in 1924 to join 
Fletcher Henderson's band, his playing was such a revelation to 
Don Redman, who was doing Fletcher's arrangements, that Don 
junked all his previous stuff and developed a whole new concep- 
tion of arranging for a big band. Everyone Benny Goodman, 
Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, all the band leaders 
of the thirties knew that no one could swing like Louis. 

And secondly, Benny Goodman and Shaw and even Tommy 
Dorscy would alternate the big-band sound with a jazz quintet or 
sextet made up of jazzmen from within the band, and I have 
always felt it was the little jazz group within the big swing band 
that was the secret of the big band's success, even more than the 
girl singers and the vocal groups and the excitement and power 
of the big band itself. It was the little ad-lib jazz band that was at 
the core of the big band and made it swing; it was the jazz in 
the swing bands that made the swing era, and you were showing 
off the best in jazz with the little jazz band. The big bands were 
actually a complete show in themselves, in the old vaudeville 
tradition, but when the little jazz combo came on stage it gave 
the audience a change of pace, and above all, the excitement of 
spontaneous improvisation* 

Everything went along fine and dandy the first few months 
with Shaw's band. Artie was always so nice to me; he'd come 
over to my house for dinner and be charming and gracious to my 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 101 

mother, and afterward we'd walk in the park and Fd tell him 
all the tricks of the music game Fd seen and experienced. And 
my ego blossomed like a rose under Artie's attention and def- 
erence. I knew I was a big factor in the band's success and that 
the other musicians looked up to me and followed me around 
and did everything I said, and I ate it all up. All of us knew it was 
a great swinging band with terrific fire, and we were all absorbed 
in it, with Artie leading us to believe that it was all a part of our 
thing, too, because we all worked so hard to make it a success. 

Billie Holiday loved that band, too. It was a happy band for 
her. This was the first time a colored vocalist had a full-time, 
regular job in a white band. 

Chick Webb's band, with Ella Fitzgerald singing in it, was 
working right around the corner from Roseland State Ballroom 
then, at Lavargi's, and Chick used to drop around occasionally 
to sit in with us and what a spark he'd give us. Chick's band 
was always a great pacemaker for all the swing bands. This little 
colored drummer was one of the first to use the new high-hat 
cymbal, which made it possible to hold these big bands together 
on the beat. The high-hat started out as a single cymbal attached 
to the lower right side of the bass drum. When the drummer 
pressed the foot pedal of the bass drum, a little metal hammer 
would simultaneously strike the cymbal. Then someone had the 
idea of moving this cymbal to the left side so the drummer could 
use it to strike the afterbeat. The cymbal was doubled, with the 
upper and lower parts connected by a spring, and when the 
drummer pressed the pedal the two cymbals clashed together to 
mark the afterbeat. In its final evolution, the double cymbal was 
put on a long metal rod and raised to a position around elbow 
height, where the drummer could also use his drumsticks or wire 
brush on it, using it as a substitute for the snare drum. The 
brilliant hard staccato of the high-hat helped the band swing, 
whereas the snare drum vibrates so much that the definition of 
the time is sluggish and blurred. 

It's because of the high-hat that Benny Goodman's band was so 



I02 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

much better than Fletcher Henderson's old band, and after a 
while Benny's drummer, Gene Krupa, began to play these 
staccato riffs on the high-hat right along with the brass section, 
giving a sharp, exciting definition and swing to the whole band. 
In the forties Kenny Clarke went another step in developing the 
bop beat by reserving the bass drum for only special accents and 
using the top cymbal to keep the steady time. These cymbals, 
incidentally, were made by Zildian, a Turkish or Armenian firm 
up in Quincy, Massachusetts, by a process that was a family 
secret, handed down from father to son. 

A jazz drummer is a whole percussion section in one person. 
While his right foot is striking the bass drum for the beat and 
his left is working the high-hat pedal for the afterbeat, his left 
hand is beating out accents on the snare and his right hand is 
riding the high-hat or one of the big cymbals or tom-toms. He's 
syncopating like mad. Syncopation, accenting notes normally 
unaccented, is the basis of jazz and gives it its element of surprise 
and wit and humor; and sustained syncopation, which builds 
greater and greater momentum, is what gives jazz its great excite- 
ment and its feeling of go, go, go. Since the Africans had no 
means of making brass instruments or finely wrought string 
instruments, they concentrated on percussion, on anything they 
could bang, shake, rattle, or roll, and in using syncopation along 
with the regular beat, they developed the complex multiple 
rhythms that is their great musical genius and that was so new 
to European music. A jazz musician never feels so happy playing 
as when he's pkying with a great drummer. That's about the 
greatest feeling you can get. 

It was this land of feeling, the feeling of wanting to play, that 
gave the Artie Shaw band its great punch. The contagion of en- 
thusiasm and inspiration leaps from one musician to catch fire with 
another, as it did in the case of "Begin the Beguine." One day at 
rehearsal, when I started to noodle around with the song, Artie 
told his arranger to copy it that way. When he recorded this 
arrangement of it later on, it became one of his biggest hits. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 103 

Artie was a master psychologist when it came to getting work 
out of his men. One afternoon when he had the band booked for 
a dance in Philadelphia, instead of telling us we had to make it, 
even though he knew we were exhausted, he made a little speech 
about how far it was and how he felt it was too hard for us, too 
much to ask of us. Of course we insisted on doing it. Another 
time, after we had traveled six hundred miles from Boston to 
Pittsburgh in a snowstorm, only about six people showed up 
for the dance. Since this was before we had been on the air, we 
weren't known yet and nobody bothered to come out on a 
stormy night to hear us, but Artie made a big point of thanking 
these people and saying how happy he was that at least some- 
body showed up, inspiring us at the same time, too, by making us 
feel we were all in this great crusade together. 

Then things began to change. The band began to catch on, and 
I was more and more in favor with the guys, and I got going very 
strong, enjoying it all to the hilt. And that's when Artie began 
to change. We began to grate on each other's nerves things get 
that way in a band and I got mad at him and he got mad at 
me, until finally one day Artie called a meeting of the whole band 
and said to the guys, "I want you to know this is not Maxie's 
band; this is my band." I was shocked and humiliated to find he 
was thinking that way about me when all I had been doing was 
knocking my brains out to make the band a success. I felt Artie 
had turned on me and wanted to push me out, to dump me now 
that he had it made, and in my hurt I blindly tried to stop him by 
doing exactly the wro'ng thing. Instead of putting things on a 
businesslike, impersonal plane and working out a contract with 
Shaw, I went emotional. And it was all further complicated by 
the fact that I was having my first big woman trouble at this 
time. 

Rhoda and I had known each other since we were kids in 
Boston. She had always had eyes for me, but I had always been 
wary of becoming involved for fear I'd get married before I had 
a chance to do anything with the music. Though Rhoda was 



104 MY LIFE IN 

married now and had a family, she wasn't happy in her marriage, 
In her way Rhoda was a wonderful girl, and in her way she was 
wonderful for me, but as there was no future in it I became so 
mixed up and so involved that I didn't know where I was; one 
minute I'd be wild with jealousy and the next minute deeply 
ashamed of myself for being in such a scandalous mess. 

But even my mother couldn't help liking her. My mother had 
been after me all year to find a nice girl, and she redoubled her 
efforts when I began getting mixed up with Rhoda. One night 
in desperation I brought home to dinner a very proper girl whose 
parents wanted me to go into the family haberdashery business. 
The next morning my mother said, "You know what, Maxie 
you're right. Rhoda is better for you! At least she lets you be 
you." My mother couldn't stand narrow respectability any more 
than I could. 

As Shaw became colder to me, I turned more and more to 
Rhoda for sympathy, and that didn't do much to help matters. 
Twice I felt so depressed about Shaw's changed attitude toward 
me that I didn't show up for work on time, though I eventually 
did make it in time to play the second set. And, of course, the 
worse I acted, the more Shaw really started to change, too. He 
probably thought, "This guy is going to dump me when I need 
him and he's showing me that he's really not reliable," but I felt 
Artie was thinking, "I have all this now, and I did it before 
without him, and I don't need him." 

When the band left Boston I stayed behind, too hurt at Artie's 
attitude to have the heart to keep on with it, and too emotionally 
involved with Rhoda to be able to break off with her. The radio 
broadcasts had done their work in building Artie's fame, and 
when the band opened in St. Louis they were a sensation. I felt 
very bad about leaving the band, but I was conceited enough to 
think they couldn't get along without me. I was doomed to 
disappointment on that score, too. Once you have a band molded, 
a replacement is always easy. Up-and-coming musicians had been 
listening to these new big bands and were waiting to replace the 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ IOJ 

men who had pioneered and done the groundwork. Later on, all 
the big bands changed personnel as fast as the military change 
generals during a campaign. Each band must have used hundreds 
of sidemen, though all of them started out with fifteen dedicated 
guys who believed they were helping a band leader make good 
and thinking they, too, would make some money out of it, but 
all they ever got were their weekly salary and union scale for 
a record date. No royalties from records ever trickled down to 
the rest of the band. Being a musician in these bands wasn't an 
easy life, with the mental and physical labor that goes into 
playing, and it does drag me to think of the band leaders who 
have made and thrown away millions and never thought of the 
men who went on the road and slaved to make them rich and 
then had nothing to show for it but broken lives and broken 
homes. 

So the band went on the road, and it was a great success, and 
then Artie broke it all up himself, walking out on the band him- 
self a year later. He did what I did, but he waited till he received 
his first royalties. Artie went off to Acapulco and married Lana 
Turner, and Tony Pastor took over the band, but neither ar- 
rangement lasted very long. 

My strongest regret was that I didn't get the chance to see 
Billie Holiday do her stuff when the band went out on the road, 
but the reports I heard made me feel good that she was making 
such a great hit. Physically the grind of one-nighters wore her 
down, though, and a few months later, when the Shaw band 
was back in Boston for an engagement, Billie was sick from the 
rough time she had on the road. I brought her over to the house 
to meet my mother, who took one look at her and exclaimed, 
"Why, you look just like my Betty! Come, sit down. Rest," 
and in two minutes they were so deep in conversation that when 
I eventually drifted off into another room no one even noticed. 
My mother sent Billie to a doctor who had her back on her feet in 
a few days. 

Billie had a dual nature the good, sweet side, and the wild 



J0 6 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

side. I knew about the wild part of her life, but we never spoke 
about it. It was her business and she kept it that way. While Billie 
was in Boston, she boarded in a house in an old aristocratic section 
that had gradually fallen into neglect and disrepair, and was 
slowly being taken over by the poor. Her room was immense, 
with beautiful hardwood floors and mellow old oak paneling. 
While she was recuperating I stopped by to see her. I brought 
along an Orthophone phonograph, one of the finest record 
players made in those days a relic of my Lismore Hotel days 
with Eddie Condon. He had been given it as a present by one of 
his friends and somehow I had ended up with it. It seemed only 
fair to pass it along to Billie. 

"Groovy gravy I" Billie said happily when I explained about 
the phonograph. "Set it right down here" she pushed aside a 
lamp on the rickety little table "and you set down there" 
she gestured with her elbow at a chair "and well dig some 
Prez " Billie had given Lester the title of "President" because 
when he played he was top man, and he was the one who had 
named her "Lady Day." 

The phonograph sounded marvelous in that big room, and I 
was more than rewarded by hearing Billie sing along with her 
records. Curled up in a lopsided old armchair with her feet 
tucked up under her bright-blue woolly robe, her beautifully 
shaped head weary against the cushion, she listened to her own 
voice with closed eyes, but when Lester's horn took off on its 
own, Billie would take oft with him. As great as Billie sang a 
regular song, to hear her sing along with Lester Young while 
he was playing a chorus was something to make your toes curl. 
No words; she just scatted along with his tenor sax as though 
she were another horn. I listened, knowing all I was hearing, and 
it was quite a while before I realized that my mind was echoing 
its own accompaniment, right in time with the beat: "God bless 
you, girl, God bless you." 



Chapter o 



While swing was sweeping the country, the battle of winning 
an audience for small-band, improvised jazz was just getting up 
steam. All during the big-band craze, jazzmen had kept on form- 
ing small jazz combos and trying to find places to play. Among 
the musicians who were determined to win a hearing for jazz 
was my old roommate, Eddie Condon. 

In addition to a bulldog tenacity and a devotion to the music 
that approached dedication, Eddie had another aptitude that was 
invaluable to the cause of jazz a positive genius for finding the 
right persons at the right time and getting them to help in the 
right way. One of these persons was a young advertising man, 
Paul Smith, who in the spring of 1938 sponsored Eddie in a series 
of Friday-afternoon concerts once a month at the Park Lane, a 
swanky Park Avenue hotel. Although Eddie had nothing against 
saloons personally quite the opposite, in fact he felt that if 
jazz could be presented in a more dignified setting and given an 
opportunity to throw off its stigma of raffish low life, it might 
have a chance. 

Eddie gathered together the best of the Negro and white 
musicians and at each concert they busted the place up. We 

107 



I0 g MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

enjoyed the concerts as much as anyone else; it was a marvelous 
feeling to be playing with jazzmen and not having to hold back. 
I remember Willie the Lion Smith feeling so good at these 
clambakes that he helped the bartender mix the drinks. However, 
many of the regular residents of the Park Lane were railroad 
tycoons from the South, and at the sight of white and Negro 
musicians drinking and playing together they set up such a 
squawk that we moved to the St. Regis, and then to the Belmont 
Plaza, and then we ran out of hotels, courage, and money. 

In the meantime, Eddie had been working down at Nick's 
in Greenwich Village. That June of 1938, Eddie called me to 
come to town to play the Princeton alumni reunion with Bud 
Freeman, Brad Gowans, Pee Wee Russell, Dave Tough, and 
Dave Bowman. After the job we had a long talk about the pos- 
sibility of staying together and trying to make a go of it with 
our own band. 

"I'll get Nick to hire you fellows," Eddie said. "Listen, there 
is no bunch of guys around that can get the sound we get. With 
Maxie, Pee Wee, Bud, Brad" he ticked us off one by one with 
a deliberate, determined finger "we could have a hell of an all- 
male band. What do you say, fellows?" 

Everybody thought it was a good idea except me. That is, I 
thought the idea of the band was great, but I was so swamped at 
the time with my personal problems that I couldn't commit my- 
self yet to anything. I did stipulate that I'd join only on the 
condition that it be a cooperative organization. After the Artie 
Shaw experience I was trying to smarten up. This suggestion 
met with unanimous approval, and a five-year charter for the 
Summa Cum Laude band, as it was christened, was drawn up. 

After the Princeton date I went back to Boston. Meanwhile 
the fellows kept after me. Condon had Ernie Anderson work 
on me, and Ernie kept calling me to come down to New York. 
Ernie, an affable, bespectacled young man who worked on a 
magazine in the daytime and devoted his evenings to listening to 
jazz, found his mission in life when he discovered that gold 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 109 

mine of unreconstructed characters Condon, Pee Wee, Bud, 
et d. From then on, aided and encouraged by Eddie, he spent 
every waking moment devising ways and means to create a 
popular audience for jazz. 

I kept saying no to Ernie's pleas to join the band. Pulled in 
five directions at once, I did my best to avoid coming to any 
decision at all. Although I still had it bad for Rhoda, I knew I 
had to get away from her, and yet I was loath to go in with the 
Chicago gang. I admired them all so much, and to have them 
praise my playing was it, as far as I was concerned. In fact, that 
was the whole trouble. Being such a pushover for a pat on the 
back, I knew that that praise would be my undoing, just as it 
was with Shaw, and I'd end up being the victim of my own 
ego again. But on the other hand, with my thirtieth birthday just 
around the corner, it was time for me to make it on my own 
now, no matter how tough things got, with no more running 
back home to Boston whenever I ran into difficulties. And, 
finally, as it slowly sank into my still bruised pride that the days 
of being the big star in Shaw's band were over, I realized that 
the only sensible thing to do was to go to work at Nick's and 
do my best. When I told my mother I had decided to accept 
Eddie's offer, we both knew without having to put it into words 
that I'd never come home again to live. With Rhoda I wasn't 
so courageous. I just told her I was going to New York for a 
couple of days. I couldn't admit to myself yet that I was break- 
ing off with her for good. When I came to town Ernie Anderson 
had me stay at his apartment at the Beaux Arts, and everyone 
treated me so wonderfully that after a few days I finally made 
up my mind to stay. 

The problem we faced with the Summa Cum Laude band 
was different from the one that had confronted the Artie Shaw 
band. In that case the ground had already been broken by 
Benny Goodman, the public was eager for more, and it was a 
matter of competition, of whipping an inexperienced band into 
a personality distinctive and exciting enough to attract attention. 



IIO MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

But with the Summa Cum Laude band the general public had 
not only never heard of us, it couldn't have cared less if it had. 
People were flocking in droves to the Broadway movie palaces 
to see the big glamorous swing bands, they were buying their 
records by the millions, and dancing to their music in dance 
halls, and as yet few knew or cared about the highly complex 
music of the small jazz band. Our problem was one of finding a 
market for a music that was considered to have died a natural 
death with the passing of the roaring twenties out of date, out 
of style, and out of favor. We had to make a comeback for a 
music that was considered dead before it had even reached 
maturity. 

And where I shone in contrast to the green, unseasoned mu- 
sicians in Shaw's band, in the Summa Cum Laude band I was 
among my peers, and each was equal to the whole. Above all, 
these fellows were a different breed from the swing kings. Now 
I was with a band composed of dedicated jazz musicians who 
never wanted to play in a commercial band, even a swing band. 
Jazz was their deepest, sincerest belief their whole life not 
money, fame, or glory. And though most of us never did get 
the money, we got plenty of fame within a short time. 

Each one in the Summa Cum Laude band had his unique con- 
tribution. Eddie Condon, in addition to his swinging guitar, was 
the great contact man, the hatcher of schemes, the spokesman. 
Bud Freeman was the dynamo who inspired us with his sparkle, 
his wit, his immense sensitivity to the melodic and rhythmic 
mood. Bud is a great, great swinger, and his enthusiasm and 
bounce as well as his taste and his drive were an invaluable asset 
to the band. Pee Wee Russell was, hands down, the most unique 
of us all, because there is no one in the universe with the musical 
charm, the magic, and the hotness of Pee Wee. Visually he was 
a sensation, with his long elastic frame and his remarkable, 
lugubrious face. Pee Wee, part poet, part roustabout, seems to 
play from his ankles up, and hearing him play is like spending an 
evening with Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Damon Runyon. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ III 

Brad Gowans, a combination of a sweet-natured soul and an 
extraordinarily talented musician, was a character even back in 
1925, when I first heard him play at a dance at the Copley Plaza 
in Boston, He was an unforgettable sight whizzing around 
Boston in those days in a racing car he had rebuilt out of an 
old Ford, his eyes barely visible above the collar of an enormous 
racoon coat. Brad was always a nut about machinery, and he 
was forever tinkering about in junk yards, building motorboats, 
sports cars, power engines, and if he had lived on into the space 
age he would have come up with an Adas missile, too. Brad, who 
was always great in fighting for jazz, not only had a pretty 
melodic sense and beautiful ideas, he knew how to play ensemble. 
The Chicago-style jazz had always been strong on ensemble 
improvisation. This is the essence of jazz. Many jazzmen who 
are great soloists cannot cope with the demands of collective 
improvisation. It was mainly the white musicians who carried 
on this tradition. With the Negro's strong rhythmic instinct, it 
was more natural for the colored bands to swing, but their swing 
was always based primarily on rhythmic riffs from the run-of- 
the-mill jump bands up to the great bands of Count Basic and 
Duke Ellington rather than on ensemble improvisation, 

It was hard going at first trying to hack out a path for our- 
selves. All of these men were strong individualists, but despite 
the high-voltage temperaments and the Chicago guys' style of 
letting loose with caustic, cutting remarks which were hard to 
take, we somehow or other worked things out as we went along. 
Bud wasn't too keen on the Dixieland songs, for one thing, and 
I knew only a few of them. Brad had his hands full trying to 
get into everyone's head the idea that there had to be some 
thought and arrangements, however flexible, along with the 
jamming and the hot solos, and he was always trying to strike a 
balance between plan and improvisation. Writing arrangements 
was so natural to Brad that he scarcely realized he was doing it 
all the time, and when a band leader once asked him if he could 
read music Brad retorted, "Not enough to hurt my playing." 



II2 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Brad's arrangements were very loose, with just certain parts 
worked out and all the rest left free for ad-libbing. Eddie didn't 
want to lead the band in those days, so Bud fronted us, but the 
burden of keeping everyone in line fell on Brad, who worked 
very hard in his nice funny way to try to do it. Brad was the 
stabilizing force in this band. But in spite of the conflicts and 
in spite of the problems, we all lived just to play. We all knew 
the sound we wanted to have, and gradually we evolved into a 
band that packed a wallop Joe Louis would have envied. And 
above all, the music was the thing, not our looks or our per- 
sonalities. When Pee Wee writhed and contorted into fantastic 
shapes while playing, it was completely unconscious; he wasn't 
selling Pee Wee, he was all wrapped up in what he was say- 
ing. 

The Summa Cum Laude band was the forerunner of the 
whole revival of the Dixieland bands. At that time our style 
of playing was called Chicago jazz; a few years later they 
called it Dixieland. When bop came in after the war, we were 
called Moldy Figs; then we were tolerated with the term Main- 
stream jazz; and now it's Dixieland again. But, nevertheless, the 
Summa Cum Laude band wasn't a Dixieland band as the term 
is used today. Most of the Dixieland bands of today play 
calendar-art style using simple, bright colors and broad, thick 
lines and they rely heavily on the traditional Dixieland songs, 
not realizing it's not what you play but how you play it. We 
played everything, new pop tunes, old standards, and show tunes, 
as well as blues and rags and stomps and the classic jazz marches 
and shuffles and shouts and one-steps. After a while it got so 
that unless we played the Dixieland songs, people thought we 
weren't playing jazz. They think it's the song that makes it jazz; 
they never seem to understand that it's the feeling, for when it 
comes down to explaining what makes a really great jazz band, 
it's like trying to explain what it is that makes the Mona Lisa a 
masterpiece. You could start by saying that it's the simple things 
that are the hardest to do. It's hard to play a song simply and 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 113 

beautifully, without tricks or gimmicks, without corn or phoni- 
ness of any kind. Before you can improvise sensibly and beauti- 
fully on a melody, you have to know how to play the melody 
right first. You have to have an inborn sense of swing, so that you 
feel the melodic phrases in terms of the jazz beat. You have to 
have harmonic sense, good intonation, good taste, and you have 
to have a sense of order, of structure, of form, so that when you 
ad-lib a new song out of the original one you can build and keep 
building up to a new climax, and not just spout out clouds of 
meaningless phrases and notes. Then there has to be understand- 
ing and teamwork among the musicians. They inspire each other 
and build on each other's ideas. The richness and the excitement 
comes from the interplay of ideas. They comment on and de- 
velop what the man ahead has just said in his solo. And they all 
have to be able to improvise collectively so that each part makes 
a beautiful, sensible whole. 

The first month with the band was a difficult transition period 
for me, both musically and emotionally. I had put so much of 
myself into the Artie Shaw band that I was like an athlete who 
has overextended himself. Since I knew so few Dixieland songs 
it was a struggle for me until I learned the whole repertoire. I 
didn't like to take too many solos at first and I confined myself 
mainly to ensemble playing in the beginning. That, in fact, was 
one of the reasons the fellows had wanted me in this band with 
them. They felt I was the guy who could play that lead with the 
tone and the time. I had that instinct for making a band, even a 
seven-piece band like ours, sound rich and full without making 
my trumpet overbearing. The other musicians had room to play, 
too; I gave them a chance, leading without dominating, holding 
them all together during improvised ensemble work and giving 
them the drive and the beat without being so showy that they 
were overshadowed and cramped. 

"Tin Roof Blues" happened to be one of the few Dixieland 
songs I knew, and Fd invariably lead the band into it when it was 
time for the last number of each set. It has since become the 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

custom to use it as the traditional signature for all the bands 
that play at Nick's. 

As the weeks went by I began to pull out of my doldrums. I 
found a pleasant one-room apartment on Bank Street and kept 
to a sane routine at first, and after a while I felt so fit physically 
and so relieved mentally that I used to just sit on the bandstand 
and laugh. I felt as if a tremendous burden had been lifted off 
me, and the thought of how seriously I had taken the events of 
the past couple of years suddenly seemed the height of absurdity. 
But it used to burn Nick up to see me laugh. He thought I 
wasn't taking things seriously enough, and Eddie had a little 
talk with me. That euphoria leveled off after a while, and I 
began buckling down to learning the songs and putting more 
thought into my work, and little by little my confidence began 
to revive. 

At first the going wasn't too good, but our luck was in play- 
ing for a man like Nick. One of the first night-club owners to 
take a chance on jazz, Nick Rongetti supported not only the 
music, letting the men play the way they wanted and never 
interfering with the band in any way; he fed us and stuck it 
out with us when business was lousy; there was never a 
time when a musician down on his luck wouldn't find a warm 
welcome and a hot meal at Nick's. Business was so bad at first 
that Nick didn't have the money to lay in a supply of Scotch. 
Each night, he'd have to wait till about 1 1 P.M., when he had 
enough in the cash register to run around the corner to the 
liquor store and buy a couple of bottles of Scotch. 

Then things began picking up. Eddie had talked Life maga- 
zine into doing a picture story on jazz, and when Life finally 
ran it, along with some plugs for Nick's, people started coming 
in. Friday- and Saturday-night business started booming, trays 
of steaks went sizzling by the bandstand every ten minutes, the 
jitterbugs discovered that dancing to hot jazz was an exciting 
challenge, and jazz fans who just liked to listen began appearing 
as if by magic. Hugues Panassie's book on jazz had come out a 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 115 

year or so before and we were suddenly besieged by a strange 
new breed of fan the record collector. Pale, intense, studious- 
looking young men buttonholed us when we were headed 
for Julius's, the saloon up the street where we relaxed between 
sets, and plied us with questions about who had played what in- 
strument in some pickup band recorded some twenty years 
earlier, and the record-collecting craze was on as fans combed 
attics and Salvation Army warehouses and thrift shops and 
second-hand stores for suddenly sought-after recordings of race 
songs and jazz bands made twenty-five years before. They began 
forming record clubs and exchanging newsletters on jazz and 
did a brisk business swapping records with each other. 

In the meantime, a very significant link in the chain of events 
that eventually led to the wide acceptance of jazz had begun 
operating Milt Gabler, the proprietor of the Commodore Rec- 
ord Shop on Forty-second Street, east of Lexington Avenue. 
Milt, a round, placid man with a benevolent blue gaze, infinite 
patience, and a deep heart for jazz, had started a one-man crusade 
a few years earlier to persuade the big record companies to reissue 
the out-of-print records of the jazz of the twenties, and then in 
1935 he bought the masters himself and reissued them under his 
own label, U.H.C.A. United Hot Clubs of America. But just re- 
issuing early jazz records wasn't helping to bring jazz back or to 
give musicians a living. It had been over four years since any 
company had made a new jazz record. Milt decided he might 
as well go whole hog, and he put out his own new records of 
contemporary hot jazz, under the label of Commodore Records. 
Later, Milt himself summed up his contribution toward reviving 
jazz with the apt observation that "]ust as New Orleans was the 
cradle of jazz, Commodore Records was the iron lung." 

By January, 1938, when Milt began recording his first Com- 
modore dates, he was also working for the Decca Record Com- 
pany as an A&R (Artists and Repertoire) man, and on the 
strength of the Commodore record sales he didn't have much 
trouble setting up recording dates for us with Decca, too. We 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

made the Wolverine album, of songs made famous by Beider- 
becke, on the Decca label, and we also made the four sides, 
"Friar's Point Shuffle," "Nobody's Sweetheart," "There'll Be 
Some Changes Made," and "Someday, Sweetheart," for the 
Decca Chicago Jazz album, the first jazz album ever made. Milt 
also used the Decca studios to record the two twelve-inch Com- 
modore records of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." That most 
of the Commodore dates turned out so well was due mainly to 
Milt's talent for moving you feel that the most important thing 
in the world was having you play a song the way you felt it, 
and he would get you feeling so good and so relaxed that that's 
exactly what you did. As Milt expressed it in Gilbert Millstein's 
profile of him in The New Yorker (March 9 and 16, 1946): 

"The thrill I get is not knowing what's going to happen. One 
guy hits on something and the others pick it right up and so 
they do compose while they play. I never can tell when I'm 
going to be lifted right out of my seat. That doesn't go with 
arranged music. You don't get knocked out. You don't get the 
bottom, the drive, the punch, the big, fat, hot note. The musician 
has got to have a heart and be able to play pretty things, too, 
things that say something different when he takes a solo and 
not just what he has heard somewhere else. They have to know 
their instruments. Guys that know their instruments don't get 
lost, they know how to play the song and improvise on it and 
then come back and play around it. Of course, when you get 
one of those frantic characters sitting in he'll mess up everything 
and throw everybody off. I don't like these screamadeemers on 
the horn who have to make faces and play high. That isn't jazz 
a lot of people don't know that. Those guys get out on a limb 
and then they can't come back. They get themselves a one-way 
ticket to nowhere. Then they miss and it's the worst thing in 
the world. He leaves you on the top floor and the whole works 
collapses." 

Things were happening so fast now with the rush of record 
dates and the sudden interest in jazz that I scarcely had any idea 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 117 

of what it was all about. One of our records from the Columbia 
Comes Jazz album, "Muskrat Ramble," was used as the theme 
on his disk-jockey show by Ralph Berton, the brother of Vic 
Berton, who played drums in Bix's Wolverine band. And with 
the sudden craze for hot-jazz records and the ever-increasing 
number of jazz fans, we found ourselves celebrities in the highly 
concentrated, intense world of jazz. I didn't quite know what 
to make of it all. Here these people were beginning to write 
about us and talk about our records and look up to us as heroes; 
compliments and plaudits were showered on us from all sides; 
and all I knew was that we were just lucky to have a place like 
Nick's to play in and be making our sixty dollars a week. Maybe 
if we were making a thousand a week we'd have felt more im- 
portant, but that sixty dollars a week salary kept our heads down 
to normal size. We had no idea that people all over the world 
were beginning to collect our records and idolize us as the 
stalwart, pure-hearted artists fighting against the commercial 
music world. All we were concerned about was making our 
band sound good. But we were creating a new following for 
jazz and a new respect for it. We were setting a style again of 
having a band play as the musicians felt the music, and not com- 
mercially, as in the big swing bands. We were helping to create 
a public for jazz, and many of those new fans are now well- 
known critics and writers and record executives. 

And we were also setting new forms of playing songs, as in 
the Lee Wiley albums, which were years ahead of their time. 
It was all Johnny DeVries' idea. An advertising artist, and a 
theatregoer as well as a jazz buff, Johnny was an ardent fan of 
show tunes, and he was fired with the idea of having Lee record 
Gershwin songs the way Johnny felt they were meant to be 
done, in an authentic jazz mood. Show tunes had been recorded 
a million times but never in the way Johnny had in mind. 

Big-band swing was at the peak of its popularity then and 
the record companies thought it was the worst idea of the year, 
but Johnny finally found a Mr. Hill of the Liberty Music Shops, 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

who agreed to sponsor the date and turn it out under the Liberty 
label. We worked out the arrangements one night, and the next 
day Brad Gowans, George Wedding, Pee Wee, Joe Bushkin, 
Eddie Condon, and Artie Shapiro and Lee and I went to the 
studio and made the records. Lee's singing was sheer perfection, 
and the album sold so well at the Liberty Music Shops that Ernie 
Anderson was able to sell Rabson's on the idea of doing another 
one. We worked out a Rodgers and Hart album with Lee next, 
and later on she did a Harold Arlen album, and a Cole Porter 
album with Bunny Berigan on trumpet. Lee set the style for 
years to come with her marvelous phrasing and the haunting 
timbre of her voice, and later everyone else copied her, as well as 
the idea of the celeste introductions, and of doing the verse out of 
tempo and then going into tempo on the chorus. Lee Wiley, who 
was born and raised in Oklahoma, is part Cherokee, and she says 
there is an old family saying that "all Cherokees sing." She points 
to Jack Teagarden and Pee Wee Russell, who are also part 
Cherokee, as further proof of the saying. Mildred Bailey, too, 
had American Indian blood, as well as Ernie Caceres, Big Chief 
Russell Moore, and Cutty Cutshall. 

As much as I loved being around with Eddie and Ernie and 
all the guys, the pace began to tell on me after a while. Eddie was 
always a great man for parties, and it seemed as though the 
whole time in the Summa Cum Laude band was one great big 
party. The other fellows could drink, but, as I've said, after three 
drinks I was out on my feet and the next day my lip had as much 
strength as a used rubber band. I met Nancy, who was later to 
become my wife, during this time, and my personal life had 
become further complicated by all the turmoil that goes with 
having a girl. I was caught up in the whirl, but in my heart I 
felt guilty about the perpetual merry-go-round. All my life I 
had wanted the chance to play jazz with musicians like these 
and now that I was doing it I wasn't happy about the kind of 
living that went with it. I don't know why it so often happens 
that way when you're living what should be the greatest mo- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 119 

ments of your life you are so often confused and miserable in- 
stead of happy. Perhaps that is the proof of their greatness. Now 
that I look back on it I see how wonderful those times were. 
But in 1938, with each weekend bringing a new crisis in Europe, 
it would have been surprising if we hadn't felt apprehensive 
and concerned underneath the excitement of our daily lives. 

People were so jittery that when Orson Welles' radio show 
about Mars invading the United States went on the air, thousands 
of terrified people in New Jersey hit the road. Kate Smith began 
ending her radio programs by singing "God Bless America," 
and I started to stay up till dawn to listen to Hitler's speeches 
over short wave, as though hearing him first hand would give 
me some new insight into the madness that was swallowing up 
Europe. Here in America, despite my name being Max Kamin- 
sky, I was knee-deep in compliments, while in Germany, because 
of my name and my faith, I would have been in a concentration 
camp on my way to the gas chamber. Was human dignity a 
matter of geography? 

In any case, I soon had something more immediate to worry 
about. Around November of 1938, Nick, in a burst of optimism 
at the upswing in business, brought in Muggsy Spanier's band 
in addition to ours. Then, after a couple of weeks, he decided 
there wasn't enough business to warrant having two bands and 
we were given notice. A week or so later, we went to work in 
the Brick Club on Forty-seventh Street, a barrelhouse West 
Side joint and I mean barrel and house. The Brick Club was 
also famous for hiring jazz bands. Hot Lips Page had had the 
band in there before us, with a marvelously flashy drummer 
named Kid Lips Hackett. Though we were paid only forty 
dollars a week, we were on the air every night and we hoped 
we were continuing to build up an audience for the band. 

For some reason, this job was hard on our drummers and we 
had a whole procession of them during the couple of months 
we were there, including George Wetding and Dave Tough. 
One night Dave became so zomped he couldn't finish the night, 



J20 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

so Don Marino took over. Don was just starting to learn to play 
then, and after his first set we all turned to him with praise and 
encouragement. 

"Thanks, fellows," he said, "but will you please tell Bud to 
ky off. He keeps twisting around when he's playing and staring 
at me as if I'm doing something wrong." 

We all turned on Bud then, telling him to lay off the kid and 
give him a chance. Bud didn't know what we were talking about, 
and it turned out he wasn't looking at Don at all. There was a 
mirror beside the drums and every time he took a solo Bud had 
automatically turned so he could get the full effect of himself 
in a mirror. Bud, in fact, was part frustrated actor. Over the 
years he had cultivated a thespian way of speaking that was very 
impressive. It was so good, in fact, that once when he actually 
tried out for a Broadway play, reading for the part of a jazz 
musician, he was turned down because the director thought he 
sounded too much like an actor! 

From the Brick Club we went out to Chicago in the spring 
of 1939 for a month at the Panther Room at the Hotel Sherman. 
It was through Lee Wiley that we landed the job, and Lee went 
out with us to sing in the band. We alternated with Stuff Smith's 
band, which had Jonah Jones and Cozy Cole; a great band 
that was vastly underappreciated. "Squirrel" Ashcraft, a Chicago 
lawyer who had been a jazz fan since his Princeton and Bix 
Beiderbecke days was famous for his Monday night open-house 
jam sessions at his Evanston home, and he made our stay memora- 
ble with his hospitality. In my book, Squirrel can be rated as 
one of the top hosts, ever. 

For our salary of sixty dollars a week, we did two broadcasts 
a night, and we also played for the floor show, which included a 
clown who handed out balloons to the patrons and had them 
participating in kiddie cart races, and a Spanish dance team for 
whom we played bullfight music. These were the days when 
publishers were still going around plugging new songs for the 
bands to play on the air. Brad would sit up all night writing 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 121 

medley arrangements of the songs: "April Played the Fiddle," 
'Til Never Smile Again," "The Wind and the Rain in Your 
Hair," and the next night we'd play the medleys mixed in with 
the jazz classics. In spite of everything, the band sounded fine 
and Lee was singing as only she could, but when the Panther 
Room engagement ended there wasn't a soul around offering us 
another job. Eddie even resorted to sending a wire to Bing 
Crosby, but Crosby's return wire squashed that hope. Los 
Angeles was still a hillbilly town and didn't dig, he said. 

When we returned to New York Eddie and Pee Wee went 
back into Nick's, but I hated to give up without trying the 
Schribman formula. When I told Ernie Anderson about Sy 
Schribman, Ernie took us up to Boston, where Sy booked us 
into some one-nighters in dance halls in New England. Along 
with Bud, Brad, and me, we had Lips Page and Al Drootin. We 
were spectacularly unsuccessful. The formula didn't work for 
us; those kids didn't care whose band they were hearing just as 
long as it wasn't ours. Even Ernie had to admit there was still 
no popular audience for jazz, but it made him more determined 
than ever to give jazz a chance to be heard. 

After a few weeks of emptying out dance halls, we slunk back 
to New York in August and found ourselves a job at the World's 
Fair, alternating with Charlie Barnet's big band in an open-air 
dance hall. It was cold and rainy out there in Flushing Meadows 
that last month of the 1939 World's Fair as Hitler began to really 
blow his stack. When Germany invaded Poland, and England 
and France declared war on Germany, that was the end of the 
long tragedy of appeasement and the beginning of the terrible 
reality of war. It was also the end of the Summa Cum Laude 
band, and the beginning of the same old routine of dodging land- 
lords, hunting for places to play, and trying not to think of 
food. For jazzmen, the years 1939-42 were the depression all 
over again. 

During that fall of 1939, Milt Gabler started running the 
Sunday sessions at Jimmy Ryan's as another way of giving jazz- 



122 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

men work. You could always count on a five or a ten out of 
Milt for the Sunday jam sessions, but besides helping keep the 
musicians in bread and beer, these sessions were a kind of oasis 
for musician and fan alike. Just as barren as was musical life of 
opportunities for playing and hearing jazz, so the sessions at 
Ryan's seemed that much richer and greener. There was a mo- 
ment there, in 1941-42, at the Ryan sessions, when hot jazz 
seemed at its purest. Hovering on the edge of public discovery 
and known only to a few, it was as yet completely unself- 
conscious and untouched by commercialism or publicity. 

It's hard to believe that the Fifty-second Street of the thirties, 
the forties, and the fifties is completely gone now, gobbled up 
by Radio City. Ryan's continued to be an oasis for hot-jazz 
fans through the sunset years of Fifty-second Street, when its 
kind of music was eclipsed by bop and cool and hard jazz and 
its buildings menaced by the wrecker's steel ball. Jimmy Ryan 
set another record for constancy by "holding over" one band, 
the DeParis Brothers, for over ten years, until the spring of 1962, 
when the club was finally razed to clear the site for the new 
CBS building. But in the early forties Ryan's was the mecca of 
jazz fans on Sunday afternoons. You paid a dollar at the door, 
usually to Jack Crystal, who helped run the sessions, and if you 
didn't want to drink you could sit in the rows of chairs set up 
in the center of the floor and listen without anything to distract 
you except the bobbing head of the cat in front of you. The club 
was smaU, the atmosphere intimate, and the audience listened 
hard. The feeling was that musicians and fans alike lived just 
for Sundays, and that Jimmy Ryan himself, genial, debonair 
ex-hoofer turned night-club owner, was having as big a ball as 
everyone else. The fans, who included specimens of all the 
varieties the earnest jazz purist; the jivey hep cat; the intense 
intellectual; extroverts from the advertising world; Broadway 
types; sentimental drunks; dedicated drinkers; plain people; and 
plain characters were all members of the same fraternity. One 
devoted fan was memorable for his absence. He was a Bronx 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 123 

baker, and most every Sunday at four he was a captive to his 
trade, stoking up his ovens for his Monday-morning bread. But 
his friends made notes of every set at Ryan's and gave him a 
blow-by-blow verbal playback the next day. Another fan was a 
dentist, who stood next to the drums at every session, and the 
sight of his blissful face was as much a part of the sessions as 
the music. The Ryan's regulars were the most sincere and discrim- 
inating group of fans I ever played for anywhere, and you could 
hear a swizzlestick drop as they listened to musicians like: Jess 
Stacy, Joe Sullivan, Dave Tough, Kansas Fields, Big Sid Catlett, 
Bill Coleman, Joe Thomas, Emmett Berry, Red Allen, Rod Cless, 
Jay C. Higginbotham, Sammy Price, Pee Wee Russell, Vic 
Dickenson, Bud Freeman, Zutty Singleton, Billy Butterfield, 
Brad Gowans, Frank Orchard, Muggsy Spanier, Ernie Caceres, 
Bobby Hackett, Sid Weiss, Mel Powell, Sidney Bechet, Lips 
Page, Dick Gary, Albert Nicholas, Cliff Jackson, Kaiser 
Marshall, Wild Bill Davison, Vernon Brown, George Wettling, 
Joe Bushkin, Marty Marsala, Sandy Williams, Benny Morton, 
Roy Eldridge, Jack Bland, Miff Mole, Charlie Shavers, Don Fry, 
Artie Shapiro, Edmond Hall, Danny Alvin, Gene Schroeder, 
Jack Lesberg, Don Byas, Joe Grausso, Bob Haggart, Lou Mc- 
Garity, Wilbur and Sidney DeParis, Barney Bigard, Buck Clay- 
ton, Bob Casey, Al Morgan, Johnny Windhurst, Mezz Mezzrow, 
Art Hodes, Pops Foster, Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Lester 
Young, Johnny Simmons, Earl Hines, Meade Lux Lewis, Deane 
Kincaide, Eddie Heywood, Ray Conniff, Tony Parenti, Gene 
Sedric, Panama Francis, Hank D'Amico, Al Hall. 

The sets fell into a pattern of a white band alternating with a 
colored group, although they were often both slightly mixed, 
and it became the tradition to have both groups jam together 
after the last set on the roof -raising "Bugle Call Rag." Nobody 
played "The Saints" then. At Ryan's the music was the thing, 
and when a musician was building a solo you never heard a 
sound from the audience. You could feel them listening. 

But eventually Ryan's, too, felt the pinch of war and the 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

quality inevitably deteriorated. Musicians were being drafted 
every day, the fans were scattered far and wide, and a different 
type of audience took over 4-F, jivey characters in zoot suits 
to match the frantic screaming tenor saxes which were the 
precursors of bop. 

In the middle of 1940, the Maginot Line collapsed and the 
British were nearly wiped out at Dunkirk. Here, isolation and 
intervention were burning issues and the scarcity of jobs was 
bugging jazzmen. There was Ryan's and some other places for 
gigs, but no steady work. Though I recorded a good deal during 
this time, no royalties for any of the records ever came my way, 
and I never even had the sense to think about it. So many 
musicians are poor businessmen; Fats Waller, for instance, used 
to sell his marvelous songs for fifty dollars apiece when he was 
broke, which was often. I didn't mind washing out the same 
pair of socks every night, but when I was reduced to putting 
cardboard in my shoes I decided it was time to resort to the 
one thing I had always resorted to going back to work in a 
commercial band. Being a con man was never my style; I was 
never one for bumming free meals and free lodgings, and when 
there was no work as a jazzman I tried to find any kind of work, 
even though it involved doing routine playing as well as swallow- 
ing my pride. Having nothing to eat and nothing to wear is a 
great aid to swallowing. I went to work in Tony Pastor's band 
at the Hotel Lincoln for a few months, and then the first half 
of 1941 was another big struggle again. 

Finally, gulping down a particularly painful lump of pride, I 
called up Artie Shaw. Shaw was very cordial on the phone, and 
he even invited me over for dinner at his apartment that night 
on Central Park South. He had just made some very successful 
records with a big band in California "Dancing in the Dark" 
and "Stardust" and had come East that August to organize 
another, bigger band with thirty men. We talked about music 
and books, as usual, and about his ideas for his new band. 

"If I were getting a big swing band together, I'd get Lips 
Page," I said, ready as ever with the advice. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 125 

"Who," Artie asked, "is Lips Page?" 

"Well, you might say he is only the greatest trumpet after 
Louis," I said softly. So Shaw hired Lips for his new band, along 
with me and Dave Tough. 

A thirty-piece band was unusually big even for those days 
of big bands. There had been no band of this size since Paul 
Whiteman's in the late thirties. A couple of weeks later, we 
started to rehearse the band and I started eating again. We had 
four trumpets, with Lee Castle and Steve Lipkin besides Lips 
and myself. Georgie Auld was in this band, and Jack Jenney, 
Johnny Guamieri, and Mike Bryan, as well as many wonderful 
string musicians whose names I can't remember now. Lips fitted 
in perfectly, playing and entertaining beautifully with songs like 
"Blues in the Night" and "Take Off Your Shoes, Baby, You 
Keep Running Through My Mind," and Artie was delighted 
with him. I played a little lead, but not much. Lips and I shared 
the jazz work, but I felt I was just sitting back and taking it easy 
compared to the earlier Shaw band when no one could play. 

We went on the road up to New England again, and Artie 
was bigger than ever. People followed his bus and swarmed in 
to collect autographs whenever it stopped. Though I eventually 
began to go crazy in this band, too, because after a while I 
couldn't just sit there and play that same stuff night after night, 
I was so thankful to be able to buy some shirts and underwear 
and shoes and a suit that I was determined to stay as long as I 
could this time. We were all paid wonderful salaries for those 
days, in fact, my kingly $175 a week was the most money I had 
ever made up to then, and I had the sense to know I ought to 
hang on to it no matter how dull it was. 

Lips never forgot that I was responsible for his getting the 
job with Shaw. Forever after, I was Buddy to Lips, and years 
later, whenever we ran into each other he would relate the story 
to everyone within earshot. "I was never so happy in my life," 
he'd say, his eyes shining at the memory, "and this is the man 
who got it for me." Besides that, he liked iny playing, too. Like 
Glenn Miller, he was always saying I was the best lead trumpet 



126 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

man, but I always felt Lips was the most underrated of the jazz 
greats. Born in Dallas, Texas, Lips had come to New York in 
1936 with Count Basic's band, along with Lester Young, Buck 
Clayton, Don Byas, and Jo Jones, and to me he ha d it; no one 
else could break it up like Lips. His drive was tremendous, and 
he could play chorus after chorus without ever repeating him- 
self. They have said that about other musicians, but Lips was 
the only one I have heard who could actually do it. In Lips' 
good days he could do thirty or more choruses, each one dif- 
ferent. In his last years, when he'd come down to Condon's club 
and sit in and play to Ralph Button's intermission piano, Lips 
was so great that the customers used to come up to the stand 
and thrust fistfuls of dollar bills at him. Lips gave them so much 
that they felt applause wasn't enough for him and they showered 
him with money. It was quite a sight to see Lips play while his 
hand that held the trumpet bristled with greenbacks. 

Lips broke up audiences even in the most segregated sections 
of the deep South. One night after the show, a cracker came up 
to the bandstand and said he thought Lips played so great that 
he wanted to meet him. After shaking Lips' hand, the Southerner 
said, ". . . and Ah want you to know this is the first time Ah 
ever shook the hand of a colored man." Lips flashed one of his 
wide, happy grins and said in his wonderfully pleasing way, 
'Well, buddy, it didn't hurt, now, did it?" 

Though Lips was only forty-six when he died in 1954, h e 
sure had a good time. To him every day was a ball, and a big 
one, and he lived more in his brief life than a thousand other 
people put together. I tried to keep up with Lips one night after 
work when we were on the road. Lips had that knack of lighting 
up a room with so much joy and life that everywhere he went, 
everyone felt they couldn't do enough for him. The bellboy 
in the little beat-up hotel where Lips was staying kept the 
whiskey coming in fast and plentiful supply while Lips and I 
swapped stories about bands, music, and musicians. At ten 
o'clock the next morning, I conked out cold in the middle of 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 127 

one of Lips' stories, but Lips told me later that he and the bell- 
boy finished the last of the liquor and then Lips had a huge 
breakfast at noon before he turned in. This was a mild night, 
but mild or wild, there weren't many who could keep up with 
Lips. 

We were playing a Sunday-afternoon show at a theatre in 
Providence on December 7, 1941, when the manager interrupted 
the performance to announce that the Japanese had bombed 
Pearl Harbor. A few weeks later we were doing a record date 
at Victor when Artie's manager handed him his letter of greet- 
ings from Uncle Sam. The band was immediately given its 
notice. 

4 Well," I said to Dave Tough as we packed our instruments, 
"that's the way it goes. The minute we get a chance to make a 
little money they have to go and have a war. See you around 
the Automat, pal." I had no idea that Dave and Artie and I 
would be seeing a lot more of each other within a year. 

As the New Year of 1942 was rung in on a world up to its 
eyeballs in war, Eddie Condon and Ernie Anderson started to 
launch the jazz concerts at Town Hall. And it was the war itself 
that was the decisive factor in bringing about recognition for 
jazz. 

The only hours that Town Hall had available for rental were 
the dinner hours of five thirty to seven thirty, and the manager 
was so surprised at anyone wanting to rent at this "dead" time 
that he gave Eddie the hall for a hundred dollars. At the first 
concert, on February 21, 1942, only thirty people or so showed 
up, but nothing could discourage Ernie Anderson. He had all 
the faith in the world in jazz and in the concerts. Although the 
box-office receipts were so poor that half the time we weren't 
paid for playing the concerts, the fans were as loyal and en- 
thusiastic as Eddie and Ernie, and they kept coming back, and 
each time a few more came with them. Condon, who has a 
reputation for clever repartee in private life, turned into a 
quaking leaf on the Town Hall stage, and he limited his scarcely 



I2 8 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

audible remarks to a muttered, "I don't think this next number 
will bother you people at all." I guess we all felt it was a mam- 
moth undertaking, trying to get jazz across in the austere atmos- 
phere of the concert stage. Many years later, when I played 
Town Hall again, I was amazed to see how small it was; in my 
memory it had loomed as immense as Madison Square Garden. 
And we ourselves presented a rather strange sight in contrast to 
the polished, show-biz appearance of the big swing bands with 
their slick uniforms and glittering music stands. We just walked 
out on the bare stage, dressed in business suits, gathered round 
in a semicircle, and blew. There were no stands and no music; 
just a chair for Eddie, and the American flag in the back of the 
stage. 

After each concert we'd reassemble at Eddie's apartment and 
hold a post-mortem and we'd tell ourselves to give up, but Ernie 
Anderson would always say, "Let's try just once more." We'd 
sit around far into the night, racking our brains trying to think 
of a big idea for publicity. 

"I know people would come if only they knew about the 
concerts," Ernie would growl, as he opened a second bottle of 
Scotch. 

"Maybe one of us could do something scandalous and get it 
in all the papers and that would bring publicity . . ." one of us 
would suggest dreamily. 

"Just one favorable review," Ernie would mutter, as he paced 
up and down the room. "Just one good sentence hell, just one 
good adjective and I'll blow it up all over town!" 

The summer of 1942, while the concerts were suspended for 
the season, Eddie Condon and I worked in Joe Marsala's band 
in the Log Cabin up in Armonk, New York. This was the be- 
ginning of the end of the big-band era, for with the musicians 
being called up right and left in the draft, we had a new re- 
placement practically every night. We were on the air nightly, 
too, but the broadcasts were nothing to look forward to because 
it was actually just a pickup band each time. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 129 

That summer was the low point in the war for the United 
States. The Japanese had overrun the Philippines after Mac- 
Arthur's last-ditch stand on Corregidor, and they were turning 
their eyes toward Australia. At home we were being introduced 
to rationing, and the problem of getting enough gasoline for the 
nightly drive up to Axmonk became another headache. The fac- 
tories began operating night and day, and as morale at home as 
well as for our men overseas began to become a concern, music 
began to play its part not only the songs, like "The White 
Cliffs of Dover," "The Last Time I Saw Paris," "When the 
Lights Go On Again All Over the World," but the uplift of the 
jazz beat began at last to find a response in the public's con- 
sciousness. 

When we resumed the concerts that fall, the impossible mira- 
cle finally happened. The Monday after our first Saturday con- 
cert of the season, we opened the New York Herald Tribune 
to find that Virgil Thomson had reviewed the concert more 
favorably than Ernie Anderson could have wished in his wildest 
dream. The succeeding concert was such a sellout that the 
mounted police was called to help keep order. And, of course, 
that was the one concert that Ernie missed, having been called 
to California the day before. That night down at Condon's, 
where we assembled for the usual bull session, I was so thrilled 
and excited at the miracle of our success that I burst into tears. 

We had the right format for these concerts. We had sat 
around and talked about it by the hour and we had worked it 
all out, from the opening set by a jazz band with a fireball num- 
ber, followed by a great pianist, Joe Sullivan, Teddy Wilson, 
James P. Johnson, or Jess Stacy, and then a quartet composed 
of Bobby Hackett, or Benny Morton, or Barney Bigard, with 
piano and drums and bass, and then a singer like Lee Wiley or 
Billie Holiday, and then another set with the band, and then the 
final jam session. Most important to the success of these con- 
certs, in addition to the quality of the performers and the pacing 
of the numbers, was Eddie's handling of the jam sessions that 



130 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

closed each concert. He never allowed these all-out sessions, 
which would number about twenty musicians, to degenerate 
into wild riffing contests, with order and meaning sacrificed for 
the merely sensational. The people who put on the thousands 
of jazz concerts and festivals that followed in the next twenty 
years rarely understood that jazz needs to be presented by mu- 
sicians who know the music and can organize it and keep it 
under control. These Town Hall concerts were the first regular 
series of jazz concerts ever given. They ran for years, and they 
were an enormous factor in making jazz known and available 
to everyone. 



Chapte 



Artie Shaw came to New York in the late summer of 1942 
to form his Navy band, and when I told him I had received my 
draft papers, he asked me to join his band. Although Artie and I 
had had plenty of battles ourselves, going into his Navy band 
seemed to me a better idea than going into the Army. I was 
nearly thirty-four, and I preferred doing something I knew to 
going into the Army and never having a chance to play any 
more. Artie, who was now Chief Petty Officer Shaw, arranged 
it all, and a few weeks later I received a letter from the Navy 
Department with instructions to report to 90 Church Street for 
assignment to the Artie Shaw Navy band as musician first class. 

I showed up at the recruiting center the next forenoon, ex- 
pecting to have the whole procedure over with in half an hour. 
Three hours later, I was standing on a long line, and when I 
ended up, stripped for a physical, on another line an hour after 
that, I was still trying to get someone to look at my letter. 

"Later, chief," the medical officer growled when I offered 
him the letter. He was cranky with fatigue, and after he had 
finished with his examination, he leaned back in his chair and 
rubbed his forehead wearily for a minute before informing me 
that I was too short to join the Navy. "Not to mention a few 



132 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

other little deterrents, such as a hernia and an ulcer," he added 
dryly. 

"All I had in mind was blowing the trumpet," I said. "Look, 
I've been trying all day to get someone to read this letter. It's all 
explained in here," and once more I held it out to him. The 
medical officer folded the letter carefully when he finished read- 
ing it, put it back in the envelope, and handed it to me. 

"We'll pretend we never saw this letter and you just go home, 
okay?" he said gently. 

"I don't see why I can't blow as well in the Navy with those 
handicaps as I have for years as a civilian," I said hotly. The 
head doctor, whom I demanded to see next, gave me the same 
kind but firm advice, and I finally got the idea that the Navy 
didn't think I was much of a prize. I put on my clothes, shoved 
the letter in my pocket, and went home. 

A week or two later, I received another letter from the Navy 
Department instructing me to report immediately to 90 Church 
Street. I felt they didn't deserve it, but I decided to give them 
one more chance at me, so early the next morning, a Saturday, I 
took the subway down to Church Street again. I had a job that 
night, and I wanted to be sure I would make it on time. 

"Stand over there," a flint-faced chief barked when I showed 
him the letter. I joined a group of guys standing sheepishly in 
one corner of the room, and after I had waited around for a 
couple of hours, my name was finally called out, along with 
four or five others, and we were sworn in and ordered to report 
to the receiving center at Pier 92 on West Fifty-second Street. 
Pier 92 didn't sound so good, but the Fifty-second Street part 
of it was reassuring. Up at Pier 92, another chief, seated at a 
desk behind a wire cage, checked our names against his list as 
we came in, and told us to sit down. We sat down on a wooden 
settee in a corner of the office, and we could have been invisible 
for all the notice anyone took of us for the next four hours, 
until I finally waylaid a lieutenant and explained that I had to 
go to work that night. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 133 

"Buddy," the lieutenant said, fixing me with a cold blue eye, 
"you're not going anyplace tonight. You're in the Navy now. 
Sit down," 

Even these simple, explicit words didn't sink into my one- 
track musician's inind. The world might be blowing up but all 
I knew was that I was supposed to be doing some blowing that 
night myself. When six o'clock came and I found myself hold- 
ing a tin plate and standing in line for chow, I still couldn't be- 
lieve I might not make my job. I had no idea yet that this was 
the start of a long career of standing in line, but it took just one 
whiff of the Navy beans and baloney to make me realize I had 
to duck out of that mess hall fast. I hadn't eaten since breakfast 
and now I felt as if I never wanted to eat again. 

Several hours later, a sailor handed me a limp pillow and a 
gray blanket and told me to go upstairs and bunk. By this time 
they had had lights out and I was forced to feel my way along 
in the dark. After waking up several hundred guys, I realized 
that this embarkation center was actually a huge camp, and when 
I finally found an unoccupied cot way up in the fifth tier of 
bunks, another chilling thought struck me. "My God," I said to 
myself as the unavoidable fact finally hit home. "I am in the 
Navy!" 

In a few minutes I began talking to the guy next to me. "What 
goes on here?" I asked. "I feel like I've been shanghaied." It 
didn't seem possible that several thousand men could be herded 
together and stacked up in tiers like that, right under the un- 
suspecting noses of New Yorkers, and my own nose, which was 
even more finicky than my stomach, couldn't believe there could 
be an odor like this. 

My neighbor, a sympathetic type who seemed to be an old 
hand at all this, tried to calm me down a little. He told me that 
if I sneaked downstairs I might be able to get to a phone, so I 
crawled back over the same three hundred guys and called the 
fellows to say I couldn't make the job something they had 
begun to suspect by now. "And, say," I added as an afterthought, 



134 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

"I might not be seeing you guys for a while. It looks like they 
mean business here." 

All day Sunday I sat around waiting and brooding, but even 
after they had set me on a detail of cleaning the latrines I was 
finally able to convince myself that I was George Washington, 
and what with Hitler and the Japs and all that crap going on, 
this was something I should do for my country. In spite of the 
confusion and the fact that I had discovered I was the only one 
out of the two thousand men there who had no boot training, 
no uniform, and no equipment, I decided just to wait and see 
what happened next. 

Monday finally came, and things began to make a little more 
sense when the other musicians, who had been out over the 
weekend on seventy-two-hour passes, showed up and I dis- 
covered that Fd been sent to Pier 92 for the simple reason that 
this was where Artie's band was assigned although none of us 
knew yet, of course, that we were set to go out on a tour of 
the Pacific. Soon I saw Claude Thornhill and John Best and 
some of the other guys I knew, and met the ones I didn't 
know, such as Conrad Gozzo, Rocky Calucci, Frank Beach, Sam 
Donohue, and Tasso Harris. Some were from the Newport 
base, where Artie had been stationed. Since the Navy had had a 
band akeady set up for him there, he had to take some of those 
men, but he needed musicians who could swing to have the kind 
of band he wanted for his tour, which is how he was able to 
get me and Dave Tough in the Navy. 

For during the time I'd been trying to enlist, Artie had been 
arranging for Dave to come into the band, too. Dave showed up 
that Monday morning in good shape, sober and serious, and he 
gave me confidence, especially when I discovered he had gone 
through a similar experience getting into the Navy. Dave was 
not only about the same height I was, he looked like an emaci- 
ated imp. His wife, Casey, had fed him spaghetti night and day 
for two weeks in an attempt to put some weight on him, but 
Artie had taken the added precaution of accompanying him to 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 135 

the induction center to make sure he was accepted. When Dave 
stripped for his physical, the medical officer took one unbelieving 
look at him, and turning to Artie, he said incredulously, "Do 
you really need this man in your band?" 

"This is the world's greatest drummer," Artie snapped. 

"Then get him the hell out of here before somebody sees 
him," the officer snapped back. "This guy is not only an im- 
possible physical specimen, he violates every basic requirement 
for size, weight, height, and health," he snarled as he stamped 
his approval on Dave's papers. 

We were at Pier 92 for about three weeks until our twenty- 
piece band, which was officially designated Navy Band #501, 
was finally organized. We'd rise at 5:30 A.M., my normal bed- 
time, and march out on the pier to play "Stars and Stripes For- 
ever," "Under the Double Eagle Flag," "Anchors Aweigh," and 
"The Washington Post March" while the poor gobs went 
through their exercises and marched around in the chilly Octo- 
ber air. Dave wasn't strong enough to carry a drum or even the 
big cymbals, so they gave him a peck horn. It was very funny 
to see him wrestling with this unfamiliar instrument and trying 
to get some kind of tone out of it. In fact, we were a horrible 
excuse for a military band, in spite of the good musicians. Re- 
hearsing didn't help much, and after we finished whatever grue- 
some details they put us to, we'd just sit around the rest of the 
day and practice die fine art of griping. On weekends I'd grab a 
seventy-two-hour pass and rush over to play at the Town Hall 
concerts on Saturday and at the Ryan's sessions on Sunday. 

I made a quick visit home on one of these weekends. There 
was a sudden cold snap that Saturday, with the temperature 
dropping down to freezing, and my mother was concerned about 
the short length of my pea jacket. That afternoon she caught 
sight of an admiral stepping briskly down the street in his long 
blue greatcoat. "Here," she said, thrusting some bills in my hand. 
"Take this and buy yourself a nice warm coat like that sailor 
is wearing." 



136 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Soon after that, one night in November the whole band was 
herded into an open truck and driven to Penn Station. 

"Take a good, long look," Dave said softly as the driver 
turned down Broadway. Even in the wartime dimout the Great 
White Way looked great to us. 

"I still feel I've been shanghaied," I said. 

We were on our way to Honolulu, but all we knew was that 
the train was taking us to San Francisco, where we were sta- 
tioned at the Navy barracks on Treasure Island. Artie was mar- 
ried to Betty Kern at the time, and she and her father, Jerome 
Kern, came out to the Coast and stayed at the Mark Hopkins 
until the band left for Hawaii. 

A couple of weeks later, we boarded the Lurline, a Matson 
Line cruise ship which had been converted into a troop ship. 
The first day at sea, while I was standing on the chow line, the 
ship's purser passed by and at the sight of me he stopped short 
and exclaimed in shocked tones, "Max Kaminsky! What in hell 
are you doing here?" I thought I was doing something wrong, 
as usual, but it turned out that he was a jazz fan, and when I 
finished explaining about being in Shaw's band he said brusquely, 
"Come with me," and he led me off to the galley. The Chinese 
chef turned out to be a neighbor of mine from Thirty-third 
Street and Third Avenue, where I had been living, and from 
then on nothing was too good for me. When I had finished the 
last crumb of the lemon meringue pie, the purser, Mr. Goodman, 
said, "You bring the rest of the boys in the band down here to 
eat, too, from now on." I used to ask Mr. Goodman for a bag 
of fruit, and Fd stand in front of my cabin and call out, "Fresh 
apples, peaches, oranges, anyone?" and hand them out to the 
crew right and left. I felt so sorry for the crew, having to eat 
that miserable regulation chow all the time, that I wanted to give 
them a treat, too. 

We arrived in Honolulu on Christmas Day of 1942. Long 
rows of tables and benches were set up near the pier, piled high 
with turkey and all the trimmings, but the five-millimeter guns 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 137 

they had shot off as a salute when we docked had so stunned me 
that I was goggle-eyed with shock all through the meal and I 
could have been eating shredded coconut husks for all that any- 
thing registered. 

We were stationed in Honolulu for nearly five months, and 
in no time at all it got to seem like five years. The sameness 
of the languid climate and the regular daily rainstorms began to 
pall after a few weeks. I never could get used to that one-climate 
deal. We shared our quarters with another Navy band, a regu- 
lation outfit, so that altogether there were about forty men in 
our barracks. All the bunks were set up in one section of the 
dun-colored frame building and the rest of the space was set 
aside for ping-pong tables and a rehearsal room. The fact that 
both bands were scheduled to practice at the same rime did 
nothing to enhance our opinion of the Navy way of doing things. 

Our barracks in Aiea, a little village outside Honolulu, was in 
the middle of a mosquito-infested swamp, formerly the site of a 
pineapple plantation. We spent most of our time cleaning the 
mud out of the barracks, and whenever it dried out enough to 
stop being mud, it turned into a fine coral powder which covered 
everything with dust and caused a chronic irritation in our 
throats. I bought several bottles of terpin hydrate codeine for 
my cough. It had a little kick to it, and whenever the whole 
Navy thing got too much for me, Fd duck into my bunk and 
take a couple of extra swigs to calm my nerves. If it weren't for 
terpin hydrate codeine, I don't know how I'd have got through 
the war. 

Artie had a room at the Halekulani Hotel and Claude Thorn- 
hill lived in a friend's apartment in Honolulu. I had an offer 
from a fan from Nick's, now an officer stationed in Honolulu, 
to stay at his apartment, but I was told that for me it was against 
regulations, and although that was untrue, I, like a schmuck, 
believed it. They kept us plenty busy, in any case, which was 
good. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons we 
played at The Breakers, a club for enlisted men on Waikiki 



138 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Beach, and at night we played at the Pearl Harbor Officers' Club 
and at officers' parties and dances, and gave concerts at the dif- 
ferent camps all around the Islands. 

Except for Claude Thornhill, Dave Tough, John Best, and me, 
most of the musicians in the band were young kids, and they'd 
take off like a shot for Honolulu every chance they had. It 
wasn't long before they had a lot of romances going one of 
them even got married and naturally a lot of friction started. 
It's hell on a civilian to be plucked out of his ordinary life and 
put into military service and sent to a far country, but a musician 
has a hard time even in civilian life because so much is required 
emotionally to play that when he stops he is a madman, and 
those kids hadn't much experience yet in learning how to handle 
themselves. 

Eventually I worked out a routine of getting up at six in the 
morning, and after breakfast bumming my way to the recreation 
hall in Pearl Harbor to pick up the mail instead of waiting all 
day for it to be delivered. (The road to Pearl Harbor, about a 
half-hour walk from Aiea, wound past the bay where the battle- 
ship Arizona, with 1,100 dead men still aboard, lay on its side on 
the blue waters.) The fellows in the band called me The Mail- 
man, but it was something to do and at least it got me out of 
those barracks in the morning. The rest of my free time I spent 
writing letters and reading. Living in a barracks with forty men 
was no ball, and when Artie occasionally invited me to have 
breakfast with him at the Halekulani I looked forward to -the 
comparative privacy as much as to the ham and eggs, which were 
a big treat after the Navy chow. 

After a few weeks I met a Marine, John Straeter, cousin of 
Ted Straeter, who was a jazz fan and knew about me. He was in 
charge of the officers' mess in the nearby Marine barracks and 
every couple of weeks on a Sunday night, which was our night 
off, he would come by in his jeep and leave bottles of whiskey 
and Cokes for me, and the four or five of us who stayed in the 
barracks instead of charging into Honolulu would have our own 
private little bash. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 139 

On one of the holidays in February, there were so many 
parties being held at different officers' homes that the band had 
to be split up into little groups. Claude Thornhill, Dave Tough, 
one of the sax players, and I were sent to play at a party which 
Admiral Nimitz was attending, and once the Admiral, who was 
a piano buff, got an earful of Claude playing things like Rhap- 
sody in Blue and some of the classical pieces, he dropped anchor 
next to the piano for the rest of the night. He had Claude, who 
is a very interesting and entertaining fellow, over to his house 
every chance he could after that, and Claude told me later that 
Nimitz said he thought a great artist like Claude shouldn't be 
in military service. 

"I told him I didn't mind doing my bit just like everyone else," 
Claude said, "but that I felt I could do a bigger job if I could be 
in charge of a band of my own." Artie's personality was still 
getting people's back up, but he was having his own troubles, 
too, adjusting to the military life and all the Navy red tape and 
regulations, and he was a natural target, in his crisp white chiefs 
uniform, for the bored Navy wives, who all trained their guns 
on him at every dance we played. 

One night in May, we received our orders to board the battle- 
ship North Carolina, which was part of a task force headed for 
the South Pacific. When we sailed the next morning, Claude was 
at the dock to wave good-bye to us. Admiral Nimitz had ar- 
ranged for his transfer from Artie's band and assigned him to 
form his own band to play on the islands around Hawaii. 

"Well, we just play the wrong instrument, that's all," Dave 
finally said, as we glumly watched the shoreline fade into the 
horizon. 

I had another surprise in store for me that afternoon when the 
medics discovered from my records that I hadji't gone through 
boot training and didn't have any of the required shots for over- 
seas duty. To make up for lost time, they gave me the whole 
series at once. I tottered back to my cabin and made a somewhat 
wavy beeline for my bunk, which was, as usual, on the fifth tier. 
I never could carry all my gear by myself and had to hire sailors 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

to lug it on board for me, and by the time we got it on the ship 
the only cot left was one of the top ones. Just gazing up at my 
bunk made me so dizzy that I wheeled around and fairly 
crawled back into the sick bay. "Oh, well, a lot of guys die every 
day around here," was the greeting I received down there, and 
it so unnerved me that I turned around once more and headed 
back for my quarters and somehow managed to climb up to my 
bunk, where I lay like a zombie for two days. 

The band was assigned to damage control, which meant that 
when we were under fire we were stationed in the damage-con- 
trol room to lock all equipment, shut off the fans, and seal off each 
compartment in case of a hit. Off the control room was the gun 
storeroom, out of which they hoisted up the big cannons. The 
first time I heard them shoot those sixteen-inch gun salvos, the 
shock was so appalling that I sprawled on my face. I didn't think 
I could ever live through it again. But I did. I never knew what 
the shooting was all about, though, since the minute the alarm 
sounded we all headed for our battle station in the control room, 
where we couldn't tell what was going on, and I never cared 
to inquire. 

Since we didn't have any other duties beside damage control, 
I used to hang around the pilots and watch them steer the ship. 
I became friends with one of the bosun's mates, and when we 
were near the Equator I asked him if I could steer the ship. When 
he told me we were crossing the Equator I instinctively tightened 
my grip on the wheel and said, "Yeah, man, I just felt the bump!" 
They all laughed, and I was only kidding, but the odd thing is, 
years later I read there really is a bump. 

Our new station was in Noumea, the capital of the French- 
owned island of New Caledonia. After the fall of France in 1940, 
most of the French colonial empire went along with the Vichy 
government, but the Frenchmen in New Caledonia got mad, and 
one day they came pouring down from the hills into Noumea, 
kicked out die pro-Vichy governor, and took over the island for 
de Gaulle. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 141 

This little coastal town had no facilities for the thousands upon 
thousands of American troops that descended on it in 1942, and 
its food and water supplies were severely rationed. We were 
allowed one milk can of drinking water a day and every second 
day we were allotted a bucket of water for washing, which we 
kept under our cots. Empty gasoline cans, in which we boiled 
our dirty clothes, made very adequate laundry tubs. Our bar- 
racks, on the outskirts of Noumea, were in the midst of a wire- 
enclosed encampment where they kept all the Navy jeeps and 
trucks, and although technically Artie bunked with us, he lived 
in one of the local officials' home. Along with short water rations 
we were given lectures by Artie about being on guard against 
food poisoning and dysentery, since the refrigeration facilities 
were so poor that the Navy couldn't guarantee that the chow it 
fed its men wasn't tainted. After a couple of meals of bad meat, 
we decided that it wasn't worth the gamble, since it all tasted so 
terrible anyway, and we took matters into our own hands. As 
musicians with a long experience of being on the road, most of 
us were used to foraging for ourselves. One of the men wangled 
several cases of tuna fish from some undisclosed source, and 
each day one of us would get a pass to go into town to buy a 
half-dozen loaves of fresh-baked French bread, and between 
candy bars and the food we were served when we played at 
officers' parties, we made out all right. That French bread 
especially tasted delicious. 

All the buildings in Noumea were built on stilts as a safeguard 
against termites. The town itself was tiny and primitive, although 
many of the planters' homes were quite grand. None of the stores, 
which kept typical tropical hours, opening from ten to twelve 
and again from three to five, had electricity, and we searched 
in vain for a restaurant. Our big thrill there was getting a shower 
for fifty cents once a week at the public baths. We were so filthy 
from living out of a bucket of water that although the shower 
nozzle barely dripped, we thought it was great. On Sundays we'd 
watch the natives stream down from the hills in their best finery 



I4 2 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

to promenade in barefoot dignity around the little park in the 
center of town. But the most unforgettable sight in Noumea 
was the hill in back of town, dazzling white in the tropic glare 
with the hundreds and hundreds of crosses marking the graves 
of Allied soldiers and sailors and airmen who died in the battle 
of the Coral Sea. 

The one problem we couldn't lick was the mosquitoes, which 
were so tiny they came right through our netting. I woke one 
morning to find that a whole battalion of them had been busy 
all night drilling a hole in niy knee, and within hours I was down 
with dengue fever, a form of malaria. There was no sick bay 
here so I just huddled in my cot, dosing myself with Empirin 
whenever I was conscious. A few days later, when the delirium 
and fever had worn off, I woke up to find Eddie Condon's wan- 
dering brother, Pat, sitting on my bunk. Thinking I was still 
delirious, I shut my eyes again and let out a terrible groan. That 
sensation of waking to find yourself observed was not unusual 
in the tropics, I was to discover, but it was more likely to be a 
spider as big as your fist eying you from its web in a corner of 
die netting. It took Pat Condon quite a little while to convince 
me he was real. Pat was in the Merchant Marines, and when his 
boat put in at Noumea and he heard Shaw's band was there, he 
came ashore to look me up. I was so pleased to see him that I 
crawled out of bed and played with the band at a camp show 
that night, and the next day I was able to go back to my regular 
routine. 

Every morning we would pile our instruments into one truck 
and climb into another truck to be driven down to the pier. 
Motor launches were waiting there to take us out to the destroy- 
ers and battleships anchored in the harbor, where we'd give 
concerts for the men. We also played at all the different camps 
around the island for the Marines and Seabees and Army troops. 

When we had played for the troops in Honolulu we were 
always warmly received, but the men in the South Pacific theatre 
were so starved for bands from home that they went wild at the 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 143 

mere sight of us. One night while we were playing at one of the 
camps in the jungle, it started to rain, but the men refused to 
let us go. We were set up in a hollow in a clearing in the hills, 
and the men rigged a canopy over us and we played on while 
those poor soaked GFs sitting out in the open yelled for more 
every time we paused to wipe off our instruments. Once when 
we played for a Marine camp, the men were so fired with enthu- 
siasm that they insisted we stay on while they whipped up some 
refreshments for us. "We don't have much, but we'll fix you up 
fine with a millionaire's salad," one of the Marines said to us with 
a happy grin. He was carrying an ax, and within minutes they 
had chopped down a coconut-palm tree. From the top of the tree 
they extracted the inner core, a yellowish-white tube two or 
three feet long and about six inches thick, which they sliced into 
a bowl and dressed with oil and vinegar. An expensive little dish, 
costing the life of a tree, but it did have a delicious taste, some- 
where between a nut and celery. 

The second night after we arrived in New Caledonia, we were 
taken out to the aircraft carrier Saratoga to give a concert. Since 
it was night, the men were gathered on the lower deck, and our 
entrance alone sent them off into an uproar. We set up the band- 
stand on the huge aircraft elevator and began playing our theme 
song, "Nightmare," as we descended slowly into the midst of 
the wildly cheering men. It was like being back in the Paramount 
Theatre again, except that the bandstand there used to rise slowly 
from the pit, while on the Saratoga it descended into the audi- 
ence. As I sat there looking out at these thousands and thousands 
of sailors and feeling the waves of homesickness flow out of them 
at the sound of the familiar songs, I began to fill up so much that 
when I stood up to take my solo on the "St. Louis Blues," I blew 
like a madman. On hearing me let loose, Dave started to swing 
the beat, and when I picked up my plunger and started to growl, 
those three thousand men went stark, raving crazy. Even the 
fellows in the band were shaken. They thought it was a one-shot 
thing, but I decided that from then on I'd try to break it up for 



144 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

the men everywhere we went and try to play the way I knew 
they felt inside. The next couple of times I couldn't do it, but 
after a while I got the feel of it and could get it going at will. 

And the men seemed to feel what I meant. Sometimes my horn 
would get to them when nothing else worked. Once, at a base 
hospital on one of the islands, the entertainers knocked them- 
selves out trying to get a response from the men, but when I 
started to growl something happened and those broken men came 
to life again and banged their crutches and beat the arms of their 
wheel chairs, or just yelled and shouted themselves hoarse if they 
were too smashed up or too weak to applaud. 

They sent us out by plane to play at camps near the fighting 
zones, and the going became rougher for us now. One time when 
we straggled off the plane after one of these hitches, a tired- 
looking young pilot who was waiting to take the plane up again 
gave us a surprised look and said, "Gee, you guys still living?" 
We weren't too sure ourselves. We were sent for a while to 
Espiritu Santo, one of the islands in the New Hebrides chain, 
and we were even less sure there. Then they sent us to Guadal- 
canal, where the question became purely academic. We always 
seemed to be in foxholes. They set up tents for us, but when that 
alarm went off zoom! we were back in those foxholes so fast 
we moved like one man. By now my trumpet had acquired a 
greenish tinge, which I couldn't rub off, and our sheet music was 
so mildewed, fly-specked, and dog-eared that it was as limp as 
pulp. ^ 

While we were on Espiritu Santo, a cruiser was torpedoed 
nearby and the surviving men brought ashore to our base. The 
next night they rigged up a screen outside on the side of a hill 
and ran off the movie Arsenic and Old Lace. Whenever I see a 
revival of that movie, I remember what a great antidote it was 
for the horrors these sailors had just gone through, and how 
moving it was to see the look of shock gradually replaced by the 
healing forgetfulness of laughter. I met some wonderful men in 
those Godforsaken islands, and some old friends, too. One day 
when we were on the dock waiting for the motor launch to take 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 145 

us out to a destroyer, I met a friend of mine from home, George 
Poor. Contrary to his name, George Poor was a wealthy guy 
who had a yacht back home and had been messing around with 
boats all his life up in Marblehead, Massachusetts. When the war 
came he went into the Navy and was assigned to a sub chaser as 
a junior officer. The tiny sub chaser, not more than one hundred 
feet long, sailed the seven thousand miles from San Francisco to 
New Caledonia without escort. Since the executive officer was 
from Iowa and knew more about cows than he did about ships, 
George was a life-saver to him. When they limped into Noumea 
they were in sad shape, with their bulkheads all smashed by the 
rough seas, but somehow George had got them there in one piece. 
The crew, composed almost entirely of colored guys, was crazy 
about George, who also played trumpet in their little band. He 
was not only handy on a ship, but he was so great for morale 
that after they landed in Noumea his executive officer reported 
to Navy headquarters and formally requested them to make 
George executive officer of the ship in has place. 

When we arrived on Guadalcanal, though the worst of that 
bloody struggle was over, it was still a hotbed of strife, with air 
raids every night from the Jap bases on Rabaul and Bougainville. 
Two days before we arrived, there had been a devastating straf- 
ing of Lunga Point by a ninety-plane Japanese fleet, and the 
tents in which we were quartered were so riddled by bullets they 
looked like mosquito netting. Needless to say, all our concerts 
were given in the daytime, and we competed with the chattering 
of monkeys, the screeching of parrots, and the whistles of the 
bright-colored little parakeets, which were as common as our 
sparrows. But when the sirens blew to alert us for Condition Red 
the warning that enemy planes were approaching the jungle 
would become suddenly still, and not even a leaf seemed to stir in 
the hushed silence until you began to hear the hum of the planes 
and the scream of bombs and then the nightmare began again. 

One night at eight o'clock, we were sitting around in our tents 
in the dark waiting for the air attacks, which came regularly two 
or three times a night, when one of the men came running in, on 



146 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

the verge of hysteria, to report that a Jap sniper had been spotted 
around the camp. Our nerves were strung so taut with strain and 
fatigue that in a few seconds the whole camp was in a turmoil, 
with guards posted every three feet, and someone yelling for 
guns to be issued to everyone, which meant us, and volunteers 
creeping out into the jungle to track down the sniper. When no 
sniper was uncovered, an investigation was set under way to find 
out how the rumor had started. Someone had seen what he 
thought was a Jap skulking past the commander's wooden hut; 
the culprit was finally traced down and revealed to be Dave 
Tough. Poor Dave looked odd enough in ordinary civvies but 
to the war-weary troops on Guadalcanal, Dave in khaki fatigues 
was a sight to make the blood run cold. 

After we had been on Guadalcanal for a couple of weeks, we 
were alerted one night around eleven o'clock to get ready to 
leave. We packed in the pitch dark and lugged our gear out to 
the road, where a truck was waiting. The fellows already in the 
track were on tenterhooks to get going before the next air raid 
started. 

"Come on, on the double, you guys, or we'll miss the plane," 
Artie snapped as Dave came panting up to dump his gear into 
the truck. The driver gunned the motor and the truck lurched 
forward as he released the brake. 

"Hold it!" Dave yelled. "I've got to go back for the drums. 
Someone give me a hand with them!" 

The driver pulled to a reluctant halt, and aside from some 
heavy swearing there wasn't a sound to be heard from any 
of the fellows. "O.K.," I said, swinging back down over the 
side of the truck. "Just give us two minutes, Artie." While Dave 
and I stumbled down the dark, pock-marked road, I was wonder- 
ing how the hell we two shrimps were going to get those drums 
to the truck in one trip. It would take die combined strength of 
both of us to handle the bass drum alone. As we rounded the 
bend of the road, the idea came to us simultaneously to cut 
through the woods to make faster time, and as we turned word- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 147 

lessly to plunge headlong into the jungle, we nearly broke our 
necks crashing into a large, immovable metal object. 

"I'll be a son of a bitch," Dave croaked in a stunned voice as 
he regained his feet. "It's a wheelbarrow!" 

How that wheelbarrow got there I'll never know but we didn't 
stop to wonder. All we knew was that it was an out-and-out 
miracle, and we managed to heave the drums into it and trundle 
it back to the truck before the jittery driver began pressing down 
on the accelerator again. 

In addition to the air raids, malaria, and nervous hysteria, there 
were other hazards on these South Pacific islands, as I discovered 
one day when I decided to go out and look for the shells and 
cat's eyes all the servicemen used to collect to send home. One of 
the sailors on Espiritu Santo, I think it was, told me he knew a 
beach where I could pick up these shells by the pailful, and one 
morning he came by in his truck and drove me out to a remote 
section of the beach. Parking his truck in the shade of some palm 
trees, my friend pulled his cap down over his eyes and settled 
back for a snooze while I set off down the rough footpath for 
the beach. After a few minutes' walk I spied a party of natives 
wending their way toward me. If they hadn't seen me at the same 
instant that I spotted them, I would have been nothing but a 
speck on the horizon a second later, but now there was nothing 
I could do except keep walking toward them as calmly as I could. 
They had the wild, frizzy hairdo of the black-skinned Mela- 
nesians, their nostrils, lips, and ears were pierced with slivers of 
white bone, and they bristled with so many spears that they 
looked like a bunch of porcupines. But as they approached, I saw, 
with just as sudden a shock, that not only were the poor devils 
bedraggled and filthy, most of them were suffering from ele- 
phantiasis, dragging themselves along on their swollen, trunklike 
legs. When the ragged, diseased litde band halted a few feet 
from me, their darting eyes looking everywhere but directly at 
me, I stepped forward with a big, compassionate American smile 
to offer them cigarettes and coins. That broke the ice, and in a 



148 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

few minutes we were all puffing up a storm. They had no in- 
terest in paper money, but they were fascinated with my ciga- 
rette lighter. By way of further introduction, I took out my ID 
card and showed them my picture and then pointed to myself. 
Their faces split into wide grins, showing their blackened, betel- 
nut-stained teeth. This amiability so encouraged me that I pointed 
out to the bay where several destroyers and a battleship were 
riding at anchor, and explained to them that these all belonged 
to the U.S.A. "Friends" I repeated over and over. They 
couldn't understand a word I was saying, of course, but I had 
the impression they thought / owned all those ships. To clear up 
the confusion, I sang a whole chorus of "I Can't Give You Any- 
thing but Love, Baby," ending up with a few jig steps and a 
buck-and-wing. The song and dance really broke them up. They 
laughed and jabbered at each other, nodding at me and then at 
each other. I figured they thought I was some kind of harmless 
nut, and in a few minutes they straggled away down the path, 
still nodding and grinning their black-toothed grins. A little 
farther on, I passed a grass hut, and, in pantomime, asked the little 
boy who was playing in the tall scraggly grass beside it who those 
fellows were. He pointed after them, nodding solemnly, and then 
drew his little brown hand slowly across his throat the native 
sign for headhunters. 

After I had recovered from the idea of having entertained 
headhunters, I filled my hat and pockets with shells and headed 
back toward the truck. On the way back, I took a look inside a 
huge rotting tree stump. The mottled gray snake curled up inside 
it must have been twenty feet long. I covered the quarter mile 
back to the truck in less than ten seconds, vowing to myself to 
stick to the guided tours from now on. 

But I had another surprise in Auckland, New Zealand, a couple 
of weeks after our second tour of the steaming swamps of Guad- 
alcanal. One afternoon, while walking through the sleepy little 
town, which was not more than a dozen houses long, I heard a 
sound which made me freeze in my tracks. After I convinced 
myself I wasn't having hallucinations and that it was actually a 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 149 

Billie Holiday recording of "I Cried for You," coining full blast 
from a little store about twenty feet ahead, on my right, I sprang 
into action. A young Chinese man stepped out from the room 
in back of the shop as I came charging in, my ears flapping like 
a hound dog. "How in hell did you ever hear of Billie Holiday 
in this nowhere place?" I demanded. When I calmed down, 
he explained he had friends in England who shipped him jazz 
records, and it turned out he even had some of mine. He was 
thrilled about the Artie Shaw band being in town, and the rest 
of my stay in Auckland I spent most of my time off visiting him, 
occasionally bringing along one or two of the other fellows in the 
band. It was a great treat to hear his records, and I'll never forget 
the wonderful Chinese meal he cooked for me one day. 

It was also in Auckland that one of the worst indignities of 
war befell me fleas. It was bad enough during the day, but at 
night it was agony, and my body was in shreds from the scratch- 
ing. I never minded the malaria attacks as much as the flea in- 
vasion. The medics put me in an iron bathtub and doused me 
with hot water mixed with some solution and I hung all my 
clothes out in the sun, but nothing discouraged my uninvited 
guests until two weeks later when we were sent to another island 
and I found somebody who had a can of Flit. I stripped down 
to my skin and had one of the guys spray me, and then I sprayed 
all my clothes, and that finally did the trick. 

From New Zealand we were sent out again to Vella Lavella 
and some of the other islands in the Solomons and then over the 
Coral Sea to Australia. From Wellington we went to Melbourne, 
where the Navy had taken over a small old hotel. This was the 
first time in eleven months that I had a room all to myself and 
a real bathroom. I never budged out of that hotel room unless I 
had to. 

In the remotest jungle camps and on the most out-of-the-way 
islands, we kept running across officers who were jazz fans and 
who knew Dave and me and knew how unnatural this rugged 
outdoor life was for us. "Wait till you get to Sydney," they'd 
say. "You go straight to Sam Lee's club; it's the nearest thing to 



150 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

home you'll find on this side of the world." We must have jotted 
down the address of Sam Lee's club thirty or forty times be- 
tween us. 

The minute we landed in Sydney, Dave, Conrad Gozzo, and 
I went out on the town and off on a bat. After we had spent all 
our money, we hailed a cab and then spent the next twenty min- 
utes trying to decide where to tell the driver to take us. We 
didn't want to go back to the hotel, but we couldn't think of 
where to go without any money. While we were debating, the 
cab driver was doing a slow burn. We had just come from the 
jungles and all we had to wear were our hot, dirty wool sailor 
suits and we were so beat and so loaded that we weren't a sight 
to inspire confidence in anyone, least of all a cab driver. Dave, 
who was usually the one we had to take care of when he was 
drunk, suddenly rose to the occasion. "Now, just a minute, my 
good man," he said in great dignity. Pulling out his wallet, he 
looked through it with shaky hands until he found a grimy card. 
"Drive to the officers' club in King's Row," he said with a lordly 
flourish of his hand. 

"You'll never get in there," the driver said, casting a con- 
temptuous look at our bedraggled condition. When we arrived at 
the door, Dave turned and said to the driver, "Maybe you had 
better wait a minute." We followed Dave up the steps while he 
rang the bell. 

"Shove off, you coves," was the doorman's greeting after one 
look at us. But Sam Lee himself happened to be passing the door, 
and he came over to see what the commotion was about. When 
Dave introduced himself, Sam Lee couldn't believe it, and we 
couldn't believe what happened next. In a few minutes we were 
eating steaks and signing autographs and lapping up Scotch. Sam 
Lee was a New York theatrical agent who had gone on a tour of 
Asia some years before the war as manager of a vaudeville team, 
and when he ended up in Australia he decided to stay on and 
open his own club. We had no money for the rest of our stay 
in Sydney, but we didn't need any. That night and all the other 
nights we were Sam's guests. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 151 

In Sydney we were quartered in another little hotel taken over 
by the Navy. There was always a lot of resentment against the 
band on the part of the other Navy men and our lot was not an 
easy one whenever we were quartered with them. Our position 
was always ambiguous, anyway. We were in the Navy as regular 
sailors, and not in Special Services, but we hadn't even gone 
through boot training, and in the eyes of the regular servicemen 
we weren't one of them, which was true, and they thought we 
received extra privileges, such as extra pay, which was not true. 

At the hotel in Sydney, the sailors used to come in loaded 
every night and raise the roof, and then blame us. One day the 
whole band was ordered to appear in the captain's office. It seems 
that some toilet seats had been wrecked and the blame laid on us. 
The captain gave us hell, while we all stood there like a bunch of 
shamefaced school kids. I guess each one of us was waiting for 
the other to say something. When I saw that no one was 
going to speak up in our defense, I began to get mad. Pulling 
myself up to my full height, I stepped forward and addressed 
the furious captain. 

"Sir," I said. "I want you to understand we're musicians. 
We've traveled all our lives and we've played in the best places 
and in the worst places, but if there is one thing we've learned, 
it's how to behave ourselves. We get loaded, but we're not ig- 
norant hillbillies. Many of us have had a whole life before we 
came into the Navy, and we respect ourselves too much to pull 
any fool stunt like that. It's not our habit to go around breaking 
toilet seats. And if we ever did anything we shouldn't," I added 
in a final burst of indignation, "we'd own up to it like men and 
not try to lay the blame on someone else." 

The captain studied me silently for a long moment after I'd 
finished and then he said abruptly, "I believe you. Charge dis- 
missed." 

Although it was a life-saver to get back to civilization again, 
by the time we had reached Australia we were suffering so badly 
from shell shock and were so worn out and weary that one by 
one we started to get sick. I could hardly play and I began hav- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

ing nightmares and would wake up screaming night after night. 
The whole band started to fall apart, and after a final trip to 
New Zealand, they sent us back to Brisbane to be reassigned to 
the United States for rehabilitation. 

Homeward bound on board a Liberty Merchant ship, which 
sailed alone to San Francisco in the Jap-infested waters without 
an escort, Dave and I were assigned to watches on the twenty- 
millimeter gun turrets. It took the combined strength of both of 
us to lift the bombs and to cock the huge guns. They're lucky 
we didn't blow up the ship just trying to load the guns. To keep 
our spirits up, I used to bring my trumpet out on the long night 
watches and after opening the intercom system to the other 
turrets, I'd put in a mute and play for all the guys, very softly, 
all during the watch. 

After the medical examination at San Francisco, the doctors re- 
ported that Dave and I were in very bad shape and they recom- 
mended immediate discharge for us as well as for a couple of 
other guys in the band. They sent us back to New York by train 
in December, 1943. During my thirty-day furlough, Nancy and 
I were married, but it seemed I wasn't in New York more than 
ten minutes before Milt Gabler had set up a series of recording 
dates, one of which was for a twelve-inch "Basin Street Blues," 
with Jack Teagarden, who was in town, too. After taking one 
look at my brine-encrusted horn, Milt ran out and bought me a 
gleaming new golden Selmer trumpet as a home-coming present. 

In January, Dave and I were sent to a base in Long Beach, 
Long Island, and then down to the Navy School of Music in 
Washington. They didn't know what to do with us. Nobody 
seemed to have received the doctors' reports from San Fran- 
cisco, and Artie was too busy getting his own discharge in San 
Francisco to bother about us. By that time I was sent to 
sick bay at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where I was finally 
discharged in March of 1944. 

A week after I was back in town The New Yorker sent a re- 
porter to interview me. The following is the litde piece they 




Brown Brothei & 



Tommy Dorsey Band, 1935: back row: 1. to r.: trumpets, Joe Bauer, Steve 
Lipkin, Max Kammsky; drum, Dave Tough; guitar, Carmen Mastren; 
bass, Gene Traxler; second ro*w: trombones, JLes Jenkins, "Walter Mer- 
curio, Tommy Dorsey; saxes, Joe Dixon, Fred Stoltz, Bud Freeman, 
Clyde Rounds; -front ro<w: Axel Stordahl, Edythe "Wright, Jack Leonard; 
piano, Dick Jones 




The Artie Shaw Navy Band No. 501 entertaining aboard the U.S.S. 
Curtis, seaplane tender, off Espiritu Santo, July 1943. Max Kammsky 
is the trumpet man at upper right. 




Brown Brothers 



Joe Venuti 




Otto Hens 



Otto 



Big Sid Catlett 



Billie Holiday 




Brad Gowans Max Kaminsky Dave Tough 



Otto Hess 




_,, , L/C CO JHCHS 




Otto Hess 



Recording the Lee Wiley "George Gershwin" album: 1. to r.: Artie Shapiro, George 
Wettling, Max Kaminsky, Joe Bushkin, Lee Wiley, Bud Freeman 




Otto Hess 



Jam session at the Belmont Plaza Hotel, 1938. Hot Lips Page, 
Max Kaminsky, Bobby Hackett, Brad Gowans in rear 




James P. Johnson 



Thomas "Fats" Waller 



Otto 1 




Willie "The Lion" Smith 



Otto Hess 




State Department tour of the Far East, 1958-1959: 1. to r.: Stan Puls, Jack 
Teagarden, Ronnie Greb, Jerry Fuller, Max Kaminsky, Don Ewell 




Max Kaminsky playing for the rubber workers in Malaya pn Far East tour 




Jack Bradley 



Louis Armstrong recording session, 1960: 1. to r.: Louis 
Armstrong, Dizzy GiUespie, Gene Krupa, Max Kaminsky 




College Jazz Session, 1956, Max Kaminsky 
Pee Wee Russell 




Max Kaminsky and Jac 
Gleason, CBS, 1962 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 153 

wrote up in "The Talk of the Town" in their December 25, 
1943, issue: 

Musician 2/C 

We've just talked with a member of the Navy swing outfit 
led by CPO Artie Shaw which returned recently from a year- 
long tour of our Pacific bases Max Kaminsky, listed by the 
Navy as Kaminsky, Mus 2/c, but known to habitues of Nick's 
and other such hot-jazz shrines as one of the best hot-trumpet 
players in the world. Max is a slender, dark fellow, exactly five 
feet tall. A year ago last October he was playing with Joe 
Marsala's band at a roadhouse in Armonk when he heard that 
Artie Shaw, for whom he had previously worked, was recruiting 
musicians for a tour of some sort. 

"I was pretty sure I couldn't pass an ordinary physical and 
this seemed about the least I could do," he told us. "I called up 
Artie and said, 'What's this I hear?' 

" 'Maxie,' he said, 'how would you look in the Navy?' And 
that is how I am where I am today, an unrehabilitated man." 

The entire band was recently ordered back to this country for 
hospitalization, rest, and rehabilitation, but Max managed to talk 
his way out of going to a hospital and is now relaxing in what 
he obviously considers a more sensible manner, living at the 
Piccadilly Hotel and playing the trumpet. 

He played at Town Hall last Saturday in one of Eddie 
Condon's jazz concerts. Soon, he told us, he expects to be re- 
called to active duty. 

Immediately after Max enlisted, he was sent over to Pier 92, 
the receiving centre, "on the grinder," This means marching up 
and down the docks in an ordinary oom-pah Navy band while 
recruits listen. In about three weeks Shaw had got together a 
twenw-piece outfit that included Max and a couple of other 
men from the old Shaw civilian band as well as representatives 
of such distinguished outfits as Benny Goodman's, Charlie 
Spivak's, Bob Chester's, and Tommy Dorsey's. They were sent 
to San Francisco and after a brief shakedown period of rehearsal 
in an old warehouse were shipped out on an itinerary that in- 



154 



MY LIFE IN 



eluded Hawaii, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, the 
Solomons, New Zealand and Australia. Max told us that they 
traveled on every kind of fighting vessel but a submarine. "I 
think they had that in mind once but the bass wouldn't slide in, 
or something," he said. They also made some of the sleeper jumps 
in Navy planes. When they traveled by plane they were airsick 
and when they went by water they were seasick. On the big 
ships Max was assigned a battle station, one time helping man the 
damage control room, another time manning a twenty millimetre 
gun with Dave Tough, formerly Benny Goodmans drummer. 
"Nearly fired it one morning, too," he said. "Probably just as well 
we didn't." 

On arriving at a Navy base, the band would go to the hospital 
and entertain the wounded first. Then they'd tour the harbor in 
a launch, clambering up to the deck of each ship with their 
instruments, giving a concert, and clambering back into the 
launch. "There was a time I heard Dave Tough say he wished 
he learned piccolo instead of the drums," Max told us. "He said, 
1 bet I would have been the happiest piccolo player in the 
world.' " 

After entertaining the ships* crews, the band would visit all 
the camps in the vicinity, playing in the open air and jumping for 
slit trenches whenever air raid warnings came. At these concerts 
they sometimes had an audience of natives as well as soldiers. 
When the natives started jumping up and down as if it were 
Saturday morning at the Paramount Theatre the boys knew they 
were in the groove. "We played for crowds all the way up to 
50,000," Max said. "That was at some cricket track in Australia. 
Our smallest audience was 1500. But wait," he added, "while 
I tell you about playing on the Saratoga. You know at the 
Paramount the band comes slowly up out of the pit playing the 
theme song? Well, on the Saratoga they built us a stand topside 
and they built it square on top of the piece of deck that gets 
lowered with planes on it. We sat there and began to play and 
they pushed a button and the stand went down into the ship, and 
all the boys were sitting waiting down there with their eyes 
out on stems. If I ever have such an exciting moment in my life 
again, I bet Fll lose my mind from the excitement."* 

* Reprinted by permission. Copyright 1943 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. 



Chapter 10 



For the first two or three months after my discharge from the 
Navy I had no desire to work or to see anybody or even to touch 
the trumpet, and I scarcely ever left the apartment. At night I 
had trouble falling asleep, and then Yd inevitably dream I was 
choking and that I had to keep prilling wads of black cotton and 
black cloth out of my mouth. It was all mixed up in my mind 
with the bombings. The malaria attacks hung on for several years 
after the war, and the scaly sore on my leg never did heal, but 
the nightmares of those first six or seven months were the worst. 

Then one afternoon in April, I stopped in at Brentano's to pick 
up some books, and things started happening again. Bill O'Gor- 
man, who worked for Brentano's, was an old fan of mine, and as 
soon as he spotted me he came over to talk to me. 

"Fve got an idea for you, Max," he said when he found out I 
wasn't working. "A little club in the Village. It would be a per- 
fect spot for you." 

I said I didn't think I was in any kind of shape yet to go out 
and work but he insisted I at least look into this setup. He took 
down my phone number, and a week later he called me up and 

155 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

persuaded me to come down to this club, the Pied Piper, on 
Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, and talk to the bosses. 

The Pied Piper, a spacious, well-proportioned room, used to 
be a saloon called La Boheme. The former owner had fallen into 
the practice of taking all the money out of the jukebox and 
keeping it himself, until he finally arrived at a point where he 
owed the jukebox concessionaires so much money that he gave 
them the club in exchange for the money he owed, and now these 
three men, the owners of a jukebox business in Brooklyn, and 
acquaintances of Mr. O'Gorman, found themselves in the night- 
club business. They changed the name to the Pied Piper, stocked 
the jukebox with a pile of new records, and waited for the 
money to roll in. I sat down with two of these discouraged new 
bosses that Saturday night, and even on a Saturday night during 
the war when the Village was boiling with servicemen there 
wasn't a soul in the place, not even one lone, drunken sailor. 

"Look," one of the partners said to me. "We're stuck with this 
joint and we don't know anything about running a club. All we 
know about is installing the jukebox. Right, Joe?" Joe nodded 
glumly, and turned to me. "So why don't you take it over and 
see what you can do with it?" he said. 

These guys knew nothing about jazz or me, but since Mr. 
O'Gorman had recommended me, they were sold on me already, 
and they were so sincere and goodhearted in their way that I 
decided to give it a try. Up to now I had had no desire to go back 
to work, but the idea of having my own little band was the 
incentive I needed to try to get back to some kind of normal 
living again. In fact, I was so inspired by the whole thing that I 
started rounding up a band that same night. Rod Cless was avail- 
able, so I hired him for the clarinet spot, and Frank Orchard on 
valve trombone, and when I called up James P. Johnson and 
Willie the Lion Smith and found out they were interested, I 
really began to get excited. The pay was very little. All I could 
get out of the owners was $55 a week for each man, including 
myself, but they threw in a free meal every night for the mu- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 157 

sicians and all the whiskey they wanted, so I didn't have too 
much trouble getting men. I managed to talk the bosses into in- 
vesting in a Steinway baby grand, and I took James P. up to 
Fifty-seventh Street and turned him loose in the store until he 
found one that talked back in the right tone of voice. With James 
P. Johnson and the Lion and a baby grand, how could we go 
wrong? We opened up about two weeks later, and nothing could 
have been righter. 

With the war opening a path a mile wide for jazz, this was 
the turning point. Our troops all over the world were clamoring 
for jazz bands, jazz records, and jazz broadcasts, and eventually 
even the top brass were becoming aware of the morale value of 
jazz. In fact, the following year, 1945, the War Department 
announced that the Commodore records were first on every 
soldier radio hit parade, and while I was in the Navy the fellow 
in charge of the PX at Pearl Harbor had told me that my 
Commodore recordings of "Ballin' the Jack" and "I Ain't Gonna 
Give Nobody None of My Jellyroll" were in especially great 
demand. 

Besides Nick's, the only other jazz club in the Village then, 
half a block away from the Pied Piper, was Cafe Society Down- 
town, but the latter, with its regular night-club acts, was more 
of a show place than a jazz club. They did, nevertheless, present 
great jazz artists; I'll never forget the time they had Billie Holi- 
day and the three great boogie-woogie pianists Meade Lux 
Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson and the blues shouter 
Joe Turner, all on the same bill. 

In any case, I had no conscious idea of the burgeoning interest 
in jazz when I opened at the Pied Piper. I just felt that somehow 
if I felt like going back to small-band jazz, other people must be 
wanting it, too, and this seemed a good opportunity to put to- 
gether a little band I could enjoy with some well-seasoned mu- 
sicians who liked to play. 

Ernie Anderson arranged for me to appear on disk-jockey 
programs to spread the word about the Pied Piper; The New 



158 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Yorker magazine gave the club a fine write-up; the newspaper 
columnists gave it enthusiastic plugs; and the place caught on 
practically overnight. Tim Costello brought the Vanderbilts 
down, Duke Ellington used to drop in to hear his good friend 
James P. Johnson, and it wasn't long before the club became a 
regular musicians' hangout, with all the jazzmen who were still 
in the service sitting in whenever they were in town, so that 
instead of six musicians on the stand there was likely to be a 
dozen or more. Frankie Newton sat in so regularly that I finally 
persuaded the bosses to hire him, too. 

It was at this time, on one of the disk-jockey programs that 
used to plug the Pied Piper, that Arnold Stang made his wonder- 
ful remark about my name. When Fred Robbins, the disk jockey, 
interrupted his interview with Stang to announce that he was 
about to play one of my records, he turned to Stang and said, 
"YouVe heard of Max Kaminsky, haven't you?" 

"Max Kaminsky!" the quick-witted Stang retorted. "Why I 
knew him before he changed his name!" 

I've been using that remark ever since when people ask me 
why I haven't changed my name a question I am constantly 
asked. "But I have changed it," I say. "You should have heard 
what it was before!" 

Except for the usual tourist traps, and the regular weekend 
invasion of carousing servicemen and curious sightseers, the 
Village was a quiet, homey place during the forties. While it had 
always had its bohemians, the atmosphere during the war years 
was unfrantic and neighborly; there were no beatniks yet, no 
freaks or boppers or bearded folk singers. The children of the 
local Italian population played hopscotch and stick ball in the 
streets, and Washington Square Park was full of babies and 
mothers and respectable, old-fashioned bums and unf ancy dogs. 
The atmosphere at the Pied Piper was equally unfancy and 
informal. We had no air-conditioning, and between sets on swel- 
tering summer nights the customers would pick up their drinks 
and grope their way through the smoky haze to the sidewalk, 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 159 

where they'd gather in little groups on the nearby steps and try 
to breathe while they listened to the intermission pianists who 
were one of the most enjoyable things about the Pied Piper. 
James P. was officially the intermission pianist and Willie had 
the band spot, but we had no rigid rules and they switched jobs 
whenever they were in the mood. 

James P. Johnson, a stocky man with powerful shoulders and 
great big ham hands, could produce some of the most delicate 
musical sounds I ever heard. He was about fifty then, and his 
royalties on songs such as "Charleston" and "If I Could Be With 
You" provided him with a steady income, but I managed to per- 
suade him to come out and work again. A very modest and re- 
served man, he was usually serious and concentrated when he 
played, but when he got really going on the piano he'd have the 
whole building vibrating. He enjoyed the Pied Piper hugely, 
especially the fact that he could have all the whiskey he wanted. 
Sometimes when we'd go on an outside job, James P. would 
bring along his son to watch over him and see that he didn't get 
too mellow, but it always ended up with our having to take care 
of both junior and senior Johnsons. 

I never tired of trying to let James P. know how much I 
appreciated him. He not only had such a beautiful way of play- 
ing, he had the right way of playing, with nothing corny about 
it. Besides being a great piano man in his own right and an ac- 
companist without equal for such singers as Bessie Smith, Ethel 
Waters, Chippie Hill, and Maggie Jones, he was also the com- 
poser of piano jazz classics like "Carolina Shout" and "Snowy 
Morning Blues," as well as of large-scale serious compositions. 
Johnson spent six years writing his jazz-conceived concertos and 
choral pieces and symphonies, but as naturally discouraged and 
deeply hurt as he felt about his works being unplayed and un- 
recognized, he didn't carry on about it. 

That yearning of a comedian to play Hamlet, and vice versa, 
seems to be a part of human nature. Both James P. and Thomas 
"Fats" Waller, like George Gershwin, yearned to be recognized 



l6o MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

for their "serious" musical side as well as for their so-called 
light music. The desire to find acceptance as a "serious," classical- 
type musician is more than ever prevalent today. The only differ- 
ence between musicians like Fats and James P., and many modern 
musicians who take a little commonplace riff and orchestrate it 
for a French horn and oboe and call themselves jazz "composers" 
and howl about how they're starved for recognition is that 
Fats and James P. had talent. Nobody wants to be called a mere 
"song writer" any more. Fats Waller was noted for being one of 
the fastest and most prolific writers there ever was; he turned 
out numbers like "Ain't Misbehavin' " and "Honeysuckle Rose" 
in less than an hour. 

"A pianist without a left hand is a very weak pianist," Fats has 
said, and it was James P. who taught Fats how to use his left 
hand, for Waller had started out with classical training. Count 
Basie, Art Tatum, and Duke Ellington were also greatly influ- 
enced by Johnson and Waller, and later Thelonious Monk, the 
master of modern jazz piano, got it from the Duke. When James 
P. was really swinging, nobody could catch him. I'll never forget 
one record date when he plunked a quart of gin down on die 
piano, sat down, and began swinging so great that he and the 
piano and the bottle of gin were all bouncing like one creature. 
Johnson was a different story from the pianists of today who 
just get going with block harmonies. James P. would produce a 
hundred different changes in ideas and expression and images, a 
far cry from the monotonous kind of roly-poly, repetitive, con- 
tinuous playing they do today. The boppers began to use the bass 
fiddle to take the place of the pianist's rhythmic left hand, and 
so the modern pianists use the left hand just to establish the 
chord changes. Lately, however, the old, full piano style has 
begun to return to fashion. 

Fats has also said, "A pianist should be rich with sound 
he should never let the richness get out of the piano, and he 
should cover distance; he should really play those open chords 
of tenths and elevenths." And like Fats Waller, with whom John- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ l6l 

son helped create the Harlem stride piano style, which broad- 
ened the scope of ragtime, James P. could make you laugh and 
feel good. That was the spirit then not to be so smart or clever, 
just to get feeling good. The two men were lifelong friends; they 
bought houses next door to each other out in St. Albans, Long 
Island, with Clarence Williams on the other side and Hank Dun- 
can a couple of doors farther down. 

Willie the Lion was like a lamb around James P., for as great 
as the Lion is and as self-assured as he always acted about him- 
self, he accorded Johnson the highest respect because James P. 
was the master piano man. And the latter in his turn respected 
the Lion's talent as a composer of contemporary piano pieces, 
such as "Finger Busters." Willie was one of the first to play the 
so-called modern chords. He knew all about the modern Euro- 
pean symphonic composers and he was using the whole-tone 
system himself thirty-five years ago when he wrote impressionist 
pieces like "Morning Air." Way back in the twenties he'd sit 
down at the piano and while roughing out some dissonant chords 
he'd call out, "Yeah! Fm getting the message from Delius loud 
and clear this evening!" and then he'd go to work and beat the 
dissonances into behaving with good sense and a good sound and 
swing. When Fats took Willie to Carnegie Hall to hear Horo- 
witz, Willie said, "He's great but he doesn't swingl" Duke 
Ellington thought so highly of Willie that he composed a piece 
in his honor, "Portrait of the Lion," and Beiderbecke used to 
head for Harlem whenever he was in town especially to hear the 
Lion play the new modern chords, which we all knew about then. 
After the early ragtime era it was these Harlem stride pianists 
who started to do other than the expected by using different 
inversions and inventing new patterns by use of the modern 
harmonic changes. 

In any case, everyone seemed to enjoy the Pied Piper, and 
working there gave me a great chance to forget about aU my 
ailments. I began to sleep better as the dreams eased off a little, 
though I would still jump three feet or automatically hit the 



l62 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

pavement whenever I heard a backfire. During the six or seven 
months I was there, I made several records with my band and 
James P., and I began to feel better about my playing, too. 

We even almost made the movies, for during this time they 
were filming the screen version of The Lost Weekend, and they 
wanted to use the Pied Piper for the scene where Ray Milland 
steals a woman's pocketbook in a nightclub to get money for his 
whiskey. The whole movie crew came down and blocked off 
Barrow Street and shot the scene in the club with the band play- 
ing in the background, but then the third Pied Piper boss, who 
was a very difficult man, loused it up by demanding all kinds of 
money and rights on the scene and it all fell through. 

And then, finally, there came a big turn of events. I had never, 
as usual, had the sense to sign any kind of contract or make any 
business deal with the owners to get myself anything if I got the 
place going. All I did was agree to bring in the band, and I was 
just paid scale for my ideas about the food and entertainment and 
for my services, and once the two bosses sold out to the third 
partner, everything proceeded to go wrong. They sold out to 
him because they couldn't get along with him, and I was stuck 
with him because he was the kind of guy no one could get along 
with. Then I hired a certain musician who began to have eyes 
for my job as the place became more and more successful. He 
started feeding a line to this boss about how he could do even 
better than I had done, and a month later I was out of a job. 
This musician took over, and a couple of months after that, in 
March, 1945, the Pied Piper went out of business altogether 
and closed its doors. 

On December 4, 1944, my last night at the Pied Piper, I stayed 
around after closing time to take down my pictures from the 
entrance and gather up my stuff , and then I went over to the 
bar and had a drink. When Rod Cless clapped a shaky hand on 
my shoulder and mumbled good night, I asked him to sit down 
and have a last one on the house. He declined, and after I real-, 
ized how drunk he was I asked him if I could walk him home. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 163 

He lived right around the corner on West Fourth Street. But 
he said no, and when the bartender offered to accompany him, 
he refused him, too. Although Rod was a heavy drinker, he 
was always so polite and pleasant that it was hard to tell how 
drunk he was, and being the nice guy he was, he didn't want to 
put anybody out by having them see him home. I walked to the 
corner with him, but when he kept insisting he was all right I 
went back to the club. Rod's apartment was up three or four 
flights. On the way upstairs he lost his balance and toppled 
backward over the railing. He died four days later in St. Vin- 
cent's Hospital. I guess I spent hundreds of wakeful nights saying, 
"If only . . ." 

I was very sorry to lose the Pied Piper, but it had pulled me out 
of my slump, and I was ready for the old normal battlegrounds 
again. In January df 1945, Art Hodes asked me to come in with 
him at the Village Vanguard, where we worked as a trio for the 
next nine months, with Art on piano and Freddie Moore on 
drums. Max Gordon, the owner of the Vanguard, was always a 
very agreeable man to work for and while I missed playing in a 
full band, I liked everything else about the job. The Vanguard 
was deep in its folk-singer period then, with artists like Leadbelly, 
Richard Dyer-Bennett, Josh White, Burl Ives, Susan Reed, and 
Pete Seeger, but it also had singers like Chippie Hill and comedi- 
ans like Irwin Corey, a very funny guy. One night when one of 
the acts didn't show up and Max Gordon asked me to go out on 
the floor and entertain, I played and sang a couple of choruses 
of "When the Saints Go Marching In," choosing it simply be- 
cause it was so short. It went over well enough so that I kept on 
playing and singing it in different places, but I had no idea that 
it would snowball some ten years later into the theme song of 
the Dixieland bands. 

Early in February, the government, in an effort to conserve 
fuel, imposed a midnight curfew on all bars, cabarets, and 
theatres, so for the next few months until May, when the order 
was rescinded, we worked only three hours a night. I had always 



164 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

had a yen to play the guitar, and having just bought a cheap one 
in a hock shop around this time, I began to mess around with it 
every night when I came home from work. After I had gone 
through a couple of elementary practice books, I inquired at 
one of the guitar stores on Forty-eighth Street, the Spanish Music 
Center, about a teacher. They recommended Miguel Angel. I 
couldn't have found a better teacher for me if I had looked for 
years. Mike, a soft-spoken Mexican slave driver, got hold of a 
Tatay guitar for me and put me to work in earnest on classical 
studies. A music-loving mouse who lived in my house used to 
appear each night at the first plucking of a guitar string and he'd 
hang around companionably all night until dawn while I per- 
fected calluses on my fingers and strained my back learning 
the fingerboard. I studied with Mike for about six months until 
I went up to Boston. What with one thing and another, it was 
sixteen years before I resumed my studies. I went right back to 
Mike Angel again, and he started me all over again from the 
beginning with a new system he had perfected during my sixteen- 
year layoff. 

In October of 1945, 1 went up to Boston with Brad Gowans 
and Pee Wee Russell to work at the Copley Terrace. The club 
hadn't been doing much business so the boss, Al Boris, decided 
to take a chance on putting in a jazz band. We were on the air 
every night, so that people knew we were there and could hear 
what we could do, and business began to pick up. Soon the place 
was doing so well that when Eddie Condon called up from New 
York to ask Pee Wee and Brad and me to come into his night 
dub, which was opening that December, I told him I couldn't 
come. Brad decided to accept Eddie's offer, but Pee Wee stayed 
on with me in Boston. 

All the years I had lived and worked in my home town I had 
been trying to get someone to open up a jazz club, and now that 
it finally seemed to be the time, I decided to take a fling at it 
myself. What made it at all possible was that I was being paid 
three hundred dollars a week at the Copley Terrace, the largest 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 165 

salary I had ever received. I put aside two hundred dollars each 
week, and by March or so of 1946, when the Copley Terrace en- 
gagement ended, I had saved up three thousand dollars. I hunted 
around until I found a place that fitted my purse, a little base- 
ment room in the cellar of a beat-up hotel on Huntington Ave- 
nue. It was so filthy that it took a couple of weeks to clean it up, 
and while the scrubbing and fumigating was going on, I ran 
around buying a piano and fixtures and seeing people about pub- 
licity and trying to arrange for licenses to operate it. When the 
place was finally aired out, I gave the walls a couple of coats of 
whitewash and hung out a sign that read MAXIE'S, and when I 
was all ready to open, I discovered I had somehow spent all my 
money without being able to get a license to sell even Coca-Cola 
or a hot dog, let alone liquor. All I had was a cabaret license, and 
all I could provide was music, chairs, and ashtrays. I opened 
anyway, with a six-piece band which included Pee Wee, and in 
this little hole in the wall with no bar, no food, no tables, no 
decorations, and no dancing, where the customers had to sit in 
rows on wooden folding chairs and couldn't even order a glass of 
water, we took in fifteen hundred dollars in admissions at a dollar 
a head, in two weeks, during which time I quickly found out 
that I would never learn how to run a night club. I might be able 
to take care of the band and ideas for the food and entertain- 
ment, but despite all my years of experience in the music busi- 
ness, I was not the man to take care of the graft and the rackets 
and the liquor and the politics and the police payoffs, and I 
never would be. It was all pretty ridiculous the way I tried to 
do it, on half a shoestring, and no backing or pull, but I did at 
least have the satisfaction of knowing that my music and my 
timing was right. After I paid off all my debts, I folded up my 
empty wallet and stole back to New York. A couple of months 
later, when Eddie Condon again offered me a job in his new 
night club at $125 a week, I was glad to go back to work as a 
plain musician. 
Eddie's attractive club on West Third Street in Greenwich 



l66 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Village, tucked behind one of the New York University build- 
ings, was a far cry from my humble venture into business. With 
Eddie's many friends and wide connections he was able to 
arrange for financial backing, to lease a large club in a good 
location with marvelous acoustics and a well-stocked bar, and to 
obtain a liquor and cabaret license. It was still very difficult to 
find any whiskey in 1945, but with his magic way of talking 
Ernie Anderson persuaded the King's Ransom people to supply 
the Scotch, without having to put up a king's ransom; Ernie 
also hired Russell Patterson to decorate the club, and he arranged 
for the nightly broadcasts from the club and for all the publicity 
in the newspapers and magazines. Through Ernie Anderson's 
efforts during die preceding four years in sponsoring and pro- 
moting the Condon Town Hall concerts, and the overseas broad- 
casts and concert bookings in cities and colleges throughout the 
country, the name Eddie Condon had become synonymous with 
jazz, and people came from all over to see him in person. 

When I went into the club, the band was composed of Dave 
Tough, Freddie Ohms, Joe Dixon, Jack Lesberg, and Gene 
Schroeder. It was a fine band, and later on, when Pee Wee 
Russell came in with us, and then when Bud Freeman joined the 
gang, too, it seemed like old times. James P. Johnson played 
intermission piano for a couple of months, and later Joe Sullivan 
took that spot over again. Brad Gowans was missing, but Freddie 
Ohms, a young trombonist who was a newcomer to the music, 
was a jazz natural 

Eighteen years had gone by since I had first met these men in 
Chicago. The whole world had blown apart and been pasted 
together again since then, but through all the hard times, the 
frustrated hopes, the busted beginnings and the bitter ends, the 
thousands of miles we'd traveled and the thousands of songs 
we'd played, and despite all the changes and flux in the prevailing 
musical tastes, we'd hung on, just trying to play that thing. We 
were no longer star-struck, half-baked kids, full of clinkers and 
ideals. To be playing together now was something we had 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 167 

earned, and to us it sounded and felt so good that at times we 
seemed to overflow, building up to such a momentum that we 
would rise above the beat for a split half second, like a swing that 
has swung too high. I've heard us do that on a couple of records; 
it makes you feel like you have to grab hold of something to 
steady yourself. We felt we had finally made it, and we looked 
forward to settling down at last and staying at Eddie's for years 
and years. But the past eighteen years had been only the prologue. 
The worst was yet to come. 

Although I had been aware that during the war years the 
interest in jazz had been swelling like a balloon, I had no idea 
how fast and furiously it was puffing up until it finally burst 
right in our faces. By the end of the war, the interest in jazz 
was so widespread, and in musical circles so intense, that the 
middle and late forties became an era of incredible nonsense 
about jazz. The monthly Eddie Condon Town Hall concerts 
attracted such huge audiences that now they had to be held in 
Carnegie Hall; in 1943, Duke Ellington had started giving 
annual concerts at Carnegie Hall, jazz programs were included 
in the Carnegie Hall Pop Concerts, and a mammoth jazz concert 
was even held at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1944. The 
jazz V-discs and the weekly WCBS jazz broadcasts, emceed by 
Eddie Condon, which were short-waved to our servicemen all 
over the world, attracted hordes of new converts, who in turn 
were filled with the evangelists' zeal to spread the good word 
about jazz. Aficionados had begun publishing little jazz magazines 
by the dozens, jazz and fan clubs sprang up all over the country, 
and jazz concerts were being held every five minutes. Recording 
companies sprouted up like mushrooms, and national magazines 
such as Esquire, as well as the trade publications like Down Beat 
and Metronome, which ten years earlier had ignored jazz, began 
sponsoring annual jazz popularity polls, usually climaxed by a 
jazz concert, a nationwide broadcast, and recordings of the "all- 
star" band of the winners, which brought together some strange 
mixtures of style and vintage. For years we had gone hungry 



168 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

fighting for recognition for jazz, and now it was all much too 
much of a good thing. 

Inevitably with all this quantity, the quality began to suffer. 
It takes more than just the gathering together of a group of 
musicians to produce a jazz concert. Just because jazzmen don't 
require written scores and painstaking rehearsal and special 
settings to play their music doesn't mean a jazz concert doesn't 
need careful, knowing, professional presentation, like any per- 
forming art or entertainment. The very simplicity of the jazz 
concert setup made it a natural for the promoters and fast-buck 
boys who swarmed in on it like a pack of wolves. But they had 
no idea of what jazz did need. The kind of jazz we played had a 
functional base. When we had started to play jazz years before, 
we had played to provide the music for dancing. Before our 
time jazz had been played in marching bands, in street parades, 
at picnics, funerals, weddings. Before that, jazz had been 
evolved from blues and work songs, in the cotton fields, on the 
levees and riverboats, on the railroads, and above all, it had taken 
form in the churches, in the gospel singing. All this was in the 
music. It came out of the raw stuff of life. It was a take-off-your- 
shoes-and-get-with-it music. The direct, down-to-earth com- 
munication of these feelings was its appeal, but the trick of 
preserving the spontaneous character of jazz without having it 
degenerate into a raucous, senseless, tasteless mishmash isn't easy. 
A jazz concert needs the knowing discipline of a pro just as 
much as a symphony orchestra needs a conductor, or an army 
needs a general. 

But while it was bad enough having the opportunists swoop 
down like vultures to exploit the newly discovered commercial 
possibilities of jazz, the worst of it was that the very people who 
professed to love jazz the most became its greatest menace. Jazz, 
like Dr. Frankenstein, had all unwittingly created a monster in 
its own image the jazz addict who, in becoming all hopped 
up about the social significance of jazz and its significance as an 
art form, very nearly snuffed the life out of it. For now jazz no 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 169 

longer belonged to the musician and the dancers; it was taken 
over lock, stock, and barrel by the fans, the addicts, the record 
collectors, the amateur critics, the recording companies, the pro- 
moters, the night-club owners, the A&R men, the lecturers and 
writers. These were the people who now decided what was jazz 
and what wasn't, who dictated how it should be played and 
on what instruments, and specified who could or could not play 
"real" jazz. 

By the time I went into Eddie's in the fall of 1946, things had 
gone far and happened fast. A couple of years earlier, record 
collectors had become so carried away with the excitement of 
finding out about jazz that they had tracked down some of the 
venerable New Orleans jazzmen. Heywood Broun's son, among 
many others, trekked down to New Orleans to record the music 
of the early practitioners of jazz, and eventually most of the 
early New Orleans musicians, such as Mutt Carey, Kid Ory, 
Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, and Jelly Roll Morton, some of 
whom had been working at other lines of employment for years, 
were brought out of obscurity. At least they had a chance to en- 
joy some recognition, but it was cruel in a way to take these men, 
some of whom had been away from their horns for fifteen years, 
and all of a sudden to drag them into the limelight and expect 
them to live up to the claims that had been built up around them 
when they were in their prime. They were hailed as the only 
rightful heirs to the jazz throne, and after being taken to New 
York and Chicago and Los Angeles, where they were eulogized 
and lionized and recorded and put on concert stages for a brief 
season or two, they were tossed aside for a newer kick. Mean- 
while, in their wake a whole school of amateur critics arose to 
preach a sort of Negro mystique, which claimed that unless you 
were a Negro with preferably a New Orleans pedigree, you 
couldn't possibly play jazz. Young white musicians out on the 
West Coast were inspired to form bands that were, note for note 
and instrument for instrument down to replacing the bass and 
the guitar with the tuba and the banjo exact replicas of the 



iyo MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

early New Orleans bands. Lu Walters was one of the first, with 
his Yerba Buena band, and later two of his sidemen, Turk 
Murphy and Bob Scobey, formed similar bands. 

All this had been snowballing for two or three years before 
Eddie opened his club, and it began to come to a head after 
we had been there only a month or two. We did the unfor- 
givable thing in the eyes of jazz addicts and collectors and critics: 
not content with playing only the Dixieland and New Orleans 
tunes, we played standards and pop and show tunes, as we had 
always done before anyone knew about jazz, and the more we 
widened our repertoire and experimented with new things, the 
more the self-appointed guardians of jazz complained. It was 
really funny when you think- about it. For years these people 
had been hailing Pee Wee and Bud Freeman and Dave Tough 
and me as great jazzmen, and now when we had really been 
through the mill all these years with the music, they decided we 
didn't play "authentic" jazz. And when we played things like 
"Savoy" and "A-Train" and "How High the Moon," they be- 
came actively violent, and to a man the New Orleans revivalists 
began sounding off about how we didn't play "genuine" jazz. 

And then, on top of all this, bop began to appear on the scene. 
This would have been okay, too, for the pioneer boppers were 
at least sincere in trying to work something out with those 
modern chords we'd been hearing for twenty years. But the 
critics and fans and writers had no sense of proportion, and just 
as the revivalists declared there was no genuine jazz except New 
Orleans jazz, the modernists proclaimed that bop was now the 
only thing and anyone who didn't play the new bop style was a 
living fossil. "Moldy fig" was the exact term. Big bands 
such as the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman groups, which 
adapted jazz to modern classical music and called it "progressive 
jazz," began making a splash in the commercial field. Together 
with bop, they made Big Business out of the word "jazz" an 
even more commercial business out of it than the big swing 
bands did. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

During the early forties while we had been blowing hot at the 
Sunday sessions at Ryan's, bop had been incubating at Minton's 
up in Harlem on Monday nights. The hoppers were going 
through the phase of rejecting everything they had grown up 
with, but before they had a chance to develop a little taste in 
their thinking and their music, the critics and jazz writers began 
climbing on the band wagon, and by the early fifties the output 
of "modern" jazz records, spurred by the invention of the LP, 
had reached a phenomenal level. Anyone who made a weird 
sound or played an out-of-tune little lick could call himself a 
genius and the critics were too ignorant and afraid to laugh them 
back into some kind of reality. It really was unfair to the new 
young "modern" musicians, for they became overnight sensations 
before they had a chance to mature musically. And so from hot 
music it became hate music. Like the fairy story about the 
emperor's clothes, no one dared to say the king was naked, and 
pretty soon the only form of jazz you heard on the radio was 
bop, and later there was "cool" and then "hard" jazz. No one 
had a chance to hear any other kind of jazz. In the fifties a whole 
new generation of young people grew up knowing nothing about 
real jazz, and among them were the new musicians and new 
critics. 

I always felt that the so-called modern school was cutting 
itself loose from the earth roots of jazz. The more they 
intellectualized it and worked out every new, purposefully 
discordant note and phrase ahead of time and polished and shaped 
it, the further they were taking it from jazz and the closer they 
were bringing it to classical music and worse than that, to 
conformity. In abandoning the diatonic scale, with its com- 
promises and its "minorities," by which I mean the two semitone 
notes in each major scale, and by tending more and more toward 
the twelve-tone system, in which all notes are equal, they are 
not bringing about the "equality" they want in life they are 
only obeying the overpowering impulse of these times toward 
conformity. Minority does not mean inferiority, it means dif- 



3MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

f erence, and it is the differences that make a democracy, not con- 
formity and sameness. Vive la difference*. 

For I believe that jazz is something truly new in music. You 
keep hearing how composers of serious music from Debussy to 
Ravel to Stravinsky to Copland were at first enthralled with 
jazz and then discarded it as too shallow a field for deep plowing. 
Although I feel they didn't really understand it, in a way I feel 
they were right. Small-band improvised jazz belongs in the same 
special category as Italian grand opera, the Viennese operetta, 
and American musical comedy. These three forms are con- 
sidered to be the only musical entertainments that are also per- 
fected art forms, and I think jazz should be added to them. Jazz 
is a highly personal music. Its appeal is in its spontaneity. That's 
what keeps it ever fresh, ever new. That's the excitement of it 
and the challenge, and that's what makes it so hard to play. A 
jazzman has to prove to himself every day that he can play jazz. 
Not many musicians have the qualities of mind and heart that it 
takes. 

Modern jazz represents the contemporary state of mind, and 
wants to play it cool, both life and jazz, because of an insecurity 
that the older generation of jazzmen did not feel. We were the 
pioneers, rebelling against the Victorian-European music, as the 
writers of the twenties did in literature. We were ridiculed and 
called barbarians, too, as the boppers were in the forties, but in 
spite of the hardships of the twenties and thirties and forties, we 
were full of fight and hope. But the poor new generation was 
hit with the atomic age and all that it implies of doom before they 
were dry behind the ears. They haven't done any living yet, and 
they want to live, so they play it cool. They've taken the spunk 
out of the beat by loosening it, and they've taken the beauty out 
of the tone because they are afraid to believe in beauty, to com- 
mit themselves to it. 

To get back to the fracas at Condon's, the know-it-all amateur 
critics began writing vituperative articles in Down Beat and the 
other jazz publications, attacking our band, complaining that the 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 173 

songs we were playing were downright heresy, that Gene 
Schroeder wasn't good because he wouldn't fit in with Bunk 
Johnson or Kid Ory, that Freddie Ohms was new to jazz and 
didn't like to play it, and that Dave Tough looked like he needed 
a blood transfusion. Freddie Ohms and I were replaced on 
January 30, 1947, with George Brunis and Wild Bill Davison, 
and then Dave Tough and Jack Lesberg quit because they refused 
to work with Brunis and Davison, who were referred to by Dave 
in an "equal rime" interview in Do<wn Beat as, respectively, "a 
clown and a musical gauleiter." Feelings, as one can see, ran high, 
bitter, and personal. Bud Freeman went to work in South 
America, while Freddie Ohms went into Nick's, Jack Lesberg 
went with Leonard Bernstein. Pee Wee and Gene Schroeder 
stayed on with the new band, as of course did Eddie Condon. 
Dave Tough went back to Woody Herman's band, joining up 
with the modernists. 

In the meantime, in the midst of all this upheaval, I suffered 
another loss, a personal one. A couple of weeks before I left 
Eddie's, I had a call from my sister Rose that my mother was in 
the hospital. All the way up to Boston on the train the next 
morning I tried to talk myself into believing it was a false 
alarm, and I was still hopeful when I spoke to the doctor before 
going in to see her. After all, her own mother had lived to be 
a hundred and twenty-five, and Mom had her heart set on cutting 
her. 

'Well, she's nearly ninety, and when you get that old your 
machinery is bound to wear out," was the matter-of-fact, Yankee 
way the doctor put it. I knew then that she was dying, but the 
sight of her thin, withered face was a shock, and her hand felt 
like tissue paper. 

"I'm going to go see Pee Wee now, Ma," I said when I was 
leaving. She smiled then, and that was the last of it. She had 
always been fond of Pee Wee Russell, and she knew that I was 
telling her it was good-bye. She knew it was my life to have to 
go and play. She had been so proud of my playing, and she 



174 MY LIFE IN J AZZ 

had loved to hear the crowds applaud when I played in Boston's 
Symphony Hall. "Don't mourn for the dead, take care of the 
living," she had so often said to me. "And when I die, I want 
you to go out and see a movie." I flew back from Boston that 
afternoon, but I didn't go to a movie. I got deliberately and 
thoroughly plastered, and then I had to soak under the shower 
till I was sober enough to go to work. I kept remembering how 
I used to play Louis Armstrong records around the house night 
and day when I was home in the thirties and how my mother was 
convinced it was I who was on trumpet. Nothing could shake 
her conviction. "That's Maxie, but he doesn't want to tell me 
because he's so modest," she'd say knowingly to Rose, and then 
turning to me she'd say, "You needn't be ashamed. In fact, it's 
very good!" Everywhere I go, all over the world, I still meet 
musicians who ask about my mother. 

In March, 1947, I went into Jimmy Ryan's with Art Hodes 
and Danny Alvin for a few weeks, and then a month later, when 
Jack Teagarden came to town, I went to work with him for 
several months in a six-piece band at the Famous Door on 
Fifty-second Street, which also had Big Sid Catlett's band, with 
Thelonious Monk on piano, on the same bill. We had Peanuts 
Hucko on clarinet, Jack Lesberg on bass, Morey Feld on drums, 
and Sanf ord Gold on piano, and the band sounded so good that 
when Sid Catlett's band was through playing, he'd stay and play 
along with our band, too. Jack Teagarden was even more tire- 
less than Big Sid. The minute our band finished a set, Jack 
would take his horn and go across the street to Ryan's or the 
Three Deuces and sit in with those bands. The manager tore his 
hair out by handfuls. "You're supposed to be appearing at the 
Famous Door exclusively!" he'd scream. "J ust being neighborly," 
Jack would drawl in his calm, unruffled way. We enjoyed the 
manager's discomfort, but we had our own troubles, too. Jack 
always had such a wonderful big heart for everybody that in the 
course of walking down Broadway during the day he'd hire 
every musician he'd meet. When night came, it would wind up 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 175 

with our having six or eight extra players milling around on 
the stand, and we'd have to explain that they were welcome to 
sit in but there was no money for paying them. We had a hard 
enough time as it was getting our seventy-five dollars a week 
from the bosses. 

Mezz Mezzrow was across the street in Ryan's then, and Dave 
Tough was at the Three Deuces with Bill Harris and Flip 
Phillips, while Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker had one of 
their first bop bands down die street at the Spotlite. Dizzy was 
having his own troubles, too, since there weren't too many 
listeners for his music yet. He was setting the new style by 
playing sixteenth and thirty-second notes in dazzling high 
registers, carrying on the style of Roy Eldridge. His daring use 
of progressive chord changes and fast, intricate intervals soon 
made him the leader in the school of modern trumpets. 

We also had a daily half -hour radio job at WMGM while we 
were at the Famous Door. The radio job was hard because we 
had to use the studio drummer and piano player and they weren't 
used to swinging, but on the other hand we used to get paid 
regularly at WMGM and we all needed the money, especially 
me, for a couple of months later, on October 22, 1947, my first 
son, Sam, was born, a month after my thirty-ninth birthday. The 
housing shortage was still acute then and it wasn't easy managing 
with an infant in our one-room apartment on West Twentieth 
Street, but having Sam made it all great, anyway. 

In spite of the mounting campaign of hostility from the new 
bop cultists, the late forties were a sort of golden time for jazz, 
with plenty of all kinds of jazz to be heard all over town. Not 
only were the hot jazzmen and boppers playing in clubs next 
door to each other, they were likely to be playing in the same 
club. Though Fifty-second Street's sun was setting, it gave off a 
warm, mellow glow in its declining years. This street had once 
harbored comfortable brownstone houses occupied by well-to- 
do families with children and dogs, maids and cooks, and back 
yards with trees and gardens. In the Prohibition era, the club 



176 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

owners began buying some of these respectable houses and 
opening their speakeasies on the ground floor. After repeal, when 
the clubs became legitimate, more and more began sprouting up. 
By the time Rockefeller Center was built, most of the families 
had moved away and the remaining private houses became room- 
ing houses, where you could rent a spacious, high-ceilinged room 
for five dollars a week even up to the early forties. 

The heyday of Fifty-second Street was from the mid-thirties 
to the mid-forties, when it was known all over the world as 
Swing Street. After that it began to deteriorate, with girlie clubs 
springing up like weeds and office buildings encroaching on all 
sides. But in the late forties there were still wonderful sounds to 
be heard, with the clubs presenting musicians like Henry "Red" 
Allen, J. C. Higginbotham, Art Tatum, Stuff Smith, George 
Brunis, Sidney Bechet, Buster Bailey, Sidney and Wilbur DeParis, 
Dizzy Gillespie, Trummy Young, Johnny Guarnieri, Rex 
Stewart, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Charlie Shavers, Bobby 
Hackett, Buck Clayton, Charlie Parker, and Coleman Hawkins 
the great "Hawk," who had pioneered in the playing of the 
tenor sax, is a poet, not only in his command of his horn and in 
his big, warm tone, but in his bottomless well of rich ideas, his 
intelligence, and his taste. The wonderful Pearl Bailey, a mere slip 
of a girl then, was just starting as a singer, and Reilly's bar, across 
the street from Ryan's, was still the musicians' home-away-f rom- 
home, between sets or between jobs. Over at the Aquarium you 
could hear Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, or 
Gene Krupa, while Nick's in the Village was likely to have Miff 
Mole, Marty Marsala, Muggsy Spanier, Ernie Caceres, Billy 
Butterfield; the Caf6 Societies Uptown and Downtown would 
have Edmond Hall or Vic Dickenson, Cliff Jackson, Pete John- 
son, J. C. Heard; and the Vanguard and Eddie Condon's were 
going strong. Those were still happy, swinging days. 




1 1 



The summer of 1948 found me in a panic. Except for Friday- 
night jam sessions at the Stuyvesant Casino and Central Plaza and 
occasional gigs, I had been out of work for several months, and 
with no sign of work in sight I was desperate to find a way to 
get my family out of our stifling one-room apartment and into 
die country for a few weeks. By the end of July, with the rent 
coming due and no money in the bank, I finally reached for the 
telephone one morning and called Jackie Marshard. Jackie was 
brief, businesslike, and to the point. 

"If you can get hold of fifty dollars and fly up to Boston today, 
I'll see what I can work out for you," he said crisply. "Bring 
your trumpet and a tux." 

Though I was weak with gratitude that Jackie hadn't brushed 
me off, having to walk into his office that Friday afternoon in 
August was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. And when 
we were face to face, it was all I could do not to turn on my heel 
and walk out. 

"Money is everything," Jackie had said to me twenty-five years 
before. Since that time, Jackie had made his million dollars, and 

177 



178 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

I had made my reputation as a jazzman, and now here I was 
coming to him for help. 

"It's a long time since the days of the Shawmut Syncopaters, 
eh, Maxie!" Jackie said, shaking hands jovially. As he lowered his 
expensively tailored frame into his leather swivel chair, his eyes 
flicked over me, taking such deadly inventory that I felt I was 
back at 90 Church Street, trying to enlist in the Navy. "Well, 
here he is, the jazz hot-shot," I could hear him think. "Hmmmm, 
not very impressive, a litde half-pint, crowding forty, beat, 
scared, and broke." 

As for Jackie, though he was the same age as I, he not only 
looked as fit and handsome as ever, he seemed actually to glow 
with prosperity and well-being. His booking office, which he had 
opened some dozen years earlier in partnership with Lou Bonick, 
another orchestra leader, was doing so well in the society-band 
field that Jackie had branched out into other lucrative ventures, 
such as managing Vaughn Monroe's band, which he had built 
into a national success. After he and Lou discussed the ordering 
of some posters for a dance at which Vaughn Monroe was ap- 
pearing, Jackie turned his full attention to me, while I put for- 
ward my case for jazz, explaining that Dixieland, as I was now 
resigned to calling it, had a great chance of catching on with 
the public, and that now was the crucial time, while the public 
interest in jazz was still high. 

While Jackie wasn't completely sold, his business instincts 
were intrigued. "I'll tell you what we'll do, Maxie," he said. "Lou 
and I will put you on the payroll at seventy-five dollars a week 
until we see what happens and how you make out. In the 
meantime, I'll put you to work right away." He took a quick look 
at his wafer-thin gold wrist watch. "I'm flying up to Bar Harbor 
right now and I'll take you with me and have you sit in with the 
band at the country-club dance tonight. How's that?" 

c< You'll never be sorry, Jackie," I said gruffly. I had to resort 
to a couple of quick blasts into my handkerchief at the thought 
that here was help from a real friend. I didn't have to be ashamed 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 179 

now of having had to come to him. Jackie had made his, and 
now he was going to help me. And this time I'll make it, I swore 
to myself. 

"O.K., Max, it's all settled, then," Jackie said, snapping on his 
Panama. "Let's go." 

In the cab Jackie unburdened himself for a while about high 
society and his disillusionment with the lives led by the extremely 
wealthy. The gist of it was that while he took an obvious pleasure 
in being able to talk so knowingly and familiarly about highly 
placed people, now that he had made a mint of money him- 
self he found he wasn't getting the satisfaction he had expected, 
and he revealed that he was, in fact, turning more and more to 
religion as his business affairs grew more and more successful. 

I turned a quizzical look on him at these words. "And to think 
that the time we met I wanted you thrown out of the shul because 
you were so disrespectful," I said, grinning. 

After reminiscing for a while about the old days in Dorchester, 
we got down to business again, and Jackie asked me if what I was 
trying to do with jazz music could be done in Boston. "I never 
could see why not," I said, and I told him about my shoestring 
night club and how fifteen hundred people had flocked into that 
dreary little cellar in two weeks. "Boston people always have to 
go to New York for their fun; it's time they admitted they were 
human, too, and had some places of their own in Boston," I said. 

Jackie was so cheered at this picture that he asked me how I 
was fixed for money at the moment. When I said I had a few 
dollars on me, he pulled out his wallet. "This will repay you for 
your plane fare," he said, handing me fifty bucks. Again I had 
trouble with that lump in my throat. 

Once Jackie's little four-seater plane was airborne, I began to 
relax. I had learned to love flying, and my spirits lifted as the 
plane nosed higher into the clean blue of the sky, until I over- 
heard Jackie's guest congratulating him on the birth of his second 
son two weeks earlier, and then my worries about getting my 
family out of the hot city came pressing down on me again. "But 



l8o MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

I still say money isn't everything," my mind kept insisting stub- 
bornly, and underneath my thankfulness was that same old 
rankling jealousy as I noticed Jackie watching my face to see 
my reactions to being on a plane, and I thought with sulky satis- 
faction of all the flying I had done in the Pacific and how Jackie 
had no idea I had flown as much as or more than he with all his 
private planes. 

Mr. Small, at whose house Jackie always stayed at Bar Harbor, 
met us with a car, and after I was settled in my room, I went 
downstairs to the big kitchen, where the musicians and the pilot 
and Jackie were gathered. 

"Come on, Maxie, live it up," Jackie said, handing me a glass 
half filled with Scotch. 

I was so intent on playing well that night that I refused at first, 
but Jackie insisted. 

"This is living!" he said, lifting his own highball in a toast. 
This was another new facet of Jackie, for in all the years I had 
known him he had never smoked or drunk. Turning to the pilot 
then, Jackie said, "See this little bastard," waving his glass at 
me. "He put me in this business. If it wasn't for him and his 
lousy Shawmut Syncopaters, I'd never have all this." 

"You would've made it no matter what business you went 
into, Jackie," I said. "You have the flair for making money." 

"Yeah, but you have to be lucky, too, and maybe I wouldn't 
have been so lucky or looked so good in some other business," he 
said, mugging. 

The dance that night at the country club was a disappointment 
to me, all keyed up as I was to knock them dead. The season at 
Bar Harbor is just getting under way at the beginning of August 
and the club was almost deserted, with only three or four couples 
showing up. There was no chance to show Jackie how people 
responded to jazz, but when Jackie and I walked back to Mr. 
Small's boardinghouse in the quiet of the summer night, I tried 
again to get across to him the tremendous interest in jazz. 

"We'll see," was all he said. "Listen, tomorrow you go back 
to Boston and see my brother Harry. Tell him to take you out 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ l8l 

on the job he's playing tomorrow night. It's a big private deb- 
utante party down on the Cape, and you'll have a better chance 
to make something out of it. Tell Harry what you need in the 
way of money and he'll take care of you." 

I flew back to Boston the next afternoon and from the airport 
I went straight to Jackie's office, where I washed and changed 
back to my tuxedo again. I piled into the car with the rest of the 
musicians, many of whom I knew from the days in the thirties 
when I had played jobs with the Marshards. The party that night 
at Marion, out on the Cape, was a different matter from the 
dance the night before. After we had played for a couple of hours, 
that wonderful comedian Frank Fontaine entertained and then 
Harry took the mike and gave a little spiel about jazz, repeating 
the things I had told him, but not really knowing what it was all 
about. 

"We have a man in our orchestra tonight who has made a big 
name in jazz," Harry concluded. "Ladies and gentlemen, may I 
introduce Max Kaminsky," and at the mention of my name, 
the house came down. I don't know who was more surprised, 
me or Harry. I had expected some of these society kids to have 
heard of me but I hadn't foreseen such total and instantaneous 
acclaim, and I just sat there for a second, staring back open- 
mouthed at open-mouthed Harry. 

"This is what I was trying to explain to Jackie," I said ex- 
citedly to him after the dance was over. "Did you hear those kids! 
I'm telling you, Harry, a jazz band, properly presented, could 
make a great thing of it now!" 

"Yeah, maybe so," Harry said. "We'll see." 

I didn't hear from Jackie all the following week, and the 
seventy-five-dollar check didn't arrive, either. I was sitting 
around the following Sunday morning debating whether to give 
Jackie a ring or to forget the whole thing when the telephone 
rang. It was Louis Rosenthal, my old buddy from Boston. 

"Maxie, listen did you see the papers? I couldn't believe it, 
but it's in the papers." 

"What's the matter, Rosey?" I said. "Calm down." 



l82 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

"It's Jackie. He was killed. He crashed his car into a tree last 
night." 

I sat there stunned for a few minutes after I had hung up the 
phone, and then a thought trickled slowly into my mind. How 
envious are you now? a chilled inner voice asked. Swearing, I 
seized the phone book and looked up the number of the Daily 
News. Like Louis Rosenthal, I couldn't believe it either, even 
after the News confirmed it. 

"Maybe if I get the Boston papers ..." I muttered. 

At the Times Square newsstand, I bundled the Boston papers 
tinder my arm and walked across the street to the drugstore and 
sat down on a stool and ordered coffee before I opened the 
papers. It was true, all right, even down to a photograph of the 
smashed car on the front page. Thirty-nine years old, and he 
had made a few million. "His reflexes were never very good," I 
muttered to the newspaper, not realizing I was talking out loud. 

"What was that, mister?" the counterman asked. 

"Nothing," I mumbled. I gathered up the newspapers and 
flipped a coin on the counter and left. 

"A driver of men," my thoughts continued as I walked down 
Broadway, "but he was lousy when it came to driving a car, or 
playing a drum, or just playing. He had worked hard, and had 
just started to live and drink and enjoy life, enjoy his money, 
and here I had come to the point of giving up all I cared about 
so I could do something for my family. No, money isn't every- 
thing, but this is a hell of a way to win an argument," I thought. 

They buried Jackie on my birthday, September yth. 

A few weeks later, Harry called me to come to Boston to play 
some more jobs and see if I'd go over as well as I did the first 
time. When I continued to get ovations and break up the place, 
I began to feel then that if Jackie had lived he would have backed 
me in a jazz band. Jackie loved to create business and success, 
and had he been managing the business end of things, he would 
have made me, but that wasn't to be. His brother Harry had no 
interest in anything but continuing with the business as Jackie 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 183 

had set it up, and he just used me as a sideman, with a special 
little act of my own. 

So for the next twelve years I did the society-band circuit three 
rimes a year. 

The society-band business is one of the looniest of all the loony 
fields in the music business. The granddaddy of all the society- 
band leaders is Meyer Davis, with some sixty orchestras in his 
bull pen, all booked solid as far as fifteen years in advance. Ruby 
Newman is another veteran, along with Emil Coleman, Lester 
Lanin, Ben Cutler, Jimmy Lanin, Harry Marshard, and others. 
It's a murderously competitive field, but once a band leader is 
established in the society circuit, he's likely to be set for life. The 
band leaders become part of the whole sentimental tradition of 
the family and the social group, and it takes a certain personality 
to go along with all this or maybe it's an uncertain personality, 
like the bandleader who, when asked by a dowager if he was 
Jewish, smoothly answered, "Not necessarily, madam," without 
his baton losing a beat. Different leaders are trying to break 
through the Diamond Curtain all the time, and occasionally 
society will try out jazz bands like Turk Murphy's and Ralph 
Button's, but on the whole they stick to the established leaders 
whom they know well. 

There is a story famous in music circles about the band leader 
who was getting some heavy competition from an up-and- 
coming young leader, whom we'll call Bobby Brown. One night 
when the established band leader was driving to an engagement 
with a busload of musicians, they ran into such a heavy snow- 
storm that eventually they bogged down in a drift about two 
miles from the place where they were to play. When it was 
obvious even to the hysterical band leader that they were hope- 
lessly stuck, he let out a wail that drowned out the gale outside. 
"That Bobby Brown will stop at nothing^ he howled, shaking 
his fist at the raging storm. 

There is no beat like the society beat. For seven or eight hours, 
the society bands will grind out some five hundred songs like an 



184 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

unending chain of link sausages, all at the exact same lively, brisk 
tempo, which is so marked that you have to be stone deaf, or 
stoned, not to follow it. The band leader's one fear is that the 
party will fizzle out from under him, and there is no one who 
cares more deeply about keeping things jumping than the leader 
himself. 

The two major debutante seasons are December and June, 
with a third minor season in September, before school starts. 
Nowadays the musicians are generally flown from date to date, 
but until just a few years ago, the men used to pile into cars at 
eight o'clock in the morning after finishing one party and drive 
four or five hundred miles to another city, arriving in time to 
catch an hour's rest before playing all night at another party. 

The arrangements for all these goings-on are usually put into 
the hands of a specialist, the professional social secretary, who 
will charge up to $1,500 for taking over all the preparations: 
clearing the date, booking the band, sending the invitations, and 
arranging for the caterers and decorations. The cost of the food, 
drink, and flowers can be anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000, and 
the social secretary's commission from the florists, liquor dealers, 
musicians, and decorators is reckoned as high as 20 per cent of the 
total cost. In the days before income tax, it was nothing to spend 
$20,000 and $30,000 on a debut, and in the thirties the coming- 
out parties of heiresses like Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, and 
Brenda Frazier cost between $50,000 and $75,000. Before that, 
the peak was reached in 1928-29, when $75,000 to $100,000 were 
sometimes spent on debuts. Nowadays the proceeds of the cotil- 
lions and debutante balls are donated to charity. 

The dancing will seldom start before ten or eleven o'clock, but 
the band leader will insist that the entire band be there before 
seven-thirty on the excuse that usually around eight there'll be a 
call for cocktail music, when the leader will appoint a three- 
piece group, called strolling musicians, to play while the rest of 
the band sits and waits, herded into some corner where the butler 
considers it safe to leave such barbarians. Most of the servants 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 185 

consider us with the cold eye of a small-town cop viewing a 
caravan of gypsies, and many outsnob their masters, but some are 
considerate and courteous and will help you find some food in 
the ten-minute supper break, around i A.M. This doesn't mean 
the orchestra stops playing for even ten minutes, though. We eat 
in shifts. It's best to go with the first shift, when the leader 
goes, because the leader allows himself a leisurely twenty minutes 
or half hour for his meal and you get a chance to eat without 
choking to death, but the men on the second shift will barely 
have got the first forkful to their mouth when the leader will 
come rushing up screaming that the party is dying on its feet 
and to stop goofing off. Sometimes the caterers will miscalculate 
and by the time the musicians are ready to eat, there's nothing 
left beside the dried hors d'oeuvres and some soggy caviar. It's 
tough when this happens at a private home miles out in the 
country where there is no chance of ducking out to a hamburger 
joint for food, so on the next job you pad your pockets with 
chocolate bars, and of course it will turn out to be a place where 
the caterer used to play alto sax in a college band and he'll load 
your plate with so much food you can't lift it. 

Most society bands are pickup bands, put together for each 
date and composed of men accustomed to the society circuit, 
who know all the songs and are used to playing them at the 
society tempo. One night during our dinner intermission, one of 
the guests came over to tell me and the saxophone player how 
wonderful the band sounded, and he marveled at how we could 
play without sheet music, flowing from one song into another 
without a hitch. He ended up asking wonderingly, "How long 
have you fellows been together?" The saxophone player con- 
sulted his wrist watch and said, "Since nine o'clock." 

The June and September private coming-out parties are 
usually held outdoors under huge red-and-white-striped tents. 
Thousands of pink roses or white chrysanthemums will be twined 
around the posts and banked behind the bandstand, or a jungle 
scene might be simulated with tons of gardenias and orchids and 



186 MY LIFE *N JAZZ 

potted palms, or it might be done up in a Parisian sidewalk cafe 
decor. One family in the Midwest who spends each summer in 
Nantucket had replicas of its windmills and lighthouses painted 
on canvas props. At another party, the entire band had to dress 
in kilts. How the Scots keep warm in them I'll never know. The 
first thing the musician's eye focuses on amidst all this splendor 
is the bandstand, to see if there are any drapes or hangings behind 
it for protection against the wind, an unexpected drop in tempera- 
ture, or a sudden thunderstorm. Lately, caterers have begun to 
supply plastic sheets which can be dropped down from the 
canopy to keep out the weather, but musicians have launched 
debutantes into society while wearing overcoats on top of their 
tuxedos or playing while rain dripped down their collars and 
dribbled into their instruments. 

I guess it's hazards like these that account for the heavy drink- 
ing among society-band musicians. Of all the dedicated drinkers 
I have known and I have known some of the most inspired 
the men in society bands make jazzmen look like sissies when it 
comes to whiskey. I have never seen men drink so much and still 
play a job all night long, without missing a beat. Some band 
leaders protest virtuously that "my men never smoke or drink," 
when a tray of drinks is sent up to them, and the men kindly 
try not to destroy this happy illusion. 

One of the most awe-inspiring drinkers I ever knew was Bill 
Dooley, a drummer who was one of the main attractions in the 
Harry Marshard band. A great big fat guy with a limitless 
capacity, Bill was a great entertainer, and underneath a W. C. 
Fields exterior and a wryly witty mind beat an immensely kind, 
cheerful heart full of fun and nonsense. He was the one who held 
the band together. As soon as the band checked into a hotel, 
Dooley would be on the telephone, and within a half hour all the 
musicians would be sprawled comfortably around his room, 
playing pinochle, studying tip sheets on the horses, and arguing 
amiably about baseball while room service wheeled in endless 
wagons of Scotch and ice and brandy and platters of steak and 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 187 

pots of coffee. I remember one rime when a musician happened 
to confess to a weakness for whipped cream, Dooley reached 
for the phone and ordered five dollars' worth of whipped cream 
for him. Dooley had a whole repertoire of songs that were always 
a big hit, and he was a wonderful opener for me, paving the way 
for my performance. Bill died in 1959; even his big heart finally 
gave out from all the years of pumping away and driving all day 
and playing all night. 

The cotillions and the debutante balls, where the season's crop 
of debs is presented to society in one shot, aren't as hard to play 
as the private coming-out parties, and since the former are always 
held indoors at a hotel or country club, the musicians are assured 
of shelter and food. But the parties in private homes are the most 
interesting. I always felt that one of the reasons musicians put up 
with the back-breaking work is simply for the thrill of glimpsing 
the fabulous homes and lives of the rich. They get their kicks 
from driving up to a palatial stone mansion, about a city block 
long, set amid velvety lawns sweeping down to the lake or bay, 
The walls in the i3o-room house will be hung with French 
tapestries acres wide, or paneled in oak or floored in dazzling 
Italian marble, or there will be galleries hung with paintings 
collected from all over the world and filled with so many price- 
less works of art that a state trooper will be stationed in each 
room to guard them. But at the end of a three-week tour of the 
society circuit, the musicians are surfeited with the sight of so 
much luxury, so much rich food, and so many jewels, so much 
perfection and so much wealth. They are polluted with whiskey, 
their nerves are jangling from lack of sleep, their skin is gritty 
and gray from too much smoking and stained with travel weari- 
ness, and they're fed up with everything. The only thing they 
agree on now is that they hate the leader. 

Actually, most society band leaders are marvelously funny, 
frantic fellows, operating a highly specialized, complex business 
under tremendous pressure. It's a wonder they keep their sanity, 
The inconsistency of their behavior with the society swells and 



l88 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

with their own men, though, is always good for a laugh among 
the musicians. One of the leaders was on a kick once about how 
he was going to write a book about bandstand etiquette for the 
musicians' edification. He was harping on this for three days, and 
then the next day at a lawn party at a posh country club, one 
of the colored attendants, a dignified old fellow, came over and 
tugged politely at the leader's jacket just as he was about to give 
the down beat. The leader turned angrily and snapped, "What 
the blankety blankety hell do you want!" The entire band 
whooped and hooted at this flagrant hypocrisy and one of the 
musicians hollered, "On what page will that remark be in your 
etiquette book?" 

One heart-warming memory I have of a society party hap- 
pened back in the thirties, and involves Fats Waller, who was in 
Boston for a theatre engagement. Jackie Marshard had called me 
to ask if I could get Fats to appear at a society charity ball that 
night. I told Jackie the first thing to do was to send a case of 
vintage wines to Fats at the theatre, and that I would do the rest. 
I had an early gig that night and when I showed up at Fats' 
dressing room after his last show and explained about the wine, 
Fats was receptive to anything as he usually was, anyway. 

"Why, sure, man," Fats said jovially. "Just a couple more sips 
of this fine wine, and I'll be glad to do my bit." 

When Fats was introduced at the affair, he waited till the 
applause died down. "Thank you one and all," he said, with an 
airy wave of his hand, "and now I want to introduce that great 
trumpet man Max Kaminsky!" He gave me a nudge with his 
powerful arm. "On your feet, boy," he muttered. Before I could 
protest that he was the one invited to play there, not me, he had 
me up at the piano with him. That was Fats' way; he was always 
making somebody else great. 

I guess the most foolish thing I did was to fall into society 
work each season, since these were the crucial years when I might 
have been able to do something, but when December rolled 
around, with Christmas looming on the horizon, the prospect of 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 189 

making fifteen hundred dollars for three weeks' work was hard 
to resist, and it would be the same way when the June society 
season came around, with the need for money to get my family 
out of the city closing in. In April, 1951, when my second son 
Matthew the spit J n' image of me was born, I depended more 
than ever on the sure thing of the society work, and I was very 
grateful for it. Home conditions at least were improved now, for 
we had been living for the past couple of years in a sunny top- 
floor apartment, right next door to our old one-room apartment 
on West Twentieth Street. We stayed there for six years, until 
1955, when we moved to a little house in Westport, Connecticut, 
where the boys had plenty of room to play baseball and swim 
in the Sound. My sons got a great kick out of my playing the 
trumpet, but as little as they were they seemed to sense the 
difficulties with it all. Once when he was around five years old, 
Sam came over to me when I was trying out a new mute and said 
seriously, "I don't care how good you are on the trumpet, Dad 
I like you anyway." 



Copter 2, 



The next seven or eight years, from 1949 to 1957, followed the 
same general pattern; the scramble for work all year, in between 
the two or three weeks of society work every season that I could 
count on to tide me over. 

Most of the jobs I had during this time were uptown in the 
Broadway area. Except for Nick's, Eddie Condon's, and the 
Central Plaza, the Village had gone cool with bop, beatniks, and 
Zen, and the only place that was still swinging was Broadway. 
Fifty-second Street was still holding on by its fingernails, but 
except for Jimmy Ryan's, where I had a trio for three months 
in the winter of 1948-49, and one or two other spots, there was 
very little hot music to be found there any more. The boppers 
and progressives were established in the few clubs left which 
hadn't deteriorated into girlie shows. A couple of big Broadway 
places opened up and flourished for a couple of years, such as 
Bop City and the Royal Roost, which presented a mixed grab 
bag of entertainment with popular singers, progressive bands, 
boppers, and traditional jazz bands. In the meantime, some of the 
smaller Broadway clubs began trying out jazz, and it turned out 
that I had the first jazz band in the Metropole and Birdland, and 

190 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

the last band in Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, where we 
played the last two weeks before it closed. 

The original Metropole was on the corner of Forty-eighth 
Street and Seventh Avenue, where the California restaurant is 
now. When the Metropole decided to bring in entertainment, 
they began with gay-nineties-type singers, and finally worked 
up to jazz in 1949. When they started off on their new jazz 
policy, they kept on a couple of the old-time singers to alternate 
with my band, just in case we didn't go over, but the Metropole 
was perfect for jazz. We caught on right away, and on Friday 
and Saturday nights the people were ten or twelve deep all 
around the great circular bar, which was so huge that we had to 
keep shifting around after each number to face a different part 
of die audience. The next year, the Metropole sold that corner 
building to the Maisel restaurant chain and moved to its present 
site next door. The new Metropole was narrower and didn't have 
the wide street frontage or the great circular bar, but neverthe- 
less it continued to be extremely successful. 

I was hired for the opening of the new Metropole, too. We 
busted into "South Rampart Street Parade" for our opening 
number to give the place a rousing send-off, and we hadn't played 
half a chorus before one of the bosses yelled out, "It's too 
Goddamned loudl" We faltered to a ragged halt, and there was 
a big controversy until finally Mr. Harriman, another of the 
bosses, said soothingly, "Maybe you'd better put in a mute, Max." 
Shortly afterward, the owners ran into some complications and 
closed the place down for eighteen months. When they reopened, 
they went back to the gay nineties policy for a while, and then 
the partner who had complained about jazz being too loud sold 
out, and Mr. Harriman called me up and asked me to come back. 
I was tied up with something else then, though, so Mr. Harriman 
went to an agent, who brought jazz back there with all the big 
names he could find, and in no time at all the Metropole became 
the loudest and most successful jazz emporium in town. It's a 
great place to work because it has something of the real old-time 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

unconfined atmosphere of jazz. The people can just walk in and 
have a couple of drinks at the bar right in front of the band with- 
out bothering about tables, but though the atmosphere is casual, 
they come there to listen, and it's a good feeling to play to 
customers who come for the music and not just to be seen. 

Just around this time, December, 1949, Birdland opened its 
long red doors, and although it became the mecca of the boppers, 
I blew the first note in there. Billy Shaw, the agent in charge of 
organizing the opening show, was a fan of mine, and he booked 
my band for the opening "International Jazz Festival," which 
included a wide array of talent: the bands of Lester Young, 
Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Hot Lips Page, and Lennie Tristano, 
as well as a singer who was just starting out, Harry Belafonte. 
A couple of years later when Belafonte took off his tie, un- 
buttoned his shirt, and went calypso, suddenly everyone could 
hear him, but at that time he dressed conventionally and sang 
straight and nobody noticed him at all. Well, he had lots of com- 
pany at Birdland, because nobody particularly heard us, either* 
The only time we made much impression was when George 
Wetding accidentally knocked over the three sets of drums on 
the bandstand, and since it was New Year's Day, even that 
didn't make much of an impression on anyone except the boss, 
who blew his top. I also had Dick Hyman, who later ran the 
Arthur Godfrey show, on piano, Sol Yaged on clarinet, Irving 
Lang on bass, and Munn Ware, one of the finest jazz trombonists 
around. 

Feelings between the boppers and the traditional jazzmen were 
strained, to put it gently. Lips Page was very unhappy there 
because all the other musicians were trying to play the new style 
and they didn't mind showing their disdain for Lips' style. He'd 
complain to me about how he was being treated, but I kept telling 
him not to think that if a guy plays a whole-tone scale or an 
exotic interval this is the end of the world. The music they're 
trying to play has been around since the beginning of time; the 
shepherds in the wilds of Persia and Afghanistan are still playing 
it today. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ Ip3 

But some of it did sound so bad. I remember the first time I 
heard one particularly "far-out" band at Birdland; it had such an 
upsetting effect on my nervous system that it actually made me 
feel nauseous. But Charlie Parker, who was rated the great genius 
of all that music, liked my band better than anything else he heard 
there. We had nothing else in common; I couldn't drink the way 
he did and I didn't know his friends and never went out with him 
on any parties, but musically we became good friends. He and 
Lester Young were the only two musicians down there who 
would go out of their way to speak to me, and they always made 
a point of coming over to the table and talking about something 
musical. No matter how much the boppers want to claim Lester 
Young and say he started the "cool" school early in the thirties 
with his dry tone and unfrantic rhythmical approach, Lester was 
always a hot jazzman. They do the same with Lester as with 
Beiderbecke; the critics try to claim that the seeds of the modern 
school lay in them in such a way as to negate everything else 
they stood for. There was so much bitterness on the part of most 
of the new bop players toward the older musicians in those days 
that it was shameful, and they were just as mean and ornery to 
poor Lips, and to Louis, too. 

But Charlie Parker's music never bothered me the way some of 
the other music did, with its bad tone and taste and intonation. 
For as far as the "modern" chords are concerned, I'd been listen- 
ing to them in the classical music ever since the late twenties in 
fact, I'd been hearing that kind of atonal melody in the Torah 
singing ever since I was a child, and when I first started to im- 
provise on the trumpet as a kid, I used to go off into those atonal 
intervals that I had heard in the temple chants simply because 
they were so familiar to me and so easy to do. I hadn't enough 
discipline and control as yet to improvise on pitch and to know 
how to build a solo. But Charlie Parker's music didn't seem to 
me so completely out of tune as so many of the others', nor did 
it have complete disregard for any sane relationship with a song. 
Parker's playing had at least some authority to it, as well as first- 
rate intelligence and artistic expression, and Parker could really 



194 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

swing, whereas so many of his imitators and followers never had 
it and couldn't get it. Parker knew; he could hear those sounds 
right, and he could fuse them into some order and form. The next 
rime I met Charlie Parker we played together, and I found my- 
self enjoying it very much. It was on a television show for CBS. 
Parker had his own band, with Miles Davis and Max Roach, 
while the studio put together a little combo of house musicians 
for me to play with. At the end of the program, we all jammed 
together on the blues, and while Parker still played his style, it 
fitted in beautifully with what I was doing. 

As salty and contemptuous as the young bop musicians were 
toward the older generation of jazzmen, I don't blame them as 
much as I do the critics and promoters, who were the really 
vicious and ignorant ones. The so-called critics wanted to be "in" 
on the birth of a new genius, since they'd missed Beiderbecke 
and Louis Armstrong when they were starting out, and they 
were trying to make this their thing. 

A perfect example of how insidious it all was is the case of 
Dave Tough. Dave had had all the admiration and glory for 
years until modern jazz became popular, and then he couldn't 
stand not being the best, or, rather, not being called the best. 
He fell for the new musicians who came in to play the music 
of the hoppers. Dave had gone through a life of happy jazz and 
swing music, but with the new music being made into a new 
cult, he couldn't realize that this music was just youth trying 
to make a living and that it had nothing to do with Dave's 
greatness. If he had given it time, he would have heard the 
barrenness of so much of it, and how a great deal of it was only 
exchanging old cliches for new cliches. In rime it would all 
pass, no matter how much certain people might herald the mu- 
sicians Dave worried about. These musicians had the forces of 
business people to back them, and the audience, knowing nothing 
about music, fell for this and admired the bad-taste musicians. 
Few people know the difference between the good and the bad. 
I couldn't talk to Dave in those days of 1947, though, for I too 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 195 

was in an unknowing spin and I had to wait to be able to see 
and reason it out. The first step I took was not to die just because 
I wasn't in favor with certain cults of musicians and critics. 
Of course, I never was the widely popular man Dave was, with 
his Do f wn Beat awards year after year as best drummer, so it 
was easier for me to take the ups and downs. Dave was always 
the best, and to lose that must have hurt him much more than I 
would ever know, just as the awful things they said about Louis 
at this time must have hurt him calling him "Uncle Tom" be- 
cause they said he didn't act "dignified" enough for them. Dig- 
nity was their new password, their god, while many were 
carrying on in ways that had nothing to do with dignity. It's 
all very pathetic. And, of course, in music there is always a time 
when one is hurt, but it does make me feel bad to think that so 
many of the great ones Dave Tough, Lips Page, Brad Gowans, 
Freddie Ohms, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, FranMe Newton 
died at a time when their music was being ridiculed. 

But despite all the hard feelings caused by the attitude of the 
new jazzmen, the modernists did, of course, widen the scope of 
jazz. They extended the use of passing notes, which Bix had 
explained to me back in 1926, to include passing chords, and 
their experiments in more complex multiple rhythms are fine, 
though it seems at times they are putting the tension into the 
melody and taking it out of the beat. Since the forties, the 
modernists have been learning some taste, and they're not so 
slavish in their imitation of the barren cliches of bop. 

There has to be change, but sometimes when they talk about 
removing the old restrictions in jazz, I feel like the people in 
the new housing developments. They were moved out of the 
old, restricting slums and put in clean, new, modern buildings, 
and then it was discovered that some of the old so-called limita- 
tions were vital to their happiness. 

And one thing I do feel bad about is what has happened to 
dance music since modern jazz. Modern jazz came about at a 
time when there was still the wartime tax on dancing in clubs, 



196 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

and since you couldn't dance to it anyway, the kids eventually 
turned to rock V roll. In spite of its poor taste, rock 'n' roll at 
least had kept those earthy blues chords and rock-bottom beat, 
and the kids took to it at once. Young people need dancing, and 
since no one was doing anything about giving them a music to 
dance to, they found their own, such as it is. But in the thirties 
when the kids danced to the big swing bands they had been 
dancing to a music that was in far better taste than what the kids 
nowadays are hearing in the rock 'n' roll bands. In short, I feel 
that the kids of the fifties and sixties have been gypped by not 
having a chance to have a good swinging music in good taste to 
dance to. 

If things were hectic at Birdland, the next place I worked, the 
Aquarium, was even wilder. Now a swanky Spanish restaurant, 
El Liborio, the Aquarium was then a low-down sailor joint in 
the Hotel Somerset. I didn't mind the low-downness of it, for 
after the freeze at Birdland it felt good to have somebody, even 
rowdy drunken sailors, enjoy themselves and the music, but at 
times it did get pretty frantic. But the riot we had there one 
night wasn't caused by the music. It seems that practically the 
entire crew of a battleship had come down with V.D. from 
fraternizing with the girls they had picked up at the Aquarium. 
The minute their ship hit port again, the crew came storming in 
with one idea in mind, to wreck the joint. When the bottles and 
chairs began to fly through the air, I turned to the cigarette girl, 
Jean, who had been after me for weeks to give her a chance to 
sing. "Now is the time," I said, helping her up on the stand. She 
was delighted; a little thing like a riot didn't bother her, and we 
went into "Sweet Sue" and "Ida" and all the calming kind of 
music we could think of while we waited for the riot squad to 
arrive. 

I worked at another dive, on West Forty-fifth Street, that was 
just as weird It always smelled of stale beer and cheap perfume, 
and of the disinfectant they used to kill the smell, and the cus- 
tomers' interest in jazz was only perfunctory. The boss, a brash 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ Ip7 

Broadway type with several clubs in the area, used to make the 
rounds every night to check the take. One night one of the 
customers took sick, and when they couldn't revive him they 
sent for an ambulance. Just as the body was being carried out 
the door on a stretcher, the boss breezed in, and he bustled right 
past the stretcher without flicking an eye at it in fact, I had 
the impression he absent-mindedly flicked his cigar ashes on it 
in passing. 

But this boss wasn't as bad as the gangster who liked my 
music so much he wanted to set me up in a night club he owned 
in the Village. The club was a good size and shape and was in a 
marvelous location for a jazz spot, and I was hot about the idea 
until I found myself sitting at a table in this club with four or 
five hard-eyed mobsters in wide-brimmed hats, striped suits, and 
wild ties, all of them puffing on vile-smelling cigars except the 
big boss himself, who didn't drink or smoke, but who exuded 
such coldness that at the mere sight of him my enthusiasm ran 
right out of the bottom of my shoes. I had just enough presence 
of mind to keep my hands out of sight so no one would see 
how they were shaking. 

"Well, what do you think?" one of the pin-striped types 
prodded. 

"Well Til have to talk to my lawyer first," I countered. I 
had no lawyer, but I sure was going to get one fast. 

The boss spoke up then. "You sound yellow," he rasped. 

All eyes snapped on me. "Well, it's just that I'd like to bring 
my lawyer down here to talk to you guys and then we can 
figure it all out. I'm not much of a businessman myself," I said 
placatingly. 

The boss took a different tack. "You haven't any confidence 
in us," he said in aggrieved tones. But I was unmoved and kept 
insisting on the lawyer until they agreed. 

The next day I called up Al Miller, a lawyer who had years 
of experience in the theatrical field. Al Miller is just about my 
height, and the two of us together wouldn't have impressed a 



198 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

rabbit, but Al knew how to handle himself in a situation like 
this. He talked while we all listened, and he sounded great, and 
he and the big boss went into the back room and talked some 
more. When they came out, Al shook hands with the boss and 
we all took cordial leave of one another. 

Outside, Al took my elbow and propelled me up the street 
until we reached the corner, then he hissed in my ear, "My 
advice to you is this run -for your life!" He signaled a cab and 
hopped in, and that was the end of that deal. 

Then there was the time a promoter came to me with a propo- 
sition for opening a club in the room underneath the Phoenix 
Theatre on Second Avenue. This room had been the 181 Club, 
the most notorious fag joint in the Village. It had finally lost its 
liquor license, and this guy, whom I'll call Gus, got in touch 
with me. "Here's what we'll do," he said. "This room will make 
a great club for you. We'll make it a three-way partnership. 
You bring in the band and I'll run the place, and this pal of mine, 
an ex-cop, will get the license for the club." 

I knew Gus was as crooked as a dog's hind leg, but he liked 
me and knew that all I cared about was having a band and that 
I didn't want a part in any deals except taking care of the music 
end, so I said, "O.K., you handle the business part and I'll bring 
in the band." The ex-policeman put in his application for a 
license, and in the meantime we opened up and for two weeks 
we played for an audience that was served only soft drinks. The 
AJB.C. investigated the license application, and when the ex-cop 
couldn't prove to their satisfaction that the money for the license 
was his own, they turned him down and the whole deal fell 
through. It wasn't until a few months later, when I picked up 
the newspaper and read that Gus had been found murdered in 
the back seat of his car, that I realized what I would have been 
getting mixed up in if the deal had gone through. 

The middle-class propriety of Childs restaurant in the Para- 
mount Building, where we opened on March 17, 1952, was a 
welcome respite from the honky-tonks and gangsters. I seldom 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ Ip9 

make auditions, because I have enough trouble after I'm hired 
from the complications that arise with the bosses and from my 
own personality, but for this job it was mandatory that I audi- 
tion, and since I was out of work I agreed to it. I put a band 
together, rehearsed it one afternoon, and took them down to 
Childs to audition for a group of austere-looking business people 
who were in charge of the corporation. The second I saw them 
I knew that if they heard any jazz they would scream. I did 
want this job very badly so I immediately put in a mute and 
had Ray Diehl do the same on his trombone, and we stole softly 
into "Tea for Two." The men still had the expression of people 
who expected something else, but who were so far being toler- 
ant. I went into another song I was sure they knew, and then, 
remembering that the band would be opening on St. Patrick's 
Day, I turned around and played "My Wild Irish Rose" and 
"Danny Boy." The agent came over then and said, "They want 
some jazz." So I played jazz, and they thought it was great, but 
if I had played it first they wouldn't have liked it. Too loud, they 
would have said. 

I met Bobby Brenner of MCA through the job at Childs. He 
came down there one night when we happened to be blowing 
up a storm and became very excited about my playing and my 
band. When I left Childs in the fall, we had several meetings 
and Bobby eventually came up with the idea of a tour of the 
colleges. I hired Jimmy Crawford, Eddie Barefield, Ray Diehl, 
Dick Gary, and various bass players and went out on the road 
that fall and again the following spring, playing at colleges and 
halls in New England, Pennsylvania, New York, and New 
Jersey. Some were quite successful and some didn't draw so well. 
It was a good idea and if it could have been kept going, it would 
have been very successful. During that time, Dave Brubeck 
started out on the same kind of tour. He was just starting to be- 
come popular and famous then he had made the cover of Time 
magazine that fall and he did well on his tours. 

One night we filled in at an upstate college for another trumpet 



200 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

player's band, which couldn't keep the engagement. This frat 
party was to start at midnight, and we drove there from another 
date some hundred miles away. The affair was being held in the 
back yard of the frat house. When we arrived fifteen minutes 
late, the student committee angrily demanded to know where 
the other band was. They hadn't even been notified about the 
change, and they were naturally burned up, but we had driven 
there in a mad rush to help out and we didn't feel so good about 
our reception, either. 

By this time the students were all loaded. The girls and fellows 
were pushing each other into the pond I forgot to mention 
there was a large pond in the yard, filled with water lilies and 
the Mds were swimming around in their clothes, and it was all 
getting frantic and out of hand. We climbed up on the shaky little 
wooden bandstand the kids had built next to the pond and 
started to play. The kids were making so much noise you could 
hardly hear the band, so after three or four numbers we just 
stopped. The committee came over again and started yelling at 
us again for not being the other band, and they said they 
wouldn't pay us, but finally they ordered us to play again. In 
the meantime, the kids were getting so drunk that they started 
splashing water all over us and squirting beer at each other and us. 
Realizing that it would take die merest breath to start them 
toppling the bandstand and us into the pool, we finally had the 
sense to stop. "Grab your stuff, boys, and run!" I called to the 
men. Pee Wee Russell couldn't make it up the side of the muddy 
hill, but we managed somehow to pull him up to safety. I don't 
think the kids even realized we had left. Early spring, when the 
students go wild with panty raids and such, is no time to play a 
college; fall and winter are the safest times to venture on campus. 
The whole outcome of this was that the union fined me forty 
dollars for playing a job without having a signed contract for 
it, and the trumpet player who had been hired originally, and 
taken an advance of $140 for the job, kept it, and he didn't ap- 
pear to defend us. We had not been paid at all, of course. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 2OI 

After two or three other unfortunate experiences of this sort 
during the tour, I finally gave it up as a helluva way to make a 
living. Of course, there were other places where the kids were 
respectful and enjoyed it all. Sometimes I felt safer in the most 
low-down dive than on a college campus, but at many of the 
concerts the reception was so great and the date such a sellout 
that I could see this could be successful if it could be held to- 
gether on both ends. 

Another time we went down to play a single date at the Uni- 
versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and here we had a 
different kind of trouble. We drove down directly after a date 
in Pennsylvania. We had finished the job there at i A.M. and 
figured we'd drive till about six in the morning and then stop 
at a hotel and catch some sleep before going on. But by this 
time we were down South, and no hotel or motel would take 
us in since I had a couple of colored musicians with me Eddie 
Barefield and Keg Purnell. In one place in Virginia I asked a 
motel keeper, "Do you have six beds for us?" and he said, "Yes, 
indeed, come right in," but when I told him I had two colored 
guys with me, he said, "Get the hell out of here before they string 
us all up." 

So this became very, very bad. Finally Eddie said, "Listen, 
man, just drive to the place we're supposed to go." So we drove 
all the way to Chapel Hill. As we went through the city, we 
asked where the colored section was, and I let Eddie and Keg 
out there before driving on to a white hotel. Later that day when 
I picked up Eddie and Keg, they told me they had found a won- 
derful place where they had fine food and whiskey and had a 
great time. Since we were stuck in a stuffy old hotel, we were 
the ones who felt left out. 

At the concert we had played here the year before there had 
been no tension about our having a mixed band, but this time 
the cracker janitor and the local help in the gym began giving 
us terrible looks. We played on, and after the concert some of 
the kids invited us to the fraternity house. They fed us wonder- 



202 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

fully, but I began feeling nervous when I overheard some re- 
marks about how unusual it was to have colored guys in the 
frat house, and I thought I had better get us all out of there. I 
hustled everyone into the car, and just as we were pulling away 
from the curb I saw in my rear window a state police car pull 
up at the frat house. We drove nonstop all the way back to New 
York, U.S.A. We did try stopping once outside of Baltimore 
for food. At first the proprietor agreed to let Eddie and Keg 
eat in the kitchen, but he changed his mind, and I got mad and 
started to recite the Gettysburg Address. Eddie and Keg grabbed 
me so I wouldn't start anything I couldn't finish. When we were 
back in New York they said to me, "Max, we like to work, but 
if we have to do it down there let's forget about the whole thing, 
because it's tough enough sometimes just bucking the weather." 
They were referring to the time we had played upstate one 
winter. We had finished around 1 1 P.M., and just as we were 
leaving, a few flakes of snow started to fall. We were in two 
cars, Dick Gary's and mine. I'll never forget how wonderful 
Dick Gary was on these tours. He used to take half the men 
in his car, and since he knew I was hard up for money, he never 
charged me for the gas and mileage. Within ten minutes, the 
flakes turned into a raging blizzard and I lost track of Dick's 
car. I heard later he had to stop at a garage and buy two snow 
tires and chains. It took us twelve hours to drive the 350 miles 
through the worst blizzard I'd ever been in. At eleven the next 
morning, we were just coming into New York on Jersey's Route 
3. It was so bad by now that all these cars were piled up in 
tangles on the side of the road and I was creeping along at five 
miles an hour and skidding all over the place; you could feel 
the back end of the car weaving and sliding as though it didn't 
belong to the front. And then when you approached a hill you 
had to get up as much power as you could because if you slowed 
down you stopped the traction. When we finally got to New 
York City, Keg said, "You did a Barney Oldfield today, Maxie. 
How you did it I'll never knew, and I was watching every inch 
of the way/' 



Chapter 13 



It was through Louis Armstrong, the nation's greatest am- 
bassador of good will, that I was selected for the jazz tours of 
Europe and the Far East. It all started, appropriately enough, 
in Washington, D.C., where every summer a group of concerts 
are given in the huge Carter Barron Amphitheatre at Rock Creek 
Park. For the 1957 season three jazz bands were hired for a 
week's engagement. Our band, with Jack Teagarden, Peanuts 
Hucko, myself, Lou Stein, Jack Lesberg, and Cliff Leeman, 
opened the show, then Enrol Garner took over, and Louis Arm- 
strong's band wrapped it all up. Although Louis and I had been 
acquainted for thirty years, this was the first time Louis had 
heard me play for any length of time. Louis would listen to our 
band each day over the speaker in his dressing room while he 
was getting ready for his own set, and reports came buzzing 
back to me so thick and fast about how much Louis liked my 
horn that I stopped in one afternoon to thank him and to return 
the compliment. 

"Man, it's very similar, very similar!" Louis said, pumping my 
hand enthusiastically. I guess there is no higher praise from Louis. 
He meant, of course, let me add for the uninitiated, that the feel- 
ing was the same, not the licks. 



203 



204 MY LIFE IN J A!ZZ 

Later that summer when the European promoters sent in a 
request to Joe Glaser's office for an all-star band to tour Europe, 
my name was among the several trumpet players listed as alterna- 
tives to Louis Armstrong, whose name headed the list. Louis 
couldn't go because of other commitments, but he said to Joe 
Glaser, "The cat to send is Max Kaminsky. He'll blow up a 
storm over there." Louis's recommendation of me meant as much 
to me as the trip itself, and the next most gratifying thing about 
the European tour was that I'd be playing with a crackajack 
group of superb musicians the great Earl "Father" Hines, Jack 
Teagarden, Peanuts Hucko, Cozy Cole, and Jack Lesberg. 

I first met Teagarden when he was working in Ben Pollack's 
band in the early thirties with Benny Goodman, although I had 
heard him on records long before that. Jack Teagarden is fore- 
most among all the great trombonists, of whom there are many, 
many greats: Miff Mole, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Jenney, Cutty 
CutshaU, Urbie Green, Jay C. Higginbotham, Dickie Wells, 
Brad Gowans, Sonny Dunham, to name some. One trombonist 
who never had the acclaim he deserved was "Tricky Sam" 
Nanton in the Duke's orchestra. He was noted for his plunger 
work, but the few times I heard him play open trombone he 
had a wonderful fresh way of playing. It was right and good, 
not the kind of thing that became popular in the so-called Dixie- 
land style with its slides and slurs and tailgate. The public today 
hears a trombone wail in tailgate style and to them that's jazz, 
and they think it's great, but it is simply regular marching-band 
style, and was used in marching bands long before jazz was born. 
But from an artistic and musical point of view it has nothing to 
do with jazz trombone. 

The first thing about the great trombonists is that they had 
the quality of the tone. When Tommy Dorsey played a melody 
it was a very straight melody and it had a silken quality to it. 
When Teagarden played the same song he could interpret it 
more deeply in the jazz idiom, but he still had that wonderful 
tone and taste. That's where we seem to have the trouble today; 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 205 

the quality of taste seems to have left most of the music. We 
had a standard in those days, so that when a musician played 
great he played great all the way he didn't squeak by on tricky 
little things. He had to know his instrument and have the great 
ideas of what to play. 

The trombone is an especially difficult instrument because, like 
the violin, it involves positions instead of a set note. You have 
to move the slide up to the right position to hit the right note. 
Most trombonists have to move that slide all around to get the 
notes, but there are "false" positions where a note can be hit, 
too, and Teagarden had figured it out so that whereas another 
player would be moving the slide like mad, Jack would scarcely 
have to move his slide to hit the same note. 

Teagarden's tone is unmistakable and individual, and his pitch 
and intonation are so right that it's always a joy to play with him. 
And his ideas are so true to the jazz feeling and in such good 
taste that it's no effort to play with him. Most musicians play 
very sharp or flat or can't keep time or their ideas are corny, 
but Jack is always so simple and eloquent that from the begin- 
ning he has been revered by the great colored musicians. Louis 
Armstrong thinks the world of him. Jack has thousands of fans 
all over the world, but the greatest fan is Louis. Louis said that 
the first time he heard Teagarden he broke out into goose 
pimples. Once when I was visiting Louis backstage in his dressing 
room, the room was filled with people and Louis was talking to 
them and singing along with the tape of his own band records 
at the same time, but when it came to Jack's solo, Louis called 
out, "Shhhh, everybody here's Jack!" 

I had had many chances to go abroad over the years. The 
college bands I had played in during the twenties were con- 
tinually offered summer jobs on boats bound for European or 
round-the-world cruises, but although like most Americans I 
dreamed all the time of going to Europe someday, when the 
opportunities arose I always seemed to be too interested in what 
was going on here to be able to tear myself away. And I don't 



206 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

know how much I was influenced by one of my mother's 
favorite remarks, to the effect that she had been all over Europe 
before she finally landed in America and, "Believe me, there is 
no place like America," but in any case I never did go. Now, 
when things were so upset at home, I was undecided at first 
about going, but the need for money and the prospect of playing 
in a top-notch band were too powerful to resist, and by the 
time we left I had worked myself up to a pitch of excitement 
at the idea that I was finally going to Europe. 

The itinerary, covering seven weeks of one-nighters in Britain, 
France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and 
Denmark, was rugged, but we were all seasoned travelers, and 
Earl Hines and Cozy Cole, who had been to Europe three or 
four years earlier with Louis Armstrong, were not only seasoned 
but knowledgeable. When we arrived in London on September 
lyth, the British fans had a band meet us at the airport, photog- 
raphers took our pictures for the papers, and all day long there 
were visits and meetings with fans and reporters and friends. 

We played our first two shows in the Royal Festival Hall the 
following afternoon and evening, and the next night we left for 
Glasgow by train. From there we played six one-nighters of 
two-a-night around the country, then back to London to the 
Coliseum Theatre, then on the road again for six more one- 
nighters (including one in Cardiff, Wales, where we couldn't 
understand the people even when they were speaking English), 
and then back again to London for another double-header at 
the Coliseum. We were in Britain for a total of sixteen days. 

The first thing I couldn't get used to in England was the 
difference in traveling. Where in the States it would take us three 
hours to cover a one-hundred-fifty mile hop, in Britain it took us 
all day to do the seventy-five or eighty miles from one engage- 
ment to the next. Our tour bus was small, ancient, and unheated, 
the roads were narrow and winding, and after pooping along at 
thirty-five miles an hour on the open highway, the bus driver 
would slow down to a snail's pace when crawling through the 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 20J 

quaint old towns and villages. The tour was laid out in such a 
way that we crisscrossed back and forth across the country-, 
which isn't very wide to begin with, and it seemed to me that 
every day at noon we were driving through the same little village 
with its same, centuries-old, red-brick city gate and its cobble- 
stoned main street where the same uniformed woman was briskly 
directing traffic, and I'd always remark in great astonishment, 
"I'll be damned if there isn't that same lady traffic cop again!" 
The prevailing color of Britain in the fall, even in the country, 
was a misty gray, and I hadn't been off the plane more than 
twenty minutes when the sight of the mist-wrapped rows of 
dingy brick houses on the ride into London from the airport 
made me think of every English murder mystery I'd ever read. 
In London, Ernie Anderson, my old friend from the Summa 
Cum Laude days, who was now working for John Huston, took 
me under his wing and walked me over every square inch of 
London, and it was all a vast confused blur in my mind, except 
for a few indelible impressions, such as the tired, listless, drab 
appearance of Londoners and of their bomb-racked city. In 1957, 
twelve years after the war, they were still in a lethargy from the 
terrible strain of five years of war and bombings. It was hard 
to realize that the British were still doing without so England 
could get the capital it needed to get on its feet again. These 
people are pathetically used to having so little and to existing 
on very little money. Not for them was the money we poured 
so lavishly into Germany, the cause of their poverty. Life is very 
strange. Germany was bustling and prosperous while London 
seemed so poor and sad and dirty, and the streets were full of 
raggedy-looking elderly people, bitter, lean-faced young men 
in turdeneck sweaters, and sharply dressed Teddy Boys. No 
one seemed to be going anywhere, they just loitered on the damp, 
cold streets. Speaking of loitering, this was before the authorities 
cracked down on prostitutes, and London at that time was filled 
with thousands of young girls, still in their teens, openly so- 
liciting. It was an astounding sight. 



208 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Another thing about London was the difficulty of finding any 
place after i A.M. where one could have a quick bite to eat. 
Everything shuts down at that hour, except for the private clubs, 
and I was always vaguely hungry during the tour. I never saw 
anyone so serious about their food as Europeans. They have very 
set hours for eating so they can give it their full attention, but 
since I'm used to being up at all hours of the night, I was com- 
pletely stymied in Europe for lack of the corner delicatessen or 
the all-night cafeteria. 

Our first performance in the Royal Festival Hall went over very 
well, but my lip wasn't in shape and I didn't play that first show 
as well as I wished. All the other guys sounded marvelous, while 
I felt lucky just being able to last through it. But at our next 
performance, in Glasgow, I was feeling and playing much better, 
and that was a better show. In fact, we were a sensation in 
Glasgow, and aside from Basel, it was the most successful show 
we <d in Europe. The concert hall had been sold out and they 
had set up an extra hundred seats on the stage to accommodate 
the overflow, so we had an audience fore and aft and both of 
them gave us rafter-shaking ovations. I feel that we made this 
tour just before the fever pitch of interest in this kind of jazz 
slackened. Within a year or so, the promoters had run it into 
the ground and it began to lose its glamour for Europeans; they 
wanted to hear the latest rage the boppers and modernists. But 
in 1957 they were still, except for the hard core of avant-gardists, 
madly appreciative of hot jazz and of the chance to see us, 
and I'll never forget the warmth and enthusiasm they accorded 
us. In Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and Switzerland, 
wherever we played we were taken to a reception room right 
after the concert, where for at least an hour or two we signed 
autograph books and programs for a line of people overflowing 
out into the street. The European fans want something personal 
to commemorate the occasion, and this is a big ritual over there. 
Once, in Norway, we had to leave right after the concert to 
catch a train and it almost caused a riot because we couldn't 
stop to sign autographs. 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

Naturally, the foreign fans had been reading about and listen- 
ing to the records of Jack Teagarden and Earl Hines and Cozy 
Cole and myself and Peanuts and Jack Lesberg for years and 
they were tremendously excited at seeing us. They are touch- 
ingly appreciative, and jazz to them is a much more serious busi- 
ness than it is to Americans, who naturally think of it as a more 
everyday thing than a rare art form. The European fan is highly 
intellectual and analytical, partly because with their main source 
of hearing jazz limited to recordings, they can't possibly get the 
whole picture. While the American grew up with it and can 
hear the real thing with very little effort, the European has, aside 
from local bands, which are improving but not quite right yet, 
only the jazz dubs, where the members gather to listen to the 
latest U.S. releases and then try to jam a little themselves. These 
jazz clubs also put out innumerable little magazines that contain 
very erudite and academic dissertations on the most minute 
aspects of jazz. 

The English have always loved jazz and have formed many, 
many bands faithfully modeled after everyone from Kid Ory 
to Count Basic to Stan Kenton to Gil Evans. The "traditional" 
jazz band has long been their favorite, however, as it has been 
here, too, where every college has its stereotyped Dixieland 
band. In one city in England, I forget where, Peanuts, Lesberg, 
and I were invited by the jazz club of the local college to give a 
lecture on jazz. We were led into a large auditorium and as soon 
as we were seated on the platform one of the boys unrolled a 
huge map on the wall which looked like a family tree and 
bristled with names like traditional, neo-primitive, mainstream, 
urban jazz, modern, etc. After we were presented to the assem- 
bly, Peanuts stood up and said, "The first thing to do is to throw 
away that chart," and he went on to talk about how that sort of 
thing was the cause of the whole trouble in jazz, the attempt to 
pigeonhole every style and even every lick a musician might feel 
like playing and trying to rule on whether it was right or 
wrong. "It's not right or wrong," Peanuts ended up grandly, 
"it's just either good or bad!" and he sat down to thunderous 



210 MY LIF E IN JAZZ 

applause and cries of "smashing" and "wizard." 

On our one-nighter trips around Britain, the bus driver would 
always have to stop in the late afternoon for his cup of tea. I 
never cared much for this tea routine, so while everyone was 
having refreshments Fd walk around town with my camera. The 
weather was turning colder and I didn't have enough heavy 
clothes with me in fact, this was the time of the Asian flu 
epidemic and all of us were coming down with colds so on 
these walks I kept an eye out for a jacket to wear under my 
topcoat. One afternoon I came upon a shop which featured an 
olive-green twill riding jacket in the window. "Just what I've 
been looking for," I was muttering to myself when Peanuts 
came up behind me. 

"It's awful!" Peanuts said flatly when I pointed it out to him. 

"/ like it," I replied. When I tried it on, it was so big on me 
that not even my fingertips showed, and the waist was nearer 
my hips than my ribs, but the shoulders fit perfectly. 

"If you wear that jacket, I'll pay for it," Peanuts said when 
he had stopped ha-haing. 

"Wrap it up," I said to the clerk. I was warm as toast in my 
oversize jacket for the rest of the trip and Peanuts said it was 
worth the price in laughs. Cozy Cole was another great one for 
making the trip fun. He'd pull his plaid cap over his eyes on 
the bus and appear to snooze, but he'd never miss a trick, and 
he'd see humor in everything. He really broke us up when he 
imitated Peanuts explaining to me how to work the German 
camera I had bought. I would listen carefully, nodding intel- 
ligently while Peanuts explained every facet of the complicated 
mechanism, and then when he was all through I'd say, "Great!" 
Then after a moment I'd say earnestly, "Uh, would you mind 
running through that again a little slower?" and Cozy would 
collapse. 

On October i4th, when we arrived in Copenhagen, we found 
both the Europe Hotel and the food a great improvement over 
London, where we had stayed in a pre-prewar hotel. The Scan- 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 211 

dinavian landscape at times reminded me of parts of Cape Cod, 
but with a grander, more barren and majestic sweep to it, and I 
could actually smell the cod and herring in the tangy North 
Sea breezes. The cleanliness and the great food everywhere we 
went in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were fine, too, and the 
concert halls in Stockholm and Goteborg were about the most 
beautiful I have ever seen, with marvelous acoustics. 

In all the Scandinavian countries, especially Norway, the 
people still couldn't get over the joy of being free again and 
were still talking about the dreadful times they went through 
under the Nazi occupation, with its daily horror of reprisals 
and hostages and calculated terrorism. 

The Scandinavians were much under the influence of modern 
jazz. Among the enthusiastic audiences in Oslo and Stockholm 
and Bergen, we'd notice certain of their avant-garde musicians 
sitting there with scornful, dissatisfied looks on their faces be- 
cause they thought we were old hat. It always amazes me how 
the Europeans could change so quickly with the fashions in this 
country. They never had any mind of their own about our music. 
They just follow us slavishly, or, rather, they follow our so- 
called critics, who don't use any critical judgment either. And 
to think it was Hans Christian Andersen who wrote the fable 
about the emperor's clothes. 

In a Stockholm night club, I saw my first European beatniks, 
or existentialists, the girls with their long mops of hair and their 
thick sweaters, and the men with their beards and thick sweaters. 
The trumpet player in the band imitated Dizzy Gillespie even 
to the point of bending the bell on his horn skyward. One of 
the things that most appeal to them in modern jazz is the modern 
beat, which is looser and lighter than the older jazz beat, but 
although they do play it well they still can't get it exactly right. 
After hearing American jazz for thirty-five years, they still can't 
get it. In Oslo we heard a big modern orchestra styled after Stan 
Kenton's. Both the band and the audience were a little too wild 
for me. 



212 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

At the end of October, we left Scandinavia for ten days of 
one-nighters in Germany, in Stuttgart, Diisseldorf, Munich, 
Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Passau, and Fried- 
berg. 

Germany jumps. After seeing the drained lethargy of the 
British and the still-dazed thankfulness of the Norwegians and 
Danes, it was startling to see the bustling prosperity of the 
Germans. They don't want to know anything about the war. 
They never heard of the Nazis. It never happened there, and if 
it did, there was nothing personal in it. 

There were still ruins everywhere in 1957, but rebuilding 
was going on like sixty, with new buildings arising from the 
ashes modern apartment houses, elegant new hotels with 
modern plumbing, and everywhere beautiful new concert halls. 
Germany was rebuilding overnight with American dollars, while 
battered old London, which had held on all alone in 1940, stayed 
in its rubble. In all the new hotels in Germany they proudly 
displayed framed photographs of the ruins they had rebuilt from. 
All along the lovely Rhine valley from Wiesbaden to Diissel- 
dorf, the air was filled with the tang of grapes and our eyes 
marveled at the beautiful old castles. Castles are pure fairy-tale 
stuff to Americans; we think we would all have been princes 
instead of serfs. 

All the cities in Germany have big night clubs and the people 
go out. In fact, all Europe has a lively night life. Munich, one 
of the loveliest cities in Germany, has a big swing section, full 
of beer halls and night clubs. We played for American Army 
bases all over Germany, as well as giving concerts for the Ger- 
man people. Our own men were wildly happy to see us, and the 
German audiences were just as enthusiastic. The avant-garde 
snobbery hadn't hit there quite yet and so they just enjoyed us. 
They liked us so much, in fact, that in one place they brought 
in movie cameras and sound equipment and without a by-your- 
leave they filmed our entire show. This piracy went on all over 
Europe and Asia, too, where we were taped repeatedly without 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 213 

our consent. Louis Armstrong's manager eventually became so 
fed up with it that he automatically would prowl around the 
concert hall before the show opened, pulling out plugs and 
cutting wires. One day in Brussels, I turned on my radio and 
out poured the sound of an American jazz band. I recognized 
Teagarden and Peanuts, but since I wasn't prepared to hear my- 
self it was several minutes before I even recognized my own horn 
or realized that it was the tape of a concert we had played two 
nights earlier in another city. 

We pkyed only two dates in France, one in Orleans and 
the other in Paris at the Olympia Theatre. The avant-garde 
element in the Parisian audience was patronizingly tolerant of 
us but the rest of the crowd enjoyed it. I visited Mezz Mezzrow, 
who has been living in Paris for years now, and who is still 
the same happy, cocky guy full of projects and enterprises, and 
in the evening I caught his band, composed of French musicians 
playing in the traditional jazz style. The night club was a cave- 
like place which was formerly a dungeon, the authentic tiny 
cells and instruments of torture all part of the atmosphere. Jazz 
sure is being played in weird places these days. The club was 
full of beatniks and intellectuals and tourists from all over the 
world and it was very expensive. Everyone in Paris seemed to be 
cross and rushing around frantically; it wasn't the kind, relaxed, 
wonderful Paris I had always dreamed about, but it was more 
beautiful and more fascinating than I had imagined. Since we 
had only a couple of days there, I was soon acting just as frantic 
and trying to cram all my sight-seeing into a few hours. At one 
point I became so confused I went to see a Charlie Chaplin 
movie, but after a half hour I came to my senses and left when I 
realized I was sitting in a movie when I had only a short time to 
see this marvelous city. 

From Paris we went to Amsterdam, a lovely clean city, and 
not expensive, but by the time we reached Brussels we began 
to get very tired. We were whisked in and out of Holland and 
Belgium so fast we had only the vaguest glimpse of them before 



214 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

we were on the plane to Naples, where we played at the Flaming 
International Club, a servicemen's club. We had about three 
minutes to see something of Italy on the drive from Naples to 
Rome and we gaped longingly at the semitropical countryside 
with the pastel-colored villas sparkling among the olive and 
cypress trees. From Rome we flew to Basel, where we had what 
seemed the best and most appreciative audience of the whole 
trip, and then we staggered on board the plane to fly home. 

In January of 1958, it was all over as far as my marriage was 
concerned. It had never worked out, though not for lack of 
trying. I moved into the Hotel Bristol, and in the middle of the 
month I took a jazz band into the Duane Hotel. The job lasted 
until summer, but in the meantime the State Department tour 
of the Far East was b the offing, and I jumped at it. 

The arrangements for travel, hotels, setting up the whole 
network with the overseas United States Information Service 
officials and the local cultural affairs representatives made 
through ANTA and handled by the Associated Booking Corpo- 
ration, proceeded through the summer. I shopped for luggage 
and drip-dry shirts, the State Department gave us a pep talk and 
briefings of what was expected of us as "ambassadors" of our 
country, we had our shots, and in mid-September we left 
Idlewild on a sparkling clear day for Paris, the first leg of the 
tour, 



Chapter 14 



It took us two and a half days to reach Karachi, in West 
Pakistan. Now you can fly there direct in twenty-four hours. 
Our tour, which started on September 22, 1958, lasted four and 
a half months, through the end of January, 1959, and covered 
eighteen countries. The band, Jack Teagarden's Sextet, had Don 
Ewell on piano, Jerry Fuller on clarinet, Ronnie Greb on drums, 
Stan Puls on bass, and myself on trumpet. 

We had time for only the merest glimpse of Karachi, an 
Arabic-like Indian city with camels, snake charmers, veiled 
women, oriental bazaars, and beautiful modern white buildings, 
before leaving the next morning for Kabul, Afghanistan. The 
plane, one of the ricketiest DCs's I ever clapped a nervous eye 
on, rattled over a thousand empty miles of starkly barren desert, 
to land us in an ancient, time-shrouded city where practically 
nothing has changed for over three thousand years. By starting 
our tour in Afghanistan, we were not only starting at the be- 
ginning of the alphabet, but almost at the beginning of time. 
Kabul, set in a shallow valley in the foothills of the Himalayas, 
commands all the passes north to India, and over the countless 
ages Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan as well as hundreds 

215 



2l6 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

of lesser conquerors have rampaged through Kabul on their way 
to invade India. 

Within an hour of landing in Karachi we had become aware 
of two of the most characteristic phenomena of the East the 
peculiar rancid funk to the air, and the servant waiting outside 
your door to serve you. But in Kabul, where I had my first real 
taste of the incredible poverty of the East, and of its astounding 
caste system, I nearly flipped. 

Since there is no modern hotel in Kabul, we were quartered 
in the homes of members of the American Embassy staff. In 
the afternoon, we were taken on a sight-seeing tour of the city, 
and that evening there was to be a reception for us at the Em- 
bassy. Driving down a street in Kabul was like seeing a page 
from the Bible come to life. And as far as the Afghans were 
concerned, we were apparently a weirder sight to them than 
they would be to us if they appeared on an American street in 
their native dress. Here the women were completely covered 
from head to toe in tendike burkas. Two tiny holes in the face- 
covering allowed them to see where they were going, but 111 
never know how they breathed in that stifling heat. Children of 
six and seven years old walked the streets with large tin cans 
tied to their backs, picking up camel dung and tossing it over 
their shoulders into die cans. These discarded fuel-oil cans were 
also very popular as cooking pots, and the filthy water in the 
gutters along the streets was used by the people to wash their 
clothes in. Since these people have no plumbing facilities, the 
air is acrid with the odor of both camel and human excrement. 
The shock to the American mind at the sight of this poverty 
is cataclysmic. 

After the sight-seeing, I returned to Mr. Coulson's house, 
where I was quartered, and had a shower and a nap. The effects 
of the no-sleep routine we had been on since we left New York 
finally caught up with me, and I fell on the bed like a slab of 
granite. When I awoke at eight-thirty, there wasn't a soul in 
the house. Everyone had left for the party at the American 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 217 

Embassy, which was scheduled for seven-thirty. I padded out- 
side to the garden and called again for the houseboy, and sure 
enough he came running out of the little house across the court- 
yard that he shared with the gardener. When I told him that I 
wanted to go to the party he understood at once, and replied 
in a sort of pidgin English that the gardener was a good man 
and would get me there. I dressed quickly and set off with the 
gardener down the dark, silent street. The night was cool after a 
long, impression-packed, blistering day, and the sight of the 
quarter moon riding high in the ancient Asian sky suddenly 
filled me with a mounting sense of excitement. At the corner, 
the gardener hailed one of the horse-drawn, gaily decorated 
wagons which are the local taxis. As I climbed aboard I heard 
the gardener say to the turbaned driver, '"Embassy Polish," but 
I let it go, thinking maybe the party was over there, who knew? 
At the Polish Embassy, the gardener tried to rouse the gateman 
but it was obvious immediately that there was no party going 
on in that quiet, darkened building. Turning to the driver, I 
said, "America." The driver stared glumly back at me. After 
trying "U.S.A." and "Yankee," I finally hit upon "Eisenhower." 
That did it. The driver broke into a great, toothless smile, and 
nodding and chuckling he repeated "Eisenhower" several times, 
and then calling to the gardener to climb aboard, he flicked the 
reins and we jogged along to the American Embassy, where I 
arrived just in time for the entertainment. An Afghan musician 
performed for us on a native instrument built like a celeste, the 
fingerboard of which he operated with his right hand while his 
left hand worked the bellows to produce the sound. All the 
songs were typical Asian minor-key tunes. Back at the Godsons' 
after the party, I worked on my packing again before hitting the 
sack. I was in a panic from all the stuff I had taken with me, 
but I finally solved it and crawled into bed to sleep only a few 
hours and then lie awake till dawn. This broken-sleep routine 
became a pattern during the entire trip as a result of the con- 
stant excitement and overstimulation of new, strange cities, the 



2i8 MY L * F E IN JAZZ 

exhaustion of travel, and the grueling strain of trying to play 
well. We were always getting up at 5 A.M. to catch planes since 
there were few facilities for night flying. 

The next evening, we played our first show of the tour at 
the home of the American ambassador to Afghanistan. The two 
hundred or so guests, composed of all the local high society and 
royalty as well as the ambassadors of all the countries represented 
there, seemed to like the music, and after the concert they 
congratulated each of us individually many times. The concert 
was taped and the next night I heard it over the radio. The Rus- 
sian ambassador said that jazz was international. The Russians 
had gone all out in 1955 on a road-building program in Kabul, 
for which the Afghans are very grateful. The Russian road leads 
past all the embassies on the way to the airport, and is the only 
modern road in Afghanistan. The Russians also built a bread 
factory, but with American aid to Afghanistan going into in- 
visible things such as financial loans and technical advice in de- 
velopment projects, the people aren't aware of the American 
money poured in there. 

Don Ewell and I hired a horse cab to drive us around the 
Old City of Kabul the next morning before we played our 
second concert that afternoon for some four hundred people in 
the open field in front of a school. These were the poor people, 
and as I looked out over the crowd of bearded, turbaned, color- 
fully robed citizens and noticed that two of them were wearing 
eyeglasses, I suddenly realized that they were the only spectacled 
Afghans I had seen here. When I mentioned it to one of the 
Embassy staff, he said the people here didn't even know whether 
they had poor eyesight or not. They have very little book learn- 
ing, he said, and consequently they never have the chance to 
find out whether they can see. That seemed to me an odd way 
of looking at it, but if they did need glasses I don't know where 
the hell they'd get them, anyway. 

My next surprise came when I tried to tune up to the piano 
and discovered it was a whole tone flat. Of course, these people 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

have no concert pitch to tune to, and not much use for a piano 
in the first place, since their music has no relation to the piano. 
While a piano player is lucky that he doesn't have to lug an 
instrument around, on the other hand he is stuck with lousy in- 
struments most of the time. Poor Don Ewell how he suffered 
on this tour. A piano player has to have great technique and a 
sturdy philosophic outlook to be able to play on instruments 
with keys missing or sticking, and still make it sound like some- 
thing. But as far-out as were many of the places we played in, 
there was always a piano, horrible wreck though it often was. 
Up in Moulmein, I thought we had finally hit a place that 
couldn't scare up a piano, but just as we were climbing up on 
the bamboo bandstand, an oxcart came rumbling down the path 
with a piano in it. 

In Kabul, when I spoke to the fellow who seemed to be in 
charge of the piano, I was so wrapped up in thinking of it in 
terms of being down to a 340 pitch instead of 440 that the way I 
phrased it was, "This piano is terribly low." The fellow gave 
me a dazzling smile and said in perfect English, "Oh, don't worry 
about that we'll put some blocks of wood under it and raise it 
up." 

The rapport between the audience and us when they heard 
us play that afternoon was equally nil. They had no idea at all 
of what we were playing. This experience was to repeat itself 
in many places in the Far East. But though it was obvious and 
understandable that the more out of touch with Western culture 
the people were, the less meaningful our music would be to them 
just as theirs often pulled a blank with us still I was bothered 
and uneasy whenever I felt we weren't playing enough for the 
common people. It was great, of course, when we played in the 
big, cosmopolitan cities where there were many jazz fans, and 
it was a tremendous thrill to have them clap the house down and 
follow us around as if we were celebrities, but it seemed to me 
that it was just as much our job to play for the common people, 
too, however little they seemed to get out of it. I couldn't get 



220 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

it through my thick head that the poor people in the East were 
not as hep as poor people in the West, and that perhaps in playing 
for the students and the elite and the culturally sophisticated our 
"message" was getting through where it would do the most good. 

The next day we flew back to Karachi for a five-day stay be- 
fore going on to Bombay. All in all, we spent thirty-two days 
in India; besides Bombay, we played in Calcutta, Madras, Poona, 
Patna, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad; and Lahore and Dacca in 
East Pakistan. 

It's hard for the American mind to get used to the great ex- 
tremes of wealth and poverty existing throughout the East. 
Of course, in a hot country like India, much of the living takes 
place out doors, in the great open-air bazaars and the open-front 
shops, and you get a good chance to see how the people live. 
Business of all kinds is done right out on the sidewalk. I wasn't 
in Bombay more than five minutes before I found myself being 
measured for a suit. The shop owners do everything but lasso 
you. The streets seethe with humanity, and as in all hot climates, 
color is everywhere. A street scene in an Indian city is a knock- 
out with its dazzle of brilliant-colored robes and saris and tur- 
bans, and all the things for sale in the shops, from the melons 
and fruits to the wood and ivory carvings, the silver bracelets 
and necklaces, the hand-woven scarves and bolts of shimmering 
materials. 

Everywhere we went in India, the people were unfailingly 
kind and gracious to us, and the jazz fans were passionately 
devoted. Crowds of fans met us at the airports, and aspiring 
young trumpet players would come to my hotel room, and 
after presenting me with a gift they are great on giving gifts 
in the Far East they would ask for a lesson and I'd do my best 
to help them. But it was in Poona, a city of 260,000 people 
about 120 miles southeast of Bombay, that I met one of the most 
impressive and unusual fans I ever had the pleasure of knowing. 
He was the High Priest of the Parsis, and after the concert he 
asked to be presented to me. A slender, olive-skinned man with 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 221 

bright black eyes, he was dressed in a long white robe and a 
white turban and he seemed to me to be one of the original Three 
Wise Men. You had the feeling he knew everything, and he 
probably did. His name was Sardar Dastur Hormuzdiar. 

This High Priest drove me all around Poona, which has a lot 
of beautiful temples and palaces, before taking me to his home, 
which was enormous and filled with magnificent carved furni- 
ture and rare antiques. I had never even heard of the Parsis be- 
fore, let alone of their high priest, and it was strange to picture 
this stately man seated in his carved teakwood chair during the 
languid Indian night listening to a Summa Cum Laude recording 
of "Nobody's Sweetheart Now." I was told later that the Parsis 
are descended from the ancient Persians who emigrated to India 
in the eighth century and are adherents of Zoroastrianism, which 
was the Persian religion before Mohammedanism took over. The 
High Priest told me his position is hereditary; he also told me 
that the Parsis expose their dead to the vultures. As High Priest, 
he was the only one allowed to take the cadavers up to the top 
of special high towers Towers of Silence, they're called 
where within five minutes the bones are picked clean. The 
Towers of Silence have three separate tiers, for men, women, 
and children. The bones are cast into a well and washed out to 
sea. It's probably just as well that one doesn't know what one's 
fans are doing in their own time. 

In Ahmedabad we had another exposure to Indian culture. 
We were staying in the home of a vastly rich Hindu family 
that owned many fabric mills. My room measured fifty by 
fifty feet, and had a porch at each end. In the morning I was 
awakened by the chattering of monkeys peeking in at me from 
the balcony. It was hot even in the early morning, and by the 
time we played our concert that afternoon in the local town 
hall, it was sweltering and our clothes clung to us like wet silk. 
It was at dinner that we ran into difficulties. It wasn't the fault 
of our hosts they didn't understand that we didn't understand 
but nevertheless it was very awkward for all concerned. We 



222 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

sat with the family at a huge, round, oilcloth-covered table. The 
food, which contained no meat since the Hindus aren't meat 
eaters, and on which the host kept pouring some kind of white 
sauce, was served in large aluminum plates with metal cups set 
on them. There were no forks or spoons and we just sat there 
in stricken silence while our hosts plunged their fingers into the 
concoction and scooped it into their mouths. They finally ex- 
plained to us that their religion taught that God had given them 
their fingers to eat with. There was nothing to do but plunge 
in, too, and do the best we could. It was funny to consider that 
no doubt each was secretly thinking how barbaric the other was. 

Ahmedabad was full of beautiful temples, palaces, and 
mosques, but it seemed to us a by-now typical Indian city of 
much poverty, full of sick and deformed people, and cattle roam- 
ing the streets at will, and we felt upset about the way the 
wealthy Indians just blew the horns of their big automobiles 
and drove through the street crowds as if the poor devils didn't 
exist. But if we were bleeding hearts in Ahmedabad, when we 
got a load of the poverty in Calcutta we were really rocked 
back on our heels. 

Calcutta, the commercial center of India, situated about eighty 
miles up the Hooghly River from the Bay of Bengal, was the 
most heartbreaking place I have ever seen. Here in this "city 
of palaces," with one of the busiest ports in the world, the streets 
are filled with starving families, and empty lots are filled with 
shanty towns. The city attracts thousands upon thousands of 
illiterate workers, many of whom are driven from their villages 
by drought, but when these poor souls reach the city, they 
pour off the train and squat right in the railroad station and call 
it home. When they do find work, they are so undernourished 
that they have no energy, and it was explained to me that the 
people lying on lawns and benches and steps weren't doped but 
just exhausted. 

I was so overtired when we checked into the Grand Hotel 
that I kept waking up all night and looking out the window 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 223 

on Chowringhee Road, which is in the midst of the shopping 
center of the city. The streets outside had a terrible fascination 
for me; it was like looking at a scene from Dante's Inferno. 
Around eleven there had been people lying all over the sidewalk. 
At twelve-thirty they were all gone, and then an hour later they 
were all there again, sprawled out on the sidewalk. I understand 
that the luckier ones who possess beds leave the bedsteads, which 
are just wooden frames with woven bottoms, stacked in hotel 
lobbies during the day and then they take them out and set them 
up on the streets at night. My eyes were drawn like a magnet to 
the sight of a man and wife and their six children. They were 
just sitting on the curb no home, no food, no place to go. The 
father started to smoke a pod of hashish and three or four 
passers-by sat down and joined him. I guess they feel their only 
hope is to stay high. At 7 A.M., I awoke and looked out at the 
incredible scene again. Among the sleeping huddled forms on 
the sidewalk I spied a little boy, sitting up beside his still sleeping 
mother. I whistled to him, but since there was only one little 
open section on the window in my air-conditioned room, he 
couldn't hear me, so I picked up my horn and began to blow 
softly. He pricked up his ears then, and when he turned to face 
me I motioned to him to come under the window. He caught 
the rupees as deftly as Willie Mays and then he scampered back 
excitedly to show his mother the money. 

A few days later, when we played for a small gathering out 
in a park, we had a more cheerful incident. The bandstand was a 
bamboo-carved little structure with one open side. All the guests 
were Indians. The microphone was far too low for Jack's height, 
so they brought a table and placed it on that, but it was still too 
low. They kept bringing out tables that were higher and higher 
until they found one tafl enough. When it was my turn to solo 
I said, "I think they'd better bring back a smaller table." The 
audience laughed and applauded, and I said to Jack, "If we had 
more tables in our act we'd get more laughs over here." 

From Calcutta we went to Hyderabad, the land of the Mo- 



224 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

hammedans, and from there to Madras. After we were settled in 
at the Oceanic Hotel, we had supper at John Wiggins' house. 
Wiggins, the head U.S.I.S. man in Madras, was really worried 
about the Communists in India, and he felt jazz was a great tool 
in helping save the country from the Reds. Naturally, I was de- 
lighted to hear him say so, and if it is true, then the U.S.A. 
should get a big movement of jazz to go there, but it seemed 
to me that this poverty-ridden country is still so ignorant and 
primitive in so many ways that it will be hard to steer it from 
the Reds. "Wiggins is worried," I wrote in my journal that night. 
"He has a tough job. I wish I could think of an idea to help him." 
But these people have such a different way of thinking, just as 
Asian music has a different thought behind it. Their music, 
which is unwritten and is played by ear and from memory, does 
have a sort of swing when they get going, but they don't have 
any harmonic system to speak of. Just as Oriental painting has 
no interest in perspective, their music has no interest in harmony, 
and harmony is to music what perspective is to painting. 

In Asia, melody is supposed to have reached its highest devel- 
opment, its most elaborate refinement. The rhythm isn't as com- 
plex as the African rhythms, but like the melody it is highly 
refined. There is no underlying drive that stirs one into action. 
Oriental rhythm and melody, with its quavering tones broken 
down to quarter tones and eighth tones, have a hypnotic effect. 
The music puts one into a languor, weaving a subtle spell of do- 
nothing, as opposed to the "go" rhythm of the jazz beat. And 
pitch, as we hear it, doesn't exist for them. They are continually 
shifting and modulating the pitch; there is no standard pitch. All 
over the Far East I was in a dither about the piano being off 
pitch, and it probably sounded better to them that way. 

In short, harmony involves order, the orderly building of a 
piece of music according to the composition, progression, and 
modulation of the chords, and they have no feeling for harmony 
in Eastern music. We heard Asian musicians playing their butts 
off, and you might say in a way that they were swinging, but 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 225 

these guys were swinging without a harmonic system. In the 
West we built a whole musical civilization on the basis of the 
harmonic system and a political one on the same principles of 
order, structure and compromise. It was the harmony between 
the white and black man that made jazz. So Wiggins has a tough 
job, trying to get the Asians on a more harmonious kick. I think 
a bop-type band would be a great hit in the Far East, especially 
since the modern jazz is getting closer to Asiatic melodies with 
its shifts in pitch and pantonality. If we can bend in their direc- 
tion with bop, maybe they can bend in ours, too. 

To get back to the trip, we left Madras on October zjth for a 
four-day stay in Ceylon. Colombo, the capital, is very old but 
very clean, and the gentle Buddhist monks look like walking 
pools of sunlight in their brilliant yellow robes. Our first night's 
concert held in Victoria Park in the center of town went over 
very well with the Singhalese. The next day, the famous Kandy 
dancers came down from Kandy to perform for us in Victoria 
Park. Their costumes are gorgeous, but their movements are 
very formalized and though the effect is breath-taking, I person- 
ally thought the best dancer I saw in the Far East was a fourteen- 
year-old Indian boy, a professional dancer who performed for us 
in Bombay. He could almost have cut my old friend Slappy 
Wallace, with his sensational ad-lib dancing, beating out time 
with his bare feet and shaking all over like Bojangles. He was 
something to see. 

On Monday morning, we drove the seventy-five miles to 
Kandy through banana, tea, and rubber plantations to play at 
the Arts Theatre Peradeniya. We stopped the cars to take pic- 
tures of the elephants working along the road and the native 
mahouts very obligingly gave us rides on them. Jack seemed to 
feel safe as long as he held on to his trombone, and when he 
played a few bars while perched on an elephant's back, the ani- 
mal must have thought he had a relative on board. Jack wanted 
to bring home a baby elephant in the worst way, but Mrs. Tea- 
garden put her foot down. 



226 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

On November 3rd, we started our swing through Burma. 
Rangoon, the capital, means "End of Strife," I was told. Let's 
hope they're right. A very large city, Rangoon must have been 
a very beautiful one before World War II, when it was given 
the works. Before they left, the British destroyed the oil works 
and transportation to make things tougher for the Japanese, 
and the Japs looted the place of everything that wasn't nailed 
down, and the bombings at the end of the war didn't help things. 
The wide boulevards laid out by the British are still there, al- 
though the sidewalks are filthy with betel juice. The streets are 
a fascinating hodgepodge of color, with the long, exotic-colored 
skirts and sheer blouses of the women, and the hundreds of litde 
curbside stalls, the trishas and the gharries the little dark-green 
shuttered wagons. The feeling here was more Oriental than 
Indian, and I was afraid to go out at night the streets looked too 
dark and mysterious to me. 

We played our first concert in a big open-air amphitheatre. 
The Burmese seemed to like us, but the bugs liked us even better. 
We played a concert in a stadium for the students of Burma Uni- 
versity, and it went over very well. The following night we 
played for the President of Burma, U Win Maung. After the 
concert he presented us with tenderfoot Boy Scout badges, mak- 
ing us honorary members of the Burmese Boy Scouts. When we 
were told in the follow-up speech by a Burmese official that this 
honor hadn't been bestowed upon Adlai Stevenson or Vice-Presi- 
dent Nixon when they were there, we really felt puffed up. The 
proceeds of all the concerts we played during our ten-day stay 
in Burma went to the Burmese Boy Scouts Fund, and at the end 
of our tour we were told we had made $25,000 for them. 

It was expensive in Rangoon and prices were sky-rocketing. 
My room at the Hotel Strand cost twelve dollars a day, and every 
time you showed your nose on the street you were approached 
by somebody who wanted to make a deal in money or sell you 
gems. When we went shopping, the shop owners would offer 
you twice their money in exchange for yours, but they wouldn't 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 227 

take travelers' checks because they couldn't unload them. Burma 
is the land of jewels rubies, sapphires, and jade and when the 
Burmese women go out they deck themselves with every piece 
of jewelry they own. They have plenty of pieces and it's all the 
real thing. 

From Rangoon we went out on two- and three-day trips to 
Maymyo, Moulmein, and Mandalay real Kipling stuff. Moul- 
mein, where we played two shows at the Palace Theatre, is full 
of pagodas and hard-working elephants. In Mandalay, the big 
town in upper Burma, the local Boy Scout troop turned out to 
meet us at the airport, but I wish they could have stayed around 
that afternoon and evening to help steady the bandstand and 
swat the bugs when we played at the fairgrounds. We were set 
up on a bamboo wedding platform that shook so badly we could 
hardly keep our mouthpieces to our lips. At night it was worse 
because when we took a breath we inhaled tons of moths and 
insects. Not only that, we were competing with a native orches- 
tra that played at the same time we did. At Maymyo, forty miles 
farther up the mountains, our open-air concert for some four 
hundred people was easier to play, but the mountaineers didn't 
dig it very much. The hills were infested with Red insurgents 
and brigands and it was extremely dangerous traveling along the 
roads; nevertheless, I found the Burmese towns and countryside 
much more interesting and varied than the Indian ones. 

Back in Rangoon, we received special invitations to a dinner 
at the President's official house. After dinner, we sat out on the 
lawn, which was glowing with the soft light of colored lanterns, 
and we and some two hundred other guests were entertained by 
beautifully costumed Burmese actors and dancers and two Bur- 
mese bands. One musician would play a few bars and another 
musician would pick up the melody from there, and they kept 
batting it back and forth between the two bands like a tennis 
ball. They have no written music and no leader; all their music 
is memorized and rehearsed. There were speeches afterward by 
Burmese officials thanking us for the fine work we had done 



228 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

there; our own Ambassador said we had done a great ambassa- 
dor's job, while the U.S.I.S. man said we had helped them in 
their work of getting closer to the people. 

On November i4th, we were up at dawn to fly to Bangkok, 
Thailand, where we found the Erawan Hotel, a brand-new mod- 
ern building, to be even more expensive than Rangoon, up to 
eighteen and twenty dollars a day. 

We hit another snag here, too, for it turned out that the chief 
Buddhist had died the day before and consequently we had to 
cancel all our big engagements, as the court went into heavy 
mourning. We just made a couple of television films and played 
a short concert at the Oriental Hotel's Bamboo Room. But the 
thirty-one-year-old King of Thailand, Phumiphon Aduldet, who 
received part of his education in the U.S., was a great jazz buff, 
and on Sunday he asked us to give a private concert for him at 
the palace. After we had played a few numbers, he took out his 
clarinet and jammed with us for four or five hours. "He doesn't 
have enough problems trying to run his country," Don Ewell 
said to me. "He wants to be a jazz musician, too!" 

Bangkok was something to see with its mixture of old teak- 
wood houses with red-tiled roofs and its modern buildings, and 
the streets are a madhouse of bicycle rickshas, autos, and buses. 
The wooden houses lining the canals that wind through the city 
are built on stilts and the kids just dive off the front veranda into 
the canal and swim around like puppies. 

We went out to the university one afternoon to hear the col- 
lege band, which played Western music. It was unbelievable to 
us that in a large university like this there was no music teacher. 
We thought the students had done wonders teaching themselves 
how to play. All of us, Jack, Don, Jerry, and I, were filled with 
zeal to have the United States invest in sending out teachers and 
music and books and instruments to these guys. 

On November 23rd, we left for a twelve-day swing through 
Indochina. The Indochinese peoples the Burmese, Thais, 
Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians seem gentler and calmer 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

than the Indians, and less subtle and less complex than the 
Orientals. Laos is a small, very mountainous country with deep 
river valleys, and it is almost completely untouched by modern 
civilization. Most of its people grow their own food and spin 
and weave their own clothes. We played daily shows at a big 
fair in Vientiane, the capital, for five days, and we were a curi- 
osity, if nothing else, although they seemed to like us. It was 
the first time in eight weeks that it had been cool, but my lip 
went bad and I had the shakes and couldn't enjoy it very much. 

We were flown out of Laos by an Army plane on November 
26th, and returned to Thailand to play at the University at Chiang 
Mai. This chief city of northern Thailand, set in a lovely valley 
surrounded by big wooded mountains, was perfectly beautiful 
at that time of year, and I thought I was in Shangri-la. I didn't 
learn till later that leprosy abounds in Chiang Mai and that 
there is a big leprosy asylum there. But I'm glad I didn't know 
that then, for the next day when we were back in Bangkok I 
came down with the Asiatic crud, and I felt miserable enough 
without being frightened out of my wits. However, it didn't stop 
me from enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in the 
palace of one of the princes, attended by the King and Queen of 
Thailand. I never dreamed when I started the Shawmut Synco- 
paters that my trumpet would be the cause of my having Thanks- 
giving dinner in a palace, but I enjoyed every minute, in spite 
of the crud. 

On the i8th of November we flew to Saigon in South Viet- 
nam. Saigon, an Oriental city with a strong French flavor, is a 
very pleasant cosmopolitan city. Our four-day engagement at 
the Alhambra Theatre was well attended and well received by 
the citizens. We also played for dances at the officers' club and 
Army recreation hall and we did a radio broadcast before mov- 
ing on to our next four-day stand, in Pnompenh, Cambodia. Cam- 
bodia, too, is largely undeveloped, with 75 per cent of its land 
still virgin forest. The high point here was our concert in the 
palace of King Norodom Suramarit. This was the last time we 



230 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

had a king for an audience, and although he wasn't as hep as the 
young King of Thailand, he seemed to get a bang out of our 
music, and we got a really big bang out of the medals he pre- 
sented to us in honor of our visit. When he gave me my medal, 
he said in French that I was the greatest trumpet player he had 
ever heard. I knew as much French as he did English, but just to 
be polite I nodded vigorously and gave out with a loud "Oui," 
which broke him up and made me feel foolish when his remark 
was translated to me. Several months after our return to the 
States, a bomb was sent to the palace in a package. It killed one 
of the King's sons and maimed several court attendants. The 
King himself died in 1960. I was sad to read about his death. 

And on to Singapore for three days, where we felt the audi- 
ence had some idea of what we were playing, and then on to 
the Malay Peninsula for ten days. I was pulling out of my play- 
ing slump now and besides beginning to play better, I was able 
to enjoy the sights. Malaya is an incredibly beautiful part of the 
world. There are very few tourists, at least in December, and you 
get the feeling the natives live an easy-going, lazy life. The 
people are shy and unaggressive and very attractive looking, and 
their spacious tropical houses with red roofs and lovely carved 
woodwork are so handsome that I must have taken five rolls of 
snapshots of them. Rubber trees are the big things here. Though 
it was hot and there were lots of mosquitoes, the hotels were cool 
and the audiences enthusiastic and very receptive to our music. 
After playing at concert halls, Catholic schools, and theatres in 
Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Seremban, and Ipoh, we flew to the 
island of Penang, off the west coast of Malaya. Penang, cool, 
quiet, and serene at this time of year, was the most heavenly 
place of all in Malaya. Our concert at the Rex Theatre pulled a 
full house, making our joy complete and our letdown bigger 
when we opened in Manila two days later and drew only about 
six hundred people in a stadium that held four thousand. The 
story was the same all over the Philippines, where we played 
everywhere to less than half -filled halls. They have a chance to 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 231 

hear a great deal of American music in the Philippines, but since 
very little of our kind of jazz is fed to them, they had little in- 
terest in us. They'd love a big band, with lots of strings, and 
rock-'n'-roll bands, and ballad singers, and modern jazz any- 
thing that is currently popular in the States would go well here. 
When Frankie Lane and Joni James were there some months 
before us, they packed the halls. 

We arrived in Cebu on Christmas Eve, and a band met us at 
the airport. On Christmas Day, we played an afternoon and 
evening concert in the school gym, and I was glad to be working 
so I wouldn't miss not being with my sons so much. Outside of 
Warsaw, Manila was the most damaged capital city in the world 
during World War II, and though they have done an amazing 
job of reconstruction, there were still bombed-out ruins, and 
the harbor was still full of half-submerged hulks of Japanese 
ships. You get to feel there is no place on this planet left un- 
touched one way or another by World War II. 

Hong Kong was the right place to be on New Year's Eve, and 
a complete change of mood after the Philippines. What a fasci- 
nating city! Hong Kong harbor, chock-full of colorful Chinese 
junks and sampans, is one of the three most beautiful harbors 
in the world, and its atmosphere is absolutely unique. You can 
actually sense the intrigue in the air; it's one of those special cities 
that generates its own unmistakable flavor and excitement. In 
spite of the dreadful living conditions of the refugees crowded 
into unbelievable quarters, you can't help feeling strangely elated 
and stimulated. And you're always conscious that Red China is 
only some thirty miles away. The streets are noisy and colorful 
and extremely interesting, especially since the fetching cheong- 
sams the Chinese girls wear are slit all the way up the thigh, mak- 
ing a stroll down the street seem as though you had wandered 
backstage at the Follies. 

Jack Teagarden wasn't feeling well during our four-day stay 
in Hong Kong and he was out of commission entirely for two 
days. During this time we were scheduled to play for four 



232 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

thousand Chinese youngsters, about six to eight years old, at one 
of the schools. This was one of the biggest thrills of the whole 
trip for me, even more gratifying than playing kings' palaces. 
The children sat on the floor, quiet and attentive and good as 
gold, their little heads shining like ebony and their round faces 
beaming with good nature. We played for them in two shifts, 
putting on one show for two thousand of them and repeating 
the performance for the second group of two thousand. Through 
the interpreter I told the children to answer me on "J a ck" and 
'The Saints," and they were perfect, coming in right on the beat 
as if they had been hearing this music all their short lives. The 
U.S.I.S. man was delighted, and all the guys in the band had a 
ball, too. 

On January ist, we were up at 5 A.M. to fly to Taipei. The cool 
air made us feel good, and so did the full houses we drew in 
Taiwan, Okinawa, Korea, and Japan, for this was the part of 
the Orient that not only had had the heaviest impact of American 
ways but also, particularly Japan, was imitative of our ways in 
many things and catered to Westerners. During the occupation, 
the Japanese built huge, beautiful night clubs for the American 
soldiers and the tourists. 

When we arrived in Seoul, Korea, "The Land of the Morning 
Calm," we were whisked straight into winter weather, with 
temperatures of twenty degrees during the day that dropped 
down to zero at night. The Koreans looked so poor in compar- 
ison to the colorfully dressed Indians and Indochinese, and after 
all the rich costumes in the warm countries their dark, heavy 
clothes added to the feeling of drabness. In spite of the heater on 
the stage of the Municipal Theatre in Seoul, it was about thirty 
degrees in the hall, and the people huddled in their overcoats, 
but their reception of us was very warm. They would have gone 
wild if we had had some colored musicians in the band. Wintry 
Seoul seemed dark and dirty and sad, and you sensed the anxious 
spirit of the people, who are always in fear of new trouble. In 
Pusan we were a big hit, too. Stan Puls had been taken sick a few 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 233 

days earlier and we had to leave him in the Navy Hospital in 
Okinawa. We played five concerts without a bass, and we were 
worried about Stan, having had no word of his condition, but 
finally on January pth we learned he had had an appendectomy 
and was doing fine. On January loth, we arrived in Tokyo, and 
here we had the biggest reception of all. 

The Japanese had been following jazz for a long time, and they 
knew all of us, and gave us the red-carpet treatment. We had a 
colored fellow, Lee Ivory, fill in on bass, and he played well and 
was a good attraction, too. We played in Nagoya, Osaka, and 
Hiroshima to full houses and great ovations. When we were 
taken to see the memorial tablet where the bomb hit Hiroshima, 
one of the Japanese officials said something about how terrible 
it was, but I got sore and snapped, "Next time don't mess 
around." There was a moment of coolness before the bland 
smiles took over again. The Japanese are very much aware of 
what is going on in the United States, and the bop bands and 
cool modern jazz bands would be extremely popular here, too, 
especially such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Or- 
nette Coleman, and Stan Getz. 

On January zist, we left for Los Angeles, and on the 2 2nd I 
arrived back in New York, having gone around the world. It is 
a beautiful world, and everybody should have a chance to live 
in it all kinds of people, all kinds of culture, and all kinds of 
music. 



Chapt 



er 



What will the sixties bring to jazz? Probably everything 
more modern chords, more experimentation in atonal sounds, 
more jazz compositions in the classical forms of tone poems, 
fugues, chorales, concertos, symphonies, and operas. More 
blending back and forth between the classical and the folk ele- 
ments of jazz. But I hope there will also be a place for the free- 
wheeling, earthy, spontaneous style, and a renewed interest in 
the personal, direct approach to die music. And most important 
of all, I hope there will be some way for the new generation of 
musicians to make a living at this kind of jazz. The thing that 
worries me about any form of federal subsidy of popular music 
is that the "business" element, the promoters and critics and 
writers, will take it over as they have taken over so much of it 
already, and will end up as another force squeezing out the free- 
wheeling types. 

Jazz must continue to evolve, to change, to try out new forms 
and new sounds, and it needs places to be heard. It has always 
found them before, but more and more laws and restrictions, most 
of which are formulated with the idea of helping musicians, tend 
more and more to cut it off from the freedom it needs to grow 

234 



MY LIFE IN JAZZ 235 

and develop. Even in the late thirties and early forties there were 
places to play in New York where you could just sit in, or make 
an arrangement with the owner to try out a little band, and if it 
didn't go over, no hard feelings. Now a contract has to be signed 
ahead of time, and this scares off a lot of projects that would 
otherwise have a chance to be tried out. But one adjustment that 
could and should be made, that wouldn't interfere in any way 
with the jazzman's music, is a more understanding tax structure 
for musicians for artists of all kinds. This is the kind of govern- 
ment subsidy that would be sure to get to the man it is intended 
to help. If a lower tax rate for musicians is too much to expect, 
at least there should be a reasonable setup whereby a musician, 
when he does have a chance one year to make some money, 
doesn't have an unfairly large share of it taxed away. A musician 
may have to work twenty years or more before he gets a break, 
and no consideration is taken of the years he was scuffling. 

It's hard enough on the emotional level, being in one week 
and out the other. One month you're a representative of your 
government in a foreign country; you're cheered by thousands 
and thousands of people; you play in palaces and embassies 
and then you're back in your hotel room, opening a can of hash 
for supper, waiting for the damned telephone to ring, and trying 
not to look at the pile of bills that covers the bureau. No matter 
how great is the job you're playing one week, next week you 
may just be a guy out of work. 

After the State Department tour I was back on the open mar- 
ket again, and back at the old haunts, the Metropole, the Central 
Plaza, Eddie Condon's, the Roundtable, the Embers, doing club 
dates, gigs, and society parties, getting a couple of weeks at clubs 
in Pittsburgh or Toronto or Chicago, an occasional record date, 
and occasionally, too, having a ball, as with the Great Gleason 
Train trip the summer of 1962, when Jackie Gleason barn- 
stormed across the country to promote his new television pro- 
gram. Jackie Gleason is a trouper and a showman in the grand 
style and manner of the great entertainers of the twenties a 



236 MY LIFE IN JAZZ 

one-man revival meeting- The train was met by cowboys in 
Denver and by Indians in Phoenix and Albuquerque, and we 
played at a baseball game in Pittsburgh. The trip was hard work, 
especially trying to blow while the train was going fifty miles 
an hour and I don't know how Gleason kept up the pace but 
it was great. We pkyed at railroad stations, where local bands 
met us, and in parades and at receptions, but the funniest incident 
was at Baltimore, where we were met at the station by a band of 
fifteen accordionists. After they played, we had time for about 
five bars of "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home," when 
another reception band of ninety youngsters, which was waiting 
nearby, burst into a march, and everyone marched after it. In 
about two seconds the whole station was empty. "Some recep- 
tion! Where did everyone g0?" Bob Wilber asked, grabbing his 
clarinet case. "They went after Bill Bailey," Cutty Cutshall said, 
"and I'm getting back on the train for some sleep." And that's 
how it went, and how it goes. 



Allen, Henry (Red), 47, 123, 176 
Alvin, Danny, 123, 174 
Ammons, Albert, 34, 123, 157 
Anderson, Ernie, 108-109, 118, 121, 

127-129, 157, 166, 207 
Angel, Miguel, 164 
Aquarium, 176, 196 
Arlen, Harold, 55, 118 
Armstrong, Lil, 39 

Armstrong, Louis, 10, 26, 27, 28, 56, 
72, 94, 174, 176, 193, 194, 203-206, 

style, 16, 17, 23, 32, 34, 36-37, 39-42, 
47, 53, 65, 100 

in Boston, 49, 74 

in Chicago, 32, 39-42 

in Harlem, 47, 48-50 

in Washington, D.C., 203 
Aronson, Irving, 94 
Asevido, Johnny, 19 
Ashcraft, "Squirrel," 120 
Auld, Georgie, 125 
Australia, 149-151 

Bailey, Buster, 176 
Bailey, Mildred, 35, 69, 118 
Bailey, Pearl, 176 
Barbarin, Paul, 47 
Barefield, Eddie, 199, 201-202 
Barnet, Charlie, 121 



Basie, William (Count), 56, 73, 80, in, 

126, 1 60, 176, 209 
Beach, Frank, 134 
Bechet, Sidney, 123, 176 
Beiderbecke, Leon Bismarck (Bix) , 10, 

12, 27, 3 35 52, 55 64, 88 Il6 > 
117, 120, 161 
style, 13, 15-19, 23-25, 32, 33, 36, 40, 

. 50, i93 

in Boston, 13-22 

in Chicago, 15-16, 17 

with Whiteman, 19, 20-21, 23, 64, 

69 

Belafonte, Harry, 192 
Berigan, Bunny, 86, 88, 89, 99, 118 
Berlin, Irving, 55 
Berry, Einmett, 123 
Berton, Ralph, 117 
Berton, Vic, 117 
Best, John, 134, 138 
Bigard, Barney, 39, 123, 129 
Billings, Frank (Josh), 43-44, 52-53 
Birdland, 190, 192-193, 196 
Bland, Jack, 123 
Bonick, Lou, 178 
Bop City, 190 
Bose, Sterling, 30, 80 
Bowman, Dave, 108 
Breed, Pearly, 10, n 



237 



2 3 8 

Brenner, Bobby, 199 
Brick Club, 119-120 
Brown, Vernon, 123 
Brubeck, Dave, 199 
Brunis, George, 31, 173, 176 
Bryan, Mike, 125 
Bushkin, Joe, 89, 90, 118, 123 
Butterfield, Billy, 123, 176 
Byas, Don, 123, 126 
Byrnes, Bobby, 80 

Caceres, Ernie, 76, 118, 123, 176 

Calucci, Rocky, 134 

Calloway, Cab, 78 

Carey, Thomas (Mutt), 169 

Carmichael, Hoagy, 14, 23 

Carney, Harry, 14, 88 

Carter, Benny, 63 

Gary, Dick, 123, 188, 202 

Casa Loma band, 78 

Casey, Bob, 123 

Castle, Lee, 91, 95, 125 

Cadett, Big Sid, 71, 72, 84, 123, 174 

Central Plaza, 177, 190, 235 

Challis, Bill, 14 

Chester, Bob, 153 

Childs Paramount Restaurant, 198-199 

Chocolate Dandies, 71 

Clarke, Kenny, 102 

Clayton, Buck, 88, 123, 126, 176 

Cless, Rod, 32, 123, 156, 162-163 

Cocoanut Grove, Boston, 74-75 

Cole, Bill (Cozy), 120, 204, 206, 209, 

210 

Coleman, Bill, 123 
Coleman, Ornette, 233 
Commodore Records, 115-116, 157 
Condon, Eddie, 30, 47, 50, 62, 63, 65, 

66, 67, 70, 71, 89, 106, 107 
Surnma Cum Laude, 108-121 
Town HaJl Concerts, 127-130, 153, 

167 
Condon Club, 164-167, 170, 172-173, 

176, 100, 235 
Condon, Pat, 142 
Conniff, Ray, 123 
Coonin, Tommy, 50 
Corey, Irwin, 163 
Costello, Tim, 158 
Crawford, Jimmy, 199 



INDEX 

Creole Jazz Band, 32 

Crosby, Bing, 55, 68, 81, 121 

Crosby, Bob, 84 

Crozier, George, 14 

Crystal, Jack, 122 

Cutler, Ben, 182 

Cutshall, Robert (Cutty), 118, 204, 236 

D'Amico, Hank, 123 

Daniels, Elliott, n 

Davis, Meyer, 183 

Davis, Miles, 194, 233 

Davison, Wild Bill, 123, 173 

Delmonico's, 67, 69, 70, 73, 75 

DeParis, Sidney, 75, 122, 123, 176 

DeParis, Wilbur, 122, 123, 176 

DeVries, Johnny, 117-118 

Dickenson, Vic, 123, 176 

Dickerson, Carroll, 39, 40 

Diehl, Ray, 199 

Dixon, Joe, 84, 166 

Dodds, Baby (Warren), 39 

Dodds, Johnny, 39, 50 

Donohue, Sam, 134 

Dooley, Bill, 186-187 

Dorsey, Jimmy, 22, 8 1 

Dorsey, Tommy, 13, 19, 22, 35, 77, 79- 

86, 90, 91-92, 95, 98-100, 153, 204 
Drootin, Al, 70, 121 
Drootin, Benjamin (Buzzy) , 70 
Duke, Vernon, 55 
Duncan, Hank, 161 
Dunham, Sonny, 204 
Dyer-Bennett, Richard, 163 

Eldridge, Roy, 88, 123, 175, 176 

ElMns, Eddie, 74 

Ellington, Duke, 14, 27, 46, 56, 58, 65, 

73, 80, in, 158, 160, 161, 167 
Elman, Ziggy, 92 
Epstein, Sidney, 59 
Espiritu Santo, 144, 147-14$ 
European tour, 203-214 
Evans, Gil, 209 
Ewell, Don, 215, 218-219, 228 

Faber, Sam, u, 12, 13 

Faisioli, Bernie, 75 

Famous Door, 86, 87, 89, 174-175 



INDEX 

Far East tour, 215-233 

Afghanistan, 216-219 

Burma, 226-228 

Cambodia, 230 

Ceylon, 225 

East Pakistan, 220 

Hong Kong, 231-232 

India, 220-225 

Japan, 233 

Korea, 232 

Laos, 229 

Malaya, 230 

Okinawa, 232-233 

Philippines, 230-231 

Singapore, 230 

Taiwan, 232 

Thailand, 228-229 

Vietnam, 229 

West Pakistan, 215-216, 220 
Farley, Ed, 78 
Farley, Max, 30, 70 
Feld, Morey, 73, 174 
Fields, Kansas, 123 
Fitzgerald, Ella, 101 
Fontaine, Frank, 181 
Foster, George (Pops), 47, 123 
Francis, Panama, 123 
Freeman, Arnie, 37, 70 
Freeman, Howard, 21, 22 
Freeman, Lawrence (Bud), 22, 47, 48, 
49, 50, 52, 62, 68, 70, 71, 123, 166, 
170, 173 

style, 35-36, iio-m 

in Chicago, 29-32, 34, 37, 43 

Tommy Dorsey band, 84 

Summa Cum Laude, 108-112, 120-121 
Fry, Don, 123 
Fuller, Jerry, 215, 228 



Gabler, Milt, 115-116, 121-123, 152 

Garner, Erroll, 203 

Gershwin, George, 47, 55, 63, 117, 159 

Getz, Stan, 192, 233 

Gillespie, John (Dizzy), 175, 176, 211, 

2 33 

Gleason, Jackie, 235-236 
Gold, Sanford, 174 
Goldkette, Jean, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 

3<>, 64, 69 



239 

Goodman, Benny, 32, 35, 49, 73, 77- 
80, 88, 92, 93, 96-98, 100-101, 109, 
153-154, 204 
Goodman, Freddy, 70 
Gordon, Max, 163 
Gowans, Brad, 123, 164, 166, 196, 204 

style, in-112 

Summa Cum Laude, 108-121 
Gozzo, Conrad, 134, 150 
Grappelly, Stephane, 69 
Grausso, Joe, 123 
Greb, Ronnie, 215 
Green, Bill, 30 
Green, Urbie, 204 
Greet, Sonny, 27, 73 
GrifHn, Chris, 92, 96 
Guadalcanal, 144, 145, 146-147 
Guarnieri, Johnny, 125, 176 



Hackett, Bobby, 89, 123, 129, 176 

Hackett, Kid Lips, 119 

Haggart, Bob, 123 

Hall, Al, 123 

Hall, Edmond, 123, 176 

Hall, Tubby, 40 

HaUett, MaX 13 

Hamilton, Spike, 35 

Hampton, Lionel, 176 

Harriman, Benjamin, 191 

Harris, Bill, 175 

Harris, Tasso, 134 

Hart, Lorenz, 45, 55, 118 

Hawaii, 136-139 

Hawkins, Coleman, 176 

Heard, J. C, 176 

Helbock, Joe, 84 

Henderson, Bobby, 87 

Henderson, Fletcher, 46, 76, 78, 79, 80, 

100, 102 

Herman, Woody, 170, 173 
Heywood, Eddie, 123 
Higginbotham, Jay C., 47, 123, 176, 

204 

Hill, Alex, 76 
Hill, Chippie, 159, 163 
Hines, Earl, 34, 39, 41, 50, 123, 203, 206, 

209 

Hodges, Art, 123, 163, 174 
Hodges, Johnny, 88 



240 

Holiday, Billie, 87-89, 97, 101, 105, 106, 

129, 149, 157 
Holmes, Charlie, 47 
Hookway, Warren, 10 
Hucko, Peanuts, 174, 203-204, 209, 210 
Hyman, Dick, 192 

Ives, Burl, 163 
Ivory, Lee, 233 

Jackson, Cliff, 123, 176 

James, Harry, 92 

Jenney, Jack, 89, 125, 204 

Johnson, Bunk, 169, 173 

Johnson, James P., 10, 47, 48, 129, 156- 

162, 166, 195 

Johnson, Pete, 34, 123, 157, 176 
Joindreau, Charlie, 27, 28, 29, 30 
Jones, Jo, 56, 73, 88, 126 
Jones, Jonah, 120 
Jones, Maggie, 10, u, 159 
Julius's, 115 

Kahn, Roger Wolfe, 69 
Kaminsky, Matthew, 189 
Kaminsky, Sam, 175, 189 
Karle, Arthur, n 
Kaye, Sammy, 100 
Kenton, Stan, 170, 209, 211 
Kern, Jerome, 55, 136 
Kincaide, Deane, 123 
King, Wayne, 55, 100 
Kirby, John, 63 
Kirk, Andy, 78 

Krupa, Gene, 22, 32, 47, 52, 67, 73, 92, 
102, 176 

Lang, Eddie, 34, 52, 69 

Lang, Irving, 192 

Lanin, Jimmy, 183 

Lanin, Lester, 183 

LaRocca, Nick, 17 

Lawson, Yank, 91 

LeadbeUy (Huddie Ledbetter), 163 

Lee, Sam, 150 

Leeman, CM, 96, 203 

Lesberg, Jack, 75, 123, 166, 174, 203- 

204, 209 

Levitan, Sammy, 50 
Lewis, George, 169 
Lewis, Meade Lux, 34, 123, 157 



INDEX 

Lewis, Ted, 2, n 
LipTdn, Steve, 125 
Little Club, 7, 90 
Lombardo, Guy, 55, 59 
Lunceford, Jimmie, 78 

Manone, Wingy, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 67, 

68, 73, 84 
Mares, Paul, 31 
Margulis, Charlie, 19, 20 
Marino, Don, 120 
Marsala, Joe, 128, 152 
Marsala, Marty, 123, 176 
Marshall, Kaiser, 123 
Marshard, Harry, 5-6, 180-183 
Marshard, Jackie, 4-9, 60-61, 86, 177- 

182 

McGarity, Lou, 123 
McKenzie, William (Red), 50 
McKinney*s Cotton Pickers, 40, 46 
McPartland, Jimmy, 32, 35 
Metropole, 190-192, 235 
Mezzrow, Mezz, 22, 50, 62-63, 7 J 75- 

77, 123, 175, 213 
Miller, Al, 198 
Miller, Glenn, 52, 91, 100, 125 
Millinder, Lucky, 78 
Mole, Miff, 123, 176, 204 
Monk, Thelonious, 160, 174 
Monroe, Vaughn, 178 
Moore, Big Chief Russell, 118 
Moore, Freddie, 163 
Morgan, Al, 123 
Morton, Benny, 123, 129 
Morton, Jelly Roll, 169 
Mosier, Gladys, 94 
Murphy, Turk, 170, 183 
Murray, Don, 13 

Nanton, Sam, 204 
Navy Band #501, 131-154 
New Caledonia, 140-145 
Newman, Ruby, 183 
New Orleans Rhythm Kings, 31, 32 
Newton, Frankie, 75, 158, 195 
New Zealand, 148-149, 152 
Nicholas, Albert, 46, 123 
Nichols, Ernest Loring (Red), 50-52 
Nick's, 108, 109, 114, 117, 118, 121, 137, 
157, 190 



INDEX 

Noone, Jimmie, 39, 50 

O'Brien, Floyd, 32, 33, 62, 71 
O'Brien, Russell, 58, 59 
O'Gorman, Bill, 155-156 
O'Hara, John, 64 
Ohms, Freddie, 166, 173, 195 
Oliver, King Joe, 17, 32, 39 
Onyx Club, 89, 90 
Orchard, Frank, 123, 156 
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 17 
Ory, Kid Edward, 40, 169, 173, 209 

Page, Hot Lips Oran, 119, 121, 123, 

124-127, 192, 193, 195 
Panassie, Hugues, 114 
Panther Room, Hotel Sherman, 120- 

121 

Parenti, Tony, 123 
Parker, Charlie, 88, 175, 176, 192, 193, 

1 W* 
Pastor, Tony, 96, 105, 124 

Persip, Charlie, 73 

Peterson, Chuck, 96 

Peterson, Pete, 50 

Phillips, Flip, 175 

Pied Piper, 156-163 

Pierce, Charlie, 32, 33, 35, 42, 43 

Pollack, Ben, 49, 204 

Pollack, Henry, 2 

Poor, George, 145 

Porter, Cole, 118 

Powell, Mel, 123 

Price, Sammy, 56, 123 

Prima, Louis, 86 

Puls, Stan, 215, 232-233 

Purnell, Keg, 201-202 

Quealey, Chelsea, 70-71 

Rainey, Ma, 10 
Rank, Bill, 13 
Rapp, Barney, 13 
Rappolo, Leon, 31 
Redman, Don, 46, 80, 100 
Reed, Susan, 163 
Reinhardt, Django, 69 
Reisman, Leo, 53, 63-66, 79, 94 
Renard, Jacques, 19 
Riley, Mike, 78 



241 

Riskin, Izzy, 13 
Roach, Max, 194 
Robbins, Les, 96 
Roberts, Luckey, 48 
Rodgers, Richard, 55, 118 
Rolfe, B. A., 52 
Rollini, Adrian, 52 
Rosenthal, Louis, 59, 181-182 
Ross, David, 84 
Roy, Teddy, 74 
Royal Roost, 190 
Rusin, Babe, 94 
Rusin, Sunny, 94 

Russell, Charles Ellsworth (Pee Wee) f 
50-52, 62, 70, 71, 86, 123, 173, 200 

in Boston, 54-55, 164-165 

Litde Club, 90-91 

Summa Cum Laude, 108-112, 118, 
121 

Condon Club, 166, 170 
Russell, Luis, 46, 47 
Ryan's, Jimmy, 121-124, 135, 171, 174, 

i?5 i?<5, 190 
Ryker, Doc, 13 

Saratoga, 143, 154 

Schribman, Charlie and Sy, 12, 13, 17, 

80, 97, 98, 121 

Schroeder, Gene, 123, 166, 173 
Scobey, Bob, 170 
Scott, Hazel, 76 
Sedric, Gene, 123 
Seeger, Pete, 163 
Shapiro, Artie, 118, 123 
Shavers, Charlie, 123, 176 
Shaw, Artie, 76, 84, 92-105, 108-110, 

113, 124-125, 127 
Navy band, 131, 134-1351 i3<5-*39 

141, 146, 149, 152-153 
Simmons, Johnny, 123 
Singleton, Zutty, 39, 41, 75, 76, 123 
Smith, Bessie, 10, 15, 23, 32, 36, 159 
Smith, Howard, 91 
Smith, Kate, 55, 119 
Smith, Pine Top, 34, 91 
Smith, Stuff, 84, 120, 176 
Smith, Willie the Lion, 16, 47, 63, 108, 

156, 157, 159, 161 
Solomon Islands, 149 
Solomon, King Joe, 74-75 



242 

Spanier, Muggsy, 32, 35, 119, 123, 176 

Spivak, Charlie, 91, 153 

Stacy, Jess, 32, 35, 123* I2 9 

Stang, Arnold, 158 

Stein, Lou, 203 

Stewart, Rex, 176 

Stordahl, Axel, 84 

Straeter, John, 138 

Stuyvesant Casino, 177 

Sullivan, Joe, 22, 49, 50, 52, 71, 123, 

129, 1 66 
Summa Cum Laude band, 39, 108-121, 

207, 221 
Sutton, Ralph, 126, 183 

Tatum, Art, 160, 176 

Taylor, Herb, 50 

Teagarden, Jack, 22, 52, 118, 152, 174 
style, 204-205 

European tour, 203-205, 209 
Far East tour, 215, 223, 225, 228, 231 

Teschmaker, Frank, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 

43 ' 52 
Thigpen, Ed, 73 

Thomas, Joe, 123 

Thomson, Virgil, 129 

Thornhill, Claude, 134, 137-139 

Three Deuces, 15 

Tough, Dave, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 119, 

123, 125, 127, 175, 194-195 
style, ^36, 72 

in Chicago, 32, 36-38, 43 
Tommy Dorsey's band, 84, 85 
Navy, 134-136, 138-139, 143, 146, 149-. 

150, 152, 154 
Condon Club, 170-173 

Town Hall Concerts, 127-130, 135, 153, 
166, 167 

Tristano, Lennie, 192 

Troup, George, 90 

Trumbauer, Frankie, 13, 21, 52 

Tucker, Sophie, 74 



INDEX 



Turner, Joe, 157 



United Hot Clubs of America, 115 
Uptown Lowdown Club, 75-77 

Vallee, Rudy, n, 55 

Venuti, Joe, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74 

Village Vanguard, 163, 176 

Wallace, Slappy, 57-59, 225 

Waller, Thomas (Fats), 36, 47, 48, 

124, 159, 160-161, 188, 195 
Ware, Munn, 192 
Waiing, Fred, 55, 85 
Waters, Ethel, 15, 159 
Watson, Ecky, 75 
Waiters, Lu, 170 
Webb, Chick, 46, 63, 78, 101 
Webster, Ben, 88, 176 
Weiss, Sid, 123 
Wells, Dickie, 75, 204 
Weston, Paul, 85-86 
Wetding, George, 32, 33, 35, 38-40, 

43, 95, 118, 119, 123, !92 
White, Josh, 163 
Whiteman Paul, 19, 20, 21, 23, 53, 64, 

65, 69, 125 
Wjlber, Bob, 236 
Wiley, Lee, 117-118, 120, 121, 129 
Williams, Clarence, 161 
Williams, Sandy, 123 
Wilson, Teddy, 87-88, 129 
Windhurst, Johnny, 123 
Wolverines, 10, 12, 17, 35, 116, 117 
Woodward, Sam, 73 
Wright, Edythe, 86 

Yaged, Sol, 192 

Yancey, Jimmy, 34 

Young, Lester, 56, 88, 106, 123, 126, 

192, 193 
Young, Trummy, 176 



Format by Mort Perry 

Set in Linotype Janson 

Composed, printed and bound by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc. 

HARPER & Row, PUBLISHERS, INCORPORATED