A History Of Jazz In America

THE BOOK WAS
DRENCHED

Text fly book

168158

> m

73

A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Also by Barry Ulanov

THE INCREDIBLE CROSBY
DUKE ELLINGTON

A History of

JAZZ

in America

BARRY ULANOV

THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK - 1955

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

SECOND PRINTING MARCH 1954
THIRD PRINTING OCTOBER 1955

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

Parts of this book appeared

in abbreviated form in Metronome.

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

CONTENTS

Preface ix

1. What Is Jazz? 3

2. Ancestors 9

3. The Negro Synthesis 18

4. The Blues 26

5. New Orleans 35

6. Figures of Legend and Life 49

7. Louis 70

8. Across the Tracks 79

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

12. B/* 128

13. Neitf F0r& 141

14. Tfce Crash 156

15. Dz/e Ellington 174

1 6. Swing 185

17. The Sidemen 201

1 8. Pianists 2 1 3

19. Figures of Transition 235

20. Singers 247

21. JB<?p 267

Vll

viii CONTENTS

22. The Progressives *9 2

23. Cool Jazz 3 l6

24. Evaluation 33 6
Glossary 349

355

PREFACE

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

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

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

ix

x PREFACE

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

BARRY ULANOV

A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Chapter

WHAT IS JAZZ?

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

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

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

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

4 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

WHAT IS JAZZ? 5

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

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

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

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

Jess Stacy: "Syncopated syncopation."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

WHAT IS JAZZ? 7

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

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

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

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

8 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

ANCESTORS

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

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

9

10 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

ANCESTORS 1 1

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

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

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

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

12 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

ANCESTORS 13

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

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

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

14 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

.'

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

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

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

ANCESTORS 15

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

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

While many art songs have exactly the same characteristics and

16 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

ANCESTORS 17

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

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

Blow your horn and call your dog,

Blow your horn and call your dog,

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

Rang tang fiddle de day.

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

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

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

Chapter 3

THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS

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

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

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

* 18

THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 19

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

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

20 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 21

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

Wheel about, turn about,

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

I jump Jim Crow.

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

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

22 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 23

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

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

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

24 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

THE NEGRO SYNTHESIS 25

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

~er 4

THE BLUES

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

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

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

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

20

THE BLUES 27

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

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

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

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

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

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

28 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

THE BLUES 29

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

THE BLUES 31

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

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

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

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

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

32 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

THE BLUES 33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

34 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

fer 5

NEW ORLEANS

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

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

35

36 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

NEW ORLEANS 37

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

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

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

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

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

38 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

NEW ORLEANS 39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

40 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

Thanking you for your patience, I remain,
Yours,

"LITTLE SALTY"

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

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

NEW ORLEANS 41

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

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

PREFACE
"Honi Soit Qui Mai y Feme"

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

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

WHY NEW ORLEANS SHOULD
HAVE THIS DIRECTORY

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

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

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

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

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

THIS BOOK MUST NOT BE MAILED

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

42 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEW Mahogany Hall,

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

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

NEW ORLEANS 43

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

The shot upstairs,

The shot downstairs,

And the shot in the room.

She also included her autobiography:

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

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

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

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

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

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

COUNTESS WILLIE PIAZZA

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

44 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

"Just ask for Willie Piazza."

PHONE 4832 MAIN

317 N. Basin

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

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

NEW ORLEANS 45

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

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

46 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

NEW ORLEANS 47

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

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

48 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

Chapter 6

FIGURES OF LEGEND
AND LIFE

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

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

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

49

50 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 51

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

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

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

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

52 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 53

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

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

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

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

54 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE

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

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

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

56 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

Sometime after 1910 Joe made his way into Storyville and played

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 57

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

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

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

58 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 59

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

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

60 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 61

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

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

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

62 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 63

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

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

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

64 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 65

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

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

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

66 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 67

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

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

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

68 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

FIGURES OF LEGEND AND LIFE 69

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

(Chapter

LOUIS

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

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

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

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

70

LOUIS 71

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

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

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

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

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

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

72 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

What was Louis's first professional job?

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

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

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

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

LOUIS 73

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

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

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

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

74 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

LOUIS 75

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

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

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

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

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

76 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOUIS 77

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

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

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

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

78 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

ACROSS THE TRACKS

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

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

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

79

80 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

ACROSS THE TRACKS 81

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

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

82 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

ACROSS THE TRACKS 83

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

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

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

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

84 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

ACROSS THE TRACKS 85

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

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

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

86 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

ACROSS THE TRACKS 87

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

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

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

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

88 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

ACROSS THE TRACKS 89

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

DIASPORA

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

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

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

oo

DIASPORA 91

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

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

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

92 A HISTORY OF JAZZ EN AMERICA

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

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

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

DIASPORA 93

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

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

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

94 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

DIASPORA 95

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

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

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

96 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

DIASPORA 97

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

THE JAZZ AGE

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

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

98

THE JAZZ AGE 99

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

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

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

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

100 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 10

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

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

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

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

102 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 103

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

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

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,

Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,

Pounded on the table,

Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,

Hard as they were able,

Boom, boom, BOOM,

With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,

Boomlay, boonilay, boomlay, BOOM.

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

A roaring, epic, rag-time tune

From the mouth of the Congo

To the Mountains of the Moon.

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

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

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

104 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 105

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

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

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

Once I was in Memphis,

I mean Tennessee,

Once I was in Memphis,

I mean Tennessee,

But I had to leave 'cause

Nobody there was good to me.

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

Charlie is a gambler

An' Sadie is a whore.

Play that thing,

Jazz band !

Play it for the lords and ladies,

For the dukes and counts,

For the whores and gigolos . . .

106 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

The usual sounds:

So beat dat drum, boy!

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

The usual message:

To keep from cryin'

I opens ma mouth an' laughs.

You know that tune

That laughs and cries at the same time.

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

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

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

(And many others there may be

Like unto it, that are unknown,

Whereon as costly fruit has grown.)

It stands before a hut of wood

In which the Christ Himself once stood

And those who pass it by may see

Nought growing there except a tree,

But there arc two to testify

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

Its roots were fed with priceless blood.

It is the Cross; it is the Rood.

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

THE JAZZ AGE 107

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

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

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

108 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 109

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

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

110 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 111

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

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

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

112 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 113

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

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

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

114 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

THE JAZZ AGE 115

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

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

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

116 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

Chapter 11

CHICAGO

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

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

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

117

118 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

CHICAGO 119

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

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

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

120 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

CHICAGO 121

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

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

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

122 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

CHICAGO 123

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

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

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

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

124 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

CHICAGO 125

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

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

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

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

126 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

CHICAGO 127

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

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

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

(Chapter 12

BIX

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

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

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

128

BIX 129

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

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

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

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

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

130 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

BIX 131

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

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

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

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

132 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

BIX 133

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

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

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

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

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

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

134 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

BIX 135

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

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

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

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

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

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

136 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

BIX 137

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

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

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

138 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

BIX 139

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

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

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

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

140 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

Chaph

eri3

NEW YORK

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

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

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

141

142 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK 143

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

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

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

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

144 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK 145

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

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

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

146 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK 147

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

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

148 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK 149

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

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

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

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

150 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

NEW YORK 151

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

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

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

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

152 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

NEW YORK 153

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

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

154 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

NEW YORK 155

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

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

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

r 14

THE CRASH

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

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

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

156

THE CRASH 157

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

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

158 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CRASH 159

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

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

160 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

THE CRASH 161

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

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

The Ben Pollack band developed into the organization Bob Crosby

162 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE CRASH 163

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

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

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

164 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

THE CRASH 165

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

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

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

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

166 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

THE CRASH 167

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

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

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

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

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

168 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE CRASH 169

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

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

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

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

170 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE CRASH 171

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

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

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

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

172 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

THE CRASH 173

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

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

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

Chapter 15

DUKE ELLINGTON

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

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

174

DUKE ELLINGTON 175

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

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

176 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

DUKE ELLINGTON 177

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

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

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

178 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

DUKE ELLINGTON 179

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

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

180 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

DUKE ELLINGTON 181

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

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

182 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

DUKE ELLINGTON 183

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

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

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

184 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

Chapter 16

SWING

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

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

185

186 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

SWING 187

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

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

188 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

SWING 189

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

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

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

190 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

SWING 191

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

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

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

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

192 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

SWING 193

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

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

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

194 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

SWING 195

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

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

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

196 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

SWING 197

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

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

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

198 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

SWING 199

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

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

200 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

w

THE SIDEMEN

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

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

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

201

202 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE SIDEMEN 203

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

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

204 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

THE SIDEMEN 205

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

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

206 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

THE SIDEMEN 207

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

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

208 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

THE SIDEMEN 209

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

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

210 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

THE SIDEMEN 211

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

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

212 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

/O;

U/iapter 18

PIANISTS

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

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

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

213

214 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

PIANISTS 215

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

216 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

PIANISTS 217

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

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

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

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

218 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

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

Hines has four favorite records out of all that he has recorded.
These are late band works. It's not that the Father underestimates
the significance of his early recordings; it's just that he is most con-
cerned with present-day problems and thoroughly delighted with
the instrumentation and instrumentalists that became available to
him. The four Earl Hines sides that really knock Earl Hines out are
"Tantalizing a Cuban"; "The Boy with the Wistful Eyes," featuring
his vocal quartet of several years ago; Billy Eckstine's "I Got It Bad
and That Ain't Good"; and his own brilliant "Boogie Woogie on
St. Louis Blues," all on Bluebird and all but the last scarce as
pterodactyl's teeth.

With good bands, and a thoughtful, mature conception of jazz,
grounded in such firm traditions as a baby art can have, Farl has done
well over the years. Because his authoritative, broad-shouldered, con-
servatively dressed figure looks like a heavyweight boxer's, because
his music is so much in and of our time, Earl Hines' listeners some-
times used to forget that he was one of the pioneer jazzmen who
helped start the whole thing. They were reminded of it in the barn-
storming concert tours and gala night-club appearances of Louis Arm-
strong's troupe in 1950, which featured, in addition to Earl, Jack Tea-
garden and Barney Bigard. Then in 1951, with a Columbia Piano
Moods album, came another reminder, that Earl was still a modern
pianist, speculative, experimental, fresh. That's as it should be with a
man of his equipment and imagination and sharp awareness of his own
time and that to come.

Thomas Wright Waller, known to millions for obvious reasons
as "Fats," died at the age of thirty-nine. His sudden death stunned
musicians and music lovers. The high-spirited, effervescent, boister-
ously energetic pianist and composer had just completed a four- week
personal appearance at the Florentine Gardens in Hollywood. The
engagement ended on Saturday; Monday he boarded the Santa Fe
Chief for New York; Wednesday, December 1 5, 1943, he had a sudden
heart attack, and when the train pulled into Kansas City he was dead.
An autopsy revealed that he had had bronchial pneumonia.

On December 20, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, a
vast crowd, including hundreds of prominent representatives of the
music world, came to pay homage to Fats. Pallbearers included Count

PIANISTS 219

Basic, Don Redman, Claude Hopkias, Andy Kirk, Andy Razaf,
J. C. Johnson, and James P. Johnson. Virtually every prominent
pianist in New York who had known Fats was present, including
Mary Lou Williams, Willie (the Lion) Smith, Cliff Jackson, as well
as the musicians from Fats's regular recording band and others who
had made records with him. Mounted police had to clear the way
for the cortege through streets thronged with admirers. The follow-
ing day a memorial program was arranged at Cafe Society Down-
town; an hour of it was broadcast, and dozens of Fats's associates
and admirers took part in the tribute, proceeds of which went to the
New York Amsterdam News Children's Fund. James P. Johnson,
the pianist whose style had inspired Fats in his formative years, com-
posed a "Blues for Fats" which he played soon afterward at a con-
cert in Town Hall, New York.

Fats was born in New York City. His father was the Reverend Ed-
ward Martin Waller of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Fats studied
piano and organ and when still a very small boy often used to play the
organ in his father's church for Sunday services. His formal train-
ing was under Leopold Godowsky and Carl Bohm. Andy Razaf,
lyric writer who collaborated with Fats on most of his outstand-
ing hits, says that Fats "knew Brahms, Liszt, and Beethoven as well
as he knew jazz, and often discussed and analyzed their work."

Fats went to De Witt Clinton High School in New York. When
he was about fifteen years old he turned up one day in an amateur
pianists' contest at the Roosevelt Theatre in Harlem, on the site
where the Golden Gate ballroom was later built. He won the prize,
playing one of J. P. Johnson's tunes, "Carolina Shout." It wasn't
long before he was playing professionally. One of his earliest jobs
was as house organist at the old Lincoln Theatre on One Hundred
and Thirty-fifth Street. About that time he began writing songs
and quickly produced a hit, "Squeeze Me," which he did with
Spencer Williams.

While Fats was working at the Lincoln he made a friendship that
lasted throughout his life and contributed very happily to his career;
he met Andreamentana Razafinkeriefo, who, out of consideration for
American tongues, had shortened his name to Andy Razaf. As Andy
says, "I used to listen to him there often, and eventually, because
everyone knew him and everyone was his friend, I somehow came
to meet him." Andy was the son of the Grand Duke of Madagascar,

220 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

who had been killed when the French took over that island; Andy
was born in Washington, D.C., just after his mother had escaped to
this country. Forced to leave school in order to earn a living, he
started his songwriting career as an elevator boy in an office build-
ing where one of his regular passengers was Irving Berlin. When
Fats met him, he persuaded Andy to take songwriting more seriously.
As Andy tells it, "One of the first things we did as a team was cash
in on a vogue for West Indian songs. As soon as we got broke all we
had to do was grind out two or three West Indian numbers, take
them up to Mills or some Broadway office, and get a nice sum for
them. Around that time there was a heavy demand for cabaret-type
songs with blue lyrics. We did hundreds of those too."

Fats worked with other lyric writers and composers too, including
James P. Johnson, J. C. Johnson, Spencer Williams, and Bud Allen,
"who was Fats's permanent sidekick, helping to keep him on time
for dates, get him home and generally look out for him." But most
of Fats's famous songs were written with Razaf. Together they
wrote the scores of several big musicals, the first of which was
Keep Shufflirf in 1925, which contained the songs "How Can You
Face Me" and "My Little Chocolate Bar."

After this success Connie and George Immerman asked them to
do the score of a Connie's Inn show, and "things really started hum-
ming," Andy says. "It was hard to tie Fats down to a job; my mother
used to make all the finest food and special cookies for him just to
keep him out at our home in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We were
working on a show called Load of Coal for Connie and had just
done half the chorus of a number when Fats remembered a date and
announced, 'I gotta go!' I finished up the verse and gave it to him
later over the telephone. The tune was 'Honeysuckle Rose.' "

Fats made records in "1929 in what Razaf describes as "amazingly
informal" record sessions. The first time he led a band under his
own name alone, as Fats Waller and His Buddies, the group "was
gotten together only a few hours beforehand, when he suddenly
realized he had to round up some men. Fats arrived on the date
with a rhythm section comprising just himself and Eddie Condon
on banjo, but the records they made ('Harlem Fuss' and 'Minor
Drag') caused quite a stir."

In later years Fats's recording sessions continued to be "amazingly
informal," with a "standard setup at the piano one bottle on top,

PIANISTS 221

a reserve bottle underneath. Fats would fix up head arrangements,
hardly ever bothering with written music for the men." He did have
an arranger, however, Ken McComber, whom Andy calls "Fats's
closest white friend."

In 1929 Fats and Andy wrote the score for Hot Chocolates, a
musical which was produced in Harlem so successfully that it was
later brought to Broadway. Reminiscing about this show, Andy says,
"I remember one day going to Fats's house on One Hundred and
Thirty- third Street to finish up a number based on a little strain
he'd thought up. The whole show was complete, but they needed
an extra number for a theme, and this had to be it. We worked on it
for about forty-five minutes, and there it was 'Ain't MisbehavinY "
In addition to this outstanding song, their score for this review
contained "Rhythm Man" and "Black and Blue," the tune which
Frankie Laine so successfully revived when he himself was coming
into the big time in 1947 and '48.

Fats and Andy turned out many other popular song hits together:
"Aintcha Glad," "Blue Turning Gray over You," "Concentrating
"Gone," "If It Ain't Love," "Keepin' out of Mischief Now," "My
Fate Is in Your Hands," and "Zonky." But Waller and Razaf had one
ambition that was never realized they wanted to get "a big break in
Hollywood as a team." Despite their many hit tunes, this never hap-
pened, although Waller himself did get to Hollywood briefly. He
proved himself an unforgettable personality when the movies took
full but belated advantage of his miming talents in Stormy Weather.
He stole scenes with his gaily artful manner and his ad-libbed catch-
phrases, such as the characteristic "One never knows, do one?"

In 1932 Fats went to Europe. He planned to appear as half of a
piano-and-vocal team, with Spencer Williams, in London and Paris.
But the story goes that one day Spencer couldn't find Fats anywhere;
"he'd gotten high and jumped on the first boat back to New York."
He didn't return to Europe after that until 1938, when he had a very
successful trip, and, Andy says, "he picked up some Scottish dialect
in Glasgow, had one long ball in London."

Fats's erratic qualities, probably both cause and effect of his heavy
drinking, hurt him more than once. He was drunk at his Carnegie
Hall concert in 1939, turning what might have been a triumph into
an embarrassing fiasco. About three years before he died he was very
ill. A doctor warned him to go on the wagon, which he did for several

222 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

months. He was ill again in 1942, and again was told to take it easy
in fact, he was warned that he would die in a few months if he didn't.
However, as his friend Andy says, "Fats could only take it easy for
just so long. Life to him was one long crescendo, and he had to live
it fast; but he never consciously hurt anybody but himself. ... I
shall always remember him as a great, happy guy who lived a happy,
carefree life that ended much too soon.

"Fats's heart was as big as his body. Money meant nothing to him,
and he was a soft touch for everybody; having a good time and look-
ing out for his family were his greatest interests." Fats was married
twice; he had one son by his first marriage and two by the second.

And speaking of Fats's musical achievements, Razaf says, "Fats was
the most prolific and the fastest writer I ever knew. He could set a
melody to any lyric, and he took great pains working on it, getting
the exact mood and phrasing until the melody would just pour from
his fingers. I used to say he could have set the telephone book to
music."

Fats began to record regularly in 1922, both for player-piano rolls
and for disks. He accompanied some eight blues singers of varying
ability and by 1929, the same year he did the score for Hot Chocolates,
he was recording his own alternately lovely and lusty compositions.
In the year of the Great Crash he recorded such famous original key-
board exercises as "Handful of Keys" and "Numb FumblinY' such
beautiful original melodies as "Ain't Misbehavin' " and "My Fate Is
in Your Hands." The next year he recorded his famous piano duets
with Bennie Payne, who was later featured with Cab Galloway for
many years; the tunes were "St. Louis Blues" and "After You've
Gone." The charming tinkles of the two pianos suggested the multi-
faceted musical personality of Fats; his several sides as an organist, his
work accompanying singers and expanding the musicianship of the
sides made under the names of the Waller and Morris Hot Babies (the
latter was Tom Morris the clarinetist) and the Louisiana Sugar Babes,
implemented that impression; his vocals, after he became a star of the
Victor label in May 1934, made the impression last. Fats made hun-
dreds of sides for Victor between May 1934 and January 1943,
brought at least one first-rate soloist, the guitarist Al Casey, to national
attention, and sold millions of records. None of these accomplish-
ments, however, ranks with his contribution to jazz piano.

One inevitably chooses one's own favorite Waller records: the deli-

PIANISTS 223

cate mincemeat his satirical playing and singing make of such a dog
tune as "The Bells of San Raquel"; the bumptious delight of his "Jingle
Bells"; the gentle trills and exquisite phrasing with which he makes an
attractive tune, "Thief in the Night," into something more; the affect-
ing religious feeling of his organ performances of such spirituals as
"Deep River," "Go Down, Moses," and "All God's Chillun Got
Wings"; his incomparable and surely definitive performances of his
own songs. Whichever one chooses of these styles, built out of ap-
proaches musical and/or commercial, one chooses unique distinction.
In all these styles, at moments or throughout a performance, there is
the languorous legato conception of the piano keyboard which Fats
brought to jazz. By definition the piano is a staccato instrument, tech-
nically a member of the percussion family, and incapable of being
slurred or tied together into glissando phrases. Nonetheless, a few
remarkable pianists, such as Moritz Rosenthal, Sergei Rachmaninoff,
and Fats Waller, have been able to elicit from the hammered strings
of the piano a sustained sound which approaches the long bow of
the violin, viola, cello, and bass and has the added quality that only
a sustained tone on an instrument which does not sustain tone can
provide. As further extension of and contrast with this miraculous
achievement, Fats offered long rows of delicate trills and evenly
articulated arpeggios in his performances, especially of ballads. Some-
times the trills had the effect of a sudden snap or sputter. Count Basic,
in his first recording with his full large band in 1937, "Pennies from
Heaven," played a seeming parody of these snaps and sputters when
he took his piano solo. But while parody of Fats's keyboard devices
was possible, as Fats found it possible to parody many others' vocal
tricks in his own singing, no pianist ever really succeeded in capturing
his grace and limitless flow of tonal beauty. All that was possible was
parodying, such as Count Basic's, or admiring mimicry, such as
Johnny Guarnieri's. When Nat Jaffe and Earl Hines recorded eight
sides as a memorial album for Fats in February 1944, they wisely
played within their own styles; however sincere a compliment imita-
tion might have been, they realized that Fats was inimitable.

Fats Waller wasn't imitated so much as he was absorbed, and none
absorbed him better than Art Tatum. Though his style was often
thought to be derived from Earl Hines 1 , Art himself always acknowl-
edged Fats as his primary source. In one remarkable early morning
I spent with Art and Nat Cole and Erroll Garner at an after-hours

224 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

club on the East Side of Los Angeles, Art played a kind of conversa-
tional battle of music with his two distinguished colleagues. The up-
shot of the evening, full of glittering displays of the techniques and
ideas of the three pianists, was a discussion between Art and Nat in
which the former put the latter to rights about his derivation. "Fats,
man. That's where I come from. And quite a place to come from."
And after Art had demonstrated again and again, with astonishing
and undeniable Waller detail, Nat was prepared to acknowledge
Tatum's acknowledgment and in turn to affirm his own source Earl
Hines, of course. Through all of this Erroll bounced away, with de-
lightful Impressionist asides in the ballads, a little of Hines, a little
more of sophisticated ragtime, and still more of Waller, as much the
father of ErrolFs style as of Tatum's.

From Fats, Art borrowed the left-hand pattern of alternating single
notes and chords called "stride" piano. To Fats, Art added the tenth,
the bass beat based on the chord of that interval. From Fats, Tatum
took touch, soft, sinuous, and classically disciplined. To Fats, Tatum
brought bravura execution, deftly inserted arpeggios, appoggiaturas,
and other brilliantly interpolated ornament, all performed with an
ease that ultimately won him the high praise of Rachmaninoff and
Vladimir Horowitz.

From his very first appearance before a large audience, in an ama-
teur program on a radio station in his native Toledo, it was obvious
that Art Tatum was something of a keyboard phenomenon. He had
switched to the piano from the violin in his middle teens. After that
amateur show he was hired as a staff pianist at radio station WSPD.
His extraordinary fifteen-minute morning programs on that station
were picked up and piped across the country by the Blue Network of
the National Broadcasting Company (now the American Broadcast-
ing Company). He was beginning to get a reputation. Adelaide Hall
took him out of Toledo to tour with her for a year in 1932, with a
long stopover in New York just time enough to amaze some of the
more sensitive natives. After another sojourn in Toledo, during which
he considerably enhanced his radio reputation, Art went to Chicago
to become a fixture at the Three Deuces. He had recorded for Decca
and Brunswick in New York in 1933 and 1934, sides which were
snatched up with an almost delirious glow of excitement by collectors
around the world. In Chicago he did not record, but when he got to
Hollywood for a short appearance in 1937 he picked up a quintet,

PIANISTS 225

most notable for the trumpeting of Lloyd Reese and the clarinet play-
ing of Marshall Royal, and led these capable musicians through four
barrelhouse sides, "Body and Soul," "What Will I Tell My Heart,"
"With Plenty of Money and You," and "I've Got My Love to Keep
Me Warm." These and the four sides he recorded in New York in
November of the same year, shortly before his 1938 tour of Europe,
are properly celebrated by Tatum enthusiasts. The New York sides,
"Gone with the Wind," "Stormy Weather," "Chloe," "The Sheik of
Araby," show Art at his sensitive and gentle best in the first, and at his
most exhibitionistic in the third; the Hollywood sides, on the con-
trary, show him at his roughest and most roisterous the beat domi-
nates these performances and for once Art's technique takes a back
seat, although there was no more than a handful of pianists alive at
the time who could have maintained so firm a beat at so fast a tempo.
With the coming of swing came cash and kudos. Art made a Decca
album that sold very well in 1940; his name helped sell Joe Turner
blues records for the same label, and, even more important, he played
some of his most tasteful and titillating piano back of Joe's shouting
on eight sides in 1941. With Tiny Grimes to plop a mighty plunk on
the electric guitar and Slam Stewart to hum a mighty buzz an octave
above his bowed bass line, Art put together a trio in 1943 that, for
two years at least, combined box office and musicianship as they had
rarely been paired before. It was during the several long runs of the
Tatum trio at several of the Fifty-second-Street hot boxes that Art's
several limitations as a pianist and musician became clear, and some
of us who had shouted, "You can't Imitatum!" began to look for
excuses for such an excess of hyperbole. For one thing, there were
the quotations, endless interpolations of the familiar phrases of
Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," perhaps, Sousa's "The Stars and
Stripes Forever," maybe. Occasionally the quote was apposite when,
for example, Art inserted the melancholy strains of "Good-by For-
ever," made more poignant in a transposition to a minor key, in his
trio performance of "The Man I Love," there was relevance and sly
wit. But apposition and relevance were rare in Tatum's quotations,
and rarely to be found in those of Tiny Grimes, otherwise an able
swinging guitarist. Then, too, there was the vocal exhibition of
virtuosity: Art was taking himself more seriously than he should have;
he was interrupting conversation that cut, however softly, across his
playing one of his now legendary interruptions was delivered on his

226 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

feet, after an abrupt breaking of an individual measure; he turned to
the audience and asked in stentorian tones, "Do I have to perform a
major operation in here to get quiet?" Sometimes Art would go up-
town to Harlem after a full night's and morning's work on the Street,
arriving at an after-hours place at, say, five or five-thirty A.M. He
would look around the room eagerly, peering beneath the half-closed
lid of his one good eye. He would find somebody to play with, some-
body unusually courageous and similarly foolish. For Art played for
keeps. These were battles of music, and their winner was always Art
Tatum, who slaughtered his opponent with unmatchable keyboard
demonstrations.

But Tatum was vulnerable too. The discovery came as a shock to
followers, fans and musicians alike, who in their jazz enthusiasms
rarely stopped to formulate standards or used such standards as were
around. Shortly after the rabid applause had reached a deafening peak,
then, came disillusionment, diminishing audiences, declining interest.
After a hiatus of a few years, in 1950, Tatum again became an impor-
tant jazz name, this time properly applauded as he deserved, but no
longer worshiped as a piano-playing archangel, a role too big for any
man.

Teddy Wilson, born the same year as Art, discovered the tenth-bass
independently of Tatum at about the same time. Most directly in-
fluenced by Hines, the lineaments of whose style can be felt in one
Wilson performance after another, Teddy nonetheless was as original
as Art in his elaboration of piano jazz. Even as Art, Teddy tended to
ornament, but he added a less frivolous and adventitious decoration.
With Goodman, with his own big band in 1939, and thereafter with his
several little bands, Teddy played a live, sometimes muscular, some-
times gentle piano. As a soloist he became adept at stringing together
ballad phrases with fresh countermelodies and fill-in phrases and a
steady moving beat. He submitted himself to traditional keyboard
disciplines and later combined his serious piano studies and jazz-
playing experience to become one of the finest teachers jazz has ever
known, both privately and at such institutions as the Juilliard School
of Music and the Manhattan School of Music.

In 1946 he became a member of the staff band at WNEW, the
New York radio station that has proved most adventurous in its pro-
gramming of popular music, both live and recorded. In nightly ses-
sions with the WNEW band and in a long-playing Piano Moods

PIANISTS 227

record Teddy has shown himself to be not only a fine swing pianist,
but an able exponent of more modern idiom too.

The capacity for growth which Teddy Wilson exemplifies so well
is in various degrees typical of most of the significant pianists who
followed in the footsteps of Earl Hines, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum.
Nat Jaffe, who died of a vascular ailment at the age of thirty, is a
splendid case in point. A well-trained New York musician, he had
the usual Gotham gigging beginning, then, following the tradition,
put in time with such bands as Charlie Barnet's and Jack Teagarden's.
Finally he became a Fifty-second-Street regular. As an accompanist
he developed an uncanny intuitive feeling for every complication,
every minute melodic and rhythmic variation of which a finger is
capable. Billie Holiday swore by rather than at him and insisted he
double from whatever club he was playing in to whatever club she
was singing in, as her accompanist. His few solo records, made in
1944 and 1945, suggest what he might have become if he had lived
beyond the latter year. On four twelve-inch sides with the guitarist
Remo Palmieri and the bass player Leo Guarnieri, he integrated De-
bussyan melodic ideas, jazz phrases, and a fresh rhythmic conception,
never losing his continuity, one of these sides, "These Foolish Things,"
is something of a jazz piano classic. In the four sides he made as half
of the Fats Waller memorial album he ran the gamut of his and jazz's
styles; one of these sides, "How Can You Face Me," has a singular
melodic beauty that does credit both to Fats as a composer and to
Nat as interpreter.

Another first-rate accompanist, in his later years perhaps the best
jazz has ever known, is Jimmy Jones. He came to New York to be-
come a Fifty-second-Street regular in Nat's big year, 1944. Jimmy
arrived as one-third of the Stuff Smith trio, plying his strings along-
side those of Stuff's violin and John Levy's bass. Like Nat, Jimmy
possesses remarkable intuitive gifts: with John providing an anchoring
beat, he managed to follow every eccentric twist and turn and leap
of Stuff's impetuous fiddling personality. As a stylist he softened the
Tatum line to fit his elegant touch, so soft in its articulations that few
recording engineers have been able to do it justice. Not until his 1950
recordings as Sarah Vaughan's accompanist did Jimmy really sound
on records, although he did make some lovely sides for Wax Records,
notably six of Noel Coward's tunes packaged as an album. Like most
of the first-rate pianists of the last quarter of a century, he also is an

228 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

imaginative musician, fully capable of transforming keyboard ideas
into band scores. Some of the finest of the records Steve Smith made
for his own Hot Record Society label in the middle forties are the
product of the Jones imagination, which fits both Tatumesque piano
ideas and Ellingtonian orchestral conceptions, and rarely fails in its
fitting.

Touch and a mingling of traditions are also the defining elements of
the pianists who followed Jess Stacy in his individual departure from
the Hines hallmarks. The best example of Jess's individuality on rec-
ords is that section of the long-playing record of the Benny Goodman
1938 concert devoted to his five "Sing, Sing, Sing" choruses. Here
can be heard the curious mixture of Mozartian elegance and honky-
tonk brashness that makes up the Stacy style. The trumpet-like phras-
ing comes from Hines, of course; the sweet, simple, and beautifully
apt melodic variations from Stacy himself. A number of pianists, such
as Dick Carey and Gene Schroeder, found themselves at ease in this
pairing of piano styles. Two pianists in particular, Joe Bushkin and
Mel Powell, found the style inspiring, and made much of the inspira-
tion.

Joe is generally associated with the Dixieland musicians congre-
gated around Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, and Bobby Hackett
at various times; actually, his most sizable performances were as a band
pianist in his long associations, first with Bunny Berigan and then
with Tommy Dorsey. In later years his galloping transformations of
show tunes, with rhythm or string and rhythm accompaniment,
showed him a far more adventurous pianist than any of his perform-
ances with the Condon gang had indicated he could be.

Mel Powell is a New York product, a prodigy of sorts, whose con-
siderable talents were nurtured in city grammar and high schools. His
precociousness was evidenced in his nursery school years, when he
first began to play the piano. He was a good student in every way,
under a private teacher at first and then later under the instruction of
music teachers at high school, from which he graduated at the age of
fourteen. He had his own band when he was twelve, the Dixieland
Six, which actually found an engagement for itself; it played for six
months at the Palais Royale in Nyack, New York. Still in his teens,
Mel played with the musicians of his fancy, Dixielanders and Nicksie-
landers, such as George Brunies, Jimmy McPartland, Zutty Singleton,
Bobby Hackett, and Willie the Lion Smith, who administered further

PIANISTS 229

Dixieland discipline to the youngster. MePs early style, an intricate
lacework pattern threaded with pointed Dixie ornament and particular
Stacy embroidery, changed some when he moved from the Muigsy
Spanier band to Benny Goodman in 1940. With Benny he was not
only a valuable member of the chamber units but also a fine soloist
in big band numbers and an excellent arranger. He was a developing
musician; with Raymond Scott's radio band and with Glenn Miller's
Air Force behemoth he showed more and more versatility, more and
more of the ability to play with jazzmen of broader scope than his
first associates. After the war, when he made his own sides for Capitol,
he enmeshed himself happily in small band arrangements with a tex-
ture more suggestive of Arnold Schoenberg than of Pee Wee Russell,
Benny Goodman, or Jess Stacy.

Big bands were an aid in the development of Dodo Marmarosa,
much as they had been for Joe Bushkin and Mel Powell, but the key-
board style Dodo developed was very different from theirs. Dodo,
christened Michael in Pittsburgh in 1926, joined Johnny Scat Davis's
orchestra, moved from it to the bands of Gene Krupa, Ted Fio Rito,
Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw before settling down
in Los Angeles in 1945. There he made a series of records with little
bands led by other men and with his own trio for the short-lived
Atomic label. All of them displayed a wide range of technique and
a felicity of phrase, but his playing eventually settled down in bebop,
never again to be revived at least for public consumption with
the delicacy and variety that made his earlier work sparkle.

Nat Cole, who made his reputation as one of jazz's kings and as an
intimate conversational singer, developed rapidly from an able night-
club entertainer and all-around keyboard handyman to a distinguished
musical personality who left a firm imprint upon the Hines tradition
and upon all pianists after him who were a part of it. His early back-
ground included the usual run of one-night and more extended en-
gagements with other bands and his own in Chicago, where his family
moved from Montgomery, Alabama, after he was born. Later he
toured with the vaudeville unit of the Shuffle Along company, and
remained in Los Angeles when the revue broke up there. In the
movie town he developed a small following, which increased con-
siderably when he organized his trio with Oscar Moore as his guitarist
and Wesley Prince as his bass player. Later changes considerably
modified the sound of the trio; but in its most important years, Nat's

230 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

facile fingering and ready thinking combined with Oscar's technically
able and richly intuitive guitar to create the best music with which
King Cole was ever associated and the peak of his pianistic achieve-
ment.

Just as commercial success later narrowed the musical range of
Erroll Garner and Johnny Guarnieri, Nat's winning of public
esteem constricted his playing and removed him from serious con-
sideration as a jazz artist. The same process gradually debilitated the
taste and musicianship of Eddie Heywood, whose broken-chord re-
vitalization of "Begin the Beguine" and other standard tunes ulti-
mately succumbed to inflexible routine in order to maintain an
audience but not before a few delightful records had been made and
the charm of Vic Dickenson's lazy, growly trombone had been felt.

Alongside the lure of commercial success, one must place the
damaging effect of eclecticism on several jazz musicians. Johnny
Guarnieri's consummate ease as a pianist in every known jazz style
was first his making and then his undoing as a serious musician. After
his preliminary engagements with high school bands, George Hall's
orchestra, and Mike Riley's small band, he alternated between Benny
Goodman and Artie Shaw for three years, from 1939 to 1942. He
played expert piano with both men and later with Jimmy Dorsey,
Raymond Scott, and his own trios and small bands; he also played in-
triguing harpsichord with Artie Shaw's Gramercy 5. He played too
well. Johnny's spectacular lack of a musical personality ultimately
made him perhaps the best of radio studio pianists; but he lost that
individual improvisatory spirit which not only identifies but distin-
guishes jazz musicians. The decline of young Andre Previn, from a
brilliant executor of Tatumesque and Cole-ish jazz piano at seventeen
to a motion-picture virtuoso as arranger, conductor, and pianist at
twenty-one, follows a similar pattern. This German-born musician,
splendidly trained in Berlin and Los Angeles by his father and others,
is both a heartening and disheartening example of what jazz can do
to and for a musician. His cocktail piano records for Victor insinuate
jazz; they sparkle both because of the remnants of Andre's early style
and because of an undeniable musical wit and wisdom that will al-
ways be present in his playing; they are also dulled by a superficial
eclecticism that represents nothing more than a concession to record-
company and motion-picture standards, with only occasional and
subtle reminders of the talent thus conceded. Eclecticism, however,

PIANISTS 231

does not necessarily represent decline and fall in jazz; in the music of
Mary Lou Williams it has always meant an unparalleled receptivity
to new ideas and a captivating catholicity of taste.

Mary Lou Williams started to play the piano professionally at six
and she's never stopped since. In the course of her long, intensely ac-
tive career she has rolled up a record, on and off records, which
deserves that much-abused adjective "unique." For Mary has played
a vital creative role in each of the three major eras of jazz since its
New Orleans beginnings, so important a part indeed that one can al-
most calculate the quality and the effect of those eras by her contribu-
tions to them.

Mary Lou Winn grew up with jazz. "People had to hold me on
their laps so I could reach the piano at church affairs and family
parties. I would play for an hour and then rest and then come back
and play some more." Born in Pittsburgh, she had several private
teachers, who taught her the discipline of keyboard performance and
the tradition of its literature. Then, at Westinghouse High School,
she was taught by the same Mrs. Alexander who soon afterward im-
parted so much feeling for music and skill in communicating that
feeling to Billy Stray horn and Erroll Garner. In Pittsburgh Mary
played the usual number of gigs, listening attentively to Earl Hines'
piano when she could, developing under that influence and with the
experience of those one-night seats a style very much her own. By
1025 she was ready for a vacation try at the Orpheum circuit, the big
vaudeville wheel. She joined up with the Syncopaters of John Wil-
liams, whom she later married, accompanying Seymour and Jeanette,
the only colored act on the Orpheum boards. Off and on she played
with that act until 1928, touring the East and Midwest, getting a
thorough schooling in show business. At the tag end of the twenties
her saxophonist husband joined Andy Kirk, and she moved with him.

Mary was with Andy Kirk from 1929 to 1942. She says, "I don't
know too much about those years. I was too happy to remember."
Fortunately that band got around, and its records got further, so its
memorable moments are well preserved, particularly those important
moments presided over by Mary Lou Williams. She didn't actually
join the band until 1931, but while she served Andy as part-time
pianist, chauffeur, and arranger she also recorded with him. Her deli-
cate melodic ideas and driving swing bass can be heard in the first
versions of "Cloudy" and "Froggy Bottom" made by the band, in

232 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

"Mary's Idea" and "Mess-a-Stomp," and in her first piano solos, made
in Chicago in December 1930, "Night Life" and "Drag 'Em." Then
there is a six-year hiatus during which the band did not record. But
Andy was very active in Kansas City in the late Hoover and early
Roosevelt years, and Mary was well on her way to a countrywide
reputation.

"Jack Teagarden and Paul Whiteman used to drop down to hear
me. Glen Gray's musicians never seemed to miss us when they were
in town and then, like so many others, made something of a point of
getting me to play for them and with them. And what they heard was
very different from what you might expect. I know all about 'Kansas
City Jazz/ but we didn't play the blues. And Pete Johnson didn't play
boogie! Yes, we played them occasionally, but things like the boogie
were for very late at night. Musicians would get a kick out of Pete's
flashy boogie then, and we used to roll off some of it as a gag, but it
wasn't our staple. The things I liked, and played, were things like
'Walkin' and Swingin' ' and 'Ghost of Love.' I liked to experiment,
of course. But the blues were the easiest for people to hear, and the
boogie caught on, and when we came to record for Decca in thirty-
six, John Hammond asked us to do those things and so we did more
than our share of them."

On Decca the band developed a popular reputation with such ex-
travagances as "Until the Real Thing Comes Along," chortled in
coloratura style by Pha Terrell, but musicians and youngsters around
the country, responding to the product that was then labeled "swing,"
listened more carefully to Dick Wilson's tenor and Ted Donnelly's
trombone and most attentively to "The Lady Who Swings the Band,"
as one of the Kirk instrumentals was appropriately called. Mary con-
tinued to play and write for Andy right through the big swing years,
turning out such intriguing items as "A Mellow Bit of Rhythm,"
which Red Norvo's band helped make famous; the charming "What's
Your Story, Morning Glory," which she also arranged for Jimmie
Lunceford, to his morning, noon, and evening glory; and "Little Joe
from Chicago," which tacked a story to a boogie line and made
"eight-to-the-bar" music as well as monotony.

Boogie woogie stayed very close to Mary after she left the band.
As she explains, "Once you get known as a boogie player, you've got
to play boogie, boogie all the time." And so she did, at Cafe Society
Downtown and Uptown in New York, at night clubs stretched across

PIANISTS 233

the country, at concerts and on record sessions. Happily for her
sanity, she didn't stick to the same tremolos, the same pedal figures,
the same raw routines she had temporarily enlivened for Benny Good-
man in "Roll 'Em" and for Andy Kirk in "Little Joe" and "Froggy
Bottom." She experimented. She kept moving.

"You can freshen anything. There's no reason to play anything
including Dixie the way they've been playing it." Mary says this and
proves it with her composing and arranging and playing. Listen to
her 1936 piano parody, "Corny Rhythm," a take-off so gentle many
listeners thought she was playing straight. Listen to her 1944 "You
Know, Baby" on Asch, with Bill Coleman and Al Hall a witty
variation on love songs, that suffered only from inadequate recording.
Or listen to what happens to "Star Dust" through two twelve-inch
sides of polished and pert writing and playing (by Mary, Vic Dicken-
son, Dick Vance, Don Byas, Claude Green, and rhythm) made around
the same time. Perhaps you heard her dramatic evocation of the
signs of the zodiac in the suite for woodwinds, jazz horns, and rhythm
which was the centerpiece of her 1945 Town Hall concert, or her
tw r o albums of piano performances of the same music. Maybe you
heard seventy men of the New York Philharmonic Symphony swing
really swing their way through three parts of this suite at Carnegie
in 1946. In 1946 Mary also invested the drab lines of boogie woogie
and the unswinging accents of waltz time with brilliance in her
"Waltz Boogie." And then there is "Oobladee," a fairy tale in flatted
fifths, which is Mary Lou Williams' fetching freshening of bop.

She doesn't stop because she can't. In Pittsburgh, in 1948, an
eighty-year-old man who runs a sixty-voice mixed choir asked her to
write for his group. "Do something like that 'Blue Skies' you arranged
for Duke," he suggested. Mary got together with Milt Orent, with
whom she wrote "Oobladee," and came up with a nine-minute spirit-
ual, "Elijah and the Juniper Tree," setting the words of a New York
poet, Monty Carr, to music that employs modern changes and suggests
bop in its texture.

"I was trained to play with everyone and to play everything. I grew
up around older musicians and I listened to a lot and I learned. I lis-
tened to how a pianist pushed, like Count Basie, and I pushed.
I broadened, I moved, I experimented. That's what I've always
taught the kids who come to me. You've got to keep going.
There's only one reason, really, to stop. That's to take account, to

234 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

get new sounds, to get the sounds you're not hearing. Today" this
was in 1949 "Lennie's about the only original pianist around, Lennie
[Tristano] and Bud Powell; you've got to credit Bud. While the other
boys are playing the same runs, the same bop phrases, youVe got to
play something fresh and new, even if the form is old. And if the form
is too old, you've got to find new forms. It's difficult for a creative
artist to live; there are all kinds of obstacles. But as long as you keep
your music broad in its scope, fresh in its ideas, and experimental,
you'll make it."

Chapte

FIGURES

OF TRANSITION

The structure of modern jazz is not the product of one man or a
number of men. It is much more an evolution of forms, sometimes
orderly, sometimes disorderly, away from the first catch-as-catch-can
attempts of New Orleans musicians, the boisterous phrases of swing,
and the intervening music, which was never any one style but was
certainly closest to Dixieland. While no single musician or group
created modern jazz although it did evolve from its antecedents
the impact of a few men upon their contemporaries and successors in
the decade following the swing period was so strong that, in the jazz
sense of the word, it can be said that they "made" modern jazz.

Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Jimmy Blanton, and Charlie Christian,
along with a few lesser figures, can be held accountable, in some such
order, for the jazz called modern. It used to be called "progressive/'
a word w r hich has more philosophical and political significance than
musical and isn't very much more precise in those contexts than
it is in jazz. The music will, I suppose, continue to be called modern
or new, and considerable use of the adjective "cool" will continue to
be made to describe the efforts of modern and new jazz musicians;
for cool their music surely is insofar as it is relaxed, organized in its
lines, and shaped by a soft and consistent sound. And yet the four
men who made modern jazz, from whom, in one way or another,
most of what is cool derives, are characterized in their playing by an
enormous drive, by an unmistakable push and vigor, by qualities that
define what used to be called "hot" in jazz.

The epitome of coolness among these distinguished ancestors of
modern jazz is Lester Young. But Lester is also a summary example
of driving, vigorous tenor saxophone. It is a point not to forget in
evaluating the size of his contribution. It is clear that the tone of his
instrument was very different from that of other tenormen, though

235

236 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

there was perhaps a suggestion of it in the work of a Kansas City
contemporary who played the same horn Dick Wilson of the Andy
Kirk band. No one, however, until Lester came along, believed that
the sound of the tenor could be other than thick, swollen with vibrato
and phrased for plushness the sound, in sum, of Coleman Hawkins.
Lester changed all that. His tone was attenuated, compounded of
leanly inflected notes, with a minimum of the furry vibration asso-
ciated with Hawk and his horde of followers. His phrases were longer
than the traditional riff; when at a loss for fresh ideas, he would extend
his statements by hanging on to one or two notes in a kind of auto-
horn honk that gave his solos a quality of cohesion; his lines hung
together, even if suspended precariously from a single note. And how
they swung!

It is not entirely true, as the legend of Lester Young seems to insist,
that all of his solos with the Count Basic band after 1936, or with
various pick-up groups recording under Teddy Wilson and Billie
Holiday, remain fresh and stimulating today. Some of his work was
as stale and stiff as his competitors', some of it as dulled by riffs, some
of it as imitative of Hawkins and as inept as the poorest of the imita-
tions. But the earmarks of a bright style did emerge in Basic's "Taxi
War Dance" and "Twelfth Street Rag/' in his own "Lester Leaps In,"
made with a small Basic group, and the coupled "Dickie's Dream." His
inventive use of ballad materials is apparent in "You Can Depend on
Me" and "I Never Knew"; and even more of the style, which has been
used to such engaging effect on ballads by Stan Getz, Allen Eager,
Sonny Siitt, Brew Moore, Herb Steward, and Zoot Sims (to mention
just a few of the school), can be heard on "Jive at Five." A brief nod
in the direction of the clarinet on "Texas Shuffle" and a Kansas City
Six date for Commodore indicate that this neglected instrument might
have been as richly adapted to cool jazz as the tenor if Lester had been
more inclined to follow its humors.

It is fitting that this man, unanimously if unofficially elected presi-
dent of their numbers by modern tenormen (hence his nickname
"Pres"), should have succeeded Coleman Hawkins in the Fletcher
Henderson band when Hawk left for Europe in 1934. The qualities
that secured Pres's election were not readily apparent, however, until
he joined Count Basic in 1936 and came east with him. Then the New
Orleans-born musician (1909) cut all his early ties which included,
besides Henderson, some time with King Oliver and Andy Kirk

FIGURES OF TRANSITION 237

lifted his horn high in the air, and began to make modern jazz. It took
some years for musicians to spot that horn, raised inches over Pres's
head; when they did, right after the Second World War, the panic
was on to push vibrato aside, pick up his licks, and produce his sound.
After 1945 everybody who was tenor-sax anybody was blowing
Lester and getting an audience except Lester, whose several small
bands lived and died in comparative obscurity. But during 1950 it
was thought proper even, one might say, hip to listen to Lester
directly, and he began to catch on a little more as a live figure, still
persuasive, still cool, still driving, whatever the limitations of his har-
monic and melodic imagination. He is, after all, the Pres.

A similar distinction belongs to Roy Eldridge, but the acknowl-
edgment is less easily forthcoming from young musicians. It is
generally understood that Dizzy Gillespie derives from Roy. Most
musicians with ears to hear and records to play can distinguish the
large change Roy effected on his chosen horn. But while Dizzy moved
from Roy's sound to his own, younger trumpeters have been content
to borrow from Dizzy directly or simply to carry over Charlie Par-
ker's or Lester's lines to their instruments. The results have not always
been salutary. There is always a loss, by definition, when a large step
in the history of an art is forgotten or, when remembered, avoided.
The consequences in this case have been grievous: bop trumpet was
bop all right; it was not always trumpet, and new trumpeters, now
that bop is fading as an organized expression, simply are not appearing.

Of the three men who fashioned, in their separate ways, the jazz
trumpet as we know it Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy
Gillespie Roy is the key figure, I think. He marks the transition from
New Orleans to bop; under his tutelage the trumpet emerged from a
blues bondage and a tonal servitude; as a result of his performances the
instrument was extended in range and color and agility. Without Roy,
Dizzy would have been impossible and the brass section of the jazz
band would never have achieved that full, glowing, vibrant life it
has been known to have upon exultant occasion. With the diminutive
figure so aptly dubbed "Little Jazz" by that master of nomenclature,
Toby Hard wick, jazz was given an additional dimension and the
trumpet was brought to maturity.

In a profession that writes off performers almost as quickly as base-
ball retires its pitchers, Roy Eldridge has been around a long time. He
was born in 1911 and he has been playing professionally for close to

238 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

a quarter of a century. He's been heard with little kid bands around
his native Pittsburgh, with a carnival show, with Horace Henderson,
the Chocolate Dandies, Speed Webb, Cecil Scott, Elmer Snowden,
Charlie Johnson, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Teddy Hill, Fletcher
Henderson, Gene Krupa, Artie Shaw, and his own bands, large and
small, American, and recently French. From a peppery little musician
who played everything "up," as fast as possible, he developed into
a trumpeter who could and can do anything anybody else can do
on his horn and a number of things nobody else would think of at-
tempting. From the first notes that one can remember hearing Roy
blow, there has been that astonishing sound. He describes it best him-
self.

"I tell you what I love about the trumpet. I love to hear a note
cracking. A real snap. It's like a whip when it happens. It hits hard
and it's really clean, round and cracked."

Roy is very much aware of the quality of the trumpet which is its
own. "When I first came to New York," he says, "I had to play every-
thing fast and double fast. I couldn't stand still. Like a lot of youngsters
today, all my ballads had to be double time. I was fresh. I was full
of ideas. Augmented chords. Ninths. The cats used to listen to me.
'Well,' they'd say, 'he's nice, but he don't say nothing!' Consequently,
I didn't work." There were other things he did. "I was playing fine
saxophone on the trumpet. Trying to hold notes longer than they
should be held, trying to get a sound which I couldn't and shouldn't
get. When I discovered that the trumpet has a sound all its own, and
a way of playing all its own, then I began to play."

It's not strange that Roy reached for saxophone lines when he
picked up his trumpet. "The two men who have been my favorites
ever since I began playing music are Benny Carter and Coleman Haw-
kins. They really inspired me. I'd listen to them and be stunned, man.
I didn't know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what
knocked me out. They'd do eight bars and then play what I called a
'turn-around.' Eight and 'turn-around.' Changes, man. I dug." Thus
Roy praises these master saxophonists' creative modulations and
imaginative alteration of chords and melodies.

Louis too, of course, played his vital part. "I went up to the Lafa-
yette Theatre to try and discover what he was doing. I sat through one
show, and nothing happened. I figured this couldn't be it. I sat through
another. Then Louis started to build, chorus after chorus; he came to

FIGURES OF TRANSITION 239

a real climax, an organized climax, right, clean, clear. Man, I stood
up with the rest of them. I could see why people were digging him."

What was it about Louis? "It was feeling. It's always feeling when
it's right. It's also building, giving your solo shape, going somewhere."

The feeling Roy looks for doesn't occur more than four or five
times a year in his own playing, he insists. "When it's there, nothing
matters. Range, speed, sound they just come. It's nothing I use; I
can be cold sober. From somewhere, it comes.'' He describes an in-
tuitive process, in which everything he has ever learned spills over
into his music, finding structure and meaning. "Afterward I sit up in
my room and try to figure it out. I know I haven't cleaned my horn,
but the sound was 'gone'! I know my lip isn't in that good shape, but
I made an altissimo C as big and fat as the C two octaves lower. It
just doesn't figure." Afterward he is usually sick. "One night recently
in Chicago they pushed me up against a bunch of young boppers.
Well, maybe I was lucky; I was blowing; it was one of those nights.
I got home, and the next day I had pneumonia."

Roy likes much that he has heard of modern jazz. "Man, I don't put
anything down that anybody's trying. Naturally I dig Charlie Parker
he's blowing. And I certainly like the long lines when they come
off. Chu Berry used to play like that sometimes two choruses at a
stretch. He had a way of breathing in rhythm so he could carry him-
self all the way without interruption."

He's interested in the possibility of free improvisation. "Clyde Hart
and I made a record like that once. We decided in front that there'd
be no regular chords, we'd announce no keys, stick to no progressions.
Only once I fell into a minor key; the rest was free, just blowing.
And, man, it felt good."

But with most of his records, "I just don't seem to make it. I'm
not sure I ever made a good record. Usually the tunes are bad, or
everybody's in a hurry. Yeah, there is one, anyway. I like the 'Rockin'
Chair' I made with Gene. I didn't know what I'd played until Ben
Webster played it for me on the Coast. I didn't even know who it
was. When I heard the introduction I thought it was Louis. I can
truthfully say that I played what I wanted to play on that record. And
maybe, too, on the 'Embraceable You' I made with a studio band.
Some of the other things you know. 'After You've Gone' was made
to make people applaud. There were some other moments here and
there and maybe we got a little bit of the sound of the band I had at

240 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

the Deuces in Chicago in 1937. 'Heckler's Hop,' maybe; 'Florida
Stomp.' That was a crazy band. The most flexible. There was nothing
those cats couldn't do. And you never knew what they were coming
up with. We could be doing 'Limehouse Blues' way up in tempo, look
at the clock, and do a direct segue into the theme."

Those of us who heard Roy and his brother Joe and Scoops Carey
on altos, John Collins on guitar, Teddy Cole on piano, Truck Parham
on bass, Zutty Singleton on drums in that band, remember very well
the suppleness and authority with which it played. It makes us starry-
eyed about the mythical Golden Age of jazz when we listen to those
Vocalions, even those of us with the most resolute of modern tastes.
Perhaps there's a reason and a connection, or maybe a direct sequence
of styles and ideas. Roy Eldridge, after all, represents taste and skill,
and those are not ephemeral values that fade with the passing of a
style, an era, or a movement in jazz. His career reaches into a past that
produced jazzmen of solid stature. He came up at a time when it was
not possible to achieve full-fledged fame at twenty and extinction
at twenty-two. It is true that he played in comparative obscurity for
several years, trying unsuccessfully to succeed with his own big band,
playing a year with Gene Krupa, during which he received star bill-
ing but didn't actually get to play as much as his talents or the billing
deserved. Then, in the spring of 1950, he journeyed to Paris to receive
the first proper appreciation of his music since his early days with
Krupa and Shaw. Paris was Roy's home for a year almost, it seemed
to him, a permanent home; but the standards of music and musicians
were not high enough, so in the spring of 1951 Roy came home again
to lock horns in battles of music with Dizzy Gillespie at Birdland in
New York and to try once again. His taste and skill have not dimin-
ished; his time is just as good as it ever was, and some of us sometimes
think it was the best; his* sound is unimpaired, and those who think it
is untouched on trumpet are not so few; his position remains big, per-
haps beyond dispute. He has never lost sight or sound of the character
of his instrument. Through all the years since 1928 Roy Eldridge has
been a brassman with a fondness and a talent for the drama, the pas-
sion, and the power which only the trumpet can bring to jazz. Like
all the other masters of this music, he has always struggled to get
ahead, to make musical as well as economic progress. When bebop
came along, Roy was frightened; he found it difficult to understand
and didn't see a place for himself in the new music. But after a certain

FIGURES OF TRANSITION 241

amount of scuffling, a series of disappointing trips with his own band
and others, a year abroad, and a return to the United States, he was
confident again. He could hear his contribution in other men's play-
ing as well as his own. He had a raft of fresh ideas, nurtured through
the bad years and the fine times in Paris. Roy knew once again that
the general and the personal struggles were worth making.

Harry Edison, with Count Basic in Lester Young's day and still
with him in bebop's, was too shy, too little concerned with his own
personal advancement, to battle for his ideas. But all with an ear to
hear recognized the advance in trumpet made with his perky triplets,
his witty melodic variations and subtle changes of chord structure.

Jimmy Blanton's musical battle was for a line, any line, that could
be called his instrument's own. The bass was a thumper when he took
over; he left it a jumper. Actually the Blanron battle was a pushover.
Duke Ellington, when he heard Jimmy playing with Fate Marable's
band in St. Louis, was immediately convinced. Bass players all over
America were won with a couple of measures of "Jack the Bear" and
"Ko-Ko" and "Sepia Serenade," when they heard the tone and the
authority and the beat of the best bassman jazz has ever known. A few
of them were fortunate enough to get copies of his duets with Duke,
the "Blues," "Plucked Again," "Fitter Panther Patter," "Sophisticated
Lady," "Body and Soul," and "Mr. J. B. Blues," all now long out of
print. On those exhilarating sides Jimmy demonstrated in 1939 and
1940 that the big violin was, like its small relative, a melodic instru-
ment, that its melodic lines joined those of the brass and reeds in jazz
as snugly and imaginatively as a guitar's, and that its rhythmic figures
did not have to be limited to so many syncopated beats a bar. Jimmy
died of tuberculosis in 1942 in a California sanatorium, having accom-
plished in the last four of his twenty-three years what few musicians
manage in a lifetime. He brought his instrument to maturity, gave it
a solo position in jazz, and went much of the way toward revolution-
izing the rhythmic patterns which, unchanging, gave every indication
of constricting and eventually killing jazz.

It was not only changes in bass playing and writing and thinking
that Jimmy Blanton effected in his brief career in the big jazz time.
When Jimmy joined Duke in St. Louis in 1939 the Ellington band
had lost some of its spirit. It was still making lovely records; there
were still occasional experimental scores forthcoming from Duke,
such as the 1937 exercise in dynamics and the structure of the blues,

242 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

"Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue"; the small units of the band, led
by Barney Bigard, Johnny Hodges, Rex Stewart, and Cootie Wil-
liams, had been making charming records and continued to make
them until 1941. There was still melodic imagination in songs written
to order, such as the downtown Cotton Club Revue pieces, "I Let
a Song Go out of My Heart" and "If You Were in My Place"; there
were all the swinging vehicles for soloists, such as Lawrence Brown's
"Rose of the Rio Grande" and Rex Stewart's "Boy Meets Horn"; Ivy
Anderson was as good as ever as she plied the amusing but poignant
phrases of "A Lonely Co-ed" and the mood, one of screaming through
tears, of "Killin' Myself." In spite of all these happy circumstances,
the full measure of the Ellington band's resources at the beginning of
World War II was not discovered until Jimmy Blanton joined up.
Those resources were epitomized in the members of the organization
who were almost as new as Blanton: Ben Webster, who joined just
before Jimmy did; and Billy Strayhorn, who preceded Ben by a few
months.

Duke knew the work of Ben Webster pretty well by the time he
hired him. He knew that Ben had a violent temper which exhibited
itself on rare occasions, and to go with it a sweetness of disposition
which exhibited itself far more often. He knew that Ben was perhaps
the best of all the tenor saxophonists in the Coleman Hawkins tradi-
tion with the exception of Hawk himself and that he had devel-
oped on the Hawkins theme a variation of singular loveliness, articu-
lated in husky tones, occasionally kicked over for a summary blast
or two even as his temperament changed on occasion from a soft
affability to erupting ire. Benny, as he was called by his friends, was
born in Kansas City in 1909, educated in a local high school and by
private music teachers who taught him the violin and piano. Before
he went to Wilberforce University he had turned to the tenor, an
instrument on which he had received almost no formal instruction. His
first professional job was with an Oklahoma band, playing the piano;
thereafter he played both the piano and the alto before switching
permanently to the tenor in 1929 when he was with the Dean Coy
band. Before joining Duke he played with Cab Galloway's sister,
Blanche; with the Kansas City bands of Bennie Moten and Andy
Kirk; with Fletcher Henderson in 1934; and for almost two years, in
1937 and 1938, with Benny Carter, Willie Bryant, and Cab Galloway,
as well as the small bands of Stuff Smith and Roy Eldridge. Although

FIGURES OF TRANSITION 243

his conception of the jazz phrase and sound was entirely different
from Lester Young's, nonetheless his playing with Ellington from
1939 to 1942 had more than a suggestion, in its restraint and careful
adjustment of solo lines to orchestral patterns, of the music that was
to come in the following decade. In Jimmy Blanton's reorganization
of the Ellington band's beat and abrupt modernization of its rhythmic
feel, Benny found a sturdy support for his own modern ideas. Their
mutual compatibility and dual contribution to the Ellington band in
its modern period can be heard in "Conga Brava" and "Cottontail,"
in "Bo jangles," and in most of the other sides they made together from
their entry into the band in 1939 and their first recording in February
1940, through the sides made in Hollywood in September 1941.

Billy Strayhorn auditioned for Duke in December 1938 in Pitts-
burgh, to which his family had moved a few years after his birth in
Dayton, Ohio. He played a song called "Lush Life," for which he
had written both the words and music. It did not find a large audience
until more than ten years later when Nat Cole made it into a big hit
with the aid of a lush string orchestra and the musical life that arranger
Pete Rugolo was able to give it; but Duke was impressed back in
1938 by this and the other songs Strayhorn played for him backstage
at the Stanley Theatre. He told Billy that he liked his songs, said he
was sorry Strayhorn couldn't leave copies with him because they
were the only ones Strayhorn had and suggested Billy look him up
when he came to New York. Billy did, the following February; Duke
bid for his services, and Strayhorn became a member of the organiza-
tion. The band recorded Billy's lovely song, "Something to Live For,"
in which Jean Eldridge no relation to Roy made her single but
sumptuous singing entry with the band on records. Then Billy was
employed as arranger for the small recording units, demonstrated his
several scoring talents as arranger and composer, and was welcomed
into a position second only to Duke's with the Ellingtonians. It was
with Jimmy Blanton playing bass in the rhythm section of the big
band and of the small units that Billy's most impressive contributions
to jazz were made: the enormously successful middle-tempo tribute
to subway life in New York, "Take the A Train," was engineered
rhythmically by Jimmy; so were Strayhorn's lovely impressionist
pastiches, "After All" and "Chelsea Bridge"; so were his extravagantly
lush but wholly successful settings for Johnny Hodges' alto, the small-
band "Daydream" and "Passion Flower." The last-named was in a

244 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

sense an apt description of Strayhorn's sensuous nature, which led
him early in his professional career to lead a hedonistic life. Perhaps it
would be too much to say that Jimmy Blanton acted as a brake upon
Billy Strayhorn's sentimental musical excesses; nonetheless it is true
that after Blanton's death Strayhorn wrote very little that had the
quality of the compositions and arrangements he scripted when
Jimmy was alive and kicking. The whole band suffered as a result
of Jimmy's death, not only in its loss of an incomparable rhythmic
complement and bass soloist, but also in the consequent sagging in
spirits. It was after Blanton died that Duke composed his monumental
"tone parallel to the history of the American Negro," "Black, Brown,
and Beige." It was after Blanton's death that Duke had his several
Carnegie Hall concert triumphs; and after Jimmy died there were
many fine compositions still to come and still some of the imaginative
solos of such musicians as Ray Nance, Jimmy Hamilton, Taft Jor-
dan, Carney, Hodges, Brown, Tizol, and Tricky Sam. Nonetheless
when Jimmy died the last great solo phase of the Ellington band was
over. Thereafter, however fresh and facile the work of the Ellington
soloists, it was Duke's and Strayhorn's writing for which one listened
to the band; everything else was essentially ornamental. As the writ-
ing of extended works in more or less new forms changed the Elling-
ton tradition, so Jimmy transformed the way and the power of these
musicians' playing. His death made performances that came after
necessarily less coordinated and cogent; after him, one had to look to
a whole new generation of jazzmen to find anything comparable in
rhythmic brilliance and melodic ingenuity.

Charlie Christian was just a year older than Jimmy; he was as for-
midable a solo and rhythmic influence, and a sad parallel in his suc-
cumbing to tuberculosis the same year the brilliant bassist did. Like
Blanton, he joined an important band Benny Goodman's in 1939;
like Blanton, he brought his rhythm instrument, the guitar, from
background anonymity to solo splendor; like Blanton, he placed a
hitherto restricted instrument well within the melodic frame of jazz,
raising the guitar line almost to dominating importance in the Good-
man sextet. Unlike Blanton, Eldridge, or Young, Charlie Christian has
a direct connection with bebop. He played up at Minton's in Harlem
in those first experimental sessions which yielded, in the early forties,
the altered chords, the fresher melodic lines, the rows of even beats
and contrasting dramatic accents of bop. Some of the participants in

FIGURES OF TRANSITION 245

the early after-hours affairs credit Charlie with the name "bebop,"
citing his humming of phrases as the onomatopoeic origin of the term.
All of the musicians who played with him then, as all of us who heard
him, insist on his large creative contribution to the music later asso-
ciated with Parker and Gillespie.

Charlie was born in Texas, bred in Oklahoma; he played in the
Southwest and Midwest before joining Benny. His bigtime experience
brought him attention and some development of style, but according
to all who heard and played with him in his early years, the lines, the
drive, and the legato rhythmic feeling were always the^e. He was a
natural musician, whose naturalness presaged the inevitable change in
jazz from roar to restraint, from childish blast to mature speculation.
Limited by the clatter of riffs in the Goodman groove, his imagination
soars free in at least some of his solos on the records made by Benny's
sextet; in "Solo Flight" it has most of a record in which to make its
impressive point, and there are lovely Christian moments on sides
made with Lionel Hampton, Edmond Hall, Eddy Howard, and the
Metronome All Star bands of 1940 and 1941.

If one listens to the two sides of the long-playing record that Jerry
Newman issued on his Esoteric label, one hears Charlie Christian
in all his glory. These sides were originally tape recordings made by
Jerry at jam sessions in Minton's Playhouse, the dining room and club
that Henry Minton, ex-saxophonist and musicians' union delegate,
made out of part of the Hotel Cecil on One Hundred and Eighteenth
Street in Harlem. The recording was made in May 1941; it was made
because Jerry, like every one of the rest of us who heard Charlie with
Benny Goodman or in such sessions, knew he was a musician whose
every moment counted. Here, playing with some of the first musicians
to make the move from swing to bebop, Charlie plays rhapsodic
chorus after chorus, threading his way through such familiar chords
and melodic lines as those of "Stompin' at the Savoy" to give shape
to a whole new conception of music. The beat never stops; its steady
pulsation is elaborated, complicated, simplified. The sound never loses
beauty or flourish; the harpsichord-like texture of Charlie's guitar is
produced in arpeggios, trills, cascades, clusters, in phrases sometimes
of tumultuous power, sometimes of elegant restraint. The recording
shows clearly what Charlie did for the electric guitar, which before
him was played on jazz records only by Floyd Smith with Andy
Kirk's band, in a manner that was engaging but not much beyond

246 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

the formulations of the blues. Charlie changed the playing technique
of the guitar and structured for it a dramatic role in jazz which, for
all their imagination and resourcefulness, Eddie Lang, Carl Kress, and
Dick McDonough had never dreamed of. He made it possible for
guitarists such as Barney Kessel, Chuck Wayne, and Billy Bauer to
think and speak musically on a level with trombonists, trumpeters,
and saxophonists. So effectively did he transform the guitar from a
rhythmic servant into an eloquent master that today very few bands,
big or small, can find guitarists good enough for their needs and
after Christian a bad one would be unthinkable.

These are the large figures of transition. Their pioneering is evi-
dence of the inventive brilliance of jazz musicians; without them
present-day jazz would not be the provocative music it is, the re-
flective music, the music of idea and developed statement. Without
Charlie Christian and Jimmy Blanton jazz not only misses two vital
voices, it lacks any development of the guitar and the bass. Roy
Eldridge is still with us, playing with the conviction and the cogency
of a vigorous jazzman, but trumpeters are insufficiently aware of him.
Lester Young is very much a part of modern jazz, but while the
coolness he contributed is unmistakable in his disciples, his drive in
most instances seems to elude them. The spirit the Ellington band
possessed when Billy Strayhorn, Ben Webster, and Jimmy Blanton
were together in it did have a flowering or two after Jimmy's death,
but not of equal brilliance. As in the times of migration and depres-
sion, new continuity with the past has to be established with each
development in jazz. Modern jazz knows where it comes from, but
not why. A fresh examination of these men might prove again as sug-
gestive and as stimulating as the first contact with them did, if it digs
beneath the surface superficialities of their influence to discover how
right, how rich, how inevitable it was that these should have been the
men who made modern jazz.

Chapter

20

SINGERS

Singing came in when swinging went out. Off and on a band would do
well; regularly a Frank Sinatra or a Perry Como or a Dinah Shore
would lead stampedes to the box office, draw screams from an audi-
ence and nickels from jukebox patrons, sell millions of their records.
A singer, after all, offered not only a voice but a visual manner, not
only a face but a calculated grimace. The day of the swooner for
many, more accurately, the return of the seven-year locust was in
many ways a dismal one; it was also a sharp change of focus. The
Second World War had as serious an impact upon the American peo-
ple as the depression of twelve years earlier, although its effect upon
their economy was quite the opposite. A kind of papier-mache ro-
mance was used to fabricate the fantasies of the forties.

Earlier the pleasure of the mob, running feverishly to cover from
the onslaughts of drought and despair and no work, had elected Russ
Columbo, Rudy Vallee, Will Osborne, and Bing Crosby entertainers
inordinary. Then, when death had taken one, a change of taste had
diminished the stature of two others, and by popular election the last
had become a maker and keeper of the American Dream, the public
had turned to bands. Bands in turn turned to singers. The leaders of
swing had always liked singers; those who had worked with Paul
Whiteman had played alongside Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys
and Mildred Bailey, the first important singer with a band; others,
both leaders and sidemen, had accompanied innumerable singers on
records, from the royal families of the blues to the passing fancies of
the men in charge. When Benny took his band out on the road in
1935 he took Helen Ward with him. Helen was a better singer than
most of those who took up valuable time when the swing bands were
on the stands and made serious jazz lovers nervous and irritable.
Sometimes Helen had a nervous vibrato, which she later conquered

247

248 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

in a brief return to music with Hal Maclntyre's band; usually she was
capable of tasteful interpretations and an attractive sound. Peg La
Centra, who sang with Artie Shaw's first band in 1936, was, like Helen
and like Jeanne Burns, who sang with Adrian Rollini's Taproom Gang
in 1935, essentially in the Mildred Bailey tradition warm, languorous
in her phrasing, and as delicate as her native gifts permitted. Jeanne,
a good musician with an intuitive grasp of the singing line, had a style
perhaps a bit more personalized, one which she turned in later years
into a considerable songwriting ability. Tommy Dorsey started with
Edith Wright and Jack Leonard, the first a showwoman, the second
a gentle-voiced crooner who paved the way for Frank Sinatra. Later
Tommy featured, along with Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, a well-
disciplined vocal group whose proudest boast was Jo Stafford; she
became the best jazz singer Tommy ever had, skilled in most of the
rhythmic bypaths, but she changed into a straightforward commer-
cial singer when she left the band. Brother Jimmy more than doubled
his income as a result of the gimmick he worked out with his two
singers, Bob Eberle, to whom was entrusted the first, slow baritone
chorus of a tune, and Helen O'Connell, who was given the second,
double-time chorus to plunge through. But able as some of these
singers were, successful as half of them became, theirs were not the
jazz voices; they were with other bands. For a while Artie Shaw had
Billie Holiday; Chick Webb had Ella Fitzgerald; Red Norvo had his
wife, Mildred Bailey.

Back in 1936 they used to call Mildred Bailey and Red Norvo Mr.
and Mrs. Swing. The labels were deserved. Red was the epitome of
swing, Mildred the epitome of good swinging and good singing.

Mildred could be counted on to bring the house or the night club
or the concert hall down, with songs such as her favorites, "Lover,"
"Honeysuckle Rose," "Squeeze Me," "More Than You Know/'
"Don't Take Your Love from Me," and "There'll Be Some Changes
Made." Rehearing her old concerts and personal performances on
records confirms the original impression she used to make: Mildred
was an audience spellbinder, with her exquisite phrasing, the intrinsic
loveliness of her voice, and her fine rocking beat. The song most
closely and permanently identified with her, of course, was "Rockin*
Chair." This and other pieces written especially for her, like the witty
Sonny Burke-Bill Engvick-Hughie Prince "Scrap Your Fat," and
other beautiful Baileyana such as "From the Land of the Sky-blue

SINGERS 249

Water," the familiar Indian plaint in swing tempo, Mildred sang
warmly, wonderfully, singing her heart out, singing with delicacy
and grace. She was a feelingful and affecting singer and, when neces-
sary, a funny one. She was almost a tradition in herself.

Mildred Bailey was born in Tekoa, Washington, in 1903. Her
mother, who was part Indian, used to run through Indian songs and
rites with her and, when the family moved to Spokane, often took her
over to the near-by Coeur d'Alene Reservation. Mildred said of her
Indian repertory, "I don't know whether this music compares with
jazz or the classics, but I do know that it offers a young singer a
remarkable background and training. It takes a squeaky soprano and
straightens out the clinkers that make it squeak; it removes the bass
boom from the contralto's voice, this Indian singing does, because
you have to sing a lot of notes to get by, and you've got to cover
an awful range." As a child, the one girl in the Rinker family,
Mildred covered many musical ranges with her three brothers, all
of whom ended up in the music business; with Bing Crosby, who
was a neighbor; and with all the other jazz fans in their part of town
who sang or hummed or played. Mildred was married at an early
age and moved to Los Angeles. There she was divorced; there she sang
some and listened more to men who were making "the West Coast
kick in the late twenties." In late 1929 Paul Whiteman was in Cali-
fornia and looking hard for a girl singer. Until that time no girl
had sung regularly with a jazz band, and Paul wanted to be the
first in this, as he had been in so many other things. Musing one
night at a party about his troubles in finding a girl, Whiteman ran
into the family patriotism of Mildred's brother Al and Bing Crosby,
two-thirds of his own Rhythm Boys, whose high praise of Mildred
sparked Paul's interest. They called Mildred, and she ran right over
to audition for him and that, of course, was enough; she was hired
on the spot. She didn't record with Paul Whiteman, but she made
many sides with musicians from his orchestra: with Eddie Lang she
sang Hoagy Carmichael's arrangement of "What Kind o' Man Is
You"; with Mattie Malneck and many of the Whiteman musicians
she made Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind" and, among nine
other sides, "Rockin' Chair." Mildred became inseparably associated
with the ditty of pity for dear old Aunt Harriet. The year she made
her first sides with Malneck 1931 she met and fell in love with
Red Norvo, who joined Whiteman in Chicago at the end of the year.

250 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Just after she and Red left Whiteman, in the winter of 1933, they
were married. Mildred recorded with pick-up bands led by Benny
Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers, with the Casa Loma band, and
with several of her own date outfits; Red did some gigging around
town and some recording too, but the two years after Whiteman
were lean. The leanness left them when Kenneth, as Mildred always
called Red, turned his little band into a big one and made Mildred
his co-leader. While that band was abuilding the Norvos threw a
party that had a lasting effect of which they hadn't dreamed. Benny
Goodman and Teddy Wilson were guests at the party, and so was a
young cousin of Mildred's who played a little drums. As musicians
like to do, they organized an informal session, following Mildred's
suggestion that Benny and Teddy should play with her drummer-
cousin. The musicians liked the combination of instruments so much
that soon after they substituted Gene Krupa for Mildred's cousin and
became the Benny Goodman trio.

There was, unfortunately, much more to bandleading, even when
the duties could be split in half, than the pleasures of parties and
pleased and pleasing audiences. With all the good music, Mildred
said, there were plenty of headaches. "It's no fun to have to worry
about making trains on time and whether this or that booking is
better for the band, shall Mr. Eddie or Mr. Charlie do the arrange-
ment on this new pop, and will I take one or three choruses on this
old standard. Many's the morning we stumbled into a town, half
dead from sleeplessness and worried over a missing trunk or make-up
kit, only to find that we had a record date, band or me, for that
early afternoon. Sometimes that meant hunting up good musicians
for an improvised date, sometimes that meant taking our band and
rehearsing them in a new number they'd never seen before all in
one or two or three hours. It was these headaches that finally drove
me out of the band business."

Mildred never did really get out of the band business; she always
found the musicians she needed for her record dates, usually the best
musicians available in jazz. She recorded with Bunny Berigan, Johnny
Hodges, and Teddy Wilson in one memorable date; with Ziggy
Elman, Artie Shaw, Teddy, Dave Barbour, John Kirby, and Cozy
Cole in another. With the band she and Red led, she made several
dozen sides; with Mary Lou Williams in charge of a band, she made
half a dozen of her loveliest recordings; with Alec Wilder providing

SINGERS 251

manuscript fit for her voice and an intriguing combination of wood-
winds, rhythm, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Wilson, she made eleven
of the really great vocal records of jazz. A fair sampling of her
various backgrounds, technical efficiencies, and inspired transforma-
tions of good songs can be heard in her long-playing record, A
Mildred Bailey Serenade, issued in 1950 when she was first hospital-
ized with her fatal illness. There, in eight performances, as in every
one of her other sides, sound her sumptuous middle register, her
exquisite upper register, her subtle nuances. Jazz was well provided
with its first band singer until December 1951, when Mildred died.
One winter night at the end of 1935 Mildred Bailey journeyed up
to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to sing her bit in a Scottsboro
Boys benefit. In a long night of superb performances by the foremost
musicians and singers of jazz, Mildred's singing stood out. So did
Bessie Smith's and that of Chick Webb's vocalist, Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella had joined Chick only a few months before. Just a seventeen-
year-old girl from Virginia, she moved simply to a microphone,
opened her lips, and sang sang with a natural ease and a musician-
ship which, though untutored, needed very little assistance from
Chick or his musicians. Ella was and is the prime example of an
intuitive singer in jazz. From her first recording with Chick, "Sing
Me a Swing Song," to one of her latest solo albums, devoted to
songs by George and Ira Gershwin, she has always found the right
tempo, and right interpretive nuance, the right melodic variation.
She was an added soloist for the Chick Webb band, the most distin-
guished of a group of distinguished musicians; it was undoubtedly
her presence with the band, in person and on records after the spring
of 1936, that catapulted it to sudden, unexpected but thoroughly
deserved success. In November of the same year Ella became a re-
cording name in her own right, when she made four sides for Chick's
home label, Decca, with her "Savoy Eight," made up of Chick's
best musicians, including Chick himself, of course. The next year
she did a date with the Mills Brothers and two others with the
Savoy Eight. She continued to record under her own name, and with
Chick she made one of the best-selling records of all time, "A-Tisket,
A-Tasket," later followed by a fairly successful sequel, "I Found
My Yellow Basket." Her great skill in these years and in those to
come, after Chick's death, was a versatility that permitted her to
sing material that was nothing less than nauseating in other perform-

252 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

ances, but something more than tolerable in hers. There were not
only the contrived nursery rhymes and the clumsy novelties songs
of short duration in people's memories but also soft and insinuating
ballads, such as "My Last Affair," or driving instrumentals to which
words were added because Ella's voice made her vocals valid parts
of improvised band performances.

When Chick died Ella was his logical successor. She led the band
which was renamed, with some justification, Ella Fitzgerald and
Her Famous Orchestra until early 1942, when the same strain which
had told on Mildred began to wreak havoc in her personal life and her
singing. Then came her felicitous collaborations with such likely
associates as Louis Armstrong, the Delta Rhythm Boys, and Eddie
Heywood and with such unlikely ones as the Ink Spots. With all
of them her sinuous imagination was given full play. No matter the
arch mannerisms and distorted falsetto sounds of the Ink Spots; Ella
felt the glow of Duke Ellington's song "I'm Beginning to See the
Light" and transformed it into exquisite sound; no matter the un-
familiar calypso inflections of u Stone Cold Dead in the Market" and
the raucous personality of Louis Jordan, Ella turned both song
and singer into rich duo comedy. In 1946 and the next year, with
able studio bands led by Vic Schoen and Bob Haggart, she pressed
the full impact of her scat-singing personality into record grooves;
through "Flying Home" and "Lady Be Good" Ella effused, singing
bebop figures and swing phrases, finding the verbal equivalents for
trumpet, trombone, and saxophone sounds. In 1939, in her recording
of " Taint What You Do, It's the Way that You Do It," she
scatted around the engaging tune and ended one of her phrases
with the word "rebop," undoubtedly the first appearance of the
first accredited name for^Dizzy Gillespie's and Charlie Parker's music.
In 1946 she coined the whole new scatting vocabulary. Three years
later she exhibited another of the facets of her singing personality
when she did a perfect imitation of Louis Armstrong's guttural
style in her recording of "Basin Street Blues." Here, and in her ducts
with Louis, she demonstrated that catholicity of taste and talent
which has always been her hallmark. She says of both Louis and
Dizzy, "I like him just the way he is." She says of Les Brown's
band that it is among her pets "because it plays a variety and sounds
like bands used to sound." Her attempts at songwriting, usually suc-
cessful both musically and commercially, show the same breadth of

SINGERS 253

interest: they range from the swingy phrases of "You Showed Me
the Way" and u Oh, But I Do" to the handsomely coordinated lyrics
she wrote for "Robbins' Nest." At times in recent years her versatility
has betrayed her: her phrases and intonation never falter, but they
do sometimes take on a mechanical edge. She works hard, she works
often; she is or has been the favorite singer of most of America's
favorite singers, drawing such plaudits as Bing Crosby's enthusiastic
summation of her position: u Man, woman, or child, the greatest
singer of them all is Ella Fitzgerald." The penalty of so much sing-
ing may be a hard sound and a cold inflection; it can never be so
severe, however, that jazz, jazz musicians, and jazz singers will forget
the size of her contribution and the electricity her name has always
carried.

For six weeks in the worst heat of July and August in 1948 another
jazz singer who has contributed greatly to modern jazz acknowl-
edged the applause of large audiences at the Strand Theatre in New
York City the largest audiences that theater had seen in many years.
The movie, Key Largo, pulled in a large part of the audience; Count
Basic and his orchestra drew some of it; but there had been big
movies before, and Count Basic had appeared at New York theaters
before. The main draw was Billie Holiday.

Like very few singers in our time, like no other uncompromising
jazz singer in our time, Billie was a big box-office attraction. She had
her own bitter explanation of her popularity. "They come to see me
get all fouled up. They're just waiting for that moment. Just waiting.
But they're not going to get it. I'm not going to get all fouled up.
I'm not! I'm not. . . ."

Billie had and has many friends and admirers, many fans. Some
of the enormous number of people who came to see her came be-
cause of her voice. Most of them, Billie felt sure, came to see the
great "Lady Day" fall flat on her beautiful face.

"I'm tired of fighting," Billie said. "All my life it's been fighting.
I'm tired of fighting."

It had been hard to have to quit school in the fifth grade. She
had had to quit, to help with the groceries and the rent. There were
no child-labor laws in Baltimore when Billie was eleven. And even
if there had been, the Holidays needed groceries and, once a month,
the rent. So, at the age of eleven, Billie went to work, washing down
Baltimore's famous white stoop.

254 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

At fifteen she was singing at Jerry Preston's in Harlem. Life
came fast uptown, with no holds barred, no experiences withheld.
If Billie had talent to begin with, she had maturity almost as soon
maturity of a sort. When most girls were just emerging from their
stiff organdy party dresses and just beginning to worry about dates
and kisses, Billie was singing for all-night parties in after-hours joints.
Before she was out of her teens she was on the road with bands, and
she reached her majority plunking two bass notes with her left hand
for Artie Shaw, while the intellectual clarinetist wove the melody
of "Nightmare" out of the early morning hours and called for more
of her exquisite singing.

Her singing won plaudits and received all sorts of audience and
critical appreciation. Then came a Paul Whiteman recording session
for Capitol in 1944, in which she sang "Travelin' Light"; and with
that notable side Billie was really recognized as a uniquely distin-
guished jazz singer, as a uniquely fascinating personality whose private
perceptions were articulated in original and delicate vocal patterns.

In 1947 Lady Day was sent to prison. Although there was this
record and there were other records to remind us of her great
talent and many newspaper stories to apprise us of her wrongdoing,
and many, many friends to echo her suffering and her sorrow, only
Billie herself could sing Billie's blues. It was not until she returned
from jail that we could understand exactly what she had been
through, what she looked forward to and what not, and why it was
and is so important to her to affirm the true, the real, and undeniable,
and the unanswerable.

"Easy Living." "Travelin' Light." If you want to be corny you
can tell Lady Day's story through the songs on her records, making
sure that you interrupt the narrative of light life and debauchery
with the tender u God Bless the Child" and the angry sorrow of
"Strange Fruit." Anybody who has watched Billie sing "Strange
Fruit" knows what the singing of that song does to her; anybody
who really knows her knows that her tears over the victims of
lynch mobs stop only when she wrenches herself violently away
from the facts of Negro life. Even the casual listener to her most
poignant record, "Porgy," knows how real a struggle against tempta-
tion and weakness hers has been.

They threw her into a cell, and a nightgown and a mattress and
a bed after her, and she was on her own. No coddling, no cozening,

SINGERS 255

no letdown, no matter how difficult; and the descent from the illusory
heights of dope is generally acknowledged to be of the nature of the
journey from the first circle to the icy center of the ninth of Dante's
Hell. Billie gritted her teeth and held on to her mind and came out
many months older, cleaner, closer to herself and the truth.

"When I was on it," she says, "I was on it! I wouldn't stop for
anybody, anywhere, ever. Now I'm off it and I don't want it and
I won't have it, and that's the end of it."

She went to her doctor's to get a very careful general check-up,
which showed her supremely well, healthier than she had been in
years. But she knew she was frantically tired and uncertain of her-
self. She also knew she would sing, and while in those bad years
before she had buoyed her sagging spirits and propped her weary
body with narcotics, now she was on her own. She went on singing,
of course. She sang, of course, as beautifully as ever, perhaps more
beautifully. And then she w r asn't entirely on her own. There were
friends and admirers, friends like Bobby Tucker and his wife and his
father and mother, who had kept their Christmas tree going until
March 16, when she got out, and admirers like the concert audiences
and Broadway theatergoers who went to her first appearances in
March and April and cheered themselves into late winter colds, wel-
coming her home.

In March 1949 Billie Holiday once more stood accused. Once
more the sights of a million scandalmongers' guns were trained at
her not insignificant figure. As before, she was accused of breaking
the strict laws of the land, which specifically forbid the indulgence
of those peculiar appetites that call for a drug here, a charged cigarette
there, a dose of opium or hemp or any of the other short ways
around to an illusory Nirvana. Billie said she was framed. She was
tried and found innocent and released.

It makes big newspaper headlines to catch a movie star or a jazz
singer redhanded and heavy handed with the hot stuff; but their guilt
is small compared with that of the gangsters who run the dope
and the rope into the country and peddle it from dressing-room to
dressing-room, from night-club entrance to night-club exit, from
alley to alley. Government agents are busy trying to run down the
gangsters and the middlemen called "connections," but these efforts
never seem to make the headlines or even the small print of the
back-page continuations of the page-one stories. The only

256 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

end the terror and threat of drugs is to stop the flow at its source, to
start directing the publicity as well as the undercover activity toward
that end, and to turn our healthy indignation on the promoters rather
than the victims of the racket. The opposite procedure is too much
like putting a beer-drinker in jail for Al Capone's crimes.

All of this left Billie with a gnawing fear. She continues to sing
well, but she is never sure that she is received by audiences as a
singer. Is she stared at as a scarlet lady? As an ex-convict? Or simply
as a magnificently constructed woman? The inner disturbance is
dreadful, but the outer calm remains, and along with it perhaps the
most brilliant and inspired singing in jazz.

Most women wouldn't worry about being too pretty, but Lena
Home worried long and hard about it. She worried that people
liked her for her looks and not for her singing, much as Billie Holiday
worries; she worried so much about it that, in the beginning of her
career, her singing suffered as a result.

After a brilliant debut at Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert
in 1942, Lena skyrocketed to fame. She made a much-appreciated
appearance at Cafe Society Downtown, and then was grabbed by
the movies. For almost five years she was a motion-picture singer,
making occasional sorties into the recording studios to relieve the
monotony of specialty bits in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals, and
winning two starring roles in the ill-starred all-Negro movies,
Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. She continued to com-
mand attention because of her astonishing loveliness, and a consider-
able coterie of Home fans continued to clamor for more of her
voice; when Lena's faith in her singing wavered, theirs didn't budge.
One of the most firm and unyielding in his admiration for her
singing was Lennie Hayton, arranger and musical director for MGM,
whom she later married. He badgered her; he worked with her; he
read her lessons out of the musical copybooks which he himself
had long ago mastered. The result, if I may borrow a limp line
from the collected works of the press agents of our time, was a new
and greater Lena Home. Her musical tastes did not merely advance;
she became part of what can properly be called the vital vanguard,
those hardy souls who have clearly formulated ideas in the generally
abstruse field of music, who can articulate their ideas and do. She
studied Stravinsky's Sucre de Printemps "It took me two years to
connect with that." She resisted Stravinsky's dissonances at first,

SINGERS 257

but under the insistent tutelage of Billy Strayhorn she came to un-
derstand and enjoy what had at first seemed like nebulous noises.
And under Lennie Hayton's tutelage she studied Hindemith. She
began to approach modern music in general with urgency and ex-
pectancy.

The true scope of Lena's talents has been only suggested, I think.
She can portray anguish and terror in a song. She feels what she
sings and articulates her feeling with just enough restraint to keep
it within the bounds of good taste, with just enough dramatic im-
pact to reach below her listeners' heads and above their glands for
their hearts. In addition, she has that necessary incidental, a fine
natural voice, a husky organ of great conviction.

There are some people who think that all instrumental music is
written or played in imitation of the human voice. When you listen
to a singer like Mary Ann AicCall you can understand such thinking.
For, without the range and volume of Kirsten Flagstad, with only a
modicum of the musicianship of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, she has much
of what they have and something else besides. Her voice is at once that
of a voluptuary and a vestal; simultaneously she crosses herself and
opens up her arms wide. She expresses the extraordinary paradoxes
contained in all the successful sounds of jazzmen; in her music Mary
is at the same time wonderfully naive and sophisticated. And here,
in this voice, is what jazz is all about.

Mary Ann McCall sang with Woody Herman off and on for a
decade, with Charlie Barnet, with Teddy Powell, for a couple of
weeks with Tommy Dorsey, and, in San Diego between 1942 and

1946, with numerous small bands. She always demonstrated more
than a passing skill in rhythmic novelties and had a pleasant ease in
burning ballads, but not until she rejoined Woody in 1946 did any-
one realize that she was a really outstanding singer. During her early
years with Woody there wasn't much opportunity to hear her curl
herself around a song, but in "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams" and
"Romance in the Dark 7 ' there was no mistaking the dimensions of
her talents. When she joined the reorganized Herman band in late

1947, her singing hit some musicians and other discerning people
with an impact that isolated her. They listened to those intriguing
conflicts again, to passion unabashed and unashamed, and to some-
thing like schoolgirl wonder at the order and disorder of the world,
all articulated with an uncommon skill. Can you really hear all of

258 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

this in the voice of a girl singer with a jazz band? Passion is not
rare in girl singers, but this sort of sensuousness is. Schoolgirl won-
der is not rare in schoolgirls; it is to be found in only one other girl's
singing, however Ella Fitzgerald's, of course.

It doesn't come as any surprise, then, to hear Mary Ann McCall
say, "Ella is my idol, always has been." Mary's skill is like Ella's;
she attacks her notes with that forthrightness, with that rhythmic
precision we expect only in the most finished musicians. Mary's un-
derstanding is like Ella's; she wraps herself around songs, enlarging
and diminishing her volume to fit the demands first of the melody
and then of the lyric, setting up her own variations on the melody
when it lacks continuity, her beat always right, never stopping. She
is rhythmically knowing and melodically secure; her performances
have continuity. And they have sound. She is blessed with that
husky voice that is best adapted to the rigors of improvisation in jazz,
with three, ten, or twenty men whispering or blasting behind her.

If one knows or believes these things to be true of Mary's voice,
it is strange to learn that she didn't start out to be a singer but a
dancer. She never had any music lessons, "just dancing school."
Why dancing school? "I had rickets. Not just rickets I was crip-
pled. They wanted to break my legs. Try to reset them. We wouldn't
let the doctor do that, so massages were prescribed, acrobatics, and
dancing school." She got a job as a dancer at Frank Palumbo's
in her native Philadelphia sixteen-year-old Marie Miller, who had
beaten the bow in her legs. It's unfortunate that so many bad movie
musicals have made such a remarkable story as Mary-Marie's com-
monplace, filtering out of the narrative all its real heroism and sus-
pense. The next step in her life was in the movie tradition but re-
member that it can happen this way, and forget for the moment
Joan Crawford and Dorothy Lamour and Doris Day who have been
reduced so often in their time to fleshless, bloodless heroines reliving
what happened to them in much the same way as Mary's career hap-
pened to her. Sure enough, the girl singer at Palumbo's got sick;
Mary sang with the band, and that was it. She worked with Tommy
Dorsey very briefly, with Charlie Barnet for quite a while, with the
Band that Played the Blues ("we struggled fifteen dollars a week,
they told me, and room and board"), with Charlie again, and with
Teddy Powell. Then she got married. She had a baby boy and stayed
home for a year, and then worked around San Diego for four years

SINGERS 259

as well as with Freddy Slack before going back with Woody and a
very different sort of music from that which she first sang with
his band.

It's fun to listen to Mary's old records with Barnet, to hear the
seeds of her later style, but it is much more than casual entertain-
ment to hear her several sides with Woody after 1946. "Wrap Your
Troubles in Dreams" was recorded without rehearsal, its arrangement
sketched between band numbers by arranger Ralph Burns. "Romance
in the Dark" had to be cleaned up, sixteen bars of blue lyrics re-
written at the last moment on the date. "P.S. I Love You/* "I Got it
Bad and That Ain't Good," and "Detour Ahead" went off without a
hitch, and other dates for the Discovery and Roost labels were un-
troubled. But Mary had trouble in the next few years, trying to
find the large audience that her talents deserve. She has worked
all sorts of night clubs, especially those that work a performer until
far, far into the morning; she has always elicited an enthusiastic
response in these clubs. She has also made some pleasant record sides
for Jack Hook's Roost label. But she is not by any means the great
success that Dinah Shore continues to be, that Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford,
Margaret Whiting, Kay Starr, and Doris Day, Fran Warren, and
Toni Arden are. It is as if the converse of the Tolstoyan aesthetic,
in its perverse way almost a fixed law in jazz, has worked steadily
against her: if your quality as a jazz performer is high, the quantity
of your supporters must be small.

Lee Wiley has been praised in the public prints as often as any of
her more famous singing sisters; her picture has appeared along with
rapturous critical comment in the fashion magazines and in Time and
The New Yorker. She has made her sumptuous sound known in
recordings with the best of the Dixieland musicians of the thirties,
forties, and fifties. She has revitalized lovely but forgotten Gershwin,
Porter, Harold Arlen, and Rodgers-and-Hart songs. But her style,
barrelhouse and torchy as it is, has been too high for mass appeal; her
records become collectors' items within months of appearance and
her plaintive vibrato has even more cause to be.

Dinah, Jo, Maggie Whiting, and their associates at the top of the
best-seller lists have never lacked for an audience. Each was almost
an immediate success when she reached records; none of them, ex-
cept for an occasional collaboration with large or small jazz bands,
is to be found in the Hot Discographies. But let it be said that all

260 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

these singers were molded by the disciplines of jazz, and each has to
some extent preserved her original musical influence. Dinah, in her
first radio programs and early Bluebird records, showed jazz feeling
and a softness of voice and Southern accent that fitted naturally into
the settings provided by her accompanying orchestras, usually made
up of able jazzmen. Peggy Lee sang a blues with Benny Goodman
in imitation of a jukebox favorite, Lil Green ("Why Don't You Do
Right?"), became a fair stylized singer when she left Benny ("You
Was Right, Baby"), turned a husky voice and whispered inflections
into a caricature of herself when she became famous ("Don't Smoke
in Bed"). Jo not only sang some viable jazz with Tommy Dorsey
but also continued from time to time to get the all-important beat
in her voice and to turn a phrase with jazz accent. Fran's passionate
outpourings with Claude Thornhill raised her from a fair vocalist
with Charlie Barnet to a touching sentimentalist; unfortunately, when
she stepped out on her own, the passion became purple and, with
few exceptions, the sentiment excessive. Maggie, musicianly daughter
of a musicianly songwriter, Richard Whiting, has always avoided
the unctuous and concentrated on the song at hand; with a better
than average vocal organ and excellent taste, she has always been
pleasant to listen to, but the amount of jazz in her voice depends
entirely on the amount of jazz played behind her, and that often isn't
very much. Toni Arden is closer to Fran in her conceptions than
anybody else the old Fran, moved and moving, but only rarely
maudlin. Kay Starr, like Anita O'Day and June Christy, is a natural
jazz singer, with rhythmic imagination and a larynx that is at least
a second cousin to Bessie Smith's. But Kay has had to yield to the
importunities of recording executives and a mass audience, and she
doesn't often achieve the contagious power of such of her per-
formances with the Charlie Barnet band as "Sharecropping Blues."
In the same way, Pearl Bailey's once expressive hands and amusing
laconic delivery have hardened into the facets of a commercial rather
than a jazz style.

Anita O'Day is an example of the minor intuitive singer who
might have been major. Essentially self -instructed, she broke in with
Max Miller's small band in Chicago, joined Gene Krupa there in
1941, and then, three years later, after a brief retirement, put in
a year with Stan Kenton. She has always been, as one of her musician
admirers put it, "a blowing chick." Her singing with Krupa, alone

SINGERS 261

and in duet with Roy Eldridge, had a brashness about it and an in-
ventiveness that always brought to mind a first-rate jazz soloist.
There was some of the same jazz quality about her work with
Kenton. The sameness, however, was after a while a considerable
deterrent, and although her singing has not often been less than
able, the constant hoarseness of voice and hotness of phrase have
not worn too well One would have to say the same for most of
June Christy's work with Stan Kenton; she replaced Anita and fol-
lowed carefully, too carefully, in Anita's vocal steps. But June later
emerged as a more technically controlled and more broadly imagina-
tive singer, to become a part of the most recent expansion of jazz
style and idea. Doris Day was for a while, in her second and longer
stay with the Les Brown band, identifiable by the elements of O'Day
in her style. Her voice was never as husky or as voluminous as
Anita's; she always managed some injection of personalized interpre-
tation. Like Bing Crosby, when she became a movie star (in 1949)
she retained her ability to inject jazz feeling where it belonged,
whether on a film sound track or a recording disk. Her charm made
a movie contract and accompanying success inevitable; her continued
taste and talent for and support of jazz were not so easily to be fore-
seen. In her present glamorous career jazz piays an uncommonly
salutary role.

In the swooning and crooning and baritone bellows of the lead-
ing male singers of our time, jazz has also been veiy important, if not
always so obvious as in the case of the girls. Dick Haymes sang some
\* ith Tommy Dorsey before he became a movie star, and continues
to make records suggestive of Tommy's commercial concerns. In
1940 and 1941, however, singing with Harry James, Dick was more
than a conventional romantic baritone. For one thing, he exploited
the luxurious lower reaches of his voice far more than he has since.
For another, he sang with a delicacy and deftness that came only
from jazz, the brisk jazz the James band was playing in those years.
He made lovely records of "I'll Get By," "Minka," "You've Changed,"
and u You Don't Know What Love Is," giving good songs additional
distinction by the strength of his feeling and the uninterrupted
length of his phrases. "O1* Man River" was lifted above its basically
lugubrious caricature of Negro plaints by Dick's delightful under-
statement and Harry's fresh conversion of the tune into an up-
tempo jazz piece. A similar authority and wit distinguished Perry

262 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Como's singing with the Ted Weems band before and during the
swing era. Many of us found it possible to sustain an evening of
ordinary dance music and novelties in order to hear Perry with that
band. When he struck out on his own in the early forties, he retained
those qualities and added to them a canny appraisal of audience
tastes, which has served him well in radio and television, in both of
which he has become a major figure. The jazz in Perry's singing has
always been a skillful compound of the Crosby-Columbo style and the
later ministrations of band singers. That compound has made his hun-
dreds of record sides devoted to second- and third- and fourth-rate
songs endurable, and made his broadcasts and telecasts and theater ap-
pearances musically interesting. Perry's sunny disposition and gentle
visual and verbal wit have also been sizable adjuncts of his singing
personality. He is an outstanding family man, one of the few in
his profession, who never forgets his beginnings as a barber and
never lets his audiences forget that he is one of them. Unfortunately
none of this can altogether offset the tawdry substance of the songs
to which he gives his almost undivided attention. One must wait
wearily for that rare spark, the sudden catching fire of singer and
song which makes Perry Como still a part of jazz.

The most popular of these popular singers with jazzmen is Frank
Sinatra. His 1939 appearances and recordings with Harry James
caught the attention not only of his colleagues but of most band
musicians around the United States. When, in 1940, he made such
sides with Tommy Dorsey as "I'll Be Seeing You," "I'll Never Smile
Again," and "Trade Winds," he was followed almost as avidly by
jazzmen as by bobby-soxers. Through the next few years with
Tommy, and through most of the remaining forties as a recording
artist and movie and theater singer, Frankie was everybody's idea
of the perfect juggler, who could manage at one and the same time
to bring the kids to their saddle-shoed feet and maintain a meaningful
vocal musicianship. In the woeful days of the musicians' union ban
on recording activity, from the fall of 1942 to the fall of 1944, such
recording activity as there was in the United States was confined to
singers accompanied by singers, soloists with choral backgrounds.
Frank made his Columbia debut after having made a few sides with
real live musicians for Victor with such a choral background.
Singing the songs so insistently popular in and out of the Rodgers
and Hammerstein operetta Oklahoma, Frank showed the same firm-

SINGERS 263

ness of tone and freshness of phrase that had made his records with
James and Dorsey successful among musicians. Through the middle
of 1948 Frank remained on his unique pedestal, lovingly erected by
press agents and children, lastingly maintained by musicians. Then
the years of bad publicity publicity that his indefatigable press
agent and manager, the late George Evans, did his best to balance
had their effect. He had appeared at the "wrong" political rallies
in Hollywood, making speeches in ballrooms and ballparks, collect-
ing funds for people unable to help themselves. Unknown to him,
in some of these activities, seemingly so worthy, the fine Russian hand
of the Communist party was present. With the best motives in the
world, Frank found himself tricked first by the Communists, then
by the Hearst papers, which made lurid headlines of his political
speeches and later turned his words into a public confession of
wrongdoing. In 1947 Robert Ruark, a Scripps-Howard columnist
who had replaced Westbrook Peglcr as the star of the syndicate,
reported that he had watched Frank shake hands with Lucky Luci-
ano in Havana. Thus started a one-week newspaper sensation that
boosted some newspaper circulation sky-high but did nothing to
boost Frank's reputation. What had earlier been good-natured humor
about Frank's slight figure and swooning stance became heavy-
handed disparagement of the "caverns in his cheeks," of his "English
droop figure," of his "dying swan deportment." The coup de grace
was administered when newspapermen found a romantic scandal with
which to sock the Voice. Not one such headline, but several, and
finally the divorce of his wife, Nancy, made Frank, a scandalous
newspaper figure. In 1947 there was Lana Turner; in 1950 there
was Ava Gardner and a Spanish bullfighter competing with Frank
for her affections. On top of all this, the musicians' union instituted
another record ban, beginning the first of January, 1948. In prepara-
tion for months of inactivity, Frank made one record after another,
day and night, until his voice began to crack. Although he continued
to sing ballads, continued to make some records requiring long sus-
tained notes and the delicate scoops of pitch that had made brilliant
moments on some of his earlier sides, he doubled the number of
middle-tempo and up-tempo songs he did. Frank became much more
of a jazz singer; rhythmic twists of phrase became much more a part
of his style. As he had in the past, he continued to use such jazz soloists
as Bobby Hackett behind him and between his choruses, and his ac-

264 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

companiments perked up a bit to match the change in singing style.

It is not certain that Frank will make as much of a mark in jazz
with his more jazzlike singing of late as he did with his lovely trans-
formations of ballads in the early years of his career. It is clear that
such singing as can be found in his first album (now on long-playing
records) will remain an important part of that popular music which
achieved its distinction through the employment of jazz devices.
Singing with woodwinds, a string quartet, and rhythm section,
Frank made perhaps the definitive recordings of "Try a Little Ten-
derness," "Why Shouldn't I?" and "Paradise," and did as much for
Cole Porter's "I Concentrate on You" in his second album. For his
delicacy of accent and phrase and for his articulate appreciation of
the musical possibilities of the romantic ballad, Frank Sinatra's sing-
ing will remain a standard for vocal style and achievement. What-
ever his faults, he is already a tradition, a maker of popular singing
patterns based upon jazz procedures.

For too long Herb Jeffries has suffered under the cheerfully meant
but cheerlessly understood appellation of "the singers' singer." The
well-meaning friends, critics, press agents, and singers who have so
called him haven't realized, perhaps, that there are few more forbid-
ding descriptions than "musicians' musician" or "writers' writer" or
"singers' singer." The public, for whom all musicians make music,
writers write, and singers sing, immediately thinks of a technician
when such terms are employed, somebody with extraordinary polish
or finish but very little of the magic they can understand. And
though no artist in any art can produce anything of distinction so
long as his single goal is public acceptance, neither can he entirely
forget that amorphous collection of heads and hearts and souls. It has
been particularly unfortunate to suggest that Herb Jeffries sings with-
out concern for the man In the street, at the other end of the loud-
speaker, or in the theater seat, for if ever there was a singer for the
masses, it is this "singers' singer."

Everything about Herb Jeffries' life springs from the acid soil in
which the common man grows. His father was part Negro, his mother
white. As a kid, Herb literally hoboed around Detroit (where he
was born), New York, and Chicago. It was in the last of these cities
that he made his first important appearances, with Erskine Tate's
huge orchestra in 1930. Earl Hines heard him, signed him for the
Grand Terrace revue, and later took him on as regular singer with

SINGERS 265

his band. Herb sang with Earl for three years and then had a short
term with Blanche Galloway's band, then left Cab's sister in Holly-
wood to do a few amusing stints as a cowboy star in all-Negro
Western films. Duke Ellington, who remembered Herb from his
Grand Terrace days, insisted that he drop the boots and saddle for
the shawl collar and cummerbund of a boy singer again, and in
mid- 1 940 Herb moved into his most important job, as a singer with
Duke Ellington.

With Duke, Herb fastened his mellifluous tones forever to Ted
Grouya's and Edmund Anderson's "Flamingo," making that song his
from the opening bass scoops to the falsetto coda. With Duke he
demonstrated an ease with slight pops ( u You, You Darlin' ") and
serious songs ("I Don't Know What Kind of Blues I've Got") alike.
With Duke he made a striking appearance, all six feet three inches
of him, in the revue Jump for Joy, sauntering through the delicate
sentiments of "A Brownskin Gal in a Calico Gown," jumping
through the defiant lines of the title tune, afterward as indissolubly
associated with his name as the saga of the tropical bird, "Flamingo."

After leaving Ellington, Herb settled in Los Angeles. He made
a successful foray into the night-club business with an after-hours
spot called the Black Flamingo, moved around LA's other clubs,
East Side, West Side, all around town, and finally wound up, in 1945,
with a contract with Exclusive Records, very much to the mutual
advantage of record company and recording artist. Songwriter Leon
Rene's independent company was as rugged and honest in its race
relations as Herb; its Negro ownership consistently practiced fair
employment. For Exclusive, Herb recorded the memorable six sides
that make up the Magenta Moods album, and such singles as "Body
and Soul," "What's the Score," and "My Blue Heaven," in all of them
joining lush voice to Buddy Baker's choice Impressionist scoring.

Herb's career as a singer has been a little uncertain commercially.
He has always had an audience of singers, musicians, critics, and that
body of fans who are not frightened by his technical prowess or the
swooping and whooping sound effects fashioned for him by con-
ductor Mitch Miller in Herb's brief sojourn with him at Columbia.
Herb has shifted now to Coral, the subsidiary of Decca records, and
has been promised treatment more sympathetic to his basic qualities.
However, he is recording songs already in the hit classification or
being groomed and plugged for it, and that means he is subject not

266 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

only to the whims and fancies of song publishers and recording ex-
ecutives in this dubious enterprise, but also to the fickle fancies of
the mass audience. His may be one more depressing example of the
talent ripened by jazz and spoiled by too much contact with the
world of commerce. He has not had and may never have the
luck of Billy Eckstine, who found his huge audience as a direct re-
sult of his jazz singing. He may not have the fortitude of Sarah
Vaughan, who refused to compromise her musicianship and none-
theless was given popular support after a long struggle. The masses
may never discover how much their kind of singer Herb Jeffries is;
their loss will not be small.

BOP

It wasn't so many years ago that Billy Eckstine was just an eccentric
band vocalist, a gravel-throated young man who used to shuffle on
stage or floor toward the end of an Earl Hines set, walking with de-
liberate relaxation, very, very slowly, toward the microphone, his
hands in as often as out of his jacket pockets, his jacket as far off
his body as it could be and still hang from his shoulders. His voice?
It was the sound of caverns in which somebody had let loose the
bloodcurdling cry, "Jelly, jelly!" sexual euphemism and title of
Billy's most successful blues to echo endlessly through the stalag-
mites and stalactites. It was a series of tremulous hotblasts, often
capped by metallic bursts from a suddenly animated trumpet section,
designed to make the second balcony jump.

Billy still walks out on a stage slowly, but the pace is less contrived.
Now his relaxation doesn't seem so planned. His hands are still in
his pockets as often as not, but they belong there; they're not so
much part of an organized effort to impress an audience. His
clothes fit him today, either because his figure has filled out or
because he has a better tailor or because the fashionable drape is
a little closer to a man's shape. His voice? It still suggests echoes,
but they have come up for air and sunlight; the jelly has been pre-
served and bottled as a historical oddity, and the blasts are much
cooler and tremble far less.

Mr. B., as the erstwhile eccentric is best known to his ardent fans,
has come all the way from subterranean depths to box-office heights,
and while he has lost some of his bottom notes and almost all the gravel
en route, the trip has been a good one. Billy Eckstine is not just a good
singer; he is enough better than that so that one is tempted to call him
great and would administer the adjective gladly if it were not neces-
sary to remember earlier disappointments and to keep firmly in mind

2C7

268 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

the limitations under which any singer who gains large approval must
work.

His voice is almost always a thing of beauty, if not with any cer-
tainty a joy forever. Because of its masculine strength, it moves from
note to note with vigor and never falls into the whispering faint that
makes listening to the swooners and crooners so disturbing. Because
its master, Mr. B., is a natural musician, whose barely tutored trumpet
and trombone performances were as provocative as they were un-
lettered, the voice is in tune and makes its cadences with musicianly
effect, occasionally lengthening a melodic line beyond its written
limits into a statement that has the quality as well as the quantity of a
first-rate instrumental jazz solo.

As a matter of fact, Billy's only teacher was Maurice Grupp, a
columnist in Metronome of an earlier epoch, who gave him a few
trumpet lessons and more than a few pointers about breath control.
Billy's testimonial to Grupp is warm and well it might be, judging
from the change in his breathing since his jelly days, all for the better.
There have been other changes made too, however, and these have not
been so salubrious. Perhaps it isn't fair to blame Billy for them, but
they exist. I am speaking about the material with which MGM has
loaded him and the changes in phrasing and sound this material has
wrought.

When MGM awoke to the size of its new singing star early in
1949, it awoke with more than a casual ringing of the alarm. It made
a momentous announcement: hereafter, said the record company,
Billy Eckstine would be assigned number-one plug tunes. This was
flattering recognition of Billy's achievement; it was exceedingly
pleasant to note such appreciation of a singer who was distinctly in
the jazz tradition; it was gratifying to watch the color line break be-
fore a powerful voice. The change was all that; but it was more. It
produced such unpleasant exhibits as u Roses" and "Baby, Won't You
Say You Love Me," songs so feeble that not all of Mr. B.'s consider-
able equipment could redeem them. It also produced a lessening of
Eckstine's tension, which can most readily be identified by the
gravelly sounds that liven much of the otherwise unimpressive sing-
ing on the earlier National records. It produced a new smoothness that
doesn't sit well with the Eckstine voice, a softening of fiber and
sweetening of texture^ which may suit the color and fragrance of rose

BOP 269

blossoms and the nature of wheedling love plaints, but which cer-
tainly do not fit the quality of Mr. B.'s voice.

Billy reached his peak in 1950. The public was even more generous
in its recognition and appreciation than MGM. He was crowded,
getting on and off a night-club stage, by hordes of bobby-soxers, as
resolute in their attentions as the screaming kids who surrounded the
other Voice in its most palmy days; he attracted a secondary ring of
older fans, who were devoted and intelligent listeners without the
clangor and clamor of their youthful associates. He was the subject
of stirring racial controversy in the letter pages of Life magazine
as the result of a picture story which, without calling specific atten-
tion to the size of his white audience, made the proper point that Billy
was not simply a successful Negro entertainer but the country's big-
gest male popular singer.

It is possible that Billy Eckstine's most lasting achievement will turn
out to be his short-lived band rather than his enormous success as a
singer. His band sprang from the Earl Hines orchestra, with which he
was in 1 943 the major attraction. In the Hines band Little Benny Harris
was the musical sparkplug; his skill on the trumpet was second, actu-
ally, to his shrewd musical taste. Charlie Parker was in the Hines band
in early 1943, an< ^ Little Benny was much aware of his presence. He
was intrigued with everything Charlie had ever done and went so far
as to copy out Charlie's alto solo on the Jay McShann band recording
of "Sepian Bounce." When he played it on his trumpet one night,
Dizzy Gillespie, who had just joined the band, looked up with interest.
Benny identified the source, and Dizzy was on the spot on his way
into Parker's pastures. The Hines band, featuring Little Benny, Dizzy,
Parker, Eckstine, and Sarah Vaughan, was not only the incubator
of bebop but a formidable musical organization in its own right. Then
Billy left the band to work as a solo singer, and the great days of the
Hines organization were over. Earl added a string section to his band,
with girls plying the bows; he mixed the sounds of his musicians and
the quality and quantity of his jazz with lush and somewhat soupy
arrangements.

The first of the bop bands did not have Charlie Parker in it. In early
1944 Oscar Pettiford, a brilliant technician on the bass and an affable
front man, combined with Dizzy to organize a jumping little outfit
with Don Byas on tenor, George Wallington on piano, and Max

270 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Roach on drums. It was with this band that Dizzy sang his octave-
jump phrase, "Salt Peanuts! Salt Peanuts!" a triplet in which the first
and third notes were an octave below the second. It was with this
band that the same sort of triplet became famous for its last two notes,
articulated with staccato emphasis that could be verbalized, as it some-
times was, "Bu-dee-daht! " This just as often became "Bu-re-bop!"
Because the emphasis was on the last two notes of the triplet, the tag
was best remembered, for humming or other descriptive purposes, as
"rebop." And because man's taste for the poetic, whether he so iden-
tifies it or not, leads him again and again to alliteration, "rebop" be-
came "bebop." Enthusiasts for the new music began to describe it as
rebop or bebop. One of these enthusiasts was Coleman Hawkins, then
leading a little band at Kelly's Stable on the second and lesser of the
two blocks that made Fifty-second Street Swing Street between
Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Dizzy organized the music for a two-
night session that Hawk led for Apollo. Dizzy's lovely melody,
"Woodyn* You," was recorded, along with several other sides, in-
cluding a blues instrumental, "Disorder at the Border," "Rainbow
Mist," which was a set of variations on Hawk's variations on "Body
and Soul," his phenomenally successful 1939 record for Bluebird, and
"Bu-dee-daht," Budd Johnson's tribute to the new music.

Budd joined Oscar and Dizzy at the Onyx Club when Don Byas
left for a job with Duke Ellington that never panned out. Intrigued
by the sound of Dizzy's music, Budd had Dizzy write out some of his
ideas so that they could play them in unison, and the resultant tenor
and trumpet lines became the base for many instrumentals, big band
and small, acknowledging Dizzy as their source or not. Then Oscar
and Dizzy split up, Dizzy going into the Yacht Club with Budd and
Max Roach, Oscar remaining at the Onyx for four more months, with
Joe Guy on trumpet, Johnny Hartzfield on tenor, Joe Springer on
piano, and Hal West on drums the style remaining with him too.
It was clearly a new era in jazz; the musicians knew it, the habitues
of the Street knew it; Billy Eckstine, organizing a band with which
he hoped to snare larger and more understanding audiences than he
had found on the Street, knew it.

Billy's band had to be a bop band; he himself played just enough
trumpet and trombone to have a feeling for the lines the new musi-
cians were putting down, and he had enough idealism as a leader to
feel that only the freshest and most significant jazz had a place in his

BOP 271

band. As a result he convinced his manager, Billy Shaw, that Dizzy
was the only logical musical director for him; that Charlie Parker,
then playing with Carroll Dickerson's band at the Rhumboogie in
Chicago, was the inevitable lead alto man for him; that he had to get
other bop musicians to fill out his personnel. The personnel did not
stay the same during the band's several years of chaotic but money-
making existence. It was recorded so badly that not one of its DeLuxe
sides can be pointed to as more than an indication of the way it
sounded on a stage or in a club. But in person, in spite of the ragged-
ness of section performance that was inevitable with such constant
changes of personnel, such soloists as Dizzy or Fats Navarro, Leo
Parker on baritone or Lucky Thompson on tenor, J. J. Johnson or
even Billy himself on trombone, gave the developing art a structure
that the many Fifty-second-Street outfits playing the music did not
have, and made for Billy Eckstine a permanent niche in jazz history.
The best of the many Fifty-second-Street bands that played bop
at one time or another was, of course, the outfit Dizzy led in early
1945 at the Three Deuces, with Charlie Parker, Al Haig on piano,
Curly Russell on bass, and Stan Levey on drums. With Sid Catlett
replacing Stan, this outfit recorded four of the classics of bebop for
Guild, in May 1945 "Shaw 'Nuff," in tribute to Dizzy's new man-
ager, Billy Shaw; "Salt Peanuts"; "Hot House," which was Tadd
Dameron's bop revitalization of Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing
Called Love?"; and "Lover Man," which featured Dizzy's old Earl
Hines colleague, Sarah Vaughan, as singer. A few months earlier Dizzy
had recorded "Blue 'n' Boogie" with Dexter Gordon on tenor saxo-
phone and a curious rhythm section, made up of Frank Paparelli on
piano, Chuck Wayne on guitar, Murray Shipinsky on bass, and
Shelly Manne on drums. Then he had done three sides with Charlie
Parker, Clyde Hart on piano, Remo Palmieri, one of Red Norvo's
fine discoveries, on guitar, Slam Stewart on bass, and Cozy Cole on
drums "Groovin' High," a translation of the venerable favorite,
"Whispering," into bop language; "Dizzy Atmosphere," and "All the
Things You Are," these last two not issued until a year later when
Musicraft took over the Guild sides. There were in all of these trans-
formations, as in the work of the Gillespie-Parker band on the Street,
an entrancing set of new ideas and the conviction of the performers
that the ideas were right. In another two years bebop, or bop, as it
came to be called among musicians and followers, would be making

272 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

newspaper headlines, usually derogatory in nature, filling out space
in Time and Life, and frightening jazz veterans who either couldn't
or wouldn't understand bop and saw no reason to make the intense
effort necessary to understand it and then to play it.

Louis Armstrong, who at first had blessed the new music, then de-
cided he didn't like it and dismissed bop this way: "I play what I feel,
what's inside of me. I don't expect to please everybody. You know
a lot of the new cats say, 'Armstrong, he plays too many long notes.'
They want me to change, but why should I go ahead and change just
to please a lot o' cats who are way ahead of themselves anyway? I
listen to what I play, and if it pleases me it's good. That's the only
way to judge what you're doin'. I'm my own best audience. I'd never
play this bebop because I don't like it. Don't get me wrong; I think
some of them cats who play it play real good, like Dizzy, especially.
But bebop is the easy way out. Instead of holding notes the way they
should be held, they just play a lot of little notes. They sorta fake out
of it. You won't find many of them cats who can blow a straight lead.
They never learned right. It's all just flash. It doesn't come from the
heart the way real music should."

Certainly much that wasn't bop was masquerading as the new music.
"Bebop" and "bop" were catchy terms; they were used, as "swing"
had been, to describe everything from eccentric singers and dancers
to the real thing. But there were better headlines to be made if the
false music was called bebop and damned as such for something else
entirely. In March 1946 radio station KMPC in Los Angeles banned
bebop. The week after bebop was banned Time explained: "What
bebop amounts to is hot jazz overheated, with overdone lyrics full
of bawdiness, references to narcotics, and doubletalk." They might
just as well have banned the diatonic scale or the Dorian mode as ban
an eighth-note rhythmic pattern, which is all that bebop is. As for its
"overdone lyrics, full of bawdiness, references to narcotics," etc.,
the only lyrics Dizzy, Charlie, or any of the other genuine beboppers
ever sang were "suggestive" odes such as "Salt Peanuts." The words?
"Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts." That's all. Read what you will into that
phrase bawdiness, a reference to marijuana, or maybe sinister
doubletalk instead of just three syllables with the right meter for
the phrase it verbalizes.

KMPC and Time both confused the frantic antics of Harry the
Hipster Gibson and Slim Gaillard with the intense but very different

BOP 273

blowing of Gillespie, Parker, and their cohorts. Gibson and Gaillard
were not merely doubletalk experts; their songs were thick with reefer
smoke and bedroom innuendo. Their mixture of this with jazz lingo
did all jazz musicians a disservice. Radio has long functioned by a
prude's code in which words stronger than "darn" and the mere sug-
gestion of an antipode to Heaven in somebody's theology are suffi-
cient to assure banning from the pure air.

It wasn't easy to take bop out of the category of flagpole sitting,
marathon dancing, and pyramid clubs into which it was so carefully
put by the magazine and newspaper editors of America. Bebop is
not and was not a game, a schoolboy passion, or a neurosis in rhythm,
but a serious form of music. The music editor of Time so little under-
stood bebop that he managed, over some one thousand words, to con-
vince himself that it was made up chiefly of bawdy lyrics; but the
lyrics of bop, like the associated goatees, hornrimmed glasses, and
berets, were simply surface symptoms of a difficult operation that had
been performed upon jazz. Such singing syllables as "Oo-pappa-da"
or "Oolya-koo" or "Oo-bop-sh-bam" were simply convenient ways of
turning the singer's function from the relaying of synthetic passion
into the improvising of musical ideas. In a picture story the editors
of Life reduced bebop to a way of greeting people that seems to have
come from some old and unsuccessful vaudeville act and a curious
perversion of the Mohammedan religion, as well as a way of wearing
eyeglasses and goatees. But we can cut through such nonsense to get
at the meat of bop, which upon careful examination turns out to be
a very tasty viand.

It has been the fortune of jazz to elude any and all attempts to tie
it down, even to words. For better or for worse, in sickness and in
health, the very name of this music has resisted any really satisfactory
explanation. Often, when the whole cannot be defined, it is possible
to make some sense out of it by summing up its parts. But when a
pan grows so big that it almost eclipses the whole as bebop spurted
beyond the confines of jazz simple definition becomes utterly impos-
sible, and complex description must take its place. In reporting the
effect of the bop musicians, one must reflect upon the accidental
nature of jazz, wondering whether or not the ultimate arrival of
bebop would have been merely delayed without Lester Young's and
Charlie Christian's lines or swept altogether aside for an even louder,
more raw effusion of blues riffs and pseudo-classical productions than

274 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

we suffered in the years just after swing. The really staggering fact
is that jazz did escape from two-bar statement and the swinging void.
Whatever its limitations, Young and Christian more or less uncon-
sciously, and Dizzy and Parker more deliberately, took the old beat and
refurbished it and set it to new tunes, and the new tunes took over.
Technically one must first point to the weakening of the riff under
the impact of bop, and the broad invention with which bop musicians
have treated the twelve-bar form, departing from the constricting
tonic-subdominant-dominant roundelay which has worn so many
ears to a frazzle, carrying the melody from the first through the last
bar, punctuating both the melody and its harmonic underpinning with
bright and fresh interjections. The same sort of imagination has been
at work upon those most venerable of chordal undergrounds, "I Got
Rhythm," "Back Home in Indiana," "How High the Moon," and a
half-dozen other tunes notable for their key changes. Next in order
are the up-beat accents of bop, the double-time penchant of such
soloists as Dizzy, and the vigorous change that has overtaken drum-
ming under the ministrations of Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, and their
followers, the bass drum replaced by the top cymbal as custodian of
the beat, and a multitude of irregular accents and sounds introduced
on the remaining paraphernalia of the drummer. Finally, in the key
section of any analysis of bop, one comes to the use of unusual inter-
vals, of passing notes and passing chords in the construction of bop
lines and their supports, ending with that celebrated identifying note
of the medium, the flatted fifth, with which almost every bop per-
formance comes to a close, which salts and peppers almost all solos
from that of the most sensitive gourmet of this music to that of the
mealiest feeder on crumbs.

This new way of thinking shaped musicians, pushed crude enter-
tainment aside for imaginative ideas, and at least suggested the dis-
ciplined creative potential of the young music. Lennie Tristano
pointed out some of the limitations of the new school when it was at
the zenith of its popularity, in 1947. In an article entitled "What's
Wrong with the Beboppers" in Metronome magazine, Lennie sug-
gested limitations:

Artistically the situation is ... deplorable. These little monkey-men
of music steal note for note the phrases of the master of the new idiom,
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie. Their endless repetition of these phrases
makes living in their midst like fighting one's way through a nightmare in

BOP 275

which bebop pours out of the walls, the heavens, and the coffeepot. Most
boppers contribute nothing to the idiom. Whether they play drums, sax-
ophone, piano, trombone, or glockenspiel, it still comes out Gillespie.
Dizzy probably thinks he's in a house of mirrors; but, in spite of this
barrage of dead echoes, he still sounds great. They manage to steal some
of his notes, but his soul stays on the record.

Lennie also pointed out some of the achievements of bebop, in this
article and in a sequel to it called "What's Right with the Beboppers."
In doing so, he also indicated some of his own concerns, the concerns
that were shaping and were going to shape his own music:

It must be understood that bebop is diametrically opposed to the jazz
that preceded it (swing as applied to large groups, and Dixieland as ap-
plied to small ones). Swing was hot, heavy, and loud. Bebop is cool, light,
and soft. The former bumped and chugged along like a beat locomotive;
this was known in some quarters as drive. The latter has a more subtle
beat which becomes more pronounced by implication. At this low volume
level many interesting and complex accents may be introduced effectively.
The phraseology is next in importance because every note is governed
by the underlying beat. This was not true of swing; for example, the long
arpeggios which were executed with no sense of time, the prolonged
tremolos, and the sustained scream notes. . .

Though Dixieland presents a single and crude form of counterpoint, its
contrapuntal development ends in a blind alley. Each line is governed
by the end result, which is collective improvisation. Collective improvi-
sation is limited by a small number of chords, perhaps six or seven. A
good melodic line is sacrificed completely. . . .

The boppers discarded collective improvisation and placed all em-
phasis on the single line. This is not unfortunate, since the highest develop-
ment of both would probably not occur simultaneously. Perhaps the
next step after bebop will be collective improvisation on a much higher
plane because the individual lines will be more complex.

Bebop has made several contributions to the evolution of the single line.
The arpeggio has ceased to be important; the line is primarily diatonic.
The procedure is not up one chord and down another, nor is it up one
scale and down another; the use of skips of more than a third precludes
this seesaw motion. The skillful use of scales fosters the evolution of many
more ideas than does the use of arpeggios, since an arpeggio merely re-
states the chord. Instead of a rhythm section pounding out each chord,
four beats to a bar, so that three or four soloists can blow the same chord
in arpeggio form in a blast of excremental vibrations, the bebop rhythm
section uses a system of chordal punctuation. By this means, the soloist

276 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

is able to hear the chord without having it shoved down his throat. He can
think as he plays. A chorus of bebop may consist of any number of
phrases which vary in length. A phrase may consist of two bars or twelve
bars. It may contain one or several ideas. The music is thoughtful as op-
posed to the kind of music which is no more than an endless series of
notes, sometimes bent.

Trumpeters did it, tenormen did it, trombonists and pianists did it,
alto-men of course they all imitated Bird; even Dizzy did. As bebop
made its intricate way among the jazz bands of America, the ideas of
Charlie Parker circulated among the soloists.

The musician they call Yardbird has had a long journey, starting
on the road at seventeen, winning some recognition with Jay Mc-
Shann, some more in jam sessions around Chicago and New York in
the early forties, fighting illness, despair, and wavering audience in-
terest, but always, invariably, gathering larger and larger support
among musicians. Finally his ideas obtained; his following increased
to the point where youngsters coming up were imitating imitations of
imitations of Charlie; his reputation catapulted him to the top of the
alto heap.

Bird was born in Kansas City on August 29, 1920. Before joining
Jay, the boogie-woogie pianist with the jumping Kansas City band,
Bird flew through school, stopping halfway through the secondary
grades, blew some baritone horn with the school band, gigged around
and played with Lawrence Keyes and Harlan Leonard, two local
bands the second of which gained some national attention, though
not when Bird was in it. McShann showed up in Kansas City in 1937,
and Charlie moved in. With Jay he came to New York in 1942 and
moved a few people to superlatives. The band had a good beat, a good
blues singer (Walter Brown), a good balladeer (Al Hibbler), and a
brilliant alto saxophonist. "Bird stayed with the band until Detroit,
then picked up horn and reeds and flew back to New York. There he
became an uptown mainstay, sitting in at the Minton's sessions, helping
to evolve the new ideas, those which became bebop when formalized.
He was part of the fine little band at the Uptown House, associated
with drummer Kenny Clarke, and put in a nine-month stretch with
Noble Sissle, doubling on clarinet; then, in 1943, he joined Earl Hines.
With the Father, Charlie played tenor, Budd Johnson's chair being
the only vacancy. There was a year with Hines, then brief stints with
Cootie Williams and Andy Kirk before Bird joined the Billy Eckstinc

BOP 277

band of 1944. Thereafter Bird was a small bandsman; he joined Ben
Webster on Fifty-second Street; then Dizzy; then he took out his
own band Miles Davis made his first auspicious appearance with
Bird at the Three Deuces. Shortly after, in late 1945, Bird re-
joined Dizzy for the ill-fated California jaunt which left Bird a sick
man in a sanitarium near Los Angeles. In early 1947 there was sad
talk about Charlie. The word from California was that he was
through; he was recovering from a series of bad breaks there. A short
story published in a major magazine made bitter fun of those who
tried to capture Bird's last notes before he succumbed to sickness and
melancholy; the central character was thinly disguised as "Sparrow."
But Charlie Parker wasn't through. He came back to New York and
played better than ever. He elicited more enthusiasm and more imi-
tation than before. He took over as the major influence in jazz.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid this imposing
musician is an accurate description of his talent. Where other pur-
veyors of bop stick closely to the cadences, changes, and rhythmic
devices that identify their formularized expression, Charlie goes
further and further afield. If any man can be said to have matured
bop, Charlie Parker did it. If any bebopper could break away from
the strictures of his style, utilizing its advances and advancing beyond
them, Charlie Parker could do it.

Another musician who helped expand the resources and mature
the performances of bop was the man called the Disciple. Maybe
"the Mentor" would be a better name for Tadd Dameron, since so
many of the young beboppers crowded around him, demanding and
getting opinions and advice. He had no formal musical education;
he wrote music before he could read it. He regarded bop as just a
steppingstone to a larger musical expression. Yet no one who gives
bebop serious consideration can omit Tadd from the list of prime
exponents and wise deponents of this modern jazz expression.

You know his work if you have heard Dizzy Gillespie's "Hot
House," Tadd's own construction based on the chords of "What Is
This Thing Called Love?" Perhaps you have heard Dizzy's "Good
Bait," "I Can't Get Started," or "Our Delight." Or Georgie Auld's
"Air Mail Special," "Just You, Just Me," or "A Hundred Years from
Today." Or Billy Eckstine's "Don't Take Your Love from Me." Or
Sarah Vaughan's exquisite "If You Could See Me Now," "You're Not
the Kind," and the two other sides made at that same memorable date,

278 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

using strings, Freddy Webster on trumpet, Leo Parker on baritone,
and a fine rhythm section built around Kenny Clarke on drums. They
are all Tadd Dameron's and all of more than casual interest, but not
for Tadd. "All turkeys!" he insists. "I've never been well represented
on records."

Tadd has never been well satisfied with anything he's done. He was
all set to become a doctor, had finished some years of his medical edu-
cation when the sight of an arm severed from the body of a man
decided him firmly against that profession. "There's enough ugliness
in the world," Tadd decided. "I'm interested in beauty." He had
listened to his mother and father play piano, had picked up the rudi-
ments of the instrument by himself and learned something of jazz
from his brother Caesar, a well-known alto saxist around their home
town, Cleveland, Ohio. It remained for Freddy Webster, the brilliant
trumpeter who died in early 1947, to get Tadd really interested in
music. Freddy never found much of an audience for his huge tone
and moving ideas; he was heard most in his brief sojourn with Lucky
Millinder. But the boppers heard him at Minton's and he heard Tadd
and persuaded him to join his band. In 1938, when Tadd had just at-
tained his majority, he left medicine well behind him for the happiness
and misery of life in the clinics of jazz.

After a year with Freddy and a couple more with Zack White and
Blanche Galloway, Tadd emerged at the surgical end of jazz, learn-
ing about the morphology of band arrangements, appreciating with
the help of a Cleveland friend, Louis Bolton the devious devices
employed in altering chords, especially fascinated with stretching the
wretched notes. By 1940, after some time in Chicago, he was a recog-
nized arranger; he left town with Vido Musso. Vido's short-lived band
folded at Brooklyn's Roseland and sent Tadd to Kansas City with
Harlan Leonard. A year"of the latter, and he went to work in a
defense plant. A year of that, and he was free to arrange for Lunce-
ford and Basic and Eckstine and Auld; this work carried him from
1942 to 1945 an d Dizzy's waiting arms.

With Dizzy, Tadd found himself. His arrangements for Dizzy's
big band went beyond the formulations of the bebop pioneers, though
he retained their most vigorous advances the long phrases, the
powerful upbeat rhythms, the chord changes. As long as Dizzy had a
big band to write for, Tadd had work. But Tadd began to write for
other bands and to lead his own bands at the Royal Roost on Broad-

BOP 279

way, where bop was ensconced in 1948 and 1949, finally to become a
full-time arranger with only occasional sorties into the recording
studio as pianist and leader.

Until almost half of 1947 was over Dizzy Gillespie was a man with-
out a regular band. He had bands, many of them, large and small, good
and bad, important and frighteningly unimportant. From his earliest
collaborations with Charlie Parker, Slam Stewart, and Oscar Petti-
ford, he had indicated his ability to lead a fine musical organization.
But never until the summer of 1947 did he show that he could whip
a band into shape, hold on to it, fight with it, win with it, lose with it.

The way of a colored band is never easy. That axiom has been too
often demonstrated to need detailing here. In Dizzy's case the diffi-
culties were doubled. He was trying to sell a new music, one that
seemed patently uncommercial, beyond the ears of the people who
would have to pay to see and hear it, who would ultimately have to
underwrite it. But a lot of people had faith in Dizzy as a musician and
leader, as a showman and trumpeter, as a composer, arranger, and
musical personality. He would, they insisted, demonstrate such unmis-
takable individuality that he would have to be accepted. For as soon
as more than a passing technical competence is achieved, the major
hurdle for a jazz musician in the race for public acceptance is the
establishment of his individual sound. In this problem he is no differ-
ent from the strictly commercial musician, who must create such an
undeniable identity that a million record buyers, several million more
radio listeners and theatergoers, all who go to hear and see bands, will
know it's he as soon as they hear a couple of choruses of his outfit.
This Dizzy had done for himself as a soloist. Could he do it for his
band? He could. He did.

Dizzy sought his individuality in manifold ways. He didn't stop
at the forms and formulas of bebop, clear as they were, associated
with him as they were. He went on to develop a visual personality
little bowing motions and big, characteristic wearing apparel, such as
his visored beret, characteristic heavy eyeglasses, characteristic goatee.
All over America young boppers who had never worn hats donned
the Dizzy cap; young boppers who had never been able to raise suffi-
cient hirsute covering to prove their age struggled with chin fuzz
in an attempt to build the Gillespie goatee; young boppers with their
own little bands began to lead from the waist and the rump; some,
with perfectly good eyesight, affected the heavy spectacles. Dizzy

280 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

was a character; he had a personality to go with his music; he was
well on his way to national importance, although more saluted for the
accessories of his music than for the music itself.

All of this was impressive. The interest in Gillespie was large, but
the box-office returns the young boppers could contribute were not
sufficient to make Diz a major draw. Something more was indicated.
The time was, as the fruitgrowers call it, ripe. In came a professional
bandgrower.

Billy Shaw was once a musician, a working musician. He had
booked all kinds of bands in his successful managerial career at MCA
and William Morris, but the bands he really enjoyed booking and
building were the musical bands. He was one of the group with faith
in Dizzy. He went out and worked. He negotiated a contract with
Victor records, placing Dizzy's product within reach of the squarest
disk jockey, the most rectangular jukebox, the dimmest listener. He
helped organize a Carnegie Hall concert under Leonard Feather's
eager auspices. And when Dizzy drew standees at Carnegie, Billy
seized the opportunity. He laid out a concert series around the
country for the Gillespie band. That wasn't enough. There were
offers from Europe, where bebop was proving a postwar sensation.
Billy signed Dizzy, at a handsome figure, for a month's tour of Scan-
dinavia, the Low Countries, and France. He augmented this strong
chain of paying dates with steady publicity. From the Gale office,
where Shaw vice-presides, streamed reprints of articles about Diz, a
steady diet of Gillespie food for editors, columnists, and jockeys.
Stones were not to be left unturned; they were to be bulldozed out
of the way. By the end of 1947 Dizzy and Billy and the men who
played Dizzy's music could breathe more easily, could smile expect-
antly, could look forward to more folding money. Maybe Dizzy
wasn't a threat to Sammy Kaye or Stan Kenton, but he was moving
ahead, he was beginning to crowd the top men, he was proving that
a colored band with a difficult music could make enough sense to
enough people to pay off.

Certainly the Gillespie band did not prove in 1947 that it was the
musical equal of the handful of top bands of the past. It was too young;
it was too rough; its personnel shifted too often. But it did show
astonishing progress. Trace the band's sound from its first Musicraft
records to the two sides which marked its Victor debut, "Ow!" and
"Oopapada." By the last of these it had achieved smoothness, playing

BOP 281

ease, the beginnings, at least, of the polish that is necessary for top
rank in the band business.

The smoothness and ease and beginnings of polish did not last for
Dizzy. Some of the chaos and uncertainty that afflicted the Billy Eck-
stine band began to disrupt performances of Dizzy's large outfit.
There were personnel changes and changes of musical policy. Eventu-
ally Dizzy's clowning proclivities obtained; by conscious reasoning
process or by intuition, audiences of all kinds, general and indifferent
to jazz or particular and sympathetic to bop, took an aversion to
Dizzy and his music. There were several editions of the big band, then
several little bands of short life. Dizzy's recordings and public per-
formances with small bands in 1951 were of a higher order, however;
although not yet back at the extraordinary level of the Guild records
of the Fifty-second-Street bands of 1945, he seemed at last, perhaps
because there was no commercial alternative, to be concerned again
with the making of music. What had been a long reign, as jazz dynas-
ties go, had been over for several years. Fats Navarro, who in the last
years of his life had interested serious musicians and followers of jazz
more than Dizzy, was dead, but Miles Davis and the music associated
with him were still very much alive.

In the short history of jazz there have been two substantial musi-
cians nicknamed Fats, men of substance both physically and musi-
cally: first Fats Waller, then Fats Navarro. Theodore Fats Navarro,
a behemoth of a man, was not as large physically as his famous nomen-
clative predecessor; musically he gave promise of becoming as large
a man but he died before he could fulfill his promise.

Fats was a trumpeter of size all right. His tone was more compelling
than that of anyone since Roy Eldridge warm, supple, pulsating.
He had a drive like Little Jazz too, with the style and imagination of
Dizzy Gillespie, whom he replaced in the Billy Eckstine band in 1945.
He was the most consistent of the so-called beboppers in his rides
down the chords, making his notes, phrasing them consciously rather
than capriciously, an astonishing technician.

Fats didn't like the name "bebop." "It's just modern music," he
said. "It just needs to be explained right. What they call bebop is
really a series of chord progressions." He protested further. "None of
us play this so-called bebop the way we want to yet. I'd like to just
play a perfect melody of my own, all the chord progressions right,
the melody original and fresh my own." In 1947 he thought he knew

282 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

the major limitation of musicians, young or old, beboppers or not.
"They don't know the chord progressions. When they know them a
lot better, when they become really familiar with them then maybe
we'll have a real modern jazz."

Fats was indefatigable in his work, spending hours at home during
the day practicing his horn, and half his spare evenings blowing with
the boys. He was what his bop colleagues called a "serious musician"
and had been for half of his twenty-seven years. He had been attached
to music ever since he began to study the trumpet at thirteen in his
native Key West, Florida. He had taken some piano lessons when he
was six, but, as is so much the way with piano lessons at six, he "didn't
learn anything." Well-schooled in jazz fundamentals, Fats left Key
West in 1941, after high school. "I didn't like Key West at all," he
said firmly. He joined Sol Allbright's band in Orlando, Florida, came
up to Cincinnati with it, and soon after left to join Snookum Russell
in Indianapolis but not until he had had a chance to work with
another teacher in the Ohio town. He was with Russell for two years
and then, in 1943, joined Andy Kirk for a two-and-a-half-year tour
of duty, a most vital one in Fats's development. Howard McGhee was
one of his section-mates. "He was the influence," Fats said. "I used
to go and jam with him all the time." And through McGhee, Fats
made the acquaintance of Dizzy Gillespie's ideas and of their origi-
nator. When, in 1945, Dizzy left Billy Eckstine's band, the organiza-
tion he had helped stock and stylize, whose musical director he had
been, he recommended Fats as his logical successor. Dizzy has never
shown better judgment.

After leaving Eckstine himself, in June of 1946, Fats gigged around,
played short jobs in and out of New York, made a few records, and
caught fire with those musicians and aficionados fortunate enough to
have heard him at Minton T s in Harlem, at various cafes on the Street,
or in his brief but noteworthy appearance on WNEW's Swing Ses-
sions in 1946. On records he teamed up with Coleman Hawkins for
Sonora, making "Bean and the Bop" and "I Mean You" with the man
he regarded as "one of the peaks of jazz" because of an ability to keep
up with changes in jazz. "Whatever happens, he knows." While he
was with Eckstine, Fats made two sides on which he can be heard
between National's surface scratches "Tell Me, Pretty Baby" and
"Long, Long Journey." With Eddie Davis on Savoy he did "Hollerin'
and Screamin'," "Maternity," and "Stealin' Trash." Under his own

BOP 283

name, on the same label, he made "Eb-Pob" (bebop spelled back-
wards) and he appeared on eight sides of Savoy's bebop album as
trumpet soloist with the Bebop Boys.

Fats intended to make more and more progress. He listened to and
enjoyed Bach and Beethoven, expanded his knowledge of chord pro-
gressions, made his lip more limber, his fingers more flexible. He
seemed to be broadening his resources beyond the bounds of bebop.
Fats was, however, a split personality, whether or not a psychiatrist
would so have diagnosed him. On his instrument he was almost always
calm, cool, reserved, collected, and controlled. Away from his in-
strument, he didn't increase the volume of his voice or the pace of
his step, but he did raise the temperature of his living to a point at
which human beings cannot survive. In spite of the warm reception
accorded bop by musicians and camp followers, and despite all the
publicity it received in the newspapers more bad than good, but
very much of it work was infrequent for bop musicians, even for
so pre-eminent a one as Fats. Practice could occupy only so much of
his time. What was left? When the world seemingly rejected his
gifts, he turned to drugs to narcotize the hurt. In July 1950, wasted
away to one-fourth of his normal size, Fats Navarro died of tubercu-
losis. The tributes at his funeral were beautiful, the shakings of heads
intense, the tears genuine. But Fats was dead, and so was bop.

Bop musicians continued to play, some better than others, a few
with continuing distinction, one or two with the individuality of idea
and the structured development which go beyond the limitations of
school and formula. Charlie Parker is the outstanding example of the
latter kind of musical personality. Momentarily captivated by the
siren sweetness of violins, violas, and cellos, he has been able in a re-
cording session with strings to emerge above their conventional in-
flections in his most cogent solo on records, "Just Friends"; listening
to him at a night club, one feels that, like its bodily housing, his creative
spirit is indestructible and that he still has far to go. As much may be
said for Miles Davis, under whose aegis one of the significant develop-
ments of cool jazz was made.

Miles, born in Alton, Illinois, in 1926, played the trumpet in his
high school band in East St. Louis, worked with a St. Louis band,
studied briefly at the Juilliard School of Music in 1945, and then put
in several years on Fifty-second Street, in sessions at Minton's, and five
months with the Eckstine band, before fronting his own outfit at the

284 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Royal Roost in the fall of 1948. He and Fats and Howard McGhee
were the trumpet stalwarts of bop, following Dizzy's pioneering.
McGhee, the oldest of the group, is a Tulsa, Oklahoma, boy, born
in 1918, who grew up in Detroit, played clarinet in his high school
band there, switched to trumpet while still in his teens, and led a
twelve-piece band at the Club Congo in Detroit before joining Lionel
Hampton in 1941. He made his reputation with Andy Kirk, Charlie
Barnet, and a couple of small bands led by Coleman Hawkins. Always
a forthright, well-organized trumpeter in the middle register, he ex-
tended his thinking range when Dizzy's conception became his in
1944. His chief variation on bop themes is a slowing down of the
rapid-fire figures of bop so that the augmented chords and whole-tone
melodies reveal their Debussyan source more clearly. While only
rarely successful in his Impressionist meanderings, he is still capable
of a fresh twist or turn of phrase, especially if playing in the register
he has made his own, the middle.

The best of bop trombonists was J. J. Johnson, an Indianapolis
youngster who graduated to the big jazz time with Benny Carter,
with whom he made an indelible impression from 1942 to 1945, dem-
onstrating an almost incomparable knowledge of his instrument's re-
sources and a fresh set of ideas. These ideas moved handily into bop
when Johnson made the transition to small Fifty -second-Street bands
with the Count Basic orchestra in late 1945 and '46, when there were
other exponents of the new music with Count too. There are few
more exhilarating moments in jazz than J. J.'s spectacular maneu-
verings of his trombone's slide at the fastest of playing tempos. Beside
his best work, that of other modern jazz trombonists even of such
skillful musicians as Kai Winding seems of little significance. His
limitations are those of bop inconsistency of performance and a
weakening dependence^upon formula.

These are also the limitations of bop's tenor saxophonists. Gene
Ammons, son of the famous boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons,
promised much when he was with the Eckstine band, delivered some,
but also lost some along the way in his battles of music with, first,
Dexter Gordon, then Sonny Stitt. Dexter Gordon lost most of the
reputation he made in his several years with Lionel Hampton when, in
the late forties, he began to rely either upon the stereotyped patterns
of the Lester Young imitators or on musical honkings and ascents and
descents of scales. Sonny Stitt was just one more imitator of Charlie

BOP 285

Parker's alto until 1949, when his switch to tenor showed him more
resourceful than most hoppers on this instrument, and closer to the
formulations of the cool jazz musicians than to the hoppers. The best
of Bird's imitators on his own instrument, the alto, was Sonny Criss, a
Memphis musician who progressed from Los Angeles bands, through
outfits led by Howard McGhee and Al Killian, to the Billy Eckstine
band when it was in California; he ended up as a sufficient star on his
instrument to be made, at least temporarily, a part of Norman Granz's
touring "Jazz at the Philharmonic" troupe.

Bop has also had its baritone saxophonists, its pianists, bass players,
and drummers. Leo Parker, a Washington baritone saxist who broke
in with Eckstine, played with Benny Carter and various outfits in
Harlem, including some in Minton's, and corrupted his fresh style to
match the honkings and caterwauls of Illinois Jacquet when he joined
that high-flying, financially successful but musically disastrous little
band. Serge Chaloff offends some people with the large and sometimes
raucous tone he developed in the Georgie Auld and 1947 Woody
Herman bands; others, recognizing Chaloff s pioneering as a baritone
bopper and his considerable control of his instrument, admire the
facility with which he gets around his horn, the fluency of phrase
that, before him, was unknown on the baritone saxophone.

The piano was used in bop chiefly as an accompanying instrument;
it had little place in a music that was essentially a one-line form of
expression, played by a single-line solo instrument or by several in
unison. Tadd Dameron, John Lewis, and George Wallington play
what musicians call "arrangers' piano." The pleasure one receives in
listening to them is chiefly from the introduction of a deft variation
here, a dextrous departure there; they are fitted by neither technique
nor interest for much more than that. Al Haig, however, has always
been capable of something more; though chiefly employed by the
boppers as rhythm-section accompanist, he made enough of his oc-
casional solos to warrant serious consideration as a pianist, and made
enough more of them when he joined forces with Stan Getz to show
himself a fleet-fingered performer with delicacy of taste and of ex-
pression. The late Clyde Hart gave bop piano a start, but he was more
distinguished as a creator of melodic lines for the new music than as
a piano adapter of them. Bud Powell made the piano an integral part
of bop. Born in New York in 1924, Bud comes from a musical family
and has devoted most of his life to music. He left school at fifteen to

286 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

begin a gigging life that has taken him all over Greater New York,
from Coney Island to the upper reaches of the Bronx. He was to be
found either playing or listening at Minton's during the famous forma-
tive sessions. He played some dazzling piano with Cootie Williams'
band in 1944 and 1945, piano which sprang almost entirely from bop
ideas long lines impeccably articulated by the right hand, with
rhythmic accents and chordal elaborations contributed by the left.
Bud's piano wanderings sometimes suggest his own career the large
number of his short-lived appearances with Fifty-second-Street, Min-
ton's, Royal Roost, and Birdland bands; his 1948 nervous breakdown;
his aimless approaches to the bandstand and departures therefrom. He
will set up an intriguing pattern of ideas, aptly constructed, brightly
developed, and then suddenly will break the structure and the develop-
ment to repeat one or two of his phrases in seemingly endless and
senseless reiteration. His solos sometimes have a nagging, fragmentary
quality, like a series of boxes piled precariously on top of one another,
without point or purpose. But then there are the solos that swing
furiously from the first to the last bar, that add lines in a constant en-
richment of idea, that give bop its only real piano voice.

Erroll Garner has often been called a bop pianist because he has
been linked with bop musicians in most of his recording and public
performances. Actually, his Impressionist meanderings in and around
middle-tempo jazz and very slow ballads are only incidentally modern.
An unlettered pianist who grew up in Pittsburgh (where he was born
in 192 1 ) and matured in New York (where he settled in 1944), Erroll
has an intuitive gift for the music that charms, whether it is ragtime,
Waller, Debussy, or bop in origin. His cheerful bounces proceed from
the first two, his languid ballads from the second pair. The pleasure
he gives can be measured against one's taste for lushness for lushness's
sake. His playing, adorfed by bop musicians, serves also as a measure
of the taste of the men who played bop and of the sound they would
have had if they had been slowed down from a gallop to a walk and
had been more concerned with sound and less with idea.

If Oscar Pettiford can be called a bop bassist, because of his early
association with the music, then bebop has had a distinguished bass
player; but Oscar is closer to Jimmy Blanton and to the tradition in
which solos are assigned his instrument than he is to bop, in which
solos are not given the bass. No Blanton, but a superb technician,
Oscar recasts Jimmy's ideas with ease and a huge tone, both of which

BOP 287

served him well when he shifted bow and fingers to the cello. For the
rest, there are Ella Fitzgerald's husband, Ray Brown, veteran of
Dizzy's bands, able but hardly inspired; Al McKibbon, a well-schooled
musician, probably the best of the big-band bop bass players; Curly
Russell, another jazz and bop veteran, another able bass player; and
Tommy Potter, probably the best of the small-band bop bass players.

Kenny Clarke was one of the founding fathers of bop and, at
his best, its incomparable drummer. Born in Pittsburgh in 1914, into
a musical family his father played the trombone, his brothers the
drums and bass he himself played piano, trombone, drums, and
vibraphone and studied musical theory in high school. He played
with Roy Eldridge in 1935, th en with one of the several unacknowl-
edged territory bands of jazz, the swinging Jeter-Pilar orchestra
in St. Louis, before joining the pianist Edgar Hayes for a tour of
Scandinavian countries in 1937 and 1938. When he got back he played
with Claude Hopkins and was Teddy Hill's regular drummer until
Teddy disbanded. Kenny was with Teddy when Dizzy was part of
the band, and he took several of the Hill musicians into Minton's,
where Teddy himself was manager. There, at various times between
jobs with Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Red Allen,
and Coleman Hawkins, he played a formidable part in the rhythmic
structuring of bop. Teddy Hill reports that when Kenny was playing
"those offbeats and little rhythmic tricks on the bass drums," he used
to ask, "what is that kloop-mop stuff?" "That's what it sounded like,
kloop-mop! And that's what we called the music they were playing.
Later on we called it bebop." Kenny's nickname is Kloop or Klook,
celebrating the part he played in the building of bebop. He was in
Europe with the Army for three years, from 1943 to 1946, and he
returned to the United States to play with Dizzy and Tadd Dameron.
He went back to Europe with Dizzy in 1948, to stay, to become one
of the highly respected American jazzmen in France, where American
jazz is so highly respected.

The great change wrought by bop drummers was in their organiza-
tion of a one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one beat, as against the synco-
pations of swing and Dixieland drummers; they reserved the bass drum
for accenting accenting beats as individually as they could, and de-
liberately divorcing them from regular patterns. They kept the basic
beat going on the top cymbal, annoying many listeners and some
musicians with the clatter they thus set up, but giving hoppers a

288 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

rhythmic push like none they had ever felt before. The most popular
of bop's pushers was Max Roach. Ten years younger than Kenny, he
learned from him most of what he knew when he first broke into the
business. He was with Dizzy from the beginning, the rhythmic bul-
wark of Benny Carter's fine 1944 West Coast band, and the solid sup-
port of dozens of Fifty-second-Street bands and recordings made by
such units. As he demonstrated in his performance with the 1951
Metronome All Stars on record, ducting with Kai Winding, Max is
a rhythmic thinker; his solos are not like swing drummers', not de-
pendent upon sheer noise and intensity to make their point; his in-
terest is in setting up drumming phrases that, without melody or
harmony to buttress them, have nonetheless the shape and structure
and integrated meaning of a solo by Charlie Parker. His solos and his
work behind soloists sometimes have such quality, when the men he
is working with are hoppers or can adjust themselves to bop accent-
ing; with others, more or less modern but different in jazz conception,
Max's drumming, even as other hoppers' trumpeting or saxophoning,
just doesn't fit. With the exception of Bird and Miles, bop conditioned
its musicians too well.

Bop is and isn't dead. Its decay as a formularized expression set in
long before its reign was officially over. Its impact as the inevitable
development of jazz that it was will always be felt. Bop lengthened
melodic lines, weakened the grip of the two- and four-bar riff, gave
jazz a rhythmic lift and fresh melodic and harmonic inspiration. Fresh-
ness was the key element in bop; when bop musicians could no longer
recognize staleness and themselves became susceptible to stereotypes
and cliches, they were finished as a cohesive group. The music itself,
however, was not finished: its influence on cool jazz was indirect; on
two important singing voices, Billy Eckstine's and Sarah Vaughan's,
unmistakably direct. And it was these singers, after all, who brought
bop to the millions and made them like it. Although the millions
didn't know that there was any bop in what they liked of Billy's and
Sarah's singing, they were aware that this was a different, a fresher, a
more experimental kind of singing than any they had heard before,
and they were perfectly content to accept it as such.

When Sarah Vaughan made her first records for Musicraft in 1946,
an impatient man stood on the sidelines. He was one of the vice-
presidents of that executive-heavy organization. Lifting his head

BOP 289

angrily, he looked in the direction of the singer and trrned to the
recording director.

"Good God," he said, "she can't do that. Tell her to sing it straight.
That stuff will never get anywhere. We'll lose our shirt."

Musicraft subsequently lost its shirt, but not on Sarah. She could
do "that"; she did do "that"; u that stuff" got very far. In its last mo-
ments the record company represented by the impatient vice-president
stuck grimly to its business; the glue was provided by Sarah, whose
records were among the few large assets Musicraft had at the end.

Actually, outside of those few combative moments with the V.P.
and a couple of periods of deep freeze from the hookers and the club
owners of the music industry, Sarah Vaughan has not had a notably
difficult career. Not without hardship, but certainly without hysteria
or dramatic highlight of any sort, her story is pitched in a middle key,
the comfortable tonality recognized by most of us as human. It's a
simple story, and one has to look hard to find the ingredients not so
much of Sarah's success but of her very large musical accomplishment.
She was born in Newark, New Jersey, that somewhat faded carbon
copy of New York, in 1924, and she still lives there. For eight years,
from the age of seven until she was fifteen, she studied the piano, and
then she moved to the organ for a couple of years. She pulled stops
and ranged the manuals in school and at church, and sang in the
Mount Zion Baptist choir alongside her mother, who still sings Sunday
service with the group. There is music in her father, too; a carpenter,
he finds rest and relaxation on the guitar. But Mamma was the moving
musical force; she wanted Sarah to become a concert pianist and con-
tinued to look hopefully at Carnegie after her daughter stepped into
the jazz world, never dreaming for a moment that Sarah would make
the great concert hall on the strength of her voice and not of her
fingers.

In October 1942 Sarah made the step. She walked onto the stage of
the Apollo Theatre in Harlem a little after midnight on a Wednesday,
to appear in one of those amateur hours that have uncovered a high
percentage of talent. The headliner on the regular bill was Ella
Fitzgerald. Like Ella, Sarah fractured the audience. Like Ella years
before, she won that night's competition. Like Ella, she got a hand-
some career under way as the Apollo Amateur Hour winner. She did
a week at the theater as a reward for winning and was heard by Billy

290 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Eckstine. Billy, then singing with Earl Hines' band, told Earl about
her, and a few weeks later she joined the band for a one-nighter at
the Manhattan Center.

"There it was," she says, "my first job. Period."

Sarah stayed with Earl for a year, part of a mammoth organization
which featured, in addition to Billy and herself, Madeleine Green and
a variety of girl instrumentalists. In those days she sounded much like
Ella, although without any conscious imitative effort. Her voice was
warm, supple, under control.

In November 1943 Sarah cut out. In the summer of 1944 she joined
Billy's brilliant bop band. In between? "Nothing. Just starving/ 1 With
Billy, with food regular again, she sang her head off, but again with
little permanent effect. She made just one record with that band, "I'll
Wait and Pray." It is still pleasant to listen to, but something less than
an accurate index of the growing musicianship she was demonstrating.
Sarah stayed with Billy a little more than a half-year, then began the
curious shuttling back and forth which is basic to all building singers:
records for H.R.S., Guild, Crown; a few weeks at the Copacabana
Lounge with John Kirby, stretching from the end of 1945 just past
the New Year's celebration that ushered in 1946; six months or so at
Cafe Society Downtown; records with Teddy Wilson for Musicraft
a good omen, since it was with Teddy on Brunswick that Billie
Holiday made her significant early appearances. The big break was
Fifty-second Street, appearing at the Onyx and Downbeat. She was
paid seventy-five dollars for her Street debut at the first-named; when
she returned a year later her weekly ante was nine hundred dollars;
when she came back to New York a year after that no such club
could pay the money she was worth.

She was married on September 17, 1946, to trumpeter George
Treadwell, and her life seemed balanced, burgeoning, brightly bur-
dened. The seeming wasn't dreaming; from then on Sarah moved.
She moved from coast to coast, from the Street to the Blue Angel to
the Rhumboogie and Sherman in Chicago to the Bocage in Holly-
wood. Musicraft recorded her with Georgie Auld ("You're Blase")
and Tadd Dameron ("If You Could See Me Now"), and musicians
lifted their ears. She did another trip around the country's night-club
and theater wheel. Musicraft recorded her with her husband and
studio combinations ("Body and Soul," "Don't Blame Me," "Ghost
of a Chance," "Tenderly," "I Cover the Waterfront," "Everything I

BOP 291

Have Is Yours"), and the public lifted its ears. Disk- jockey-concert-
promoters like Dave Garroway made her singing their special con-
cern, and she made something special of "It's Magic," a record that
got just as big as the rapidly failing Musicraft concern permitted it
to get. When she returned to Los Angeles late in 1949, to do th ree
weeks at Giro's and four at the Casbah, she had reached the $3250-3-
week class and was still soaring. When she made her first Columbia
records, in January 1949, after suing the defunct Musicraft company
and thus emerging from contracted inactivity, she reached the musical
heights that "If You Could See Me Now" and some of the early rec-
ords had suggested.

Those are the facts. A pleasant history with few downs, more ups,
and an almost straight line to the top billing, following a pattern that
almost seems lifted from her singing. As all of listening America knows
by now, Sarah's style is compounded of a few downs, more ups, and
a great drive to the top of a bar, a phrase, a song. Her filling of inter-
vals, her breaking of half-notes into eighths, of quarters into sixteenths,
her careening melodic variations, have been imitated since 1946 by
every singer of consequence with ears to hear and voice to sing. Sarah
says she's had only one influence "Eckstine, of course." The smile
that accompanies this admission betrays as much of her retiring per-
sonality as she generally permits non-singing expression. Of course
the influence was mutual. Of course Billy bursts explaining the
strength of Sarah Vaughan's influence upon his singing. Whichever
way you cut it, she is certainly Billy's running-mate, one-half of a
pair of singers who have broken every commercial tradition, every
bigoted bar, as they have made America accept musicianship, a degree
of detachment, and a governing jazz sound that springs from bop and
courses beyond.

Chapter

22

THE PROGRESSIVES

After years of struggling, some better than others but none filled with
fame or fortune, Woody Herman finally emerged as the major band-
leader of his time in 1945. The particular pleasure afforded his friends
then was the realization that he had "made it," as the ambiguous col-
loquialism goes, with the best band he had ever had and one of the
very best ever. Only once before had a band of such unequivocal
standards and evenness of musicianship been organized. It looked in
1945 as if at least one promise of the millennium had been fulfilled:
good jazz was making money. Then came the end of the war; a much
greater promise was fulfilled. The cessation of hostilities also brought
the close of another great battle, the one waged to make jazz accept-
able to the multitude. Both victories were, of course, short lived. Be-
cause jazz was without an UNRRA or a Marshall Plan, its conquests
were quickly dissipated. With postwar inflation, bands became too
expensive for their leaders, the public shifted its taste just enough to
make the shakier leaders quicken a bit and then give way more; heads
fell, bands broke up.

The demise of the great Herman band in late 1946 was not alto-
gether unexpected. There had been dissension and corollary difficul-
ties in the band. Woocly was a remarkable leader who had had several
significant bands, though none as good as this one, but he was also
a human being. The taut and precarious tightrope he had had to walk
with this greatest of his bands eventually gave way. Family problems
piled up, and Woody was devoted to his wife and child; band prob-
lems accrued, and Woody was devoted to music and to his musicians.
He was no longer able to assuage with the pride of achievement the
feelings of frustration and incompleteness that attack such a man so
far away from home so much of the time. He could no longer con-
vince himself that the enormous success of his band would ultimately

292

THE PROGRESSIVES 293

give his personal life a perfect balance. He quit, and the best band that
jazz had ever known apart from Ellington's broke up. During
1947, Woody's year away from bandleading, many tears, salt and
crocodile and very real also, were shed over the loss of the band, and
a certain perspective about it was achieved. Looked at, even from that
short distance, the real contribution of his band could be assayed, and
for the first time, perhaps, Woody's leading and defining role in its
performances could be properly seen.

It was not until the advent of the band that seemed in 1947 to be
Woody's glorious farewell to his profession that he was overshadowed
by his musicians. Until 1944, at least, Woody Herman was always
the star. He was a singer and dancer who stopped shows before he
was nine, working with his father, a onetime member of a vocal
quartet known as the White City Four. When he was nine he bought
a saxophone out of his own earnings, and after three months intro-
duced it into his act. For two years he studied the saxophone with a
teacher in Milwaukee, his home town; when he was eleven he picked
up the clarinet; when he was fourteen he left the stage to join the
Myron Stewart band at the Blue Heaven, a road house just outside
Milwaukee. Featured as a singer and instrumentalist, he played with
Stewart for six months and then began to work around town with
a series of local outfits. He was heard and hired by Joe Lichter, a
Milwaukee violinist with a good jazz ear and some Chicago musi-
cians to implement it. With Lichter, Woody was brought close to
the central jazz tradition, both as a record listener and performer.
That did it for him, and thereafter he was fully committed to the
music in which he became in time a formidable name.

After working on the road with Lichter, Woody finished up his
high school work in Milwaukee, studied music for one term at
Marquette University there, and gigged around town. Tom Gerun,
leader of a dance band of large reputation and some musical quality,
brought his musicians into the Schroeder Hotel to play and to look
for a few new men, if they were available in Milwaukee. Hearing
about Woody, he sent for him, auditioned him, and hired him.
Woody had arrived in the big time; he was featured vocalist alongside
Al Morris who played tenor and baritone sax and sang so well he
was able later, under the name of Tony Martin, to make himself
a major figure in American show business and an attractive young
girl named Virginia Simms, later to become Kay Kyser's great

294 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

attraction. Woody stayed with Gerun for four years, singing and
playing tenor saxophone solos, on which he sounded, he says with
his usual self-deprecating air, "like Bud Freeman with his hands
chopped off." He left Gerun to join Harry Sosnik's band at the
Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood. He remained eight months with
Sosnik, who had a fair band made easier to look at by the face and
figure of Adele Girard, who sang and played the harp, easier to
listen to by the jazz arranger for the band, Dave Rose. After eight
months with Sosnik and two singing but not playing in theaters
with Gus Arnheim, Woody met three old friends of his who were
all playing with the Isham Jones band Walt Yoder, Pee Wee
Erwin, and Jack Jenney. This, the old friends decided, was their
man. They talked Isham into hiring Woody and having him join
them early in 1934 in Denver.

The Jones band was distinguished for the original tunes of its
leader, one of the more gifted popular songwriters of his time,
and for the occasional solos of its jazz musicians. It was a fairly im-
portant band for the new recording company, Decca, and it wasn't
difficult to persuade Jack Kapp, whose child Decca was, to record
the small band the jazz musicians had formed within the larger or-
ganization. The Isham Jones Juniors, as they called themselves, made
two dates for Decca in March 1936 six sides, the only one of which
to feature Woody as a singer was "Fan It," the only side to endure.
The musicians who worked with Woody here were to become the
nucleus of the Herman band. That band, a cooperative organization,
was formed by the Jones musicians when Isham gave them notice
early in 1936 that he had tired of the profession and would break
up a month later in Tennessee.

Walt Yoder went to New York and convinced some of the ex-
ecutives at the important Rockwell-O'Keefe booking agency that
the Jones jazzmen were ripe for success in swing-crazy America.
Woody got some arrangers together, gathered his musicians at the
Capitol Hotel in New York, and started rehearsing them in the free
space the hotel gave them. Six weeks later the band made its debut at
Brooklyn's Roseland Ballroom and after a short stay there moved
into the Manhattan Roseland, the most important ballroom in New
York. Working the arduous routine of waltzes, rhumbas, and its own
brand of music jazz the band managed to satisfy Roseland patrons
sailors, shopgirls, and the rest of that hard-dancing fraternity

THE PROGRESSIVES 295

and also to expand its repertory beyond a meager twelve scores, in-
cluding its theme, "Blue Prelude." There were some impressive
Dixieland soloists in the cooperative group: Joe Bishop played a
pretty ballad with overtones of Beiderbecke on his fluegelhorn;
Neal Reid doubled as road manager and barrelhouse trombonist;
Walt Yoder and Frankie Carlson, on bass and drums respectively,
kept the two-beat judiciously syncopated. Woody's taste and that
of his musicians was best expressed by the blues, and the blues the
band played, even when bookers, ballroom and night-club managers,
and recording executives explained that a steady radio, record, and
bandstand diet of the blues would be too heady for the average
audience. One night when they were playing at a major hotel in
Houston, Texas, Woody received a note from the manager: "You
will kindly stop singing and playing those nigger blues." They re-
ceived short shrift at the hands of a hotel manager whose taste ran
to Viennese waltzes, and shorter at other places which expected the
band to work under union scale and the music to be as simple as the
C-major scale. In April 1939 Woody recorded an instrumental named
after the small band within the band, "Woodchoppers' Ball," and
almost overnight the years of scuffling for food and with managers
were over. An album of the band's better blues sides, Blues on
Parade, was a success and, with Mary Ann McCall singing well and
the band playing better, Woody was a success in the cubbyhole
called a night club, the Famous Door, on Fifty-second Street.

The draft removed most of the members of the cooperative corpo-
ration and, with the help of its new managers, lawyers Chubby Gold-
farb and Mike Vallon, its form was reorganized along more con-
ventional lines with Woody as the proprietor of a gradually improv-
ing band. Cappy Lewis joined at the end of 1939 an ^ gave the trumpet
section a sizable growling soloist. Hy White, who came in at about
the same time, added a significant guitar voice. Such soloists as
trumpeters Ray Lynn and Chuck Peterson, tenor saxophonists Pete
Mondello and Dave Matthews, played with the band from time to
time and considerably modernized its outlook, Dave adding manu-
script with an Ellington flavor as well as solos similarly constructed.
At the end of 1943 the personnel was almost completely changed.
Chubby Jackson became the band's official bass player and unofficial
cheerleader, Ralph Burns its pianist and arranger, and Frances Wayne
its featured vocalist. It seemed reasonable to ask such a musician as

296 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Ben Webster to record with the band, and he did in November 1943.
It seemed fair to ask the best trumpeters and saxophonists and trom-
bonists around to join up, and they did in 1943 and 1944, until at
the end of the second year a more or less fixed personnel had great-
ness thrust upon it.

The first records the band made for Columbia in February 1945
caught its quality, and every side it made until December 1946, just
before it broke up, had the same exultant collective spirit and end-
less individual inspiration. The first sides issued were "Laura" and
"I Wonder," and they were, as they should have been, Woody's
exhibitions of his sensitivity and warmth as a singer, of an individual
style best in ballads, as its progenitor's, Red McKenzie's, had been.
Then came "Caledonia," a transformation of a Louis Jordan jazz
novelty, with jubilant Herman singing and an extraordinary five-
trumpet unison chorus built on bop lines but unplayable by any bop
trumpet section before Woody's. Coupled with it was Frances
Wayne's exquisite "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe," in which her
controlled anguish was given jazz emphasis by her own phrasing
and the almost violent eruptions of the band behind her. Then came
the driving instrumentals "Apple Honey," "Northwest Passage,"
"The Good Earth," "Your Father's Mustache," "Wild Root,"
"Blowin' up a Storm" driving but, like Frances's anguish, con-
trolled; powerful in their brass flourishes but also subdued and deli-
cate in individual solos. In between the blasts and the bellows there
was time not only for a solo or two, but also for whole numbers of
a different volume, mood, and musical intensity. "Bijou," Ralph
Burns' "rhumba a la jazz," was the side that caught Igor Stravinsky's
attention and moved him to write his "Ebony Concerto" for the
band's Carnegie Hall conceit in 1946. Its rhythmic accents and or-
ganization of brass and reed sounds were at least suggestive of his
own work; its infectious figures were played by the band as a
whole and by Bill Harris as trombone soloist with a finish and a free-
dom at the same time that were like nothing else that Stravinsky, or
anybody else, had ever heard. A group of able musicians were so
fired by each other and by the collective sound they managed to-
gether that an entirely new kind of jazz eloquence and playing
decorum was instituted. The Herman musicians were individually
impressive; as a band, they were incomparable.
Chubby Jackson was responsible more than any other single musi-

THE PROGRESSIVES 297

cian with Woody for the quality of the band. It was not only his
playing and talking enthusiasm; he was also, as the Jones jazzmen
had been earlier, the indefatigable supporter of the talents of musi-
cians he thought belonged with the Herman band. He was a searcher,
and just as his searches had never succeeded in the days before Woody,
they struck fire every time he went looking for musicians after he
joined the band. Show business was an integral part of his life;
his mother, the former Dorothy Wahl, had been a vaudeville and
musical-comedy singer. Known to all of Chubby's friends as "Mem,"
she has long presided over the house in Freeport, Long Island, that
Chubby bought, providing meals and roaring enthusiasm for a group
of sometimes stray but always talented musicians. Chubby switched
to the bass in high school, inspired by Arnold Fishkin, who sold
him his first bass for three dollars. Chubby played it some while he
was in high school and some more at Ohio State University, where
he completed his freshman year and broke seriously into the dance
business with small bands around Columbus. Back in New York the
next year, he played with Mike Riley at Nick's, studied his instru-
ment with a member of the New York Philharmonic Symphony,
and became a notable of the swing era as an entertainer and person-
ality. He played with Johnny Messner, Raymond Scott, Jan Savitt,
Terry Shand, and Henry Busse before he found the opportunity to
demonstrate his enlarged musicianship and diminished dimension.
With Charlie Barnet for almost two years, he participated in the
stimulating performances that musicians like the trumpeters Al Killian,
Howard McGhee, and Peanuts Holland, the clarinetist Buddy De-
Franco, the guitarist Turk Van Lake, and the trombonist Eddie
Burke provided. When Chubby joined Woody, in late 1943, he
brought with him Jimmy Blanton's bass conceptions and his own
brand of enthusiasm. His effervescent personality bounced through
the rhythm section, inspiring comparative youngsters in the band,
and reinspiring such veterans as Dave Tough. His loudly encourag-
ing "Go! Go! Go!" sailed over the band, moving both musicians
and audiences. His constant experimentation involved, first, the hir-
ing of new men, and second, a variety of rhythmic tricks, the most
exciting of which, replete with doublings of doubled tempos and
halvings of halved times, can be found in the Woodchopper album
made in 1946, on the side called, in description of the beat and the
number of musicians attacking it, "Four Men on a Horse."

298 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Dave Tough had played all the Dixieland he wanted to when he
joined Woody in 1944. He was proud of his pivotal position in the
growth of jazz in Chicago, as the steadiest, the most gifted, and the
most inspiring of the drummers who kept time for Frank Tesche-
macher, the McPartlands, and their various and sundry associates.
He had enjoyed himself in his two outings with the Tommy Dorsey
bands, with Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Artie
Shaw, and in an earlier, brief appearance with Woody in 1942. But
two events stayed with him always in his short life: his two and
a half years with Danny Polo and other musicians in Europe, from
1928 to 1931, and his year and a half with the Artie Shaw Rangers,
the Navy band with which he played from 1942 to 1944. The one
introduced his eager and receptive mind to the vast delights of
European culture; he never tired of describing the titillating pleasures
of such appeals to mind and body as he found in reading Baudelaire
on the beach at Deauville. The other confirmed his low opinion of
the human species; he came back from the war bitter and discouraged
and certain that the affront to his and others' dignity was of the
nature of things and that no amount of struggling against it would
avail. The sense of humor he had displayed in his drum articles for
Metronome changed; he was no longer capable of such charming ex-
plorations of drum styles as the passage from a 1937 column in which
he explained that George Simon u is working out a formula of musical
criticism. . . . Postulating that:

(6 saxophones 2 X Ray Bauduc 6 ) (2 torn toms X Chick Webb 8 )

(Pi plus Ray McKinley 6 ) (Big Sidney plus Zutty)

he has a tentative three-dimensional equation that will set the musical
cognoscenti back on its heels."

The new Tough justified his surname. His gentle nature, notwith-
standing the postwar discouragement, did take over for a while.
With Woody for almost a year, from late 1944 to late 1945, ^ e to k
authoritative charge of the rhythm section, complementing Chubby's
rhythmic fancies with his unyielding beat and inspiring variations
thereon. He didn't last; his body was not up to the anodynes with
which he attempted to prop his failing spirits. He left Woody to
spend almost five years in sulking, sodden deterioration, which came
to a tragic close in Newark in December 1948, where he died of
complete exhaustion.

THE PROGRESSIVES 299

Dave was replaced by Don Lamond, son of an Oklahoma City
lawyer, who had moved with his father to Washington, D.C., when
Don was very young. Don was one of the Washington School, a
group of District of Columbia musicians who found a meeting of
minds and styles in each other and kept both intact in bands around
Washington from 1940 to '42 or '43, then with Boyd Raeburn's band
from ''43 to '44, then back in Washington again when Don led a
group of them at the Kavakos Club. When Dave Tough became too
ill to play Don was sent for on the recommendation of Sonny Herman.
Sonny was enthusiastic but not enthusiastic enough. Not since
Dave himself had come up in Chicago had so facile and shrewdly
intuitive a big-band drummer emerged. He took up where Dave left
off, maintaining the steady beat, driving the rhythm section and the
rest of the band, putting down that difficult row of even beats which
the bop formulations of these musicians required. Although few musi-
cians afterward, including, perhaps, Don himself, were able to keep
such a demanding and subtle conception of rhythm going with such
contagious lightness, he did set a pattern which jazz drummers will
be shooting at for decades to come.

Billy Bauer had had an ordinary playing career when he joined
Woody keeping the beat steady with Carl Hoff, Dick Stabile, Abe
Lyman, Louis Prima, and numerous little bands around New York.
Chubby brought him into the Herman band, and the band perked
up that much more when Billy's guitar artistry was made a part
of it. His solidity of performance was such that by comparison no
other rhythm-section guitarist after him seemed quite professional;
but his full impact was not felt until he joined Lennie Tristano in
1946. Tommy Aless, who replaced Ralph Burns on piano after the
Herman band took a layoff in Detroit in June 1945, was essentially
a rhythm pianist with Woody; his major duty was to combine with
Don, Chubby, and Billy, to keep feeding the saxophone and brass
sections the necessary beat, which he did very well.

Ralph Burns was clearly the best pianist and the best arranger
Woody ever had. He was essentially a band pianist, who could, like
his Herman confreres, manage a very good beat, and a soloist who,
with an arranger's mind, always made his solos a part of the larger
texture of the performance. As an arranger, he always had Duke
Ellington's kind of ear; he always adapted his arranging and com-
posing ideas to the sounds and conceptions of the musicians making

300 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

up the bands for which he was writing. Ralph came by his several
skills at an early age. He sums up his first years in one breathless
statement: "We always had a piano in the house and my sister and
I took lessons for about five years with private teachers and then I
went to the New England Conservatory of Music for four months
and then I went to work at a little beer and pizza joint at Revere
Beach and that's where I started arranging and wrote 'Goodmania'
and that's how I became a musician." Ralph comes from a big Boston
Irish family; he was born on June 9, 1922, one of what was even-
tually to be a family of twelve. He played around his native Newton,
a Boston suburb, with Bob Adams' orchestra before joining the
band led by Frances Wayne's brother, Nick Jerrett. His arranging
began with "Goodmania," which, he says, "was a lot of 'Sing, Sing,
Sing' and 4 Don't Be That Way.' I copied the records. Oh, it was
horrible too. I loved the Goodman band. And Bunny Berigan's band
loved it. Boston's Bunny Berigan, Gushing Bean, was in the Bob
Adams band. He was so blind he couldn't read music, even with
special glasses but how he blew!"

Curiously, for an arranger whose thinking has been so much like
Duke's, Ralph didn't like Ellington's work when he first started ar-
ranging. "But he came into Boston to play the Ritz roof in 1939 and
I went in there all the time to hear him, and tried to understand
why I didn't like him. And I got to know and love his music. Sure
was great." Ralph came to New York with the Jerrett band in 1941,
to play at Kelly's Stable on Fifty-second Street, with Frances Wayne
singing with the band. Charlie Barnet came in often to hear Frances,
and heard Ralph as well and hired him. Ralph did some arranging
for Charlie, Duke's "Cottontail" and "Caravan" as a kind of penance
for his original attitude toward Ellington, and also "Happiness Is
a Thing Called Joe," which he brought with him when he joined
Woody at Christmas time in 1943. Before joining Woody, he played
with Red Norvo's overseas band in the spring of '43 the band, as
Ralph says, "that never got across the East River. But what a won-
derful ball that was!" It was also the first time Ralph's keyboard
facility and felicity of phrase became audible on records, in the
excellent series of V-disks Red made with that band for the Army.

When Ralph Burns joined Woody Herman it was almost certain
that after a year or two he would leave the piano to spend full
time with pen and score. At the age of twenty-one he had reached

THE PROGRESSIVES 301

the maturity as arranger and composer that no other scripters with
bands except possibly Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn could
match. With a taste and ear for both the orchestral formulations
of Stravinsky and the jazz ideas of Ellington, he was able to mass
sections in three-minute tone poems that had some of the eloquence
of both his major influences, and to balance the mass of sound of his
ensemble writing with solo passages of notably restrained and soft
invention. In the Herman band he found sections and soloists to
give that balance proper articulation.

The Herman saxes achieved their quality not so much from the
work of their most famous member, the tenor saxophonist Flip Phil-
lips, as from the team sound they achieved under the leadership of Sam
Marowitz. Sam, talented member of a Middletown, New York,
musical family, started his career on the C-melody saxophone when
he was ten; by the time he was twelve he had started jobbing with
local bands, playing in Catskill resort places. When he was nineteen
his family moved to New York; he started auditioning and got his
first name-band job shortly afterward, with Harry James, when he
was just twenty. He stayed with James almost four years, playing
on many of the band's records, but with no solos except for a few
odd bars on "Trumpet Blues" and a few others and on a transcrip-
tion of, "Let's Go Home." With Woody, his main concern was to
keep the section in order, leading it with a tone suggestive of his
own alto favorites, Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges. He was also
lucky to have under him so facile a musician as John LaPorta, a fine
arranger who did a couple of originals for the Bob Chester band,
with whom he played before Woody, and for Woody too. Mickey
Folus, like Sam an upstate New Yorker, played with Woody several
times in 1937, 1938, 1941, and 1942, and rejoined him in 1945 after
being discharged from the Coast Guard; he had little opportunity
to solo in the great Herman outfit, but his warm and large tenor
tone was a considerable asset in the saxophone section. The same
can be said for the baritone playing of another prewar Herman saxo-
phonist, Sammy Rubinwitch; molding his work on that of Harry
Carney, Sammy managed to sustain the anchor end of the section
with a friendly bleat. Joseph Edward Phillips, best known as Flip
and a soloist, also upheld his section end very well, having developed
from a jumping Fifty-second-Street tenor saxophonist who would
take on all comers (whence his name, Flip, from one of the synonyms

302 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

for going wild, or snapping one's cap, blowing one's top, or flipping
one's lid) and could not read music very well, into an able team-
mate. Most of the saxophone solos with Woody were his, and he
was capable of playing them with softness of tone, celerity of finger-
ing, and subtlety of phrase. His ballad meanderings were always
more impressive than his self-conscious frantic jazz, but it is the
latter facet of his playing style that has made him a big name in
recent years, as a soloist in "Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts.

Solos for a while were almost evenly distributed between Flip
and Bill Harris. Bill, who was born in Philadelphia in 1916, started
as a versatile musician, playing trumpet, tenor, drums, almost any-
thing he could get his hands on, when he was a youngster. "I found
it didn't pay too well to be a musician, and that I had to take a lot of
other jobs. What kind of jobs? Well, let's see I was a truck driver
awhile; I worked in a warehouse; I read electric meters. All kinds
of things, playing club dates on the side." On those dates he played
with two other distinguished Philadelphia musicians, Charlie Ventura
and Buddy DeFranco. Charlie kept them working at Italian wed-
dings. Then Bill's father sent him out as an able-bodied seaman in
the Merchant Marine. He was nineteen when that happened; when
he got back, two years later, he married and settled down in Phila-
delphia. In 1938 Charlie Ventura sent for him to join Gene Krupa's
band. But Bill couldn't read nearly fast enough in those days and,
in his own words, he "laid an egg." The job lasted one week. Back
home again, operating a machine in a defense plant, Bill "got real
mad" about the Krupa incident and studied hard to overcome his
handicap of poor reading. Nonetheless, he laid another egg with Ray
McKinley, trying to play first trombone parts; "so I went back in
the cellar and studied some more." He was more successful with
Buddy Williams' band~and still more successful with Bob Chester's.
When Benny Goodman heard the Chester outfit over the air he sent
for Bill. Bill was a great success with Benny, only suggesting the kind
of imaginative modern reworking of Dixieland procedures which he
made into the most popular trombone style of his time after he
joined Woody. After Benny disbanded Bill put in some time on the
Coast, and then with his own little band at Cafe Society in New
York. He joined Woody in August 1944, * n Detroit, after playing
with Chester again for a few weeks. "Bijou," if it is anybody's
achievement besides Ralph Burns', is Bill Harris's: the slight burr in

THE PROGRESSIVES 303

his tone, the long extension of his trombone slide across acres of
skipping notes, his identifying vibrato all these things made an
impression upon jazz in general and jazz trombonists in particular
unequaled since the early days of Jack Teagarden. The contagion of
Bill's style extended through all the bands that played or pretended
to play jazz in the late forties, not excepting Woody 's. Ed Kiefer
and Ralph Pfiffner played almost as much in the Harris idiom as
Bill, when they were joined to him in section performance. Both
skilled and broadly experienced, both quiet and unassuming, they
were keenly aware of their individual responsibilities, which they
discharged with distinction.

No trumpet section in jazz was more distinguished than Woody 's.
At its 1945 peak it scaled the heights of human sonorities in the
playing of Pete Candoli, whose physical prowess as a trumpeter was
matched by his swimming and weight-lifting attainments; he could
always be counted upon to bring a playing performance to an ex-
ultant climax with his altissimo notes, or a stage show to a hilarious
ending with his impersonation of Superman at the end of the driving,
screaming "Apple Honey." Neal Hefti composed two of the band's
finest instrumentals, "Wild Root" and "The Good Earth," and con-
tributed to the band a refinement of bop trumpet style that reflected
his experience with Bobby Byrne, Charlie Barnet, and Charlie Spivak,
as well as an unusually imaginative mind, essentially restless on the
trumpet, but beautifully grounded on manuscript paper. Irv Lewis
was one of the leading actors in the band's troupe of Jewish come-
dians, fitting neatly into histrionic place beside Chubby Jackson,
Sam Marowitz, and Sonny Berman. He was also a splendidly versatile
trumpeter, veteran of Detroit club dates and radio work, of the
Henry Busse band when Chubby Jackson was with it, and of in-
numerable recording dates. He was replaced by the most brilliantly
gifted lead trumpeter in jazz, Conrad Gozzo, at the same time that
another of the able musicians of the Washington school, Irving
Markowitz, replaced Neal Hefti. Goz and Marky carried on the
Herman trumpet tradition with all the skill and addiction to playing
duties which marked their new associates. The same was true of
Shorty Rogers, born Milton, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
a difficult nativity to believe when one hears his musician's Southern
accent. Shorty, when he joined the band in 1945, brought into it a
delicacy of style and subtlety of idea that had been tutored by Red

304 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Norvo when Shorty played with his small band in 1942. A product
of Fiorello La Guardia's pride and joy, the New York City High
School of Music and Art, Shorty was well trained in the classical
tradition and, as a result, never at a loss in composing and arranging,
first for the Herman band and later for Stan Kenton.

All of these men contributed to the band its extraordinary flash
and power and contrasting accents; none of them was quite the equal,
as a soloist, of Sonny Berman. Sonny played with seven bands in
his six years in the jazz business, but not until he joined Woody
Herman in late 1944 did his unusual skill and taste become widely
apparent. At first, with Woody, he was end man in the trumpet
section, a funny kid whose square countenance looked so much like
the front of a subway car that it earned him the extraordinary
sobriquet of "BMT-face." Then came the famous vitalization of
Woody's band, and Berman became to Herman what Chubby Jack-
son and Bill Harris and Flip Phillips and later Red Norvo did a
sparkplug in the band's celebrated drive to the top of jazz. He was
never too well featured with the band on records you can hear
him at his best on "Sidewalks of Cuba" and it remained for a set
of Woodchopper disks, a couple of V-disks, and one side in Dial's
bebop album ("Curbstone Scuffle") to carve his groove in eternity.
But anyone who heard the Herman band in person will remember
Sonny's solos, those long cadences and flattened notes piercing the
wildest up-tempo jazz with such lovely poignancy. There was al-
ways something poignant about Sonny, no matter what he was play-
ing or saying, in his role as Yiddish dialectician and storyteller or as
a slapstick comedian knocking everything down before him in his
determined pratfalls. Sonny was funny with a touch of sadness sad
with a meaning, sorrowful on his horn, touching as a person when
you got to know him and got beyond the frantic exterior. This boy
was well on his way to a mark in jazz beside the handful of titans
on his instrument, until the ways of the jazz world caught up with
him. His was one of the few fresh new trumpet sounds after Dizzy's,
Fats's, and Miles'; he was a musician potentially of the stature of
Louis Armstrong, Cootie Williams, and Roy Eldridge. But the grim
fact is that, at the age of twenty-one, Sonny Berman died of a
heart attack, brought on by events at a wild party.

In 1942 a Charlie Barnet record started people talking about a
singer with overtones of Billie Holiday in her voice and style

THE PROGRESSIVES 305

Frances Wayne. That record was "Black Magic." In 1945 a Woody
Herman record started the same people and a lot of others talking
about Frances Wayne all over again. That record was "Happiness
Is a Thing Called Joe."

Frances was a good singer when she made "Black Magic." She
was an excellent singer through her three years with Woody. But
"Happiness" struck the right chord a brilliant ensemble chord
scored by Ralph Burns and tempo slow for her voice and
temperament. She is essentially a moody, torchy singer, a more
modern, handkerchiefless Ethel Waters. She sings with Italian oper-
atic intensity of feeling in a jazz frame. The intensity reminiscent of
Verdi and Puccini and Donizetti comes from her Italian family
background. The jazz feeling springs from similar sources: her
brother, clarinetist Nick Jerrett, led one of the good little jump
bands around Boston and New York and Syracuse until 1943. Frances
sang with Nick off and on, between single turns, stretches with Sam
Donahue and Charlie Barnet, and a layoff to recover from the ravages
of a strep throat.

Frances was born Chiarina Francesca Bertocci. She spoke better
Italian than English until she was eight years old. A native Bostonian
with a father from Tuscany and mother from Naples, she spent three
years of her childhood in their native land, went to a convent school
in Naples, and visited the opera house in Rome on weekend jaunts
with her father. Frances finished her schooling in Boston, didn't sing
until she was twenty, only had four months' formal teaching. She
had always had musical-comedy ambitions, but her family didn't ap-
prove of them. She starred at the Hi-Hat in Boston for nine months
with a small band of which Hy White was also a member, and then
worked in other night clubs before joining her brother, Nick, who
was studying at the New England Conservatory, where he formed
his small band with Ralph Burns. Later they all came to New York
and played at Kelly's Stable. Eventually the whole band except
Nick and Ralph was drafted. Frances took a job with Charlie Barnet,
stayed eight months, and waxed the above-mentioned "Black Magic"
for Decca. For eight months after that she was ill and didn't sing a
note. Then she worked locally as a single again. One night Woody
Herman heard her, and she joined him two days later.

Frances Wayne was welcomed to the inner circle of jazz singers,
that very small number of distinguished men and women who sense

306 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

the great heart and soul of popular singing at its best, who are aware
of its philosophical tractability, and are able to communicate all of
these things with a beat.

Besides his own and Frances's singing and the soloists on the con-
ventional jazz instruments, Woody offered first Marjorie Hyams
and then Red Norvo on vibraphone, flavoring the sound of the band
with a seasoning only a handful of musicians have been able to
manage. Marjorie's alternation of bland countenance and electric
smile paralleled her playing with Woody. Sometimes she was only
a plunk or a series of amplified sounds to sharpen the texture of the
band's performance; occasionally, granted a solo, she expanded the
melodic fragment handed her by the previous soloist or the band as
a whole into soft, simple, and beguiling elaborations. Red, of course,
had invented and defined most of the possibilities of xylophone or
vibraphone mallets before he joined Woody at the beginning of
1946. With the Herman band his was not so much technical practice
as a demonstration of the breadth and depth of vibes in modern jazz.
Most of the musicians with whom he played were old friends, per-
sonally and musically, and he played beside them as if he had been
with them from the band's beginnings. Such alterations as were re-
quired Red accomplished with a minimum of show and a maximum
of taste. The size and value of his adjustment can be heard in his
performance of one of his most famous solos, "I Surrender, Dear"
in the Woodchoppers' album.

Red's contribution to the Carnegie Hall concert of the band was
on his own high level, which was matched, note for note, bar for bar,
inspiration for inspiration, by all the musicians in the band that eve-
ning. With the addition of French horns and harp, the slightly
changed personnel of ihe Herman band moved through Stravinsky's
"Ebony Concerto" as if his dry accents and fragmentary phrases
were ancient conquests. They played their ragtimey work, with its
wry overtones of a German band, with a finish and polish that Virgil
Thomson, who did not like the band's jazz, admitted was without
equal as a performance of Stravinsky. "Ebony Concerto" was the
succes cTestime of the evening; Ralph Burns' "Summer Sequence"
was the major musical achievement. In its four parts, evocative but
not programmatic distillations of four summers spent in different
parts of the country, the power of the band ensemble, the sweet-
ness of such soloists as Bill Harris and Flip Phillips, and the pianistic

THE PROGRESSIVES 307

imagination of Ralph were given full display. One of its most felicitous
phrases, in repetition and variation, was built out of Beethoven's
familiar piano-practice piece, "Fur Elise," and assigned to piano
(Ralph), guitar (Chuck Wayne), bass (Chubby). A similar inven-
tion was to be heard in "Lady MacGowan's Dream," one of the last
of the band's recordings, not issued until after it had long broken
up a$ was true of "Summer Sequence" too.

Woody's success was contagious. Following the spectacular
changes effected in jazz by the boppers, it suggested to many that
a new era had begun, one in which the technical inefficiencies and
the cliches of Dixieland and swing would be replaced by a more
skillful and imaginative organization of jazz resources. Suggestion be-
came conviction, and conviction became cult. With startling rapidity
lines were drawn, barricades built, and war declared. It was an old
war in jazz; it had not been declared by the swingsters or the bop-
pers. With the rise of swing, a generation of early jazz enthusiasts took
root and found newspapers and magazines and beer parlors across
the country in which to blossom. Assuming a false parallel between
successful swing bands and successful tinsel movies, magazines, the
writings of such as Faith Baldwin and Kathleen Norris and Kath-
leen Winsor these enthusiasts pummeled Benny Goodman and Art
Tatum and even found Duke Ellington wanting he had succeeded
commercially, ergo he had failed musically. When bop came along
the tools were sharpened, the adjectives were bared, and adherents
of the new music were damned as specious entries in a sacred tradi-
tion, which, it was said, decayed a little more with each of their
ministrations. Besides, it was a complicated music, and nobody un-
derstood it, and wasn't it that most noxious of qualities, intellectual?

If these arguments had come only from one obvious source, the
philistine newspaper columnist, it is unlikely that the battle would
have raged so furiously. But these were the attacks of generally
sensitive and knowing people, those who had grown up with jazz
in the twenties and those who were growing up with it in the
thirties and forties. On college campuses around the country the
vote was better than two to one for the old jazz; it was infradig to
support modern jazz at any of the Ivy League colleges, and maybe
a little subversive too. A whole network of little magazines devoted
to the "art" of Dixieland, New Orleans and Chicago versions, in
contradistinction to the "commerce" of swing and bop, took shape

308 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

and called names. One of the favorite debating points of this cult,
both in conversation and in print, was the argument from analogy:
the failure to recognize the incomparable size of the unique contribu-
tion of the Dixielanders was akin to calling Bach and Handel, or per-
haps (if the arguer was better equipped and knew his musical history
better) di Lasso and Palestrina, corny. When the cudgels of the
Communists were joined to the battering rams of the Dixieland
lovers in support of "the people's music," the modernists saw blood.
Infuriated, frustrated by the non sequiturs and nimble evasions of
their opponents, admirers of the new jazz reduced themselves to the
level of name-calling and the construction of questionable analogy.
In 1945 Metronome published an article which, employing the
coinage of a sailor, Sam Platt, who had written a letter to Esquire,
made a label for the bigoted Dixieland devotee stick. Platt's letter
was a protest against what he called the "Moldy Fig" genre of jazz
lovers. The article pointed out that the musicians who were beloved
of the Moldy Fig pointedly disagreed with the bigoted view, and
quoted several of them side by side with Fig detractions to prove it.
In a magazine called The Jazz Session, representative of the Fig posi-
tion, Benny Goodman was summed up as "without doubt, probably
the poorest musician in America. An uncreative riffster trying des-
perately to copy even the poorest of Negro musicians, and failing
miserably." In answer, Edmond Hall, a New Orleans clarinetist in
high favor with the Figs, was quoted: "They don't come any better
than Benny. . . . Benny's always been my favorite jazz musician.
I've never heard a bad performance by him. If I buy a Goodman
record, big band or small band, I always know it's going to be
great." Another of these magazines, Jazz Quarterly, disposed of Art
Tatum by comparing him to a hillbilly bandleader and singer who
had had fantastic success with one record, "Pistol-packin' Mama."
Art, the Quarterly opined, "knows about as much about jazz as AI
Dexter." But Mary Lou Williams, enormously popular among Figs
because of her occasional forays into the venerable precincts of
boogie woogie, could be quoted too; for her, "Tatum is the greatest
jazz musician I have ever heard."

If the Modernists had remained content with musical analysis and
the comparison of fanatic fans' views with measured musicians'
judgments, the controversy would clearly have been one-sided, and
a degree of dignity could have been maintained. The challenge was

THE PROGRESSIVES 309

incendiary, however, and intelligence was affronted. Into the fray
went critics and amateur crusaders. Dixielanders were labeled "reac-
tionaries" when the air was cool and the offense mild, "musical
fascists" when the temperature and the blood rose to a serious oc-
casion. As the Figs refused to listen with any attention if at all to
any jazz later than 1929 in style and idea, so the Modernists turned
from jazz earlier than 1935 in origin except perhaps for an occa-
sional Duke Ellington record. The full fury of political differences
between Right and Left was vented upon these arguments. Finally,
as "commercial" carried all the calumniatory opprobrium of the Fig
with it, "progressive" was weighed down with all the venerating ap-
probation of the Modernist.

Woody Herman's 1944-1946 band was the first vehicle of "prog-
ress" for the outspoken supporters of such in jazz, and with it bebop
and singers like Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan. The second re-
cipient of the honors of progress, first class, was Boyd Raeburn.
Boyd, who had made money and something of a name for himself as
leader of a commercial band in Chicago, did his best to carry the
torch. In 1944 he brought a band into the Lincoln Hotel in New
York that featured Johnny Bothwell and supported that alto saxo-
phonist's Hodges-like musings and wanderings with the Washington
School of Jazz musicians Earl Swope on trombone, Emmett Carls
on tenor, Mert Oliver on bass, and Don Lamond on drums. The
next year Boyd's books carried a heavy load of bebop, and the band
recorded with such significant boppers as Dizzy Gillespie, Benny
Harris, Serge Chaloff, and Oscar Pettiford. These sides and four
others featuring Trummy Young were recorded for Guild, bop's
home label in 1945. The real force of Boyd's band was not felt until
it settled down to starve and fight as best it could on an empty stom-
ach in California in 1945 an< ^ ^^ e next y ear -

The band Boyd led at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in August
1946 was distinguished by any jazz standards. It was well rehearsed;
its ensemble sound was handsome and its own. It had a fresh alto
soloist in Hal McKusick and a tenorman with a provocative set of
new ideas in Frankie Socolow. Johnny Mandell played his own set
of trombone variations on Bill Harris's ideas and wrote arrangements
that were fresher still. George Handy played piano and wrote scores
that showed an astonishing growth beyond what he had been doing
for the band in New York a year earlier. He had begun to write in

310 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

earnest, utilizing his playing experience in his native city, New York,
and his intensive pursuit of modern musical ideologies at New York
University, the Juilliard School of Music, and in private lessons with
Aaron Copland. The ideologies were omnipresent: there were echoes
of Bartok and Stravinsky, rolled into captivating hollers, in his ar-
rangements of "There's No You" and "Out of This World"; there
were obvious traces of the same influences in his collaborations with
McKusick, "Yerxa" (the name of a Los Angeles columnist that
intrigued George) and "Tonsilectomy" (sic); they were unabashed
in "Boyd Meets Stravinsky." Nonetheless, in such original composi-
tions as "Dalvatore Sally" and "Bloos," which he wrote for Norman
Granz's experimental album, The Jazz Scene, he was emerging as a
jazz thinker of striking originality. There was more than a play on
the name of a Surrealist painter in "Dalvatore Sally"; there were too
a nimble handling of changes of tempo, polytonality, and a lovely
overlying melody. The "Bloos" reached entertainingly after twelve-
bar chorus cliches and the combined resources of strings, wood-
winds, and jazz sections. "Stocking Horse," the musical story of a
horse born with silver stockings on its hoofs, which George wrote
for Alvino Rey, changed time piquantly, as its subject demanded,
shuttling back and forth between four/four and five/four time and
other multiples of the quarter-note that permitted the rhythm section
to maintain its basic beat.

After 1946 George disappeared from the jazz scene, and so did the
Raeburn band, with the exception of a few well-managed record
performances of Johnny Richards' excursions into Debussyan and
Ravelian pasture, and occasional theater and club appearances with
personnels very different from the California organization. George
succumbed finally, although not forever, one hopes, to his calculated
unorthodoxies. As others suit deed to word, George's actions fol-
lowed his music. His nonconformist practices ranged from the mild
eccentricity of lapel-less jackets to the more out-of-the-way habit
of wearing a beard (before and after the boppers made the hirsute
adornment de rigeur) to the highly irregular procedure of dyeing
his hair red, in which he was imitated by many adoring young
musicians. Such behavior patterns and their enlargement into a life
dominated by the lust for gratuitous pleasures have taken their toll
of many more jazzmen than George and his aping attendants; they
have rarely debilitated a better musician.

THE PROGRESSIVES 311

Stan Kenton tried hard a few years later to fit George Handy into
his concert plans. At one time or another he has tried to make every
serious jazz musician a part of his plans. He has been called "the
savior of American music" and "an empty noise." He has accom-
plished things with strings that no symphony orchestra in the world
can equal, and he has also produced some of the most revolting
sound ever to come from a group of musicians ostensibly playing
together. He, more than any other, gave meaning to the term "pro-
gressive jazz"; more than any other he helped make the term ridicu-
lous. But up or down, good or bad, he has been a force of very
real importance in music. In 1949 and 1950, almost singlehandedly,
he made audiences listen to, learn about, and even enjoy the avant-
garde formulations of jazz and classical music. Without the jazz
splendor, either of band or soloists, of the Woody Herman organiza-
tion of 1944 to 1946, he has polished an orchestral instrument to the
disciplined point at which nothing fazes it. If only because he has
made the playing potentialities of jazz musicians into actualities,
Stan Kenton has made a significant contribution to jazz.

Stan comes from Wichita, Kansas, where he was born on February
19, 1912, but his six and a half feet and rugged countenance have
always convinced people that he was a Texan or a Californian. He
did grow up in California, in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell. His
mother tried to make him into a pianist when his major interest was
playing baseball. When two cousins of his, both musicians, stayed
at his family's house for a few weeks and began to play jazz, Stan
was convinced. He studied some with his mother and some more
with an organist. He used to play jobs at Bell High School and in-
crease his income some by working in a hamburger joint. In 1930
he was earning thirty dollars a week in San Diego on a summer job.
"But I got homesick and I kept hoping the job would blow up so
I could go back home. It did. I went home." In 1934 Stan played the
piano and wrote arrangements for Everett Hoagland, then "a big
man at the Rendezvous Ballroom at Balboa Beach." At the same ball-
room, a few years later, Stan led his own band, the first of many
editions of an organization that was changed again and again and
usually for the better. In 1942 Stan brought the band East, to play
ballrooms and theaters and hope for the best and almost always
get the worst.

The band that Stan brought East was essentially on a Lunceford

312 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

two-beat kick; if anything, it hit those syncopations with a blasting
insistence that was stronger and more obvious than the playing of
the originators of the style. Stan knew what was wrong, knew it
with the kind of electrifying intuition he has always depended upon.
"I realized that my style had become antiquated. There was nothing
really new, no new sounds, just a lot of rhythmic accenting. Today
all styles that are concentrated on accenting beats are through. Now
it's the manner in which you phrase. Every tone must have a pulse.
Anything stiff has got to go today. That's what was wrong with
my band; it was much too stiff. I have learned, I have felt, that music
today is a natural, human, pulsating sound. It's no longer mechanical."

Stan's realization of the limitations of his first style has been
packed away in recording after recording since 1944, when the first
important changes in his style were effected. Those changes, to begin
with, were in the direction of a looser, more modern jazz, with Anita
O'Day and then June Christy to give the jazz vocal articulation, and
such arrangements as "Just A-Sittin' and A-Rockin' " and "Painted
Rhythm" to demonstrate the instrumental capacity of the band. In
1946, with the band's first album, came some of the first successful
experiments, of which the presentations of drummer Shelly Manne
in "Artistry in Percussion" and of bassist Eddie Safranski in the
piece named after his last name were the most successful. In 1947
the band went through its Cuban period, from which it has never
fully recovered, but which it has relaxed some, following the general
decline of bongos and Latin American accents, which threatened for
a while to engulf jazz. As Stan said, "All styles that concentrate on
accenting beats are through."

Later albums emphasized the experimental nature of Stan's ideas.
Again there were pieces built around soloists, this time some better
soloists, such as the constantly improving alto saxophonist Art Pepper.
For the first time, in his 1950 Innovations album, recorded to demon-
strate the music played across the country by his first concert orches-
tra, Stan gave Pete Rugolo a satisfactory opportunity as a composer.
Basically a composer in the modern classical idiom, Pete showed him-
self more at home in occasional quarter-tone flights than in the
deft but undistinguished jazz instrumental he has spent most of his
professional time in writing. In his next album Stan presented Bob
Graettinger's "House of Strings," a work steeped in the adventurous
patterns of atonality, with reminiscences of Schoenberg and Alban

THE PROGRESSIVES 313

Berg, but reminiscences more in the listener's head than in the com-
poser's, since Bob has never knowingly heard their music. The writing
is unusually skillful; the playing is impeccable, a definitive example
of the fluency, precision, and masterful attack of which musicians
even violinists, violists, and cellists trained in a foreign idiom are
capable when they have been disciplined by their work in jazz and
under a leader of Stan's caliber.

Soloists have never meant as much in the Kenton band as they have
in other jazz orchestras. Rather the section work of such trumpeters
as Buddy Childers and Ray Wetzel, of such trombonists as Bart Var-
salona, of such a drummer as Shelly Manne has been important. Vido
Musso was once a featured soloist, but he was more successful because
of his earlier performances with Benny Goodman than because of his
playing with Stan. Eddie Safranski built a reputation as a bass player
with Stan that only Oscar Pettiford has challenged in recent years;
essentially a technician with a catholicity of musical interests that in-
cludes both jazz and classical music, he has found proper recognition
as an NBC studio musician, playing in jazz trios with Billy Bauer and
in the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini. In 1951 the band
had some able saxophone soloists in the altoist Art Pepper and the
tenorman Bob Cooper, both close to the cool sound of Lee Konitz
and Stan Getz. It had, in Shorty Rogers, the best of the trumpeters
influenced by Miles Davis; in Milt Bernhart, a trombonist who has
lifted the Harris style far beyond its Dixieland base. Most of all, the
band still had Stan Kenton, and Stan makes more sense today than he
did in 1940, 1945, or 1 94& more musical sense, though he has had
to divide his audience in two. For one part of his audience Stan plays
jazz, occasionally lets loose the atomic blasts that first won him his
reputation, and just as often softens them with the languid movie
music that helped him keep it. For the other half he plays his concert
music. For both halves he has more measured and more meaningful
words. Until about 1949 Stan ran for election every time he opened
his mouth to engulf a microphone in a disk jockey's studio or on
stage. He made sense, but a sense that was often garbled by his in-
tensity. In 1946 he talked about progressive music in this fashion:

Jazz is progressing rapidly; much faster than most people think. Soon
there'll be no more "in the middle" bands, no more of those that try to
play something new for a few minutes and then settle back into the old
way because it's more commercial. The pace is much too fast for that

314 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

sort of thing. Duke and Woody are putting themselves in a class by them-
selves. That's the kind of music that's going to be it from now on. The
rest of the bands will have to make up their minds whether they want to
be plain, commercial dance bands or whether they want to be progressive,
musical bands. Quite frankly, I think that if the commercial bands try to
compete with the more modern type of bands, they'll wind up making
asses of themselves.

What are we trying to do? We are trying to present a progressive form
of jazz. We've got that common pulse now, we know what we want,
we know what we are going to do and we know how to do it. We want
to make our contribution to real music and we want to make it a really
worth while contribution. So, my friends, this is it, and you can take it or
leave it, because from now on in we're not going to change, we're not
going to listen to anybody else. We've found what we've wanted, what
we believe in. For we've found that common pulse at last!

In 1950 he recognized that his was not the only jazz and that the
music his band played, like all jazz, had roots:

I'm clear beyond the stage where I start arguing the merits of pro-
gressive jazz against swing and swing against Dixieland. We just have to
accept all the different phases and let the thing go. I think Dixieland is the
basis for all of our jazz. And these fellows got brave and ran out in front,
but oops! they got afraid; they had learned a little bit about music, so it
was pretty hard for them to be basic and simple as they used to be.

He hesitated a bit about 1950 jazz:

In modern and progressive jazz and bebop there is such an urge today
for new harmonic sounds everyone is in the throes of creating new
harmonic excitement that the music has suffered greatly by the lack of
rhythmic assertion and the lack of real emotional character. Charlie
Parker is about the only example today of someone who has progressed
harmonically while at the same time maintaining a jazz character. The
young jazz player should listen to Charlie not just for the technical and
harmonic part of his creativeness but to see how honest and free his
projection is.

But Stan wasn't going to turn his back on jazz as he had done twice
before, when he had disbanded for short periods, under the impres-
sion that he was finished with jazz and that jazz was finished with
him when "I felt I didn't have it, musically speaking, to reach the
top. Our music seemed out of tune with the people; we just had no
common pulse. I guess I just had the wrong goddamned feel for music.

THE PROGRESSIVES 315

Yes, some people with lots of nervous energy could feel what we were
doing, but nobody else could." In 1951, with full respect for what
had gone before him, he summed up the past and confronted the
future:

The thirty-five or forty years of jazz are finished as an era. We might
as well close the door on it. Maybe it should have been closed three or
four years ago. Maybe we're going to go back to the minuet or the
Viennese waltz. Wherever we go, we're certainly not going to jitterbug
again. The future is broad and inspiring. Modern musicians will use
every conceivable method, no matter what it is. My band ha^ gone beyond
my own technical knowledge in its use of the complexities of modern
orchestration.

The tribute he pays his musicians is not false modesty on Stan's part.
The compliment works both ways: in jazz, as in the other arts in
which collective performance is involved, there is no clearer sign of
maturity or strength of leadership than this one. In acknowledging the
high achievement of his musicians, Stan indicates his own.

Chapter

COOL JAZZ

The making of the modern tenor saxophonist in the image of Stanley
Getz was accomplished by one record maybe two. The one record
is "Early Autumn"; the "maybe" is occasioned by the last side of
Ralph Burns' other seasonal salute, "Summer Sequence." For there is
little doubt among devotees of modern jazz that the tenor is properly
sounded by Stan and those who follow in his tonal tradition.

"Cool" is the adjective that best describes that sound "cool," in-
evitably overworked because it seems such a precise description of
the almost indescribable. One of the great changes effected in jazz
in the late forties was a revolution in thermodynamics, a new con-
ception of the relation between heat and the mechanics of making
music. The change, the new conception, the revolution, all are best
illustrated by the playing of Stan Getz.

When we were first confronted with the look as well as the sound
of cool jazz, some of us were dubious about its qualities. The compo-
nent parts of the look were a relaxation of the body to accompany the
restraint of tone, and an indifferent facial expression amounting to
apathy. The phlegmatic personalities of the Woody Herman band of
1948 suggested that the coolness would soon become frigidity, so
blas6 did these musicians seem as they moved, or rather mooched,
about the completion of their appointed tasks. But from the icy stare
and the immobile mien something good and positive and musicianly
did emerge. A four-tenor voicing that Stan suggested, and he and
three of his associates developed, relieved the monotony of saxophone
writing and playing in big bands; with a baritone substituted for one
of the tenors, it was immediately compelling as heard in Woody's
"Four Brothers" and "Early Autumn." A tenor voice of substance
and size leaped forward, developed from the suggestive performances
of several musicians, notably Herbie Steward. Stan's polished author-

316

COOL JAZZ

ity on his instrument became the highly attractive center of cool jazz.

At twenty-four, Stan could look back on nearly a decade of big and
small band blowing of all kinds, with every variety of music and musi-
cian in jazz playing experience that had to make him either a hope-
less eclectic, with a little of everybody's sound and none of his own,
or a distinct personality immediately identifiable as himself. He was
born in Philadelphia and grew up in the Bronx. He played the bass
fiddle in his junior high school orchestra and switched to bassoon in
high school in order to get into the main school orchestra. He played
with the All City Orchestra, made up of New York's best high school
musicians; picked up the harmonica when Borrah Minnevitch's ad-
vertising promotion brought the mouth-organ to the attention of his
school orchestra; and then, when he was fifteen, dropped out of school
to join Dick Rogers' band. A truant officer dropped him right back in
school, and he dropped out again quickly to join Jack Teagardenu
The school authorities pursued Teagarden all over the country be-
cause of Stan, until Jack signed guardianship papers to keep the kid
with him. Stan stayed with Jack for nine months, a period that he
remembers affectionately. "I can appreciate all Dixielanders," he says,
recalling the period with Big Gate. "Not their jazz ideas that's out
of the question, of course. But I've never heard any modern trombone
player get the sound Jack gets. His way of playing a sweet solo is
crazy. A friend of mine and I got our union cards in New York the
same day; I thought he was getting the better break he went right
out with a four-beat band, Hal Mclntyre's; I went out with Tea-
garden. Now I think I got the better break. Dixie is a foundation. It's
simple enough; you know what you're doing all the time. It's a good
way to get started, or at least it was good for me."

The job with Teagarden spanned the country, leaving Stan finally
in Los Angeles. He took a job there in a men's clothing store, while
he worked out his union card, which, in Los Angeles as in other big
cities, couldn't be his until he'd played a prescribed number of short-
term jobs for a prescribed number of months. Then he joined Bob
Chester for a month at the Trianon Ballroom. After an uneventful
thirty days, he became part of a six-piece Dixie group led by Dale
Jones, who had written "Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on
Chestnut Street" with Stan's first employer, Dick Rogers. "I was
happy, though I didn't realize it then. I didn't know anything and
wasn't aware of it that's when you're happiest, maybe."

318 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

After six months with Jones, he played the last fifteen broadcasts
of the Bob Hope show with Stan Kenton, joined Jimmy Dorsey for a
month, and then Benny Goodman for six. "With Benny I had to push,
to get that hard sound he likes from his saxes, but I was beginning
to dig Lester." His digging is only barely evident in his recorded solos
with Benny on "Swing Angel," "Give Me the Simple Life," and "Rat-
tle and Roll"; it's much more apparent on the small-band sides he
made with Kai Winding at the same time notably, "Always."

Singer Buddy Stewart's sister, Beverly Byrne, was working with
Randy Brooks then, and Stan and Beverly were close. She got him into
the band; he married her. There followed short engagements with
Buddy Morrow's motley of sounds and styles, with Herbie Fields, and
then Hollywood again, where he worked with Butch Stone in a re-
markable group made up of Herb Steward, Shorty Rogers, Butch,
Arnold Fishkin, Don Lamond, and himself. Then the original Four
Brothers Stan, Herb, Jimmy Giuffres, and Zoot Sims worked a
Spanish ballroom, Pontrelli's, in Los Angeles, with Beverly singing.
The quartet of tenors moved bodily into the Herman band formed in
Hollywood in September 1947.

"It sure makes you want to blow when youVe got those cats with
you," Stan said. "You hear the right sounds all night; finally the right
sounds come out of you."

When Stan stepped out of the Herman band in 1949, it was to gig
around New York, lead some of his own groups, make small-band
records, of which he likes "Long Island Sound/' "Lady in Red," and
"Indian Summer" best. The records he made with Woody caught on,
his own began to move, and his identification with the soft, clean, clear
air of the new sound was complete.

Stan has always had a photographic memory for music. There are
few musicians who know as many tunes as he does, as anybody who
has worked with him can attest. He used to memorize the library of
each band he was with; he knew his book cold and cool. Ballads
have been his big attraction, as he is most attractive in ballads. "Fast
tempos seem unnatural to me. The fastest I like to get is 'Lady in Red/
Faster, I don't feel it's relaxed; I have to stop and think about the
chords, my time goes, I lose my ideas. When you go slow you can
create. I like to play simply, to hold back some of my ideas. Listen to
Bird; you know he's holding back, that he's always got something in
reserve. You can't play everything you know."

COOL JAZZ 319

Sometimes Stan plays too simply, too close to the melody, and is
too anxious to make the public know it. That's when his phrases
shorten, his naturally long line and even-flowing time get choppy,
and some of the loose stride disappears. But Stan is a serious, thought-
ful musician. He dreads becoming caught in a rut he may have mis-
taken for a groove, and no matter what the commercial allure, he is
not, consciously at least, going to sacrifice his talent for security, much
as he wants to know his wife and child are well cared for. He knows
that relaxation can be carried too far. He will fight for an orderly
development of his gifts.

The great struggle among the adherents and practitioners of cool
jazz was for order and development. They emerged from bop and
from the big bands that built upon bop with an inevitable background
chaos in their work. This chaos sometimes sidetracked performers
like Stan Getz. Only one man of this group remained unaffected.
Lennie Tristano's whole life has been the wresting of order from
chaos, development from immobility.

Lennie Tristano was born in 1919, at the height of the paralyzing
flu epidemic that followed the First World War. He was the second
son of four in a second-generation Italian family solidly ensconced
in the great Italian section of Chicago. True to Italian family form,
he went to a parochial school at the age of four. He spent a year and
a half in the first grade, after the nominal kindergarten period. "They
just didn't think I learned easily. And I just didn't think I wanted to
stay in the first grade forever. So I moved to another school." For
three or four years he went from school to school, his progress marked
by increasing physical difficulty and growing mental ease. At six he
suffered a serious attack of the measles. His eyesight, weakened at
birth by influenza, grew dimmer. When he landed in his last public
school in Chicago, at eight, he was placed in a class for handicapped
children one room holding children with all forms of disability, in
all grades from the first of elementary school to the last of high. At
ten Lennie's sight was just about gone, but any difficulty that his long
term in the first grade might have suggested was gone too. He was
able to do long and complicated mathematical problems in his head.
He was, as a matter of fact, quite a boy. Since his fourth year he had
been able to sit down at the piano and work out simple tunes, such
enduring items as "The Stars and Stripes Forever." By his tenth year,
after a brief and not very satisfying foray with a private piano teacher,

320 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Lennie had become very adept in the ways and wiles of popular songs.
He became, with mixed tricks and an appealing young personality, a
pert parlor performer.

In 1928, acknowledging his blindness, his parents sent Lennie away
for the pivotal ten years of his life from nine to nineteen to a state
institution for the sightless in a little Illinois town some considerable
distance away from Chicago. "The place," says Lennie, "does one of
two things to a student either it makes an idiot out of him, or a per-
son. I was lucky enough to fall into the second group." In the first
were all manner of blind children, babblers, the feeble-minded, the
imbecilic and idiotic. The only qualification for entrance was blind-
ness, and the result was a shambles of a school population, rigorously
disciplined in its conduct, girls strictly separated from boys for all
activities except an occasional heavily chaperoned party. Sexual ten-
sions developing in adolescent boys were treated as monstrous
growths to be shunned, somehow to be shaken off. The surroundings
were prison-like, the education sparse. The brighter boys were treated
like well-esteemed trustees. And yet Lennie flourished. He studied
piano, saxophone, clarinet, and cello. He led his own bands from his
second year at the institution. His groups played occasional dates at
local taverns. Some of the intellectual disciplines were well taught,
and he became a skilled mathematician, a highly facile student. There
were opportunities to play most of the team sports, and these he en-
gaged in with distinction. By the time he was ready for college, his
musical talent was sufficiently obvious that his music teacher took him
to the American Conservatory in Chicago and warned the school to
"pay particular attention to this boy, because he's going to do every-
thing faster than you're used to."

Lennie sped through the conservatory. If they had permitted him
to maintain his own rate of development, he might have completed
the four-year course in less than two; as it was, with every possible
restriction, he got his Bachelor of Music degree in three, and had
completed all the requirements for an M.A. except for final exams,
when he decided to skip the five hundred dollars or so necessary to
sign up for the graduate degree, and to make his way as at least a
part-time jazz musician. At the conservatory he had run through a
huge selection of the orthodox repertory, had composed in all the
required forms, and had had a string quartet performed at one of the
school's conceits. "It was a jazzy piece, but jazz was so far from that

COOL JAZZ 321

faculty's experience that they didn't hear it in the quartet. They
simply thought it sounded fresh."

Lennie gigged around Chicago more seriously than he had in his
school years. He played the leading role in a small rhumba band,
played it so successfully that the band's leader took him aside and
offered to make him "the King of the Rhumba." With very little
effort, Lennie was able to refuse the gracious offer and to get on with
the piano he had begun to take seriously after playing most of his
jobs on tenor sax. As a tenorman, Lennie says, "I was somewhat in-
fluenced by Chu Berry but didn't imitate him. As a pianist, in 1944, 1
had reached the point where I could rifle off anything of Tatum's
and with scandalous efficiency."

The remaining Chicago years were lightened for Lennie by his
meeting with Judy Moore, a beautiful product of Racine, Wisconsin,
who sang with him at the Zanzibar for several months in 1945, and
whom he married that July. The years were made heavy by infre-
quent work and by the increasing puzzlement with which his music
was greeted as he shook off influences and conventions and shaped
his own striking style. On one date, which was scheduled to run three
days, the manager came up to him after his little band had played for
a couple of hours and said, "I don't want you to think this is anything
personal, but everybody in the place thinks you stink. So I'll be glad
to pay you for the three days now, if you'll quit immediately." He
says he drove another manager to a nervous breakdown. "He just got
out on the middle of the floor, pulled some hair out and screamed
when he heard us play some things in three keys at once." A couple
of other places at which he played went into bankruptcy "volun-
tary, I'm sure, after hearing us," Lennie muses.

Chubby Jackson thought differently from the Chicago club man-
agers. He was planning a "monster" tour when he stopped off with the
Woody Herman band in Chicago in the late spring of 1946, and pre-
vailed on Lennie to come East that summer to join him. The tour
never materialized, but a job in Freeport with Arnold Fishkin and
Billy Bauer did. Another brief spot on Fifty-second Street followed.
Lennie became a New York fixture, setting up shop as the brightest
of the new jazz musicians, playing occasional engagements with his
own groups, taking on an imposing list of pupils Lee Konitz (who
had worked with him earlier in Chicago), Warne Marsh, John La-
Porta, Bud Freeman, Billy Bauer, Arnold Fishkin (who left Cali-

322 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

fornia to rejoin Lennie in late 1947), and lots of youngsters inter-
ested in the future of significant jazz.

Lennie's is not only an inquiring mind but an instructed one; in
the realms of literature and philosophy, as in music, he is not content
merely to feel something; he has to explore ideas, to experience them,
to think them through carefully, thoroughly, until he can fully grasp
them and then hold on to them. He takes possession of such a book
as Tolstoi's War and Peace or Dante's Divine Comedy as delightedly
as a child seizes a new toy; he takes them apart as eagerly and curi-
ously as a young boy separates the parts of a clock; he speculates about
them as seriously as a Ph.D. candidate examining his thesis. Over end-
less cups of coffee, Lennie listens and thinks and talks. Padding about
his apartment in slippers, his stocky, muscular frame clothed in
pajamas unless he is expecting to go out and has reluctantly donned
street clothes he carries his conversations from his living-room-
practice-room through his bedroom into his kitchen and dining room.
They usually begin at one or two in the afternoon and often carry
on into the hours he has found most fertile for his activities
those from midnight until six, seven, eight, or even later in the morn-
ing.

At eight o'clock on Friday evening, May 13, 1949, after two hours
of fairly orthodox recording, Lennie and four other men Billy
Bauer, Arnold Fishkin, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh grouped
themselves around two microphones and began to make permanent
the most audacious experiment yet attempted in jazz. The experiment
was to create out of skill and intuition a spontaneous music that
would be at once atonal, contrapuntal, and improvised on a jazz base.
The microphones were provided by Capitol Records. Logically
enough, "Intuition" was the name Lennie gave the first side of the
four recorded between eight and nine that night. Not logically, but
perhaps understandably, Capitol was bewildered by and uncertain
about what it heard. As a result, two of the sides were erased from
the recording tape, and, of the remaining two, those chosen as the
best of the four, only one was released and that two years after it
was recorded. And yet these adventures in musical intuition are among
the high points of jazz.

"Intuition," both the record and the procedure it names, is the
inevitable development of Lennie Tristano's years of laboratory,
living-room, and lounging-pajama experiment. You can hear his

COOL JAZZ 323

growth, from the codas of the six sides made for Keynote later
gathered together in a Mercury album through the two sides Disc
issued ("Speculation" and "Through These Portals") and the many
it didn't, through "Subconscious Lee" and "Judy" (on New Jazz),
to the six Capitol sides. You can hear the individual melodic lines
lengthen first Lennie's and Billy's in the trio performances on Key-
note, then Lee's, then Warne's, with Arnold's bass part taking on more
and more individual life. You can almost see the long lines pair off,
side by side, the improvised counterpoint taking shape, crackling
with suggestions of atonality, all strung together with a toe-snapping
beat. You can't miss the evolution from other men's chords, from
established chorus lengths, from familiar sounds, to the individual
freedom and group interdependence of "Intuition," all accomplished
without relying on other men's devices.

Lennie and his group have labored at their music under many diffi-
culties. The insistence of recording companies and some critics and
disk jockeys on linking it with bop has hidden its own qualities and
cloaked it in a ridiculous disguise. The envy of other musicians and
the tin ears of night-club owners have kept the group from working
under the right conditions or from working at all. The infrequency
of work has kept Lennie and his men busy teaching, playing gigs
anything to stay alive and, as a result, has kept them apart often.
Hence, there have been too few opportunities for them to fashion
new numbers, to expand in as direct and unimpeded a line as the music
has demanded. The scarcity of engagements for music so frighten-
ingly fresh and free has often reduced the playing edge of Lennie's
musicians, who have rarely produced less than a good performance
but who have often missed the peaks patently within them.

This new jazz is deeply moving to hear; it is, of course, even more
satisfying to play. For it rests upon the pillars of all music, the great
supports that buoyed the polyphony of Bach and gave depth to the
elegance of Mozart. It marks a strong parallel to the development of
the twelve-tone structure in classical music in the twentieth century
a parallel, but not an imitation. Whatever the limitations within the
three-minute form on records and the only slightly longer elaboration
off them, the performances of the Tristano group represent at least a
partial unfolding of the resources of the participating men. Here are
improvising musicians who are sufficiently disciplined on their instru-
ments to give expression to almost any idea that they may think

324 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

or feel, sufficiently free to vent those ideas together, with a beat, with-
out preliminary map or plan.

A large number of jazzmen have paid lip service to Lennie and the
music for which he stands, none more enthusiastically than another
blind pianist, the recently Americanized Englishman, George Shear-
ing. In interview after interview, in conversation after conversation,
George has celebrated the advances for which Lennie and his asso-
ciates are responsible. He has adopted some of the block-chord elab-
orations Lennie developed and introduced a single-line variation or
two of Lennie's, as he has integrated many facets of Bud Powell's
style in his playing. But George's major concern is a large audience,
and he ingeniously united minor and major concerns to make his
amalgam of styles the most pronounced jazz success of 1949 an ^ 1 95-
George's music is cool, calm, and collected. The melodic line is car-
ried alternatively or together by piano, vibes, and guitar; the beat by
bass and drums, creating a texture as sweet and simple as possible
within a modern jazz frame. George's arrangements change the ac-
cents of the famous standard tunes his quintet plays (e.g., "September
in the Rain," "East of the Sun," "Summertime"); they never, how-
ever, stray far from the melody, the most ignorant and the more sen-
sitive hooker's measure of musical quality. Denzil Best, a better-
equipped musician than most drummers, keeps a very light beat going
with his brushes (you'd never know he was one of the first and
best bop drummers). First Margie Hyams, then Don Elliott, ca-
ressed the vibraphone bars. John Levy plucks a mildly resolute bass.
Of the group, only Chuck Wayne on guitar seems altogether mind-
ful of his jazz responsibilities; without any large variation in volume,
Chuck manages a sizable variety of idea, chiefly single-string, not
necessarily on the melody. His predilection for the pseudo-Oriental
he exercises in compositions such as "In a Chinese Garden," a whole-
tone adventure in tea-room atmospheres which is best forgotten.

The success in clubs and hotels and on records of the Shearing
Quintet let loose several imitative groups, most of which bettered the
musical quality of George's product. Paul Smith, a magnificently
fluent pianist with Les Paul's small band and Tommy Dorsey's big
outfit, lost none of the fleetness of finger or facility of idea that char-
acterized his work with Les and Tommy when he made Shearing-like
records with rhythm section and Novachord and with rhythm alone
for Discovery, George's first label. Red Norvo, recording for the

COOL JAZZ 325

same firm with his new trio, had so much to offer in himself, bassist
Charlie Mingus, and, above all, guitarist Tal Farlow, that one could
forget the more obvious machinations of imitation with which most
performances began. And Marion Page McPartland, Jimmy's Eng-
lish wife, added sufficient wit and charm to match her skillful
modern piano with harp, cello, and rhythm so that the connection
with Shearing was, for all musical purposes, forgotten.

Stan Freeman, an indefatigable studio pianist and harpsichordist,
stepped outside these mimetic precincts in 1950 into others more
fertile. He began a series of recordings that year in which his com-
mand of the classical keyboard gave form and substance to show
tunes and jazz standards. Though pianists such as Calvin Jackson and
Johnny Guarnieri and composers such as Alec Wilder had made
this attempt before, none succeeded half so well as Stan in maintain-
ing a jazz beat and an improvising texture in a classical frame. Stan
has style as well as technique, and a sense of form which sometimes
takes his performances beyond jazz, but never so far that one forgets
where he came from.

Not nearly as successful in the United States as George Shearing,
in Europe the most warmly appreciated and avidly imitated of cool
jazzmen is Miles Davis, both as a trumpeter and as leader of a record-
ing band. The band sprang from a series of afternoon and early eve-
ning talking and playing sessions at the apartment of Gil Evans, chief
arranger for Claude Thornhill. In those sessions Gerry Mulligan, a
young baritone saxophonist from Philadelphia and Queens, and Gil
worked out a voicing trumpet, trombone, alto sax, baritone sax,
French horn, tuba, and rhythm. When rehearsals of the new music
were called at Nola's, New York's prime rehearsal studio for jazz and
dance bands, Miles was called too. When Capitol decided, for a brief
while at least, to go along with bop and the even more recherche
elements of modern jazz, Miles was signed. He made a few dates with
"the new sound," as musicians referred to it, and the sound was sent
round the world. In England, Johnny Dankworth, a gifted alto man,
perhaps the best jazz musician in his country, led his band through
Miles' paces and he himself sounded not a little like Lee Konitz,
who played alto for Miles on Capitol dates. All over the continent of
Europe youngsters playing jazz tried to achieve the sound of the
Davis recording band, with the same instrumentation if possible if
not, with a diff erent voicing of saxes and brass to get the same effect.

326 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Miles' fragile quality, producing slight but coherent fragments, be-
came the one to capture on trumpet, J. J. Johnson's swiftly moving
slide the one to imitate on trombone. Bill Barber's facility on his in-
strument, the tuba classically disciplined, articulate in jazz was
unique, recognized as such, and not imitated. Gerry Mulligan's soft
baritone sound did make its way into saxophone sections, as his mode
of lower register discourse was followed rather than his means.

The most eagerly imitated of them all, when imitation was possible,
was Lee Konitz. As Stan Getz and Herbie Steward defined the cool
sound for the tenor, Lee did for the alto. He also accomplished some-
thing more: along with his clean, clear, evenly inflected tone was a
high level of musicianship; in one way or another, consciously or not,
it was his level that one used as a criterion with which to judge the
work of Stan, Herbie, Zoot Sims, Sonny Stitt, Art Pepper, and others.
One could hear at moments, perhaps, that Zoot, a frcebooting member
of Woody's 1947-1949 cool band, was adding some thinking to per-
haps the best beat among the Young tenors, or that Sonny, a similarly
accomplished rhythmic tenorman, was adding Lee's furtive asides to
Bird's vigorous line and growing in stature as a result. Certainly Art
Pepper changed from an ordinary alto saxist to a meaningful musi-
cian with Stan Kenton as he came closer and closer to Lee. The
same was true of Stan's tenor soloist, Bobby Cooper, who, like Art,
took some lessons with Lennie Tristano. It was especially true of
Warne Marsh, a brilliant youngster, whose tenor imagination grew
as he got to sound more like Lee's conception though not like Lee's
tone as he learned to play alongside Lee and still retain a personality
of his own. As Warne matured, he began to think about what he was
doing in a fresh way, to see, as few people did, that jazz especially
the new jazz consisted of many things, attitudes, working proce-
dures, disciplines, and combinations thereof.

To some people jazz is just a state of the glands. To others it is a
series of beats, preferably banged or shrieked. To a few, jazz is a state
of mind a very low one, corrupt and questionable, but at least a
state of mind and not just the rhythmic noise that awakens the ele-
mental passions. Actually jazz is all of these things in part, but it
is also something more, several things more to be precise, the several
things that lift the playing of Lee Konitz above the average, however
pleasant and progressive it may be, of the other talented youngsters
we have been listening to in recent years. For in Lee's playing, as in

COOL JAZZ 327

his talking and thinking, a degree of consciousness emerges which
colors every solo line he essays on alto saxophone, which determines
the precise valuation he gives the dot that extends each eighth note
before each sixteenth, which moves his music from fragment to
whole, from sound to statement.

It all started in 1938 at the Boston Store in Chicago a department
store dating from the last century, when the name of the chief city
of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts carried such cultural cachet
for settlers in the West. Lee was eleven and he wanted to play an in-
strument. For no reason that he can remember, he decided on the
clarinet and went to the Boston Store to buy it because they threw
in a coupon book giving him two hundred free lessons. And then
the next year he bought a tenor saxophone at the Boston, of
course and picked up another two hundred lessons. He had more
lessons than he knew what to do with, but fortunately for him his
teacher, Lou Honig, was resourceful, and the lessons made eventual
sense, even if Lee's first job beyond the neighborhood circuit was
with Gay Claridge at the Chez Paree. Then he went to work with
Teddy Powell and Jerry Wald just a sixteen-year-old alto man who
could play clarinet and tenor. After three months with Wald, Lee
decided to give his aching head a break and returned to Chicago to
put in two years at the newly opened Roosevelt College, and, rested a
little, left town again with Claude Thornhill's band in August 1947.
A year's sojourn with the sweet nothings of that polished organization
left him in New York, where he joined forces with Lennie Tristano.

"What I owe to Lennie," says Lee, "I can't put it in so many words,
I'm afraid. I can only say it inadequately. If nothing else, he's given
me such a tremendous insight into music, into jazz and all its counter-
parts. I'm not saying I have that insight, just that it's there, if I can only
reach it. Knowing Lennie has made it available." Thus Lee sums up,
cautiously, warmly, uncertainly, what he feels and would like to say
better about a decisive influence in his life; talking slowly, worrying
the words, because he is always careful about what he says, because
he stops to consider, because he is a conscious musician, a conscientious
human being.

"You know how I met Lennie? I was working with a society band
and went over after the job across the street to some joint to see a
friend who was supposed to be working there in a rhumba outfit. My
friend's back was visible, that's all, but some remarkable music was

328 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

audible. Lennie was playing I can just about remember what he was
playing. It was crazy! What he was doing to a rhumba! I sat in and
blew a little. Lennie could detect nothing from what I played except
my enthusiasm."

That meeting across the maracas was shortly before Lee left Chi-
cago for his brief tours with Powell and Wald. He returned and soon
afterward began to study with Lennie; Lee worked with Lennie until
he joined Thornhill. After about a year with Lennie, Lee began to
evolve his own style. "I actually hadn't ever fallen into any kind of
idiom; there were touches of everything in my playing but nothing
really definite. Lennie had a rough time with me. I knew I was playing
something different, but I was insecure. I didn't think I got a beat. I
didn't think I was playing anything until I suddenly snapped out
of it. Consciously. Suddenly I realized I was playing music."

Now Lee can sit down and analyze his playing, most of which he
will describe as moving toward a goal rather than as achievement,
though more of his goal is apparent in his music than he will permit
himself to say. "The first thing," he says, "is sound. Actually there
hasn't been a sound put down on alto as there has been on tenor and
I don't think Fm going to do it, but it's a thought anyway. I first
became aware of sound with Santy Runyon, who was my teacher
between Lou Honig and Lennie. Santy stressed a brilliant, piercing
sound, and I was gassed with it at the time. Then there was the sound
of Lester Young on the old Basie records real beautiful tenor saxo-
phone sound, pure sound. That's it. For alto too. Pure sound. How
many people Lester influenced, how many lives! Because he is defi-
nitely the basis of everything that's happened since. And his rhythmic
approach complex in its simplicity. How can you analyze it? Shall
we tag some words on it? Call it polyrhythmic?"

Lee describes the process of assimilating new rhythmic feeling, a
process duplicated on all the levels of comprehension and expression
in jazz improvisation. "First you write it out. Then you can improvise
something." What do you improvise? That takes us to the melodic
line.

"Superimposition, the superimposition of the individual line upon
the basic chord structure. In addition to the changes in this line, the
substitutions, there is the building on the fundamental chords. And
then there is the use of intervals, different intervals, avoiding the
banal and the obvious. I tell you what I mean. When the altering of

COOL JAZZ 329

the major construction of a melody is confined to an occasional
flatted fifth, used as a stopping point, and no more, what you have is
a very cute approach to melody and no more. With us, the flatted
fifth would be in the line, as would the other variations, thought of
as regular intervals; the flatted fifth becomes the regular fifth of the
tonic. This approach integrates the new intervals." And that brings
Lee to the crux of the matter, the construction of new melodic lines.
"It means getting away from the mass of popular music, doing as
much as possible with the chord structure of pop tunes, and then do-
ing away with the chord structure of pop tunes. Look what you're
doing most of the time. In a thirty-two-bar chorus you get one eight-
bar phrase three times and a second eight bars in the bridge; and so
in three choruses of blowing you play the same eight bars nine times,
and another eight bars three times."

Reflecting on the strictures of chorus construction, Lee offers an
explanation of his conception of phrasing, an explanation notable for
its clarity and cogency. "Let's say we change the punctuation of the
thirty-two-bar structure, like carrying the second eight bars over
into the bridge, making our breaks sometime within the second eight
and in the middle of the bridge instead of at the conventional points.
We reparagraph the chorus. Or better, since we have already altered
the construction of the line, we reparagraph a paraphrase. And that
leads to the next logical point, to continuity and development. Be-
cause you've got to think in terms of both, so that everything holds
together, so that you get not four choruses but a four-chorus state-
ment."

Thus a sensitive youngster sketches the outline of his own style,
suggests the way music looks and sounds and feels to him and to the
men with whom he plays. He leaves unsaid his contrapuntal convic-
tions, assuming that anybody who listens to the Tristano group will
perceive, by head or heart, the linear structure of their performances.
But that perception alone is not enough; it is vital, if one is to appre-
hend the rich invention and feel the lovely texture of this music, that
such sketches of style and suggestions of underlying conception in-
form one's every listening moment. For, as Lee will work his way
back from the Museum of Modern Art to the Metropolitan, pacing
the endless galleries with his sympathetic and encouraging wife,
Ruth, in search of sources and understanding and insight to correct
an early antipathy toward the visual arts so must his listeners dig

{30 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

>eneath the rich sound and the tight organization. The fine facets of
lis music hide something even finer beneath, the conscious exploration
>f all that is or can be in jazz. It is almost as if Lee Konitz had made
>f his alto saxophone a thinking reed almost, but not quite, for Lee,
he best of Lennie Tristano's students, is to some degree afflicted, as
he least of Lennie's pupils are, by a doctrinaire limitation of style and
dea. It is from that limitation that John LaPorta broke away.

John LaPorta is a clarinetist of parts fresh, new, and authorita-
ively original. He has been hidden for years in the saxophone sections
>f Buddy Williams (a local band in John's native Philadelphia), Bob
Chester, Woody Herman, and a music school in Brooklyn. He was a
dd with Williams, took some of his first professional breaths along
vith Buddy DeFranco and Bill Harris. With Chester he became a
easoned lead alto man and achieved dubious if anonymous notoriety
n a stage-show review in Metronome magazine, in which he ( u the
,lto sax soloist") was censured for his copying of a Johnny Hodges
olo he had never heard and reproved "because his coat and pants
ooked as if he had just taken them out of a duffel bag" (it was hot at
iarlem's Apollo Theatre that July, with no air cooling and the doors
:losed, and neatness went with the wind). On third alto with
Yoody, John won the considerable respect of his distinguished as-
ociates for his knowing musicianship, his proficiency as a sight-
eader, and his modest demeanor. And then, on December 21, 1946,
ic was cast adrift along with the rest of that edition of the Herman
>and. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. He picked up
lis clarinet, played some with Lennie Tristano, composed some and
aught more, to make a living.

John is a well-schooled musician; he had a couple of years at a
'hiladelphia school and several months with Ernst Toch on the West
>oast, with Alexis Haieff, Igor Stravinsky's aide, behind him. He can
each almost anything in the clarinet tradition, from counterpoint
o atonalist formulations. He's a far cry from the balling jazzman
/hose musical happiness lies in his ability to capture tonally last
light's alcoholic and other excesses. To John jazz is an art and a sci-
nce; it must be studied; it can be significant only if it is the end result
f an intensive preparation. That preparation entails hours of work,
f unrelenting attention to the interior detail of the creative process,
nd the very conscious avoidance of the cliches and banalities of most
iOt improvisation.

COOL JAZZ 331

"Jazz," says John, "requires a virtuoso technique today. But, unlike
the virtuoso of classical music, who doesn't have to be any more than
a finished performer, the jazz virtuoso has continually to make har-
monic and melodic progress; he has to be a first-rate performer and
composer as well." John thinks he knows some of the progress which
the jazz virtuoso can make. "The old idea of playing in major triads
is trite today. Now we can alter chords and use all forms of inversion.
But not by trial and error a musician must know."

Meeting John LaPorta, one wonders where in his reticent person
he holds the brilliant array of new ideas he has displayed in his few
gigging appearances, his several broadcasts, and his two record sides
with the 1951 Metronome All-Star Band. His myopic eyes behind
heavy glasses, his mousy voice, his retiring disposition seem to betoken
a student of one of the dead languages, perhaps, or a librarian in an
institution devoted to research on extinct Australian birds. But chal-
lenge one of his musical ideas, carry the argument beyond words and
put a clarinet in his mouth, and watch the mouse become man, an
inspired man with a compelling message. If one probes enough, one
may also stimulate words, and then the most alert musical mind in
jazz may begin the constructive but relentless analysis of his own
music and anybody and everybody else's from Bach, whose harpsi-
chord and organ music he has transcribed for jazz instruments,
through Mozart, Schoenberg, Berg, and other contemporaries, to his
jazz colleagues. He can also listen and learn, as he has in his participa-
tion, at rehearsal and performance, in the music of the Sandole
Brothers.

Dennis and Adolph Sandole are Philadelphia jazz contemporaries
of John's. They have both played with bands big and little, nationally
famous and locally infamous; they play guitar and baritone sax
respectively. After the war, teaching at Philadelphia music schools,
they developed a brand of orchestral writing that is all by itself in
jazz. Recognizing the inevitability of atonalism in jazz, they also
understood the restrictions under which such a violent change of focus
must be made. The necessary intermediate stage, as they saw it, was
one in which polytonality playing in two, three, or more keys at
once would dominate the jazz musician's consciousness. That in it-
self was enough for the Sandoles; it represented a challenging revolu-
tion that could, if properly directed, evolve in turn toward the expan-
sionary goals of the atonalists. They themselves provided the direc-

332 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

tion, with supervisory assistance from a teaching colleague of great
sensitivity and equipment in the modern classical idioms, Frank
Caruso. In late 1949 they whipped together a concert in Philadelphia
in which their ideas were put on full public display, with the sympa-
thetic aid of some sixteen Philadelphia jazzmen, who sweated through
many rehearsals and the concert itself for very little money because
of their belief in the Sandoles' talents and convictions. The concert
was a considerable musical success. It demonstrated the feasibility of
the brothers' jazz conception; it revealed a handling of orchestral
masses without precedent in jazz, in which soloists, sections, and the
ensemble were bundled together to make a moving whole, sometimes
the sum of its parts, sometimes setting them in parallel to each other,
always integrating them.

The music of the Sandoles does not stand alone in modern jazz; it
has an opposite number in the compositions, arrangements, and per-
formances of Dave Brubeck, a fine pianist, who almost singlehandedly
is responsible for a renaissance of jazz in San Francisco before his
coming a city singularly devoted to the raucous, if enthusiastic, re-
vivals of pre- World- War-I Dixieland by such bands as Lu Watters'
Yerba Buena group and Kid Ory's crew. Dave, a student of Darius
Milhaud at Mills College, where he received his M.A. degree, and a
teacher at the University of California, is another polytonalist. With
a brilliant bass player, Ronald Grotty, and a doubly able drummer and
vibraphonist, Callen Tjader, he recorded the most engaging and pro-
vocative jazz trio sides of 1950 and 1951. With the addition of horns
and the filling out of his rhythm section, he did as much for the larger
jazz chamber group in his case an octet. Of the works for the latter
outfit, a "Fugue on Bop Themes" is the most immediately arresting,
but all of the trio and octet scorings and performances partake equally
of Dave's active imagination, of the cool sound of the Miles Davis
band, and of the controlled but not stifling disciplines of a music which
is polytonal, polyrhythmic at times, and spontaneous too. This is the
balance of cool jazz at its best, whether played by a big band like the
Sandoles', a small one like Dave's, or a soloist such as Billy Bauer.

"He's the end! Have you ever heard anything like it? There's no-
body like Billy Bauer!" That was Shelley Manne, running over with
enthusiasm for the guitarist at a Metronome Ail-Star Band recording
date.

"I don't like it. It doesn't sound ri^ht to me. Gee, I never seem to

COOL JAZZ 333

get what I want. That's pretty bad guitar/' That was Billy Bauer, a
the same date, and at all other record sessions, public and private per
formances in which he has been involved.

There is a marked difference of opinion over Billy's playing. Jus
about every musician who has ever worked with him thinks he's "th<
end!" or something very close to it; Billy himself isn't sure he ha:
begun yet. When Arnold Fishkin brought his bass three thousanc
miles across the United States to rejoin the Lennie Tristano trio ii
1947, one of the first questions he asked Lennie was about Billy. "Ha:
he changed?" "He sure has," Lennie assured Arnold. Lennie was re-
ferring to Billy's playing. Arnold was referring to the guitarist's per-
sonality, specifically his incessant self-deprecating talk. He had anc
he hadn't changed.

For many years Billy was a first-rate rhythm guitarist, satis-
fying to jazzmen of several schools because of his superlative time
his superlative steadiness, drive, relaxation, and unrelaxed musician-
ship. Ever since joining Lennie, Billy has offered something new, s
new conception of his instrument's place in jazz. He credits his initia
interest in this new way of playing to Zeb Julian, a fellow guitarist
"He used to come back when I was with Woody and show me. He'
a creative guy who first had the idea of playing that way. Maybe h<
didn't do it on the job, playing with other musicians, but he did i
when he played alone."

The way? The guitar picks up and goes. It is no longer restrictec
to rhythm chords, with occasional sorties provided by note-for-not<
reiterations of piano arpeggios. Under the administration of Billy':
fingers and the busy head that directs them, the guitar plays fill-in:
wherever they fit, not where they fit by this man's jazz conventioi
or that one's, but where they belong according to the mind and hear
of Billy Bauer. The guitar, in this system, has all the autonomy of i
trumpet, a trombone, a saxophone; it has the additional rhythmi<
duties it has always had, made broader, and more subtle too, by it
departure from the one-two, or one-two-three, rhythmic strait jacket
The way has become the power.

It all started in the Bronx in 1916. Billy ambled along, not especially
aware of music, until he was eleven or twelve years old, when, if th<
ukelele counts, he became aware of sound as something more thai
shouts on a New York City street. At fourteen he made a tentativ<
beginning on the banjo, supported by a few lessons on its noisj

334 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

strings. He did well enough at it to transfer his activities indoors and
to play club dates with pick-up bands around town, including a
quartet of his own. The summer of his fifteenth year he went up to
play the Borscht Circuit with a small band, and, like the first long
pants and the first drink, this changed Billy's life.

Back in school after this exciting musical adventure in the Catskills,
Billy could talk about nothing else. He had learned about life, and he
proceeded to tell his classmates in junior high all about it, his voice
rising in coloratura accents from the lyric boy soprano which was
and is its normal register. It was all right between classes; but his
teachers didn't like having regular class procedure interrupted by
these tales of derring-do on the American steppes. One of them rapped
Billy's hands with a ruler in the midst of one of his heartfelt narra-
tions.

"That's it," Billy said as he rose from his seat. "I'm through!"
And he was. He rode out another year of part-time classes in continu-
ation school and then scrapped formal education as an unnecessarily
dangerous experiment.

When all the jazz world was shifting from banjo to guitar, Billy
made a quick switch with the aid of Allan Reuss. He asked the eminent
Benny Goodman guitarist for help. Allan got him started on the
guitar, then sent him out on his own, suggesting that he add his own
ideas and technique as he went. Billy has been following that advice
ever since.

Before joining Woody Herman in mid- 1944, Billy played w r ith
Jerry Wald's first band at an uptown Manhattan Child's restaurant,
shifted from that Kemp-styled music to the bands of Carl Hoff and
Abe Lyman, and played short terms around New York radio studios.
In the early forties he jobbed with Flip Phillips then a clarinetist
and ran a sextet with him. When Flip joined Woody and heard
that a guitarist was needed, he recommended Billy. Woody called
Billy.

" Would you like to sit in?" Woody asked Billy on the phone.

"When?"

"Tonight."

"I can't, Woody," Billy said. "It's my kid's birthday."

"Well then, come in tomorrow. Come to work."

Billy hadn't been playing hard to get. His family was, and is,

COOL JAZZ 335

important to him so important that after more than two years with
Woody, in August 1946, he left the band.

"I wanna get through, Woody," Billy announced simply. It wasn't
that he was sick of the endless ribbing he took from the guys in the
band for his high-pitched voice, his shrubby blond hair framing a
gleaming, very high forehead. "I was a little panicky," he explains. "I
didn't Icnow where the band was going. Everything seemed uncertain,
and my family couldn't be supported with uncertainties."

Billy came back to New York and the waiting charms of Chubby
Jackson's great enthusiasm, Lennie Tristano, who had just arrived
from Chicago. They paired instruments, ideas, fill-ins, point and
counterpoint; and the Tristano trio, which has since made what can
most seriously be called jazz history, was inaugurated. Now Billy has
moved to the musicians' staff at the National Broadcasting Com-
pany studios in New York. Cool Jazz hot jazz good jazz has a
representative in one of the most powerful of mass-communications
media. It is at least an entry. It may be the beginning of a new era,
in which jazz will have a proper voice in the culture it best repre-
sents.

Chapter

24

EVALUATION

In all arts violent changes occur with frightening regularity. Not
only do customs and movements and fashions change, but so do
their makers and their imitators. Jazz, youngest of the arts, is even
more in the grip of bewildering upheaval than literature and painting
and traditional music. There are almost as many temptations in the
way of personal integrity for a jazzman as there are for a motion-
picture artist. Between the tumult of change of custom and fashion
on the one hand and commercial allures on the other, most jazzmen
find it hard to hold on to themselves; ill-equipped, undisciplined,
most of them lose their early purity, their musical as well as their
moral wholeness. A slackening of standards occurs as obscure jazz-
men become celebrities. One can sympathize; one can understand
their plight and explain their change; but one must also deplore and
sometimes condemn.

Some big names in jazz notably Charlie Barnet, Duke Ellington,
Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Billie Holiday, Mil-
dred Bailey, Billy Eckstine, and Herb Jeffries have made far more
than a passing effort to give music as much due as money, with
varying success in both categories. But they, like their more insistently
commercial colleagues, have had to toe the box-office line to keep
the money coming in, so that they could continue making music.
And toeing that line, which definitely forms to the right, means
finding an identifiable and popular style and sticking to it, no matter
how low the musical depths that must be plumbed. Jazz has spent
so many of its formative years just seeking an appreciative audience
that most of its practitioners are content to find a formula that at-
tracts people who will listen to them and buy their records and pay
to see them; and when they have found it, they cling to it against
all odds, even if depreciation of artistic quality follows. The results

336

EVALUATION 337

are often an almost violent decline in the quality of jazz musicianship,
and a kind of abject slavery to the mawkish marks of immediate
identity and mass favor.

The problem of when an artist is good and when bad and that
most difficult of all the attendant queries, why is a poignant one.
Critics who take their work seriously look for quality in a jazz
musician. They often find it, usually when the musician is just get-
ting started, or shortly after. Then, if well-deserved success comes
to the musician, with that success comes the fixative. To make suc-
cess permanent, the orchestra leader holds on hard to the more popu-
lar elements of his band's style and searches far and wide for super-
ficial novelty while avoiding from then on the genuine novelty of
artistic experimentation. The virtuoso instrumentalist comes to idolize
his own technique, and his ideas get lost in a sea of slimy syllables.
The singer subverts genuine feeling to the demands of a mechanical
anguish. The bulk of beboppers, following this pattern, after having
made a large collective contribution to jazz, became lost in trite
formulas in which they found inner and outer security the cer-
tainty that they could make it instrumentally and that audiences
would get what they had come to expect. All too often, at this point
in the career of a jazz artist, loss of creative imagination occurs just
when one has hoped to see development into mature art.

When a budding artist becomes a blooming entertainer, the only
standard that remains is the gold. If this seemingly ineluctable proc-
ess cannot be stopped, jazz will turn out finally to be what its most
carping critics have called it, a decadent form of entertainment, an
aphrodisiac designed only to rouse flagging glands and lagging hearts,
to set bodies in motion and numb minds and souls. But if this change
is not inexorable, if some one or two or perhaps a dozen musicians
continue to believe in the serious prospects of their own work and
that of others in jazz, and if audiences can be educated to respect the
genuine in place of the synthetic, then the garden will thrive.

All of this brings us to the positing of criteria. How do we know
what's good and what's bad in jazz? We may agree that the majority
of jazz musicians do not fulfill their early promise, that they yield to
the importunities of hungry stomachs and ill-clad backs and the
opportunities of success, financial and otherwise. One can't blame
them entirely, but neither can one make a virtue of their needs and
praise musicians for having given way to them. One can only look

338 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

for standards, formulate a working set of values, and give due praise
to those precious few who make similar values the canon of their
professional life.

Actually, something close to a viable aesthetic standard has been
arrived at in jazz, if it is only the measure of the quality of out-
standing performers; and maybe even broader criteria can be per-
ceived hiding beneath the good of these musicians and the bad of
the others who have sacrificed everything, consciously or not, for
box-office survival.

Of all the arts there is none so perplexing as music, none so difficult
to write about, none so productive of argument and disagreement.
And of all the branches of music there is none about which people
get so exercised as jazz, none about which they get so distraught, so
determinedly disorganized, none in which they resist disciplined
thinking and logical procedure so violently. And yet of all the arts
and all their branches there is none in which discipline and logic,
clarity and orderliness should be easier than in jazz. The art of creat-
ing spontaneous notes and chords and extemporaneous rhythms
the art of improvisation is still small enough and young enough to
be surveyed and assayed. It is worth while, therefore, to organize
working criteria for jazz and to take a long, reflective, retrospective
view of the achievements of jazz from its beginnings to the present.

Actually there are very few general standards with which most of
us approach any of the arts. Basically, there seem to be three: fresh-
ness, profundity, and skill.

Freshness means, of course, freshness of idea. Another way of put-
ting it offers an even more ambiguous debating term in the arts
inspiration. How do you ascertain a musician's freshness or inspira-
tion? It seems to me that we can do no more than compute mathe-
matically in this branch of musical activity but that is not so little.
It is altogether possible to name the figures a man plays, to compare
his phrases with all those that have gone before, and to make a
firm quantitative judgment and the beginning of a qualitative one
as a result. In poetry or painting so much has gone before that just
naming the stock phrases and figures, tropes and images and textures
and color combinations, is an impossibility; but in jazz the process is
not so difficult. The thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years of jazz, depend-
ing upon how you date its history, can be totted up, listened to for
the most part on records, and at least outlined on paper. It is possible

EVALUATION 339

to follow the blues tradition, the common variations on the even
commoner themes, the rows of familiar riffs, and the mountains of
only slightly different solos. And from this it is further possible to
come up with common sounds, with basic ideas, to note one long
curve on a graph, reaching to bop and then changing shape and
direction abruptly, whether for good or bad. The very least, then,
that we can do with freshness of idea or inspiration is to name the
changes wrought by musicians, to discover exactly what they are
doing with notes and chords and rhythms, and to make public that
discovery. In the next category of standards we may find some way
of deciding the value of those changes.

Profundity is one of those grimly determined words that cover a
multitude of meanings and can be carried over from one field to
another, from activity to activity, from level to level. In jazz, in its
early years, the word was almost entirely missing from verbal discus-
sion and properly, because until some of the later Ellington, until
Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano, there was little if anything in
jazz that could be called really profound. Nonetheless, profundity
must be the end and purpose of jazz as it is of traditional music, of
painting and poetry and the novel. And if jazz is a bona fide form
of music it has a supreme opportunity to achieve profundity of ex-
pression; for a distinguishing mark of music is its ability to portray
states of being rather than things with the qualities of those states
sorrow rather than a sorrowful girl, joy rather than a joyful boy,
tragedy rather than a tragic event, pathos rather than a pathetic
situation. While traditional music, however, must confine itself to
the static, to the w r ritten mood, caught once forever, jazz can make an
infinite number of grasps at profundity profundity in its permanent
forms and profundity at its most fleeting and elusive, its most tran-
sient because jazz is by its very nature spontaneous, an improvised
art.

If profundity is or should be the goal of jazz, how does a jazz
musician achieve that end, and how does a listener recognize it when
it has been attained? The answers to these two questions are not easy
to find. Of course part of the procedure is to convince jazz musicians
that every profound urge and effort they may feel and make should
be expressed in their music, that their music comes closer to offering
them an adequate expression for the intangible integers of sorrow
and joy and tragedy and pathos than any other creative outlet they

340 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

have. Then, the vital purpose of their work having been named and
recognized, they will be well on their way toward achieving it,
seeking always to perfect their skills, to find the means toward
the end of profundity; even as Bach and Mozart did, as Stravinsky
and Hindemith do; perhaps reaching the important conclusion that
virtuosity with no other purpose than self-display is as pointless as
words addressed to a mirror, and that exaltation and ecstasy are
greater than "kicks" and "having a ball," and that they lie within
the reach of musical talent and equipment. Exaltation and ecstasy
can be achieved in music, even though they cannot be equated with
any given set of notes. Thus must one consider the second standard,
for no clearer description of it can be found outside of the great
works of art themselves.

Skill is the easiest of the three standards to describe, to understand,
and to recognize. The abundant technical skill of such men as Roy
Eldridge, Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Charlie Shav-
ers, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Goodman is beyond argument.
But what of that corollary skill, the ability to express fresh and pro-
found ideas? This must come from practice and from conviction,
from the desire to express such ideas, a desire which is really a need
and as such molds the means necessary to its vital end. Because jazz
musicians have almost always been interested more in achieving great
control of their instruments than in controlling greatness, they have
usually become mechanical virtuosos and little else. On rare occasions
something more has appeared, and that brings us right back to the
previous categories. For the something else that was added was
spontaneity, and the spontaneity was compounded equally of fresh-
ness and profundity, since the truly spontaneous, the completely
unrepetitious, is by definition fresh; and the fresh is by definition
inspired; and the'inspired more often than not contains elements of
profundity. Spontaneity was recognized as the greatest of all the jazz
skills when it was first heard; it remains the hallmark of a jazz musi-
cian who is also an artist.

Throughout this discussion, one working principle has been clear,
I think: that these three criteria are interdependent, that each of the
standards rests upon the others. Without skill, there can be no fresh-
ness or profundity. Without freshness, the skill is hardly noticeable
and certainly of little worth. Without profundity, an artist is incom-
plete, having achieved his skill and freshness to no purpose. And

EVALUATION 341

yet, to reach that elusive profundity, a jazzman must have fresh-
ness and skill. Any two of the three are means to the end of the
other standard. The most vital of the three, and the really important
end of the other two means, is profundity; but it cannot be separated
from the other two. Ultimately the relationship becomes triangular
an isosceles triangle of arrows, with profundity as its apex and the
arrows flowing in both directions.

Having attempted to establish critical standards for jazz, it might
be well to discuss for a moment the value of criticism in the arts. I
know no statement of the function of the music critic, and the fre-
quent abuses of that function, closer to what I regard as the truth
than this paragraph from Igor Stravinsky's series of Harvard lectures
on the Poetics of Music:

To explain or, in French, to explicate, from the Latin explicare, to un-
fold, to develop is to describe something, to discover its genesis, to note
the relationship of things to each other, to seek to throw light upon them.
To explain myself to you is also to explain myself to myself and to be
obliged to clear up matters that are distorted or betrayed by the ignorance
and malevolence that one always finds united by some mysterious bond
in most of the judgments that are passed upon the arts. Ignorance and
malevolence are united in a single root; the latter benefits surreptitiously
from the advantages it draws from the former. I do not know which is
the more hateful. In itself ignorance is, of course, no crime. It begins to be
suspect when it pleads sincerity; for sincerity, as Remy de Gourmont said,
is hardly an explanation and is never an excuse. And malevolence never
fails to plead ignorance as an attenuating circumstance.

". . . to describe something, to discover its genesis, to note the
relationship of things to each other, to seek to throw light upon
them" that, I think, sums up the critic's prime obligations to his
readers. And ". . . the ignorance and malevolence that one always
finds united by some mysterious bond in most of the judgments
that are passed upon the arts" that I think adumbrates the major
offenses of which the critical gentry are sometimes guilty. The world
of jazz has been subject to harrowing attacks not always malevolent,
but often ignorant, and just about never well-informed, rarely noting
"the relationship of things to each other." Uncertainties continue to
prevail in the average man's approach to jazz and jazz criticism. We
have reached a point in the speedy maturation of jazz where it is
necessary, therefore, to declare working critical principles. Not only

342 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

must standards be named, but they must be referred to clearly and
relentlessly.

In our time it has become fashionable to assert the eternal truth
of the proposition that there is no eternal truth. The concomitant
of that antidogmatic dogma is that there is no verifiable good or bad.
And the inevitable conclusion of that pair of premises is that there is
no way of ascertaining the value of a work of art. There are no
guides, really, no standards, no criteria; there is only "taste," accord-
ing to this view. And taste varies directly with the number of people
in the world, all of whom, of course, though they have no standards
by which to like or dislike anything, know what they like. By the
simplest sort of deduction it becomes apparent that judgment is im-
possible, that criticism is unnecessary, and that critics are intolerable.

I start the other way round. Perhaps as a self-apologia, perhaps
as a result of a nai've faith, but also because I cannot accept the
chaos of such a ruthless relativism, I believe that music critics have
the obligation to justify the ways of musicians to men. Many jazz
musicians believe they have more than an opinion about their
music; they have a fierce faith in what they are doing. For those who
are conscious of the direction they have taken, it is always possible
to name and to define proper and improper procedure in jazz. I use
these moral terms advisedly, for musicians have set standards for
themselves with all the zeal of churchmen, and they have attempted
to convert others to their position with all the superhuman strength
of reformers. Such a setting of standards and such a drive for follow-
ers characterized the rise of bebop. Such a plotting of problems and
suggestion of solutions identify the working method of the Lennie
Tristano school of jazz. For jazzmen, as for painters and poets and
architects, there must be a declarable end, and there must be a de-
finable means of arriving there. It is my conviction that all the sig-
nificant sounds of jazz have been produced as a result of some con-
scious merger of the three principles suggested above profundity,
freshness, and skill. The exact extent to which the vital men and
women of jazz have been aware of this triangular relationship is
certainly beyond proof. But a serious discussion with any of them at
any important point in their careers would have yielded and will
yield a clear demonstration of such concerns.

Now profundity, freshness, and skill, no matter how irrefutably
discernible in the work of a jazzman, do not all by themselves pro-

EVALUATION 343

duce finished masterpieces. The three elements must be joined to-
gether by some reactive force which assures a tight reciprocal re-
lationship among them. In jazz, again as in most of the arts, there
is, I think, no trouble in naming that reactive force. As it operates in
each musician as an individual it can be called intuition; as it operates
among a group of musicians playing together it can be called tension.
In one of his most lucid passages Aristotle explains that intuition occurs
when the mind is in direct contact with itself, when the subject of
thought and the thinking process are identical, without any external
object as a middle term. This seems to me an excellent description
of intuition as its enormous constructive force is felt by the jazz
musician. Carrying this description along to the realm of collective
improvisation, one may say that tension, in the particular sense in
which I am using the word, occurs when one musician's mind is in
direct contact with another's and perhaps another's, and still an-
other's.

When skilled jazzmen can summon up fresh and profound ideas
by using their intuitive resources, and can, beyond their individual
contributions, contact the intuitive resources of their colleagues,
you get that highly agreeable tension, that motion of minds expressed
through instruments or human voices, which is first-rate jazz. The
means are many: they may be melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic; they
are always at least two of the three and often all three. Whatever
the means, however many musicians are playing, their end is nothing
unless it is produced with an unmistakable tension, the product, in
turn, of individual intuition.

Enter now the music critic. This worthy (if such he be) has a
function which parallels the jazz musician's, down the melodic line
and up the harmonic chord. The minor aspects of that function come
first, the clerical labors of naming the materials at hand, the tunes
or chords with which the musicians are working, the accuracy with
which they play, alone and together. An intelligent, trained, objective
critic should be able to spot the familiarity or novelty of a musician's
work, judging it by the standard of all the jazz that has gone before,
with which the critic's acquaintance must be broad. For these duties,
his faculties must be alert, disciplined; he must be able to hear all
that he has ever heard at all times or at least as much as is necessary
to hear borrowings and describe them and to know when what he
hears is a new contribution; and when what he hears is new he must

344 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

be able to sense its quality if not to appraise it and to decide
whether or not a degree of profundity lurks within it.

A critic of jazz, be he a constructive guide to musicians, a profes-
sional interpreter of the musicians' music to its audience, or merely
an enthusiastic and intelligent member of that audience, needs to
acquire skill and intuition, like the musician he is criticizing. All
the training available will not make it possible for you to recognize
and appreciate freshness and profundity in music if you cannot to
some large extent duplicate the performer's intuitive power. Days
and nights bent over phonographs, huddled around bandstands, may
permit you to hear how much of Roy or Dizzy, Bird or Lester or
Hawk or Louie, Billie or Ella or Sarah has been borrowed by a
trumpeter, saxophonist, or singer; but this equipment has a limited
value. With it, you will be able to do your accounting; but you will
not be able to do any more if you cannot yourself intuit as the jazz-
man does, when the jazzman does. Without intuition you will be
merely an accountant adding up figures, making necessary but neg-
ligible arithmetical computations, deciding percentages of Eldridge,
Parker, and Young, Holiday, Fitzgerald, and Vaughan. Freshness and
profundity, the vital elements which cannot be assigned to direct in-
fluence or found in precise quotation, will remain blobs of uncer-
tainty. For the informed and intuitive critic, however, accounting
measurable elements only inaugurates activity; the freshness and
profundity which mean so little to a comptometer mean everything
to him. He looks for individual intuition and collective tension with
the eagerness of a baseball scout on the trail of a new DiMaggio or
Feller, and with the prospect of a far greater reward. And in his
search he grows as his intuitions expand. He makes thrilling dis-
coveries as he delves further into the work of musicians. If he is suc-
cessful, he becomes genuinely, joyously creative. Creative criticism
means really "digging," in both the conventional and the jazz sense
of that word; you must penetrate deeply in order to learn, and, hav-
ing delved deep, you may understand. The man who really "digs"
can more often than not describe the next development in jazz before
the musicians have reached it. His intuition is such that he always
understands what is fresh, what may be profound, and welcomes it
and fights for it, joining to the music in which he finds creative
strength his own vigorous voice, in which musicians can find in-
spiration and untrained audiences can find a trustworthy guide.

EVALUATION 345

The jazz audience is like no other in the world. It becomes a part
of its music, falling in with foot, head, hand; bouncing in or out of
time; surrendering to the jazzman's mood with an eagerness that often
borders on hysteria, that sometimes produces rewarding reflection. As
no other group of listeners or viewers, the jazz audience rises and falls
with its stimulus, reaching manic heights at one moment, the depths
of depression at another. Not the maddest balletomane, not the most
stagestruck theatergoer, not the most starry-eyed movie fan, neither
dog fancier, bird lover, nor baseball fanatic projects so completely
into the working and playing frame of another living being. For the
duration of a three-minute record, a half-hour radio program, a couple
of hours in a night club, the jazz fan, according to his lights and loves,
becomes Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Dizzy
Gillespie, or Billy Eckstine. However unreal this transmigration of
musical souls may actually be, to the jazz lover this foolish fancy is
right and proper and, furthermore, undeniable.

One of the salutary results of the remarkable identification the
jazz audience makes with its heroes and heroines is an academic
knowledge of its subject without precedent or comparison. The
true jazz fan's ability to recognize dozens of trumpeters, trombonists,
saxophonists, and pianists has long been properly celebrated. There
are even some with so keen a sense of rhythm and sound that they
can identify drummers with as little trouble as most people distinguish
Vaughn Monroe from Dinah Shore. What is even more remark-
able, many jazz fans listen with the kind of attention and intelligence
which permits them to hear every technical facet of a performance,
though they are sometimes without musical training. Again and
again they can recognize the well-known chords on which an ob-
scure melody is based; they hear subtle key changes and subtler varia-
tions based on passing tones; they follow the development of a solo, the
spread of a section voicing, the break or continuity of an arrangement,
with an accuracy that would do a brilliant musician or a trained critic
credit and all without knowing the right name of anything musical,
without the vestige of a musical education. Such untrained under-
standing can proceed only from love. Such affection must be deserved.

One must respect the undying devotion of the jazz audience to the
jazz musician, recognize its fruits, and even pay homage to it. One
must also, I think, demand something more, in return for the pleasure
and stimulation, the emotional and intellectual satisfaction, provided

346 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

by the jazzman. One must insist on a double responsibility on the
part of the audience a responsibility to itself and to jazz musicians.
The responsibility to itself takes one fundamental form education.
The responsibility to musicians is just as simply categorized support.

To make its identification with the jazz musician complete and
meaningful, the jazz audience should study music. It must learn the
difference between a chord and a piece of string, learn the simple
facts of musical life, the technique of the art, and set these in a more
complicated context, the history of all the arts. When jazz audiences
become better equipped, they can help to break the stranglehold of
the great booking corporations and the alternate death-grip and
whimsical relaxation of press-agent-promoted fads which now handi-
cap jazz so seriously.

And what must the musician himself do on behalf of his art?
His function is, of course, to play. But to play what, and how, and
where, and when? It is easy to answer these questions if you are
a musician or critic in the classical tradition. However much disagree-
ment there may be over the merits of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Bee-
thoven, Berlioz, Debussy, or Ravel, there is general agreement that
all of these men are part of the standard repertory, ranking some-
where under Bach and Mozart, and leaving much room for many
others. However much contention there may be about the quality
of contemporary music, it is clear by now that Stravinsky and
Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berg, Bloch, Bartok, and a few lesser lights
have earned a substantial place for themselves in the concert and re-
cording activities of pianists, violinists, chamber groups, and sym-
phony orchestras. But the jazz musician, who has to depend so much
on his own resources, has no such simple solution to these several
problems of what and how and where and when.

The jazzman in New Orleans before the closing of the red-light
district in 1917 led an uncomplicated musical life. With only the
blues and a few related tunes to rely upon harmonically and melod-
ically, with rhythmic strictures to confine any desire to wander with
the beat, he was not only able, he was commanded to know all the
answers before he picked up his horn to blow. The result was a very
narrow avenue for creative imagination the exploitation of instru-
mental technique. A further result was the evolution of jazz sounds
away from the crinoline and old lace of nineteenth-century Louisiana
to the denim and pongee of the riverboats.

EVALUATION 347

The jazzman in Chicago, Kansas City, or New York in the twenties
followed somewhat more complex patterns, but his aim, like his
sounds and sights, was trained on the same basic objectives. Men like
Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, women like Bessie Smith,
broadened the emotional and intellectual range of New Orleans jazz
and brought dignity to their profession. It remained, however, for
Duke Ellington, something more than a greatly skilled primitive, to
suggest the profound potential of jazz. And it fell first to Benny
Goodman and his generation, then to Coleman Hawkins, Roy El-
dridge, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker, and Lennie
Tristano, in quick order, to translate the potential into the actual.

No longer, then, does the jazzman stand alone, uncluttered tech-
nically, emotionally constricted. Behind him is a history and a tradi-
tion. Before him is an art. But again: what, how, where, when?

In analyzing the functions of the jazz critic and the jazz audience,
in attempting to set up working criteria for everybody seriously
concerned with jazz, I have announced with considerable brazen-
ness that a balance of inspiration, skill, and profundity, molded by
the individual intuition and collective tension developed among jazz
musicians, should produce first-rate jazz. These words shield a for-
midable brace of ideas, of sometimes impenetrable abstractions; the
words and the ideas are too often loosely used, too little understood,
too rarely invoked with consciousness by musician, critic, or audience.
I have made some attempt to pin the words and the ideas to notes
and chords and working procedure in jazz, because I think that
such a stocktaking, such a review of principle and process, is funda-
mental to the healthy growth of this medium of expression. And of
all those who may have the capability and/or concern to take this
stock, to make this review, it seems to me that the most critical effort
must be made by the jazz musician himself.

The man who plays jazz is faced with several cruel alternatives.
He cannot in the future, unless he is intellectually slothful and emo-
tionally spent, return to the kindergarten constructions of his New
Orleans forebears, though he must pay his respects to them for
yeoman service in building a craft with the crude implements at
their disposal. If he is at all sensitive, he knows that the bop school,
which at first surged so brilliantly through the jungle of jazz weed,
later began to grow its own brand of weed heavy, clumsy, too
often aromatic of the worst of weeds, and rotten at the roots. Reject-

348 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

ing these choices, the creative jazzman is left at the mercy of his own
inspiration, his own groping after profundity, his solo intuition, and
the rich tension he may feel when playing in a group all tempered, if
meaning is to be achieved, by the skill in exercise of these faculties
which can come only from hard, directed work. And there, I think, lies
the answer to the perplexities suggested by the one-syllable queries.

What? The jazzman must give up the stagnating security to be
found in playing in and around familiar chords, where he loses all
his inspiration and any hope for profundity in the false comfort of
hackneyed phrases, repetitious ideas, and fixed choruses. He must
recognize that he as an improvising musician has for his basic ma-
terials the note and chord unburdened by other men's manipulation
of them. Sooner or later he must learn the limitations of most of
present-day jazz and the free field that lies ahead of him if his
background permits him to explore the lines of polytonal and atonal
music played in contrapuntal frames.

How? By accepting the existence of principle, by searching for
and finding it, and then by practicing precept, the jazzman can, I
am convinced, find his way to articulate communication of ideas at
the art level which music that is at once polytonal or atonal, con-
trapuntal, and improvised must reach. What this means above all is
a dedication to purpose, a governing humility, a refusal to accept
adolescent success as any real indication of ability.

Where and when? The kind of jazz that seems to be growing up
around us, less and less fitfully, more and more artfully, demands a
hearing. It will out, but not necessarily before large audiences, al-
most certainly not within large ballrooms and theaters, and definitely
not for great reward. This music will be played wherever and when-
ever a musician finds a friend in his own home, in little studios, in
big back rooms. It will be played with such conviction that its prog-
ress will become unmistakable and its difficulties desirable; it will
make its way, as all enrichments of human culture have in the past
propelled themselves, from obscurity to public acceptance.

Clearly I am demanding an assay able maturity of the jazz musi-
cian; I am insisting on the essential dignity of his calling; I am trying
to demonstrate that out of the half -century or so of jazz an art has
taken shape. The resources of jazz are huge. It is the function of the
musician in jazz to cull and command those resources, to make of his
work a vocation in all the beautiful meaning of that word.

GLOSSARY OF JAZZ WORDS AND PHRASES

The vocabulary of the jazz musician is spiced by a variety of terms
of his own coinage. At any one time these may be vast or small in
number, depending on the quantity of transient materials such words
as "mop!" an exclamation of wide currency in the early forties which
accurately described a musical device (the final beat in a cadence
of triplets, usually bringing the release of a jazz composition to an
end). The "mops" of jazz are swept clean in the following list; only
the durable terms have been given and explained. Thus you will not
find the language which was carefully attached to jazz in the first
spate of general magazine articles about swing no "doghouse" for
bass, no "licorice stick" for clarinet. The color of this glossary is
musical; this is the way jazzmen speak when the English and Ameri-
can languages are inadequate for their needs. Here are the jazz terms
used in this book and a few others that may prove valuable if you
ever find yourself across a table from a musician and at a loss for
words, or bewildered by the language of a blues or related jazz lyric.

air-check: a recording of a radio or television performance, usually made
for purposes of demonstration.

apple: New York City (see Chapter 13).

ballad: a romantic popular song, usually slow or middle tempo and with
a thirty-two-bar chorus (see Chapter 4).

barrelhouse: after the New Orleans cabarets in which liquor was dispensed
from barrels; music that is rough and ready, chiefly applied to Dixie-
land, but not exclusively.

beat: jazz time; more meaningful to jazz musicians as an honorific descrip-
tion of rhythmic skill ("he gets a fine beat") than as a description of an
underlying 2/4 or 4/4 or 6/8 or any other time (see Chapter i). Also
weary, exhausted ("I'm beat to my socks").

bebop: generic term for that modern jazz of which Dizzy Gillespie and

349

350 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

Charlie Parker are the most distinguished representatives; also known
as "bop" (see Chapter 22).

bending: the process of altering pitch between notes, up or down, some-
times called "scooping pitch."

blow: verb used to describe playing of the brass and reeds; in modern jazz
parlance, used of all the jazz instruments ("he blows fine piano").

blow one's top: phrase expressing exasperation, enthusiasm, or insanity;
synonymous with "flip one's lid," "snap one's cap" or "wig," each of
which describes the process of losing the hair or skin of the head.

blue notes: the flattened third and seventh in the blues scale (see Chapter
4); in classical music, synonymous with "clinker."

boogie ivoogie: a piano blues form (see Chapter 4).

bounce: used by some musicians, especially Duke Ellington, to describe a
particularly buoyant beat; used by jazzmen in the phrase "businessman's
bounce" to describe a monotonous two-beat played fast, usually by so-
ciety bands, for the delectation of tired businessmen and their dance
partners.

break: much used in the pre-swing and early swing days for inserted solos
of two to sixteen bars; not without later currency.

break it up: to "stop the show," "kill 'em," "fracture 'em," to achieve the
major success in a sequence of performances.

bridge: conventionally the third eight bars in a popular song chorus, the
B section in the A-A-B-A pattern or any other which uses an A-B alter-
nation; also called the "release" (see Chapter 4).

bring down: to depress (verb) or (as one word, "bringdown") one who
depresses.

bug: to bewilder or irritate.

cat: jazz musician.

chick: girl.

clambake: earlier used synonymously (and honorifically) with "jam ses-
sion," later descriptive of an improvised or arranged session which
doesn't come off. ,

clinker: bad note.

combo: short for "combination" of musicians, usually a small band.

commercial: music or musicianship designed solely to garner money and/or
fame; usually inflected with great scorn; also, a sponsored radio pro-
gram.

cool: superlative, usually reserved for sizable achievement within a frame
of restraint; for some, synonymous with modern jazz (see Chapter 23).

corny: stale, insipid, trite, usually the worse for age; and so too "corn"
(noun), "cornfed," "cornball," and "off the cob."

crazy: superlative of the late forties, synonymous with "gone," "the end."

GLOSSARY 351

cut or cut out: to leave, to depart. "Cut" also means to best a soloist or
band in competition.

dig: to understand; often to penetrate a hidden meaning, hence used of
the process of intellection of the jazz initiate ( u he digs!").

disk jockey: record announcer or commentator in radio or television.

Dixieland or Dixie: early jazz (see Chapter 8).

dog time: a song of questionable musical quality.

drag: see p. 74.

drive: to play with concentrated momentum.

fake: to improvise (widely current through the swing era, not much
thereafter, though still used).

four-beat: an even four beats to the bar.

fracture: see "break it up."

fly: smooth; to describe looks or manner or performance, usually the first
two ("he's a fly cat").

gate: once (and occasionally used after the swing era) synonymous with
jazz musician; also Louis Armstrong (see Chapter 7) and Jack ("Big
Gate") and Charlie ("Little Gate") Teagarden.

gig: a one-night job.

give or give out: swing parlance for "let yourself go."

gone: superlative, may be further qualified, such as "real gone."

goof or goof off: to wander in attention, to fail to discharge one's responsi-
bility (as for example, not to show up for an appointment and not to
be provided with a clear excuse); in musical performance, to play with-
out much attention, to miss coming in on time, etc.

groovy: applied to a good swinging beat (earlier, "in the groove").

gutbucket: music of the kind played in barrelhouses; synonymous with
"barrelhouse."

have a ball: to enjoy oneself inordinately.

head arrange?nent: see p. 170.

hip: adjective to describe a jazz initiate, somebody who really "digs" the
music and its performers (earlier, but never since swing, "hep").

horn: originally a generic term for the brass and reed instruments; in
modern jazz used of all the instruments (see "blow").

hot: as distinguished from "sweet" (but not from "cool"), describes an
improvising jazzman as against a studio musician who may be called
upon to play music with a jazz feeling; not much used for music or musi-
cian after the swing era.

icky: a "cornball," one who doesn't "dig," who isn't "hip" (in the argot
of jazz just before and through the first years of swing; afterward rare).

Jack: equivalent of "Mac" or "Bud" in American slang; means of address
to the male; in later years sometimes replaced by "Jim."

352 A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA

jam: to improvise; hence, as a noun, a group of improvisers at work, a

"jam session."
jazz: see Chapter i.

jazzy: sometimes used as synonym for "corny."

jitterbug: a frantic dancer to jazz, generally adolescent, and after the early
forties a rapidly disappearing species.

jive: comic speech, usually larded with ambiguous jazz terms; sometimes
synonymous with "kid" ("don't jive me"); never a kind of jazz, as it has
sometimes been thought to signify.

jukebox: electrical coin machine which plays records, usually at a nickel
a spin.

jump: synonymous with "leap" and with "swing," although often used
with overtones of quantity to describe the swinging of a large and
powerful jazz band ("a jump band," or "he really jumps").

kicks: synonymous with "jumps"; also, as noun, meaning pleasure ("I get
my kicks on Route 66").

kill: see "break it up," "fracture."

lead man: trumpeter, trombonist, or alto saxophonist who plays the top or
melodic line in the brass or reed section, who shapes the sound of the sec-
tion, usually a skilled technician, not necessarily a jazzman in a large band.

lick: see "break"; also used in early days of swing to designate any solo;
sometimes called, in early days, "hot lick."

longhair: a classical musician or partisan of traditional music (not much
used by musicians).

Mickey Mouse band: an orchestra that plays "corn," usually identifiable
by some non-musical noise, such as agonizing trombone glissandos or
out-of-tune saxes.

moldy fig: a modernist's name for an ardent admirer of Dixieland jazz.

novelty song: a song that depends upon some obvious contrivance for its
appeal, such as a reorganized nursery rhyme ("A-Tisket, A-Tasket,"
"Mairzy Doats"), a sound ("Woody Woodpecker"), or an infectious
sort of gibberish (-"Come on-a My House").

off-beat: the weak or unaccented beats in a four-beat measure (see "two-
beat").

out of this world: outmoded superlative, still occasionally used in mod-
ern jazz, to describe something so wonderful it's "gone."

pad: apartment or bed.

pop: abbreviation of "popular song."

release: see "bridge."

remote: late evening band broadcast from club, ballroom, or hotel.

ride: to swing, especially in last chorus or section, sometimes called "ride-
out"; especially used of Dixieland and swing.

GLOSSARY 353

riff: two- or four-bar phrase; sometimes used for longer phrase in bop.

rock: synonymous with "jump" and "swing," except for tempo; "rock" is
usually not fast.

scat: to improvise with nonsense singing syllables; earlier identified with
Cab Galloway; brought to high art by the late Leo Watson with the
Spirits of Rhythm; later further developed by Babs Gonzales and Ella
Fitzgerald.

send: to stimulate, move; not much used after the swing era, and then
usually in passive past tense ("1 was sent" rather than "he sends me").

sharp: u hip"; used chiefly of clothing or verbal manner.

society bawd: orchestra that plays for latter-day equivalent of the cotillions,
its tempos almost all "businessman's bounce," tenor saxophones replacing
altos and baritone to give a plush reed sound to the band; tenors usually
doubling on violin or vice versa; total personnel small, rarely with more
than one or two brass.

solid: contemporary and synonymous with "groovy."

square: "cornball," one who is not "hip," who doesn't "dig."

standard: a tune such as "Stardust" or "Back Home in Indiana" or "How
High the Moon," that has become a jazz classic and an inevitable part
of the jazz musician's repertory, as opposed to a "novelty" or a "pop"
that will be widely played for a while and then forgotten.

siveet: applied to music that is played straight, without improvisation, at
slow and middle tempos, in which the melody can always be recognized
and a conventional sound tending to lushness prevails; much used as a
term in swing to distinguish strictly dance outfits from, for example,
Goodman, Basic, or Lunceford.

swing: see Chapter 16.

tag: final ending to a composition, scored or improvised; "coda" in tradi-
tional musical terminology.

take five: (said to musicians, usually at rehearsal) you are entitled to a
five-minute intermission.

the end: see "crazy," "gone."

ticky: synonymous with "corny," though more specifically addressed to a
mechanical beat than anything else ("tick-tock, tick-tock").

torch: only occasionally used after the twenties and early thirties as a de-
scription of a ballad of unrequited love.

two-beat: four-four time in which two of the beats are accented and two
are not, causing an alternation of weak and strong beats.

zoot: exaggerated clothing, especially in the wideness of the shoulders
(padded) and narrowness of the trouser cuffs (pegged).

INDEX

Abraham, Morton, 82

Abyssinia (musical comedy), 143

Adams, Bob, 300

Adams, Tom, 50

Adirondack Sketches, 133

"advertising wagons," 81-82

Aeolian Hall (New York), no, 155

African dancing, 10-11, 46

African influence on jazz, 9, 12

African music, 10-14, 20, 45-46

"After All,*' 24}

"After You've Gone," 222, 239

"Ain't Misbehaving" 221-22

"Aintcha Glad," 221

"Air Mail Special," 277

Aless, Tommy, 299

Alexander, Van, 171-72

"Alexander's Ragtime Band," 103, in

Alfred (masque), 16

All City Orchestra (New York), 317

"All God's Chillun Got Rhythm," 181

"All God's Chillun Got Wings," 223

"All the Things You Are," 271

Allbright, Sol, 282

Allen, Bud, 220

Allen, Charlie, 217

Allen, Red (Henry), 67, 78, 193, 199,

287

Alley Cats, 210
"Alligator Hop," 53
Along This Way (book), 104
"Always," 318
"America," 15

American Broadcasting Company, 224
American Conservatory (Chicago),

3 20
American Federation of Musicians, 46

American in ?aris y An, 113
American Scene (book), 3

355

Ammons, Albert, 30, 122-23, 284
Ammons, Gene, 284
Amsterdam News (New York), 219
Anderson Annex (New Orleans), 40-

41, 44, 65, 91
Anderson, Cat, 54
Anderson, Edmund, 265
Anderson, Ivy, 179-81, 183, 185, 217,

242

Anderson, Tom, 38, 40-41, 65, 91
Andrade, Vernon, 67
"Apex Blues," 62

Apex Club (Chicago), 62, 132, 216
Apex Club Orchestra, 216
Apollo Theatre (New York), 141, 171-

172, 289, 330
"Apple Honey," 296, 303
Arcadia Ballroom (St. Louis), 126, 132
Arden, Toni, 259-60
"Arkansas Traveler, The," 24
Arkansas Travelers (band), 152
Arlen, Harold, 181, 259
Arlington Annex (New Orleans), 38-

39

Arlington Palace (New Orleans), 38

Armstrong, Alpha, 75-76

Armstrong, Lil, 59-60, 68; see also
Hardin, Lil

Armstrong, Louis, 5, 29, 31, 34, 42, 45,
55-60, 62-63, 66-68, 71-78, 92-96,
108-109, 116-18, 120, 129, 132, 147,
1 53-54* J 5 8 > 164, 1 66, 169, 179-80, 196-
198, 213, 215-16, 218, 237-39, 2 5 2 > 272,
287, 304, 347, 351; Chicago records,
59, 73, 126; childhood, 71; early
records, 31; first professional job, 72;
first trip to Chicago, 72-73; first trip
to Europe, 75; first trip to New York,
73; first trip to West Coast, 75; movie

356

Armstrong, Louis (continued)

career, 77; musical tastes, 77-78, 272;

recordings, 59, 73, 76-77, 126
Armstrong, Mary Ann, 73
Arne, Thomas, 16
Arnheim, Gus, 159, 294
Arsonia Cafe (Chicago), 92
"Artistry in Percussion," 312
Ash, Paul, 160, 207
Ashby, Irving, 199
"At the Jazz Band Ball," 84, 86, 89
Athenia Cafe (Chicago), 83
"A-Tisket, A-Tasket," 172, 251, 352
Atkins, Boyd, 92
Atlantic City (movie), 77
atonal music, 52, 136, 312, 322-23, 331,

348

Auburn Theatre (Bronx, N.Y.), 75
Auld, Georgie, 194, 210, 277-78, 285,

200
Austin Gang (Austin High School),

118-19, 121, 161
Austin, Lovic, 96
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

(book), 104
"Away Down Souf," 23

"Baby, Don't Tell on Me," 33

"Baby, Won't You Please Come

Home," 163, 191
"Baby, Won't You Say You Love Me,"

268
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 4, 52, 107, 283,

308, 331, 340, 346

"Back Home in Indiana," 274, 353
"Back in Your Own Backyard," 137
"Back Water Blues," 95
Bacon, Louis, 168
Bailey, Buster (William), 73, 94, 96,

146-47, 149, 189
Bailey, Mildred, 67, 109, 207-10, 247-

252* 33<*

Bailey, Pearl, 260
Baisden, Harry, 160
Baker, Buddy, 265
Baker, Dorothy, 128
Baker, Harold, 145
Balconades (New York) , 84-85, 94
Balla, 99

ballads, 16, 21, 80, 88, 96, 318, 349
Ballew, Smith, 152
Bama State Collegians, 192

INDEX

bamboulas, 46

Banjo (book), 104

Baquet, Achiile, 81-82

Baquet, George, 54, 60

"Barbara Allen," 16

Barbarin, Paul, 93, 1 17

Barber, Bill, 326

Barber of Seville, The, 17

Barbour, Dave, 63, 250

Barnet, Charlie, 166, 187-88, 197, 227,

229, 257-60, 284, 297, 300, 303-305,

336

"Barnyard Blues," 84-85
baroque music, 7, 52, 85
"Barrelhouse Stomp," 127
Barren's (New York), 150, 176
Bartok, Bela, 107, 208, 310, 346
Basic, Count (William), 33, 143, 148,

166, 180-00, 192-93, 202, 204, 213, 218-

219, 223, 233, 236, 241, 253, 278, 284,

328, 353

"Basin Street Blues," 216, 252
"Battle Hymn of the Republic," 24
"Battle of the Kegs," 15
Battle, Puddin' Head, 193
Bauduc, Ray, 162, 188, 206-207, 210,

298
Bauer, Billy, 66, 68, 246, 299, 321-23,

332-35

Bauza, Mario, 169
"Be-Hap-E," 83
"Beale Street Blues," 33, 115
"Bean and the Bop," 282
Bean, Gushing, 300
"Bear Went Over the Mountain, The,"

16

Beatty, Josephine, 74
"Beau Koo Jack," 216
bebop, 46, 52, 68, 133, 106, 199, 233,

237> 239-41, 244-45, 252, 267-91, 303-

304, 307, 309-10, 319, 337, 342, 347;

harmony and melody, 244, 274-75,

288; rhythm, 244-45, 272, 274-75, 287-

288, 209

Bebop Boys, 283
Bechet, Sidney, 44, 53-55, 58, 60-62,

66-67, 93, 117, 135, 179, 186
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 8, 107, 219,

283, 307, 346

"Begin the Beguine," 194, 230
Beiderbecke, Bix (Leon Bismarck), 85,

87, 94, 97, 109, 115, 118-21, 124, 128-

INDEX

140, 154-55, 159, 161, 201, 208-209,

211, 295; compositions, 132-33; death,
128, 139; education, 129; family, 128;
first professional job, 129-130; piano-
playing, 128, 131-35; records, 131-32,
137-38

"Belgium Stomp," 191

Bell, Clive, 98-100

Belle of the Nineties (movie), 182

Beller, Al, 160

"Bells of San Raquel," 223

"Bells of St. Mary's," 84

Berg, Alban, 312-13, 331, 346

Berger, Herbert, 153

Berger, Morroe, 56

Berigan, Bunny, 189, 203, 206, 200-12,

228, 250, 298, 300
Berlin, Irving, 23, 98, 101, 108, in, 115,

142, 220

Berman, Sonny, 209, 303-304
Bernardi, Noni, 187
Bernhart, Milt, 313
Bernie, Ben, 157, 207
Bernstein, Artie, 186, 210
Berry, Chu (Leon), 148, 193, 199, 210-

212, 239, 321
Berton, Vic, 131
Best, Denzil, 324

"Between i8th and i9th on Chestnut

Street," 317
"Big Boy," 131
Big Easy Dance Hall (New Orleans),

5'

"Big John Special," 204
Bigard, Barney, 58, 72, 178-79, 181, 184,

218, 242

"Bijou," 296, 302
"Billie's Blues," 33
Billings, William, 20
Binyon, Larry, 162
Bird, see Parker, Charlie
Birdland (New York), 141, 240, 286
"Birmingham Breakdown," 184
Bishop, Joe, 205, 295
Bishop, Sir Henry, 17
Bishop, Wallace, 217
"Bixology," 132
"Black and Blue," 221
"Black and Tan Fantasy ," 177-78
Black and Tan Fantasy (movie), 179
"Black Beauty," 145, 181
Black Bottom Club (New York), 167

357

"Black, Brown, and Beige," 244

Black Christ, The (book), 106

Black, Clarence, 59

Black Flamingo (Los Angeles), 265

Black Hawk (Chicago), 160

Black, Lew, 86

"Black Magic," 305

Black Manhattan (book), 104

Black Revue, The (musical comedy),
60

Blackberries, The Ten (Duke Elling-
ton), 178

Blackbirds Revue, 1^8

Blake, Eubie, 81, 145

Bland, Jack, 124

Blankenship, Russell, 106

Blanton, Jimmy, 212-13, 235, 241-44,
246, 286, 297

Blesh, Rudi, 10, 57, 68

Blithe, Jimmy, 122

Bloom, Rube, 132

"Bloos," 310

"Blow Your Horn and Call Your Dog,"

17

"Blowin* up a Storm," 296

Blue Angel (New York), 290

Blue Blowers, 124

Blue Book y 39-42

Blue Boys, 210

Blue Five, 60, 74, 143

Blue Friars, 119, 125

Blue Heaven (Milwaukee), 293

"Blue Light," 179

"Blue Minor," 169

"Blue 'n' Boogie," 271

blue notes, 12, 27-28, 86, 350

"Blue Prelude," 295

"Blue Ramble," 182

"Blue Skies," 210, 233

"Blue Turning Gray over You," 221

"Bluebells of Scotland," 16

blues, 12, 16-17, 21, 23, 26-34, 45 59*
64-65, 73-75, 81-84, 86, 88, 95-96, 105,
in, 148, 222, 232, 295; analysis of
blues form, 27-29; melodic and har-
monic structure, 27-29, 52; rhythmic
structure, 27, 30-31; singers, 26, 28,
32-34, 74, 95-96, 222

"Blues" (Ellington), 241

"Blues for Fats," 219

"Blues I Love to Sing, The," 178

"Blues in E Flat," 210

358

"Blues in Thirds," 216

"Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to

Me, The," 83
"Blues of Bechet," 61
Blues on Parade (record album), 295
Blues Rhythm Band, 193
Blues Serenaders, 96
Blythe, Jimmy, 52
boating songs, 90
Bocage (Hollywood), 290
Bocage, Peter, 57
"Body and Soul," 33, 212, 225, 241, 265,

270, 290

"Bojangles," 243
Bolden, Buddy (Kid; King), 50-53,

55-5 6 i 5 8 : 6 7> 70-7 1 * 79 i9 8
Boll Weevil Song, 19
Bolton, Louis, 278
"Boneyard Shuffle," 154
boogie woogie, 30, 63-64, 122-23, ! 99t

207, 213-^4, 232-33, 276, 284, 308;

harmony, 30; rhythm, 30, 123
"Boogie Woogie on St. Louis Blues,"

218

Bose, Sterling, 162
"Bouncing Buoyancy," 6
"Boy with the Wistful Eyes, The," 218
"Boy Meets Horn," 242
"Boyd Meets Stravinsky," 310
Brahms, Johannes, 107, 219, 346
brass bands, 46, 56, 71, 81
Braud, Wellman, 75, 91, 93, 117
Brice, Fanny, 98, 101, 144
Bricktop's (Paris), 176
Briggs, Pete, 74
Brooklyn Eagle, 202
Brooks, Randy, 318
Broun, Hey wood, no, 144
Brown, Lawrence, 7.5, 179-80, 182, 184,

213, 242, 244
Brown, Les, 252, 261
Brown, Pete, 62
Brown, Ray, 287
Brown, Steve, 86, 120, 134
Brown, Tom, 82-83, 94, 120
Brown, Vernon, 204
Brown, Walter, 276
Brown's Dixieland Jass Band, 82-83
"Brownskin Gal in a Calico Gown,"

265

Brown-Skinned Jazz Band, 58
Brubeck, Dave, 332

INDEX

Brunies, Albert, 87

Brunies Brothers, 56, 87

Brunies, George Clarence, 86-89, 119,

126, 131, 147, 160, 189, 208, 228
Bryant, Dan, 22

Bryant, Willie, 193, 203, 212, 242
Bryant's Minstrels, 21
Bucket of Blood (New York), 143
Buckley's New Orleans Serenaders, 22
Buckner, Milt, 199
"Bu-dee-daht," 270
"Buddy's Habits," 154
"Bughouse," 210
"Bugle Call Rag," 204
"Bull Frog Blues," 124
"Bump It," 62
Bunn, Teddy, 60
Bunny's Blue Boys, 210
Burke, Eddie, 297
Burke, Sonny, 248
Burns, Jeanne, 248
Burns, Ralph, 259, 295-96, 299-302,

35-37> 3*6

Bushkin, Joe, 210, 213, 228-29
Busse, Henry, 136, 297, 303
Bustanoby's Restaurant (New York),

8 3
Butterbeans and Susie, 126

Butterfield, Billy, 194, 206
"By Candlelight," 132
Byas, Don, 233, 269-70
Byrne, Beverly, 318
Byrne, Bobby, 303
Byzantine music, 26

"C Jam Blues," 29

CBS, see Columbia Broadcasting Sys-
tem

Cabin in the Sky (movie), 77, 256
Cafe Society (New York), 100, 219,

232, 256, 290, 302
Cajun music, 65
"Caledonia," 296
California Ramblers, 152
Galloway, Blanche, 242, 265, 278
Galloway, Cab, 193, 212, 222, 242, 265,

353

"Camp Meeting Blues," 73
"Camp Town Races, De," 23
"Can You Take It?" 147
"Canal Street Blues," 73
"Candlelight," 133

INDEX

Candoli, Pete, 303

canonic music, 51-52

Capitol (riverboat), 120-29

"Caravan," 300

"Careless Love," 95

Carey, Dick, 228

Carey, Jack, 55

Carey, Thomas (Papa Mutt or Mutt),

54-55," 57

Carey, Scoops, 240
Carls, Emmett, 309
Carlson, Frankie, 295
Carmichael, Hoagy, 130, 135, 137-39,

249
Carnegie Hall (New York), no, 199,

204, 221, 233, 244, 256, 280, 289, 206,

306

Carney, Harry, 78, 178, 181, 244, 301
"Carolina Shout," 219
Carr, Monty, 233
Carroll, Bob, 165
Carter, Benny, 78, 142, 147-49, 163-64,

167-68, 176, 198-99, 203, 212-13, 238,

242, 284-85, 287-88, 301
Caruso, Frank, 332
Carver, Way man, 170
Casa Loma Orchestra, 138, 191, 209, 250
Casbah (Los Angeles), 291
Casey, Al, 78, 222

Casino de Paree (New York), 162, 165
Casino Gardens (Chicago), 83
Catalano, Tony, 120
Catlett, Big Sidney, 193, 213, 271, 298
Cawley, Joe, 83
Cecil Hotel (New York), 245
Celestin, Oscar (Papa), 45, 57, 68
Cellar (Chicago), 121
Cellar Boys, 1 18, 127
"Cemetery Blues," 95
Center, Boyd, 88
Challis, Bill, 134
Chaloff, Serge, 285, 309
Chambers, Elmer, 146-47
"Changes," 137
chansons de geste, 16
"Chant of the Weed," 164-65
chants, 18, 45-46, 85
Charioteers, the, 203
Charity Dance Hall (New Orleans),

5i

Charleston Chasers, 152
"Chattanooga Stomp," 73

359

Chauvin, Louis, 80

"Cheatin' on Me," 191

Check and Double Check (movie), 179

"Chelsea Bridge," 243

"Cherry," 126, 163

Chester, Bob, 301-302, 317, 330

"Chevy Chase," 16

Chez Paree (Chicago), 162, 327

"Chicago Breakdown," 92

Chicago Conservatory of Music, 121

"Chicago High Life," 216

Chicago Rhythm Kings, 118, 125

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 126, 149

Chicago Vagabonds, 59

Chicagoans, 208

Childers, Buddy, 313

"Chimes in Blues," 216

"China Boy," 124-25, 130, 154

"Chloe," 225

Chocolate Dandies, the, 126, 163, 238

Chopin, Frederic, 178

"Chopin Prelude," 191

Christian, Buddy, 57

Christian, Charlie, 133, 153, 193, 212-13,

235, 244-46, 273-74, 347
Christian, Emil, 84
Christian, Lillie Delk, 62, 96, 126
Christie, E. P., 22-23
Christy, June, 260-61, 312
"Chrysanthemum, an Afro-American

Intermezzo," 80
church music, 14-15
Cibber, Colley, 15
Cinderella Dance Hall (New York),

.94* 131

circus bands, 55, 82
Giro's (Los Angeles), 291
Clambake Seven, 206-207
Claridge, Gay, 327
"Clarinet Lament," 179, 184
"Clarinet Marmalade," 84, 89, 119
"Clarinet Squawk," 83
Clark, Dick, 203
Clark, Pete, 169

Clarke, Kenny, 274, 276, 278, 287-88
Clark's Uptown House (New York),

276

Clay, Shirley, 165
Clayton, Buck, 190
"Clementine (from New Orleans),"

134
"Cloudy," 231

360

Club Alabam (New York), 146

Club Congo (Detroit), 284

Club de Lisa (Chicago), 123

Club Elite (Chicago), 214-15

Cobb, Arnett, 199

Cobb, Junie, 93

Cocoanut Grove (Los Angeles), 159

"Cold in Hand Blues," 28

Cole, Cozy, 193, 250, 271

Cole, Nat (King), 199, 213-14, 223-24,

22^-30, 243
Cole, Teddy, 240
Coleman, Bill, 233
Coliseum (Chicago), 125-26
Collier's (magazine), 189
Collins, John, 240
Collins, Shad, 168
Columbia Broadcasting System, 150,

159, 210

Columbo, Russ, 159, 247, 262
"Come Back, Sweet Papa," 59
Come Clean Dance Hall (New Or-
leans), 51

"Come on-a My House," 252
commercial music, 157-58, 160, 175, 187,
195, 197, 204-205, 279, 307, 309, 313-

3'4i 336-37i 350

Como, Perry, 247, 261-62

"Concentrating" 221

Concerto in F, 112-13

concertos, jazz, 112-13, 184

concerts, jazz, 18, 25, 77, 110-13, 155,
199, 204, 215, 218-19, 221, 233, 244,
256, 280, 285, 289, 296, 306, 332

Condon, Cliff, 121

Condon, Eddie, 118, 121, 124-26, 129,

1 60, 189, 197, 208, 220, 228
Confrey, Zez, 111-12
"Conga Brava," 243
Congo Melodists, 22
"Congo, The" (poem), 103
Congress Hotel (Chicago), 184
Connie's Inn (New York), 75-76,

1 08, 164-65, 220
Conzelman, Bob, 130
Cook, Doc, 62, 93-94, 119, 126
Cook, Will Marion, 117
Cooke, Charles L., see Cook, Doc
"coon songs," 22, 79
Cooper, Al, 193, 313
Cooper, Bobby, 326
Copacabana (New York), 200

INDEX

"Copenhagen," 127, 131

Copland, Aaron, 108, 310

"Coquette," 137

"Cornet Chop Suey," 153

Cornish, Willie, 50

"Corny Rhythm," 233

Coslow and Johnson, 182

Cottage Grove (Chicago), 93, 120

Cotton Club (New York), io8, 150,
165, 174, 178-79, 181, 191, 193, 242

Cotton Club (Sebastian's, Los An-
geles), 75-77, 162, 182

Cotton Pickers, 147, 162-63, 2 3&

"Cottontail," 243, 300

Cottrell, Louis (Old Man), 53, 57

counterpoint, 8, 12, 51-52, 86, 275, 322-

323, 348

"Countin' the Blues," 95
Coward, Noel, 227
Cox, Ida, 32, 96
Coy, Dean, 242
Crane, Hart, 102
Crawford, Jimmy, 191
"Creole Love Call," 178
"Creole Rhapsody," 182
"Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue,"

242

Criss, Sonny, 285
crooners, 158-59, 261
Crosby, Bing, 21, 77, 109, 159, 165, 207,

209, 247, 249, 253, 261-62
Crosby, Bob, 161-62, 187-88, 206
Crotty, Ronald, 332
Crump, E. H., 30
"Cryin' All Day," 137
Cuban jazz, 312
Cullen, Countee, 106
Cumrnings, E. E., 98, 101-102, 116
"Curbstone Shuffle," 304

Daley, William, 49

"Dalvatore Sally," 310

Dameron, Caesar, 278

Dameron, Tadd, 271, 277-78, 285, 287,
290

D'Amico, Hank, 207

Damrosch, Walter, no, 112

dance music, African, 10-11, 46; Amer-
ican, 13-14,47, 159; European, 11, 13

dancing, African, 10-11, 46; folk, n;
jazz, 11, 80

"Daniel Jazz, The" (poem), 103

INDEX

Dankworth, Johnny, 325

"Darktown Strutters' Ball," 124

"Davenport Blues," 132

Davenport, Cow-cow, 122

Davidson, Cuffey, 163

Davis, Eddie, 282

Davis, Johnny Scat, 229

Davis, Meyer, 82, 150, 175

Davis, Miles, 277, 281, 283-84, 288, 304,

313, 325-26, 332
Davison, Wild Bill, 127, 189
Day, Doris, 258, 259, 261
"Daybreak Express," 183
"Daydream," 243
De Lisa Club (Chicago), 123
De Lobbie Cafe (Chicago), 83
De Luxe Cafe (Chicago), 60, 92
De Paris, Sidney, 165
"Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts," 23
Debussy, Claude, 4, in, 132-33, 136,

209, 227, 284, 286, 310, 346
DeFranco, Buddy, 213, 297, 302, 330
"Deep Purple," 166
"Deep River," 25, 223
Delta Rhythm Boys, 252
"Detour Ahead," 259
Dewey, Laurence, 91
Dexter, Al, 308
Dexter, Dave, 62
Dickenson, Vic, 190, 230, 233
Dickerson, Carroll, 66, 74, 1 17, 126, 215,

271

"Dickie's Dream," 236
"Didn't He Ramble?" 47
"Dinah," 145, 154, 191
"Dippermouth Blues," 73, 130
"Disorder at the Border," 270
"Dixie," 21-22, 24, 103
Dixie (movie), 21
"Dixie Jass Band One-Step," 84
Dixie, Johaan, 21
Dixie to Broadway (musical comedy),

'45

"Dixieland Band, The," 186

Dixieland jazz, 22, 64, 81-84, 88-89, 94,
102, 129-30, 138, 160-61, 1 88, 100, 198,
206-208, 228-29, 233, 235, 259, 275,
287, 295, 298, 302, 307-309. 3 i 3~*4i
317, 332, 349, 352; harmony, 51-52;
melody, 85-86; rhythm, 85

Dixieland Six, 228

Dixon, Charlie, 146-47

361

Dixon, George Washington, 22

Dixon, Joe, 206

"Dizzy Atmosphere," 271

"Do Your Duty," 95

Dockstader, Lew, 22

Dodds, Baby (Warren), 9-10, 68, 72-

74, 92-93

Dodds Brothers, 120, 129
Dodds, Johnny, 45, 53, 57-60, 62, 68,

73~74> 93> 9 6 I! 7> *2o, ! 35 l86
Donahue, Al, 187-88
Donahue, Sam, 305
Donnelly, Ted, 232

"Don't Be That Way," 169-70, 204, 300
"Don't Blame Me," 290
"Don't Smoke in Bed," 260
"Don't Take Your Love from Me,"

2 4 8 , 277
Dorsey Brothers, 115, 134, 153, 163,

187-88, 207, 209, 250
Dorsey, Jimmy, 109, 126, 137-39, I 5 I ~

154, 166, 1 88, 207, 230, 248, 318
Dorsey, Tommy, 23, 109, 126, 132, 137-

138, 151, 187-88, 191, 206, 210-11,

228-29, 248, 257-58, 260-63, 298, 324
Dos Passos, John, 98, 100
Douglas, Aaron, 105
Dow ell, Edgar, 167
Downbeat (New York), 200
Downbeat (magazine), 64
Downes, Olin, 112
Doy, Daniel, 175
"Drag 'Em," 232
Dreamland Cafe (Chicago), 74, 92-94,

117, 126

Dreamland Ballroom, 93, 126
Dreamland Orchestra, 62, 126
drugs, 255-56, 272, 283
Dudley, Bide, 144
Dunn, Johnny, 95
Duson, Frankie, 55
Dutrey, Honore, 73, 93
Dutrey, Sam, 57, 72

Eager, Allen, 236

Eagle Band, 54-57, 59-60, 67-68

"Early Autumn," 316

Early, Frank, 61

"East of the Sun," 324

"East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," 177, 184

"Easy Living," 254

"Eb-Pob," 283

362

Eberle, Bob, 188, 248
"Ebony Concerto," 296, 306
"Ebony Rhapsody," 182
"Echoes of Harlem," 184
"Echoes of the Jungle," 182
Eckstine, Billy, 217-18, 266-71, 276-78,

281-85, 288-91, 309, 336, 345
Economy Dance Hall (New Orleans),

5*

Edison, Harry, 189, 241

Edwards, Eddie (Daddy), 83-86

Eldred, Ray, 103

Eldridge, Jean, 243

Eldridge, Joe, 240

Eldridge, Roy (Little Jazz), 67, 77-78,
194, 196-97, 212-13, 235, 237-42, 244,
246, 251, 261, 281, 287, 304, 340, 344,

347

Elgar, Charles, 93, 126, 179

"Elijah and the Juniper Tree," 233

Eliot, T. S., 98-102, 115

Elite (Chicago), 214-15

Elkins, Eddie, 75

Elks Place (New Orleans), 53

Ellington, Duke (Edward Kennedy),
6, 17-19, 28-29, 45, 54, 75, 78, 80, 92,
96, 108-109, 115-16, 138, 145, 149-50,
163, 167-68, 174-85, 1 88, 193, 197, 204,
213, 217, 228, 233, 241-44, 246, 252,
265, 270, 293, 295, 299-301, 307, 309,
314, 336, 339, 347, 350; education, 174;
first jobs, 45, 175; movies, 179, 182-
183; records, 177, 179, 182

Elliott, Don, 324

Elm an, Ziggy, 190-200, 204

"Embraceable You," 239

Emmett, Daniel Decatur, 21-22

"Empty Bed Blues," 95

Engleman, Bill, 121

Engvick, Bill, 248

Entertainers' Club (Chicago), 215

Erwin, Pee Wee, 206, 294

Escudero, Bob, 147, 162

Esquire (magazine), 77, 308

Ethiopian Serenaders, 22

European music, 9, 12-14, 16-17, 107

Evans, Carlisle, 129

Evans, George, 263

Evans, Gil, 325

Evans, Hershal, 190

Evans, Stumpy, 216

Every Day's a Holiday (movie), 77

INDEX

"Every Evening," 62
"Everybody's Doing It Now," 138
"Everything I Have is Yours," 290-91
"Exactly Like You," 165
Excelsior Band, 49-50, 58
"Exposition Swing," 184
Ezell, Will, 122

Famous Door (New York), 188, 295

"Fan It," 294

Farley, Eddie, 185

Farlow, Tal, 325

Farrar, Fred, 134, 136

Farrell, Bob, 22

Fazola, Irving, 206

Feather, Leonard, 76, 280

"Feelin' No Pain," 152

Ferguson, Maynard, 54

Fewclothes, George, 54, 61, 63, 68

"Fidgety Feet," 84, 131

Fields, Herbie, 318

Fifty-second Street, New York, 141,

188-89, 210, 225, 227, 270-71, 277, 28l-
284, 286, 288, 290, 295, 300-301, 321

Filhe, George, 66, 92

"Fine and Mellow," 33

Fine Clothes to the Jew (book), 105

Fio Rito, Ted, 229

first American composer, 15

first American opera, 15

first bebop, 270

first blues, 30

first girl singer with an orchestra, 249

first growl trumpeter, 142

first jazz bands, 48

first jazz concert, 110-13, 155

first jazzing of the classics, 65

first jazzmen, 49

first minstrel show, 20

first ragtime, 80

first riverboat jazz bands, 91

Fishkin, Arnold, 210, 297, 318, 321-23,

333

Fisk Jubilee Singers, 24
Fitzgerald, Ella, 5, 166, 171-72, 248,

25i-53 258, 287, 289, 344, 353
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 98, 115
Five Horsemen, 171
Five Pennies, 151-52
"Flamingo," 265
"Flashes," 132
"Flock o' Blues," 132

INDEX

Flora (opera), 15

Florentine Gardens (Hollywood), 218

"Florida Stomp," 240

"Flying Home," 199, 252

Folus, Mickey, 301

"For Dancers Only," 191

"For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," 16

"For No Reason at ail in C," 137

"Forty-six West Fifty-two," 212

Foster, Pops (George), 44, 67, 72, 92

Foster, Stephen Collins, 22-24, 80

Fountain Inn (Chicago), 92

four-beat jazz, 85, 351

400 Club (London), 84

"Four Brothers," 316, 318

u Four Men on a Horse," 297

"Four or Five Times," 62, 191

Fowler, Lemuel, 122

Frank, Bab, 66

Frank, Waldo, 100-102

"Frankie and Albert," 17

"Frankie and Johnnie," 17, 95

Freeman, Bud (Lawrence), 118-20,

125-27, 138, 153, 155, 160-61, 204,

206, 208-209, 294, 321
Freeman, Stan, 325
"Frenesi," 194
Friars' Inn (Chicago), 86-87, 94, 118,

121

"Friars Point Shuffle," 124
Friars Society Orchestra, 127
Frisco and McDermott, 82
Froeba, Frankie, 5
"Froggy Bottom," 231, 233
"From Monday On," 137
"From the Land of the Sky-blue

Water," 248-49

fugue, 4, 52; see also counterpoint
"Fugue on Bop Themes," 332
Fuller, Walter, 217
"Fur Elise," 307
Futurists, 98-99
Fux, Johann Josef, 8

Gabler, Milt, 208
Gabriel, Gilbert, 112
Gaillard, Slim, 272-73
Gale, Moe, 168, 171, 280
Gande, Al, 130
Garber, Jan, 126-27, 150
Garden of Joy (New York), 143
Gardner, Ava, 263

363

Garland, Ed, 93

Garner, Erroll, 213, 223-24, 230-31, 286

Garroway, Dave, 291

"Gay Negro Boy, The," 20

"Gee Ain't I Good to You," 163

"Georgia Boy," 217

"Georgia on My Mind," 139, 249

"Georgia Skin Game," 65

Gershwin, George, 23, 110-13, lid,

225, 251, 259
Gershwin, Ira, 251
Gerun, Tom, 293-04
"Get Together," 169
"Get Yourself a New Broom," 181
Getz, Stan, 236, 285, 313, 316-19, 326
"Ghost of a Chance," 212, 290
"Ghost of Love," 232
Gibson, Harry the Hipster, 272-73
Gide, Andre, 10-12
Gifford, Gene, 209
Gillespie, Dizzy (John Birks), 68, 133,

213, 217, 237, 240, 245, 252, 269-82,

284, 287-88, 304, 309, 336, 344-45* 349
Gillette, Bobby, 130
Gilman, Lawrence, 112
Gilmore, Patrick, 24
Girard, Adele, 294
Giuffres, Jimmy, 318
"Give Me the Simple Life," 318
Glaser, Joe, 74, 77
"Glory Hallelujah," 24
"Go Down, Moses," 25, 223
Gobee, Sonny, 72
"God Bless the Child," 254
"God Save the King," 15
God's Trombones (book), 104
Goffin, Robert, 195
Going Places (movie), 77
Golden Gate Ballroom (New York),

219

"Golden Rule Blues," 95
Goldfarb, Chubby, 295
Goldfield, Goldy, 137
Goldkette, Jean, 109, 131, 133-37, 154,

162

"Gone," 221

"Gone with the Wind," 225
"Good Bait," 277
"Good Earth, The," 296, 303
"Good Man is Hard to Find, A," 95
"Good Time Society, The," 171
"Good-by Forever," 225

364

Goodman, Benny, 4-5, 17, 24, 63, 65-
66, 78, 88, 96, 107-108, 115, 118, 120,
126, 130, 133, 138, 148-49, 151, 153-54,
160-62, 170, 174, 185-89, 191, i93~9 8
202-204, 207, 2io-ii, 213, 226, 228-
230, 233, 244-45, 247, 250, 256, 260,
298, 300, 302, 307-308, 313, 318, 334,
340, 347, 353; Quartet, 188, 193, 198;
Sextet, 153, 244-45; Tri i l88 J 93
250

Goodman, Harry, 118, 160

Goodman, Irving, 210-11

"Goodmania," 300

"Goody Goody," 187

Goofus Five, The, 152

"Goose Pimples," 138

Gordon, Dexter, 271, 284

Gowans, Brad, 208

Gozzo, Conrad (Goz), 303

Gradus ad Parnassian, 8

Graettinger, Bob, 312-13

Gramercy 5 (band), 230

Granada Restaurant (Chicago), 157

Grand Terrace (Chicago), 180, 189,
216-17, 264-65

Granz, Norman, 285, 310

Grant, Coot, 74

Graupner, Gottlieb, 20

Gray, Glen, 191, 232; see also Casa
Loma Orchestra

Great American Bandwagon, The
(book), 115

Great Gatsby, The (book), 113

Greek music (ancient), 7, 26

Green, Big (Charlie), 73, 146-48, 215

Green Book (New Orleans), 39

Green, Claude, 233

Green, Lil, 260

Green, Madeleine, 290

Green Mill, The (Chicago), 93

Greene, Freddy, 189

Greer, Sonny (William), 150, 175

Gregorian chant, 85

Greystone Ballroom (Detroit), 162-
164

Griffin, Gordon (Chris), 204

Grimes, Tiny, 225

Grofe, Ferde, in

"Groovin' High," 271

Grouya, Ted, 265

Gruber, Franz, 17

Grupp, Maurice, 268

INDEX

Guarnicri, Johnny, 194, 213, 223, 227,

*3 325

Guest of Honor, A (opera), 80
Guitar, Willie, 82
"Gully Low Blues," 31, 59
"Gut Bucket Blues," 59
Guy, Freddie, 176
Guy, Joe, 270

H.MS. Pinafore (operetta), 25
Hackett, Bobby, 67, 88, 204, 208-209,

228, 263

Haggart, Bob, 188, 206, 252
HaiefT, Alexis, 330
Haig, Al, 271, 285
"Hail, Columbia," 15
Halfway House (New Orleans), 87
Hall, Adelaide, 96, 178, 224
Hall, Al, 233
Hall, Edmond, 245, 308
Hall, Fred "Tubby," 91, 216
Hall, George, 230
Hall, Minor "Ram," 91, 93, 117
Hamilton, Jimmy, 244
Hammond, John Henry, Jr., 5, 123,

189, 201-202, 210, 232
"Hamp's Boogie Woogie," 199
Hampton Institute, 25
Hampton, Lionel, 75, 92, 193, 198-200,

203-204, 245, 284
"Handful of Keys," 222
Handy, George, 309-11
Handy, W. C., 23, 30, 32-33, 93, 143,

149

Happiness Boys, 115
"Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,"

296, 300, 305

"Happy as the Day Is Long," 181
Hardin, Lil, 73-74, 91, 93, 117; See also

Armstrong, Lil
Hardwick, Toby (Otto), 150, 167-68,

175, 181, 237
Hardy, Emmett, 87, 129
"Harlem Dances, The" (poem), 104
Harlem Footwarmers, 150, 178
"Harlem Fuss," 220
Harlem Opera House, 141
harmony, 4, 27-28, 30, 51-52, 65, 244,

274, 288; definition, 4; of bebop, 244,

274-75, 288; of blues, 27-29, 52; of

boogie woogie, 30; of New Orleans

jazz, 51-52; of ragtime, 65

INDEX

"Harmony in Harlem," 184

Harney, Ben, 80

Harris, Bill, 213, 296, 302-304, 306, 309,

3 '3; 330

Harris, Joe, 162, 203
Harris, Little Benny, 269, 309
Harrison, Jimmy, 95, 142, 147-48, 168
"Harp that Once Thro' Tara's Halls,

The;" 17

Hart, Clyde, 239, 271, 285
Hartwell, Jimmy, 130
Hartzfield, Johnny, 270
Haughton, Chauncey, 170
Hawkins, Coleman, 73, 77-78, 95-06,

147-48, 163, 192, 199, 212-13, 236, 238,

242, 270, 282, 284, 287, 340, 345, 347
Hawkins, Erskine, 192
Hawthorne, Alice, 24
Hayden, Scott, 80
Hayes, Edgar, 287
Haymer, Herbie, 207
Haymes, Dick, 261
Hayton, Lennie, 256-57
"Heah Me Talkin' to Ya," 164, 216
"Heaven," 25
"Heckler's Hop," 240
"Heebie Jecbies," 92
Hefti, Neal, 303
Heidt, Horace, 209
Heiffh-Ho Club (New York), 158
Hell-O (New Orleans newspaper),

40

Hemphill, Shelton, 78
Henderson, Fletcher (Smack), 73-74,

95-96, 108-109, 115, 143, 146-49, 152,

161-63, 167-68, 181, 187, 195-96, 202,

212-13, 236, 238, 242, 347
Henderson, Horace, 149, 164-65, 213,

238

Henderson, W. J., in
Henke, Mel, 213
Herbert, Victor, in, 142
Herman, Len, 207
Herman, Woody, 63, 66, 188, 205, 257,

259, 285, 292-307, 309, 311, 314, 316,

318,321, 326, 330, 333-36
Herskovits, Melville J., 9-10
"Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop," 199
Heywood, Eddie, 230, 252
Hibbler, Al, 276
Hickman, Art, 157
Hicks, Billy, 193

365

Higginbotham, J. C, 193, 109

"High Society," 47, 53, 62, 66, 73

Hightower, Willie, 68, 93

Hi-Hat (Boston), 305

Hill, Chippie (Bertha), 32, 96, 126

Hill, Teddy, 193, 212, 238, 287

Hindemith, Paul, 257, 340, 346

Hines, Earl (Father), 59, 62, 74, 78, 93-
94, 109, 117, 120-21, 132, 197, 203,
213-18, 223-24, 226-29, 231, 264-65,
267, 269, 271, 276, 290

Hinton, Milton, 193

His Eye Is on the Sparrow (book), 145

Hite, Les, 75, 180, 182

Hoagland, Everett, 311

Hob-in-t he-Well (opera), 15

Hobbes, W. L., 21

Hodges, Johnny (Rabbit), 28, 60, 78,
167, 170, 178-79, 181, 190, 199-200,
210, 213, 242-44, 250, 301, 309, 330,
340

Hoff, Carl, 299, 334

Holborn Empire Theatre (London),

75

"Hold Tight," 166
Holiday, Billie, 32-33, 189, 193, 210,

227, 236, 248, 253-56, 290, 304, 336,

344-45

Holland, Peanuts, 297
"Hollerin' and ScreaminY* 282
hollers, 18

"Hollow Men, The" (poem), 102
Hollywood Club (New York), 150,

176
Hollywood Dinner Club (Galveston,

Texas), 162

"Home, Sweet Home," 17
Home to Harlem (book), 104
"Honeysuckle Rose," 220, 248
Honig, Lou, 327-28
Hook, Jack, 259
"Hooray for Love," 186
"Hop Off," 147

Hopkins, Claude, 168, 171, 219, 187
Hopkinson, Francis, 15
Hopkinson, Joseph, 15
Horn Palace (San Antonio), 153
Home, Lena, 256-57
Horowitz, Vladimir, 224
Hot Babies, 222
Hot Chocolates (musical comedy),

169, 221-22

366

Hot Five, 59, 66, 74, 126
*Hot House," 271, 277
Hot Seven, 59, 66, 74
Hot Six, 74

Hotel American (New York), 23
Hotel Astor (New York), 211
Hotel Biltmore (New York), 209
Hotel Capitol (New York), 294
Hotel Cecil (New York), 245
Hotel Congress (Chicago), 184
Hotel Lincoln (New York), 309
Hotel New Yorker (New York), 136
Hotel Palace (San Francisco), 309
Hotel Park Central (New York), 161,

'7 2
Hotel Pennsylvania (New York), 150,

194, 210

Hotel Ritz (Boston), 300
Hotel Ritz-Carlton (New York), 98
Hotel Roosevelt (New York), 157
Hotel Schroeder (Milwaukee), 293
Hotsy-Totsy Gang, 161, 186
Hottentots (band), 152
"Hotter than That," 59
Hour with American Music ', An

(book), 107

"House of Strings," 312
"How Can You Face Me," 220, 227
"How High the Moon," 274, 353
Howard, Darnell, 93-94, 216-17
Howard, Eddy, 245
Howard Theatre (Washington), 175
Howe, Julia Ward, 24
Hudson, Will, 191
Hug, Armand, 213
Hughes, Langston, 105
"Hundred Years From Today, A," 96,

27?

Huneker, James, 107
Hunt, Louis, 168
Hunter, Alberta, 96
Husing, Ted, 150
Hyams, Marjorie, 306, 324
hymns, 13-14,47, 79

"I Can't Get Started," 211, 277

**I Can't Give You Anything But

Love," 96

"I Concentrate on You," 264
"I Cover the Waterfront," 290
"I Don't Know What Kind of Blues

I've Got," 265

INDEX

"I Found a New Baby," 61

"I Found My Yellow Basket," 251

"I Got It," 191

"I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good,"

181, 218, 259
"I Got Rhythm," 274
"I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," 33
"I Heard," 164-65
"I Just Couldn't Take It, Baby;" 96
"I Know That You Know," 62, 208
"I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,"

242

"I Mean You," 282
"I Need Some Pettin'," 131
"I Never Knew," 236
"I Surrender, Dear/' 306
"I Want a Little Girl," 147, 163
"I Want to be Happy," 154
"I Wonder," 296
"Icebag Papa," 95
"Ida," 152, 154
"If I Could Be with You One Hour

Tonight," 163
"If It Ain't Love," 221
"If It's True," 165
"If You Could See Me Now," 277,

290-91

"If You Were in My Place," 242
"I'll Be Seeing You," 262
"I'll Get By," 261
"I'll Never Smile Again," 262
"I'll Wait and Pray," 290
"I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a

Bluebird," 61

"I'm Beginning to See the Light," 252
"I'm Coming, Virginia," 137
"I'm Glad," 132

"I'm Just Wild About Harry," 81
Immerman brothers, 108, 220
Imperial Band, 58, 66
Impressionism, 111, 132-33, 265, 284,

286; see also Debussy
improvisation, 5-7, 195-97, 2751 3 2 2~***

3*8, 339i 348

"In a Chinese Garden," 324
"In a Jam," 184
"In a Mist," 132-33
"In a Sentimental Mood," 183
In Dahomey (musical comedy), 143
"In the Dark," 132
"Indian Summer," 318
"Indiana," 154

INDEX

Inge, Edward, 165

Ink Spots, 171, 252

Innovations, /pjo (record album), 312

"Intuition," 322-23

"Invitation to the Dance," 17

Irvis, Charlie, 61, 176-77

"It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't

Got That Swing," 6, 181, 185
"It Was a Sad Night in Harlem," 181
"It's Magic," 291
"I've Got Elgin Movements in My

Hips," 44
"I've Got My Love to Keep Me

Warm," 225

"Jack the Bear," 29, 241

Jackson, Calvin, 325

Jackson, Chubby, 295-99, 303-304, 307,

321, 335

Jackson, Cliff, 219

Jackson, G. P., 19-20

Jackson, Papa Charlie, 52

Jackson, Pee Wee, 217

Jackson, Tony, 44, 60, 63, 80

Jacquet, Illinois, 285

Jaffe, Nat, 213, 223, 227

James, Elmer, 168-69

James, Harry, 65, 166, 187, 204, 261-
263, 301

James, Henry, 3

James, Ida, 217

Jaz-E-Saz Band, 72, 92-93

jazz, aesthetic value of, 336-48; Afri-
can influence on, 9, 12; anthropo-
logical approach to, 9; arrangements
of, 170, 195-97; beat in, 5-7, 12; com-
mercial, 84, 157-58, 160, 175, 187, 195,
197, 204-205, 279, 307, 309, 313-14,
33 6 ~37. 35. concerts, 18, 25, 77, 110-
113, 155, 199, 204, 215, 218-19, 221,
233, 244, 256, 280, 285, 289, 296, 306,
332; cool, 6, 142, 196, 235, 246, 275,
285; critics, 189, 337, 341-44, 347*.
Cuban, 312; definition of term, 4-7,
52, 123; four-beat, 85, 351; harmony
in, 12, 52, 123; hot, 6, 31, 72, 158, 235,
275, 351; instrumentation in, 46, 50-
51, 67, 130, 157-58; melody in, 12,
30; modern, 68, 141-42, 235-39, 241,
243-44, 246, 282, 308-309, 314-15, 323,
328, 331-32; origin of term, 5-6, 82-
83; origins of, 9-17; progressive, 3,

367

141-42, 235, 292-315; relation to clas-
sical music, IU-I2, 132-33, 323, 325,
331-32, 339; relation to other arts,
98-101, 133, 339, 342; symphonic,
111-13, 133, 155; two-beat, 85, 189-
191, 207, 295, 312, 353; vocabulary of,
5-^, 349-53; see also Dixieland jazz,
improvisation, rhythm, syncopation

Jazz Age, 97-116

"Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts,
285, 302

"Jazz Band Ball," 84, 86, 89

Jazz Bandits, 121

Jazz (book), 1 10

Jazz Cardinals, 52

Jazz Hot, Le (book), 197

Jazz Hounds, 149

"Jazz Me Blues," 84, 86, 131

Jazz Quarterly (magazine), 308

Jazz Scene, The (record album), 310

Jazz Session, The (magazine), 308

Jazz Singer, The (movie), 113, 156

Jazzmen (book), 55

"Jazznocracy," 191

Jazzola band, 167

"Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,"

*4
Jefferson, Hilton, 168, 170

Jeffries, Herb, 217, 264-66, 336
Jenkins, Freddy (Posey), 176, 178-79,

181

Jenney, Jack, 210, 294
Jerome, Jerry, 204
Jerrett, Nick, 300, 305
Jerry Preston's (New York), 254
Jeter-Pilar band, 192, 287
"Jingle Bells," 24, 210, 223
"Jive at Five," 236
"jive" lyrics, 165
"John Brown's Body," 24
"John Peel," 17
Johnson and Coslow, 182
Johnson, Bill, 53, 73, 92-93
Johnson, Budd, 217, 270, 276
Johnson, Buddy, 193
Johnson, Bunk (William Geary), 54-

58, 70-71

Johnson, Charlie, 142, 238
Johnson, Dink, 58
Johnson, George, 130
Johnson, J. C., 219-20
Johnson, J. J., 213, 271, 284, 326

368

Johnson, J. Rosamund, 104

Johnson, Jack, 176

Johnson, James P., 80, 96, 143, 150, 213,

219-20

Johnson, James Weldon, 104
Johnson, Jimmie, 50
Johnson, Johnny, 151-52
Johnson, Lonnie, 126
Johnson, Pete, 30, 122, 232
Jolly Jesters, 178

Jolson, Al, 98, 101, 108, 112-13, 116, 156
Jones, Claude, 147, 163, 165
Jones, Dale, 317-18
Jones, Davey, 92
Jones, Isham, 124, 157, 160, 205, 294,

297

Jones, Jimmy, 213, 227-28
Jones, Joe, 189
Jones, Jonah, 193
Jones, Maggie, 74
Jones, Renald, 169
Jones, Richard M., 44, 54, 57, 61, 63-

64, 96, 126
Jones, Spike, 88
Joplin, Scott, 47, 79-81
Jordan, Louis, 170, 252, 296
Jordan, Taft, 169, 244
Joy Bells (musical comedy), 84
Joyce, James, 100, 115
"Jubilee Stomp," 181
"Judy," 171, 323

Juilliard School of Music, 226, 283, 310
Julian, Zeb, 333

Jump for Joy (musical comedy), 265
Jungle Band, 150
Jungle Kings, 124

"Just A-Sittin* and A-Rockin'," 312
"Just Friends," 283
"Just Too Soon," 216 ^
"Just You, Just Me," 277

Kahn, Morton, 5

Kahn, Roger Wolfe, 152, 154, 160

Kalberger, Karl, 83

Kaminsky, Max, 189, 206, 208

Kansas City Six, 236

Kapp, Jack, 294

Kassel, Art, 120, 160

Kavakos Club (Washington), 299

Kaye, Sammy, 280

Kazebier, Nate, 187, 203

Keep Shufflin' (musical comedy), 220

INDEX

"Keepin' out of Mischief Now," 221

Kelly, Peck, 153

Kelly's Stable (New York), 270, 300,

305

Kemp, Hal, 185, 209
Kenny, Ken, 207
Kenton, Stan, 54, 133, 260-61, 280, 304,

311-15, 318-19, 326, 336
Kentucky Club (New York), 150, 167,

176, 178

Kentucky Minstrels, 22
Keppard, Freddie, 45, 5 2 ~54 5^57* &>

62-63, 66-67, 70, 93-94, 117, 120
Keppard, Louis, 58, 91
Kessel, Barney, 246
Key, Francis Scott, 15
Keyes, Lawrence, 276
Kiefer, Ed, 303
Killian, Al, 190, 285, 291
"Killin' Myself," 181, 242
"King Porter Stomp," 47, 64-65, 147,

186, 210

King, Stan, 126

Kirby, John, 59, 170, 189, 250, 290
Kirk, Andy, 192, 219, 231-33, 236, 242,

245, 276, 282, 284
Kirkpatrick, Don, 165, 167-68,
"Kitten on the Keys," in
Klein, Manny, 153, 186
"Ko-Ko," 241
Koehler, Ted, 181

Konitz, Lee, 213, 313, 321-23, 325-30
Kostelanetz, Andre, 133
Kress, Carl, 152, 246
"Krooked Blues," 73
Krueger, Benny, 84
Krupa, Gene, 5, 118, 125-26, 138-39,

153, 155, 186-87, 196, 203-204, 210,

213, 229, 238-40, 250, 260, 302
Kyle, Billy, 189
Kyser, Kay, 187, 293

La Centra, Peg, 248

LaRocca, Nick (Dominick James),

83-86, 129, 142
Lacey, Jack, 1 86
Lacoume, Stale Bread (Emile Auguste,

Sr.), 56

Lada, Anton, 83, 94
Ladnier, Tommy, 60-6 1, 93, 147
"Lady Be Good," 252
"Lady in Red," 318

INDEX

"Lady MacGowan's Dream," 307
"Lady Who Swings the Band, The,"

23*
Lafayette Theatre (New York), 66,

238

Laine, Alfred, 81

Laine, Frankie, 221

Laine, Papa Jack, 79, 81-82

Lala, Pete, 45, 54, 57-58

Lamare, Nappy, 162, 188, 206

Lamb, Joseph, 81

Lambert, Bill, 82

Lambert, Constant, 113

Lamond, Don, 299, 309, 318

Lambs' Cafe (Chicago), 82

"Land of the Loon," 133

Lane, Eastwood, 133

Lang, Eddie, 109, 124, 134, 136-37, 139,

151-52, 158, 246, 249
Lanin, Sam, 152, 154
Lannigan, Jim, 118, 120, 124-26
LaPorta, John, 301, 321, 330-31
"Last Rose of Summer, The," 16
Latin- American music, 46, 180, 312
Lattimore, Harlan, 165
"Laura," 206

Lawson, John Howard, 98, 101
Lawson, Yank, 188, 206
"Lazy Daddy," 131
"Lazy Rhapsody," 185
"Lazybones," 165
Leader House (Pittsburgh), 215
Ledbetter, Huddie (Leadbelly), 18
Lee, Peggy, 259-60
Lee, Sonny, 134
Leibrook, Min, 130, 132
Lemaire, George, 144
Leonard, Harlan, 192-93, 276, 278
Leonard, Jack, 248
Leroy's (New York), 143
Leschetizky, Theodore, HI
"Lester Leaps In," 236
"Let's Dance," 17
"Let's Go Home," 301
Levaggfs (Boston), 172
levee songs, 18-19, 9
Levey, Stan, 271
Levy, John, 227, 324
Lewis, Cappy, 295
Lewis, George, 9
Lewis, Irv, 303
Lewis, John, 285

369

Lewis, Meade Lux, 30, 122-23

Lewis, Sinclair, 98, 101

Lewis, Ted, 88, 108, 118, 126-27, 157,

186

Liberator, The (magazine), 104
Lichter, Joe, 293

Lid, The (New Orleans paper), 40
"Liebestraum," 210
Life (magazine), 269, 272
Life on the Mississippi (book), 91
Lil's Hot Shots, 74
"Limehouse Blues," in, 240
Lincoln Gardens Cafe (Chicago), 73,

1 08

Lincoln Hotel (New York), 309
Lincoln Theatre (New York), 66,

219

Lindsay, Joe, 72
Lindsay, John, 57
Lindsay, Vachel, 102-103
Linton, Charlie, 171
Lipkins, Steve, 211
Lippman, Joe, 210
"Listen to the Mocking Bird," 24
Liston, Virginia, 74
Liszt, Franz, 111-12, 182, 219
literature, relationshin to jazz, 98-106
Little Chicks, 170

"Little David, Play on Your Harp," 25
"Little Joe from Chicago," 232-33
"Livery Stable Blues," 8 1, 84, 142
Livingston, Fud, 118-19, I 5 l * *53
"Liza," 125, 172, 208
Load of Coal (musical comedy), 220
Lofton, "Cripple Clarence," 122
Lomax, Alan, 63
Lombardo, Guy, 126, 157-59, 161, 168,

185

"Lonely Cabin," 165
"Lonely Co-ed," 181, 242
"Long Island Sound," 318
"Long, Long Journey," 282
"Long-Tailed Blue, The," 21
Lopez, Ray, 82
Lopez, Vincent, 108, 150, 157
"Lost Chord, The," 25
"Louisiana," 138
Louisiana Five, 83
Louisiana Rhythm Kings, 152
Louisiana Six, 58
Louisiana Sugar Babes, 222
Love Dance Hall (New Orleans), 51

370

"Lover," 248

"Lover Man," 271

Loyocano, Arnold, 82, 120

Lucie, Lawrence, 78

Ludwig, Ray, 134

Lunceford, Jimmie, 23, 85, 166, 190-93,
206, 232, 278, 311, 353

Lunceford Trio, 191

"Lush Life," 243

Lyman, Abe, 299, 334

Lynn, Ray, 295

Lyon, James, 15

lyrics, 16-19, 2I *6-*7* 3~3 I 33~34
95, 105, 165, 272-73; "jive," 165; be-
bop, 272-73; blues, 19, 26-27, 3-3 I
33~34 95. I0 5*> folk son g s > r 7i hollers,
18-19; minstrel songs, 21

Lytell, Jimmy, 151

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 256
McCall, Mary Ann, 257-59, 295
McComber, Ken, 221
McConnell, Shorty, 217
McCoy, Clyde, 88
McDonough, Dick, 152, 210, 246
MacDowell, Edward, 1 1 1
McEachern, Murray, 204
McGhee, Howard, 282, 284-85, 297
Maclntyre and Heath, 22
Mclntyre, Hal, 197, 248, 317
McKay, Claude, 104
McKenzie, Red, 118, 124-26, 160, 189,

210, 296

McKibbon, Al, 287
McKinley, Ray, 188, 207, 298, 302
McKinney, William, 162, 164
McKinney's Cotton Pickers, 147, 162-

164, 238

McKusick, Hal, 309-10
McPartland, Dick, n8~
McPartland, Jimmy, 118-20, 125-26,

131, 139-40, 160-62, 228, 298, 325
McPartland, Marion Page, 325
McRae, Ted, 170
McShann, Jay, 192-93, 269, 276
Madison, Kid Shots, 68
Madranga's (New Orleans), 72
Magenta Moods (record album), 265
Magnolia band, 67

Mahogany Hall (New Orleans), 42, 44
"Mahogany Hall Stomp," 42
"Mairzy Doats," 352

INDEX

"Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre," 16

Malneck, Mattie, 249

"Man I Love, The," 33, 225

"Man on the Flying Trapeze," 165

Mandell, Johnny, 309

"Mandy Make Up Your Mind," 61

Manet, Edouard, 133

Manhattan School of Music, 226

Manne, Sheldon (Shelly), 271, 312-13,

33*
Manone, Wingy (Joseph), 5, 121, 127,

155, 161, 210

Maple Leaf Club (Sedalia), 81
"Maple Leaf Rag," 47, 61, 80-8 1, 119
Marable, Fate, 67-68, 72, 91-93, 120,

241
marching bands, 46, 49, 50, 58, 63, 67,

71, 81

marching songs, 79
Mardi Gras, 38-39
Mares, Paul, 86, 160
"Margie," 84, 191
Margulics, Charlie, 136
"Marie," 210

marijuana, 272; see also drugs
Marinetti, F. T., 99
Markowkz, Irving (Marky), 303
Marmarosa, Dodo (Michael), 194, 213,

229

Marowitz, Sam, 301, 303
Marsala, Joe, 63
Marsh, Warne, 321-23, 326
Marshall, Kaiser, 147
Martin, Tony, 293
"Maryland, My Maryland," 24
"Mary's Idea," 232
Mascot (New Orleans), 39
"Maternity," 283
Matthew, Cliff, 93
Matthews, Dave, 63, 197, 295
Matlock, Matty, 162, 188, 206, 209
"Meatball Blues," 81, 84
"Melancholy," 59
"Mellow Bit of Rhythm, A," 232
melody, 4, 12, 27-30, 51, 65, 85-86, 244,

274, 288, 328-29; definition of, 4; in

bebop, 244, 274, 288; in blues, 27-29;

in Dixieland jazz, 85-86; in jazz, 12,

30; in modern jazz, 328-29; in New

Orleans jazz, 51; in popular songs,

329; in ragtime, 65
"Melody in F," 2 10

INDEX

Melrose, Charlie, 127

"Memphis Blues," 23, 30, 32, 67

Memphis Five, 151-52

Memphis Men, 150

Mencken, H. L., 98, 101, 116

"Merry-Go-Round," 183

Merz, Charles, 115

"Mess-a-Stomp," 232

Messner, Johnny, 297

Metronome All Star bands, 245, 331-32

Metronome (magazine), 202, 268, 274,

288, 298, 308, 330
"Mexican Serenade," 80
Mezzrow, Mezz, 118-19, 124-25
Midnight Air dales, 152
Midway Garden (Chicago), 120
Mikado, The (operetta), 25
Mildred Bailey Serenade, 251
Miley, Rubber (James), 138, 142, 145,

149, 176-79, 1 8 1
Milhaud, Darius, 332
Miller and Lyles, 145
Miller Brothers, 175
Miller, Eddie, 162, 188, 206, 210
Miller, Glenn, 5, 24, 151, 160, 162, 209-

210, 229

Miller, Max, 260
Miller, Mitch, 265
Millinder, Lucky (Lucius Venable),

216, 278

"Million Dollar Smile," 109
Mills Blue Rhythm Band, 193
Mills Brothers, 165, 251
Mills, Florence, 143-46
Mills, Irving, 161, 165, 186, 220
"Milneburg Joys," 55, 163
Mince, Johnny, 206, 210
Mingus, Charlie, 325
"Minka," 261
Minnevitch, Borrah, 317
"Minor Drag," 220
"Minstrel Boy, The," 17
minstrelsy, 20-22, 25-26, 55, 79, 82, 90,

H3

Minton, Henry, 245
Minton's Playhouse (New York), 133,

244-45, 276, 278, 282-83* 285-87
"Miserere," 65
"Mississippi Mud," 137
"Mistreatin' Daddy," 95
"Misty Mornm'," 181
modernists, see jazz, modern

371

"Mister Crump," 30

"Mr. Five by Five," 33

"Mr. J. B. Blues," 241

Mister Jelly Roll (book), 63

Mr. Lode of Koal (musical comedy),

H3

Mohr, Joseph, 17
"moldy figs," 308-309
Mole, MirT (Milfred), 126, 132, 151-

*53

"Monday Date," 62, 216

Mondello, Pete, 295

Mondello, Toots, 203

"Money Blues,' 73, 147

"Monotony in Four Flats," 191

Monroe, Vaughn, 345

"Mooche, The," 179

"Mood Hollywood," 209

"Mood Indigo," 181

"Moon over Dixie," 185

"Moonglow," 183

Moore, Bill, Jr., 191

Moore, Brew, 236

Moore, Judy, 321

Moore, Oscar, 220-30

Moore, Thomas, 16-17

Moore, Vic, 130, 132

"More Than You Know," 248

Morehouse, Chauncey, 134, 136

Morgan, Dick, 162

Morris, Tom, 222

Morris, William, 280

Morrow, Buddy, 318

Morton, Benny, 147-48, 165, 190

Morton, Henry, 58

Morton, Jelly Roll (Ferdinand Jo-
seph), 9, 44, 47, 63-67, 79-80, 93, 117,
197,213

Moten, Bennie, 189, 242

Mound City Blue Blowers, 124, 134

movies, 21, 77, 113-14, 133, 156, 179,
182-83, 2 5<5, 261, 2 ^5

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 107, 228,
331, 340, 346

Mueller, Gus, 82

Mulligan, Jerry, 325-26

Mumford, Brock, 50

Mundy, Jimmy, 217

Municipal Beach Pavilion (Gary, In-
diana), 131

Murder at the Vanities (movie), 182

Murray, Don, 132-35, 154

372

music, African, 10-14, 20, 45-46; an-
cient, 7, 26; atonal, 52, 136, 312, 322-
323, 331, 348; baroque, 7, 52, 85; bat-
tles of, 68, 132, 167, 226, 240; canonic,
51-52; classical, 107-108, in; church,
14-15; commercial, 84, 157-58, 160,
175, 187, 195, 197, 204-205, 279, 307,
309, 3 I 3~ I 4 13&-371 35; dance, 10-
11, 13-14, 46-47, 159; folk, 7, 10, 13,
17, 19, 27; Impressionist, in, 132-33,
265, 284, 286; Latin-American, 46,
1 80, 312; modern, 19, 24, 81, 257, 312,
315; primitive, u, 45-46

Music Corporation of America
(MCA), 280

"Music Goes Round and Round, The,"
88, 185

Music Hall (New York), 186

Musical Chronicle (book), 107

musical comedies, 60, 81, 84, 92, 112,
143-44, l6 9 *7 8 220-22, 229, 262,
265

Musicians Union, 46, 83, 262

"Muskrat Ramble," 53, 153

Musso, Vido, 204, 278, 313

Muzillo, Ralph, 187

"My Blue Heaven," 191, 265

"My Country, Tis of Thee " 15

"My Days Have Been so Wondrous
Free," 15

"My Fate Is in Your Hands," 221-22

"My Last Affair," 252

"My Little Chocolate Bar," 220

"My Old Flame," 181, 183

"My Old Kentucky Home," 23

"My Pretty Girl," 134

Myers, Sig, 120

"Mystery Song," 182

Myth of the Negro Past, The (book),
10

N.B.C. Symphony, 313

Nance, Ray, 178, 217, 244

Nanton, Joe (Tricky Sam), 143, 177-

178, 181, 213, 244
Napoleon, Phil, 151
National Biscuit Company Program,

1 86
National Broadcasting Company

(NBC), 159, 171, 186, 224, 313, 335
Natoli, Nat, 126
Navarro, Fats, 271, 281-84, 34

INDEX

"Nearer, My God, to Thee," 47
Nelson, Louis de Lisle (Big Eye), 53-

54> <*7

Nelson, Ozzie, 5
Nelson, Romeo, 122
Nesbitt, John, 163
Nest, The (Chicago), 62
New Orleans Feetwarmers, 61
New Orleans (movie), 77
New Orleans Rhythm Kings, 86-89,

94, 118-19, 159, 161
New Orleans Serenadcrs, 22
New Orleans (steamboat), oo
"New Orleans Stomp," 73
New Republic (magazine), 98
New York All City Orchestra, 317
New York City High School of Music

and Art, 304
New York Philharmonic Symphony,

112, 113, 233, 297
New York Syncopaters, 152
New Yorker (New York), 136
New Yorker, The (magazine), 259
Newman, Jerry, 245
Newton, Frankie, 189
Nicholas, Albert, 72
Nichols, Red (Ernest Loring), 94, 109,

126, 131, 150-55, 158, 186
Nick's (New York), 67, 189, 208, 297
"Night Life," 232
Nightingale Serenaders, 22
"Nightmare," 254
Nixon, Teddy, 61
"No One Else but You," 164
"Nobody's Sweetheart," 124-25
Nola's Studio (New York), 325
Noone, Jimmy, 53-54, 57, 61-63, 67-68,

93-94, 117, 120, 132, 186, 203, 216
Norris, Al, 191
North, Dave, 1 19
Norvo, Red (Kenneth), 198, 207-208,

210, 232, 248-50, 271, 300, 303-304,

306, 324

"Northwest Passage," 296
Not without Laughter (book), 105
"Numb Fumblin'," 222
Nunez, Alcide (Yellow), 82-83, 94

O'Brien, Floyd, 118-19, 206
O'Connell, Helen, 188, 248
O'Day, Anita, 260-61, 312
"Off Time Blues," 216

INDEX

"Oh, Babe! Maybe Someday," 181

"Oh, Baby," 131

"Oh, But I Do," 253

"Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?",

16

"Oh! Susanna," 23
O'Hare, Husk, 119
O'Hare's Red Dragons, 119
O'Hare''s Wolverines, 119-20
Oklahoma (musical comedy), 262
"Ol' Man River," 137-38, 261
"Old Black Joe," 23
"Old Folks at Home," 23
"Old Oaken Bucket, The," 17
Oliver, Joe (King), 31, 44-45, 55-6,

62-63, 66-68, 71-73, 77-7^ 9N 93

108, 117-18, 1 20, 126, 130, 142, 147,

167, 178, 191, 215, 236
Oliver, Mcrt, 309
Oliver, Sy, 23, 190-92
Olsen, George, 150-51, 157
Olympia Band, 53-54, 60, 66-67
"On the Sunny Side of the Street," 76,

165, 169-70, 200

101 Ranch (New Orleans), 44, 68
"One Step to Heaven," 126
"One Sweet Letter from You," 199
Onward brass band, 56-58, 66
"Onward, Christian Soldiers," 47
Onyx Club (New York), 189, 270,

200

"Oobladee," 233
"Oopapada," 280

Orchard Cabaret (New Orleans), 72
Orent, Milt, 233
"Organ Grinder Swing," 191
Oriental Theatre (Chicago), 217
Original Creole Band, 53-54, 58, 61, 66,

02-93, 117
Original Dixieland Jazz Band

(ODJB), 81-86, 88-89, 94, 129, 134,

142, 161

Original Jazz Hounds, 95
Original Memphis Five, 151-52
"Original Rags," 80
Ornstein, Leo, 107
Ory, Kid (Edward), 31, 45, 57~59 6l

66-68, 72, 74, 147, 332
"Ory's Creole Trombone," 59
Osborne, Will, 159, 247
"Ostrich Walk," 84, 89, 142
"Our Delight," 277

373

"Out of This World," 310
"Ow!" 280

"P.S. I Love You," 259

Pace, William, 143

Paddock Club (New York), 167

Page, Lips, 194

Page, Walter, 189

"Painted Rhythm," 312

painting, relationship to jazz, 99-100

Palace Hotel (San Francisco), 309

Palace Theatre (New York), 124, 158

Palais Royal (New York), 150

Palais Royal (Nyack, N.Y.), 228

"Palesteena," 84

Palladium Theatre (London), 76

Palmer, Bea, 87, 126

Palmer Brothers, 217

Palmer, Roy, 91, 93, 117

Palmicri, Remo, 227, 271

Palomar Ballroom (Hollywood), 188,
202, 294

Palumbo, Frank, 258

Palumbo's (Philadelphia), 258

Panassie, Hugues, 76, 197

Panelli, Charlie, 83

"Panther Rag," 216

Paparelli, Frank, 271

"Parade of the Milk Bottle Caps," 207

"Paradise," 264

Paramount Pictures, 182

Paramount Theatre (New York), 158,
160, 172, 211

Par ham, Truck, 240

Park Central Hotel (New York), 161-
162, 172

Parker, Charlie (Bird, Yardbird), 68,
*33 2I 3> 237, 239, 245, 252, 269, 271-
274, 276-77, 279, 283-85, 288, 314,
326, 339, 340, 344-45, 347. 35<>

Parker, Daisy, 74

Parker, Leo, 271, 278, 285

Parrish, Turner, 122

Pasquall, Don, 149

"Passion Flower," 243

Paul, Les, 324

Payne, Bennie, 222

Payne, John Howard, 17

"Pearls, The," 65

Pearson, Ted, 217

Peavey, Hollis, 121

Peerless Band, 66

374

Peerless Theatre Orchestra, 126
"Peg o' My Heart," 154
Pekin Cafe (Chicago), 60, 92
Pelham Heath Inn (New York), 151
Pennies from Heaven (movie), 77
Pennsylvania Hotel (New York), 150,

194, 210

Pennsylvanians, The, 150
Pepper, Art, 312-13, 326
Pepper Boys, the, 1 3 1
Perez, Emanuel, 44, 50, 56-57, 66, 92
Perkins, Dave, 81-82
Perry, Oliver (Doc), 175
Perry, Ray, 199

Perryman, Rufus (Speckled Red), 122
Peters, W. C, 23
Peterson, Chuck, 194, 295
Petit, Buddy, 61
Petit, Joseph, 53
Pettiford, Oscar, 78, 269-70, 279, 286,

309, 3n

Pettis, Jack, 86, 161, 186
Peyton, Dave, 59, 66, 126
Pfiffner, Ralph, 303
Phillips, Billy, 44-45
Phillips, Flip (Joseph Edward), 301-

302, 304, 306, 334
Piazza, Countess Willie, 42-44
Picabia, Francis, 100
Picou, Alphonse, 47, 50, 53, 58, 62, 72,

85* 92, 135
Pied Pipers, 248
Pierce, Charles, 118, 124, 160
"Pine Top's Boogie Woogie," 122
Piron, Armand J., 57, 61
"Pistol-Packin' Mama," 308
"Pitter Panther Patter," 241
plain chant, 7
Plantation Cafe Orchestra (Chicago),

126

Plantation Club (New York), 145-46
Platt, Sam, 308
Pletcher, Stewie, 207
"Plucked Again," 241
poetry, relation of jazz to modern,

101-106
Pollack, Ben, 86, 126, 151, 154-55, J 59~

162, 164-65, 186, 188, 203
Polo, Danny, 120, 135, 298
polyphonic music, 51-52
polyrhythms, 52, 65, 332
polytonality, 331-32, 348

INDEX

Pontrelli's Ballroom (Los Angeles),

318
Poodle Dog Cafe (Washington), 45,

i?5

"Pop Goes the Weasel," 24
Poppie Gardens (Geneseo, 111.), 129
"Porgy," 33, 96, 254
Port of New York (book), 107
Porter, Cole, 108, 259, 264, 271
Porter, King, 47, 65
Poston, Joe, 62
"Potato Head Blues," 31, 59
Potter, Tommy, 287
Powell, Bud, 213, 234, 285, 324,
Powell, Mel, 213-14, 228-29
Powell, Teddy, 257-58, 327-28
Powers, OUie, 74
"Praline," 81
Preston, Jerry, 254
"Pretty Girl is Like a Melody, A," 1 1 1
Prevm, Andre, 213, 230
Prima, Louis, 209
Prince, Hughie, 248
"Prince of Wails," 127
Prince, Wesley, 229
"Prisoner's Song, The," 211
Privin, Bernie, 194
Prohibition, 97, 130
Prokofiev, Serge, 107, 208
Psalm tunes, psalmody, 14, 15

Quartel, Frank, 131

Rachmaninoff, Sergei, no, 223-24
radio, 58, 68, 113-15, 126, 133, 157-59,

171, 186-87, 20 7 2I 22 4* 22 6, 272
Ragas, Henry, 83-84
rags, 47, 65, 73, 80-81
ragtime, 29, 30, 50, 63-65, 72, 79-82, 09,

102, III, 121, 142, 174, 198, 213, 214;

harmony and melody in, 65; rhythm

in, 65, 79

"Rainbow Mist," 270
Rainey, Ma (Gertrude), 32, 74, 95-96,

103, 146

"Rainy Weather Blues," 95

"Raisin' the Rent," 181

Ramirez, Ram, 193

Rank, Bill, 134, 136, 154-55

Rappolo, Leon Joseph, 56, 86-88, 94,

119, 153, 160
"Rattle and Roll," 318

INDEX

Ravel, Maurice, 113, 132-33, 136, 310,
346

Ray, Louis, 50

Razaf, Andy, 219-22

Re, Payson, 5

Real Thing, The (New Orleans), 72

rebop, 252, 270; see also bebop

Rector's (London), 84

Red Dr-agons, 119

Red Heads, 152

"Red Hot Pepper," 65

Red Hot Peppers, 65-66

Red Mill Cafe (Chicago), 93

Red Onion Jazz Babies, 74

Rediscovery of America (book), 100

Redman, Don, 73, 126, 147-49, 162-66,
193, 219

Reese, Lloyd, 225

Reeves, Ruben, 94

Regal Theatre (Chicago), 217

Reid, Veal, 205, 295

Reisenweber's (New York), 83, 142

Reliance Brass Band, 81-82

"Remember," 208

"Reminiscing in Tempo," 183-84, 193

Renaissance Ballroom (New York), 48

Rendezvous (Chicago), 109, 160

Rendezvous Ballroom (Balboa Beach,
Calif.), 311

Reno Club (Kansas City), 189

Renoir, Auguste, 133

Reuss, Allan, 66, 203, 334

Rey, Alvino, 310

Rhapsody in Blue, 110-13, 155, 225

Rhumboogie (Chicago), 271, 200

rhythm, 4-7, 12, 27, 30-31, 52, 65, 79, 85,
123, 241, 243-45, 2 7 2 > 274-75, 287-88,
299, 312, 314, 328; definition of, 4; in
bebop, 244-45, 272, 274-75, 287-88,
299; in blues, 27, 30-31; in boogie
woogie, 30, 123; in Chicago jazz, 123;
in Dixieland jazz, 85; in jazz, 12, 52,
123; in modern jazz, 241, 243-44, 328;
in popular music, 27, 84, 142; in pro-
gressive jazz, 312, 314; in ragtime, 65,
79; in swing, 287-88; syncopation, 5,
20, 51, 79, 287

Rhythm Boys, 109, 147, 249

Rhythm Kings, 86, 118-20, 125, 152

"Rhythm Man," 221

Rice, Thomas "Jim Crow," 20-21

Rich, Buddy, 194

375

Richards, Johnny, 133, 310

riffs, 29, 66, 236, 273-74

Rifle, The (play), 21

Riley, Mike, 185, 230, 297

Rinker, Al, 249

Riskin, Irving (Itzy) 134-37, *39

Ritz Hotel (Boston), 300

Ritz-Carlton Hotel (New York),

98
riverboat bands, 56, 67-68, 72, 90-91,

92-93, 120, 129
"Riverboat Shuffle," 131
"Riverside Blues," 73
Riverview Park 'Chicago), 94
Riverview Park Ballroom (Chicago),

126

TUviera Theatre (Chicago), 131
Roach, Max, 68, 269-70, 274, 288
"Robbins' Nest," 253
Robechaux, John, 49, 67
Roberts, Luckey, 80, 174
Robertson, Zue (Alvin), 53, 57, 66
Robcson, Orlando, 171
Robinson, Bill, 145
Robinson, J. Russell, 84-85
Robinson, Les, 194
Robinson, Prince, 78, 163
Robinson, Vernee, 215
Robison, Willard, 153-54
"Rock of Ages," 47
"Rockin' Chair," 139, 239, 248-49
"Rockin' in Rhythm," 181
"Rocks in My Bed," 181
"Rocky Road," 163
Rodemich, Gene, 124
Rodgers and Hammerstein, 261
Rodgers and Hart, 259
Rodin, Gil, 159-61
Rogers, Dick, 317
Rogers, Shorty (Milton), 303-304, 313,

318

"Roll 'em," 204, 232
Rollini, Adrian, 136, 152, 209, 248
"Romance in the Dark," 257, 259
Roosevelt Hotel (New York), 157
Roosevelt Theatre (New York), 219
Rose, Billy, 162, 165, 186
Rose Danceland (New York), 168
Rose, Dave, 204

"Rose of the Rio Grande," 184, 242
Rosebud Cafe (St. Louis), 81
"Rosebud March," 81

376

Roseland Ballroom (Brooklyn), 278,

294
Roseland Ballroom (New York), 146,

1 68, 189, 294

Rosenfeld, Paul, 107, 116
Rosenthal, Moritz, no, 223
"Roses," 268
Ross, Alonzo, 177
Ross, Doc, 153
Ross, Ranger, 153
rounds, 51-52

"Row, Row, Row Your Boat," 52
rowing songs, 20
Roxy and His Gang, 1 15
Ruark, Robert, 263
Royal Canadians, 157
Royal Gardens Cafe (Chicago), 81, 93,

H7
"Royal Garden Blues/ 1 81, 131, 137-38,

H3

Royal, Marshall, 225
Royal Roost (New York), 278, 284,

286

Rubin witch, Sammy, 301
Rugolo, Pete, 243, 312
"Rule, Britannia," 16
Runyon, Santy, 328
Rushing, Jimmy, 33, 100
Russell, Curly, 271, 287
Russell, Luis, 67, 72, 76, 108, 179
Russell, Pee Wee (Charles Ellsworth,

Jr.), 63, 121, 134, 138, 152-53, 155,

189, 208, 228-29
Russell, Snookum, 282
Russell, William, 55
"Russian Lullaby," 208
Russin, Babe, 152, 162, 204
Ruth, Babe (George Herman), 109, 138

Sable Harmonizers, 22 *

Sacre de Print emps, Le y 256

"Sad Night in Harlem," 181

Safranski, Eddie, 312-13

Saga of Mister Jelly Lord, The, 63

St. Cyr, Johnny, 57, 66, 74, 92

St. Joseph Brass Band, 49-50, 65

"St. Louis Blues," 31-32, 171, 222

"Salt Peanuts," 270-72

"Salt Water Blues," 95

Sampson, Edgar (Lamb), 81, 142, 169,

*7*
"San," 137

INDEX

Sandburg, Carl, 102

SandoJe, Adolph, 331-32

Sandole, Dennis, 331-32

"Saratoga Swing," 181

"Saturday Night Function," 181

Saturday Night Swing Club, 210

Sauter, Eddie, 208

"Save It, Pretty Mama," 164

Savitt, Jan, 297

Savoy Sultans, 193

Savoy Ballroom (New York), 48, 75,

81, 105, 167-69, 171, 193, 212, 251
Savoy Ballroom (Chicago), 74, 105,

164, 216

Savoy Ballroom Five, 164
"Savoy Blues," 59
Savoy Eight, 251
Sbarbaro, Tony (Spargo), 83
Schertzer, Hymie, 186, 203
Schiller Cafe (Chicago), 83
Schoebel, Elmer, 86, 120, 127
Schoen, Vic, 252
Schoenberg, Arnold, 4, 107, in, 136,

229, 312, 331, 346
Schoepp, Franz, 149
School of Ragtime (book), 80
Schroeder, Gene, 228
Schroeder Hotel (Milwaukee), 293
Schutt, Arthur, 152-53
scooped pitch, 28, 52, 350
Scott, Bud, 62, 68
Scott, Cecil, 238
Scott, Cyril, 1 3 3
Scott, Howard, 146-47
Scott, James, 80

Scott, Raymond, 28, 229-30, 297
Scranton Sirens, 134, 151
"Scrap Your Fat," 248
Sebastian's Cotton Club (Hollywood),

75-77, 162, 182
"See See Rider," 95
"Sensation," 1 3 1
"Sensation Rag," 81, 84, 142
"Sentimental Ethiopian Ballad," 24
"Sentimental Mood," 183
"Sepia Serenade," 241
"Sepian Bounce," 269
"September in the Rain," 324
Seymour and Jeanette, 231
shack bully holler, 18
Shaffner, Bob, 93
"Shag," 61

INDEX

"Shakin' the African," 164

Shand, Terry, 5, 297

Shapiro, Artie, 63, 208

"Sharecropping Blues," 260

Sharp, Cecil, 19

Shavers, Charlie, 59-60, 62, 189, 340

Shaw, Artie, 78, 193-94, 210, 229, 230,

238, 240, 248, 254, 298
Shaw, Billy, 271, 280
"Shaw 'Nuff," 271
Shearing, George, 324-25
"Sheik of Araby, The," 61, 154, 184,

"5

Sherman Hotel (Chicago), 200
Shields, Larry, 82, 85-86, 88, 142
"Shim-Me-Sha- Wobble," 119, 126, 154
Shining Trumpets (book), 10
Shipinsky, Murray, 271
Shore, Dinah, 247, 259-60, 345
"Showboat Shuffle," 183
showboats, 31
Shubert brothers, 92
Shuffle Along (musical comedy), 81,

145, 180, 229

"Sidewalks of Cuba," 304
Siegel, Al, 87

Signorelli, Frank, 84, 126, 136, 151
"Silent Night," 17
Silver Slipper (New York), 161
Simeon, Omer, 94
Simms, Virginia (Ginny), 293
Simon, George, 202, 298
"Simon Legree" (poem), 102-103
Simpkins, Arthur Lee (Georgia Boy),

217

Sims, Zoot, 236, 318, 326
Sinatra, Frank, 247-48, 262-64
Sinatra, Nancy, 263
Sinbad (musical comedy), 112
"Since My Best Gal Turned Me

Down," 138

"Sing Me a Swing Song," 251
"Sing, Sing, Sing," 204, 228, 300
"Singin* the Blues," 124, 137
Singleton, Zutty (Arthur James), 63,

67-68, 72, 74, 216, 228, 240, 298
Sioux City Six, 132
Sissle, Noble, 60, 81, 145, 276
"Sittin' In," 212
Six Jolly Jesters, 178
Sizzling Six, 193
"Skeleton Jangle," 84

377

"Skip the Gutter," 216

"Skip to My Lou," 24

Slack, Freddy, 207, 259

Slevin, Dick, 124

"Slow River," 134

Smalls' Paradise (New York), 142, 167

Smith, Ada (Bricktop), 176

Smith, Bessie, 28, 32, 34, 74, 95-96, 103,
115, 132, 146, 251, 260, 347

Smith, Clara, 32, 74, 96

Smith, Floyd, 245

Smith, Jabbo, 94

Smith, Joe, 95-06, 146-48, 163

Smith, Laura, 32, 96

Smith, Mamie, 32, 95-96, 143, 149

Smith, Paul, 213, 324

Smith, Pine Top, 122

Smith, Russell, 147

Smith, Samuel Francis, 15

Smith, Steve, 228

Smith, Stuff, 227, 242

Smith, Tab, 190

Smith, Trixie, 32, 52, 74, 06

Smith, Warren, 206

Smith, Willie, 191

Smith, Willie "the Lion," 143, 150, 219,
228

"Snag It," 147

"Snake Rag," 73

Snow, Valaida, 217

Snowden, Elmer, 175, 238

Snyder, Frank, 86

"Sobbin' Blues," 73

Socolow, Frankie, 309

"Soda Fountain Rag," 175

"Solitude," 183

"Solo Flight," 245

"Somebody Loves Me," 204

"Somebody Stole My Gal," 138

"Something to Live For," 243

"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless
Child," 25

"Sometimes I'm Happy," 106

"Song of India," 210

songs, 15-27, 37, 79-80, 88, 90, 96, 252,
318, 349; ballads, 16, 21, 80, 88, 96,
318, 349; battle, 15, 20-21, 24; "coon,"
22, 79; folk, 1 8-2 1, 26; hymns, 13-14,
37, 79; patriotic, 16, 26; popular, 15-
17, 22-27, 96; work, 18-19, oo; see also
spirituals

"Sophisticated Lady," 181, 183, 241

378

"Sorry," 1 38

Sosnik, Harry, 294

Sousa, John Philip, 225

South Sea Islanders, The, 114

"Southern Stomp," 73

Southmoor Ballroom (Chicago), 160

Spanier, Muggsy (Francis), 118, 120-

121, 124-26, 206, 229
"Spasm Band," 56
Specht, Paul, 150
"Speculation," 323
Spencer, O'Neil, 59, 189
Spirits of Rhythm, 189, 353
Spiritual Folksongs of Early America

(book), 19
spirituals, 13, 16, 18-19, 21, 24-26, 79,

90, 104, 177, 223, 233
Spivak, Charlie, 162, 187, 303
Spivey, Victoria, 96
Sporting Guide (New Orleans paper),

40

Spraul, Sullivan, 65
Springer, Joe, 270
"Squeeze Me," 219, 248
Stabile, Dick, 299
Stacy, Jess, 5, 118, 120, 187, 203-204,

206, 208, 213-14, 228-29
"Stack O'Lee Blues," 95
Stafford, Jo, 248, 259-60
"Stampede," 148

Stanley Theatre (Pittsburgh), 243
"Star-Spangled Banner, The," 1 5
"Stardust," 171, 212, 233, 353
Stark, Bobby, 147-49, 167-69, 176
Stark, John, 80
Starr, Kay, 259-60
"Static Strut," 94
"Stealin' Trash," 282
Stearns, Marshall, 5 *
"Steel Laying Holler," 18
Steele, Joe, 169
Stein, Johnny, 83

"Stepping into Swing Society," 184
Stevenson, Bobby, 213
Stevenson, Tommy, 192
Steward, Herb, 236, 316, 318, 326
Stewart, Buddy, 318
Stewart, Myron, 293
Stewart, Rex, 147-49, 184, 242
Stewart, Sammy, 212
Stewart, Slam, 225, 271, 279
Stitt, Sonny, 236, 284, 326

INDEX

"Stocking Horse," 310
Stockton Club (Hamilton, Ohio), 130
"Stomp Off, Let's Go," 94
Stompers, Red and Miff's, 152
"Stompin* at the Savoy," 81, 169, 210,

245

stomps, 47, 73
Stone, Butch, 318

"Stone Cold Dead in the Market," 252
Stork Club (London), 124
"Stormy Weather," 165, 181, 225
Stormy Weather (movie), 221, 256
Story, Alderman, 35, 38
Story, Nat, 171
Storyville, La., 35-48, 52-53, 56-57, 61,

64-66, 68, 79-80, 91, 123, 135
"Stowaway," 216
Straight, Charles, 109, 131
Strand Theatre (New York), 253
"Strange Fruit," 254
Stravinsky, Igor, 99-100, ni, 115, 133,

208, 256, 296, 301, 306, 310, 330, 340-

34^ 34^
Strayhorn, Billy, 231, 242-44, 246, 257,

3 01

stride piano, 29-30
"Struttin' with Some Barbecue," 59
Stuyvesant Casino (New York), 55
"Subconscious Lee," 323
"Subtle Lament," 179
Suburban Gardens (Chicago) , 75
Sud, Percie, 92
"Sugar," 125, 137
"Sugar Foot Stomp," 73, 147, 204
Sugar Johnny, 91-93, 117
Sullivan, Joe, 63, 118, 121-22, 124-26,

151, 153, 155, 186, 206, 213
"Summer Sequence," 306-307, 316
"Summertime," 324
Sunshine Serenaders, 192
"Sunny Side of the Street," 76, 165,

169-70
Sunset Cafe (Chicago), 74, 77, 126, 132,

215-16

Superior Band, 54
"Susie," 131
Swaffer, Hannen, 76
"Swanee," 112
"Swanee River," 23, 191
Sweatman, Wilbur, 150, 175
"Sweet Lorraine," 62
"Sweet Mistreater," 95

INDEX

"Sweet Sue," 137

swing, 3-<5, 29, 52, 65, 67, 72, 88, 107-
108; 115, 148, 163, 165, 174, 185-202,
204-205, 208, 210-12, 225, 232, 245,
247-48, 274-75, 287-88, 294, 307, 314,
351-52; definitions of, 5-6, 195-98;
rhythmic characteristics of, 287-88

"Swing Angel," 318

"Swing* Background for an Operatic
Soprano," 207

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," 25

Swing Street, see Fifty-second Street

Swing That Music (book), 197-98

Swope, Earl, 309

Symposium of Siving, A (record al-
bum), 211

Symphony Hall (Boston), 199

Symphony in Black (movie), 183

Syncopaters, 126, 152, 231

syncopation, 5, 20, 51, 79, 287

"Tain't What You Do," 191, 252

"Take the A Train," 243

"Tantalizing a Cuban," 218

Taproom Gang, 248

Tate, Buddy, 190

Tate, Erskine, 74, 94, 117, 126, 149, 203,

264
Tatum, Art, 30, 77-78, 189, 197, 213-14,

223-28, 230, 307-308, 321, 340
Tausig, Karl, in
"Taxi War Dance," 236
Taylor, Deems, no, 112
Taylor, Eddie, 93
Taylor, Eva, 74
Taylor, Montana, 122
Taylor, Roddy, 93
"Tea for Two," 154, 165
Teagarden, Charlie ("Little Gate"),

153, 162, 186, 351
Teagarden, Jack ("Big Gate"), 33-34,

63, 78, 88, 96, 1 1 8, 139, 151, 153-55,

161-62, 186, 208-209, 213, 218, 227,

232, 298, 303, 317, 351
"Tell Me, Pretty Baby," 282
Ten Blackberries, 178
"Ten Little Injuns," 24
"Tenderly," 290
Terrell, Pha, 232
Teschemacher, Frank (Tesch), 6j,

118-21, 124-27, 161, 163, 298
"Texas Shuffle," 236

379

"That's No Bargain," 154

"Them There Eyes," 33

"There'll Be Some Changes Made," 248

"There's No You," 310

"These Foolish Things," 227

"Thief in the Night," 223

Thomas, George, 126

Thomas, Hersal, 122

Thomas, Joe, 191

Thomas, Lewis, 175

Thorn hill, Claude, 186, 209-10, 260,

325, 327-28
"Thou Swell," 138
"Three Blind Mice," 52
Three Deuces (Chicago), 67, 121, 224,

240

Three Deuces (New York), 271, 277
"Through These Portals," 323
"Tia Juana," 131
Thompson, Lucky, 271
Thomson, Virgil, 306
"Tiger Rag," 47, 64, 76, 81, 84, 86, no,

131, 142, 171, 181
"Tight Like This," 216
Time (magazine), 259, 272-73
"Tin Roof Blues," 119
Tintype Dance Hall (New Orleans),

5i"

Tio brothers, 178
Tio, Louis, 49, 61
Tio, Lorenzo, 49, 53
Tio, Lorenzo, Jr., 54-55, 57, 61, 66
"Titanic Man Blues," 95
Tizol, Juan, 179-80, 244
Tjader, Callen, 332
"To a Wild Rose," in
Toch, Ernst, 330
Toddlin' Blues," 132
Tompkins, Eddie, 192
"Tonsilectomy," 310
Toscanini, Arturo, 313
Tough, Dave, 118-19, 153, 204, 206,

297-99

Town Hall (New York), 219, 233
Town Topics Revue, 92
"Trade Winds," 262
"Travelin' Light," 254
Travels in the Congo (book), 10
Tread well, George, 290
Treemonisha (opera), 80
Trianon Ballroom (Los Angeles), 317
Tricky Sam, see Nanton, Joe

380

Tristano, Lennie, 68, 142, 213, 234, 274-
276, 299, 319-24, 326-30, 333, 335, 339,

342, 347

Trotter, John Scott, 209
"Trouble, Why Pick on Me?" 164
"Troubled Waters," 183
Trovatore, H, 65
True Reformers Hall (Washington),

i?5

Trueheart, John, 167-70
Trumbauer, Frankie (Tram), 109, 124,

132-35, 137-39. 154-55. 158
"Trumbology," 124
"Try a Little Tenderness," 264
"Trumpet Blues," 301
"Trumpet in Spades," 184
Tucker, Bobby, 255
"Turkey in the Straw," 22
Turneri Big Joe, 33, 150, 225
Turner, Lana, 263
Turpin, Tom, 80
"Turtle Twist," 65
Tuxedo Band, 45, 57, 59, 61, 67
Tuxedo Cafe (New Orleans), 57
Tuxedo Dance Hall (New Orleans),

44-45

"Tuxedo Junction," 192
"Twelfth Street Rag," 236
"25 Club" (New Orleans), 45
two-beat jazz, 85, 189-91, 207, 295, 312,

353
"Typhoon," 142

"Underneath the Harlem Moon," 165

Untermeyer, Louis, 102

"Until the Real Thing Comes Along,"

232

"Uptown Downbeat," 184
Uptown House (New York), 276
Urania, 15
Urban Room (Chicago), 183-84

V-disks, 300, 304
Vallee, Rudy, 115, 157-59, 161, 247
Vallon, Mike, 295
Van and Schenck, 144
Van Eps, George, 186, 210
Van Lake, Turk, 297
Vance, Dick, 233
Varsalona, Bart, 313
vaudeville, 54, 82, 87, 101, 132, 158, 168,
207,215,231

INDEX

Vaughan, Sarah, 217, 227, 266, 269, 271,

277, 288-91, 309, 344
Veau, John (Ratty), 53
Vega, Lawrence, 56, 82
Vendome Theatre (Chicago), 74, 94,

149

Vendome Syncopaters, 126
Venice Ballroom (California), 160
Ventura, Charlie, 302
Venson, Eddie, 93
Venuti, Joe, 88, 109, 134, 136-39, 158
Verdi, Giuseppe, 65, 305
Verlaine, Paul, 133
Villa Vallee (New York), 158
"Volga Boatmen, The," 1 1 1
Voynow, Dick, 130

"Wa-da-da," 138

Wabash Dance Orchestra, 152

Wahl, Dorothy, 297

"Wailin' Blues," 127

Wald, Jerry, 327-28, 334

Walclteufel, Emil, 114

Walker, Frank, 32

"Walkin' & Swingin 1 ," 232

Wallace, Sippie, 74, 96

Waller and Morris Hot Babies, 222

Waller, Edward Martin, 219

Waller, Fats (Thomas Wright), 20-
30, 67, 80, 94, 143, 148, 150, 163,
175, 189, 211-14, 218-24, 227, 281, 286

Wallington, George, 269, 285

"Waltz Boogie," 233

Ward, Helen, 203, 247-48

Waring, Fred, 150, 166, 217

Warner, Woody, 50

Warren, Earl, 190

Warren, Fran, 259-60

"Washboard Blues," 154

Washington, Jack, 190

Washingtonians, The, 176

"Waste Land, The" (poem), 100-102

Waters, Ethel, 96, 143, 145-46, 203, 305

Watson, Leo, 353

Watters, Lu, 332

"Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,"

137

Wayne, Chuck, 246, 271, 307, 324
Wayne, Frances, 295-96, 300, 305
We Called It Music (book) ,121
"We Won't Go Home Until Morn-
ing," 1 6

INDEX

"Weary Blues," 83
Weary Blues, The (book), 105
"Weather Bird," 73, 216
Weatherford, Teddy, 93-94, 215
Webb, Chuck, 5, 75, 166-73, 177, 179,

193, 212, 248, 251-52, 298
Webb, Speed, 238
Weber, Carl Maria von, 17
Webste'r, Ben (Benny), 148, 199, 212,

239, 242-43, 246, 277, 296
Webster, Freddy, 217, 278
Webster, Paul, 192
Weeks, Anton, 180
Weems, Teddy, 262
Weiss, Sid, 211
Welles, Orson, 58, 77
Wells, Dickie, 190
Wells, Johnny, 62
"West End Blues," 216
West, Hal, 270
West, Mae, 77, 182
Wettling, George, 124, 127, 189, 208,

211

Wetzel, Ray, 313
"What-Cha-Cail~Em Blues," 73, 147
"What is Home Without a Mother?",

*4
"What is This Thing Called Love?",

271, 277

"What Kind o' Man Is You," 249
"What Will I Tell My Heart," 225
"What's the Score," 265
"What's Your Story, Morning Glory,"

191, 232

"When a Black Man's Blue," 181
"When Dreams Come True," 169
"When Johnny Comes Marching

Home," 24
"When the Saints Go Marching In,"

47

"When You and I Were Young, Mag-
gie," 24

Whetsel, Arthur, 175

"Whispering," m, 271

"Whispering Hope," 24

White and Negro Spirituals (book), 19

White City Ballroom (Chicago), 94,
119-20

White City Four, 293

"White Heat," 191

White, Hy, 295, 305

White, Lulu, 42-45

381

White Spirituals in the Southern Up-
lands (book), 19

White, Zack, 278

Whiteman, Paul (Pops, Fatho) , 34, 108-
112, 115-16, 128, 133, 136-39, 150, 155,
157, 159, 166, 189, 207, 209, 217, 232,
247, 249-50, 254

Whiting, Margaret (Maggie), 259-60

Whiting, Richard, 260

'"Who'll Buy My Violets," 210

Whoopee Makers, 161, 178, 186

"Why Don't You Do Right?", 260

"Why Shouldn't I?", 264

"Wild Man Blues," 31, 59

"Wild Root," 296, 303

Wilder, Alec, 250, 325

Wiley, Lee, 259

Wilkins, Barron, 176

Williams, Bert, 143-45, 176

Williams, Bobby, 93

Williams, Buddy, 302, 330

Williams, Claiborne, 49

Williams, Clarence, 44, 60, 74, 143

Williams, Cootie, 177-78, 193, 199, 242,
276, 286, 304

Williams, Elmer, 167-70

Williams, Fess, 88

Williams, John, 231

Williams, Mary Lou, 191-92, 213-14,
219, 231-34, 250, 308

Williams, Sandy, 169, 171-72

Williams, Spencer, 219-21

Wilson, Dick, 232, 236

Wilson, Earl, 146

Wilson, Teddy, 78, 188, 193, 202-203,
210, 213-14, 226-27, 236, 250-51, 290

Wind, Al, 126

Winding, Kai, 284, 288, 318

Windy City Seven, 208

Winner, Septimus, 24

Wintz, Julie, 162

"With Plenty of Money and You," 225

Wolverines' Orchestra, 94, 109, 119-
120, 125, 130-32

Woodchoppers, 304

"Woodchoppers' Ball," 295

Wooding, Russell, 175

"Woody Woodpecker," 252

"Woodyn' You," 270

"Working Man Blues," 73

"Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,"
239, 2 57

382

Wright, Edith, 248
"Wringin' and Twist in'," 137

Yacht Club (New York), 270

Yancey, Jimmy, 9, 122

"Yankee Doodle," 4, 15

"Yankee Doodle Never Went to

Town," 1 86

"Yearning for Love," 184
Yeats, William Butler, 123
Yerba Buena band, 332
"Yerxa," 310
Yoder, Walt, 294-95
"Yonder Comes the Blues," 95
"You Can Depend on Me," 236
'Tou Can't Pull the Wool over My

Eyes," 187

"You Don't Know What Love Is," 261
"You Know, Baby," 233
"You Made Me Love You," 187
"You Showed Me the Way," 253

INDEX

"You Took Advantage of Me," 137

"You Was Right, Baby," 260

"You, You Darlin'," 265

Young, Lester (Pres), 78, 148, 189-90,
206, 213, 235-37, 241, 243-44, 2 4 6 > 273-
274, 284, 318, 326, 328, 344, 347

Young Man With a Horn (book), 128

Young, Trummy, 191, 217, 309 .

Young, Victor, 160, 207

Youngberg, Johnny, 153

"Your Father's Mustache," 296

"You're Blase," 290

"You're not the Kind," 277

"You've Been a Good Old Wagon," 28

"You've Changed," 261

Ziegfield Follies, 143-44
"Zip Coon," 22
"Zonky," 221
Zurke, Bob, 206