by Rose, Al;
History has, of course, proven him a prophet. It had to be disillusioning to spend a lifetime making creative and beautiful and most of all happy music, to assume you were an organic part of a great cultural process, expecting to find your proper niche in the pantheon of musical gods, and then to watch the economic and aesthetic structure of the society crumble before the mindless and greedy huns who have come to dominate it.
So we fished. We put mullet heads on our hooks and fought it out with many a tarpon on the silent night waters of the Gulf of Mexico or in the calm South Atlantic. There were times when our muscles ached from hauling in and releasing the big fish. Some went over a hundred pounds. We never seemed to get tired of the sport and we hardly ever talked about music anymore.
Many months later I had to leave for a couple of months on business. From Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I read in the New York Times that Adrian Rollini had been brutally murdered in Tavernier. I’ll not recall here the especially grisly details. His body was found in his pickup truck, and that was the end of his exciting, pioneering career. The crime was never solved. When I got home to Key Largo people were speculating that he had been killed in retaliation for robbing other peoples lobster pots. But anybody who had known Adrian would have known that kind of thing wasn’t in his character.
I didn’t get to know many people in the Keys, and I missed his company. I wish I could tell you things he said about Jean Goldkette, Eddie Lang, Bix, and some of his other musical buddies, but the truth is we just never talked much about all that.
Stephane Grappelle
Hugues Panassie introduced me to Stephane Grappelle in the winter of 1936. Panassie was the first patron of jazz in France and the author of Le Jazz Hot, the first book ever written to acquaint the public with this art form. He organized the Hot Clubs of France, which produced the celebrated quintet records oh which Grappelle and Django Reinhardt made their recording debuts.
Panassie picked me up in the eighth arrondissement where I was staying with Parisian friends. He had a congenitally deformed foot and walked laboriously with a cane. He took me to a place where the quintet was rehearsing for a session. There I met Charles Delauney, a quiet man who was then working on his “Hot Discography,” the first such effort ever attempted.
We all went out to a large, low-priced, busy place to eat. My French was very rusty and the musicians spoke little or no English, though Reinhardt and I spoke Spanish and he translated some of the discussion for me. Django wasn’t a stimulating personality; he was one of those vague and languid types who never think about anything besides music. Grappelle, on the other hand, was a dynamic, actively curious person, with a remarkable grasp of facts and contemporaneous events. He was Jewish, and he had what seemed to me then a morbid concern for the future of his nation, for the future of Jews throughout the world. I never for a moment thought that Adolf Hitler posed much of a threat to anybody except Germans.
Grappelle said, “These animals are a threat to the entire world—not only to us Jews, but to you, too. We must prepare ourselves for our defense—even survival. Anyone who thinks our French politicians, our generals, will protect us against the inevitable Nazi invasion doesn’t understand that most of them are Nazis in their hearts.” Three years later, exactly as he’d predicted, we saw the vaunted Maginot Line crumble and watched the treachery of General Petain and Pierre Laval as they turned Paris over to the brown-shirted beasts.
Having been, in those days, a labor activist and militant anti-Fascist, I was in a position, during the worst days of the French occupation, to hear reports of the activities of the French underground. In the jazz world many of us came to know that Grappelle, a stupendous musician, was even more important as a hero of the resistance. This frail fellow endured torture, imprisonment, illness—more than anyone could have foreseen—not only to survive but to save many other lives by helping his compatriots gain freedom from Hitler’s oppression. When I saw him again in 1949 and expressed my admiration for his heroism, he said it was only natural to protect oneself and one’s own.
The last time Grappelle and I talked, in New Orleans in 1980 on the gallery of Johnny Donnels’ photographic studio overlooking Royal Street in the French Quarter, those black days had receded in our memories and we could talk of our work, his violin and my writing. It crossed both our minds that the freedom to pursue our arts was a luxury we couldn’t always guarantee ourselves.
At this 1985 writing, Grappelle is seventy-three and still doing the concert circuit, drawing substantial crowds. His virtuosity on the violin hasn’t been approached by anyone in the jazz field.
George Cvetkovich
The young man told me that as a civilian he’d been a professional jazz saxophonist. I never did hear him play, but it was clear from his talk about life in Baltimore that he knew all the right people, that we shared many friends. From his manner I had no reason to doubt that he was involved with the music world.
He weighed whatever was the minimum required for someone to be drafted into the United States Army, and he told me how he’d starved himself in the weeks before his physical in an effort to become ineligible. He was also the shortest soldier I served with during my tour of duty, a service I approached just as reluctantly as he did. Through our six-week basic training course, Private Cvetkovich occupied the bunk next to mine in the dismal barracks at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, which, as any G.I. knew, was the American Siberia.
George and I got to know each other well. He needed me—not just to keep his morale up by talking of the delights of the jazz life, but also to help him to his feet when his eighty-plus pound field pack caused him to fall backward to the ground. We were required to wear these loads strapped to our backs for the ten-mile regulation saunters into the hustings. We shared a contempt for the unattractive terrain, the army, its institutions and customs. We were both against American involvement in World War II and had participated during our civilian days in active skirmishes with the law and against the Communists over the political issues involved.
Cvetkovich’s concerns were two. One was finding a way out of the army, and the second was discovering a source of supply for Cannabis Sativa, which was as illegal a substance then as it is now. My exclusive concern was getting out of the army, by fair means or foul. That I achieved this with an honorable discharge was pure happenstance. Certainly I wasn’t about to be picky about what kind of discharge I got.
Before we were shipped out of that legal concentration camp, we did manage to get one three-day pass with which we went to the nearest town, Jefferson City, where we set out in search of wine, women, and jazz. We found a form of the last being performed abominably in some establishment that was aspiring to be a dive. Somebody agreed to lend George a saxophone so he could participate. I didn’t hang around. Bad music hurts me, and in certain circles my antipathy to saxophones is well known. Besides, seeing George absorbed in the awful music we were hearing made me realize he had a long way to go before he could ever be a jazzman. So I left. We got back to camp separately on a Sunday night, and George displayed with some enthusiasm several packets of cigarette papers he’d managed to acquire against some anticipated windfall of marijuana.
One miserable morning as we headed out in trucks for the rifle range, I heard a sharp intake of breath from him and I turned to notice an unaccustomed gleam in his eye. “I found it, Jack!” he whispered excitedly.
My name, of course, isn’t Jack, but my diminutive Serbian colleague called everybody Jack, like you’d say, “Buddy” or “Kid.”
That night he sneaked out of the barracks and didn’t get back for a couple of hours. It was still dark. He whispered, “Hey, Jack! You awake?” I told him I was. “I found it, Jack!” he announced exultantly. “I got it hid in a safe place to cure. By Friday you and me can get high enough to forget we’re in the army.”
During the week he disappeared many times for short periods, sometimes barely making it back in time to answer the endless bugle calls. He wasn’t ready on Friday,
but on Saturday night he announced that his magic carpet was ready to put in gear. I didn’t feel any compulsion to smoke any gage (as we sometimes called it then), but I suppose I was ready for anything to relieve, even briefly, the miseries of a conscript. And so as the rest of the platoon passed the time in what our officers called, with straight faces, the recreation hall or did the jock thing on the lighted athletic field, Cvetkovich and I went into a nearby wooded area for a smoke. He was breathless with anticipation, already high with the prospect of things to come. I, less zealous, was certainly interested. George produced a rolled-up parcel that contained cigar-sized cylinders of his processed weed. We lit up.
The taste and aroma proved intolerable. For a moment I assumed that my tolerance for this stuff was demonstrably lower than George’s. But then I noticed he had ceased to puff on this mini-haystack and was contemplating it with marked distaste.
“Shit!” he announced fervently. “This ain’t it, Jack.”
When we were shipped out of camp it was to different places. We wished each other early discharges. I told him I hoped he’d keep me posted about his musical career and that he’d find some proper marijuana before his stint was up. I did get one post card from him just before he went overseas. All it said was, “I got it, Jack.”
Sidney Bechet
Reading Sidney Bechet’s autobiography, Treat It Gentle, I had to accept the fact that the Bechet he was writing about had little in common with the Bechet I knew so well. His Bechet and mine both played soprano sax and clarinet. The kindly old gentleman in his book was filled with charity and compassion. The one I knew was self-centered, cold, and capable of the most atrocious cruelty, especially toward women.
As much as I admired his artistry, I couldn’t help being appalled by his character. Toward his fans, his attitude ranged from indifferent to contemptuous. He could have been the prototype for what is now called “male chauvinist pig.” I never discovered anything he wouldn’t do for money; to my knowledge, he had absolutely no ethics, no principle or loyalty.
In 1937 I arranged a number of Journeys Into Jazz concerts in some of the Ivy League schools so people would get a chance to hear Bechet in person. The whole tour was for only ten days or so. We had appearances at Amherst, Tufts, Princeton, Brown, and Yale on the schedule. The band also included Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy Archey, Baby Dodds, Pops Foster, and Joe Sullivan. In the back of my mind is a banjo player, too. It would have been either Danny Barker or Lee Blair, though I don’t remember which. Bechet was just off the road playing in Noble Sissle’s orchestra in vaudeville. In the universities, I usually did a little historical commentary and the band played appropriate, illustrative pieces. We were sponsored by the music departments of the schools we performed in.
Every now and then Bechet showed a flash of humanity. Once we were getting ready to leave our hotel suite in New Haven. He was waiting for me to put on my tie, a function that took me an inordinate amount of time back in my days of sartorial impeccability. Sidney said, “You sloppy son-of-a-bitch—you got no tie clip?”
I confessed I rarely wore one.
“So,” he pursued, “you gonna let your goddam tie flap around in the wind?”
There hadn’t seemed to be any unusual breezes. He fished around in a little leather case on his dresser and came up with a goldstone tie clip which he handed to me. “Put it on!” he instructed. “Any son-of-a-bitch goes anyplace with Sidney Bechet gotta look like a gentleman.”
On reflection I had to assume this was Bechet’s way of proffering a gift, and I thanked him warmly for this gesture.
“Shit!” he said. “I give you that for me. When you ain’t with me I don’t give a shit whether you wear a tie clip or not!”
I wore it, I think, in 1970 at the ragtime festival in St. Louis. Walt Gower, the clarinetist with the Mothers Boys Jazz Band of Detroit, was expressing his admiration for the work of Bechet. He said he was sorry he never had the chance to hear Bechet when he was alive. I told him about the tie clip and took it off and gave it to him. Walt still wears it, whether he’s sporting a tie or not.
In concerts I was always in arguments with Sidney about his so- prano sax solos. No matter what other stars were on the stand with him, he always assumed the audience wasn’t interested in them. “Tell Muggsy not to play so loud behind me. I don’t need no other horns with me.”
It was my rule that Sidney was only permitted to play a single soprano specialty in each half of the concert. (I grant that a large portion of the audience would have been grievously disappointed if he hadn’t.) The rest of his time on the stand he had to play the clarinet. I never heard anyone who could play clarinet better in the front line than Sidney.
Bechet resented any restraints and never stopped complaining. “What you think them people is payin’ to hear? Bechet! Not no fuckin’ piano player [Joe Sullivan] or some half-assed trombone tooter [Jimmy Archey]. They want Bechet! You hear! Bechet!”
I never even gave him star billing—just more money than he’d make anywhere else at the time.
He had this hit record out, Gershwin’s “Summertime.” It was very good for what it was, and he played it with some hot overtones. But he worked it like a rhapsody and it didn’t have any real jazz character, though it was a perfect vehicle for his unchallenged virtuosity. Bechet played it at every performance. And—just to irritate me, I think—he would take two or three additional improvised choruses, breathtaking and dazzling, that would drive the crowd crazy. On these occasions, they’d applaud wildly, stamp their feet, and whistle loudly. He’d look offstage to me for permission to do an encore and when I was certain the crowd noises would not abate, I’d grudgingly signal for him to continue. Once in Philadelphia, I let him take two encores.
“I want them people to remember me,” he told me. “That’s the onliest way I’ll ever get into the big money. Them other musicianers, they gone as far as they can go. But not Bechet! You wanna get anyplace in this world, you gotta look out for number one.”
I must mention that Bechet had a consuming hobby, photography. I know he liked to take pictures of naked ladies, a preference consistent with his exploitative bent toward females. He seemed, even on the bandstand, to be constantly clicking the shutters of the cameras that always hung from his, neck. One evening the two of us were standing on the steps of the Philadelphia Academy of Music waiting for an attendant to come and unlock the doors. I was holding his instrument cases, and he was weighted down with enough accoutre- merits to film an edition of National Geographic. As a younger man, similarly laden, walked by, he and Sidney recognized each other and exchanged greetings, though Sidney displayed no sign of cordiality.
Pointing to one of the man’s cameras, he demanded, “How much you want for that?”
“I don’t want to sell it, Sid. I just got it,” the man replied.
Bechet turned away and the man introduced himself to me. His name was Emmett Matthews, no mean soprano saxist himself and a member of the internationally acclaimed Red Caps. He tried a little small talk on Bechet; but since Sidney ignored him, he left us with polite goodbyes. I mentioned to Sidney that he hadn’t treated this acquaintance very considerately.
“He wouldn’t sell me his camera!” Bechet pouted, with irritation. “He ain’t got nothin’ else I want and I don’t need him to give me sax lessons.”
Bechet never showed me any of his photographs, even the ones he took of me with various musicians. He promised to have a set made for me, but he never bothered to do it.
One night after a concert, I paid him his thirty-five dollars. Then after counting the exceptionally high box office receipts, I handed him an extra hundred. He didn’t even thank me, though I never failed to thank any musician when he finished a concert of mine. The next time I called Bechet for a gig he said, “I ain’t comin’ unless I get seventy dollars.”
Now, nobody in the world valued Bechet more as an artist than I, but I knew there were limits to his box-office value. My musicians were always guaranteed s
cale, and they got bonuses according to the night’s take. I asked Bechet if he ever worked a job for me that hadn’t brought him more than seventy dollars. He told me he didn’t remember.
“You want to take this job for a flat eighty bucks and no extras?” I pressed.
He hung up on me.
For that concert I hired Edmond Hall.
Tom Brown
The music we have come to call Dixieland made its debut north of the Mason-Dixon Line under the leadership of Tom Brown, born in New Orleans on June 3, 1888. He and his Band from Dixieland made their bow at Lamb’s Cafe in Chicago in 1915, and that started it all. Tom played a thoroughly satisfying trombone, and his influence on succeeding sliphorn players was universal. He was not merely an innovator but a protean performer capable of filling every ensemble hole, in and out of his register.
He was also as thorough a bigot as the sunny South ever produced. He provided leadership to a tiny group of peanut-brained musicians, many of whom, I must say in fairness, were among the greatest jazzmen New Orleans ever produced. But this crackbrained coterie effectively kept black and white musicians in the Crescent City from playing together for two generations. Not that there weren’t some outstanding white jazzmen, like Johnny Wiggs and Armand Hug, who had no prejudice. Nevertheless some of them refrained from performing with black musicians for fear of being blacklisted by their colleagues. Raymond Burke, Harry Shields, and Boojie Centobie, a trio of super clarinetists, were indifferent personally to the color line; but except for recording sessions, they refused to work mixed band jobs for me, though Raymond never objected to sitting in informally with black musicians.