by Rose, Al;
I assured her that we’d be delighted to have him sit in.
On the way over in the plane, I’d asked if anyone knew “Hail to the Chief” and was met with blank stares. However, Brad said he knew “Kansas City Kitty.” He took out his valve trombone and played the melody. Muggsy and Pee Wee recognized it at once, so we decided that when the President came in, we’d play that.
At about 9:30 P.M. there was a flurry of secret service men at the entrance. The band had been playing for maybe a half-hour, and an impressive assemblage of dignitaries, including Vice-President Alben W. Barkley, was standing around and really enjoying the music. A few couples were dancing including, if my memory is working, Congressman and Mrs. Richard M. Nixon.
So in came the President, beaming jovially and shaking hands with everyone within reach. My practiced eye told me that he’d already begun the party somewhere else on the premises, possibly with no guests present. Bess whispered in his ear and he nodded. Then she spoke to what appeared to be a head secret service man and he nodded. Then he came over to talk to me and I nodded. The band continued to play “Kansas City Kitty.” I told James P. to go to the bar and make himself comfortable, explaining that the President was going to sit in. It wasn’t the kind of a suggestion that would displease James P.—not if there was a free bar set up.
The President, escorted by two large gentlemen, approached, extended his hand, and said, “Hello, Mr. Rose. I’m Harry Truman.”
I introduced the musicians to the President, proposed that they start with “Kansas City Kitty,” which he would, of course, know. Then I turned to the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a guest artist with us tonight, sitting in on piano …” and I was drowned out by applause, laughter, and cheers as I retired from the makeshift bandstand.
Harry Truman knew “Kansas City Kitty” and he kind of knew the “Missouri Waltz.” After that it was straight Stephen Foster. Anyway they played those two tunes for perhaps two hours. Truman appeared to be in heaven, and Bess stood by beaming at his obvious delight. She said, “I don’t know when I’ve ever seen him so happy.”
Anyway, the evening ended. We were all roundly thanked, praised, congratulated, and patted on the back. The President shook hands warmly with all the musicians and especially made his apologies to James P. for having hogged the piano all evening. James P. blearily told him it was a pleasure.
So they took us to the plane—these same State Department folks—and we fastened our seat belts. I was sitting next to Dodds, who was always preoccupied and I’m convinced never thought about anything else but rhythm and music. After we were in the air, I turned to him and asked, “How do you feel, Baby? Did you enjoy the party? Have a good time?”
“Oh, sure!” he answered, “but that little fellow with the glasses couldn’t play much piano.”
Jack Teagarden
As far as the musical arts were concerned, the middle thirties were years of drastic changes. The swing era started effectively in 1935 with the startling success of the Benny Goodman Orchestra, which achieved popularity by dumping the prime essentials of authentic jazz and borrowing the solo concepts of what was called “Chicago style,” showcasing them in elaborate arrangements for thirteen pieces. Anyone who wanted to get rich in the music business had to abandon the idea of doing it in a genuine jazz band and scramble to catch on as a “sideman,” or featured soloist in a swing orchestra. Some, equipped with special personality and appearance requirements, could become leaders like Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and the Dorseys. Jack Teagarden decided he was one of these.
Now, “Big T” was certainly personable enough, certainly talented enough to overwhelm an audience. He had a pleasant singing style, and his trombone artistry was already a legend. But Jackson couldn’t attend to business. He didn’t know how to get serious. He was lazy and he had a short attention span. The only things that really interested him were jazz and railroad trains, either the real thing or the Christmas toys. He had been talked into being a bandleader, but it didn’t come natural to him. I’ve seen him stand with a baton in his hand and gape at his sidemen as they wove their ways through their solos—and he had sidemen like Irving Fazola and Sterling Bose. He’d just forget to wave the stick and become part of the audience, and he’d even applaud them just as the fans did. When it came time for his solo, though, he didn’t lose track of things. He’d lift up his horn and transfix his listeners for as long as he wanted to.
Back in 1936 I got some musicians together to play a concert for the Philadelphia local of the American newspaper guild. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but this was the very first time people ever bought tickets to sit in a room and listen to authentic jazz. No food. No drinks. Just jazz. The first jazz concert. Sidney Bechet, Sidney De Paris and friends. It was in Mercantile Hall on North Broad Street.
No cheapskates, the guild had also engaged Jack Teagarden and his Orchestra to play on another floor of the building for dancing. But that’s not the way it worked out. By ten o’clock all the dancers were downstairs listening to the jazz. Teagarden, Fazola, and Bose had joined the front line and excitement was high.
I had an unexpected thrill that evening. I was just a twenty-year-old kid with literary pretensions, and during a brief break I was standing with Big T when a baggy-looking fellow came by and greeted him with real enthusiasm. T said to him, “This is the kid who got these folks together, Al Rose. Al, I’d like you to meet Damon Runyon.”
I doubt that I contributed much to the subsequent conversation. I knew I’d be telling generations yet to come that I had personally shaken hands with Damon Runyon. Big T was on first name terms with the great and famous—not just musicians, but movie stars, a king or two, big industrialists. But he considered that the most important person he knew was Mr. Van Sweringen of Cleveland who built and owned the Nickel Plate Railroad. If there was ever anybody in the world he envied it was this man who had been able to build and operate his own railroad. Jack did a brief concert tour with me one time. St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. He couldn’t wait to get to Cleveland. Maybe he only came with me because he was sure Mr. Van Sweringen would let him ride in the cab of a locomotive.
Working with jazzmen you get inured to all kinds of idiosyncracies and after a while nothing surprises you. That Jack knew the owner of a railroad well enough to call him on the phone and ask to be permitted to ride in the locomotive was credible to me by that time. What wasn’t credible was that when T got ready to go for his ride he was able to pull a motorman’s hat out of his suitcase. I discovered he wore that to drive his car, too. Even more astonishing was the fact that Mr. Van Sweringen joined him for the ride in the cab of the locomotive.
The way things worked out, I saw him frequently in the years after that, during many of which he was, of course, playing in Satch’s all-stars. I moved back to New Orleans, more or less to stay, in the fifties. It was with great pleasure that I noted he had been booked into the Dream Room on Bourbon Street. He called me from out-of-town, told me he’d be staying at the Prince Conti Motor Inn, and asked if I’d take him by the old railway stations and roundhouses while he was in town. I said I’d be happy to do that, but we never got to make that particular tour. Jackson died in the Prince Conti motel during his engagement.
Eubie Blake
I knew Eubie Blake so well, and for so long, that I still can’t believe he’s gone. As his official biographer I put almost all the Eubie stories in that volume, Eubie Blake by Al Rose (Schirmer-Macmillan, 1979), but not all of them. Some were withheld in deference to Eubie’s wife Marion, who was always offended by any mention of his many—and I mean many—amours. She was very generous in the matter of supplying photographs, but she absolutely refused to turn over any, no matter how innocuous, that showed him with another woman—even his first wife Avis, who died before he began his courtship of Marion. Eubie had an extended string of affairs from his extreme youth, through both his marriages, and the last of them when he was in his nineties. I asked h
im when he was ninety-seven, “How old do you have to be before the sex drive goes?”
He answered, “You’ll have to ask somebody older than me.”
Eubie wasn’t a man to pursue the ladies, but he was certainly quick to yield to temptation. After all, when “Shuffle Along” became a smash on Broadway, he was rich, talented, and personable. He was an international celebrity; his songs like “Memories of You,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and “You’re Lucky to Me” were part of the main body of American music. The ladies, especially the show business ladies, were all over him. He was lionized.
Certainly everybody knew he was in love with Lottie Gee, his “Shuffle Along” ingenue. The cast knew it, his partner Sissle knew, his wife Avis knew, and all of Broadway knew. Both Avis and Lottie were jealous as they could be, and Eubie’s attitude was one of complete helplessness. He never felt he was cheating on anybody. It was just that all women were always taking advantage of the unfortunate fact that he couldn’t resist them. He once confessed to me, “I been gettin’ away with that act for sixty years.”
He told me that every time he left his house, Avis would insist on making love to him until he climaxed and then when he left Lottie in the apartment he kept for her, she’d do the same thing; then, he added, ruefully, “there were the other girls.” The roster of Eubie’s lady friends read like a directory of black soubrettes, ingenues, chorus girls, and showgirls. That, he said, was the big thing about being a success in the music business. He was saddened by the girls—and there were several—who committed suicide over him, two who were killed by their husbands—yet he discussed all these events as an outsider, as one who had exercised no initiative in these matters. He viewed it all as an innocent bystander.
“Listen,” he explained. “You got to understand how the world is. I wasn’t foolin’ with jail bait. These were all grown-up women. They were in the theatrical world, and a woman in the theatrical world needs to know it ain’t the same as the rest of the world. Show people think a certain way. They act a certain way—and what I did was what show people did. Maybe I did it more than most of the others—but it wasn’t the kind of thing you just decide you’re gonna do! It just comes up on you and there you are. I treated Avis good and she was the first to say it. And Marion, too. A guy like you, you been in it and you understand it, but women—even show business women—they might understand it if it’s somebody else. But if it’s them, hah!”
But then he told me a story that seemed to tell me he thought Avis was really above all that, too. I wrote it in the manuscript of his biography, but Marion raised so much hell I took it out. It seems that this girl friend of Avis’ came to visit her, to recite his list of misdeeds. The girl friend appeared scandalized with Eubie’s adulterous conduct, saying, “Avis, that niggah you married to, he got an apartment for a chippie in his show. An’ that niggah goes up there to be wit’ her every day. You might be a saint, Avis. You shouldn’t have to put up with a niggah like that.”
Avis reportedly led her informant to the window and pointed down to the luxurious new automobile. “You see that car, Honey?” she asked. “That niggah just gave me that car. And inside of that car there’s a chauffeur sittin’ just waitin’ to see if I want to go anywhere.” Then she led her friend to the closet, opened the door, and said, “You see these fur coats? This one’s mink, this is sable. That’s a beaver, that’s a silver fox. That niggah gave me all those things. Now, tonight, after the show is over, where do you think that niggah’s goin’? He’s comin’ right back here where he goes every night and,” indicating the bedroom with her thumb, “gets into that bed next to this niggah,” indicating herself.
Eubie never told me how he knew about this incident but I have to assume one of the ladies involved reported it to him.
Although he lived to be a hundred, Eubie was always young, always planning new things to compose, even considering writing one more show. But many of his attitudes were old-fashioned. He deplored, for example, the modern public attitude toward homosexuals. Eubie had always been willing to work with them, because he was prepared to accept genuine talent wherever he found it, but he wouldn’t, to his knowledge, associate with one. He hated for show-business men, even straight ones, to hug him or kiss him as is the common practice in the theater these days. As he grew older, the problem got worse and his aversion increased. By the time Eubie got into his late eighties it seemed as though every man, woman, and child wanted to embrace him. He didn’t mind the women and children doing it, but he pulled away from the men as though they were preparing to give him a tetanus injection. (“Stand over here, Shazzam—and if you see one comin’, head him off.”)
Back in the late thirties and early forties he and Noble Sissle, as well as many other Harlemites, called me “Shazzam” because Sissle said I looked like Captain Marvel, a comic strip character of that day who frequently entered the scene in a kind of explosion that spelled out in jagged letters SHAZZAM! As we all got older I guess the resemblance vanished.
Diana and I went to New York for Eubie’s hundredth birthday celebration, which was held at the Shubert Theater. Max Morath, the super entertainer of our times, and Eubie’s long-time friends Robert Kimball and Phoebe Jacobs organized the party, but he was confined to his bed in Brooklyn listening to the proceedings over a telephone hook-up to the stage of the theater. He heard messages from the President and the governor, as well as countless other friends. Mayor Koch was present in person. The stage and the audience were peopled with celebrities.
When it was over some of us went to Max’s new studio on 42nd Street at his kind invitation and reminisced about Eubie. Norma Morath and their three adult children were skillful and patient hosts as Rudi Blesh, Bill and Joanie Bolcom, Dick Zimmerman (the ragtime magician), William Albright, Ian Whitcomb, and I don’t know how many others toasted Eubie’s happy life.
Five days later, on my car radio in Athens, Georgia, on February 12, 1983, I heard the news of Eubie’s passing. It was hard to be sad over the completion of as successful a life as his.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band
The ODJB’s importance in the history of jazz can’t be overstated. Those musicians made the very first jazz record ever issued (1917). And they ultimately made jazz a household word with early records that were enormously successful just after World War I and with tours both in the United States and abroad. The recorded performances that earned the band its fame, though, sounded little like the prerecording ODJB. Since 78 rpm discs were limited to three minutes of performance, the band had to play far too fast to get the entire piece tracked. As a result much of the subtle and artful improvisation had to be sacrificed. Subsequent audiences, of course, wanted to hear the band sound the way it did on its records. Thus the ODJB had to say goodbye to the real jazz and give the public what it wanted.
“What could we do?” Nick Larocca, the trumpet player and leader, asked me in 1955. “That’s how we made those records and everybody in the world was copying us. The only thing we could do was to copy our own records.”
When I met Eddie Edwards, the trombone player, in the 1950s, he was no longer the slim, handsome figure I had known from photographs, but a jolly old gentleman of enormous girth. He was making a Commodore record session with Johnny Wiggs, and they ran through a piece in rehearsal that was real and satisfying. Wiggs was gleeful over Edwards’ sound. Then Eddie said, “Yeah, Johnny. That was great—but we can’t do that on the record. It’ll put everybody to sleep.” Unfortunately, his view proved to be accurate.
I noted that Edwards didn’t speak with the characteristic New Orleans dialect and I mentioned it to him. “You don’t sound at all like a yat,” I said. (Orleanians tease each other for using the phrase “Where y’at” as a greeting, and thus call each other “yats.”)
“I never heard it at home when I was young,” Edwards said, “and my mother was always correcting my speech. So I guess I just never picked it up. It used to be hard for people from home, when they met me up No
rth, to believe that I was really from New Orleans.”
Larry Shields came home from California for a brief visit just before he died. I took him and his brother Harry to lunch at Tujague’s on Decatur Street. (Larry remembered the place nostalgically and observed that it hadn’t changed in forty years.)
When I asked him if he thought he’d picked up his clarinet style from someone who had gone before, he shook his head and said, “Style! I didn’t have any style! I just blew like hell the best way I could and only hoped I could keep up. When people talked about my style I never knew what they meant. I could never play much clarinet. Not like the kid, here. [Younger brother Harry was then fifty-two.] If he’d been playin’ he would have been the most famous clarinetist in the world.” But Larry’s testimony notwithstanding, listening to those old records is enough to show that Larry wasn’t the tyro he made himself out to be.
I never knew Harry Ragas, the original piano player with the band. He died when I was three years old, but I had the opportunity to speak with J. Russel Robinson, who made many early records with the band, and he said, “I suppose you could say that I’ve played with better musicians in my life, but that’s only true in a way. For originality and spontaneous music—and for just plain fun—that was it. I never had a better time in my life.”
Frank Signorelli, who also played with the ODJB in its early years, recalled that he was completely disoriented during his first rehearsal. “Those guys didn’t know any music, but they always knew what they were doing. I knew all about music, but I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. But they just showed me. They didn’t tell me. They showed me. God, it was great.” Signorelli worked for me a time or two, and I was impressed with his professionalism and flexibility. I couldn’t believe that someone who had never played in New Orleans could have fit in so well.