by Rose, Al;
I used to love to have Tony Sbarbaro (Spargo) on my sessions, not only because he kept the authentic beat going as naturally as he did, but also because he was always oriented toward having a happy time. A New Orleans lady I knew who lived in Philadelphia could make red beans and rice with hot sausage in true French Quarter style. If Tony was playing for me in New York, I’d bring a bucket of this specialty with me. And if he was going to be doing a concert in Philadelphia, I’d call Tante ‘Nette and we’d eat at her house. He was full of talk about ancient drummers he had admired: Kid Totts, Ragbaby Stephens, and a man named Alfred L. Jaeger from the Orpheum Theater Orchestra.
Emile Christian didn’t appear on the early ODJB discs—or any that were made in America. But he did make the European tour with the band and played the trombone on all of the British sides, since Edwards had elected to stay in New York for personal reasons. Christian’s association with the ODJB, though, preceded Nick Larocca's. He was, in fact, the group’s original trumpet man. But for the vagaries of the music business he might have been the one credited with the band’s meteoric rise. It’s doubtful, though, whether Emile would ever have had Nick’s presence or acumen. But he was a magnificent musician.
One of my most exciting recollections is of an evening in 1959 on the stage of the Shryock Auditorium at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Emile was sixty-four years old, ailing, and suffering foot trouble that made it painful for him to wear shoes. I had persuaded him to make the trip, anyway, as a replacement for Jim Robinson, who had, in his customary careless manner, double-booked himself for the date. It was truly a great all-star band with Johnny Wiggs playing the cornet, Harry Shields playing clarinet, Jeannette Kimball playing piano, Danny Barker on the guitar and banjo, Chester Zardis playing bass, and Louis Barbarin as the drummer. I had Blue Lu Barker to sing her incomparable specialties, plus a delightful member of the psychology faculty who was also a fabulous entertainer, Jeannie Kittrell.
When I introduced Emile, I supplied all the historical build up, telling how, despite his advanced years, he continued to play with the verve and excitement he had been known for a half-century earlier. Then I brought on this frail, emaciated, white-haired old man wearing bedroom slippers and obviously having great difficulty making his way to center stage, even with a little help from me. The people applauded, but could have been expected to take my encomiums with a grain of salt after watching his laborious progress to his chair and observing his ancient figure.
I’m so happy that that concert was recorded! Nobody would have believed the old man could come up with that riotous, ingenious, and vital trombone. It only took four bars to make you forget his age and condition. He drove the crowd wild.
Fourteen years later I tried to get him out to make a final appearance on wax, but he told me, “I’ve given all that up, man. I give away my horn, too. After all, I’m seventy-eight years old. A man can’t keep doin’ that forever. It’s hard work, you know.”
“But it’s fun, though, isn’t it?” I asked.
He replied, “That’s easy for you to say. You ain’t doin’ the playin’.”
Emile died on New Year’s Eve of 1973, and that was the end of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
Armand J. Piron
How I wish I could recreate this scene for you and the feelings of this nine year old, as he sat on the bank of Lake Pontchartrain in the light of the full moon, watching the flickering bulbs of the amusement rides of Spanish Fort in their perpetual multicolored pattern changes, and listened while A. J. Piron and his orchestra played for dancing at the end of Tranchina’s Restaurant Pier. The strains of “Purple Rose of Cairo” or “Dreamy Blues” seemed to take on an added dimension by drifting languidly across the easy ripples on the surface of the lake. There was even the illusion that the occasional mullet that jumped out of the water was part of the arrangement. Piron’s Orchestra was a New Orleans institution. In these years, the band was at its musical peak with the legendary Lorenzo Tio, Jr., playing the clarinet and Peter Bocage on trumpet, occasionally joining the leader in a violin duet. Old man Louis Cottrell, Sr., played the drums in that band, and Steve Lewis played the piano, with Johnny Marrero and his banjo. “Dreamy Blues,” which was then the band’s theme, was to have a devious history, ending when it was published in 1930 as “Mood Indigo” and carrying the names of Barney Bigard and Duke Ellington as composers. But all of us in New Orleans knew that tune, and we knew it was Tio’s.
It was a great thrill for me, then, in 1939, while I was headed north from Mexico to Philadelphia, having stopped for an extended visit in New Orleans, when Peter Bocage suggested we go by and visit with Piron. We walked from the French Quarter to the impeccable little white house in the 1400 block of Derbigny Street. Piron was ailing at the time. He was still in his early fifties, and I never had known what his physical problems were, but he only lived four more years after I met him.
Edmond Souchon was his attending physician, and he just happened to be present when Bocage and I arrived. In fact, that was when I met Sou for the first time, too. He was just leaving when Bocage and I got there.
I was impressed by the manner in which Piron and Bocage greeted each other. It was all very Creole. “Evenin’, Peter. You looki' might’ prosperous, sir. The family fine?”
“Evenin’, Arman’. I hope you res’ well this mawnin.”
Not at all the kind of meeting I was accustomed to among jazzmen, but this particular breed was reared in gentility. Their soft voices and mild manners were relaxing, comfortable to be around.
I asked Piron about a piece that was copyrighted in his name, “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” noting that Louis Armstrong had recently said Piron had stolen it from him. Piron’s attitude toward Satch’ was patronizing, but understanding.
“Of course,” he assured me, “that’s not Louis’ tune or mine or Pete’s either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company.” He sang me one brief and obscene version. “The way Louis did it didn’t have anything to do with his Sister Kate”:
Gotta have ’em before it’s too late,
They shake like jelly on a plate.
Big ’n juicy, soft an’ ’round
Sweetes’ ones I ever found.
“That’s the way Louis sang it, his words. Well you know, there’s just so many places you could do a number like that. Not in my band, you know. We never did anything like that. Now it’s true we used the “jelly on a plate,” but who knows if Louis made that up himself. The published words—at least the title—Peter made up. Most of the rest of it was Steve Lewis and me. Steve worked out the band routine.”
Bocage nodded along with this recital. They both made a number of comments about the extraordinary talents of Steve Lewis, talked about the success of Pete’s “Mama’s Gone Goodbye,” which had been recorded very recently by a number of bands and was having an unexpected revival. I asked him if he thought the kind of music he played with his orchestra would ever become popular again. He shook his head and told me, “You know, back when I started to do that, it was something new. It was way ahead of the jazz guys. So very few of the jazz guys could play well enough to work in my band, and I always had the cream—the very best. Well, now you see these new fellows, these swing bands—Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey—they’re even more ahead of me than I was ahead of the jazz people. I listen to their records, and I can’t believe musicians can play that well. But still, when you’d hear Tio play Aunt Hagar’s Blues’ or ‘Liebestraum,’ well, you might wonder if music ever got any better than that.”
I asked him if he ever played his violin anymore.
“I fool with it some,” he admitted, “but I was never what you’d call a great violinist. Pete, here, could give me a run. He can really play it—I mean play it—not like some of these banquette fiddlers you throw pennies to by the Cabildo. We still do a job here and there, but out in public I’m satisfied just
to wave the stick. It’s lucky there’s still some good men to wave it in front of.”
I asked Peter after we left if he knew what was wrong with Piron. He said, “Armand was never very strong. He doesn’t have a lot of bad habits—used to drink a little wine years ago, but I don’t believe he even touches that anymore. He doesn’t smoke. And as pretty as he always was, you’d think he’d be a big lady’s man. But that’s just not his way.”
The Candy Man
In our times, you may have noticed, there’s been a proliferation of “old time ice cream parlors.” Even the very young now associate that white-topped table, those ice cream chairs, the gayly striped awnings, and the Tiffany-style light fixtures with fifty delicious flavors in cones or dishes. I must admit that entering certain of these establishments strikes a nostalgic note in my head. And it’s amazing how closely some of them come to reproducing the real thing. (Only the decor—never the ice cream.)
But in New Orleans, the ice cream parlor—at least the more popular ones—didn’t stop at merely serving ice cream and imaginative sundaes and sodas. They also offered floor shows. Can you believe a floor show in an ice cream parlor? There was no cover charge. You just paid your dime for the sundae and permitted yourself to be entertained by some outstanding talent.
At the moment, I’m recalling the rather large emporium at Old Spanish Fort Amusement Park, which was called Brown’s Ice Cream Parlor back in the 1920s. The house piano player during the afternoon—before he went to work as the pianist in Piron’s Orchestra at Tranchina’s Restaurant at night—was Steve Lewis, composer of many tunes that Piron made popular. The energetic dancer and blues singer, New Orleans’ Willie Jackson, was the principal entertainer, sometimes the only one. He would later have his singing preserved on commercial records. But J always hoped that one of my visits to Brown’s would coincide with one of the unscheduled appearances of the “Jacobs Candy Man.”
The Jacobs Candy Company was a local manufacturing firm that turned out boxes of quality chocolates, frequently in ornate metal boxes bearing the legend
JACOBS CANDY
“Made Last Night”
Freshness and flavor were their prime selling points. In order to convey this message to the sweet-toothed public, the company employed a song-and-dance man whose function was to visit the city’s many ice cream parlors regularly and do his act, replete with remarks about the excellence of Jacobs Candy, “Made Last Night.” He would pass out samples, and for the young ladies he carried a pocketful of lapel buttons that he’d pin on their dresses or blouses. The buttons said, “Made Last Night.”
A number of entertainers succeeded each other as the Jacobs Candy Man. Among the most noteworthy were songwriter Billy Price Augustin and Al Bernard, whose multiple careers as a composer (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” “Blue Eyed Sally”), TV show host, and vaudevillian earned him great distinction in the world of show business. (Bernard was also the only male singer to perform on records with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.) Another Jacobs Candy Man was Wilbur Leroy, who traveled the theater circuits with his own revue. (He was the uncle of the great jazz pianist, Armand Hug, who called him “Uncle Dewey.”)
I think it was this very same “Uncle Dewey” that I was familiar with. I remember him singing and playing and dancing to “He Was a Nice Boy (But He Ain’t No Relation of Mine)” and “He’s Just a Cousin of Mine.” He played some really hot piano, and Armand would sometimes play little things for me “the way Uncle Dewey did it.”
Bunk Johnson
There may have been a variety of earth-shaking events going on in the world on that particular spring day in 1922, but only one thing mattered in the sun-drenched town of Perryton, Texas. It surely didn’t look as though it were participating in Mr. Coolidge’s prosperity, with its dusty streets and its one-story buildings with two-story fronts. But nevertheless, all its flags were flying, flamboyant bunting was draped over a speakers’ stand, and the mayor was about to open the festivities observing the town’s first anniversary by dedicating the new wooden sidewalks. To help celebrate the gala occasion, a unit of the Greater Holcamp Carnival Shows had set up in the vacant square upon which the optimistic townsfolk proposed to erect a grand City Hall.
I suppose my memory could play tricks on me. I was only six years old, and the lingering images in my recollections could be confused with the sets of Jack Hoxie or Ken Maynard western movies—what with the real Indians on horseback, the cowboys in their big hats, their lariats hung over the pommels of their saddles. I remember very well that most of the cowboys were black and that they fraternized freely with the white ones. I hadn’t yet seen that kind of social phenomenon in my native New Orleans.
My father had acquired ownership of this unit of the Greater Holcamp Carnival Shows, and I do recall a visit from Mr. Greater Holcamp himself, a short, skinny, dyspeptic, youngish man in a golf cap (we call it a golf cap now) and a sweater with leather-reinforced elbows.
One of the feature attractions of this particular carnival was a real blackface minstrel show, complete with tambo and bones, the traditional interlocutor, and the pink top hats and gloves. Best of all though was the band, which consisted of five black New Orleans musicians. The leader’s name was Willie, and he played the trumpet.
The music, of course, wasn’t new to me, but it was a music that never failed to be exciting. I observed early that when this music was played, people listening couldn’t keep still. They were impelled to dance, stomp their feet, and otherwise appear to have lost kinetic control of their appendages.
From time to time, when my parents were off tending to business, Willie would take temporary charge of me. It wasn’t a difficult assignment for him, since I was a sober and sensible six-year-old, reasonable enough to understand that there were surely dozens of things Willie would have preferred to do. We carried on brief, desultory conversations, handicapped by the fact that I found it very difficult to penetrate his dialect. I probably asked him a question or two about the music he played, but I just don’t remember. In any case, a season went by in which I frequently found myself in Willie’s company. I would have to describe the relationship as sedate and uneventful. I still attended every performance of the minstrel show, mainly to listen to the band. I had, by this time, all of the routines and gags in my head, though I had made no effort to commit them to memory.
Back in New Orleans, I resumed my accustomed lifestyle, and I remained endlessly fascinated with the multifaceted French Quarter. I remember feeling considerable relief when I learned that my father had sold the carnival and that I wouldn’t be required to repeat the tour. (Some kids have no sense of adventure.)
Now two dozen years go by. I have, by that time, learned a lot about this music and the people who played it. I had been producing my Journeys Into Jazz concerts for some time, and during 1946 and 1947 I had a regular Friday night series going in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. I did very little advertising, because I had a mailing list of devout followers of the music.
One day I got a call from Bob Maltz, who operated the Stuyvesant Casino in New York, asking me if I’d like to book Bunk Johnson for an appearance at one of my concerts. I had, of course, heard of the old man, since anything that happened in the jazz community of those years became common knowledge almost instantly. We all knew how several months earlier Bill Russell and Fred Ramsey, on a tip from Louis Armstrong, had discovered Bunk working in a canefield in New Iberia, Louisiana. It has become a jazz legend now, how they got Sidney Bechet’s brother Leonard, a dentist, to make Bunk a set of false teeth, how they got him a horn and inaugurated his heralded comeback.
I thought my regular patrons would enjoy having a look at this ancient relic, so I hired him. Naturally, I assumed that very little could be expected of Bunk musically by now, and to be on the safe side, I also engaged Wild Bill Davison to take up any possible slack. The rest of the musicians I called were all New Orleans people, except trombonist Jimmy Archey, who really understood authentic jazz. The o
thers were Albert Nicholas for clarinet, Sam Price for piano (come to think of it, he’s not from New Orleans, either), and Pops Foster for bass. (I never hired anyone else if I could get Pops.) Baby Dodds, my choice for greatest jazz drummer of all time, was present, too.
Anyway, on the night of the concert, perhaps forty minutes before curtain time, this old, old black guy, wearing a brown homburg hat and a long, tightly fitted, long out-of-style overcoat and carrying a trumpet case, walks down the aisle to where I’m standing on the stage. When I saw him I’m sure I must have looked like I’d turned to stone. When I recovered my equanimity, I said, “Willie! What are you doing here?”
“You got to know me a long time to be callin’ me Willie,” he speculated. “Most everybody calls me ‘Bunk.’”
In a matter of seconds I realized that I had undergone dramatic changes in appearance since the time I was six, and I reasoned that it was perfectly logical that Willie—excuse me, Bunk—could fail to recognize me. After settling down to some coherent talk, we discussed who I really was and I saw a flicker of not-too-excited recognition on his face. We marvelled for a moment over the small world, and by this time other members of the ensemble had arrived.
Bunk said to Nick, “Remember we played in that carnival in Texas and Oklahoma in the twenties? You remember the boss had a kid that hung around the jig show?” (Sorry—that’s what they called minstrel shows in that era.)
Nicholas remembered vaguely. Bunk told him I was that kid. My discussion with Nicholas over this bit of history was more animated. I already knew him well, but had no idea he had been the clarinetist in that early venture. As I took another look at him, I found I could match his middle-aged face with that of the twenty-two-year-old from that Texas spring. He then told me, “You know, Dodds, here, was with us in that band.” I was amazed. The whole story was carefully repeated to Baby, who didn’t remember the boss’s kid. He also didn’t remember the boss, the Greater Holcamp Carnival Shows, and was somewhat surprised to learn that he had ever been in Texas. He wasn’t skeptical about it. He just expected other people to remember things for him. (Most of Baby’s life was spent in an unfamiliar galaxy.) Bunk, however, corroborated Baby’s presence on that tour. I was, of course, overwhelmed to learn that these great jazzmen had been part of my childhood.