I Remember Jazz

by Rose, Al;

  Bunk also told me that we had had a one-legged blues singer and guitar player traveling with the show who had achieved a certain success in the music business. I remembered a fellow who answered to that description who was employed to perform in front of the sideshows to attract a crowd. Bunk told me this was Walter “Furry” Lewis of Memphis, the virtuoso of the bottleneck guitar. I had the opportunity to check that report out with Furry in later years when he came to stay at my house in New Orleans while filling a musical engagement. Amazingly, it checked out.

  The concert that evening was beautiful. I got to record some of it on wire. It includes Wild Bill and Bunk playing together. Paul Mares turned up gratuitously for the session and was on stage with his horn. I thought he was playing along, but the playback reveals no trace of his sound. I played it for Joe Mares, too, but he could detect no trace of his talented brother's presence, either.

  After the concert, Bunk and Nick and I went to Billy Yancey’s to eat, and we talked about Bunk's revival. He had proved to be articulate and outspoken. Apparently my ear had matured sufficiently to be able to follow his speech patterns. Most musicians are careful to speak no evil about their fellow performers. Not so Bunk.

  So now I’m stuck with this band. They got me a trombone player, Jim Robinson. I swear he come out of some Hawaiian band. He don’t know but three changes and he don’t always make them in the right place—and he don’t wanna learn nothin’ new! You ever hear of a musician like that? An’ a clarinet player! George Lewis, he knows how to play a little blues an’ that’s all. Like you see Nick here? He hears the harmony. You play him a lead, he plays you the harmony. But that guy? Them people, Russell and them, they found him an’ I’m stuck with him. ‘Course, Baby’s okay. The li’l bass player got a good enough beat, but he don’t make no changes. It might as well be a drum. I got ’em to get me a white boy, Don Ewell, to play the piano. He’s a shark. The guy that come up here with me, Alton Purnell, is okay, too, but he really don’t know the basics. I really enjoyed comin’ here to play for you tonight. Real musicians. An’ it was good to see ol’ George again. [George Baquet, the great New Orleans clarinetist of jazz’s earliest days, had come backstage to say hello to his old colleagues.]

  I had occasion to see and talk with Bunk several more times before he died in 1949. I suppose he represented my earliest personal association with a New Orleans jazz musician. The four or five times I heard him in live performance before an audience, I came to understand his stature as a trumpeter and leader. His records reveal very little of his actual ability. They couldn’t and didn’t demonstrate the extent of his inventiveness, the firmness and facility with which his dominant lead drove the ensemble.

  I also came to understand that for the most part his musical objectives had little in common with those of the musicians who had been assigned to make up his band. “People don’t want to hear those same old numbers all the time. ‘Panama,’ ‘Muskrat Ramble,’ you know, ‘When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.’ When I come up, we learned the new tunes soon as they come out. Musicians got to move with the times. Can’t keep playin’ the same thing all the time. People don’t want that. They want to hear the new songs.”

  Not what I expected to hear from the dean of New Orleans jazz trumpet players.

  Edmond Souchon

  Over the phone, he said: “Man, I do believe my family’s tryin’ to kill me! I promised Marie [pronounced with a flat a and with the accent on the first syllable] I was gonna take her for a visit to California, and I swear, I’m too sick to go. I’m not over this damn flu yet. And it’s not only my wife! My daughter Dolly Ann, too. They say, ‘Get out in that California sunshine! It’ll do you good. You’ll feel better.’ All that kind of stuff. Even my brother Harry is after me to go to California. I’m not well enough to go to California—or anyplace.”

  I happened to know there were good reasons for Sou not to want to go to California right then. Of course, he’d promised to go and he’d keep the promise if the ladies in his family insisted. I suspected, though, that he was using his recent bout with the flu to try to postpone the vacation. I said, treacherously, “Might be a good idea. The change could do you good.”

  “You, too, you son of a bitch?” he demanded. “You’re all tryin’ to kill me.”

  The problem was, of course, that we were all in on a secret we were keeping from Sou. He and Marie were to be the guests of Karl Kramer, one of the founders of the Music Corporation of America (MCA). Karl was to take him on a tour of the CBS studios and, once there, to steer him through a door that would bring him on stage and camera, face to face with Ralph Edwards, as the guest of honor on “This Is Your Life.” An all-star jazz band, including Eddie Condon and Muggsy Spanier, had been summoned to abet Sou’s musical efforts, and I was one of the people the CBS researchers had contacted to help supply data and photographs. I was, of course, sworn to secrecy, because it was supposed to come as a complete surprise to Sou when the host said, “Doctor Edmond Souchon—This Is Your Life!”

  I wasn’t one of the people invited to make the trek to California, so I stayed home and watched on television. I saw the show open on a semidarkened hallway at CBS. Walking slowly in the hall were Sou and Karl. I saw Karl put his hand on a doorknob to open it, and I saw Doc lean toward him and say something the TV audience couldn’t hear. Then Karl opened the door onto the TV stage where Sou, in the brilliant glare of the Kleig lights, stood nonplussed, realizing suddenly, I’m sure, the cause of the strange conduct of his family and friends during the preceding week or so.

  Well, Sou did what he was supposed to do. He was affable and friendly, though I noticed he seemed ill at ease, a state in which he was rarely to be found. Nevertheless, he played his banjo and guitar, he sang, he listened as the host recounted the fact that he had dragged ten thousand infants, kicking and screaming, into this world. He accepted the accolades and the deluxe souvenir scrap book graciously. Then the show was over.

  A week or so later we met for lunch at Commander’s Palace to discuss the publication of our joint venture, New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album, for which we would ultimately win the Louisiana Book Award. I congratulated him on the tribute the TV show had paid him, and I commented that he hadn’t looked as happy on camera as I would have expected. “You seemed uncomfortable,” I said.

  “How the hell would you feel?” he demanded. “You saw right at the beginning—before Karl opened the door—you saw me lean over to him and say something?”

  I recalled that I had noticed that.

  Sou explained, “What I said to him was, ‘Is it possible that in this whole damn place they don’t have a men’s room?’”

  Sou and I were natural collaborators. Both of us accepted a leisurely approach to work. We shared our musical interests, produced happy LP’s together, stood in for each other as speakers. We’d call each other to pass along the news when some out-of-town jazzman was coming in, and together we’d do what we could to help him have a pleasant visit. We went to the ragtime festival in St. Louis in 1967, and I had the pleasure of hearing him perform a blues that I had written, to tumultuous applause. That took place on the riverboat Goldenrod, which has a rather large, conventional theater where melodramas are frequently presented. Sou sang “Mindin’ Your Business Blues,” which I wrote just for him and which he recorded a number of times. When he came to the last lines,

  I didn’t rob no money—it wasn’t nothin’ that I done—

  I just give a gal some lovin’ when she didn’t crave it none.

  it brought down the house. I’d like to think it was my deathless lyric that did it, but more likely it was Sou’s irresistible delivery.

  The two of us visited many ailing jazz greats in their last days. I remember when we left little Monk Hazel for the last time, Sou said, “There goes another one. Pretty soon it’ll only be you and me.”

  When I wrote the book Storyville, New Orleans, he proved to have genuinely reliable firsthand recollections of the red-light district. An
d he was also able to direct me to people even more intimately involved with it, though he made me promise not to tell Marie about the misdeeds of his youth.

  Not too long before he died Sou put together a fascinating autobiography, including a substantial selection of excellent photographs. He gave it to me to read before submitting it for publication. Because I’m interested in the social history of New Orleans, the book mesmerized me. But by the time I was finished I realized that he’d had virtually nothing to say about jazz or his role in it. The manuscript was the entertaining memoir of a successful physician—not exactly what the mass market was likely to storm the local bookshop for. In discussing the work I made this point, suggesting strongly that Sou add a great deal of material about his life in jazz. I myself was aware of and a witness to a variety of reportable events.

  But Sou was hardheaded, never morbidly addicted to sweet reason. He sent the memoir to a publisher that found in it the same shortcomings I had. Pettishly, he suggested that I had raised these questions in their minds, though as a matter of fact I had never discussed the project with this publisher.

  I did write a long piece about him in Second Line entitled “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz A La Creole.” (Second Line is the quarterly magazine published by the New Orleans Jazz Club.) Because of its fascinating subject, the article brought in more mail than the publication had ever received in response to a single article.

  Sou died in August, 1968, just a few months after our New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album was published. He had been ailing—though hiding the fact—through all the time the volume was in progress. When we planned it, both of us conceived of it as a tax shelter. We reasoned that the processing costs for our photographic collections would be high enough to insure a substantial loss. It seemed obvious to us that the work could never return in royalties anything like what it cost us to deliver it. To everybody’s surprise, our first period royalties ran into the thousands, and Sou said, “Now it’s really gonna cost us!”

  Both the second, enlarged, revised edition of 1978 and the even more revised and enlarged edition of 1984 continued to carry Edmond Souchon’s name alongside mine. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  Pee Wee Spitlera

  Only recently someone told me that Pee Wee Spitlera had retired. Retired? That little child, retired? Why it was only yesterday….

  He had a distinguished career as a clarinetist to Jumbo (Al Hirt) and developed a following of his own not only in Jumbo’s Bourbon Street nightclub, but among the TV audiences that noticed there was something special in the tone of this roly-poly little fellow whose every note was pure New Orleans.

  Okay. So he’s retired. After all, I just looked up his age and he is forty-six. I suppose he saved his money while the pay was good. I suppose he made a few decent investments. Why not? Why shouldn’t he retire?

  I think back to 1954. In those days at 112 Royal Street in New Orleans, on the second floor, there was a place called the “Parisian Room” where the proprietor, trumpet player Tony Almerico, hosted a regular Saturday afternoon jam session to which jazz fans across the nation had become addicted, since they could tune it in on 50,000 watt, clear-channel WWL, which conducted a weekly live broadcast of the proceedings. Pee Wee then had a nice tone for a sixteen-year-old, and Tony would let him sit in with the band until the broadcast started. There were top musicians on those shows—Jack Delaney, Deacon Loyacano, even, before he died, Fazola. People like Stanley Mendelson or Bob Doyle might be on piano. Usually Tony stomped things off at tempos that were too fast to make for the best jazz, but it was a good-time place and a good-time party. It was always fun.

  We used to tease Pee Wee because, even though he had reached the advanced age of sixteen, he looked closer to eleven. He never had any smart comebacks. He’d just look at you with those big, wide eyes and apply himself to blowing the best horn he could.

  The first week that Tony Parenti came back to town after an absence of two decades, Almerico called me and asked if I’d bring the master clarinetist up to his radio talk show. I said I thought Parenti would do that, and later Parenti agreed. We went up there and spent an hour on the air, talking about old times and listening to records. Then on Saturday, I was in the French Quarter with Parenti, eating oysters at the Acme, and I suggested we go around the corner to the Parisian Room for the jam session. I thought Tony might enjoy meeting some of his old friends. So we went up and walked in. Pee Wee, his eyes shut, was wailing away on some war horse. Just as the number was over, I brought Parenti up to the low bandstand. He shook hands with bass player Joe Loyacano, an old friend, and greeted others he knew. We came to where Pee Wee was standing. He had never seen Parenti, of course. The maestro had been gone too long. But like every young New Orleans clarinet hopeful, he knew the name and was familiar with all the Parenti records.

  I was saying, “Tony, this little kid is Pee Wee Spitlera—and Pee Wee, I know you’ll be happy to shake hands with Tony Parenti.” Pee Wee’s reaction was instantaneous. With a motion quick enough to rival the great Houdini, he whisked his clarinet behind his back so Parenti wouldn’t think he’d have the presumption to attempt to play it in the great man’s presence.

  Parenti was at his benign best. He chuckled at Pee Wee’s ingenuousness and said, “Don’t worry, kid. You sound good. I heard the last chorus you played and you’re okay—and you’re gonna be even better. Now on the next number, you and I are gonna play a little duet. You know ‘Cecilia’?”

  Pee Wee knew it and Tony made arrangements with the band. “Now you just play the melody, kid. Don’t let anything get you off the melody. And then don’t worry. You’ll see. It’ll sound great.”

  So the grand master of New Orleans clarinet and the new kid got into it. Pee Wee didn’t feel like he was doing anything but it sounded like the angels, and I always had the feeling the kid learned a lot from the five minutes they were on the stand together. The audience, naturally, was ecstatic. Later Pee Wee told me, “I always thought a great man like that would be, well—hard to get to know. But he’s just like anybody else. Whew! I was scared to be standin’ there alongside him and tryin’ to play!”

  And that’s the little kid who has just retired?

  Morten Gunnar Larsen

  Morten Gunnar Larsen is one of the great jazz and ragtime pianists in the world. His only problem is that he lives in Norway, apparently on purpose. Now in his mid-twenties, he devotes himself to concert work in Europe, playing mainly the works of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

  On his first visit to the United States in the late 1970s, he spoke virtually no English. But at a party at my place in New Orleans in honor of Eubie Blake, he melted the ladies with a dazzling smile, European manners, and general modesty.

  Morten was overwhelmed with the excitement of meeting Eubie in person. I told Eubie this nineteen-year-old was a piano shark. Morten was reluctant to demonstrate his abilities before the legendary composer and virtuoso, but we overcame his diffidence, though not without difficulty. He opened with Eubie’s challenging “Charleston Rag,” which was composed in 1899 with the express motive of “cutting” all his contemporaries in piano competition. Eubie would later say he didn’t think he, himself, had ever rendered the piece so flawlessly. With urging, Morten continued to play for most of the afternoon. Eubie never moved, but at last he said, “I been waitin’ all day for this kid to make a mistake, but he never did.”

  Danny Barker

  Anytime I get back to New Orleans after having been away for an appreciable time, there are a few people I check in with—first to satisfy myself that they’re all right and second to find out what’s going on. One of these is my old and valued friend, Danny Barker, one of jazz’s great musician-entertainers.

  There has been a rumor afloat for years in the jazz world that Danny Barker is an outstanding writer, and I happen to know that’s true. I have had the opportunity to read through his unpublished manuscripts, and I can enthusiastically report that he
’s as good a teller of tales as I’ve read. Danny turned all that stuff over to me in the hope that I could help him sort it out and put it into the initial stages of preparation for submission to publishers. I have also personally brought the material to two publishers, both of whom were delighted with the material and with Danny’s often hilarious literary style. The reason you’ve never gotten to read any of this material is that nothing ever gets finished.

  I spent a lot of time with Danny, explaining the differences between primary and secondary sources. I pointed out to him that he is himself a primary source, as is demonstrated by the frequency with which he is quoted (and sometimes credited) in books by other people. Together we fished out of his pile of writings all of what was written in the first person, with a view toward putting together a volume based entirely on his own personal recollections and experiences. Together we drew up a table of contents. I suggested to him that if he would finish each memoir he had begun, he’d wind up with a very publish-able book. But it’s one of Danny’s weaknesses that every yarn reminds him of something else he wants to tell. So he wanders off into delightful and brilliant development of one more unfinished tale. Nobody can write finishes on Danny’s yarns because only he knows how they end. I keep hoping that he’ll grasp the simple principle involved and go on to produce what will become a gem in the literature of jazz. He also has exceptional skill in writing historical fiction based on the early New Orleans scene, sometimes using characters drawn directly from life. He has clearly mastered the techniques for bringing his people to life. I remain confident that some day he’ll bring it off.