by Rose, Al;
In New Orleans in 1976, he made two 90-minute documentaries, entitled New Orleans Bien Aimée, in which I had the great pleasure of participating. We were brought together by John Shoup, a modern show business impresario who owns the Dukes’ Place atop the Monte-leone Hotel. I was impressed at once by Averty’s enthusiasm and joie de vivre. His carefree attitude made me, just for a moment, suspect him of being too frivolous to produce a quality tape. As he said goodbye to his young and beautiful wife, Yvaline, when we started our first day of shooting at the hotel, I watched him counting hundred dollar bills into her hand so that she could shop. He may have been up to fourteen or fifteen when he suddenly stopped, looked doubtful, and then said, “That’s enough for a young girl for one morning.”
As Averty set up his shots at the various locations, as he yelled confusing instructions to the driver of the car—or later to the pilot of the helicopter—it appeared to me that his approach to this job was anarchic, to say the least. It didn’t appear that there was any rhyme or reason to his procedures and methods. Nevertheless, I couldn’t fail to notice the loyalty and enthusiasm of his crew. It also became apparent that they were fearful of his wrath should they fail to carry out his instructions in the most precise detail. My experience has taught me, though, that creative people are exceptionally demanding in these matters.
During the fall of that year, Averty engaged me to translate New Orleans Bien Aimée into English and to do the voice-over for American consumption. There, in his Paris studio on the rue des Alouettes, I had the opportunity to view the dazzling results of his visit to New Orleans. There had been no way to predict, from the apparent chaos of his activities there, the magnificence of the final product.
While we were watching the finished show in French, Charles Aznavour interrupted us by coming into the studio and explaining to Averty that Channel 3 wanted him for an hour special. He had told them he didn’t want to do it unless Averty directed. Jean Christophe tried to tell him tactfully that he had no time available in which to do this, but the diminutive singer wouldn’t take no for an answer. The discussion reached a crescendo, with Averty showing symptoms of apoplexy. He seemed on the verge of picking Aznavour up bodily and throwing his tiny figure down the stairs, which would not have represented a difficult physical feat. Initial cordiality vanished and the shouting match ended with Averty having the final word, “Be careful not to pull your socks up or you won’t be able to see your way out!”
On an afternoon my wife and I spent with the Avertys in his apartment, he showed me his research files on New Orleans jazz musicians. Carefully stored on index cards is information which, incredibly, traces the day-to-day activities and appearances of hundreds of jazzmen. I saw his extensive correspondence with Nick Larocca and Tom Brown and his newly acquired memorabilia of Josephine Baker, with album after album of fascinating unpublished photographs. We decided that we’d collaborate on a book. Friends had told me that Averty was not dependable, that he developed and abandoned enthusiasms with equal suddenness, that he had so overextended himself that he could no longer be accepted as responsible.
In 1980 at seven o’clock one morning, the phone rang in my New Orleans study. (I am frequently hard at work at the typewriter by that hour.) A voice said, “Al? Al Rose?”
I said I was Al Rose, and the voice continued, “Averty. This is Averty.”
I asked him how he was. He asked, “Are you going to be at your phone for the next five minutes?” I told him I had no plan to leave.
He said, “I’m going to call you right back in five minutes. Please stay there.” Then he hung up.
That was almost seven years ago, and I haven’t heard from him.
Eddie Miller
I never had much professional contact with Eddie Miller, because I have always abjured the use of that deplorable device, the saxophone, in recording or concert work. I understand their function in swing bands, or as replacement parts to be fitted under sinks. But when it comes to music I am convinced the saxophone should revert to the original purpose for which its inventor, Adolph Sax, created it—as a cure for asthma.
Collectors know, though, that Eddie Miller was a superior clarinet player, good enough to help folks overlook his one big vice. They remember him playing “High Society” on that Mound City Blue Blowers record and are aware that on some of those Bob Crosby sides, it’s Eddie playing clarinet rather than Fazola or Matty Matlock, both of whom were in that band.
Eddie was in New Orleans for several years during the 1970s, playing in Pete Fountain’s band, getting a good press and attracting a lot of cash customers to Pete’s Place on Bourbon Street. This was during a period when I had recording commitments to meet and had just lost some of my favorite clarinet players to the Celestial All-Stars. Johnny Wiggs and I were sitting in my studio, suggesting names to each other and realizing how close we were to the bottom of the barrel. Because of this lack, I would close down my jazz recording activities shortly thereafter. But right then I had to produce a record for the state of Louisiana. Suddenly I thought of Eddie Miller.
“My God!” Johnny said. “I don’t know if it’s fair to ask a man to pick up a clarinet after all these years and expect him to sound decent on such short notice. Anyway, I doubt he’d accept.”
“You think he can resist if I tell him who’s on the session? You and Jack Delaney and Chink Martin? And Armand Hug, Danny Barker? And with Louis Barbarin on drums? I’ll bet he’ll give it a shot.”
I called and left a message for Eddie to call me when he got home. He returned the call while Johnny was still with me. I outlined the project. He told me he still had his clarinet, but explained that he hadn’t touched it in maybe twenty-five years. He said he’d spend a couple of hours with it and if he felt he couldn’t cut it he’d call and let me know.
The next day he decided he could handle it, so I called the session for my favorite recording room, the Esplanade Room of the Royal Orleans Hotel. It’s really a happy sight to see old friends reunite for another go at their favorite music. The shared affection was so apparent among these hometown kids that I was convinced everything would work out well on the LP.
Eddie and I had never known each other in New Orleans, though we had met and talked in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. At the session, I think he was surprised to learn that I, too, was a New Orleans kid. That knowledge may have relaxed him.
I told the band the tunes I wanted and included Eddie's own composition, “Lazy Mood,” which he’d recorded on tenor sax with Bob Crosby a quarter-century earlier, in 1939. Even Eddie acknowledged it sounded so much better on clarinet. And, of course, Armand Hug’s incomparable presence enhanced the piece even further.
Through the session, Eddie’s clarinet sounded like he’d never been away from it. That liquid, pervasive tone he’d been developing from the time he won a newsboys’ clarinet contest sponsored by the New Orleans Item at the age of eleven seemed at the peak of its power and appeal—the essence of the Crescent City sound that reaches its crest in this instrument. I considered the session a personal triumph for him and for me. Needless to say, it was received critically with the highest praise, and the other musicians on the date were ecstatic.
Raymond Burke
Philosophy is a very personal matter and you wouldn’t expect to learn it from a jazz musician, but I must admit that my own attitudes toward life and my perspective on people have been discernibly modified by observing at close range Raymond Burke’s approaches to life and art. Raymond, as every jazz fan knows, lives in New Orleans, plays the clarinet, and collects things. His formal schooling has been minimal. His accent is the one that is common to New Orleans’ pure, easily identifiable working-class culture.
His fabulous wife Catherine babies him, treats him as though he were made of some easily soluble substance that requires watchfulness and exceptional care. “Put your little shoes on, Raymond,” she tells him gently before watching him, with great apprehension, go off into the night air to play
somewhere. He takes it all for granted, maybe even feeling the need for her solicitousness and management.
Raymond is one of the very few New Orleans jazzmen who has never done anything else for a living but play jazz. He can’t imagine anybody doing anything else. One time the two of us were sitting and fishing under the Huey Long Bridge in the Mississippi River’s battures (Raymond pronounces it “batches”), silently gaping at the ripples in the water. I say “silently.” I mean without speaking. Raymond whistled as he often does—obscure ancient melodies he and I and very few other people know. “Love Dreams,” “Peculiar Rag,” things like that. I came to understand his unique attitude toward the music when he commented, after perhaps a half-hour of no conversation, “You know, a fella’s got to do an awful lot of funny things for a livin’ if he don’t play.”
For several years, in the 1960s, Raymond owned and operated a rabais shop on Bourbon Street, right below St. Ann. I had a long article about this in the Second Line. It was widely reprinted around the world. I explained in the article that rabais is not quite junk. It’s not necessarily antiques, because the things are not necessarily old. It’s just stuff the owner collected because he wanted to. Raymond hadn’t especially wanted to run a rabais shop. But Catherine, in the interests of sanitation, had demanded that he clean out his private room. And since the stuff was too valuable to throw out—well, he just rented this tiny store (which had neither window nor electricity, and could thus only operate during bright daylight hours) and moved all his stuff into it. The stuff occupied the entire floor, was totally inaccessible even to him, much less a prospective customer. If somebody came in and asked whether he had, say, a flugelhorn mouthpiece, he’d know if he did or not, but the process of finding it involved moving his entire stock out into the street until he came to it. Of course, if he didn’t like the looks of the person making the inquiry, he’d just shake his head and say, “I don’t b’leeve.”
Sometimes a jazz musician on his way up the street to work or rehearse would stop to talk to him, or maybe sit with him on one of the unsteady chairs he kept on the sidewalk for such visitors. Maybe Santo Pecora or Frank Assunto would tell him to get his clarinet and the two of them would sit for a while and harmonize. I’ve heard some great music standing in front of Raymond’s place.
Always reluctant to leave town for any reason, he has in recent years come to know the joys of travel. I was astonished one evening, watching the CBS evening news, to see Raymond performing in the Soviet Union with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. When I got back to New Orleans and asked Raymond if he’d enjoyed the trip, he answered, “That’s a funny place. Nobody speaks English.”
Recording Raymond poses a variety of unusual problems, not the least of which is that he bobs and weaves in all directions—rarely toward the microphone—all the time that he’s playing. You can’t signal to him, because he always plays with his eyes tightly shut. Trying to follow him around with a hand-held mike is futile, because his twists and turns aren’t predictable. And that’s not all. No matter what the tune or the circumstance, Raymond never comes in on the first note. If you’re looking for your trumpet, trombone, and clarinet to come in with a hard, united attack on that first note, forget it. If you remonstrate with him he’ll say, “What is this—a readin’ band?”
You just have to recognize the session to accommodate what Raymond will or will not do. If you feel that on a particular piece the effect would be better if the instruments stayed in their conventional ranges with the trumpet in the middle, the trombone on the bottom, and the clarinet on top, you suggest to him that he play this ensemble in the high register. He might do that and he might not. Still his artistry and creativeness are of such a high order that you’re sometimes tempted to scrap your own plan and proceed according to Raymond’s whims. It might not turn out exactly like you wanted it, but it’s still going to be great.
Raymond learned, apparently early in life, that there are a whole lot of things you really just don’t have to do. I’ve seen him sit on a stage as a guest of honor for an out-of-town jazz club, getting ready to play a concert. Raymond’s ritual in getting ready includes winding string around the doweling of the parts of his clarinet, arranging rubber bands to compensate for springs that no longer react to the touch, and making infinite adjustments on his reed. So there he sat, watching a person carrying an enormous baritone sax onto the stand. He was followed by another worthy pushing a vibraphone from the wings. As Raymond watched the proceedings with what appeared to be a blank stare, I observed that he was taking his instrument apart and replacing it in the case. When it was properly packed—and while the radio announcer was reviewing his career and extolling his musical achievements, Raymond left the stage and came up the center aisle, signaling to Joe Mares and me that he was ready to go home. We went outside, and he was already seated in the car by the time we got there. We started for home.
Meanwhile, on the car radio, we could hear the announcer continuing to sing Raymond’s praises, unaware that the star had left. As we drove toward New Orleans, I commented to Raymond that a lot of people would be disappointed when they discovered he wasn’t going to play.
“They asked me to come up there and play some jazz. If they don’t know you can’t play jazz on that junk, they ain’t ready to listen to me.”
Raymond and Catherine came to visit me for an extended stay in Key Largo, where Raymond looked forward to keeping his fishing line in the water during every waking hour.
Now, my dock was a fisherman’s paradise. The water abounded with snapper, grouper, grunts, sharks, tarpon—about every known variety of southern fish. The first day we sat out there for many hours getting sunburned. I had caught a half-dozen or so nice pan fish—just enough for lunch. But Raymond just kept losing bait and not landing anything. When I examined the way he had rigged his line, it was obvious he had done it in a way that was sure not to catch a fish. He never expressed any curiosity about why I was catching ’em and he wasn’t. Still, as the hours wore on, I thought I was detecting some signs of frustration in his mien.
At last I told him he wasn’t rigged properly and suggested that he might improve his luck by attaching it in accordance with conventional practice for these waters. I explained that these fish didn’t act like the tchoupics and sac-à-lait of our native swamps.
He shook his head and told me, “I like to fish like this.”
Spencer Williams
September was still hot in 1880 New Orleans, though not as bad at Number 3 South Basin Street, because that was a wide, tree-lined boulevard. It was already known for its massive houses of ill-fame such as those presided over by Kate Townsend and Hattie Hamilton. Number 3, though, was a less pretentious structure, flimsily built of clapboard, in a complex of four such buildings. It was just a few steps from Canal Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. The railway depot was just on the opposite side of Canal. Therefore the four brothels occupied an ideal location for their economic purposes. Single men, arriving by train, didn’t have far to go—just across the street—to be accommodated.
The proprietress of the establishment was a twenty-year-old black chippie whose name was Bessie V. Williams. On this particular fall afternoon, she was depressed because of the heat, because the living room was a mess, and because she was pregnant, a condition not conducive to potential prosperity in her line of work. “My God!” she said to herself, “If Loula hadn’t come to New Orleans to help out, there’s no telling how all this would resolve itself.” Loula and Bessie had had the same mother back in Selma, Alabama, on the plantation where they’d grown up. In those days, where black girls were involved, nobody cared who their father was. Bessie said she couldn’t properly remember what slavery was like.
The son she gave birth to the next month, on October 14, to be precise, was Spencer Williams. Loula went on to international notoriety as Lulu White, proprietress of Mahogany Hall and New Orleans’ whore queen. Spencer never tried to hide this part of his past, though as an adult he
never told the truth if he could help it. When he did, it was hard to separate it from the lies. I knew him slightly in New York, years before he died and before events led me to undertake to write his biography.
When I first met him in 1946, it was in a dressing room normally used by main-event prize fighters in Madison Square Garden. He was on the endless talent list performing for the Pittsburgh Courier Charities annual fund drive, and I was sharing emcee duties with such distinguished colleagues as Manhattan disc jockey Freddie Robbins and Harlem’s Symphony Sid. This was a 24-hour marathon function, and our shift was on about two in the morning. I was sitting on a rub-down table with lyricist Andy Razaf (“Memories of You,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose”). Also present was a thin man I took to be a professional animal trainer, since he had a mean looking monster on a leash. This beast was Billie Holiday’s boxer, which went everywhere she went. Billie cared not a tittle for the apprehension of persons into whose environment she had this feral canine herded. Also present were the super ragtime pianist Luckey Roberts and Dan Burley, the piano playing editor of Harlem’s Amsterdam News. Sissle and Blake had done their turns and gone. Billie was on stage; Herb Jeffries was waiting in the wings. Spencer sat on one of the two leather chairs. He was a huge, well-groomed elderly man of vaguely professorial mien, a type you’d never imagine telling a lie or otherwise compromising his dignity. I had just introduced myself and asked him what he was going to play. He said he’d do a few of his most famous hits. In fifteen minutes we could easily have presented “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,” and “I Found a New Baby.” He said if we had time for an encore he’d do “Basin Street Blues.”