I Remember Jazz

by Rose, Al;

  Billie Holiday never cared about the time. She was into a second encore, and we knew the crowd wouldn’t let her get off stage without singing “Strange Fruit.” It gave me time to ask Spencer some questions to satisfy my own interest. I asked him where he’d gone to school in New Orleans. He was obviously an educated man and had a polished manner not inconsistent with his having spent so much of his life abroad in London, Paris, and Stockholm. He told me he had attended the Arthur P. Williams School and St. Charles University. I told him I’d gone to St. Aloysius, and he seemed interested to learn that I, too, was a native of New Orleans. Neither of us knew, needless to say, that someday I would undertake to write his biography and in the process learn that New Orleans never had a St. Charles University and that the Arthur P. Williams School came into existence several years after he’d left town. He told me he was born in 1880. (Earlier, he told a Swedish interviewer he’d been born in 1889.)

  Having no reason to doubt his veracity, I took this misinformation down in my notebook. He told me he liked living in Europe, that he was going right back, and that in 1936 he’d married an English lass. Meanwhile, Billie finished her set and came back to claim her beast and his handler. I told Spencer to wait while I introduced Jeffries. I told him he’d be next.

  When the famed singer had finished, I announced that the celebrated composer, Spencer Williams, was coming out and that he’d play some of his most successful pieces. In fact, he didn’t play at all. Someone else I hadn’t yet seen appeared from nowhere, sat at the piano, and began to play as Spencer began to sing in his full, clear tenor the “Basin Street Blues.” After that he performed a number of pieces I’d never heard, pieces he was “plugging.” He did about twelve minutes of unrepresentative tunes, then he walked off stage, saying to me in passing, “We never got to talk much about New Orleans. Let’s do that sometime.”

  As a matter of fact we did do that the following year in the same place, at the same time, under the same auspices. And he told me an entirely different set of lies.

  Pierre Atlan

  There are always people that you consider lifelong friends, people who seem as though they’re part of the family. Even when your com- munication may be grossly irregular, you never cease to be concerned about and interested in their welfare. For me, Pierre Atlan and his wife Michele are part of my gallery of saints. They have enriched my life, though on at least one occasion, I thought Pierre was about to bring mine to an abrupt halt.

  Anyone unfortunate enough to have been driven on one of the French super highways by a Parisian sees his life pass quickly before his eyes many times. I discovered that my own takes thirty-seven seconds, and in the five-hour drive from Paris to Deauville I watched enough reruns to put me in a coma. Atlan likes to cruise at 200 kilometers an hour, and he adds a sporting challenge by carrying on animated conversations with people in the back seat, frequently turning to look them in the eye while pressing harder on the accelerator. Michele, tense and troubled, keeps screaming “attention!” and “regardez!” But Atlan behaves as though these words are synonyms for “faster.”

  We were headed for the Normandy coast, where Atlan and the High Society Jazz Band were booked to play a college graduation party at the Deauville Casino. Besides the Atlans, there were three passengers: Pierre Merlin, the band’s cornetist, about whom this is far too little to say—wait until later; my wife Diana; and someone I had always thought of as Fearless Al Rose. I suppose it was because from time to time a car passed us that I continued to feel I was still clinging to a thread of life. My concern was heightened by Merlin’s decision to be let out somewhere, to travel the rest of the way by train. This is not to say there was no relief. Michele had planned well, and we found ourselves leaving the highway and gliding into a driveway that turned out to belong to a chalet in which we were to discover the reason for the world fame of Normandy’s cheeses and pâtés.

  We arrived intact, incredibly, and had dinner in what appeared to be a private house. We went up to the second floor, where we found the rest of the band waiting. Merlin had made it faster on his own, and we were delighted to see the lovely Martine Morel, who played the piano in the band, as well as Claude Rabanat and the others—I wish I could remember them all.

  The evening in the casino was exciting. Claude Boiling and his orchestra had also been booked. This huge, overwhelming organization—I counted twenty-two pieces—was playing arrangements that made Stan Kenton sound like a barbershop quartet. I’d have loved to hear Boiling play some of the rags I knew he could do in his virtuosic extravagance, but the nature of the event precluded that kind of performance.

  Michele and Diana, at one point, repaired to the ladies’ room, and en route, Diana found a gambling chip. She picked it up, of course, but since games of chance have never played a part in either of our lives, she had to be guided to the roulette table and instructed by Michele in the procedure for breaking the bank. How nice it would be to report that she had parlayed this plastic disc into a huge fortune. Alas, she lost it on the first spin of the wheel. The band, as usual, played superbly.

  I had first met Atlan and Merlin when they visited New Orleans, quite a long time ago—I can’t date it exactly. I know that from the middle 1950s they had shared an intense interest in railroad trains, along with their confrere, the Super-clarinetist Claude Luter. The three of them, working together, had built a train layout in Atlan’s huge apartment in the Eighth Arrondissement. The room was 55 × 12. Atlan, an aircraft engineer, was the designer of Air France’s Mercure, that airlines medium-sized plane. Merlin, a graphic artist of considerable talent, professionally created TV show sets, primarily for Jean Christophe Averty.

  By the time these two came to New Orleans, they had already determined that a train layout was not enough. A properly run railroad obviously needed a setting, a depot for the train to end its run in, that sort of thing. What, then, could be more appropriate for two authentic jazz musicians than to have the train run up Basin Street and come to a halt in the Canal Street Station?

  It was common knowledge in New Orleans that in the process of preparing my book Storyville, New Orleans for publication, I had accumulated many rare photographs and other graphic material. Atlan and Merlin located me to see if I could and would make available to them whatever I had that could abet their project. I did, of course, supply them with a bundle of what they needed, intrigued with the idea. After they got back to Paris I heard from them occasionally, with requests for information and other graphic material. I complied as well as I could, but the whole matter faded from my memory. Diana and I went to Paris twice in 1976. The first time it was just for a week, but the Atlans insisted that despite our busy schedule, we must come to see what they were working on. We were somewhat handicapped by the fact that we had been involved in a plane crash at Kennedy Airport on the flight from New Orleans and had had to leave the plane on one of those inflatable escape chutes. Diana had fractured her heel in the process and was functioning with wheelchair and cane.

  But we did make it up to the fourth floor walk-up to this magnificent 16-room apartment. When we were admitted to the room that housed “le layout,” I was dumbfounded. There before me, in the smallest commercial scale, lay the entire 1917 city of New Orleans in unbelievable detail. The L & N and the T & P ran on their proper tracks. The Barracks Street ferry came across a real river from Algiers and docked itself in the right dock. I was speechless.

  For two years afterward I made a Herculean effort to effect a deal between Merlin and Atlan and the City of New Orleans, to bring the dazzling artifact to what I thought of as its proper permanent home. I got Mayor Moon Landrieu to visit Atlan’s apartment to see this work of art. Everybody loved it. In my plan I had it earmarked for Armstrong Park, for which I had been retained by the city to create a use program. That plan never materialized, for various reasons—at least one of which must be the same as what caused the bronze historical plaque in the entrance to display the wrong date for Satch’s demise. Anyway, t
here was a gorgeous TV documentary done on “le layout,” which is, alas, still in Paris instead of in New Orleans where it belongs.

  The night before we left Paris, Michele gave an unforgettable dinner party for us. At Averty’s suggestion, Atlan performed two routines for us which will live forever in our memories among the greatest comedy acts we’ve ever seen. In one, Atlan does the entire opera “Faust,” singing all the parts, doing sound effects, the orchestra, the intermission announcements, and the critical commentary. For an encore he recited the names of every local railroad station on the line from Paris to Bordeaux and return. He did it with expression, rhythm changes, and a variety of intonation. We could never have expected these hidden wells of genius. Averty, who had seen the act hundreds of times, literally rolled on the floor in infantile glee. Michele, not yet inured to this excruciatingly funny performance, made no attempt to restrain her laughter. As for us, we laughed the whole eight thousand miles to home.

  Claude Luter

  Claude Luter, in the area of authentic jazz, is Europe’s foremost musician. His name is a household word in Paris, but unfamiliar, for the most part, to American fans and even collectors. One reason for this is that he has never performed in this country; in fact, he has only been in the United States once in his life.

  In 1979 I received a call at my New Orleans home from Time-Life Records. This organization frequently issues record sets centering on our foremost jazz stars—Jelly Roll Morton, Eddie Lang, and others. The lady on the telephone explained that Time-Life was about to produce a Sidney Bechet set of LP’s. Since I had cooperated with them before on earlier projects, she had called to ask if I had any data and/or photographs that might be useful. She also said that they’d been trying for many weeks to locate Luter in Europe, and she wondered if I had any idea where he was.

  “This is an unbelievable coincidence,” I told her, “but Luter and his new wife are coming to stay with us in New Orleans. They arrive tomorrow, and they’ll be here for several days.” I didn’t mention that Pierre and Michele Atlan would also be with us. The lady asked if I could arrange a telephone interview between Alexandria, Virginia, where the company’s offices are, and New Orleans. When I told her that Luter couldn’t speak any English at all, she paused for a moment. But I agreed to arrange for competent translation.

  And so it happened that on the following day, Luter, Atlan, and I were deployed on three of our telephone extensions, speaking with the interviewer from Time-Life, who was thrilled to have nailed the elusive Luter. (I might mention that in any competition among jazz musicians to induce swooning among members of the fair sex, Luter—tall, handsome, personable—would have been the obvious winner. A sort of combination of Maurice Chevalier and Gary Cooper, he has been celebrated, for forty years, as a devastating charmer. I understand that his appeal also extends to his telephone voice.)

  Luter spoke, Atlan translated, and I chipped in an occasional reminder. The discussion went on for about two hours. Our wives pursued their business in other parts of the house. Luter told about how I had arranged to bring him and Bechet together in Paris in 1949, how they’d formed a musical alliance that was to last for seven years. He talked of personality quirks, humorous incidents—the things interviewers like to talk about—Bechet’s influence on his music and such. Eventually, the lady felt that she had plumbed the subject. She expressed her sincere appreciation, and we all said goodbye and hung up.

  I must tell you, now, since it’s relevant, that I am known to have a phenomenal memory and an apparently uncanny ability to recall facts, details, printed pages, and other information on demand, which, in this case, was fortunate for Time-Life Records. Directly after Claude and Annie Luter and Michele and Pierre Atlan left New Orleans, and while my wife Diana and I were about to leave on an extended trip, I got another call from the Time-Life lady. She began an extended apology which I couldn’t make head or tail of until I understood what had happened.

  As one traditionally distrustful of modern technology, who has only recently conceded the potential for social advancement inherent in the wheel, I can’t say I was astonished to learn that the tape recorder she had used in the long and expensive interview had failed her. The tape yielded not a sound. Luter was gone and would not be accessible again for months. I reached into my memory and repeated the entire interview. She remembered it all as I restated it, and I’m happy to say the set finally came out, incorporating all of the data we had provided in its voluminous notes.

  Claude spent virtually all of his time in New Orleans in the company of Atlan and Diana, visiting railroad yards, roundhouses, and terminals, climbing on cabooses and on the ancient Baldwin locomotive in Audubon Park. We had our music exhibit going on at the Louisiana State Museum, which now houses the New Orleans Jazz Museum. There is a soprano saxophone there that belonged to Sidney Bechet, and we prevailed upon Claude to play a solo on it for the television cameras. It proved to be in dreadful condition, but his musicianship is of so high an order that he was able to produce creditable sounds on it. We had proposed some plans, including musical ones, to make the visit of these Parisians satisfying to them. But most everything had to be scrapped because of their zeal to spend every minute in search of exotic boxcars to photograph.

  Three years earlier, in Paris, Luter had announced to me his intention to visit New Orleans, stating unhesitatingly that his interest was in seeing railroad-related sites and artifacts. But of course I never assumed that this would be his only pursuit in New Orleans—and in the nation, for that matter.

  When they left us, I think they were headed toward San Antonio and San Francisco, with the same objectives.

  W. C. Handy

  The “Father of the Blues” was already a legend forty-five years ago, and most people—even musicians—didn’t know he was still alive. He was occupying an office on Broadway opposite the Brill Building, running his music publishing business with what seemed to be moderate success. I tried to make an appointment to talk to him, purely for research reasons, and a very attractive, very officious lady kept telling me he wasn’t in and that nobody knew when he’d be in. I explained what I wanted, and she agreed tó give him my message and my phone number. The lovely lady was Marion Tyler, widow of a great violinist, Willie Tyler. I would come to know her very well later, after she married Eubie Blake. W. C. never called back, and I was frankly irritated. At twenty-one, we’re not always models of patience.

  Several months later, I was having lunch with Eubie in the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. I told him I had been thinking of trying to put together an educational tour through the Ivy League schools with Eubie and his lifelong partner Noble Sissle, and with Hall Johnson, W. C. Handy, the black symphonic composer William Grant Still, and two or three more black musical pioneers. Eubie thought he might enjoy that. I confessed I hadn’t discussed it with any of them yet and that I’d been unsuccessful in getting to see Handy on other matters.

  “The reason you never got to see Handy,” he explained, “is that you didn’t have any money in your hand. You go up there with money in your hand, he’ll talk to you.”

  I asked Eubie if he thought Handy might be interested in making such a tour. His eyesight hadn’t failed completely yet, and moving him from one place to another wasn’t as difficult as it would become in later years.

  “Shaz,” Eubie advised, “don’t try to talk any business with Handy if you don’t have money in your hand. He’ll always listen to any offer. He doesn’t want to know about percentages or getting paid at the end of the month. You go with money in your hand, he’ll listen.”

  I thanked Eubie for the advice and as I got ready to leave him, he said, “Remember what I said. In your hand. That don’t mean in your pocket. He can’t see in your pocket. In your hand, see?”

  The building where W. C. s office was was almost exclusively occupied by other blacks in the music business, just as the Brill Building was occupied by whites in the same pursuits. The black music building was referred to in the trade
as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The Pace and Handy Music Publishing Company consisted of a very small, neatly kept suite of offices. When I entered and announced myself to Mrs. Tyler, I could hear a loud voice, speaking in gossiping tones, which I assumed was on the phone. I immediately recognized the fact that the speaker was a compulsive talker. The door to Handy’s private office was partially open. Mrs. Tyler said he’d see me in a minute, and she walked into his office without hesitation. I heard her interrupt him in midsentence to tell him I was there. In a matter of seconds a gaunt little figure emerged, saying goodbye to Mrs. Tyler and to me. I met the little man sometime later at Tom Delaney’s in Harlem. It was Perry Bradford, who had been responsible for the first blues to be issued on records.

  Before going into Handy’s office, I took a thousand dollars out of my pocket and held it in my hand, just as Eubie had advised. Eubie had also warned me to go right ahead and talk. “That guy will tell you the history of the world, the troubles Negroes had when they were slaves, how the white folks were claiming they invented the blues. If you don’t go ahead and talk, you’ll never get a chance to tell him your proposition. You might not anyway. You might look too young. The money in your hand will help that.”

  In my life, I never went wrong following Eubie’s advice.

  Around Handy’s wall were framed copies of original sheet music—first editions of “St. Louis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Rag,” “Memphis Blues.” I went right ahead and told him what I proposed to do, judiciously putting the ten hundred dollar bills on the desk as I outlined the deal. It called for four weeks at $500 a week. The money on the table was for the first two weeks. I would provide transportation and hotel accommodations.