by Rose, Al;
If you’re old enough to remember 1937, I won’t need to tell you that this was big money. In the same year I had paid Bechet $300 a week, and he had been on tour with Sissle’s orchestra for about half that figure. I paid jazzmen about twice what they’d make on other jobs. Handy complained the money wasn’t enough, and then he wanted to talk about billing. He wouldn’t appear anywhere unless he got top billing, he said. It had to say, “W. C. Handy, the Father of the Blues.” I explained to him that there would be no billing at all, since there wouldn’t be any advertising. The function would be closed. All that appeared to him to be nonsense.
I said I’d spoken with Eubie about it and that he was interested. W. C. then told me, “Eubie? You don’t talk to Eubie about anything like that. You’ve got to talk to Sissle about it.”
“Okay,” I pursued, moving the bills around on his desk a little, “but if Sissle agrees will you go along?” He stared at the desktop where the money was. In the time I was to know him later, this would prove to be the longest uninterrupted stretch of silence I’d ever see him initiate.
Then he said, “Not for that money.”
I abandoned the project right there, realizing that whatever made him refuse, it had to be something other than money that made him turn me down. A decade later he’d appear nightly for less money at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. And 1947 was a year of much greater prosperity, too.
After W. C. had passed on to his reward, my good friend Harry Godwin invited me to come to Memphis for the dedication of the W. C. Handy statue and park the city was inaugurating. I suppose the statue is all right, but nobody could do a real likeness of W. C. Handy unless it talked.
David Thomas Roberts
During my long association with American music, only two musicians have assured me that they were the most important creative artists of their time in their idiom. One was Jelly Roll Morton, who, in 1939, told me, “All these other guys is playin’ Jelly Roll. You turn on the radio or play a new record, you’re listenin’ to Jelly Roll. I made all that up that they’re playin’.”
About a half-century later a nineteen-year-old explained to me that no other contemporary approached his skill in the composition and execution of classic rags. His name is David Thomas Roberts. What is curious is that both of these men were right.
In Jelly Roll’s case, because of the times and the then-higher level of public taste, he was able to build a significantly large following. Roberts, on the other hand, has come along in an era when only a handful of musicians and ragtime enthusiasts know about him or understand what he is bringing into music. This young man came to visit me at my home in New Orleans, asking me to listen to his work, frankly in the hope that I could help him further his career. I tend to be skeptical about such requests. At best somebody merely wants to demonstrate to me his technical achievements, and I am only an average judge of these. I agreed to listen to him, and it took about three minutes for me to realize that I was being treated to a performance of some of the most satisfying original composition I’d heard in fifty years, played by a dazzlingly virtuosic artist. Needless to say, I got on the phone while David was still in my living room to alert the people I thought could do him the most good. This resulted almost immediately in an invitation from Trebor Jay Tichenor to come to St. Louis.
In a matter of five years, David Thomas Roberts has become an admired and respected leader in the ragtime community. By the time this reaches the bookstores, he will have premiered his ambitious suite for piano, “New Orleans Streets.” The piece takes an hour and ten minutes to perform. Its debut at Dixon Hall on the Tulane University campus on September 20, 1985, the centennial of the birth of Jelly Roll Morton, was predictably fine. Having been privileged to hear it informally, I felt confident in proclaiming it, even before its debut, the most significant contribution to the culture of New Orleans in the past fifty years.
But nobody’s perfect.
As it happens, David Thomas Roberts has an abrasive personality and frequently conducts himself in the kind of arrogant manner not likely to endear him to audiences or employers. I have found, though, that like Jelly Roll, Davids apparent eccentricities follow a certain demonstrable logic. Generally, if you follow what he’s saying, he turns out to be on sound ground. If the temperature in the auditorium is a mite too chilly, he gets up from the piano bench. He leaves, convinced that if he’s not comfortable, he can’t supply the quality of performance his audience has come to hear. He’s inhospitable to programming suggestions from his sponsors and not inclined to cooperate with dress requirements. But whenever such issues have arisen between us, there’s never been a time that his position was not defensible on other than frivolous bases.
I contracted with him to perform at the 1983 “Fingerbreaker” concert, a part of the Tulane Hot Jazz Classic. I only presented two pianists, David and Dick Wellstood. A week or so before the event, it occurred to me that I had left a stone unturned. I called David, who’s never easy to find, and told him that if, as I suspected, he had no tuxedo, I’d be happy to rent one for him. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “You know, Al, it doesn’t say anything in my contract about a tuxedo.”
“I know that,” I agreed. “But this is a prestigious event and a prestigious appearance for anybody who’s on the bill. I’m sure that there’ll be many people in the audience who could do you some good. I want for you to make the best possible personal impression.”
“Well,” he told me, “if it was anybody but you asking me, I’d give him a flat out ‘No.’ But I know you only have my best interests at heart, so I promise you I’ll think it over. I’ll let you know.”
He called back a couple of days later and told me he had decided against the tuxedo. The prime consideration, he explained, was that for him to give his optimum performance, he had to feel completely comfortable, which he couldn’t be so long as he felt he was compromising his integrity.
Not without some dismay, I asked him what he planned to wear.
“I have a very nice red sweater and matching pants,” he announced. “I’m sure I’ll appear neat and that my clothes won’t offend anybody.”
I told him I was sorry he saw it that way. I was on the point, I confess, of canceling him, but my own commitment to excellence prevented that. I only replied, “I’m glad you took the time to think it over.”
The concert was an unqualified artistic triumph. I had to acknowledge to myself that his unconventional outfit seemed exactly right for him. So, I realize, would a burlap sack have been. I told him so later, but he wasn’t in the least bit astonished by my acceptance.
In 1985 I asked him to supply me with a list of the fifteen parts of “New Orleans Streets” because I planned to write an article on it well in advance of the initial performance. In St. Louis he gave me a handwritten list which he asked me to return after I’d copied it. At home, the following week, I made neatly typed copies of the list, one of which I sent to him. Immediately he wrote back, thanking me for the prompt action, but explained that he, in fact, wanted his own handwritten list back. I realized then that he puts a certain value on holographic matter from his own pen, on the assumption that it will all one day be of significant historical value in the same way that anything in jelly Roll’s hand is inestimable today. Initially I was astonished, even amused, by his egotism. Not long ago, in discussing the work of another pianist-composer, John Rummel of Denver, David told me, “He’s the most important composer to come along since me!”
I have learned now never to dismiss anything David says or does as nonsensical. He makes sense, and his music makes sense. I never considered it my role in life to play John the Baptist to any musician; but in this case, I feel comfortable in the part.
Chink Martin
His name was Martin Abraham. The music world called him Chink Martin, an unfortunate use of an ethnic slur. But what could he do about it, or who would have wanted to, during the years before the general public began to frown on the use of such nicknam
es? If you’d used his correct name, nobody would have known who you were talking about.
He was born on June 10, 1886, and he spent a continuous, uninterrupted career as a jazz musician for seventy years. He was the first jazzman I ever knew personally. I was four years old, and he worked in the pit orchestra of my grandfather’s Dauphine theater. He was, even then, the most exciting and proficient jazz tuba player in the history of the idiom. The issue of a German father and a Filipino mother, he had neither discernible Oriental coloring nor features, though he was no more than five feet tall, if that. He can be heard playing string bass or tuba on some of the recordings of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, many of the recordings of Sharkey’s Kings of Dixieland, and lots of Southland records of the 1950s. His involvement in the music literally goes back to the very beginnings of jazz.
“Man, we were terrible!” he recalled during supper at the Pont-chartrain Hotel while we were making a British ITV series entitled “All You Need Is Love.” “It’s a good thing those first bands didn’t record. Nobody today would want to hear that music we called ‘ragtime.’ I’d be ashamed to listen to a record from that time if I was on it.”
My wife and Terry Waldo, the ragtime virtuoso and scholar, had been speculating about the actual musical content of those bands of the pre-1910 era and had virtually forgotten that Chink was present. After he’d listened for a while to the discussion, he decided to put aside his veal cutlet and remind them. “I was there! I played in them bands. They wasn’t no good at all!”
One day in the early fifties I met Chink as we were both going into Joe Mares’s warehouse on St. Louis Street. Chink mentioned that Joe had asked him to be sure and drop in that day. When we saw Joe, he explained that he had stopped by and picked up government forms to make it possible for Chink to make his application for social security. Chink said he didn’t want any and I, out of curiosity, asked him why not. It turned out that he had no idea what social security was, but was merely afraid of forms and suspicious of anything that had to do with the government. I explained that he had this money coming to him, that he had been paying a percentage of his income since the thirties in order to provide himself with an income after he had reached the age of sixty-five.
He shook his head. “I ain’t never paid them people nothin’,” he asserted. “They ain’t never asked me and I ain’t never paid.”
“But,” I pursued, “I, myself, took money out for social security on every job I ever hired you for—and I’m sure anybody else you worked for did the same thing. Joe, too.”
Chink looked at Joe, hurt and suspicious. “You mean,” he asked, with a “say-it-ain’t-so” plea in his voice, “You mean you guys been holdin’ out on my money all these years?”
“Of course!” I told him. “That’s the law. We have to make the deductions.”
He brightened. “The dee-ducts!” he said with relief. “You mean the dee-ducts! Why didn’t you say so?”
Further discussion elicited the fact that Chink had always thought the people who hired him were able to deduct a certain amount of his pay as a sort of commission for finding him or supplying him with any job. My attempt to explain what this money was for, I could see, was falling on uncomprehending ears. I went on further, to point out to him that on the first of the month, after his papers cleared, he’d receive a check for a couple of hundred dollars from Uncle Sam.
“What I gotta do for it?” he demanded.
I told him he didn’t have to do anything, that it was his own money. He looked extremely skeptical. Only his close relationship and past history with Joe and me reassured him.
“If that’s for true, what you tellin’ me, I’m gonna buy you a box of cigars,” he promised. As he spoke further of his forthcoming windfall, I realized that I had neglected a detail in my explanation to him. He didn’t yet realize that this wasn’t a one-time payment, that he’d receive a check every month for the rest of his life. He was speechless and unbelieving. Many months had to go by, and many checks come in, before he realized that he really didn’t have to work anymore. Not that that stopped him. He continued to work in Preservation Hall until his death in 1980 at the age of ninety-four.
And just to put in perspective the extent of his career in jazz, I must report this brief excerpt from an interview I did with him while preparing the publicity handout that would accompany him to Disneyland for Frank Bull’s Jazz Jubilee. I asked him when was the very first time he had recorded. This was his reply.
“Well, you know, Al, them first records we did, they wasn’t jazz, see. There wasn’t even no such word then. It was 1905, just Ropollo and me. We made them cylinders, banjo and guitar.”
“How were they?” I asked. “Did they ever come out?”
“Oh, yes,” he assured me. “They come out. Mr. Edison didn’t like ’em at first, but….”
Walter Bowe
During the mid-1940s, I often found myself embarrassed by the incontrovertible fact that no blacks attended my Journeys Into Jazz concerts. It would have seemed as though I had been systematically excluding Negroes, since we found we were playing exclusively to all-white audiences. In historical perspective, I understand now why black society had turned its back on the authentic music it had done so much to create. Blacks were going in droves to Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic productions to watch his succession of saxophone honkers at work, people like Illinois Jacquet leaping into the air and spinning as he blew his tenor, that sort of thing. But when it came to the real, fundamental jazz form, they just junked it along with the characteristics they considered Uncle Tom—eating watermelon or fried chicken in public, watching Stepinfetchit movies, or mugging on stage. (In the mid-1940s mugging didn’t mean assaulting in the street for purposes of robbery and/or mayhem. It meant making grotesque faces.) This was a part of their heritage that blacks merely junked. My own reputation as a civil rights activist constituted no redemption in black eyes. I distributed free tickets to black organizations, press, and personal friends to no avail. At least half the musicians I hired were black—and famous, too, for that matter.
It was, therefore, an astonishment to me when, during one intermission, a young black boy of fifteen or sixteen, carrying a trumpet case, approached me and asked very politely if he might have the opportunity to meet the musicians. Needless to say, I was delighted with this obviously well-bred youngster who was interested in authentic jazz. I took him backstage and introduced him around. I don’t recall who was being featured that night. I remember I told him that Bunk would be in town in a couple of weeks and was elated to discover that Bunk was the boy’s idol. He had tried to model his trumpet playing after Bunk’s records. I promised him that I’d invite him to my house to meet Bunk, and he seemed to feel as though the world was his.
At that time, there was a group of youngsters—all white—in his age group which I permitted to play during the intermissions at the concerts, just to give them a chance to perform on stage before a concert audience. The band was better than you might have expected. It included the clarinetist Larry Gushee (now Dr. Lawrence Gushee of the University of Illinois) and Dick Hadlock on soprano sax. (He would become the publisher of Record Changer magazine.) I persuaded them to give young Walter Bowe a turn sitting in with the band. He proved to be an unpromising lead horn, but this didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. I had a teenage black boy eager to play the real jazz. That was enough. Maybe I could reawaken in a new generation the spirit of its forefathers.
So Bunk, Baby Dodds, and Pops Foster came to visit, and I invited Walter. He was enthralled to be in the presence of these masters. Other black kids—even musicians—wouldn’t even have known their names. Each time Bunk came to visit, I’d have Walter over. Bunk would show him some things about playing the horn, and the kid would ask questions. Later, he took to going to New York frequently to sit at the feet of the master at Stuyvesant Casino or the Central Plaza. Then he’d come home and during the week stop by at my place to talk about his dreams and aspirations—a
bout restoring the musical heritage to his people, about perfecting his technique. He never failed to express to me his deep and sincere appreciation for all I was doing for the music, for his people, and for him personally. If ever I saw a highly motivated kid, it was Walter Bowe.
One day he came and told me he was going to live in New York and try to find work playing jazz. He promised to let me know how he was doing from time to time. We shook hands, and I wished him well. For a couple of years, he’d call me and tell me what he was doing and where he was working. I never had expected him to be able to support himself as a musician at that stage of his career, but he was doing it. Every now and then someone would report to me that they’d heard him and that he was playing pretty well. I was delighted.
Then, one fine morning, I opened the Philadelphia Inquirer, and there on the front page was a photograph of Walter Bowe. The accompanying text identified him as a Philadelphia boy who had been placed under arrest, along with a number of other people, because of his involvement in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. I followed the story with considerable interest as you might imagine. In the end he was convicted, along with the others, and sent to prison. I can’t tell you any more, because that’s all I know.
“Buglin’ Sam” Dekemel
“Buglin’ Sam the Waffle Man” was a New Orleans institution in the early twenties, when his colorful, horse-drawn wagon would ply the streets of New Orleans selling hot waffles, four for a nickel. You could always tell when he was in the neighborhood, because he heralded his own proximity by playing the blues on a battered army bugle. You might be playing stoop ball or running in Jackson Square when, suddenly, you’d be aware of that raucous and rhythmic sound, and you’d react like a Pavlov dog. Your mouth would water and you could already visualize the four, playing-card size waffles covered with powdered sugar, deployed on a quarter-page of the Times-Picayune, ready to eat. Buglin’ Sam was a fourth-generation scion of the Dekemel waffle family, but he was certainly not the first of his clan to announce himself with the bugle. When I asked him in 1954 how he had learned to perform in that manner, he told me his grandmother had taught him.