by Rose, Al;
Davila organized a big grand opening party, inviting the press and other important folk, most of whom showed up with their engraved invitations. The place was packed for the opening—naturally, since everything was on the house. Sid and I sat at a table and watched the show together. First Lizzie Miles sang her little Creole things, accompanied by Joe Robichaux at the piano. Then Smilin’ joe (Pleasant Joseph), with his guitar and trolley car conductors cap, did his monologue, singing his blues and convulsing the crowd with his comedy. Sharkey and the band were last, and there was no better band in the city. When the set was over there was tumultuous applause.
Sharkey came off the stage and joined us at the table. This is exactly what he said. I guarantee it’s verbatim. “Man, you guys got the life. We stand up there and blow our asses off and you sit down here and rake in all that money.”
Sid got up and left the table. And I never said another word to Sharkey as long as he lived.
Armand Hug
There are many kinds of piano players. Among the most numerous is the kind that can dazzle you with their sheer brilliance. Even among them there is a hierarchy of the super-brilliant, and if you’ve sat in an audience being overwhelmed with the consummate skills of a Johnny Guarnieri or a John Arpin you know how that is. Then there are the good-time boys. You go to see them, and they make a holiday of any ordinary day. I come away from listening to Max Morath or Knocky Parker just feeling good. These are people that bring their ambience with them. I tell Max how good he is and he looks at me in amazement, certain that I’ve heard a hundred better piano players—but I haven’t. Knocky just shrugs and says, “How nice of you to say so.” But he feels like he’s just putting one over; after all, he reasons, he makes so many mistakes and he doesn’t practice, doesn’t even have a piano in his own house. Then there have been a very few who sit down at the keyboard and hit those chords that grab your internal organs and drag you through a tour of your own unexplored emotions. Some of those keyboards—Joe Sullivan, Art Hodes—preach to you, telling you, showing you how it is, how it ought to be, what it all means.
And then there was Armand Hug. Armand’s conceptions were huge, sometimes involved tapestries of elaborate and compelling fantasies weaving together sunny nostalgia and primal urges, calling upon the rich, colorful cultural threads of which he himself was made. Armand, more than any other pianist, could enthrall me.
The first time I met him I was seven and he was fifteen. I had discovered that if you stood on Iberville Street opposite what we called the Budweiser (because of the advertising sign in the window), which was really the Fern Dance Hall Number Two, you could hear the wonderful band that played in the taxi dance ballroom on the second floor (dime a dance). I know now that Harry Shields was the star, but the bandleaders varied. When individual musicians came out for five-minute breaks (one at a time, because the music wasn’t permitted to stop for eleven consecutive hours), I could tell they were musicians because they wore tuxedos. One of them was obviously a young lad, obviously too young to be playing in a dance band. He’d come outside, light a cigarette, and stand there.
After a few nights I spoke to him, commenting that he seemed too young to be a musician. He confessed his age, showed me that he didn’t smoke, but just held the cigarette so people would think he was older. He said he played piano in the band. After that I tried to listen for the piano, but I could never hear it very well. However, I went by there many a night and always stopped to talk with Armand. We got to know each other very well. When I got to be old enough to go into saloons, I’d find Armand playing in the poshest bars in New Orleans. He discovered that I knew thousands of tunes, and often he’d play melodies he liked but didn’t know the names of so that I could tell him the titles and he could go to Werlein’s to get copies.
One day I met him on Canal Street when he was perhaps eighteen. I was going to McCrory’s dime store where Jeannette Kimball was the demonstrator in the music department. I met Armand on the way in and learned that he went there often just to hear Jeannette play. I suspected he also came just to look at her, because she was—and still is—the prettiest lady in town. Of course, that didn’t count with me yet. I was only ten.
The day came when I would occasionally need to engage a few musicians to play for some function, and I’d hire Armand if there was a piano. Then one day a friend in Biloxi asked me if I could bring a band to play for his sister’s wedding. That was the first time I discovered that Armand would never leave New Orleans, not even for a few hours. I think he had a superstitious belief that he would die if he stepped on unfamiliar soil, but he’d never give me his real reason. He’d tell me his wife’s health was bad, or that he was expecting to have to close a mortgage on his house, or anything to keep from leaving town. Once I called him from Chicago where I was doing a concert in partnership with Dave Garroway at the Chicago Civic Opera House. I offered him $500 and transportation for one night. (This was, at that time, more than twice what big name jazz attractions were getting.) He was apologetic but he refused. Then I offered him a thousand.
“Gee, that’s nice of you, Al—but I can’t leave here,” he told me.
Then, just to establish a principle, I offered him $2000. No go. I tried $5000 (“You don’t make that much in a year!” I reminded him). Nothing.
So we left it at that. He never did leave town, except once when he played with a band on the Mississippi Queen for one trip to Memphis and back. The other musicians told me, though, that during the few free hours they had in Memphis, Armand had chosen to stay aboard the boat, so he never set-foot in Tennessee. His lovely wife Linda conspired with me to get him away somewhere” just once, and I think we were making some progress just at the time he died.
Like so many New Orleans musicians, Armand overate consistently. By St. Joseph’s Day of 1977 (St. Joseph’s Day is an Italian festival in the city during which overeating is part of the fun), when he went to visit one of his friends who had a holiday shrine laden with great New Orleans food, Armand overdid it and expired on the spot. That same night my wife Diana and I, along with Bob Greene, went down to the Royal Orleans Hotel where Armand worked regularly in the Esplanade Lounge. Normally, we dropped in on him there once or twice a week. The maitre d’ told us what had happened. Only weeks before I had recorded a solo session with him playing the pieces identified with Bix. I’m glad we weren’t too late.
Earl “Fatha” Hines
Anybody who knew him didn’t call him “Fatha.” That was PR stuff. His friends and other musicians called him Earl, though he, himself, called his own close associates by various nicknames, many of which he made up. He called Louis Armstrong “Homey” because, he alleged, Satch was so naive and ill-equipped to deal with the phenomena of the nonmusical world. He teased Louis about his tastes (“I keep tellin’ him they don’t serve red beans and rice in the Waldorf”), his uncertainty about the social graces (“Tell him he doesn’t have to take his hat off in the men’s room”), and his speech (“I played with him for years before I realized it’s no act. Homey really talks like that”).
It’s true that by contrast with Satch, whom Earl really thought should have been president of the United States, Hines was an urbane, witty man-of-the-world who exuded genuine confidence. His confidence never failed him, except when he was called upon to play an unaccompanied piano. Everybody else in the jazz world recognized him from the beginning as a consummate master of piano playing techniques, but Earl always felt he was pulling the wool over their eyes and misleading the public with a musical trickery that had little to do with the art of piano. He was constantly concerned that he might be called upon to perform before an audience that would see through his legerdemain.
Collectors, of course, have his early recorded piano solos, and his talent and taste in the twenties and early thirties are not controversial. There are those people who seem, from the outset, to fuse their own consciousness with the principles of music, and it all seems so simple to them that they find it hard to gras
p the fact that not everybody can play. Earl was one of those who could never understand why anybody would come to hear him.
During the mid-1940s, I persuaded Frank Palumbo to book Earl into Ciro’s in Philadelphia as a solo act. I thought his name would be big enough to draw customers, and I personally would have enjoyed spending the week listening to him. You never could really get to hear all of Earl Hines so long as his sound was going to be complicated by bass, guitar, and drums. If he could have them, he wanted saxophones, too. The more the better. He always felt that the bigger the band the less his deficiencies would show up.
The plan was all right with Palumbo. The money was exceptionally good for the time, too. I seem to remember that it was something like $1800 for the week. Anyway I called Joe Glazer, who booked Earl, as well as Satch (this was before the All-Stars), and told him what we wanted.
“Yeah,” Joe agreed, “but Earl, you know how he is. He won’t want to be on by himself—but I’ll ask him.”
I explained to Joe that it wasn’t a matter of money. It wasn’t that we’d have to pay extra for accompanying musicians. I had hundreds of people who would have patronized the place to hear him playing solo, people who wouldn’t have been interested if anyone else was on the stand with him.
Despite this explanation, Joe called me back and told me Earl would hire a bass and guitar out of his own pocket for the gig. I asked Joe whether he’d mind if I talked the situation over directly with Hines, and Joe said, “I don’t care. I know you’re not going to try to cut me out of anything.”
So I called Earl to press my case.
“Come on, man,” he insisted. “You know people don’t want to hear me by myself. What am I going to play?”
“How about ‘Sheltering Palms’ for instance?” I asked, selecting an early recorded piano solo, “or ‘Glad Rag Doll’?”
“Where you been, man?” he demanded. “Music has come a long way since that stuff. They’d laugh at me.”
I tried to assure him there were still countless fans out there who wanted to hear only that. I had him persuaded for a moment, and he agreed to do it. Then he called me back, maybe two minutes later, to rescind his acceptance.
“I can’t take a chance like that, man. I could blow my reputation in a minute.” The upshot of it all was that he never accepted the booking.
Ten years later, I was sitting with him in San Francisco in the Hangover Club where he was working in a band that included Darnell Howard, Pops Foster, Baby Dodds, and Henry Goodwin. And he told me, “I’m gonna play one just for you!”
When he got back on the stand, he said a few words to the other musicians and then sat on the piano bench and played the first sixteen of “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” Then the band blared in, in unison, as he laughed his trademarked laugh.
A quarter-century later, Eubie and I sat watching his act for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. By this time, he had surrounded himself with certain modern virtuosi of no genuine jazz interest. At one stage, he pointed to me and played eight of “Sheltering Palms,” then he gave his group their cue and they did something else very uninterestingly. The saxophonist went through endless meaningless choruses to the delight of the rabble shouting “Go! Go!” and other musical terms of encouragement.
It was George Wein’s concert and I asked him if he’d had any luck getting Earl to play the way he could play, and he confessed that he’d tried with no success. Afterward, Hines came down to sit with Eubie and me, and Jules Cahn took our picture together. Hines said, “I’d have played that solo for you this time—but not in front of this guy!”
This is the last word I had from Billie Holiday before the police got her on drug charges.
The front line of my last record session for the state of Louisiana. From left to right are Preston Jackson, Louis Cottrell, and Alvin Alcorn. Photo courtesy Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry.
I couldn’t find room for all my photographs so I persuaded Dick Allen, then curator of the jazz archives, and Dr. Herbert E. Longenecker, then president of Tulane (and a pretty good hot clarinet man), to take the jazz and Storyville pictures off my hands. Photo by Tulane University Staff.
Signing the first contract ever by a black musician to host his own radio show. Sammy Price was the star. (That’s me in the horn rims.) I had to move mountains to make this possible in 1947, persuading the station to break with racist tradition, finding a sponsor. Then came the second week, and he didn’t show up. That’s the last I ever saw of him. Photo by Henry McCrary.
Sweet Emma Barrett had no idea what “public domain” meant. Photo by Grauman Marks.
George H. Buck, with the aid of his wife Eleanor, right, carefully built a virtual monopoly by buying up nearly every authentic jazz record company in America. I was honored to have some of my sessions on his labels. Diana and Eleanor were close friends until Eleanor’s passing in 1982. Photo by Grauman Marks.
A scene to remember! The High Society Jazz Band and thirteen other hot groups, including Alvin Alcorn’s Imperial Brass Band of New Orleans, parade on the Champs Elysées in celebration of Louisiana Week in Paris, 1976. So why isn’t Al Rose in this picture? Because he’s leading the parade in a jeep. Photo by Diana Rose.
Chris Burke doesn’t look like this anymore since he left Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. The seventeen-year-old girl is Kelly Edmiston, who had just won a fellowship to the Royal Academy theater. When she was an infant she used to ride my shoulder to Mardi Gras parades. Photo by Diana Rose.
Jimmy McPartland and I compare acquired girth since our previous meeting, as Johnny Wiggs offers to bring out the tape measure. Photo by Diana Rose.
You can find jazz everywhere—even in Key Largo. Raymond Burke, left, Knocky Parker on piano, and a tub-a-phone player scare the fish away from my dock in 1961. Photo by Mary Mitchell.
The incomparable Art Hodes offers me a flower as drummer Hillard Brown and trombone whiz Jim Beebe wonder if it’s my birthday. Photo by Diana Rote.
Australia’s ranking jazz star, Graeme Bell, looks over my shoulder as I draw a caricature of somebody. Photo by Diana Rose.
The statue destined for the new Armstrong Park in New Orleans is delivered on Decatur Street with a broken arm. Sculptress Lynn Emery made the repairs. Lucille (Mrs. Louis) Armstrong unveiled it at the dedication, while Louis Alter played his “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” on the piano through the ceremony. Photo by Rex Rose.
The dynamic Dick Zimmerman holds still while I draw him at the Scott Joplin Festival in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1976. He’s a toy designer, a magician, and one of the best ragtime piano players in the country. Photo by Diana Row.
This is the product—Rose’s caricature of Zimmerman.
Preston Jackson, the celebrated trombone star of the Louis Armstrong Orchestra, was a great source of information about early Chicago jazzmen.
Pee Wee Russell as I saw him in 1946.
Greeting late-arriving James P. Johnson, who’s just missed the first half of a Journeys Into Jazz concert in which he was to be featured. Way over on the right you can see his replacement, George Wein, making his concert debut. (Later Wein went into the festival business.) Between James P. and me is Freddie “Gatemouth” Moore. Photo by Nick Alexakis.
This is May Fisher in 1901, who may have been the first ragtime piano player I ever heard. She was still playing to accompany silent films at the Penny Wonderland Theater on Canal Street in 1922.
Spencer Williams wrote more hits than any other black composer. Even in 1985 “I Ain’t Got Nobody” was on the charts.
Gene Krupa said, “You’ve got a couple of smart kids here. They’re gonna grow up to be college professors.” And so they did. That’s Frank on the left and Pancho on the right. Photo by Harry Romm.
“No, sir,” said Earl “Fatha” Hines, left. “I’m not gonna play a piano solo in front of this man!”—Eubie Blake, center. Al, right, failed to persuade him. Photo by Jules Cahn.
Ian Whitcomb beca
me a rock star in the sixties and then reformed. With his ukelele, he now shows us how the razz-ma-tazz sounded in the twenties. Photo by Diana Rose.
Even if he says so himself, David Thomas Roberts is the most important living ragtime composer. Photo by Diana Rose.
On stage with scat singer Jo Jo Carter at Town Hall in Philadelphia. Behind him is Bud Freeman, and that’s Dan Burley clapping his hands and “Hot Lips” Page on the snare drum. Photo by Nick Alexakis.
“Buglin’ Sam” Dekemel played hot jazz on an army bugle. He said his grandmother taught him how. Photo by Mary Mitchell.
I had brought along a photograph of Satch, Earl, Bigard, Arvel Shaw, and me that was taken thirty-five years earlier. I got a copy for him. He was very appreciative and promised, “Next time I see you, I’ll play that tune!”
He died in 1983. So if I want to hear it again, it’ll have to be on the record player.
Gene Krupa
After 1935, Gene Krupa was all the rage. Before that hardly anybody had ever heard of him, though I had been dimly aware of him, I suppose, from hearing musicians talk. I can’t really remember when I met him, but I’m almost sure it was while the Goodman band and the Berigan band were both in New York at the same time—maybe early 1938. I remember going out into the street with him from some drinking place and noting that the sun was up. We were both wearing tuxedos. There were a large number of young ladies with us, and I told him his face was covered with lipstick. He said mine was too and also that I had some on my collar. I had very little recollection of what had taken place earlier in the evening—or rather on the previous night—and he said he didn’t have to go to work until late in the afternoon. We were ignoring the rest of the company. It turned out that none of the young ladies was known to either of us, and we didn’t have a clear idea of how they happened to be with us.