by Rose, Al;
With an expertise patently the result of extensive experience, he disposed of our following, with a slight and less-enthusiastic assist from me, after which we went to a nearby kosher-style restaurant for breakfast. I really don’t remember whether we’d chosen the place beforehand or not. But it seems to me he just directed the cab to stop, we got out and paid the bill, and then we went into the nearest restaurant. He said he was going to have to stop doing this stuff except on his day off. I had no recollection of whom I’d been with, but Krupa appeared to be more in possession of himself.
Coffee seemed to change the color and contour of the planet. Neither of us seemed to be too far out of it to eat. I still remember the smoked sturgeon and boiled eggs, the inevitable bagel and cream cheese.
“Weren’t any of those young ladies yours?” he asked me.
I disclaimed proprietorship and told him I was quite sure I hadn’t had a girl with me, because it wasn’t like me to ignore that sort of responsibility. Nevertheless, I was racking my brain trying to figure out how and why I’d been there, but with no success.
Finally, he said, “You know something; I’m tired of this routine. Working and drinking and playing with these girls. Man, I can’t wait until I can find me a nice girl and get married, with a house in the country and kids around.”
“I’ll bet a few years ago you wouldn’t have said that,” I suggested. “Most any stud in the United States would sell his soul to change places with you.”
“The kids, maybe,” he acknowledged, “but I’m almost twenty-eight years old. Any guy my age that would want to change places with me is stupid. Say a guy is married and he’s got a couple of nice children. You think he’s gonna want to give all that up? I’m not rich. I work hard at least six nights a week, besides rehearsals, and I’ve got no future. I’m just a drummer—not even a chance to ever be a bandleader! Drummers don’t get to be bandleaders. So when this fad is over, I’ll still be a drummer. These girls that are always tryin’ to jump in bed with me—they won’t even remember my name.”
We finished our substantial breakfast, and he asked me if I had any gum. I gave him my pack. I didn’t chew gum, but I always kept some for purposes Berigan had taught me. I told that story to Krupa, who thought it was funny and also a great idea to jam juke boxes with chewing gum. He told me his reason for wanting it was so that liquor wouldn’t be too obvious on his breath.
A decade later we were guests together on a Philadelphia radio program called “Juke Box Jury,” hosted by the ebullient Ed Hurst. By that time I was married and had two sons who were about six and four years old. They liked to watch me doing radio, either my own show or guest shots on somebody else’s. (This was just when TV was coming in, and I don’t think I’d been on it yet at that time.) I sometimes brought them to the studios so they could watch. They always behaved like gentlemen.
“I see you did it,” Krupa commented. “You’re lucky.”
I asked him if he found himself any closer to his goals, and he shook his head. I reminded him that he had told me drummers didn’t get to be bandleaders. His band was now among the most popular in the nation. He acknowledged that he had achieved some financial stability, but denied that the quality of life had improved for him. He gathered my kids, Pancho and Frank, together with him and motioned to my photographer to take their picture. Then he scribbled an address on a note pad and handed it to me.
“I hope you’ll send me a print of this,” he said.
I did, of course.
The Exterminators: Pete Fountain and Al Hirt
Things were hard for jazzmen in the fifties—especially the early fifties—and most especially in New Orleans. Bourbon Street was still a year or so away from full bloom, and the Dixieland bands that were to proliferate hadn’t yet secured their jobs. There were places like La Lune, a dance spot where Mike Lala and his band held forth, playing Mickey Mouse music—rhumbas, slow fox-trots, and businessmen’s bounce a la Lester Lanin. But even Mike, though employed, couldn’t make ends meet on the low pay of that time. He took a job during the daytime working for the Orkin Exterminating Company. During the day he’d go around making home termite inspections and bug-proofing houses. But Mike wasn’t the only musician that needed money, and Joe Mares and I used to talk frequently about the plight of the music and the difficulties performers were having to confront. There were two of the younger ones we were especially concerned about, and I suggested we might find out from Lala whether there were any openings where he worked. He said he’d see. I think one of his relatives was part of the firm. The building, by the way, is the original “Halfway House,” a historic jazz spot of the twenties. It was fitting that though there was no music, the place was still employing jazzmen.
It all ended with the young men getting the jobs. I will always remember how they looked in their yellow jump suits with the Orkin logo on them as they dropped in on Joe during their lunch hour, looking for all the world like Laurel and Hardy in one of those two-reelers. Al Hirt, in those days, had no beard, but he was even heftier than he is now, and Pete Fountain was a skinny kid, ill-adapted to anything other than playing his clarinet. I’d have given anything for the chance to watch them on the job. It must have been one of the all-time great comedy acts.
Fortunately for the music world, neither of them had to stay with that occupation long enough to become expert at it. I suppose you could say that they began to attract attention in about 1955 when they worked at Dan’s International, at Bourbon and Toulouse streets, with a scary trombone player named Bob Havens who is now the hot sliphorn man in the Lawrence Welk band.
We were concerned about Pete, anyway, in the exterminating job. He had a long history of respiratory problems (which actually had led to his taking up the clarinet), and he was generally frail. Al, however, had to do all the work he could with his enormous family (a wife and eleven children). He had been so thoroughly trained in music, having occupied a trumpet chair for a long time in the New Orleans Symphony under the direction of Alexander Hillsberg, that he showed all the signs of disillusionment at having to go outside his music to earn the kind of living he needed.
Joe and I sat at a table in the club listening to this hair-raising band, and Al and Pete came to sit with us during a break. I said to Al, “How long can you keep up that pace? Your lip probably feels like it’s turning to stone.”
Pete said, “This sonofabitch never gets tired. My God! Playin’ with him is like a track meet.”
“This guy,” Joe predicted, “in a year or two is gonna be a superstar. He’s goin’ to Vegas and when they hear him out there, that’ll be it.”
Afterward, I was standing outside the club with Al and I told him what Joe had said. He told me, “Joe’s got more confidence about all that than I do.”
Later, I told Joe I didn’t think Al would ever get to be a significant factor in the music business. “He really doesn’t play jazz,” I explained. “But anyway he’ll blow himself out. Nobody can play with that power for so long night after night and stay healthy. He’ll be burned out in six months.”
Now, after the intervening twenty years, I don’t mind eating my prophecy at all, and Joe has been generous enough not to say “I told you so.”
As for Pete Fountain, Johnny Wiggs, his teacher, had explained that he’d told Pete to give up the music. “I told him,” Johnny said, “that he’d never be able to play jazz. It’s too bad. He loves it and he’s got a nice tone, but he’ll never be a jazz musician.”
Several years later, Wiggs and I were sitting in my living room watching Pete on the television as he performed on a network show. And Johnny said, “I told you he’d never be a jazz musician.”
Dizzy Gillespie
In a book about the real jazz you wouldn’t reasonably expect to find anything about Dizzy Gillespie, but I’ve included him to make a point. The point could be of interest to people who feel that the music began to decline roughly around the time it began to be recorded. It’s only fair to confess, though
, that I lost interest in the movies when they started to talk.
In Philadelphia in 1940 or 1941—just before I got drafted, anyway—I had a concert going on in the Academy of Music. I don’t remember who was playing, but it must have been an authentic New Orleans jazz band, with maybe a Chicagoan or two thrown in. I’m sure Joe Sullivan was on piano. A local entrepreneur named Nat Segal, who owned a club called the Downbeat in South Philadelphia, asked me if I would, as a favor to him, permit a young trumpet player and a girl singer to participate. In those days there weren’t any major music controversies going on in the business. We were still saying, in our sublime ignorance, “It’s all jazz.” So I agreed to have Nat’s people on stage briefly, to give them an opportunity to be exposed to the concert audience. The skinny little girl singer, whom I judged to be about sixteen, told me her name was Sarah Vaughan. And the trumpeter, whom I had met before in Minton’s in New York where he had seemed to be only fooling around with the other musicians on the stand, Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker and, I think, Slim Gaillard (it’s hard to remember for sure—after all, it was more than forty years ago), was Dizzy Gillespie.
So, anyway, he played in one or two sets at the Academy, and he still seemed to be just fooling around. I talked to him for a while backstage, and it struck me that he was far more personable and intelligent than most of the musicians I had been associated with in the world of authentic jazz. On reflection, I admitted to myself that most of these younger musicians playing that strange music they were calling “be-bop” were superior folks, generally better educated, more civilized. Their manners were better, they were more polite, more considerate of each other. I found what they were playing very boring, and the more I heard it and understood it, the less I liked it. I said all that to young Dizzy, and he said, “Everything moves along, man. It’s not a question of whether it’s better or worse, it just keeps movin’. There’s no reason musicians, especially young ones, shouldn’t experiment with the instruments—find out how far they can go.”
A few years later, I’d go far enough into it to actually produce a Lenny Tristano concert, featuring such newcomers as” Fats Navarro and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. I made a record session with Percy Heath (long before the “Modern Jazz Quartet”). And at last I confronted the fact that while I enjoyed working with these really very nice people, I just couldn’t stand what they were playing. That was what got me off on the whole complex business of jazz theory, about which I’ve written at length. All of my predictions about the music business—like how the public would never go for long playing records, how Stan Kenton was too complex ever to be a commercial success, and how the public would be sick of the Beatles in two months—didn’t work out. But I was right about be-bop. It was a musical deadend. I hoped when it was over that some of the excellent musicians it produced would turn their attentions to genuine jazz, but that never happened.
Five or six years later, Dizzy and a group were booked into one of Frank Palumbo’s places. In order to publicize his appearance I took him around for radio interviews on various disc jockey shows and then up to a school called “The Twentieth Century Institute of Music,” which was run by some friends of mine, Bernie Lowenthal and Art Singer. Naturally, all the students, mostly studying on the G. I. Bill, were so impressed by Dizzy’s friendly, gentle manner that they flocked down to the place to see him perform.
I remember saying to him, “Well, you’re still doin’ it.”
He smiled and said, “If you’re not doin’ it, you’re not doin’ anything.” After that I’d see him from time to time in Felix Valdera’s Para- mount Record Shop or at a benefit where I might be doing some emceeing or at a jazz festival.
But I heard him play jazz one time, which I’ll always remember. It was in 1980 and I had just published my biography of Eubie Blake. B. Dalton and Company gave a closed autographing party for the benefit of the New York Public Library in their Fifth Avenue store. Eubie and I were there to autograph the book, and Dizzy had just written his own autobiography. The place was alive with author-celebrities—Leroy Neimann, caricaturist Al Hirshfeld, Rona Jaffe. There were also a lot of very rich folks, donors to the library, and so on. I was surprised to see Larry Adler, who lives in London now. Eubie, of course, never could get away from any place without performing, and he asked Dizzy if he had his horn with him so they could play together. Dizzy said he didn’t live too far away and that he’d be back in a few minutes with his horn. When he returned, he and Eubie began to play “Memories of You.” To our surprise, Larry Adler produced a harmonica, which I swear didn’t measure more than an inch and a half in length, and joined in. Well, it was jazz. Genuine, hot, and authentic. Gillespie did all the things a great jazz trumpeter is supposed to do. The crowd, aware that what was going on was an unusual event, responded with uncontrolled enthusiasm. Eubie, at ninety-seven, was in his usual euphoric condition while playing his own music, and the idea of playing in public with Dizzy and Larry tickled him. I told Dizzy afterwards that it was nice of him to have gone and gotten his horn. He said he wouldn’t have missed the honor of sitting in with Eubie.
Miffi Mole
There used to be a little middle-Eastern restaurant on Fourteenth Street in New York. It was called The Kafkaz, and many evenings when I planned to go to Nick’s to listen to some music, I’d go in there for some shashlik and kasha. I was on my way in one night when I encountered Eddie Condon on the corner, and I invited him to have dinner with me.
“The aftertaste of foreign food,” he demurred, “spoils the clean, pure flavor of gin for hours.”
Nevertheless, I persuaded him to join me, since it was still too early for music. Inside the restaurant we found Pee Wee Russell and Miff Mole, both of whom were slated to play on Nick Rongetti’s bandstand with Phil Napoleon some hours thence. Miff had all the charisma of tepid ovaltine; without his legendary trombone skills he might have become the most anonymous individual in history. He rarely had much to say, and when he did speak his conversation was homiletic and cliché-laden. But Miff, a true boy scout at heart, was reliable, sober, responsible, and charitable. This was before World War II and he had undertaken the responsibility of acting in loco parentis to Pee Wee toward whom he behaved like a mother with a retarded child. When Condon and I entered, Miff was explaining to Pee Wee that the glass of kvass he had ordered for him would satisfy his insatiable craving for the mixture of gin and milk on which he lived. Kvass, he explained, was not without alcohol since it was fermented from honey and, I think, wheat. Not only that, but it was far more healthful and nutritious, as proven by the fact that it was well-known that natives of the Caucasus lived longer than any other people in the world. (Kafkaz means Caucasus in Russian.)
“This stuff’s got no alcohol in it!” Pee Wee protested. “Gin is medicine to me. You think I drink it to get drunk. I need it, see?” Then, turning to Condon, “You know what I mean, Ed.”
Condon shook his head solemnly. “Miff is right, you know. This whaddyacallit is much better for you.” He picked the glass up and took a sip. “Got a real kick, too!” he reported earnestly.
Pee Wee had an unfocussed look of one who has been betrayed by a close friend. Miff, grateful for the support, assured Pee Wee that by the time the night was over he’d realize how much better he felt. Pee Wee squirmed in his seat, picked at his pilaf without enthusiasm, and kept saying, “Aw, c’mon, Miff! When can I have a real drink?”
Miff promised him a gin and milk at the midnight break.
Condon went off into a monologue on sadism, the Inquisition, Cain and Abel, and other accusatory comments about Miff’s fundamental cruelty. But Pee Wee’s eyes were wandering around the room. He never had a long attention span.
Later that night, during the break at Nick’s, I was over at Julius’ Bar across the street when Miff and a shaky Pee Wee came in. Miff was really concerned about him. Pee Wee was sweating so that it was dripping off the ends of his moustache, and it wasn’t even hot. They sat at the bar and Miff instructe
d the bartender about the proper mix of milk and gin. Pee Wee asked if he could have an extra slug of gin and Miff told him he couldn’t. The bartender was new. He said they didn’t have any milk, but Miff explained that Julius always kept milk just for Pee Wee and told him where to look for it. The drink pulled Pee Wee together enough so he could go back for the next set. Miff said he was making arrangements for Pee Wee to go to a sanitarium.
Miff had so little personality that I never even thought of him when I was hiring trombone players. It’s true that his style didn’t add much to the kind of music I produced. But if you listened to him for two minutes, you’d know you were in the presence of one of the great masters of sliphorn. I used him when I hired Pee Wee because, for one thing, they played so well together, and, for another thing, it was the only way I could be sure Pee Wee would get there.
I was talking to Red Nichols in California the day after he’d signed the contract to have a movie made of his life, with Danny Kaye as himself. Red was elated because he said the deal, at last, provided for an honest and authentic film on a jazz theme. “They have to finish every tune they start!” he exulted. “No breaking away to something else in the middle of something good!”
I don’t know what happened to that deal. They never finished a single number. The picture brought in a hokey scene presenting a relationship between Red and Louis Armstrong that never existed. Red, in fact, said he’d only met Armstrong once. But worst of all, the film never mentioned or portrayed Miff Mole, who worked as closely with Nichols as Sissle did with Blake. Nothing about “Red and Miff’s Stampers” or the “Cotton Pickers,” those early groups that drove the jazz collectors wild. Miff and Red were like ham and eggs. I can’t tell you how embarrassed Nichols was over the movie in general and this omission in particular.