by Rose, Al;
In New York, I mentioned to Miff that I’d talked with Nichols and told him how badly Red felt about it all.
“That’s a funny thing,” Miff said, without apparent rancor. “I’ve always been easy to forget. Every time I shave, I look in the mirror and I see somebody there and I always come out on photographs.”
One time I asked Phil Napoleon to try to reassemble the Original Memphis Five for a concert and possibly a recording session, but he wrote me that he couldn’t get them together. I think Jack Roth, the drummer, had died, but Signorelli and Jimmy Lytell were all right. Miff was ailing, he said, and I’m ashamed to say my first thought was how that was going to affect Pee Wee. But then I remembered that I ought to be worrying about Miff.
Johnny Wiggs went to New York for a while in the mid-1950s. He stayed in the same hotel as Miff and played a few jobs with him. Miff’s decline, he wrote, was quick and horrible. His ailments cost him a leg, among other things. He tried to go on playing till the end, and I had the feeling that nobody noticed.
Clarence Williams
I didn’t get to know Clarence Williams until the late forties. He wasn’t playing music anymore, having made his pile out of his music publishing business and other hustles he seemed to generate consistently. I had always wanted to talk to him, and when I found out from Jimmy Pemberton, who was then the Harlem District Leader, that he was operating a shop on 125th Street in Harlem, I made my way over there one weekday afternoon.
Wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt and leather boots, he was sitting outside the store with his chair tilted back against the building. He was in his fifties, still looking fit and vigorous. The shop was a kind of junk shop, it appeared to me, and I have no idea who his customers could have been. Williams, however, didn’t look like a junk man. He was neat and crisp, and he looked like somebody who spent time every day in the gymnasium.
I introduced myself and asked him if he might still be interested in appearing in an occasional concert. He said he wasn’t. “Don’t need to do any o’ that any more,” he explained.
I asked him questions about his composing and publishing career, his playing days with Bessie Smith and other blues and jazz stars.
“Wait just a minute, man! It’s pretty near closing time, and it’s gonna take a long time for me to tell you all the things you want to know. Can you come back tomorrow?”
I was committed for the rest of the week until noon Friday. I asked him about the weekend.
“Not this weekend,” he said. “This weekend I’m gonna do a little huntin’ up in the mountains. I’m gonna meet some friends and we’re gonna try to find us some deer.”
It would be a long time before I’d get another chance to talk with him since I was starting on a concert tour the following Tuesday. “Have you got room for one more?” I asked, innocently.
He tilted his chair down so all four legs were on the sidewalk. “Well, you know, we’ll be in the Catskills and we got to stay someplace. The place we stay is just for colored, you understand.”
“You think I could pass?” I suggested.
He thought that was pretty funny. “Hell, I guess it would be all right with them if it’s all right with you. The place is called the Notch.” He didn’t think they actually had a policy against ofays. It amused him. The idea of bringing a southern white to the place seemed a little outré.
He asked me about my gear, since he knew I’d come in from out of town. I told him I could be ready with everything but a gun, and he generously volunteered to supply me with one. He seemed to have lots of them. What he didn’t ask me was whether I’d ever hunted before. I’d have had to confess that I hadn’t.
The next morning I went to an Army-Navy Surplus Store and bought cut-rate fatigues and boots, after describing my intentions to the storekeeper. I also bought some extras. A red bandana, dark glasses, a metal box to keep matches dry. (I smoked in those days.) And I bought one of those knives with all kinds of tools that popped out like blades. Ready for the kill.
I didn’t know whether I had the kind of emotional makeup that would permit me to go out and assassinate Bambi, but I wasn’t about to miss the chance to spend the time with the illustrious Clarence Williams.
Our party, on the way up, consisted of Clarence, me, and an attractive young lady whose name I don’t remember. By their behavior I would have had to assume she was something more than a secretary. She was quick, literate, relaxed. Her color was dark gold; her hair short and dyed blonde. She could have been a model. I’m sure she was under thirty. Clarence drove. I pay so little attention to cars that I can’t say what make or color the car was, but I remember that it rode more comfortably than most cars. The lady was looking forward to playing tennis with other ladies she knew who frequented the Notch. I gathered she wasn’t planning to join us in the high grass or swamps or wherever the hell you went to look for deer.
The trip wasn’t as long as I expected it to be. By the time we reached the Notch, the sun was still up, and we were in time for a great dinner. Since the girl had maintained a continuous monologue for the entire drive, I had had no chance to talk with Clarence. Dinner proved to be a culinary triumph. The lodge catered to well-to-do folks, and there was a real opulence about the fare. They served a great deal of butter and genuine heavy cream with things. There was roast chicken, fried chicken, baked apples, fresh corn on the cob. By the time we were through, Clarence’s friends had arrived. They were New York musicians I didn’t know and hadn’t heard of. I noticed they were wet when they came in, and that was the first time I realized that it had begun to rain.
For the rest of the weekend, St. Swithin was in charge. Going outdoors was out of the question, much less hunting. I was full of gratitude to the deities for this untoward weather. We spent two delightful days in the parlor around the piano, listening to Clarence play and tell stories in answer to my questions. Just as the nimrods had been foiled, so had the “racqueteers.” The young ladies stayed with us, and the one who had come up with us proved to be a very talented singer who knew, apparently, hundreds of Clarence’s songs.
I brought him up to date on Armand Piron’s last days and recalled with him the scenes of his youth. He almost wept when I told him they were about to tear down the Big 25, which he had managed in New Orleans. And we talked of river shrimp, buster crabs, and lost bread. In answer to one of my questions, I got an answer I must pass on to you.
“No, man. I didn’t really write that. The only tune I ever really wrote was ‘The Sugar Blues,’ and I did that because I needed it in a hurry for Oliver. You see I already had told him I had this tune dedicated to him, because, you know, he always ate those sugar sandwiches. Po’ boy bread spread all over with butter and then as much sugar as he could get on it. So I needed it in a hurry and I didn’t have anybody to do the tune, so I did it myself. But you understand I never stole anything. That was the way the music business worked in those days. If you couldn’t get a piece of the copyright, it didn’t pay to publish it. Songwriters understood that putting the publisher’s name on it, along with his own, was part of the original deal. Of course I published a lot of big hits.”
He told me of Bessie Smith’s first recording session, “The Gulf Coast Blues,” and how he’d had to explain to her what the microphone was for, that she’d have to sing into it. He said how difficult it was for her to get started with no audience before her. He told me how she was dressed in calico and how she demanded that a spittoon be brought into the studio before she began. “I just gave her a water glass full of gin and she was fine,” he recalled.
He didn’t drop me off in Harlem, but took me all the way into town to the Algonquin Hotel where I was staying. (The rain continued to come down torrentially.) He asked me if I was planning to write a magazine article, and I told him I expected sometime to use our conversation in a book. This is the book.
The Dixieland Rhythm Kings
This is about six youngsters from Dayton, Ohio—at least that’s where they’d been playing i
n their short careers and the leader, Gene Mayl, was from there. He performed expertly on a four-valve tuba. All of them were enamored with early New Orleans jazz and most particularly with King Oliver. They had been affected by the sounds being generated in California by the Lu Watters Orchestra. But by the time I encountered them in New Orleans in 1954, they had developed something genuine of their own that was rooted firmly in the original jazz form. The band had no drummer, for the simple reason that they couldn’t find a competent one who would add anything to their ensemble. Today’s leaders will empathize.
The trumpet player, Bob Hodes, a slight, intense, straightforward young man, played a hard-driving, no-frills lead that was the answer to a real jazz fan’s prayer. The trombonist, a sandy-haired kid with Kaiser Wilhelm mustachios, was an intellectual—not only a brilliant tailgater but a polished artist and writer; his name was Charlie Sonnanstine, and the last I heard of him he was hand-crafting harpsichords. Jack Vastine, a banjoist who also sang, supplied much of the beat. And a fascinating pianist, Robin Wetterau, had, at the age of nineteen or so, already begun participating in a ragtime revival that would not come to fruition for another decade. The clarinetist, Ted Belafield, would die while still in his twenties.
This band came to New Orleans to fulfill an ill-advised booking in the Dream Room on Bourbon Street, an upholstered sewer run by characters that shouldn’t have had a license. Many native jazz bands were working the street in those years, but they’d become stereotyped and lazy, playing a handful of tired tunes too fast and too loud, mainly following the dictates of proprietors who were (and are) convinced that this kind of jazzoid music will bring the customers in off the street. I am offended by the fact that they’re probably right.
I had the opportunity to listen to these kids informally before their engagement opened, and they were so good that I booked them to play for the New Orleans Jazz Club’s annual function at the municipal auditorium. This booking was to follow their “Dream Room” stint. During that week, at least, they were the best band in New Orleans.
The night they opened at the club, I was there for the first set. I found their performance fascinating, exciting, and extremely professional. The management, however, had a different view. They were disturbed because this band was playing unfamiliar tunes. They didn’t do the standard Bourbon Street book, but had gone to the trouble of learning and developing lesser-known items of early jazz as played by the old masters. Club owners were under the illusion that such tin-pan-alley favorites as “The Birth of the Blues” were typical New Orleans melodies. The band didn’t do “Basin Street Blues” or “Bourbon Street Parade”—that sort of thing. They did, though, play Oliver and Morton things beautifully, and in the correct tempos.
Outside the club I talked with the business agent of the union who was hostile to the appearance of any out-of-town band. I asked him how he liked the music and he answered, “It’s okay if you like that authentic stuff.”
The club owners fired the band without notice on the second night. They didn’t care about the union rules. They threatened bodily harm to the band if they decided to make an issue of it; and the union, to its extreme discredit, took no action against the proprietors of the room. I must hasten to add that this failure to act was certainly not typical of the great New Orleans local of the musicians’ union.
Needless to say, the band was disheartened by this turn of events, and I tried to do what I could to organize their stay in New Orleans—until the jazz club concert—in a way that would alleviate their disappointment. We had gotten together the Papa Celestin Orchestra, Sharkey and his band, and a couple of other attractions for the event. I went on stage to introduce the performers, knowing in my heart that despite the stars on the bill, the kids from Dayton were going to steal the show. I’m sure I was motivated to do my very best emceeing to prepare the crowd for their act.
The Dixieland Rhythm Kings took New Orleans jazz fans by storm. They stopped the show. I don’t know how many encores there were, but they captured the hearts of maybe two thousand jazz lovers. The newspapers the next day sealed their claim to being the best band in the concert, in the city, and maybe in the country. I don’t need to tell you they were all smiles before they took their leave of us that week—especially when I relayed to them the messages that two Bourbon Street club owners, plus the ones who had just fired them, wanted to offer them bookings. Gene Mayl asked me to refuse the two owners with thanks. And he gave me a special message for the Dream Room owners, which is too indelicate to print in this context but which I did repeat faithfully to the parties concerned.
Anyway, I like seeing the good guys finish first.
The Brunies
George was the most famous Brunies. I think he’s the best jazz trombonist I ever heard, but I finally had to stop using him on concerts because he was incorrigible. I can’t talk about the characters of Richie and Henny, who played with Papa Laine, though the old man had a lot to say about them. Abbie, the leader of the legendary Halfway House Orchestra, was a solid lead horn who was built like a fire plug and never got tired. In his old age he looked exactly like Colonel Sanders. Merrit, who recorded as the leader of the Friars’ Society Orchestra in the twenties, was a typical southern redneck who even became a Mississippi sheriff, if you can believe that. He played beautiful cornet and valve trombone. All five were brothers, and together they certainly constituted one of the great families of New Orleans jazz. There was also Little Abbie, an excellent drummer who was the son of Henny.
I remember the Halfway House, so-called because it marked the halfway point of the trip from downtown New Orleans to Old Spanish Fort on Lake Pontchartrain. Here people would stop to refresh themselves en route, and many would take the opportunity for a dance or two to Abbie’s music. Ropollo and Charlie Cordilla had played in that band, as had the almost mythical Emile “Stalebread” Lacoume. The food was good, too; I doubt whether there’s a better stuffed flounder in the world than the ones you could get for lunch there on the bayou. Abbie played all the latest songs from New York, as well as the work of local composers like Tom Brown, Irwin Leclere, and Nick Clesi.
The times I talked with Merrit, whom I didn’t know well, he was always more interested in programs to clamp down on drunken drivers, “who were mostly niggers,” he explained, “because everybody knew that niggers couldn’t hold their liquor.” Whites, presumably, could. I also discovered, through my brief discussion with him, that “niggers invented jazz but didn’t know what to do with it” and that white musicians “improved” it to make it what it was at its best. For illustration he cited the music of Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm.
Little Abbie was a good drummer and a real gentleman whom I knew well. He had little education and no concept of the world outside of New Orleans, though he’d made a trip or two to the northern metropolises. He had become enamored of Jewish food in Chicago, and I sometimes thought he married his lovely wife Jerri largely because she could cook it.
But George was something else again. He was rude, crude, and obnoxious. Time after time I flagged him down in his inclination to perform his belly dance on stage or to invite a very large person from the audience to come up on stage and stand on his chest while he lay flat on his back and played his chorus of “Tin Roof Blues.” I never condoned that kind of clowning in the presentation of authentic jazz, since I’m satisfied that great music is cheapened by such conduct. What ultimately caused me to close the lid on his shenanigans as far as Journeys Into Jazz was concerned happened one night during a concert in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. I had a regular Friday night audience, many of whom had been driven there in their chauffeured limousines. Rolls Royces were parked all around the place on those nights, and the aficionados were a conservative lot that included the likes of Lessing Rosenwald, Russel Sage, Leopold Stokowski, and, once, Nelson Rockefeller. Generally speaking, outside of its interest in authentic jazz, it was a very square crowd.
During intermission, George wandered out on
stage, trailed by Wingy Mannone and the piano player, Frank Signorelli, and began to sing an obscene song about Eddie Condon to the tune of “M-O-T-H-E-R.” As soon as I was alerted to this jollity, I ran out and escorted him off the stage. The audience didn’t fail to note that we carried on the second half of the concert without a trombone. Never again did I hire him to perform under my auspices. Oddly, we remained friends, and I often saw and spoke with him at various fes- tivals and a record session or two. Once at the Cotton Carnival in Memphis, I came into the coffee shop of the headquarters hotel and found George having brunch with other musicians and fans. I heard him say, “Watch your language. Here comes Al Rose.”
Still, there were things I approved of about George besides his musical artistry. I approved of the fact that he was color blind on racial matters. He always said, “We learned everything we knew about jazz from black musicians.” I doubt that that was true, but he believed it. I certainly am aware of the fact that he was deeply influenced by Roy Palmer, an early black trombonist. But, as I have written before, that music is a product not of a race but of a place and all the people in it. George demonstrated, however, that bigotry doesn’t necessarily run in families.
In matters like building fires under the chairs of his fellow musicians while they were performing, however, or stuffing limburger cheese into the horns of unsuspecting tuba players or switching banjo strings on people and otherwise comporting himself in sophomoric ways in public, he was intolerable. In combination with a Wild Bill Davison or a Wingy Mannone, he could be a catastrophe. Muggsy Spanier could control him pretty well, but Muggsy could deviate from genteel behavior on occasion himself.