by Rose, Al;
I saw the taciturn bassist Steve Brown slug George in the stomach in an elevator one time—hard enough to bring him to his knees. I had no idea what the controversy had been about, but I would have been ready to bet it was something George had initiated.
Paul Barbarin
Paul Barbarin was one of the finest gentlemen in jazz—and a good friend besides. He rarely appeared to react to the stupidity and crassness of others. But when ugliness became so blatant that even he felt compelled to respond, he could be withering.
In 1958 the morning TV show “Wide Wide World” decided to cover the tenth anniversary celebration of the New Orleans Jazz Club aboard the steamer President. The vessel was alive with jazz stars, including Paul’s band, Sharkey’s band, Wiggs’s band with Edmond Souchon, Lizzie Miles, Joe Robichaux, and Fats Pichon playing the calliope on the top deck. Dave Garroway, the show’s host with whom I’d worked on concerts in earlier days, called me a few days before-hand and asked if I’d do him the favor of keeping an eye on things. I’m not sure he knew what he wanted me to keep an eye on, but I was there.
The production people knew absolutely nothing about the music, and they kept asking for retake after retake until Lizzie’s voice was about gone and the musicians were getting irked. Barbarin was playing the “Basin Street Blues.” It was a great band and the rendition was superb, even though they’d done it a dozen times that day. A young assistant director approached him and said, “Paul, can’t you play that a little dirtier?”
Paul asked, “Where you from, young fella?”
“Iowa,” the kid said.
“An’ how old are you?” Paul pursued.
“Twenty-two,” was the answer.
Paul fixed him with a glare worthy of one of Macbeth s witches. Then this jazz pioneer who had played behind King Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Louis Armstrong, and Kid Ory said, “Young fella, you’re from Iowa, you’re twenty-two years old, and you are tellin’ me how to play the blues?”
Maybe ten years before that I was sitting in Childs’s Paramount Restaurant in New York, watching Paul’s band as he was completing an engagement there. When the set was over, Paul and the renowned clarinetist Willie Humphrey joined me at the table. We talked a few minutes and Paul said, “I got a tune we’re gonna play for you. You’re a big man with words, would you try to write me some words to this? I was thinkin’ of somethin’ about Bourbon Street. Like Bourbon Street Parade—you know, like South Rampart Street Parade.”
I promised I would if I could think of something. So the band played a couple of choruses and I wrote down on the menu, “Let’s drive down or fly down to Bourbon Street… etc.”
Paul had already had at least one successful number; it was “Come Back Sweet Papa.” Louis recorded it a couple of times.
Paul said, “I’ll try this out and if it goes, I’ll put you down for the lyrics.”
“No,” I told him, “I don’t want any of your copyright. Hell, it only took me five minutes and I don’t think the words are that great.”
I still don’t but the number was a big hit anyway. I hope Paul made a bundle on it. Willie Humphrey was the only witness to the affair.
Paul died on February 17, 1969, right in the middle of Mardi Gras. He was playing the snare drums in the Onward Brass Band and parading as he’d always done. I was standing on a gallery overlooking Royal Street with drummer Leonard Ferguson, whose apartment it was. Maskers were throwing beads and doubloons at us. Leonard is a superior drummer, coleader of the beautiful Crawford-Ferguson Night Owls, which produced one of the great LP’s of the jazz revival. There were lots of other guests, too. These were the days when the carnival parades still came through the French Quarter and came up Royal Street right past where we were standing. A musician—I think it was Brother Cornbread Thomas—called up to us to tell us that Paul had fallen out a short time before. By the time I called Charity Hospital he was dead.
The wake was attended by most every jazzman in town, besides a host of other distinguished citizens. The funeral next day, in the pouring rain, attracted one of the great mobs in New Orleans funeral history. Pete Fountain played “A Closer Walk With Thee,” and the various bands played many of Paul’s tunes. I was doing a recording session the following week and I had dialed halfway through his phone number before I remembered he wouldn’t make this session.
Neighborhoods
Somewhere there’s a doctoral dissertation yet to be done on the seeming coincidence of certain neighborhoods producing a disproportionate share of jazzmen. I’ve known everybody in the so-called “Austin High Gang” of Chicago. It included Krupa, Bud Freeman, Jimmy and Dick McPartland, and, I think, Dave Tough, and the bassist Jim Lannigan. I talked with Jimmy McPartland at a concert at St. Joseph’s Academy in Covington, Louisiana, during the late 1970s. He said he thought everybody was trying to play jazz in those days—not just the Austin High kids. Art Hodes was the bandleader that day. He’s from Chicago, too, but he pointed out that the Austin gang was younger, and he had no idea what was going on with them. Krupa never saw anything extraordinary about it. As for Dave Tough, it was always difficult to get him to concentrate on a question for more than a few seconds.
The Scarsdale High School troupe of the forties was another of these phenomena. Nominally, Bob Wilber headed the band. Each of its members seemed to have his own role model. Wilber, of course, got some pointers personally from Bechet while I watched. Trumpeter Johnny Glazel was clearly a copy of Wild Bill Davison, and Jerry Blumberg, another trumpet man, was a shade of Bunk. The band, with Dick Wellstood on piano, had a very convincing sound in its earliest days. Wilber seemed to feel, not without justification, that he, himself, was the catalyst that pulled it all together.
There were sections of New Orleans that spawned whole bands, too. Between 1915 and 1925 there was an area in the Faubourg St. John that spawned early Dixieland stars like Johnny Bayersdorffer, Lester Bouchon, Jules and Ray Bauduc, the drummer Roland “Dutch” Flick, and later Pete Fountain. I lived there for a while, too; but, of course, I never attempted to play with these guys. Bayersdorffer, an early recording star, once said, “It was nice and cool in the evenings under the trees in the neutral ground. In those days there was no television—hell, there was no radio. And when I started out there was no jazz on phonograph records, either. If you wanted that music, you just had to play it yourself.”
When an Orleanian says “downtown” he means the French Quarter and its immediate environs. When he says downtown, he’s talking about an area roughly back of Elysian Fields Avenue. Part of it is the Faubourg Marigny, and the rest is spread all the way back to the Industrial Canal toward Chalmette. Here, the three Christians—Frank, Charlie, and Emile—grew up, along with Willie Guitar, the Baquets, the Bechets, and dozens of others. Uptown, the section known as the “Irish Channel” brought together the Brunies, Tom and Steve Brown, Nick Larocca, Yellow Nunez, and the components of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, as well as the Loyacanos, Armand Hug, and another twenty or so. They were all centered on Jackson and Magazine. Also uptown, Joe Oliver, Kid Ory, and the Dutreys lived within a two-block radius. Buddy Bolden, Charlie Galloway, and Wallace Collins all lived in the section around First Street and Simon Bolivar. They played music together almost from childhood. The Shields family lived in the same block as Bolden.
The section known as Treme is now mostly gone and has been replaced by Armstrong Park. Back in there lived Picou, Kid Rena, Big Eye Louis Nelson, Sam, Isaiah, Andrew, and Albert Morgan, the Keppards, Jim Robinson, George Lewis, and the composer of “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” Edward Boatner. Jim Robinson had no explanation for this concentration. “It seemed like everybody played music when I come up from the country. I started out on guitar before the war [World War II], and music was just somethin’ you had to do,” he said.
Joe Robichaux once told me, “When I put together my big swing band, I didn’t have to go out of the neighborhood to get my men. And they were musicians! Those two great trombones, �
�Frog’ [Joseph] and Clement Tervalon. Guys like Turk and Kildee lived right near me, and Freddie Kohlman. I don’t remember where [Guy] Kelly lived, but he was the only one didn’t live close.”
Jelly Roll and Piron lived in what we always called the “Creole Section,” roughly bounded by Esplanade, Elysian Fields, Claiborne Avenue, and North Broad Avenue. The Nicholases, Albert and Wooden Joe, John Lindsay, and Buddy Petit were from around there. And a few came up from the slums. The area around Perdido and South Rampart was the roughest area of the city at the turn of the century. Louis Armstrong, Johnny and Baby Dodds, Kid Shots Madison, Punch Miller, and most of their early musical associates developed right around there.
The various neighborhoods of New York City didn’t follow this rule. It seemed as though each of the jazzmen that city produced came out of isolation into the jazz world. Harlem didn’t become the black musical center until too late. Before the late twenties, its ethnic composition was entirely different. It was a largely Jewish community, much of it Orthodox—not the kind of culture that produced jazz.
I hope someday someone will do the research on the connection between jazz and the various neighborhoods. Maybe Trebor Tichenor is trying to find out why so much ragtime was generated in Missouri, of all places. And maybe Harry Godwin knows why the blues got so much impetus out of Memphis and the barren hell of the Mississippi Delta country.
Lagniappe
Four Bar Breaks
One of the world’s great jazz bass players is Sherwood Mangiapane of New Orleans. He’s retired from his “day job” now as an officer of the Whitney National Bank. He’s one of my best friends among jazzmen I’ve known, and he has a number of talents besides slapping a bull fiddle, which he plays backwards because he’s left-handed. (He doesn’t restring the instrument—he just plays it backwards, but right.) One of his other talents is that he sings in the time-honored Crescent City tradition of Armstrong, Wingy, Prima. Not only that, but he’s the best hot whistler of them all. The problem is that he finds it impossible to whistle in front of an audience, so you’ll very likely never get to see him do it live. On recording sessions if you want him to whistle, you’ve got to let him turn his back to the musicians so that nobody can look at him. He’s known among his contemporaries for his uncanny musical ear. If something trivial goes wrong in a chord, he stops playing and says, “That’s wrong!” He doesn’t know music so he can’t tell you what’s wrong, but he can surely tell you where it’s wrong. By now nobody questions his ukase. When he says, “That’s wrong!” we all get to going over what happened until we find it. (The rest of us usually can’t read either.)
• • •
I’ve had the chance to work with some great drummers. Baby Dodds was always ready to lecture aspiring youngsters about the absolute necessity of practice. People who asked him how he had developed his phenomenal skills all got a one-word reply: “PRACTICE!”
There were several weekends in the summer of 1947 when you could have sailed up the river on the Hudson River Day Line for a jazz cruise and huddled in the bow of the ship to get as close as possible to the performers. The band included Bechet, Marty Marsala, Sam Price, Pops Foster, and Baby. On one such evening, I sat between Baby and a tweedy spectator who was smoking a cigarette and had become so intent on the intricacies of Baby’s magic with the sticks that he had permitted a large, glowing ember to drop off his cigarette onto the knee of his obviously expensive trousers. Baby, without missing a beat, flicked the tip of his drumstick and removed the potentially destructive fire so adroitly that the smoker was never aware of anything. Baby winked at me and whispered, “Practice!”
• • •
Big Sid Catlett was a great drummer and a great showman. I always thought he could also have been a great stand-up comedian. He was the original drummer in the Louis Armstrong All-Stars. He told me, “I might not be the best drummer in the world, but I’m big enough to slug any drummer who says I ain’t.”
• • •
George “Silver” Wettling, whenever he was working for me, always brought along a sketch pad full of drawings and color sketches for paintings. (I don’t know if I ever mentioned that art is my profession. It’s what made everything else possible.) I would criticize his work and try to give him helpful hints about improving it. I never took his things seriously because he didn’t seem to show much promise. But hell, everybody needs a hobby. Before he died, his things were bringing high prices and I suspect they’re worth even more now.
• • •
We had Buddy Rich working in the Click in 1947 with his left arm in a cast. That’s not easy for a drummer. But broken wing and all, he maintained his hectic pace through every set and remained ready to make the rounds with me on all the promotional activities I had planned. I asked him if it was a strain on him, and he said everything he’d ever done was a strain—even sex.
• • •
I got involved with helping a group of very eccentric folks produce a recording session in the mid-1970s. It was a stupid concept they’d started with. The leader, a guitar player of negligible ability, wanted to play with the best possible New Orleans jazz band behind him. I got Wiggs and Raymond Burke, Jack Delaney and Chester Zardis, and for a drummer none other than Louis Barbarin, who at that time was the best living jazz drummer.
This gang—one of those now-notorious California “families”—decided they couldn’t use Louis because he was born under the wrong sign. I had to pay Louis off and try to explain the problem to him. (They hadn’t even heard him play!) He said, “I already met some crazy people in the music business. At least these guys pay off.”
• • •
Arthur “Monk” Hazel spent a large part of his life on the road. He was clearly in the big time, especially during the years when he supported Gene Austin along with Candy and Coco. He played his drums with a strong feeling of the burlesque house and played on many occasions with Bix. Monk was an alcoholic, and I can’t believe he lived to be sixty-five years old in his condition. He can’t have had much liver left. He was back in New Orleans and working in Santo Pecora’s band at the Famous Door once when I actually saw him fall off the bandstand. I picked him up, carried him outside to my car, and drove him to his house on Arabella Street where he lived with his sister. Then I went back and saw Santo, who was extremely embarrassed to have had one of his musicians pass out from drinking in front of a full house. He was finishing the evening without a drummer.
“Whatya gonna do?” he asked. “I been playin’ with him all my life—and when he’s sober he’s the best drummer I know. He ain’t bad when he’s drunk, either. I hope the boss lets me keep him on.”
I had a talk with Hyp Guinle, the proprietor, expecting to have to make a plea for Monk’s job. He said, “If you’re somebody’s friend, you’re his friend when he’s drunk, too.”
Checking on Monk the next day I found him bright and cheerful and ready to work. He thanked me for bringing him home again. His sister had told him. He explained, “I gotta stop drinkin’ that scotch and go back to gin. Scotch’ll make a drunk out of a man.”
He gave me a mute that had belonged to Emmet Hardy. I still have it.
• • •
I never knew the king of the brass band bass drummers, Ernest “Ninesse” Trepagnier, even though he lived until 1968. But there’s a photograph, well-known to all jazz fans, of him with a band that included Clarence Williams, A. J. Piron, Kid Ory, and Oscar Celestin. Visible in the picture is an unusual, one-of-a-kind, hand-made snare drum, which, after his death, came into the possession of yet another outstanding drummer, Alfred Williams. Young Barrie Martyn, an English kid who would later organize his own band, “The Legends of Jazz,” to tour the world with great success, coveted that drum. But Barrie was in no financial position to pay the twenty-five dollars Alfred wanted for it, so I bought the drum for him with the understanding that he would pay me when he got the money. It took him quite a long time, but I got my money back. More years later, I heard, to m
y dismay, that he’d sold this historic treasure. I didn’t recognize him the next time I saw him, because he was approximately a hundred pounds heavier than the skinny kid I’d bought the drum for. I had worked myself up to tell him off for disposing of Ninesse’s drum. But it turned out he hadn’t sold it at all. Someone had stolen it. He was even more distressed than I was. Take a good look at the famous photo and observe the snare drum. If you ever see another drummer using it, you’ll know how he got it.
• • •
Ray McKinley was one of the demon drummers of the swing era—according to many, the best in the world. This tall, skinny, bespectacled Texan took over the Glenn Miller Orchestra after its famous leader was lost on a flight during World War II. But by 1947 he was the leader of his own band, and I sat with him as he rehearsed it in preparation for a recording session of the first Sauter-Finnegan arrangements. They were entitled “Borderline” and “Sandstorm” and would come out on the Majestic label. I didn’t have much I needed to do besides move his drums back fifteen feet or so and try out the mike on Lou Stein’s piano. I asked Ray how he felt and he said, “I’d feel better if I knew what I was doin’.”
The record was acclaimed by the “experts,” but I had the feeling Ray’s enthusiasm was limited. When he came to Philadelphia, he appeared on my radio show at the WFIL studio and talked about how much more fun it was to play with a real jazz band where you weren’t restricted by arrangements.
• • •
Wiggs had a job for his band in the St. Charles Hotel in the late forties. His drummer was Ray Bauduc, who had been sitting pretty a decade earlier when he gained fame as one of Bob Crosby’s celebrated Bob Cats. Wiggs didn’t hold the job long—though the short engagement was not because the music wasn’t outstanding. I spent quite a few evenings there because I knew it wouldn’t last, and I talked with Ray during many of the breaks. He once said, “I love this band! But when you’ve been up there at the top of show business it gets in your blood—New York, Hollywood, all that. You’d have thought I could save some money, but I didn’t. I’ve gotta have a go at it again, though.”