I Remember Jazz

by Rose, Al;

  Ray and Nappy Lamare organized their “Riverboat Dandies” and made it to the big time for a last hurrah.

  I talked to him in Fort Lauderdale in the fifties and he told me, “Ten years from now, I think the real music we play will be all gone. The kids comin’ up are doin’ something else. I’m not saying it’s no good—it just isn’t our kind of music.” Nappy nodded along in agreement.

  • • •

  I don’t remember any time in my life when I didn’t know Albert Francis. Before I was aware of him, he was employed as the drummer in the trio that performed nightly in Tom Anderson’s legendary saloon in the Storyville district. It was here that the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) walked in one night with his entourage for a spot of amusement. The prince politely asked Albert if he might borrow his sticks. He then sat down on the stool and played for an hour with the group. Albert told me the princes performance was creditable. But he added, “Sure, it sounded good to me! If he’s playin’, that means I ain’t playin’ and after eight, ten hours a man got enough playin’.”

  I was happy to sit and talk with him at the Tulane Hot Jazz Classic series of events in May, 1983. The vigorous nonagenarian greeted me with, “I didn’t know youngsters like you was allowed out after dark.”

  I showed him my medicare card.

  • • •

  Zutty Singleton was showing me how he made his press roll on the snare drum. He slowly counted out eight rhythmic beats as he played them, then repeated that slightly faster, then sixteen, even faster, but still not too fast to count the beats. Then he said, “Now you turn your tape recorder on and I’ll do you a couple of thirty-twos and then a couple of sixty-fours. Then you play it back at a speed where you can count ’em and you’ll see there’s exactly the right number in each set.”

  He played three sets of beats in what sounded like approximately the same time. Then he did three more sets in what seemed like half the time. Of course, as a roll, it was an apparently continuous sound, since it was too fast to distinguish an individual drumbeat.

  “Now you slow that tape down and see what you got.”

  But slowing it to the slowest speed the beats were still too fast to count, so I rerecorded it later to make it come in even slower. At last I got it slow enough and was able to establish that the first sets had all been exactly thirty-two beats and the last ones twice that speed.

  On a later occasion I had some questions to ask Zutty, like “I know you can’t count that fast! How do you get it to come out right on the money?”

  “When I first started out I counted. But after I got really good at it, I didn’t have to count any more and it would just come out right. Today’s young kids can’t even play a roll that doesn’t count out right. I s’pose it’s just a gift.”

  Zutty’s delightful wife Margie said, “He can’t tell how he does any of that. I’ve seen him show a lot of people, but I guess you can’t explain a gift.”

  If You Pick It It Won’t Get Better

  That’s what Edmond Souchon used to tell other banjo and guitar players: “If you pick it, it won’t get better.” Jazz bands that had to operate on short budgets in the old days would try to get by with the minimum number of musicians. They eventually settled, informally, on five as a minimum number of components for a jazz band. Of these five, three had to be the front line horns—trumpet or cornet, trombone, and clarinet. A proper seven-piece band also included piano and drums, plus guitar (banjo) and bass. Expediency eventually dictated that the way you cut a seven-piece band down was first to drop the banjo/guitar player, then the bass. This fact created a clear-cut defensive attitude among guitar and banjo players. Lonnie Johnson, famed for his work with Armstrong and his recorded duets with Eddie Lang, explained it to me like this:

  “So you got a job in this seven-piece outfit, see, and you workin’ steady, say in a club or a dance hall. Then the band gets popular and they send for ’em to come out of town somewhere. The telegram says ‘five pieces,’ maybe ‘six pieces.’ It don’t never say seven pieces. So the band goes, the guitar player stays home. A guitar player go to learn to do a single or he don’t work much. That means sing, too.”

  Elmer Snowden’s version went like this: “A banjo player wants to play for a livin’, full time, he’s got to put together his own band. Got to be the leader. Of course I did that when I first started out in Washington. I had this band, and I hired me a piano player [Duke Ellington] and he stole my band [The Washingtonians] and my job!”

  • • •

  Emanuel Sayles is an accomplished banjoist and guitarist. He plays regularly in Preservation Hall, and his musical credits include having played in the history-making recording session issued under the name of the Jones-Collins Astoria Hot Eight. This was the first racially mixed session in the South. We had an argument one time, about 1958, when he handed me his card advertising the Three Chocolate Bars. I objected that he shouldn’t be identifying his group racially at all—that designations such as the Ink Spots, the Black and Tan Orchestra, and the Black Eagles had become socially retrogressive. Sayles’ view was that he was proud to be a Negro and wanted everyone to know it.

  He was the teacher of Danny Barker, and it has been my great pleasure to have had both of them, at various times, making record sessions. (I really prefer Danny on guitar, Sayles on banjo.) Several years ago, a young and talented free-lance television producer, Stevenson Palfi, sought my counsel in the development of a documentary based on a New Orleans jazzman’s career. I talked over with him a number of possible personalities he might use. Among the names that came up were Danny, Narvin Kimball, and Percy Humphrey. At last Palfi and his associates came up with the choice of Sayles, and I was happy to be asked to help with and appear on the show.

  It was entitled “This Cat Can Play Anything,” and it won the Leigh Whipper Award for the best musical biography of the year on television. Since it was shown on a network, it earned national recognition for its subject. When Sayles played in the Soviet Union during a Preservation Hall European tour, he was astonished to find there were many Russian jazz fans who were familiar with his name and his work. “They never even saw the TV show, either,” he commented.

  • • •

  Within even the narrow scope of New Orleans jazz banjo, specialties develop that become unique to certain individuals. Narvin Kimball, for instance, is a true virtuoso in the matter of single-string picking on the plectrum, and he also has a style of singing standard gospel songs that captures the hearts and wrings the emotions of his audiences.

  Kimball is a fine, cultured gentleman. He’s one of the few New Orleans jazzmen that have never worked with me on anything. He let me know he was aware of that, too, and I just couldn’t bring myself to explain to him that what he does best doesn’t fit the context of what I produce. I have a principle objection to religious music of any kind, and never do any in any medium. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy listening to him or that we don’t greet each other when we meet.

  • • •

  Creole George Guesnon was a pretty good banjo player who recorded as a soloist for Decca. He was also a kind of jazz historian, and since he grew up at the source of the subject, he had an expert’s knowledge of his own environment. When our first edition of New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album was published, Bill Russell brought him a copy to look at. Guesnon, a cynic who was convinced the world had conspired to keep him out of the spotlight, found an error in the text. (There were several.) He was quick to point it out to Bill, who said he’d pass the information on to me so that the error might be changed in future printings.

  George said, “Don’t you do that, now! That’s down in the book now! That’s hist’ry! You can’t change hist’ry!”

  • • •

  Lawrence Marrero gained most of his fame as the banjo player in the bands of George Lewis and Bunk Johnson. Even most of his many fans had no idea he was once a professional boxer, too, or that he often played bass drum in street parades. I was follo
wing one of these parades one day in 1954 when a tall young man, respectably dressed and carrying a camera, attempted to grab Lawrence’s wire beater as the band stood at rest. I saw Marrero grab the young man’s arm with one hand and hit him in the abdomen with the other. As the aspiring thief doubled over, Marrero, a quiet man if ever there was one, shouted, “Somebody call an ambulance.” The policemen assigned to provide security for the parade were on the spot in an instant. The band struck up and marched away. I followed the band but looked back to notice that the cops had stood the offender on his feet and one of them hit him on the head with a billy club. I walked alongside Lawrence and told him what was happening, and he said, “If they hit him too hard he’ll forget how much his stomach hurts. I got him a good one.”

  It had obviously made his day.

  • • •

  There was a period during the thirties when Joe Capraro’s Orchestra was the only outfit in town with steady work. He’s a genuine master of jazz guitar, a beautiful musician whom I’ve known for years. There was something about his face, though, that haunted me. I was sure I knew somebody who looked exactly like him. I told him he had a double in town, but I couldn’t remember who it was.

  “Yeah?” he said. “There can’t be another face like this.”

  But I had this face in my head—and in a uniform. Policeman? No. Postman? No. I couldn’t get it off my mind whenever I was around Joe.

  I frequently have business around City Hall, and one day I was in a group of people leaving the building. A limousine was waiting, and the chauffeur jumped out to open the door. The driver, fully liveried from billed cap to leather puttees, was Joe Capraro. He showed no sign of recognition.

  The next afternoon I saw him at Joe Mares’s studio. I couldn’t wait to tell him who his double was—the mayor’s chauffeur.

  He told me. “That wasn’t no double. That was me. That’s my day job.”

  I asked him why he never spoke to me. He told me, “I ain’t allowed, but I thought you knew it was me.”

  Some Piano Sharks

  It’s always been hard to find a piano player that can fit into a genuine jazz band. Most of them think like soloists and can never grasp the instrument’s basic percussive function. Getting a pianist to limit himself to keeping rhythm and making the chord changes is now almost impossible. Some of them can’t do it and some of them won’t, but it isn’t easily established which is which. In the past there were some great band piano men. Sammy Price, Joe Sullivan, Art Hodes, Gene Schroeder, Armand Hug, Stanley Mendelson, Jess Stacy, and Hank Duncan were outstanding. Price, Stacy, and Mendelson survive, though Stacy doesn’t play anymore. Knocky Parker still performs frequently, if not regularly, with bands, and he’s hard to beat.

  Don Ewell, who was Bunk Johnson’s favorite, has a place in my gallery of great people. He stayed at my house for an extended visit once, while he was working at the Royal Orleans Hotel. He was an intellectual with a scholar’s grasp of the humanities, and he had one major vice, chess. His lovely wife Mary gave him a Christmas present of an electronic, computerized chess opponent while he was at my place, and I think we never discussed anything after that. He kept competing with this box every waking moment. His health was failing at the time, and his physician established the fact that he needed a heart by-pass desperately. Don was shocked by this news, reluctant to take the necessary steps to get himself repaired. I spent lots of time giving him pep talks and convincing him to follow the doctor’s orders. I finally persuaded him to let me drive him to the Ochsner Clinic for the surgery. He improved dramatically after that, moved back to his home in Pompano Beach, Florida. I’m such an unreliable correspondent that I didn’t keep in touch with him for too long. He stayed on my list of things to do until he died. Now he’s gone and I feel guilty.

  Dick Wellstood, whom I had the chance to present at the 1982 Tulane Hot Jazz Classic, is another chess freak—one of those who carries on international competition by mail. He played piano behind Bechet frequently. I remember him when he was just a youngster and I had brought Bechet and some other musicians to Boston for a do at Symphony Hall where he performed brilliantly. One of the numbers he played at the concert this year was James P. Johnson’s “Old Fashioned Love,” which Wellstood defined as “love before herpes.”

  • • •

  Frank Amacker was an old man by the time I met him. He had been, in the period from 1907 to 1913, a piano-playing professor in the bordellos of Storyville, and I set about finding him for an interview while researching my book on that subject. He proved to be a mine of information and color background. I’d find him in the carriageway of Preservation Hall occasionally, and it became my custom to shake hands with him and leave a dollar or two in his palm as a kind of gratuity. One evening I discovered I’d left my wallet in my apartment and I told him I was going back to get it and that I’d have a little something for him. He said, “That’s all right, Mr. Al. Your credit’s good with me.”

  • • •

  Professor Manuel Manetta lived across the river from New Orleans in Algiers. He started many an aspiring jazzman on his career, including many of his relatives. The family included pianist Dolly (Douroux) Adams and her illustrious sons—bass player Placide, guitarist Justin, and drummer Gerald. He, too, played piano in the district but was competent on all other instruments. Sometimes, when Buddy Bolden had a job for an expanded orchestra, which he sometimes did, he’d hire Manetta just to wave the baton.

  Manetta told me an exciting story of how he’d been leading his orchestra on the bandstand of the Tuxedo Dance Hall on the fateful Easter night of 1913 when the altercation took place that left the owner of the place, Harry Parker, and his rival from across the street, Billy Phillips, owner of the 101 Ranch, dead. Manetta described all of the action. He told how he and his musicians had dropped to the floor and taken refuge behind chairs, how they’d escaped from the place through a trapdoor in the ceiling. I duly made notes of the gory details, which all made for some fast-moving melodrama. Being, however, the compulsive researcher that I am, it wasn’t long before I discovered that since it was Easter night, there couldn’t have been any orchestra in there because music wasn’t allowed in dance halls on Sunday. Besides, the police blotter showed that only one musician, drummer Abbey “Chinee” Foster, had been present, and he was only there to see about a job for the following week.

  • • •

  Joe Sullivan, the great Chicago piano player, and I looked very much alike in the forties. Jazz fans coming backstage would frequently ask me for my autograph on the assumption that I was Joe. I was considerably taller and ten years younger, but audiences don’t get the proper perspective seeing people on stage. I was coming out of a stage door with Eddie Condon one night, and a girl came up to us with an autograph book. She asked for our signatures. I said, “Young lady, I’m not Joe Sullivan. He should be out in a minute or two.”

  Condon signed his name and handed the book back. He said, “Sure, he’s Sullivan. Whenever he doesn’t want people to recognize him he doesn’t carry a piano.”

  • • •

  In 1965 a junket left New Orleans aboard the private plane of Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller. Our purpose was to participate in the dedication of the John Reid Jazz Wing of the Arkansas Cultural Center. Allan Jaffe was aboard, with musicians from Preservation Hall including Kid Thomas, George Lewis, and the piano player Charlie Hamilton. Hamilton hadn’t been hired for the job originally. On the Wednesday before this particular weekend, Jaffe had engaged Joe Robichaux. On the following day, January 17, Robichaux died in New Orleans, a grievous loss for all followers of the real jazz.

  But the show must go on. Jaffe immediately phoned Lester “Blackie” Santiago, an illustrious piano artist from Celestin’s band. Santiago accepted and then died on the following day, January 18. It’s understandable that Charlie Hamilton was reluctant to accept the job.

  On our arrival in Arkansas, after checking into the hotel, we were informed that late the previous night,
Papa John Joseph, ninety-two years old, had been playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” in Preservation Hall, had turned to the other musicians at the conclusion of the piece and said, “That about took everything out of me.” He then collapsed and died on the spot. Larry Borenstein, who was with us, immediately flew back to New Orleans, missing the ceremonies, to settle the chaos that had resulted from Papa John’s death.

  Despite Mrs. Rockefeller’s generous hospitality, that proved to be one weekend none of us were anxious to relive.

  • • •

  It is time honored custom in New Orleans for Rex’s Mardi Gras float to be followed by an old fashioned circus wagon atop which a real jazz band holds forth during the entire parade. This marathon effect is achieved by having a full rhythm section going all the time and two front lines, one on either side of the wagon, which alternate. It was my function as director to control these shifts and to call the tunes, besides constantly regulating the amplifying system’s volume according to the width of the streets we went through. Each Mardi Gras provides unpredictable events for the musicians, and in each case, one way or another, it all works out all right. Of course, you must remember to carry empty fruit juice cans for the older and less continent performers, you must monitor the distribution of alcoholic beverages that are all too generously supplied by Rex, the King of Carnival, and you must keep the two front lines from playing simultaneously from the beginning of the parade because, if they do, the music won’t last from 8 A.M. to 3 P.M. as it must.