by James Jones
WHEN WE MET Willy Jefferson, “King” Jefferson, our band had already been following his progress for over five years. His records used to cause more argument in our band than Stephen Grappelli’s Hot Four and the question of whether the violin ought not to be morally disqualified as a jazz instrument. All we had to do was to put on some of King’s records and listen to that trumpet and we would end up by bringing in everybody from Panassié and Rudi Blesh to Dave Dexter, Jr.
Our whole band were juniors in high school when they were combing the backwoods of Louisiana looking for King. The next summer, when Bob Rhynolds of US Records finally found him, our band was playing its first booking away from home ground as a truly professional outfit. We manufactured schmaltz for ten weeks in the pavilion at Seraphan Lake upstate for the dancers. Our high school music director led the outfit. We had to put up with him because he got the job for us. He was friends with the owner and also had the soft-drinks concession. We came home from there sick of Guy Lombardo, but with our minds made up to all go together in a body to the same university so we could continue to develop our band as a unit, in spite of the parents.
Bob Rhynolds was already making plans then to record Mister King. He started collections, via Down Beat and some others, to buy King a new horn and some teeth. And he wrote a couple of articles about him for Down Beat, telling how at sixteen the old man had played second cornet with Buddy (King) Bolden’s Band; how, when they finally carted poor Buddy off to the nut ward, he had apprenticed himself to Freddy (King) Keppard, Buddy’s successor; how later, while slow-developing Joe (King) Oliver was still earning his feed as a butler, he had organized the Triple Eagle Band and with it won himself the title of third King in that dynasty which would die with Joe Oliver in a Savannah poolroom cleaning spittoons. And how finally, when they closed down Storyville in the First War to protect the virtue of the soldiers and sailors, he had disappeared off with a circus band and not been heard from since, mainly because after his horn got busted up in a fight at a dance and the rest of his teeth started to go he was forced to retire to the New Arcadia rice fields where he had started, without the money for a new horn, or for new teeth. And there he stayed for twenty years, until this letter from Rhynolds addressed in care of the New Arcadia postmaster found him, still working in the rice fields.
The story caught the public’s imagination, and the response was terrific. A lot of people who were not even jazz fans sent in money for him. Our band would have sent in ten bucks on that horn and them teeth ourself if we had not been so short of cash.
Bob was writing King regularly, because King was giving him the dope about the early days for his book Jazzbabies, which was why he contacted King in the first place, but now this offer of recording him had taken hold of him, and he published King’s thank-you letter in Down Beat. King wrote he was very pleased and proud over the response, and that he was excited over the prospect of being able to play again for the audiences of the world, whom, King admitted, he had not even expected would even remember him. He said maybe his hair was gray but the only thing old about him was his clothes. And he was waiting eagerly for the chance to play for all the good people who were helping to get him his teeth and his horn.
By the time the Rhynolds records, which were to create such a stir, finally reached the market, our band had graduated and were playing our second big summer job, at Edmond’s Point in Ohio. Our drummer’s uncle owned the amusement park there. He talked to the pavilion owner. Edmond’s Point was a summer resort on Lake Erie but not of the class of Russell’s Point or Cedar Point and they only had the name bands in on the weekends. We did the playing the other four nights of the week.
It was our drummer’s mother, together with two of the mothers of our reed section, who had hatched the idea to write the drummer’s uncle and appeal to him. They did that after the band had declared itself about to embark for Chicago to seek a summer playing job somewhere down around the vicinity of South State Street.
Actually, it was not nearly as bad as it sounds. Our drummer’s uncle hardly ever bothered to check up on us. We could buy all the bottles we wanted. And our two cabins were off by themselves on a spit, so that after we knocked off from work at midnight we could go home and play our own kind of music and jam to our hearts’ content without waking up anyone. And of course, we had our records and player.
We bought the Rhynolds records as soon as they were out.
You have to remember we were all serious about the future of jazz music in general, and our own in particular. Coupled to this was the fact that they were important historically. They were the first cuttings ever to be made of King Jefferson’s legendary trumpet, and they would provide a lasting link between the lost music of Buddy Bolden and King Oliver’s old acoustical recordings from the days of Dreamland and Royal Gardens. We held great expectations for them.
Well, what we heard, sitting there on that screen porch looking out over Lake Erie, was a style of trumpet that was rawer and coarser than any we had known existed, including our own grade school efforts when we first got our horns. Gutty wasn’t the right word for it at all. Armstrong played gutty trumpet, with a high polish and technical refinement of guttiness. This trumpet had no polish. It was as unpolished as our bass man’s fingernails he had never learned to stop biting. King Oliver’s cornet might occasionally sound antiquated to modern jazz ears—mainly because of the old acoustical-type recordings—but always it had a sensitivity of tone and precise originality of phrase that nobody, not even Armstrong, could beat, though he might tie it. This trumpet didn’t have that either. This trumpet sounded as if a man whose reflexes had forsaken him was fumbling and choking to get half-remembered things in his head out through the mouth of his horn. And to complete it, there was not a single original phrase in the whole collection of sides. The numbers were all traditional old New Orleans numbers, and the trumpet’s treatments of them were the same old trite treatments, solos so ancient they had beards, so hackneyed we all knew every note before it came out the horn. And yet, with all the faults and blunderings, you couldn’t deny that there was power in the trumpet, a strong emotional power, that hit you hard.
All this was a pretty big lump for our musical natures to swallow and digest. We were disciples of men like the early Hawk, and Jimmy Archey, and Pops Foster, and Art Hodes, and old Sidney Bechet, mostly men whose music had grown and smoothed out and changed since they left New Orleans. And here we were being asked to appreciate a man whose music had not changed since around 1910. But we made it. Not all in one day, naturally. But by the end of the summer we were ready to admit he was almost as good as Bob Rhynolds maintained he was. Maybe the opinion of the public in general had something to do with it.
Even our reed section who disliked him (led by the saxes, naturally, but also reinforced by the bass and piano) argued against him theoretically, rather than personally. By that I mean, they too had accepted him as a permanence, as a big man in the field who would have to be reckoned with. They would have only sneered at a third-rater, not argued.
The critical opinion didn’t agree any better than our band did. Some of the critics, who had previously lauded Bob Rhynolds’ rediscovery of King, were frankly shocked and disillusioned, they said. The Opinions ran all the way from the prophecy that King Jefferson would immediately sink back into the obscurity he deserved, to the prophecy that King Jefferson would immediately rise to the top and remain there for good, above Armstrong. Several writers feared King would give jazz the coup de grâce of cacophony. Others maintained jazz had at last reached the long-awaited fulfillment of its golden promise.
Whatever effect the argumentative reviews had on King himself when he read them, they certainly didn’t hurt his popularity any. The general non-jazz public went wild over him. King and his band began to get more engagements in New Orleans than they could handle. A couple of record store owners in L.A. made a trip clear from California to record him under their own label. Another guy, from Pennsy, drove all the way dow
n to New Orleans to record him himself. Before long King was recording right and left, for just about everybody but the big companies.
Our band enrolled en masse in James Millikin at Decatur that fall, majoring in Business Administration, a concession made to our various parents in return for the right to enroll in a body, and continued to follow the Cinderella Story from up there.
For that was what it was. We could see it in the change in our own band. The college kids, instead of asking for swing a la Goodman or Dorsey, at the dances we played, wanted to hear New Orleans a la King Jefferson. It was hard on our saxes, and the bass and piano, but the rest of our people thought it was great.
In the spring King appeared in Frisco with a series of Rudi Blesh jazz lectures, as a sort of living example. He played to an overflow crowd and told them the story of jazz in his own words, and of his happiness at finding so many good people who still liked his music. The critics’ Greek chorus immediately swelled in volume, some pointing out that the story of jazz King told wasn’t anywhere near the truth, while others pointed out that the music in King’s soul made him use words like a poet,
Then a small group of rebels, led by Bob Rhynolds naturally, voted him into third place in the Esquire Jazz Poll, and he was in.
In January of our sophomore year he played the Jazz Poll Concert from New Orleans. That spring Sidney Bechet brought him up to play with his band at the Savoy in Boston. That didn’t last long, but King had stopped off in New York for a sensational jam session at Jimmy Ryan’s that made all the trade papers, and appeared on Condon’s coast-to-coast program. That fall he and his old band opened at the Standish Casino on the lower East Side. They were an immediate sensation. Time, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Vogue, Esquire, and the New York papers ran pics and stories on them. Collier’s ran a full length feature on King and he was interviewed over the local radio stations. At the Standish he was pulling them in, not only the jazz fans but the general public.
Actually, it didn’t happen all that quickly. There was a time lag of over a year of hard luck in there, but looking back you tend to forget that. When King went out to Frisco our band were still freshmen at Millikin; when he opened at the Standish we were juniors. But looking back on it it still seems it all happened in one long breathless rush.
Maybe that is because the popularity, when it did come back, came so hard and so strong that it was as if it were not fickle and had never faded, but had instead kept right on growing.
New York had taken him into its arms with all its enthusiasm for what is new, and the out-of-towners asked to go to the Standish the first place, when they got in. And in the newspapers he was The King.
Our band was having its own troubles all through that time. It was all right for us during the school year, what with the dance jobs, but during both of those summers the only jobs we could get were dances at the local Moose, Elks and Country Club, and some weekends at Lake Lawler right next to home.
It was the same thing the next year, too, the summer after our junior year at Millikin. The home-rule was, if we couldn’t get a regular-paying job playing, we had to work. And when the band wanted to try Chicago on its own again, the parents set their collective foot down on that.
When we went back to school our senior year, we had what amounted to a signed ultimatum. If we could not get the band established as a self-paying proposition during the summer after we graduated, then we would all come home and go into the various businesses. Our bass man had an uncle who owned a couple of newspapers in Connecticut, and he promised to use his pull to get the band a job there for the summer, but after that we were on our own. Our parents were financing us for that one summer. We all knew how that would end. It wasn’t much of a deal, but it was all we could get.
The first thing we did when we got our bags unpacked in Stamford, where the job was, was to take in New York. There were only five of us, the others were coming to Stamford in another car and hadn’t got in yet. In New York we headed straight for 52nd Street. Bechet was playing at Jimmy Ryan’s, and we went straight there, without even stopping to look at the strippers’ pictures down along The Street, and we did not come out till they closed at four in the morning.
We had hit town on a Saturday night and Ryan’s was crammed. There was a fog of beery breath and tobacco smoke that burned your eyes, and so much screaming you could not hear yourself think and had to concentrate hard to even hear Bechet any at all. It was wonderful. We stood at the bar to save money. We were dressed right, cardigans and drapes, double-Windsors and spread collars, and pretty soon some of the cats there had swept us in and we were arguing Mezz Mezzrow, musician versus writer.
We had the best time we’d ever had in our lives. The first time of anything only happens to you once, in your life, I guess.
Maybe there was something significant in the fact that we went straight to Ryan’s, to hear Bechet. We did not even consider going to the Standish Casino. King Jefferson was still playing there.
When we left, one of those cats yelled to be sure and come down for the jam session tomorrow.
We knew all about the Jimmy Ryan’s Sunday afternoon jam sessions, of course. I mean, we knew they paid the players. And we knew they charged a buck and a half. We knew sidemen didn’t just bring their horns down and sit in. In other words, we knew they were commercialized. But we also knew—how well—musicians had to earn a living, too. And hick strangers from the Middle West don’t get into the apartments of featured strippers. Or of unfeatured strippers.
We got there early Sunday. The instruments weren’t set up yet. A couple of the featured artists were floating around accepting drinks from the cats. The rest weren’t there. We bought our tickets, and went across the street to Johnny’s Tavern to do our drinking. We had already learned that trick last night. The rest of the featured artists were over there where rye is thirty-five a shot. Ryan’s was having Pet Brown on alto, Ed Hall on clarinet, Jerry “Wild Bill” Bailey trumpet, Baby Dodds drums, Pops Foster bass, and somebody else on piano and guitar. By the time we had our drinking done, they had all sifted out and gone back across the street to work and you could hear them clear outside as we crossed the street to Ryan’s.
It was during the second break of the afternoon that we saw King Jefferson standing at the bar. We were on our way out to Johnny’s to have a drink. King was talking to Baby Dodds about Punch Miller, and we stopped to listen. It was a minute before we noticed Baby was embarrassed and trying real hard not to be constrained, King had his trumpet case under his arm. “Is Punch Miller in town?” one of us asked.
The King swung around so hard he almost fell over. He was real drunk. “You know old Punch?” he asked eagerly.
“Naw,” one of us said. “Just his music. We got some of his records.”
“Yeah, he in town. I just telling Baby.”
That was when we noticed Baby was gone. He had moved down the vacant bar and was talking to some cats at the other end.
“So you boys know old Punch,” King said. “Whyn’t you go look old Punch up.”
“We don’t know him,” one of us said. “We just—”
“Here. I give you his address,” King said. “He be real glad to see you boys. Old Punch is down and out. He on his uppers, and he sick. That’s nowhere to be, not in this New York town.” He wrote the address on one of Ryan’s cards and handed it to the nearest one of us. “I just telling Baby about old Punch. You go see him.”
“We don’t know him,” one of us said. “We just—”
“Why don’t you put your name on it, too, King?” the one who had the card said. “I’d like to have it.”
The King’s eyes kindled. “You boys know me? Sure, I sign it. Here. Gimme that card.”
“Hell yes, we know you,” one of us said.
“You ever hear me play?”
“Just on records.”
He nodded. “You boys stick around. I going to play here, pretty soon. They din’t ask me, but I going to anyway.” He shook the tr
umpet case at us. “They don’t ask ol King no more to these jam sessions. But I just come down anyways. I see you boys.” He went off down the bar toward Baby Dodds and the talking cats.
“I’m going to keep this card,” our bass man said, shaking it at us, as we crossed the street to Johnny’s. “I’m going to keep it forever.” He put it in his pocket carefully.
“It don’t belong to you,” our trumpet man said. “Belongs to the whole band.”
“Like hell,” the bass man said.
We argued about the card over our series of rye-highs in Johnny’s Tavern, without reaching a decision, until we heard them start up again across the street, and then went back over there.
There wasn’t any minimum at the Sunday sessions and we got bottles of beer and moved down to a table as close to the band as we could get. They were already gone and going strong on Nobody’s Sweetheart, with Wild-Bill-Bailey punching out the drive in that surcharged style of his.
King Jefferson was standing in the passageway around the left of the stand to the men’s room with his trumpet in his hand. He would play a few bars, low, along with them, and then he’d stop and reach up and pluck at Baby Dodds’ shirt sleeve. Baby would look down at his drums embarrassedly until he couldn’t any longer, and then he’d look down at King and frown and shake his head and say something, and then smile, with that constrained look of trying not to look constrained on his face embarrassedly. It was bothering his playing. King didn’t even leave him alone when he was on his solo choruses. He kept it up all through the set, but Baby never got mad.
Once we saw Wild-Bill-Bailey lean over and say something to the colored guitarman and they both shook their heads and laughed disgustedly. When the set was over, Wild-Bill climbed down and cut out quick. So did Baby and Pops Foster. King Jefferson lingered around the stand, after they were all down, and blew little bleats on that exquisite trumpet as if he were warming up his lip. He would blow a bleat and look around and grin and nod his head and then blow another bleat.