Milt Hinton: We Are Like Atlas - Part 1-3 Complete

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Milt Hinton is a unique figure in jazz. As a bass player, he spans seven decades of the music's history. Starting out with Cab Calloway in 1936, he soon became one of jazz's essential sidemen, performing on what are now classic recordings with the likes of Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, and Ben Webster. And with some help from Jackie Gleason, he became one of the first black musicians to integrate the recording studios in the early '50s, backing up legends like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Barbra Streisand.

What also makes Milt Hinton's life so wonderful is his photographic work. He got a camera in the late '30s and began shooting his fellow musicians and the places he traveled. What he recorded provides valuable insights into why jazz is one of America's great art forms.

I was deeply touched when my son Kyle, a jazz bassist, was asked to perform at a concert celebrating Milt's ninetieth birthday at the JVC Festival in 2000. Having Kyle play in a bass chorus with some of jazz's finest musicians made me proud and reaffirmed my passion for the music.

Milt Hinton's body of work has inspired and guided me in my musical journey, and I think this book will provide a similar experience for all who have loved jazz as I have throughout my life.”

- Clint Eastwood, April 2007, Foreword to Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton’s Life in Stories and Photographs

“Milt Hinton is an extraordinary man, and this is an extraordinary book. It engages the reader on a multiplicity of levels—and not just because its author has created both words and pictures.

On one level, it is the story of an exemplary American life, a tale of overcoming, telling us that talent combined with character, motivation, and tenacity can conquer adversity. On another level, it is a remarkable history of the great American music called jazz, told from the special perspective of a man who made some of that history in the course of a unique career spanning its most productive years—half a century and then some of music-making. It is also a slice of revealing personal and social Afro-American history, keenly observed. And to all this is added a selection of prime Hinton photographs, a kind of visual counterpoint to the words.”

- Dan Morgenstern, Preface to Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton’s Life in Stories and Photographs

During the last decade of his life, Gene Lees dedicated himself and his Jazzletter to the following proposition [Gene died in April, 2010].

“In the past few years, I have been only too aware that primary sources of jazz history, and popular-music history, are being lost to us. The great masters, the men who were there, are slowly leaving us. I do not know who said, "Whenever anyone dies, a library burns." But it is true: almost anyone's experience is worth recording, even that of the most "ordinary" person. For the great unknown terrain of human history is not what the kings and famous men did — for much, though by no means all, of this was recorded, no matter how imperfectly — but how the "common" people lived.

When Leonard Feather first came to the United States from England in the late 1930s, he was able to know most of his musical heroes, including Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. By the end of the 1940s, Leonard knew everybody of significance in jazz from the founding figures to the young iconoclasts. And when I became actively involved in the jazz world in 1959, as editor of Down Beat, most of them were still there. I met most of them, and became friends with many, especially the young Turks more or less of my own age. I have lived to see them grow old (and sometimes not grow old), and die, their voices stilled forever. And so, in recent years, I have felt impelled to do what I can to get their memories down before they are lost, leading me to write what I think of as mini-biographies of these people. This has been the central task of the Jazzletter. [Emphasis mine]

When I wanted to know something about one aspect or another of music history in the 1960s, I could pick up the telephone and call these older mentors, such as Alec Wilder or my special friend Johnny Mercer, or Robert Offergeld, music editor of Stereo Review when I wrote for it and one of the greatest scholars I have ever known. If I wanted to know something about the history or the technique of film composition, I could telephone my dear, dear friend Hugo Friedhofer, who wrote his first film music in 1929. There was nothing worth knowing about film music that Hugo didn't know; and not much for that matter about the history of all music. I can't call Hugo anymore. Or Dizzy. I can't call Glenn Gould either. Gerry Mulligan was ten months older than I. Shorty Rogers died while I was researching the Woody Herman biogra­phy; I was to interview him in a week or two.

Now, when my generation is gone, there will be no one much left who knew Duke Ellington and Woody Herman and Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. All future writers will be depen­dent not on primary sources, which all of these people were for me, but on secondary sources, which is to say documents. And earlier writings. And I have found much of the earlier writing on jazz, such as that of John Hammond and Ralph J. Gleason, to be unreliable — sloppy in research, gullible in comprehension, and too often driven by personal and even political agendas. Errors — and lies — reproduce themselves in future writings.”

Beginning with the April 2000/Jazzletter, legendary bassist Milt Hinton was the subject of a multi-part profile by Gene.

You took Milt Hinton for granted. He wasn’t flashy; was not the author of memorable finger-bustin’ bass solos; did innovate using all four fingers of the right hand to pluck the bass strings; nothing flashy here.

But man could Milt Hinton play the bass: flawless time; creative choice of notes; framing the chords; establishing a metronomic pulse with a devastatingly pure walking bass; Milt Hinton was everybody’s bassist of choice, especially in the New York studios in the 1950s and 1969s.

Here’s his story as told to Gene.

“The Cab Calloway band outlasted the big-band era but finally, in 1948, it too broke up.

"Now I had a problem," Milt Hinton said in his deep Mississippi accent. It is a Gulf accent, related to that of New Orleans, and, for reasons I have never fathomed, that of Brooklyn. "Rehearsed" is pronounced rehoised.

"I'd been in Cab Calloway's band 16 years and I thought it was going to last forever, and it almost did. I didn't know New York. I'd been traveling. I was busy all those years, recording with Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, making records on the side. New York was doing 75 percent of all recording in America. This was before Motown, Nashville, and all that. We invented the TV jingle in New York. And here I am, I don't know anybody, and I'm out of work now.

"I'm walking down the street one day, and I run into Jackie Gleason. I knew Jackie Gleason when he couldn't get arrested. I worked clubs in Jersey when I had to buy him a drink. Bullets Durgom was his manager. And I knew Bullets when he was a song-plugger at the Cotton Club. He'd bring songs to Cab. So Bullets and Jackie Gleason are walking down the street. It was around 55th Street." Milt has an uncanny memory for exact locations and dates.

"Jackie says, 'Milt Hinton, where've you been?'

"I said,'Nowhere.'

"Jackie said, 'Bullets, we're doing this record date tomorrow, I can use Milt.' But they ain't used no black guys in any of those big string bands. You know that.

"Bullets says, 'Jackie, we've got a bass player.'

"Jackie says, "Yeah? Well we've got two now.'

"I went to the date the next day, and everything was wonderful."

"Were they the string dates with Bobby Hackett?" I asked.

"That's right," Milt said. "I made every one of them. It was called Music for Lovers Only. The problem wasn't the musicians. The powers that be were the problem. Nobody had ever bothered to change things. I showed up, I've got a good bass, and I can play and I can read music. We had 65 men there. And all the big contractors were there. They heard me play, and the string players were interested in my bass, a Mateo Groffella, made in 1740. Wonderful bass. And so the guys all came over to me and were talking to me and the contractors took my name down.

"And that's when I got into the recording business. I did Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand, I worked with Percy Faith. And it all started with Gleason.

"At that time Jack Lesberg was the busiest bass player in New York. He was doing Lucky Strike Hit Parade and he was doing a CBS radio show, Galen Drake, on Saturday morning. Bernie Leighton was the pianist, Jack Lesberg was the bassist. They changed the rehearsal time of Lucky Strike Hit Parade, so Jack Lesberg couldn't make the show and he recommended me. In radio it was cool.. .."

"Yeah, you were invisible."

"Yeah!" Milt laughed. "Invisible. I got the show, and it paid 90 dollars. It was manna from heaven. Jack Lesberg gave me that show. Then I did the Woolworth Hour with Percy Faith, radio show on Sunday afternoon. Percy was a beautiful man. That was the beginning of life for me. By now I've made more records than any bass player living or dead.

"Pretty soon we were the New York rhythm section: Hank Jones, piano, Barry Galbraith, guitar, Osie Johnson, drums, and me. And we dealt in service. We want to make you sound good. We'll give you anything you want. We worked 10 to 1, 2 to 5, and 7 to 10, every day. We made all those Eddie Fisher records when he was hot."

One of Milt's countless bassist friends is Bill Crow. Bill commented:

"After those Jackie Gleason dates, the New York contractors were lining up to book him for dates. At the height of the recording boom in the '50s and '60s, Milt and Osie Johnson were the rhythm team of choice around New York. Many contractors waited to get their availability before booking studio time.

"Milt had a helper running basses to different recording studios around town in advance, so he could hurry from one date to the next and have an instrument waiting for him. He took every date seriously, no matter how inconsequential the music. On the simplest jingle date, Milt would listen critically to the playback and work to improve his part on the next take. He would help you find gigs, would send you to sub for him in important situations, and would share anything he knew about basses, technique, lore, and the ins and outs of the music business. It was his kindness that connected me with the conductor who hired me for two of the major Broadway shows I played for 11 years.

"I treasure his friendship."

To which John Clayton added:

"Milt is our maestro. He is the leader who has taught us, first, how to be loving, compassionate human beings. And he has helped us set our goals by supplying us with such a high level of bass playing."

All of this reminded me of something Oscar Peterson once said to me. Oscar said: "Bass players are very protective of each other. I would find it almost unbelievable if you told me you'd ever heard a bass player say something about another bass player that wasn't good. If you look at the history of the instrument in jazz, you can see why. The public never used to notice bass players. They were always the guys who came into the group and were given one order, 'Walk!' Once in awhile they'd be thrown a bone, like, 'Walk — one chorus solo.' Finally they managed to break away, because of the proficient players who came along."

I told Milt that Oscar had said you'd never hear one bass player say anything against another.

"Never!" Milt said emphatically, and laughed. "It's like family. You might have nine or ten brothers and sisters, but your Mama is your Mama. We come one to a customer in jazz. There's only one bass player in a band. I'm the best bass player of any band I'm in. And I don't have to worry about playing first or second. Saxophone players, this one wants to play first, this guy doesn't want to play second, this guy don't want to play third, and they put each other down. We don't have that problem. We share work. I just told you what Jack Lesberg did for me. We've always done that. We still do it."

"Who are your favorite bass players?" I asked, knowing full well that he would never say.

"All of them. I'm older than most of them that are living. And they all revere me, they treat me like I'm their father. It makes me feel great. I saw this great accomplishment. I saw Ray do what he did. Ray Brown to me is the guru of bass players. He sacrificed. He's a quarterback, he knows music, he's a finished musician, a pretty good piano player. He dedicated himself to playing that bass.

"I saw Oscar Pettiford do that. It was a natural thing; he was not a schooled musician. I saw him first time in St. Paul, Minnesota. I went to a nightclub when I was with Cab Calloway's band, 1937, to be exact. And this kid is playin' his ass off in there. I said, 'Holy cow!' and I introduced myself. Ben Webster was with me. I said, 'We're down at the Orpheum Theater. Come down tomorrow. I want the guys to hear you.' He came down, and all the guys heard him. All through our lives we were friends.

"I saw Richard Davis when he was right out of high school, when he came to New York. He looked me up. And look what he's done.

"I'd invite the new young bass players to come to my home. Some of them stayed at our house. We'd make a big pot of chicken and rice and some chili. If there was a gig, I'd recommend them. So it's gone like that, and we keep that going. I gave Bryan Torff his first job.

"There's no color to that.

"Scott LaFaro was fantastic. When he was killed, I finished a recording gig with Stan Getz at Webster Hall for him. He was amazing! I saw his great progress. The same thing when Blanton came along. The harmonic expansion, the solos, and still maintaining the prime requisite of a bass player, which is to support. I've seen Richard Davis do that, then Ron Carter, and Rufus Reid. John Clayton is fabulous. He's won awards in classical bass and jazz.

"We have a Milt Hinton Scholarship for bass players. We've got enough money to give three, four scholarships a year, on the interest, without even touching the money. They submit a tape, and we sit down, people like Bill Crow, Jack Lesberg, Ron Carter, and listen to all these tapes, and decide who is deserving of this scholarship. I don't even get a vote unless there's a tie. We allocate the scholarships according to that.

"On my eightieth birthday, a hundred bass players went down to Lincoln Center and played Happy Birthday."

That was ten years ago. Milt's ninetieth was celebrated June 13, 2000, with a concert at the Danny Kaye Theater. Every bass player you ever heard of was there, excepting those who simply couldn't make it.

There is no more revered figure on any instrument than Milton John Hinton, almost universally known as the Judge. The nickname came from the punch line of a joke even he could not remember, but he started greeting friends with "Good morning, Judge," or "Good evening, Judge," but with time musicians began applying the sobriquet to him. Yet he is the least judgmental of men, this most generous man, this miracle of a man, this giver of knowledge, this phenomenal musician. No other bassist — and only one other musician, namely Benny Carter — has comparably transcended the eras of jazz, comfortable in all of them, since the days when Louis Armstrong put the refining touches to the definition of this music in Chicago in the 1920s.

"I was born June 23, 1910, in Vicksburg, Mississippi," Milt said. "It was the era of blacks migrating from the south. It's a most interesting era that people seem historically to overlook.

"My grandmother was a slave on a plantation. At Emancipation, you took the name of the overseer, the man who was in charge of the plantation. And the man who was in charge was named Carter, so she took the name of Hetty Carter. She married a man named Matt Robinson. He was a pretty enterprising sort of a guy, and he got a horse and a buggy and started what we call a hack, to carry people around. He did very well. He had thirteen children. My mother was one. Most of'em died.

"My grandmother was the idol of my entire life, because this lady had the fortitude, the strength, the know-how to survive. Her last child was born five months after her husband was dead. He had dropsy, they called it in those days. You can imagine a black woman in the south with nine or ten kids and no husband.

"She got a job working for a white family, a Jewish family named Baer, that had a department store. They liked her and gave her three and a half dollars a week, which was a good salary. They gave her carte blanche to take care of the house, to cook, wash, iron, buy all the food. And she bought enough food for them and her children. She cooked for them, and she had enough left for her children to come to the back door and get the food and take the dirty clothes back to the shack they lived in, put the dirty clothes in that big pot out the back with a fire under it to boil those clothes, and the children could eat while she finished doing what she had to do in the house.

"She went to this man Baer, who seemed to like her very much, and she asked him if he would permit her to open a little stand down by his store. People coming to work in the morning needed coffee. She set up her coffee stand, where she sold a cup of coffee and two biscuits for a nickel. And she augmented her salary like that to keep her kids going.

"My grandmother learned to read. She was very religious, of course. She led us all to dignity and morality and peace. She didn't want any of her children to even argue among themselves. She lived until I was in Cab Calloway's band. She made a hundred and three years, so I got the first-hand information about this.

"She told me about smallpox and other diseases. They didn't care about black people with smallpox, and the black community was just ravaged. They quarantined her shack with her children in it and she couldn't even go home to help them. She'd have to push food under the gate and they'd come and get it. She took one of my uncles, who was a baby, to what they called a pest house. It was supposedly like a hospital for black people, and they didn't even have any water. She said they told her the water was no good. People were laying there, dying, and drinking out of the urinals because they had no water.

"Do you know what a dray is? It's a two-wheel cart. Black people were being piled up on a dray like cord wood, and still groaning, and they would take them to the graveyard because there was no hope for them. And she survived all that. She had pockmarks in her face, and most of her children did. My mother escaped that. Of the 13 children, there were five left after that great scourge, my mother, two sisters, and two brothers.

"The boys never had a chance to go to school. The three girls got to go to school. My mother seemed to be the most militant of the three. She got a fairly decent education in some kinda way.

"There was a piano in our house. She must have got the Baer family to let her have a piano, and God knows what she must have paid for it. My mother got to learn how to play piano. She was in the church, and choir rehearsals were held in our house. The two boys, my uncles, would go down to the railroad tracks when the trains came by and make faces so the engineers would call, 'Little black bastards,' and throw coal it at them. They would put it in a sack and take it downtown and sell it. That's how they made their survival.

"The house sat up on stilts so the Mississippi could run under it. There were bayous in the sunken part of the land. The Mississippi River starts up in Minnesota. When it gets down to Louisiana, it's going with such force that it pushes the bay water 90 miles out to sea. And when it backs up, all sorts of sea animals, sea urchins, come back with it into these bayous, and when it recedes, they can't get away. We had big sea turtles and fish from the ocean. My uncles and I would go down there and get 'em and sell 'em. There were water moccasins, and they were deadly poison. I remember skinny dipping there. You'd hit the top of the water and they would go away from you. Kids didn't have any better sense. But we survived. That's the kind of thing we did.

"By 1910, the year I was born, the minister in this church my mother was organist of, was preaching to the black folks: 'There's no future for you here. Conditions are terrible, they're not going to get any better. So, young people, try to get out of here, try to get North, where you get opportunities to be somebody.' So the young people were finding ways to get out to Chicago, which was the center of the United States. And it needed all kinds of unskilled labor, which the black folks had. They needed porters in the railroad stations, redcaps, they needed laborers in the stockyards. There was a big strike among white laborers in the stockyards, and in order to break the strike, they sent down south to get a lot of black laborers to come up and take these places. And the ones who could get away got to Chicago. And instead of making three and half a week, they were making 20 or 25 dollars a week."

I pointed out that Hank Jones too was from Vicksburg. His family went to Pontiac, Michigan.

"Hank's younger'n I am," Milt said, "and I didn't know him in Vicksburg. I met him a lot later."

"And who was your father?" I asked.

"My father was an African, a Monrovian bushman. Missionaries brought his family here to educate them. This was in 1900. The kids went to work, but they couldn't stand all that biasedness and the conditions they had been put under in the South. My father married my mother and they had a baby, but he couldn't stand it here and he went back to Africa when I was three months old. My mother's brothers, my uncles, told me about him. I was 30 years old the first time I saw my father."

When Milt was about six, he saw something he could not, would not, ever forget.

His Uncle Matt was taken to a hospital after an automobile accident. Milt went with his Aunt Sissy to see him. The black hospital ward was noisy and dirty. When they left, to make their way home along Clay Street, the main thoroughfare of Vicksburg, passing through the white district, they saw a crowd of excited men. Sissy tried to pull him away, but Milt tugged at her hand and got closer. A black man was dangling by the neck on a cable from a tree limb. He was covered in blood, apparently already dead. The men, dancing drunkenly around the tree and swigging from whisky jugs, kept firing bullets into the body. Then they pushed a drum filled with gasoline under the body and set it afire. The flames leaped up and Milt saw the body sizzling and turning black like, he remembered, a piece of bacon, and a ghastly stench filled the air. Sissy dragged him home.  Next morning his mother said that a white woman had claimed to see a black man peeking in her window as she dressed. A pack of men set off in search, with dogs. The dogs barked at a man in the railway station. His was the body Milt saw cooking in the flames.

On his way to school the next morning, he passed the place of the killing. The tree was gone, the stump was covered with fresh red paint.

"That was the tradition," Milt said. "After a lynching, they'd cut down the tree and paint the stump red."

"The tradition?" I said. "The tradition?"

"Yeah," Milt said.

His Uncle Bob decided that one way or another he was going to get to Chicago, where all those good wages were supposedly paid.

"With this preacher telling people to go," Milt said, "the white people decided they can't let this cheap black labor get away. So they blocked the railway stations in Mississippi, and said, 'You can't buy a ticket.' A black man could not buy a ticket from Mississippi in 1910. You had to have permission from your boss. He had to give you a note or go down there with you."

"That's still slavery," I said, "except that you got a small salary."

"That's right. You couldn't leave. And the ones who had left already, who had escaped, are writing back telling how wonderful it was in Chicago, what great opportunities they offer you, and nobody bugs you, if you've got some money, you can get a nice place on the South Side. Black people from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, all moving to Chicago.

"My uncle Bob was working in a white barber shop in Vicksburg, Mississippi. And even white folks didn't have bathtubs in their houses in 1910 in Mississippi. So the barber shop was a very important place. Each white barber shop had tubs and places for your mug and razor and towels, so on Saturdays and Sundays people came down to get a bath and a razor for twenty-five cents. And no self-respecting barber would work on Sunday. But the shop had to be open, so the boss would tell the porter, 'You keep them tubs clean, you keep the water hot, keep them brushes clean, and charge them twenty-five cents a person. And when you come in on Monday, you tell me what you sold.' So if my uncle sold 40 baths, he told him he counted 30. And that's how he stashed his little stash."

But how was he to get out of town? Uncle Bob got a friend living in Memphis to send a letter saying that his beloved Aunt Minnie was ill and wanted to see her nephew once more before she died. The barber wrote the requisite permission, Bob bought a round-trip ticket to Memphis (the only kind the station master would sell him), and in Memphis turned in the return half of the ticket for cash, which he spent on a ticket to Chicago. There he got a job as a bellboy, and began making very good money, as much as 50 dollars a day in tips. But tips were not the only source of money.

Milt said, "Chicago was a transit city and a convention center. Salesmen were there, the stock exchange, the stockyards. And all those hotels. Prostitution was rampant. At the hotels, the contact man was a porter. When a salesman arrived, and the porter took him to his room, the first thing he wanted was a girl. 'Get me a girl and I'll give you a good tip.'

"The girls were already in the hotel. They'd tell the porter, 'Get me a good John, I'll give you a good tip.' He was getting it from both sides. And he had this home-made gin down in the basement, and he'd take it upstairs and sell it for five dollars a pint."

Uncle Bob was sending home money, carefully wrapped in newspaper. But the money stopped with the advent of World War I. Bob got drafted, and in Vicksburg, Uncle Matt went into the navy. With the war over, Bob returned to Chicago and another good job and again sent money to Vicksburg. Matt joined him in Chicago, where they shared an apartment. They extricated two of their sisters, Milt's mother and his Aunt Pearl, from Vicksburg, leaving only Milt, his grandmother, and his Aunt Sissy there. When the brothers had set up the two sisters in an apartment, they sent money to bring the rest of the family to Chicago.

They were to catch a morning train, but it was raining heavily and they missed it. The three of them were standing in the railway station in the downpour, their baggage around them. One of the neighbors learned of their dilemma and sent a cart for them. They stayed at this friend's house through the day, drying their clothes, desperately hoping that nothing would prevent their leaving. It must have been a lot like trying to escape from Nazi Germany into Switzerland. They waited out the time, went to the station, and got on a six o'clock train. Milt remembers the black railway coach as filthy and smelling of rotting food. But Vicksburg receded behind them. They arrived in Chicago late the next day. It was autumn, and Chicago was cold. Milt's mother bought him a coat in the railway station, and they took a taxi to their new home.

Chicago was a revelation. Milt had always thought that being black meant being poor, and suddenly he was seeing black people who lived in homes far finer than anything in Vicksburg and wore the most elegant of clothes.

"There was a whole segment of town that was changing," Milt said. "The South Side of Chicago, where today black people still live in mass, was a beautiful section. The boulevard was called Grand Boulevard. Mansions were on this street, great mansions. Armour, Cudahy, Swift, had these great mansions there. And as black people began to move into town and working at the stockyards, and it was a little close, these rich white people began to move out, and they changed the name from Grand Boulevard to South Parkway. It's now Martin Luther King Drive.

"It was Grand Boulevard when I moved there in 1918."

Milt was enrolled at Doolittle Grammar School at 36th and Cottage Grove. He had been in Grade Five in Vicksburg, but the Doolittle authorities, after testing him, set him back three grades. He cried.

Milt's mother taught piano, his sister sang in her church choir, and his Uncle Matt — the two brothers lived nearby, and Milt loved to visit them for, among other benefits, the way their girlfriends gushed over him — played him Louis Armstrong records.

Chicago is largely a city of apartment buildings, and in much of it the buildings are three stories high and built of brick, with limestone window sills and front-door frames. Their fronts, facing on the street, are pleasantly dignified. Their backs are a little shabby, facing onto the alleys that run like veins through the city. The backs of the buildings have flights of wooden stairs, connecting the balconies of each apartment. Some of these balconies are enclosed, some are open; and the steps are treacherous in winter, when they are slick with ice.

Milt said, "I delivered vegetables up and down those stairs for a Mr. Holt, who had a vegetable wagon. He rang a bell when he came into the back alley and people would come to the door, out on the porch, and say, 'Give me a dime's worth of sweet potatoes and ten cents worth of mustard greens.' He would give me five dollars worth of change and he would go somewhere and talk to some ladies while I delivered vegetables, running up and down those steps. He'd stay about an hour on that block and move on to the next block."

Milt remembered that every kid in the neighborhood seemed to be studying music, the girls taking piano lessons, the boys studying violin. When he was thirteen his mother bought him a violin. A neighborhood boy named Quinn Wilson taught him to tune it. They remained friends; Quinn Wilson was later an arranger for the Erskine Tate and Earl Hines bands.

Milt had a paper route, delivering the Herald-Examiner. One of the homes to which he took papers was that of the mother of violinist Eddie South.

He said, "I see these wonderful pictures on the wall. By this time Eddie was in Europe, playing. He was called the Dark Angel of the Violin. He was playing a lot of Hungarian stuff. A black gypsy. He played for all the crowned heads of Europe, and for the Rothschild family, he was the darling of Europe. His mother said, 'Yes, that's my son. And you're studying music?' And I said, 'Yes, I'm studying music and playing it.' And she said, 'I hope some day you'll get to play with my son."'

South, who had studied at Chicago Musical College, was a formidable musician. His career illustrates a dark irony in the history of American music: the fact that, perversely, the bigotry that excluded blacks from classical music effectually enriched and improved the music we have come to call jazz by driving such men as South into it.

The classic case is that of Will Marion Cook. Born in Washington DC, on January 27, 1869. Cook was trained as a violinist, educated at Oberlin College. He became a student of Antonin Dvorak during that period when Dvorak lived in New York (1892-95) and directed the National Conservatory. Dvorak, himself a part of the nationalist movement among European composers, whose essential tenet was that composers in each nation should use the folk and popular musical elements of their culture to the end of creating a formal art music, held that the United States would not develop a distinct American music until composers explored and incorporated into their work their folk elements, including Negro music. Impressed by Cook, Dvorak arranged for him to study in Europe with the great German violinist Joseph Joachim. During his time abroad, Cook came to know such European musical figures as Johannes Brahms.

Returning to America, Cook set out to establish a concert career. After a Boston music critic described him in what (one may presume) he thought to be flattering terms as the best Negro violinist in America, Cook entered the man's office, asked if he had written the review, and on being told Yes, said, "I am the best violinist in the country," and smashed his fiddle on the man's desk. He never played again. Researchers have verified the story.

Cook turned his attention to writing for the musical theater. Collaborating with poet Lawrence Dunbar, he produced in 1898 the revue Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk, the first important black musical on Broadway. In 1918 he formed what was at first called the New York Syncopated Orchestra but later, perhaps in deference to general public stereotyping, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. One of its members was Sidney Bechet. Cook took the orchestra to England, where it performed for King George V. (This inspired Sidney Bechet's delicious remark that this was the first time he'd ever met anybody whose picture was on money.) The foray into Europe inspired the essay Sur un Orchestre Negre by the Swiss mathematician and conductor Ernest Ansermet. Though elements of the essay have occasionally been mistranslated, it does make a prediction that this is the way music is likely to go.

In New York, Cook befriended Duke Ellington, passed along Dvorak's exhortations for a distinct American music, and (by Ellington's testimony) taught the latter elements of harmony and composition. Thus one must consider the influence of Dvorak on what came to be called jazz, and wonder in what ways jazz and American music generally might be different were it not for the faint fragrance of condescension in the writing of a Boston music critic.

The degree to which jazz drew sustenance from this exclusion from "classical" music must be considered in any reflections on the careers of Eddie South, Teddy Wilson, James P. Johnson, Hank Jones, and others, certainly including an aspiring violinist named Milt Hinton.

Milt took Saturday morning lessons at Hull House, the famous community center established by Jane Addams. One of his friends there was a young clarinet student named Benny Goodman, with whom he discussed music.

The vegetable delivery days were over. Milt had a new job.

"It was 1925 or '26," Milt said. "We looked on Al Capone as more or less a Robin Hood in the black community. There was a lot of shifting of power. It didn't concern us in the black community on the South Side until the thing got pretty big and people realized there was a potential of a lot of money.

"Al Capone had decided to come to the South Side of Chicago and sell alcohol to the people who gave house-rent parties."

Rent parties were a part of the legend and lore of musical evolution in Chicago. And they exemplified the sense of community in the black population of Chicago which, I have been told, did not exist in that of New York. Chicago was different. When someone had trouble coming up with the rent money, they'd hire a pianist, throw a big party, and charge admission. Thus they would come up with the needed money.

"My uncle," Milt said, "knew Pete Ford, who had a cleaning and pressing place, which was centralized at 37th and State Street, and he got me a job there. Al Capone told Pete, “I’ll bring my alcohol over here and I'll sell it to you for 12 dollars a gallon. You sell it to all these houses that have these parties.' We called them skiffle parties. He said, 'You sell it for 18 dollars a gallon. You make six dollars on the gallon. Just don't buy from nobody but me. I pay all the police protection. I give you the cars to deliver it in, and I pay you good money.'

"He brought us cases of liquor with that green strip across the top of it, which meant it was bonded. We'd take that green strip off the top and pour the whisky in a tub and put alcohol in there and make three cases of bonded whisky. We'd put it back in the bottles. And he had some black guy, a guy that had a funny eye, that worked for the government who'd get these sheets as big as the New York Times of government bonds. And I used to sit back of the cleaning and pressing place and clip these things in strips, and put them over the bottle and you thought you had a five-dollar bottle of bonded whiskey.

"We would sell that to the house-rent parties. We had three trucks. One was El Passo Cigars. One was Ford Cleaning and Pressing. I can't remember the name of the third truck. We delivered to the people giving house-rent parties all the way from 31st Street out to 63rd Street, from State Street to the lake. It was a thriving business. Pete Ford made a fortune. The only thing you needed to do was sit there and take the telephone calls, and deliver.

"And Al Capone came every Thursday or Friday, I can't remember what day it was, in a big car, bullet proof. He'd come with his bodyguards with a bag full of money. And he would park that car and walk in the back of that Ford Cleaning and Pressing place, and the police would be lined up, like they were waiting for a bus. He paid every one of them five dollars, and every sergeant ten. He paid 'em off, so we had no problem with the police at all. You'd never have your house raided.

"Everything was great. There were gang wars, and big funerals with lots of flowers. But then things calmed down because Capone took over the whole city. He had the hotels.

"And all of these flats in Chicago, where people are having these house-rent parties, they were buying alcohol from Pete Ford. Every weekend a different person would have a house-rent party. They'd have a lot of fried chicken. Everybody had a piano. That's why we had what we called ragtime. Ragtime was not band music, it was piano music. They'd get a good piano player to come in and play skiffle, which is what we called boogie-woogie in those days. A guy named Dan Burley was a very important man in jazz history, a good piano player. He was a newspaperman. In fact he went to school with me. We were on the Wendell Phillips High School newspaper, the Phillipsite. He taught me how to run a linotype machine. My mother had run a press in Mississippi for a Baptist minister. So I knew how to set type.

"Dan Burley played house-rent piano. He wasn't a good reader or an academic musician. He was a good contact man. He knew where the best house-rent parties were gonna be, and he was there playing for them.

"These piano players made lots of money. They'd get two dollars or five dollars to come in, and you'd get your fried chicken and your drinks and there'd be a lot of girls there.

"It was party time. The guys were making good money. Labor was making 25, 35 dollars a week in the stockyards. A loaf of bread was ten cents.

" I was 15 years old. Every day after school I would come by Ford Cleaning and Pressing. That was the shill. They weren't cleaning any clothes in there. I was getting something like 50 dollars a week. For a kid, it was crazy!

"This one Saturday afternoon, we were delivering all this alcohol to these different apartments. One-gallon tins, with a screw top on it. We loaded up the truck. Pete Ford had on a candy-stripe silk shirt. It was hot in the summertime. He had about fifteen hundred dollars in his shirt pocket. He always carried a lot of money. He was a big guy, nice-looking guy, ate like a horse.

"I was driving the truck. As we were crossing Oakwood Boulevard a lady in a Nash car hit us direct sideways, going full. I went right out the driver's side, out the window. Pete was lying in the street. Alcohol was all over. I thought he was dead. I tried to get up. My arm was broken, my leg was broken, my hand was broken. The finger next to my pinky on my right hand was off, hanging by skin. I pulled myself up. My face was cut. I crawled over and grabbed the money out of Pete Ford's pocket.

"The police were all around, but it was Capone's stuff. No problem. They took Pete to one hospital and me to another. I was in terrible shape. By the time they got me to the hospital my legs and hands were starting to swell. I was in excruciating pain. And my finger's hanging. I'm screaming. The doctor said, 'I've gotta take this finger off And I was studying violin. I said, 'Please don't take my finger off!'

"Now Capone heard about this accident, where two of his men got hurt. Whenever anything happened, he showed up or sent one of his lieutenants. And I'm screaming, 'Please don't take my finger off.'"

In his book Bass Line Milt said that Capone's lieutenant Eddie Pappan came to the hospital. But he told me that Capone himself came. "My mother came. She was crying. Capone says to the doctor, 'If he says don't take it off, then don't take it off.'"

When Laurence Bergreen was researching his biography of Capone, I suggested that he talk to Milt Hinton and gave him Milt's phone number. The book, a massive (and superb) study titled Capone: The Man and the Era (Simon and Schuster 1994) contains this quote from Milt:

"Al Capone got my mother and brought her down to the hospital. He said to the doctor, 'Don't cut that finger off, don't cut it off.' And what Al Capone said, went."

Possibly both Capone and Pappan were there. One of them certainly issued an order to the doctor.

"And here it is today," Milt said, showing me the finger. "But they put it together wrong. The bone was smashed. But I've never had a moment's trouble with that finger.

"Pete Ford died. I've never driven again to this day."

To be continued ...

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Milt Hinton died on December 19, 2000, nearly six months after his 90th birthday on June 24th. Gene published the 3rd and last part of his interview with Milt in the June 2000 issue of the Jazzletter. It will follow this posting at a later date to form part three of the “Milt Hinton - We Are Like Atlas” feature.

“I was young when I first realized that music involves more than just playing an instrument. It’s really about cohesiveness and sharing. All my life, I’ve felt obliged to try and teach anyone who would listen. I’ve always truly believe that you don’t know something yourself until you can take if from your mind and put it in someone else’s. I also know that the only way we continue to live on this earth is by giving our talents to future generations.” - Milt Hinton

Jazzletter

Gene Lees, Editor

May 2000

At the end of his grade school days, Milt became a student at Wendell Phillips High School. Wendell Phillips — named after the famous Boston abolitionist — had an exceptional music department, headed Dr. Mildred Bryant Jones. She was conductor of the school's symphony orchestra. During his time there, Milt was soloist in the Mendelssohn violin concerto. The school also had a brass band, headed by Major N. Clarke Smith.

Milt said, "One of the most popular and famous black newspapers was the Chicago Defender. They had an editor named Abbott. He was very much interested in youth. A picnic for young people was organized every year by the Chicago Defender.

"When the black people moved into Chicago en masse to those big mansions, as I said, the white people moved out. The first people black people to make big money were women who made hair straighteners, because black women were using this stuff to process their hair.These women who produced this stuff got rich. This was before even black men began to use it.

"Madame Walker, out of Indianapolis, Indiana, made a fortune making this stuff. There was another lady named Addie Malone, out of St. Louis. They still have an Addie Malone Day in St. Louis.

"This lady had a product called Poro. My wife Mona was one of her secretaries as a young girl. This woman was a very Christian woman and a very enterprising lady. She opened up a school for black girls in St. Louis to teach cosmetology and hairdressing.

"Now these women, with the money they amassed, began to buy these mansions on Grand Boulevard. Addie Malone bought two. She bought one for a school for her girls. And when Mr. Abbott wanted to organize a youth band for black kids so they could learn to play and go around the country and perform, Mrs. Malone loaned the Chicago Defender the other mansion for the rehearsals for these black youths.

"Major N. Clarke Smith was in charge. That's where Lionel Hampton, and yours truly, and Hayes Alvis, and Nat Cole, and Scoops Carry, went for band rehearsals. Because

we were in his high-school band at Wendell Phillips. Every Saturday he would have rehearsals. Lionel was a year or two older than I. He got in the band on drums. He wanted to keep me out because I was in short pants! But I could always read good. I wanted to get in the band because I wanted the chance to learn the bass horn. And when Nat Cole wanted to get into the band, because he wanted to play the lyre, and Nat was younger than I, I tried to keep him out!

"My mother loved Nat Cole. He would play piano for her church socials. Even after he was dead, she called him 'dear Nathaniel.'

"Major N. Clarke Smith was a very great disciplinarian. A very military person. He wore a uniform all the time. And for reasons not known to me, he had a deep connection with Lyon and Healey, who had a big music store in Chicago. He was commissioned by Lyon and Healey to go around the world and write music about black people and to come back to Chicago and perform it. He did. I still have some of the music. He had us play it. Pineapple Lament. He went down into the Caribbean. He was not a jazzman! He was interested in the more academic world, like Sousa or something. And this is the kind of band we grew up in.

"I remember at Wendell Phillips High we had no idea what great influence he had. I remember one day he said to us in class, 'I don't think any of you kids ever heard a symphony orchestra.

"He said, 'I think I'll call up Fred Stock.....'

"We sort of giggled. He's going to call up Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony!

"He said, “I think I'll call up Fred Stock and have him bring the orchestra out here.'

"And we giggled some more. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's going to come out to our school at 39th and Prairie Avenue! And in a week or two, they did, and played for us. I remember they played Haydn. The Surprise Symphony.

"I was coming along pretty good. I'm playing violin, I'm president of the symphony orchestra at school, and I'm director of the jazz orchestra. First Major N. Clarke Smith put me on peckhorn. I always had a fascination for big things. So he gave me a bass saxophone. I liked that. There were only two bass horns in school, and there we had two players, and I had to wait for one of them to graduate. Finally one of the guys graduated, Quinn Wilson, and I got a chance at the bass horn. Nat Cole's older brother Eddie played tuba, and then he graduated.

"Major Smith said to me one day, 'Go down to Lyon and Healey's and tell them I said to give you a sarrusaphone.' It's built like a double bassoon, but it's brass. It's five foot tall. And you can't break it down like a bassoon. And it had a big wide double reed on it. I went down to Lyon and Healey, and they gave me one. I had to bring this thing back on the bus in this huge long case. My mother said, 'What in God's name are you going to do with that thing?' It has a very deep bass sound. It buzzes like a bassoon, and it's fingered like a saxophone. Adolph Sax made it.

"Major Smith was a marvelous conductor. He left Wendell Phillips to teach at Sumner High School, a black high school in St. Louis. And Captain Walter Dyett replaced him.

"I was supposed to graduate in 1930 but I graduated in the 1929 class. And they hadn't even finished building Dusable High. Captain Dyett came to Wendell Phillips and he went on to Dusable. He's the one who had Johnny Griffin and Richard Davis and Johnny Hartman. It was really a continuation, the next generation after us. I left Nat Cole in school, I left Ray Nance in school. John Levy was also at Wendell Phillips. I gave him my Sam Browne belt when I graduated. I was a lieutenant in the band by the time I graduated.

"Ed Fox had the Grand Terrace Cafe, and he had Percy Venable, a choreographer from Pittsburgh. Al Capone decided to open up a Cotton Club in Cicero, copied after the one in New York City. Black dancers, black musicians, white audiences. He gave a lot of work to guys. This was about the time I was ready to play. I was doing very well on violin. Every theater in every neighborhood had a violin player, a piano player, and a drummer to play for the screen.

"And that was when Al Jolson was in the first sound movie. When they showed that they didn't need orchestras in the theater, violinists lost their jobs, and here I am, just about ready to enter that business. Things got a little thin. And when Al Capone opened that Cotton Club in Cicero, and used all these black musicians, it was like manna from heaven. All the kids that I went to school with began to get jobs. One of my friends tried to get me to change from violin to trombone, because there weren't any violins in the band. They were using trumpets and saxophones. But I never learned how to play trombone. I was still delivering newspapers. The guys would come by and see me delivering newspapers for nine dollars a week and they were making 75 dollars a week in Al Capone's Cotton Club. And they'd say, 'Sporty,' which was my nickname, 'get a horn.' And I was totally embarrassed. Which is why I switched to bass.

"Capone didn't frequent the South Side, except to pay off. But he was in that Cotton Club in Cicero a lot. The guy who produced the show was Lucky Millinder. That's how he got started. His uncle, Percy Venable, was the choreographer for the Grand Terrace. He came from Pittsburgh. And his nephew was Lucky Venable. That was Lucky Millinder's name. When Capone opened his Cotton Club, he wanted to get Percy Venable to produce his shows. And Ed Fox, who owned the Grand Terrace, wouldn't let him go. Percy said, 'Take my nephew.' So Capone took Lucky Venable who changed his name to Lucky Millinder. And that's how he got his start as a bandleader. He was never a musician. But he knew choreography. I was in the band there for a while. There were no arrangements. He'd get the girls together and say, 'Two choruses and a half, take the last eight, tag four,' and that's the way we went out."

"Dizzy said he was a good bandleader."

"He was. He was not a musician. He exploited the same sort of thing that Cab Calloway had. Have a good flashy guy in front of the band. And Lucky was flashy. The gangsters put Cab in front of the Missourians. Missourians was a corporate band, owned by the musicians. It was a great band. They were all from Missouri. When they got ready to come east to New York, they needed somebody in front of 'em. Cab's sister Blanche Calloway was working in a club in Chicago owned by Joe Glaser's mother."

Joe Glaser was later known as Louis Armstrong's manager and president of the Associated Booking Corporation, which booked, among other bands, that of Duke Ellington. There were always rumors in the jazz world of Glaser's shady connections, but for that matter anyone in the nightclub world of Chicago in the 1920s had connections of some sort with Al Capone: he actually ran the city. In his biography of Capone, Larry Bergreen wrote:

"In an earlier incarnation Glaser was an influential fight promoter in Chicago. From his two-room office in the Loop, Glaser ran his boxing empire and zealously protected his turf. When a gambler and part-time journalist named Eddie Borden denounced Glaser in print as a front for the Capone organization, Glaser had him run out of town and swiftly returned to business as usual. Glaser's power to fix fights earned him a reputation as the sage of boxing .. . ."

In those days, Milt said, Cab Calloway " was a young kid, a basketball player, who'd come around to see his sister Blanche. She wanted to get him into the club, so she taught him how to sing, and he'd come in and play the drums."

Blanche Calloway was five years Cab's senior. She began singing in Baltimore clubs — she and her brother were both born in Maryland — in the 1920s, recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1925, worked with Andy Kirk, and for a time had her own band. Thus she was Cab's entree to show business. The mob people were impressed by the dashing young man.

"So the gangsters," Milt continued, "said to the Missourians, Put this kid in front of the band.' And they were a great success. They played the Savoy Ballroom and were doing great. When Duke Ellington was getting ready to leave the Cotton Club in New York, they said, 'Give him the band.' They told the Missourians, 'It's Cab's band now.' The bass player was the leader, so he was naturally fired. They told the guys in the band, 'You can stay, but Cab Calloway is the bandleader, and you're going into the Cotton Club.' And they stayed. I can tell you who they were. Lamarr Wright, Walter Thomas, Andy Brown, Doc Cheatham. They stayed and it was a tremendous success.

"Cab was made by radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club two or three times a week. Network radio was starting and people all over the country could hear you.

"When they got Capone on income tax, he said, 'If you think all of these people that I'm hiring, who are making three or four hundred dollars a week when everybody else that works a week long in the stockyards and different places is making 25 and 30 dollars, are going to go back to taking jobs at 15 or 20 dollars a week, you're crazy.'

"And that's when chaos broke loose. They broke up all that alcohol-selling, and those people were not going to go back to those jobs. And they started robbing and killing and breaking into places. It changed the whole complexion of the town. The happiness all left, the clubs all closed, and it was pretty drab there for a long time after that."

"The first band I ever played in, really," Milt said, "was not a jazz band. It was a sweet band at the Jeffrey Tavern, a white tavern. It was like Lester Lanin. The bass player got sick or something, and somebody recommended me for just one night. I got 19 dollars. That's the first time I made any money playing bass. I was still delivering newspapers, 200 papers every morning, Chicago Herald-Examiner, for $9.75 a week, and going to Northwestern University. That's how I gradually got into the gigs, when I got this one job for $19, and I worked late, and I had to deliver my morning papers. Then somebody else got sick in a band, and I got a call again. My mother said, 'You can't do both things. You've got to make a decision.' I had no dreams it would be possible to make a living in music. That was the toughest decision of my life, to give up my paper route.

"I had to wait for some of the older players to get drunk or get sick. We didn't have too many clubs to go to. There was a guy named Charlie Levy. He wrote arrangements and played violin in old road houses. He had a car. This is summertime. He'd put me in a car and we'd go out to some tavern. There was no juke boxes in those days. We'd go in and start playing, and they'd give us nickels and dimes and quarters, and we'd come home with $10 a piece.

"I came out of Northwestern University, because I was sleeping in the history classes, and Dr. Jones, who had studied with Coleridge Taylor, asked me what was I doing. Why was I so tired? I explained I was working and I had to help support my mother. He encouraged me not to kill myself just to get a degree, but to continue my studies in music, because I seemed to be talented along those lines.

"Consequently I started working with bands around Chicago. I got to work with Erksine Tate. The Savoy Ballroom got to be very popular. All those bands came through Chicago from the west and from the east. Andy Kirk and Duke Ellington. They all played the Savoy Ballroom. And we had a union there, so they had to have a relief band. So I got the job in the relief band, playing the intermission. I got the chance to hear and see Mary Lou Williams and her husband, John Williams, who was a saxophone player. Ben Webster was in the band at that time. Duke Ellington came through and I got the chance to stand there and watch Wellman Braud, and hope he'd just drop his rosin, so I could hand it to him or something like that. The contribution to me was to be around those wonderful people, and see it.

"In 1929, Eddie South came back from Europe. He had a manager named Sam Skolnick. He was an agent. Eddie had been so successful in Europe, Skolnick had convinced some people they should put him into some of the great white hotels downtown in Chicago, with violins, a society type of band. This guy organized the band while Eddie was still in Europe. He got some great musicians. They got me to play bass in this band. It rehearsed for maybe four or five in the afternoon upstairs in a Chinese restaurant called Chu Chin Chow near the Savoy Ballroom. We rehearsed music like Dancing on the Ceiling and that kind of beautiful stuff. Eddie was supposed to come in with his quartet from Europe and be augmented by this band. We had the rehearsal, and the powers that be decided they couldn't have a black band in this hotel downtown.

"The agent had signed everybody up to contracts, $75 a week, guaranteeing us 30 weeks a year. And then the bubble burst. And Eddie had to buy the contracts back from the musicians. He paid $300 a piece. It probably depleted what he had earned in Europe. They paid everybody off. And when they got to me, this guy said to Eddie, 'Now wait, we can get you a job in one of the small clubs. You don't have a bass player. So don't give this kid $300. Give him a job.'

"That's how I got the job with Eddie South. We worked for Al Capone. He owned the Club Rubaiyat, a small club on the North Side that seated less than a hundred. That's where I began to meet most of the white musicians, because everybody knew about Eddie South. We had a small band, with a piano player named Anthony Joe Spalding, from Louisville, Kentucky. A very great piano player. He played all kinds of music, things like Rhapsody in Blue, all of the French music. This guy played it well. Eddie had Stanley Wilson on guitar, and a drummer named Lester Moreira, from Cuba, who later played for Cugat. And he hired me for bass. And we played these wonderful things. I learned to play all the classical things that Eddie played. And all of the musicians from Ben Pollack's band used to come over to hear Eddie South. Benny Goodman was in that band, and Jack Teagarden. This is where we got to meet all these wonderful musicians and exchange ideas. And later they'd go out and jam together. It was that kind of a thing.

"We stayed in this little club until 1933. That was the year they had the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the Congress Hotel. The Congress was a fabulous hotel. And they decided then, we couldn't play in the big ballroom, but they put us in the lobby, by the fountain. We were playing music with the water dripping, and that's where I got to see all those congressmen. I saw Al Smith and John Nance Garner, speaker of the house, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That was the convention that nominated Roosevelt for president.

"We got to do a recording session for RCA. One of the big tunes was Old Man Harlem at that time. Then we went to California. We went to a beautiful club on Hollywood Boulevard, the Club Ballyhoo. We had a trio, Eddie South, Everett Barksdale on guitar, and I'm playing bass. We were really tight. All strings. We played from hot jazz to classical music. Everett Barksdale was the first black guitarist I ever worked with that really read music and played single-string stuff. He was out of Detroit. He was absolutely fantastic. There was no amplification, of course. All they had for entertainment besides Eddie South was a dance trio, a woman and two men. We had to play tango for them. The woman was Carmen Miranda and one of the men was Cesar Romero.

"Now all of the great writers and the good musicians in the studios had heard of Eddie South. That was 1933. We stayed in California. Eddie's career grew. We came to Chicago after that

"Joe Venuti had always loved Eddie South. He was a great benefactor of Eddie's. You hear all the crazy stories about all the jokes that Joe Venuti did. And of course he did that. He was a raucous guy. I never saw one instance of his having any racial feelings at all. He told me that he and Eddie Lang used to cork their faces and go up to Harlem to jam with black musicians, so that nobody would give them any flak about it. When he was with Paul Whiteman at the College Inn, Eddie South was at the Vendome Theater, Whiteman had a great singer with him named Bea Palmer.

"She was used to being accompanied by Joe Venuti on violin. He played beautifully behind her. Joe was leaving with a group of his own playing country clubs. And this lady was distraught because she didn't have Joe to play jazz behind her. She said, 'What am I going to do?' And Joe Venuti said, 'Get Eddie South.' But of course, you couldn't get a black violin player to play in Whiteman's band then.

They put her on the stage and put a screen behind her and Eddie South stood behind it and played for her.

"Joe Venuti was so wonderful. When he went on tour with his trio, people asked him, 'Who can we get to follow you in here?' Joe always recommended Eddie South. We began to get these wonderful jobs, playing in these exclusive country clubs. When we got there, there was always a very funny note left on the piano for us from Joe Venuti. He made it possible for Eddie to make a very good living.

"Years later I got the chance to work with Joe Venuti. After working with Eddie South, I loved violin, and it was my first instrument. About a third of my record collection is violin players, from Heifetz on down. So I finally got a chance to work with Joe in New York City. He appreciated me because I understood the violin. We could play contrapuntal things. And I could bow. I had one of the most exciting times of my life with him. I was playing with him at Michael's Pub when he got very sick and died — his last engagement

"I've always been a sideman. I've never had a band. I've worked once or twice in a little trio. I always decided I wanted to be such a good bass player that people would want me to work for them. I could always work. That's what happened to me with Eddie South. Work slowed down for violin players, but I could get gigs around Chicago. I'm not expensive, I'm a side man. I'm getting scale, but I can survive on scale. A violinist of Eddie's stature can't work for scale."

"And," I interjected, "a jazz violinist can't work as a sideman."

"No, that's right," Milt said. "And if you've got any kind of reputation, you can't step into somebody else's band. I'm working around with Erskine Tate and Johnny Long and Joe Williams, we're working on the South Side. Eddie South had to sit at home. And he's my master. And I'm ending up with a hundred dollars at the end of the week. I had to loan him twenty, because he didn't have the money. He always paid me back when he got a gig. But it was very sad. That's how I really got established, working with Eddie South. In 1934, we got on the RKO circuit with a comedian, and Lee Sims, the pianist, and Olive May Bailey, all through theaters in Ohio, and wound up at the Palace Theater in New York City for one week. I made 75 bucks.

"I didn't want to go back home. That's just like I'd get back in school or something. So I stayed around New York. For five dollars a week, I got a room in the 135th Street YMCA. I starved, but I didn't care. I could get a fish sandwich with four slices of bread and a whole fish laid across it for 20 cents up in Harlem. I'd cut that sucker in half, put a little hot sauce on it, wrap the other half up and put it in my pocket for later. You could get a big soda for three cents. And I'm trying to get a gig. I go by the Apollo Theater and listen to the rehearsal. I had no dreams: John Kirby was a jazz bass player, Beverly Peer was with Chick Webb. I had no way to survive. I finally had to go back to Chicago.

"In the early 1930s, there was only one big band, besides Les Kincaid's, in Chicago, and that was Earl Hines' band. So there weren't a lot of jobs for bass players. I couldn't get into Earl Hines' band, because he had Quinn Wilson, who graduated ahead of me, and he had Hayes Alvis, a great bass player that used to be a drummer. When the Grand Terrace closed for the summer, the band split up. Some guys would take one half of the band, and some guys would take the other and go to small clubs. I worked my way up to be the second bass player.

"The first time there was ever a coast-to-coast network was when the Lindbergh baby was kidnaped. That night Earl Hines was on the air from midnight at the Grand Terrace. They kept him on the air all night, and they would patch in from Oak Park, Illinois, to Gary, Indiana, to Indianapolis, to relay that message about that baby's kidnaping. It was the first band to ever play coast-to-coast network, a network of stations thirty or forty miles apart.

"Then, in 1935, Zutty Singleton from New Orleans really established me. He was even more respected than Louis Armstrong. He worked with Louis in the Hot Five. And now he's got the job at the Three Deuces down at State and Lake. And he hired me as his bass player. Cozy Cole's brother, Lee Cole, was on piano, Lee Collins was playing trumpet, Everett Barksdale was playing guitar, and Zutty Singleton was playing drums. These guys were New Orleans seniors, and they hired me. There were not too many string bass players around. Zutty was a giant, and when he hired me, that was my stamp of approval into the New Orleans society. Art Tatum was the relief piano player.

"And it was my sad duty, at the end of the night, closing up his set, I had to go play with him. I never caught him yet. He was playing those fantastic changes that I never knew, and I stood there in amazement, trying to catch him all the time. But he was always so nice. We played pinochle together, so the rout wasn't that complete. He'd hold the cards right up to his eye, with the light behind him. A unique man. He would make the waiters set up the room the way it was going to be that night. He knew how to maneuver through the tables without falling or stumbling to the piano.

"I played there with Zutty in 1935. That's when Cab was going out to California to do The Singing Kid with Al Jolson. Cab had Al Morgan, this fabulous bass player from New Orleans. Photogenic. Big, tall, looked he was chiseled out of ebony. Handsome man, exotic clothes, and the ladies loved him. A great shower, and of course he was the biggest showman of the time, and they're making this movie with Al Jolson. And in one of the scenes, Cab Calloway is dancing and shaking his hair, and he looked up. He thought the camera was on him and it was on the bass player, Al Morgan. And of course that didn't sit too good.

"Then Al Morgan beat Cab out of a couple of ladies, and so they weren't too tight together. And then one of the directors told Al Morgan, 'If you're out here in California and we've got a jazz movie, the way you went over, you've got the job.' And so with this altercation between the two of them, Al Morgan quit and stayed out in California and joined Les Kite's band. Lionel Hampton was in that band, Lawrence Brown, quite a few guys.

"Cab had to come back east without a bass player for his one-nighters. Well my friend Keg Johnson, Budd Johnson's brother, who had gotten in Cab Calloway's band, said, 'Well going through Chicago, check out Milt Hinton. He's down at the Three Deuces with Zutty.' Cab Calloway stopped in at the Three Deuces in his coon-skin coat on a cold winter night, and he came in the door and everybody saw it was Cab Calloway, and they were making over him. And he never said a word to me. He came up to Zutty Singleton and said, 'I hear that kid's pretty good. How is he?' Zutty said, 'He's fine. He's a good kid. He plays good.'

"And Cab said, 'Well, can I have him?'

"And Zutty said, 'Yeah.' He didn't ask me anything. He just gave me away, like a baseball player. Zutty came upstairs, and I was playing cards with Art Tatum, and Zutty said, 'Well kid, you're gone.'

"I said, 'I'm gone where!'

"'Well Cab just asked me for you,' he said with that New Orleans talk.

"I said, 'Zutty, do I have to give you notice or anything?'

"He said, 'Get your ass out of here tonight.'

"We went back and played another set and Cab Hi-de-hoed a couple of choruses with us, and all he said to me, he turned around to me and said, 'The train leaves from the South Street Station at 9 o'clock in the morning. Be there.' And he walked out.

"I had to call home and tell my Mama — and that was one o'clock in the morning, and we played till four — I've got this job with Cab Calloway, and tell her to pack up whatever I have. I only had one suit. She packed up a canvass bag with a change of underwear and a clean shirt. I got on this train in South Street Station, and I'd never been in a Pullman in life. And you know I didn't come from Mississippi in a Pullman. I got in this train, and all these giants were there. There was Doc Cheatham, Mouse Randolph, Claude Jones — Tommy Dorsey's buddy, great trombone player — Keg Johnson, my friend. And Cab Calloway and Ben Webster had been out in the night in town and got drunk, and missed the train.

"But if you missed the train downtown, you could get on at the 63rd Street station. Keg Johnson is introducing me to the guys. I musta looked terrible. The train stopped at the 63rd Street station, and Cab Calloway and Ben Webster fall in drunk.

"Ben Webster looked at me, and said, 'What is that?'

"And Cab said, 'That's the new bass player.'

"And Ben Webster said, 'That is what? I must have weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. I swore I would never like this man. And he turned out to be one of my dearest friends."

I found myself laughing out loud, having often stood beside Ben, in all his gloomy majesty, talking at the bar of Jim and Andy's in New York. I said, "I think everybody had experiences with Ben. When he was drunk, get out of the way."

"That's right,' Milt said. "But he was beautiful. He was good to me.

"I was in the band three months on the road, playing one nighters, before we hit New York. Cab said, 'We've got a lot of one-nighters. I'll keep you till I get to New York and get me a good bass player.'

"And I stayed with his band 16 years.

"When we got on the road, the guys liked me. Al Morgan hadn't been much of a good reader, because he was from New Orleans. But he was a handsome bass player, and he knew the book. There was no book when I got there!

"But I knew changes, and all of that stuff. Benny Payne, the pianist, was calling changes off to me. And I was doing so well. But the funny part, I've got to tell you .... Cab turns to the guys — the guys all seemed to be satisfied with me — and said, 'Let's give him a blood test.' He called this hard number that Al Morgan was featured in. It was called Reefer Man. I had no music. I said to Benny Payne, 'What's that?' He said, 'It features the bass. You start out playing anything you wanna play, and the band’ll come in. And it's blues changes when the band comes in.'

"So I started this in F, man, and I played a chromatic deal. I played the F scale upside down and sideways. I squared F, I cubed F. I did every conceivable thing. And when finally the band came in with this big chord, I wanted to drop my bass and go out. Benny Payne says, 'Keep on playing.' Now the band's playing the blues, about ten choruses. And all of a sudden the band stops, and Benny says, 'You got it.'

"That's when I started slapping the bass, and playing all kinds of hip scales and everything. I used to wear my hair in a pompadour, long in front and you plastered it down to your head with grease to make it smooth, and I got hot and the perspiration was running offa me. And the grease ran off and my hair stood straight up!" he said, laughing. "And the musicians in the band were rolling! They were laughing, they could hardly play their horns, and Cab was out of his skull. He was falling out. And they let me go for about ten minutes by myself and I said to Benny Payne, 'What the hell do I do now?' And Benny said, 'When you get thinking about time, just fall back like you're fainting and I'll catch you.'And that's the way it ended. And the audience cracked up.

"Ben Webster was very kind to me now. He'd take me around with him. We'd get to a town and he'd want to go jamming. He taught me how to approach things, how to lead into a chorus, and all that sort of stuff. I'm making a hundred dollars a week now, after the $351 was making with Zutty, and by the time we get to New York, I've saved up about four, five hundred dollars. That was good bread! That was the Depression. You could get a good meal for 35 cents. A suit cost twenty-two-fifty.

"And I looked so bad, Ben don't want me to come into New York and hangin' with him, and he's was always dressed impeccably. So Ben and Keg Johnson take me right down to Billy Taub's, one of the clothing stores. He put things up in front of me. And they're dressing me like your Mom would. 'How does this look on him?' And they picked up a nice green suit, and I put this suit on, and they bought me shirts with my money. So by the time I got to Harlem, I was pretty cool, I was sharp.

"Now this is 1936. I'm in the band, I'm established, everybody loves me, and I'm playing my ass off. Everything's going right. The Cotton Club is opening downtown where the Latin Quarter was, used to be Palais Royal where Paul Whiteman used to play. Now they made it the Cotton Club, Owney Madden is closing the one in Harlem and moving it to 48th and Broadway. The first show is Cab Calloway and Bill Robinson, the Berry Brothers, Fred Coots, and a host of others, including Will Vodery. Nobody mentions Will Vodery any more. It's just terrible."

Vodery was an arranger and orchestrator for Florenz Ziegfeld. He worked for Jerome Kern, orchestrated Show Boat, and he was the first black composer and arranger to penetrate the film industry. Milt was astonished that I'd heard of him.

"He orchestrated the very first Cotton Club show downtown. And he was so damn sure of himself, he scored in ink. I had never seen a man like Vodery. A dignified man. A brown-skinned man. He had trouble with hearing in one of his ears. He lived up in Harlem, but he had a place in Saratoga too. He rehearsed us. J. Fred Coots was writing tunes."

Among Coots' tunes were For All We Know, Love Letters in the Sand, and You Go to My Head.

"Harold Arlen did some of the tunes later," Milt said. "Vodery rehearsed us. Nobody's heard of some of these people."

To be continued ...

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Milt Hinton’s impressive sound and his sense of time were linked with a consummate feeling for harmony. These attributes gained him a strong reputation for playing many styles of music, including work with popular singers. His harmonic experience in the 1940’s with Dizzy Gillespie made him a forerunner of modern Jazz bass players.”

- John Chilton, Barry Kernfeld, Ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

"Dizzy was harmonically miles ahead of me, and everybody else at that time. He'd show me things. At intermission, instead of hanging around and getting drunk, we'd go up on the roof of the Cotton Club and jam. Every night, Dizzy and I would be on the roof, just he and I. There was an old fire escape, winding stairs. He'd help me get my bass up there, and we'd rehearse on the roof. Dizzy would show me some new changes. The flatted fifth, which nobody was using in 1938, altered tenths and thirteenths. We'd rehearse until it was time for the show to go on, and we'd come back down.

- Milt Hinton, Jazz bassist

"The word bass means bottom. It means support. That's the prime requisite of a bass player, support. Architecturally, it has to be the lowest part of the building, and it has to be strong, or the building will not stand. Musically, it is the lowest human voice. It is the lowest musical voice in the orchestra. It's identifying. If it's a B-flat major chord, I have to play B-flat, or you won't know it's a B-flat major chord. We are like Atlas, standing in support.”

- Milt Hinton, Jazz bassist

"Why do you think," Milt said, "that Antonin Dvorak wrote the New World Symphony?

"When he came here from Czechoslovakia to teach, he had a black singer in his class named Harry T. Burleigh. Nobody's heard of him either. Dvorak asked him to sing some of the spirituals. And that's when Dvorak wrote the New World Symphony, based on Going Home. Harry T. Burleigh became a great singer and sang in the big white churches in New York City. He was a big name. Now nobody mentions him."

I'd heard Burleigh's name but knew little about him. I asked my friend Dr. Dominique de Lerma at Lawrence University — one of the great scholars of black music, including all that which preceded jazz — about Burleigh, telling him what Milt had said. Dominique wrote me a letter:

"Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) was a voice student at the National Conservatory of Music, there on a scholarship encouraged by the mother of Edward MacDowell (who had been registrar). She had met him at a winter evening musicale being given at a fancy-ass home in Erie where Rafael Joseffy was performing. Burleigh was outside in the snow, trying to listen through the window. The hostess saw him, called him inside, and supposedly gave him some servant's clothes as a disguise.

"My sources say that Burleigh studied with Dvorak. He did not. He was a voice major. But Dvorak got him often to his residence — way up on something iike 15th'Street in New York! — to sing all the spirituals Burleigh knew. When in that year, 1893, Dvorak wrote his final symphony to show Americans what (he thought) American music was like, he gave the Second Movement's initial theme to the English horn because, he is said to have remarked, it was most like the sound of Burleigh's voice. Today he might have given the solo to the tenor sax.

"Dvorak encouraged his students to write American music, not pseudo-German music, and as you well know, Will Marion Cook was one of his students. So was William Amis Fischer (1861-1948). Fischer later became associated with Oliver Ditson (1897-1937) in Boston. It was there Fischer set Dvorak's melody to a so-called spiritual text, Goin' Home. That was in 1924. The tune is in ballad form, AABA, like Over the Rainbow, Take the 'A' Train, and Swanee River. I know no spiritual in that form.

"Goin' Home was often thought to be a real spiritual from the start, but it isn't. Dvorak quoted no spiritual in any work of his.

"Burleigh, a real dicty dude, taught at the school for a bit, even tried his hand at a minstrel show — which I'm sure disgusted him. He became baritone soloist at New York's all-white St. George's Church, high Episcopal, because J.P, Morgan said so. He remained there for a half century, even after Morgan's death, as requested in Morgan's will.

"Since he was free on Saturdays, he was also soloist at Temple Emanu-El from 1900 to 1930, doing such things as singing Deep River in Hebrew. I'm on the trail of a recording of Burleigh. Those I've known who actually heard him raved about his voice.

"By 1913, he was editor for Ricordi, in which capacity he published also his own settings of the spirituals, giving the Harlem Renaissance some important literature."

Little wonder, then, that Milt Hinton doesn't want Burleigh forgotten.

Milt said, "I got married in 1939. Mona was in my mother's choir.

" I was in the Cotton Club. The World's Fair was going on. The Trilon and Perisphere. I got a call that my grandmother had died, 103 years old. I left my bass right on the bandstand and I got to Chicago, and all these Mississippi folks had a wake. There was chicken and whisky and talkin' and consoling the family. The house was loaded. And I'm a star. I come in sharp. There were a lot of young girls there, pretty chicks. And my mother gave me hell. She said, 'You come to Mama's funeral and you're looking these girls over. Leave these girls alone!'

"And I saw Mona over there and I hit on Mona. I said, 'Look, I'll be back later. Let's keep in contact.'

"A few weeks later, we were coming back to Indianapolis, Indiana. 1 called up Mona on the phone. I said, 'Look, I'm going to be in Indianapolis for a week, at the Circle Theater. Why don't you come down on the weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and hang out with me, and then go on back to Chicago.' She said, 'Okay.' I told her to come backstage at the theater and when you see my bass trunk, tell them you're waiting for me. So she did.

"Now my mother had some friends in Indianapolis. She decided since I'm playing there, she'd come down and see her friends. She walked backstage, and there was Mona sitting on my bass trunk. She raised hell. She said,' What are you doing here? Get back on the train, and go back to Chicago.'

"And when I come off stage, she says, 'She's gone back to Chicago.' As if that would stop it. We've been married ever since."

1939 was a major year in Milt's life. Another major figure came into it. Dizzy Gillespie joined the Cab Calloway band.

"Dizzy came into the band while we were at the Cotton Club. Doc Cheatham got sick, and Dizzy took his place. Dizzy had just got back from Europe with Teddy Hill. Dizzy and I got to be very tight. I was young, and he was younger than I."

He was in fact seven years younger than Milt.

"He had a mouthpiece that was so damn brass it was eating through his lip. I gave him five dollars to go and get it plated.

"Dizzy was harmonically miles ahead of me, and everybody else at that time. He'd show me things. At intermission, instead of hanging around and getting drunk, we'd go up on the roof of the Cotton Club and jam. Every night, Dizzy and I would be on the roof, just he and I. There was an old fire escape, winding stairs. He'd help me get my bass up there, and we'd rehearse on the roof. Dizzy would show me some new changes. The flatted fifth, which nobody was using in 1938, altered tenths and thirteenths. We'd rehearse until it was time for the show to go on, and we'd come back down.

"We would go to Minton's and jam every night. A lot of kids would come in, because they know the name guys are gonna be there. These kids got their horns out, they want to get up on the bandstand and jam. There was no room for us to get up there and do our thing. So Dizzy said, 'Okay, we're gonna change these changes all around.' The kids are all standing around, and they say, 'Whatchall gonna play?' We say, I Got Rhythm,' and we'd play these other changes, then they'd have to get off the bandstand. Black kids and white kids both. They just didn't want no beginners up there.

"When Benny Goodman started the quartet with Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson, Cab tried to follow suit. He named his quartet the Cab Jivers. He got the four biggest names in his band, Chu Berry, Cozy Cole, Danny Barker, and myself.

"The drummer in the band had been Leroy Maxey. He'd been with the band since it was the Missourians. When Gene Krupa started playing all them drum solos. Cab wanted drum solos. Maxey was a great show drummer, but he didn't know how to take drum solos. Cab got him to take a solo one night, and he got so hung up in it. he stood up and sang the rest of it. Cab fired him, and got Cozy Cole, who was with Stuff Smith and was a hot drummer around New York.

"So now we're doing this thing as the Cab Jivers. Slam Stewart was very big now. Slim and Slim had Flat Foot Floogie going.

"We had a piece to play, Girl of My Dreams. Dizzy said, 'Let me show you a solo on that. Play it like Slam, use the bow.' Dizzy sang it to me, and played it on his horn, and I used my bow. It goes to a flatted fifth. And I couldn't hear that damn thing. Every night I would play it on the air, and I would look back at Dizzy. If I would get it right, he'd nod, and if I missed it, he'd say, 'Jesus Christ, you stink.'

"This went on and on.

"Dizzy's chops weren't right yet, not like they got to be later. He would start things he couldn't finish. In the band, we didn't mind that he was even attempting it." Milt sang a typical Gillespie line and screwed it up. "We'd say, 'That was a great try.'

Cab would turn around and say, 'What the hell you got to play that damn Chinese music for?' He was always on Dizzy. And Dizzy would do all kinds of crazy things.

"Cab would be singing a ballad." Milt sang: I've got you under my skin .... "Dizzy would look out at the audience like he saw someone he knew, and wave. And the people would start laughing. Cab would turn around to see what's happening, and Dizzy sat there like he was in church.

"Tyree Glenn came into the band. And Cab would be singing a beautiful ballad, and Dizzy would act like he was throwing a football. And Tyree would act like he caught it. Just as he'd catch it, Cozy Cole would hit the bass drum, doom! And the people in the audience were falling out. It drove Cab crazy. And he keeps trying to find out who in the hell is doing it.

"We get to Hartford, Connecticut. Sunday afternoon. The band is all set to play. And then comes the spot for the Cab Jivers. We go out front. They drop the lights down on the band. Cab introduces us and goes off in his white suit. He's got two pretty ladies in the wings, waiting for him back there. It's my turn to play the solo on Girl of My Dreams and I missed it a mile. I look back at Diz and Diz says, 'You stink!'

And Cab is in the wings and sees this. Just then somebody threw a wad of paper up in the air and it landed on the stage in the spotlight, right beside me.

"When the curtain closed, the show was over, the band walked off, I got to put my bass back up on the stand. Cab walks away from these two chicks, and walks over to Diz and says, 'You stupid son of a bitch, these men are out there entertaining the people, and you're playing like you're a kid in school throwing spitballs!'

"For the first time in life, Dizzy hadn't done anything. The guys called Cab Fess. Dizzy said, 'Fess, I didn't do that.' Cab savs. 'You're a damn liar. I'm looking right at you. '

Now Dizzy gets kind of mad about this, because he's right this time. He says, 'You're another liar, I didn't do it'

"Now Cab can't have the youngest cat in the band talking to him like that when he's got these fine chicks standing over there on the side. He's the leader. Cab said, 'Get away from me, or I'll slap the hell out of you.' And Dizzy said, 'I didn't do nothin'.

"Cab turned around and slapped his hand upside his face.

"I'm ambidextrous. We used to play with knives when we were kids , like cap guns. Not switchblades, case knives that you throw. J taught Dizzy to do this either hand. If you know how to do it, the blade opens right up. And Dizzy came up with this knife and went right for Cab's stomach. If I hadn't been standing there, Cab would have been dead twice.

"Dizzy was always biggcr'n me, and strong. I just hit his hand and deflected the knife. Cab grabbed Dizzy. Cab was a strong guy, and a street fighter, a tough dude. He was one of those Baltimore alley cats. He grabbed Dizzy's wrist, and they had this big scuffle. The musicians were in the band room, and they hear the scuffling, and they rush back out. Chu Berry and Benny Payne, two big guys, pull them apart and push Cab into his dressing room. Dizzy went to the band room. By the time Cab gets into the dressing room, his white suit is red, all the way down his leg. The knife went into his leg when I deflected it.

"Dizzy was scratched on the wrist from the scuffle. Cab walked into the dressing room. Mona was there and Dizzy's wife, Lorraine, was there. Cab said, 'I guess you cats know, this cat cut me.' And he said to Dizzy, 'Get your horn and get out of here.' Dizzy packed up his horn. Lorraine was standing in the door. And they left. And it was quiet.

"The guy who did the spitball did not mention it. That was the sad part about it. It was Jonah Jones.

"We finished the engagement that night and went back to New York. The bus always went to the Theresa Hotel at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. That was home base in New York. Cab always had the first seat on the bus.

"When we get to the curb. Cab stepped off the bus. Dizzy was waiting. He said,

'Fess, I didn't do that.' Cab just hit him on the hand and walked away. The newspapers and Down Beat made it up like it was a big fight.

"It made 'em both famous."

"Did they ever get over it?" I asked.

"Absolutely. When there was a big reunion of the Cab Calloway band, everybody was there. Tyree Glenn, Budd Johnson, Illinois Jacquet. Dizzy was there. Dizzy started some of his antics, and one of the guys said, 'Don't start!' Dizzy went out and played his solo and turned around to the band and said, "Who threw the spitball?" And the whole band yelled, 'Not me!' And Cab grabbed Dizzy and hugged him and said, 'I know you didn't do it'.

"Later, we were all in Nice, France, and Cab pulled his pants down and pulled Dizzy over and said, 'Feel here,' and put Dizzy's hand on his leg. The scar was still there."

"Dizzy always sent Cab a Christmas card. He loved Cab. Cab was one of our greatest leaders. He was kind to us, he paid us more money. He even paid more money than Duke paid. He was born on Christmas Day. We stopped work December 23. Wherever we stopped work, he gave us our salary and a hundred dollars for Christmas, a ticket home to wherever you lived, and a ticket back to Chicago. We had a contract for years to play New Year's Eve at the College Inn.

"He paid for the pre-natal care for my daughter. He said, 'Have this one on me.' It's never been told what kind of man this was, except by people like Dizzy and me. We kept that band together after it broke up, like family. Anybody got broke, got sick, was out of money, we always chipped in. When Benny Payne died in California, we got some money together. It's still that way, those of us who are left."

A year after Mona and Milt were married, another figure came into his life: his father.

"He came back to the United States. He was an educated man. His field was agriculture, like Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. After slavery, we weren't trying to get brain surgeons. We were trying to get people who knew how to be servants, porters, cooks. That's why Tuskegee was built. This was right after slavery. People knew nothin'.

"My father was well-versed in cotton. When he went back to Africa, Firestone found you could grow rubber trees there in the same conditions you did in South America, and they built the great rubber plantations in Monrovia, and he worked there. But he didn't get on too well with them. From what I hear, he wasn't a very easy man to get along with, and he didn't take anything from anybody. And he got in trouble there, and he came back to the United States — to Memphis, Tennessee. He got to be a cotton sampler, and that was the best job a black man could have in the South. Every cotton buyer would have a cotton sampler, a black man who knew cotton, Grade A, Grade B. And he would buy according to that man's opinion.

"We were playing Memphis. Benny Payne, the piano player, says, 'I hear your father's in town. Have you seen him yet?' I said, 'No.' I'd just played a bass solo. Benny said, 'He's standing over there.' And he was. He was standing backstage. I looked just like the guy. I didn't know what to say to this man. But he said the right words. He looked at me, and he said, 'Your mother's done a wonderful job.' And when he said that, I hugged him. And I said, 'Let's go have a drink.' And Cozy Cole, Cab Calloway, Chu Berry, and my father and I went to the nearest bar and got stoned.

"I went to the telephone and called my mother in Chicago, and I handed him the phone. His voice was the same as mine, with the half hoarseness, half harshness, and she said, 'Baby, have you got a cold?' And he said, 'No,' and she knew, and she said, "Put my son on the phone!' She never saw him.

"He stayed in Tennessee. When they started building the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they grabbed everybody who knew about cotton, because cotton acetate is the basis for explosives.

"I don't know what he did there, but they gave everybody who worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a citation, because if the thing had gone up. everybody would have been gone. He died when he was 66 years old. The only thing I have of my father's is that citation from Oak Ridge and his razor."

Many musicians have taken up photography as a hobby, and some have become highly proficient. Stan Levey even turned professional, giving up music as a career. Les McCann is a superb photographer, and a fine painter as well. Milt is one of the best of them. In 1988, Temple University Press published a coffee-table book of his pictures supported by a text in which he recounts his life and times. It's titled Bass Line.

"How did the photography start, Milt?"

"Somebody bought me a camera for my birthday in the late '30s. Traveling with Cab, I just wanted to take pictures of the musicians. I wanted to record what I did, and the places that I'd been and the people in my surroundings. And I found that I can do what photographers can't do because I'm a musician. Because I'm going to take a picture, the guy doesn't tie his tie or get his horn. If he does that, I don't take the picture, because that's not what I'm into. I took a picture of Dizzy sleeping in a bus. I just want to catch a guy in a restaurant, eating a sandwich. I got Chu Berry down in Texas, where it was hot as hell, with a big piece of watermelon and he's enjoying it, and he's soaking wet. Places we've been. I've tried to show the stupidity of prejudice. Like a picture in Atlanta, Georgia, of a railway station, 1939. It says Colored Entrance. Cab Calloway's whole band. I said, 'Before you go through, guys, let me get this picture.' Fifty years later, you had a black man running for governor there. It shows you the progress that has been made. There's not nearly enough, but we've come a long ways. I took a picture of a sign in Florida that said No Jews and Dogs Allowed. Forget me!

"Ray Brown — he was married to Ella Fitzgerald at the time — and I used to stand out on the corner. He was working in one club and Cab Calloway was playing another club. During the day, we walked down Second Avenue, that's the black neighborhood. The club where he worked at night, there was no one there in the afternoon. There was a bass in the back. We'd get a half pint of whisky and take a little sip and he'd play something and show me, and I'd play something and show him.

One day I remember the bar was open in front but in the back it's dark. And we heard some cats rehearsing back there. We couldn't see who it was. We listened to the bass player. You couldn't hear much tone out of it. But Ray Brown said, 'That cat sure is keeping good time, man. We're gonna hear more about him.' And the guitar player was playing! And the trumpet player was out of sight. Years later that bass player took Ray's place with Oscar Peterson. It was Sam Jones. The trumpet player was Blue Mitchell. The guitar player killed a woman and went to jail. The saxophone player, the chicks just ruined him and he never made it."

"This brings us to another point," I said. "Milt," I said, "how do you see the line of development of the bass from about the 1920s on?"

"Oh!" he said in a long sigh. "Bass has made more progress than any other instrument in the last fifty years. Listen to Lynn Seaton, or Ron Carter, or Richard Davis. And John Clayton. Fantastic. The epitome of players! The instrument hasn't changed bodily, but the balance of strings has changed, the teaching has changed.

"I heard Jimmy Blanton with Jeter-Pillars down in St. Louis. Bass horn was still the style down in St. Louis. Anybody that played bass fiddle had to emulate bass horn. We played two beats, boom boom, boom boom, budoom-budoom boom boom. That's the way we were taught play. That's what the musicians wanted to hear. And nobody wanted to hear a bass player taking a solo. Pops Foster got a chance now and then to do a little something.

"The word bass means bottom. It means support. That's the prime requisite of a bass player, support. Architecturally, it has to be the lowest part of the building, and it has to be strong, or the building will not stand. Musically, it is the lowest human voice. It is the lowest musical voice in the orchestra. It's identifying. If it's a B-flat major chord, I have to play B-flat, or you won't know it's a B-flat major chord. We are like Atlas, standing in support. Now what we're doing today in most instances is not really supporting. We're bypassing that, doing other things as well as supporting. Which is possible to do. Bridges don't need to have columns, we have suspension bridges with cables coming from them. And we're doing the same thing musically with the bass."

I said, "You made the adjustment, through all those styles of the'30s and'40s."

"Right," he said. "Very few guys did."

"And you play in contemporary styles."

"I try. But I'm still using some of the old things that I heard. Like the slap bass, which f got from those guys. Steve Brown was one of my idols. He was fabulous. I listened to his records. He was a better slap bass-player than even Pops Foster, and more exposed because he was with Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. He was a big man. I never met him, but I always loved him. He was on Rhapsody and Blue and all those things with Whiteman. and you had to be a proficient bass player for that music. He was the best slap-bass player I ever heard in my life, amazing. The best in the world. I try to double that, like these young people who double what Blanton did, and all that sort of stuff. Now they're coming to me to find out about this slap bass thing.

"But I'm amazed at them, and I'm still trying to find out and continue. Education will make you do that, that you don't shut your mind to any one thing. Not to be facetious about it, all the bass players in all of the big bands down through the years, you don't remember who they were. All they did was that one thing and they didn't keep abreast of the other things. Nobody remembers who was Jimmie Lunceford's bass player. All he had to do was play that two beats, and he never got past that. His name was Mose Allen.

"And that goes for all the other bands. So when the complexion of the dance orchestra changed, Blanton was one of the innovators. He was also a violin player. Blanton's innovation was the violin, improvising. The academic knowledge, having the dexterity, the knowledge of the instrument harmonically. I have some records of him before Ellington, the Jeter-Pillars band out of St. Louis, and the guys in the band didn't like him, because he was playing all that stuff, and that was not what they wanted out of a bass player. But he was modern, and he wasn't very successful. He was improvising and doing little things in between. They weren't accustomed to that. It was because of Ivie Anderson, who was a very modern lady singer with Duke Ellington, they went down to St. Louis and heard him, and thought it was marvelous. She introduced him to Duke Ellington. And Duke Ellington was always looking for the new.

"And they started with those duos. Pitter Panther Patter. I've got the write-ups from when that came out. They panned Duke like hell for that. They said, 'What docs Duke mean doing this kind of thing, duets?' I call them bass booets. And then the musicians heard it, and could see a vision of what he was about, and they fell in love with it. And other bass players began to emulate it, and as they got more advanced began to do it.

"I was in Cab Calloway's band, and when I heard him, I thought I'd hang up my bass and leave. There was nothing else for us to do. Billy Taylor was with Duke. Duke never fired anybody — he just added Jimmy Blanton. And Billy Taylor couldn't take that, standing there every night and hearing all that wonderful playing. He just quit.

"You have to keep on top of things, keep abreast, keep listening and find out what you can do, and how it works, and appreciating it. And these kids appreciate me, they're coming to me and saying, 'Milt, how do you do that slap-bass thing?' And I'm only too happy to try to show them. But it's gonna take practice to do it."

Yet another bassist who began as a violinist was Milt's friend George Duvivier. He studied at the Conservatory of Music and Art and became concert master of the Central Manhattan Symphony when he was sixteen. When Duvivier died in 1985, Ray Brown wrote a piece in his memory to be played by seven bassists, himself, Bob Haggart, John Clayton, Major Holly, Carson Smith, Milt, and John Heard. John Heard said, "We all played our solos. And then came Milt's turn. He did his animal number. He played slapped bass, he did everything, and he wiped everybody out! It was great."

It would seem, then, that all Milt's life, after the flight from Vicksburg, has been sunny. Not so. He and Mona had one daughter and adopted another, whose son Milt considered his own grandson.

"He was nineteen years old. He was going to be a lawyer. He was to graduate from the New York Police Academy. My grandson was a big guy. Just wonderful. He didn't like to argue with anybody. If he had an argument, he'd walk away. He could move a building over if he wanted to. This kid he knew, who was eighteen, started an argument. He walked away. The kid picked up a cinder block and hit him on the head and killed him and put his body in the trunk of his car.

"I had two condominiums for my daughters where the Jamaica race track used to be. St. Albans. They had keys to our house and we had keys to their places. My adopted daughter was working for the Board of Education. She went to work in the car pool every morning.

After this kid put my grandson in the trunk, a meter maid came along. She started to write a parking ticket and she saw blood. She called the police, and then she left. The police were a long time getting there, and the kid came back and got the car. And he had the keys to our daughter's house. He knew that she went to work, and he decided to go and rob their condominium.

"But my daughter hadn't gone to work yet. When the kid put the key in the door, she thought it was her son. He opened the door and this kid jumped in. She screamed. They had a big fight, and he killed her. He took his clothes off and put on my grandson's clothes and sat down in the house.

"When my daughter didn't show up at work, the people at the Board of Education called. He answered the phone. They think it's my grandson. He says, 'No, I'm waiting for Tommy.' They said, 'Elizabeth didn't get to work.'

"He said, 'Well, she thought of coming later.' And she's in the kitchen dead.

"The police had traced the car to the parking lot. They're watching it. They find out where she lives. They go over to the other condominium, and my real daughter says, 'I've got keys to her place.' Meantime, this kid is going back to the car, and they catch him. My daughter and the police go to my adopted daughter's place and open the door. When she saw what happened she went berserk. We almost lost her, too. She was put in the hospital, and we thought she was going to die.

"It was a dark day in our life.

"They sent the guy to jail."

Somehow Milt and Mona survived even that. I suspect that his passion for teaching is one of the things that sustains him.

"Clark Terry and I have gone to black universities, like Morgan State, and the faculty teaching don't know about people like Harry T. Burleigh, and we tell them these things, the black kids particularly, to give them some impetus about their heritage, some inspiration. Kids have to have role models. There's a book by a man named James M. Trotter called Musical People of Color. It goes back to 1845 and tells about the time of slavery, when free blacks became great singers and great writers and opera singers. Joseph White, a great violin player, went to Cuba and France and won medals and was a friend of Rossini's. And our black kids don't know about these things. James Holland, whose music for guitar is on the market to this very day. And Blind Tom. This book has got the reviews he got from all over the world. This is a wonderful book. We need this to give the kids something to aspire to.

"In the Jewish religion, the kids learn about the Maccabees and Eliazar, the great priests who held up the faith, and defied kings. Jewish children can read about these things. And we don't have that kind of thing in our race, and it's important.

"I love doing clinics. Sharing my expertise. And not teaching but advising, encouraging, setting a role model. Telling the kids from where we've come, where it is now, and where you 've got to go, because these young ones have got to do better. If you don't do better than what's happening now, you haven't made any progress. I try to tell them how you should carry yourself, and what's required of a professional musician.

"This music came up on the North American continent. That includes Canada, because it is part of this continent. Everybody's contributed to this music, whether Indian, Canadian, black, white. We have to use the academics that people get and put it together with the creativity of other people, and we form something that is truly American.

"It's like plastics. I took a course in plastics. Plastics can be made from waste material, and under heat and pressure it becomes another substance with none of the properties of what it came from. If you wanted to make plastics in Iowa, you would use corn cobs, the parts you throw away, and under heat and pressure you make a plastic sheet material that has none of the properties of corn.

"This is what was done in music in America. All of this has been under the heat and pressure of ihe North American continent, and we concocted music that has European and African and Asiatic background, and it becomes America's classical music. And it is constantly changing, according to what waste materials we use.

"I'm a descendant of slave Africans and black Africans, but it's African. Other people come from the intermarriage of American Indians and black people. Because they were on the low part of the totem pole, they kind of hooked up together there.

"But what we really want to do is be Americans. We're all on this American continent together, man."

Milt continued to perform well into his eighties, producing that big, gorgeous tone and powerful beat, but time slowed him at last, and he eventually gave it up. For years he was a regular on the jazz cruises of the S.S. Norway, and it was on one of these that I was able to interview him over a period of several days.

The night of his 90th birthday tribute at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College arrived, June 13, 2000. Forty musicians played. According to the New York Times no concert ever went more smoothly. Produced by David Berger, it was directed by John Clayton. Mitt and Mona —-who is as much loved in the business as Milt — were in the audience with his friend Jack Lesberg, now 80 years old.

The players included Russell Malone, Benny Green, Howard Alden, Art Baron, Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Joe Bushkin, James Williams, Renee Rosnes, George Wein, Dick Hyman, Randy Sandke, Jon Faddis, Kenny Davern, Dennis Mackrell, Jackie Williams, Warren Vache, and more paid their loving tribute. At one point there were 18 bassists on stage, including Bill Crow, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, Jay Leonhart, Brian Torff, Kyle Eastwood, and Richard Davis. All the musicians were chosen by Milt.

"We all had a wonderful time," Bill Crow said. "Everybody had a chance to play something for Milt and Mona. And the packed house seemed enchanted."

The Times story, by Ben Ratlif, noted that Milt made his first receding in 1930 with Tiny Parham.

"Mrs. Hinton," Ratliff reported, "stood up and asked the crowd not to leave without stopping by to say hello. The concert's proceeds benefited Mr. Hinton's scholarship fund. Concertgoers were given bags of M&M's as they left — for Milt and Mona. It was a charmed night."

Atlas, indeed. They don’t make ‘em like Milt Hinton, anymore.

Jazzletter

Gene Lees, Editor

June 2000