"Hear Me Talkin' to Ya'"- Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn," 

- Charlie Parker.

"What is jazz? The rhythm—the feeling." 

- Coleman  Hawkins.

"The best sound usually comes the first time you do something. If it's spontaneous, it's going to be rough, not clean, but it's going to have the spirit which is the essence of jazz," 

- Dave Brubeck.

Originally published in 1955, when recorded Jazz was about thirty years old, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya’: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It [hardcover Rinehart and Company in 1955; paperback Dover Publications in 1966] is even more significant now that recorded Jazz is entering its second century for the testimonies and stories it contains from many of the original makers of the music.

Here, in their own words, such famous jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong. King Oliver. Fletcher Henderson. Bunk Johnson. Duke Ellington. Fats Waller, Clarence Williams, Jo Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, Mezz Mezzrow, Hilly Holiday, and many others recall die birth, growth, and changes in jazz over the years. From its beginnings at the turn of the century in the red-light district in New Orleans (or Storyville as it came to be known), to Chicago's Downtown section and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Chicago's South Side to jam sessions in Kansas City, to Harlem during the depression years, the West Coast and modern developments, the story of jazz is vividly and colorfully documented in hundreds of personal interviews, letters, tape recorded and telephone conversations, and excerpts from previously printed articles that appeared in books and magazines.

There is no more fascinating and lively history of jazz than this first-hand telling by the men who made it. It should be read and re-read by all jazz enthusiasts, musicians, students of music and culture, students of American history, and general leaders. 

A taste of what’s on offer in the book are the following quotations from Chapter 10 - “‘In A Mist’ - the Legendary Bix.”

PEE WEE RUSSELL

I first met Bix I'd say in the latter part of 1926. That was in the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis. Frankie Trumbauer had the band there and he had brought Bix down from Detroit where both had been working with Jean Goldkette. This was a summer job and we worked the season at the Arcadia. After we finished the season we went to Hudson Lake. You see, this was a Goldkette unit. We had the book and Jean was at the office from where he sent bands out. I had heard Bix on records before—those Gennett records with Tommy Dorsey and Paul Mertz and the other guys—and I had heard him in Chicago. There used to be a band at the Rendezvous that Charlie Straight had. Those were the speakeasy days and Bix used to come late and play with that band. It would sometimes go to seven or eight in the morning. But I had never worked with Bix until St. Louis.

Sonny Lee, who later played with Jimmy Dorsey, was playing trombone with this band at the Arcadia, and Sonny used to live at my home. I came home one afternoon and there was Bix with Sonny in the living room playing Bix records. It gave me a kick—a big thrill to have Bix in my home. Among musicians, even at that time, Bix had a reputation. Very few of us understood what he was doing; even in Chicago only a limited number did. In fact, it was the guys like Krupa, Goodman, Sullivan, Freeman, Dave Tough, and Tesch, naturally, that really appreciated him. The other musicians, like in St. Louis, understood what he was doing on a much smaller scale. And as for the management, he wasn't even featured with the band.

The thing about Bix's music is that he drove a band. He more or less made you play whether you wanted to or not. If you had any talent at all he made you play better. It had to do for one thing with the way he played lead. It had to do with his whole feeling for ensemble playing. He got a very large tone with a cornet. Records never quite reproduced his sound. Some come fairly close but the majority don't.

Then there were the men he usually recorded with. He had a hard time with some of those records. I don't mean that the men he recorded with weren't musicians. I mean he wasn't in bad company, but they didn't belong in a jazz band and Bix had been raised in jazz. So it was all due to them that a majority of the records didn't quite catch what Bix could do. But Bix's disposition wasn't one to complain. He wasn't able to say, I don't like this guy, let's give him the gate and get so and so. He was never a guy to complain about the company he was in. Like I say, they were good musicians and they could make it with Goldkette where they were supposed to do certain things. But they weren't for jazz.

Without a doubt, music was all Bix lived for. I remember we used to have a Sunday afternoon thing at the Arcadia Ballroom. Ordinarily the band would complain about the extra work, but Bix would really look forward to it. He said he liked to see the kids dance on Sunday afternoon. He liked to watch them do things like the Charleston, et cetera. He said he liked it because the kids had such a fine sense of rhythm. And, in their way, the kids knew what Bix was doing. They knew he was doing something different because he made them want to dance.

We used to have little head arrangements, written by some of the men in the band. They were good musicians in the band. We had a bass player, for example, from the St. Louis Symphony for a while. We would do little things once in a while so drastic or rather so musically advanced that when we had a damn nice thing going the manager would come up and say, "What in God's name are you doing?" I remember on I Ain't Got Nobody we had an arrangement with five-part harmony for the three saxes and the two brass. And the writing went down chromatically on a whole-tone scale basis. It was unheard of in those days. "For God's sake!" the manager would yell out—and naturally we couldn't explain it to him. That sort of music became more or less of a novelty with the people though. And they'd say at times, "Play those awful things!" Bix was instrumental in things like that. Most of the writing at that time was done by Bud Hassler. He was a tenor player.

As for Bix's compositions, this is the background of In a Mist. Tommy Satterfield, who was working with the Skouras brothers at that time, I don't know if anybody knows this story—Tommy had an office and did all the scoring for the large pit bands. Being an arranger, he took a liking to Bix and what he was doing and he took down In a Mist for him. You see, Bix played it for him on the piano. It was the first time that the song had ever gotten written down. I think Ferdie Grofe helped Bix with Candlelights later and some of the others.

Bix had a miraculous ear. As for classical music, Bix liked little things like some of those compositions of MacDowell and Debussy —very light things. Delius, for example. Then he made a big jump from that sort of thing to Stravinsky and stuff like that. There'd be certain things he would hear in some modern classical music, like whole tones, and he'd say, why not do it in a jazz band? What's the difference? Music doesn't have to be the sort of thing that's put in brackets? Then later it got to be like a fad and everybody did it, but they wouldn't know what the devil it was all about.

We would often order a score of a new classical work, study it, and then request it from the St. Louis Symphony. And we'd get ourselves a box for those concerts when they did a program we all liked. It would be Bix, Hassler, and I. We'd haunt them to play scores that we wanted to hear. Stuff like the Firebird Suite.

Rudolf Ganz was conducting at that time. We got to know him. We had the connection through Trumbauer's bass player. There was a soloist clarinet in the St. Louis Symphony, Tony Sarlie. I used to try to get him to teach me, and I studied with him a little. I wish I had studied more.

Anyway, we'd get those requests in. We weren't exactly like jitterbugs. It was on a different scale. I guess you could call us a different type of jitterbug. At least we were trying to learn something. And we wanted to hear these scores played well. You see, we knew what was supposed to happen because we had taken the scores with us and followed the work with them. Later on, Don Murray, Bix, and I used to go to concerts in New York. Murray was a very, very clever arranger. He and Bill Challis … 

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

And the first time I heard Bix, I said these words to myself: there's a man as serious about his music as I am . . . Bix did not let anything at all detract his mind from that cornet and his heart was with it all the time.

I shall never forget those nights in Chicago, when Bix was with the great Mr. P.W. [Paul Whiteman] and I was playing for Joe Glaser at the Sunset at Thirty-fifth and Calumet Streets. That's when Earl Fatha Hines, Tubby Hall, and Darnell Howard was in the band. It was Carroll Dickerson's band. That's when the Sunset was really jumping.

Bix came through with Mr. P. and they opened up at the Chicago Theatre. I shall never forget that incident because I caught the first show that morning . . . hmm -. . . I had to stay up all night to do it.

But Bix was in that band and this was the first time I witnessed him in such a large hellfired band as Mr. Whiteman's ... I had been diggin' him in small combos and stuff. Now my man's gonna blow some of these big time arrangements, I thought . . . and sure enough he did ... as soon as I bought my ticket, I made a beeline to my seat because the band was already on, and they were way down into their program, when the next number that came up, after the one they were playing when I came in, was a beautiful tune called From Monday On . . . My, my, what an arrangement that was.

They swung it all the way . . . and all of a sudden Bix stood up and took a solo . . . and I'm tellin' you, those pretty notes went all through me ... then Mr. Whiteman went into the Overture by the name of 1812 . . . and he had those trumpets way up into the air, justa' blowing like mad, but good . . . and my man Bix was reading those dots and blowing beautifully … and just before the ending of the overture, they started to shooting cannons, ringing bells, sirens were howling like mad, and in fact everything was happening in   that overture.

But you could still hear Bix ... the reason why I said through all those different effects that were going on at the ending you could still hear Bix . . . well, you take a man with a pure tone like Bix's and no matter how loud the other fellows may be blowing, that pure cornet or trumpet tone will cut through it all ... all due respect to the men.

After the show, I went directly around backstage to see Bix, and say hello to a few of the other musicians I knew personally. After a long chat and when they went on the stage for their next show, I cut out and went straight to a music store and bought From Monday On . . . and put it with the rest of my collectors' items of his.

The recordings from Singing the Blues on down to In a Mist , . . they all collectors' items. . , .

When Bix would finish up at the Chicago Theatre at night, he would haul it out to the Sunset where I was playing and stay right there with us until the last show was over and the customers would go home.

Then we would lock the doors. Now you talking about jam sessions. . . . huh. . . . those were the things . . . with everyone feeling each other's note or chord, et cetera . . . and blend with each other instead of trying to cut each other . . . nay, nay, we did not even think of such a mess . . . we tried to see how good we could make music sound which was an inspiration within itself.

After a while we would sort of rest up and Bix would get on the piano and play some of the sweetest things . . . real touching . . . that's when he was getting ready to record his immortal In a Mist .,. , the tune is still fresh today, as it was then . . . you couldn't find a musician nowheres in the whole world that doesn't still love Bix's In a Mist.” … 

PEE WEE RUSSELL

“As for what caused Bix to destroy himself, well, in that era, naturally where he started, around Indiana, there was that thing with the hip bottle and the gin—the 'twenties and all that stuff. Later, when he had acquired a name, he could get a bottle of whiskey any time of day or night. Now Bix enjoyed a drink but he was human too. Everybody likes privacy. Privacy enough to

sleep and eat. But it was impossible for him to get any. There were always people in his room. They would knock on the door even at six A.M., and it was impossible for him because of the kind of person he was to insult anybody, to say get out of here.

I remember how, at one hotel, he used to leave word that he wasn't in. So some fellows would check into the hotel, take a room on the floor below Bix's room; then they'd come up and rap and pound on the door and you'd have to answer. He even had a piano in the room, and, when he had a spare moment, he'd try to get a composition started, but with all those people always hanging around he didn't have a chance. In a sense, Bix was killed by his friends. But I think the term is being used loosely. Because they weren't his friends. They were the kind of people who liked to be able to say, "Last night I was up at Bix's and oh, was he drunk. Gee, you should have seen his room!" You know that type of people. They wanted to say they were there. I don't think I have to say any more about that type of people. And Bix couldn't say no. He couldn't say no to anybody.

I remember one Victor date we did. Bix was working in the Whiteman band at the time. He had hired me for the date but rather than hurt anybody's feelings he also hired Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and everybody.

Every time somebody would walk into the door at Plunkett's, the bar we hung out at, Bix would say, "Gee, what am I going to do?" So he'd go up to the guy and hire him for the date. He didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. So he went way over his budget and we had to scrape cab fare to get back from the date.

Bix came from a good home life. He had the best. His people were very well-to-do. Anything more I could tell you about Bix is all history anyway and has been written about.”