Inside Pee Wee 1950 by Orrin Keepnews

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

“… Pee Wee stands as the basic minimum, as a kind of proof that jazz is demonstrably a matter of men creating a music that is what they feel and what they are.”

“His style is undoubtedly something quite inevitable — inevitable and doomed, I suppose — but it's a wonderful kind of music and it's an awe-inspiring kind of personal dedication. 

“[With Pee Wee we are] dealing with someone who had something, as a musician and as a man, that few people ever have — an internal completeness and sense of personal satisfaction. Although Pee Wee himself is undoubtedly quite unaware of all these obscure metaphysical values.”

-Orrin Keepnews

Many Jazz fans are unaware of the fact that before he became a record producer and co-founder of Riverside and Jazzland records [with Bill Grauer] and other, later labels devoted to Jazz in his long and illustrious career, Orrin Keepnews [1923-2015] wrote and edited for The Record Changer, a small Jazz magazine “… which managed to survive just long [1946-52] enough to provide my on-the-job training as a Jazz writer.”

Little did Orrin realize how valuable this internship would become because, given the shoe-string operation Riverside/Jazzland records was from 1953 until it's bankruptcy in 1964, he pretty much wrote the liner notes for almost all of the records he produced. 

And while Riverside, Jazzland and subsequent labels he founded - Landmark and Mainstream, among them - were essentially devoted to modern Jazz, Orrin had a very deep background in the music and its makers from the early origins of the music as is detailed in his autobiographical The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-1987.

As a case in point, the following 1950 essay on clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, one of the founders of the Chicago Style of Jazz in the 1920s, is excerpted from this book. [The Riverside History of Classic Jazz RLP 12-112 is also a testimony to Orrin’s interest in early Jazz.]

In the 1990s when we both lived in San Francisco, I got to know Orrin pretty well; we were neighbors and he allowed me to interview him about a variety of artists who had recorded for him at Riverside Records.

We usually met at a restaurant/club on Geary known as The Beach House, a somewhat ludicrously decorated place with Tiki heads, lots of bamboo, waitresses in Hawaiian print dresses and a funky looking bartender who served up a pretty good Mai Tai.

During one of our get-togethers, he gave me a paperback copy of The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-1987 which, dog-eared from lots of readings during business travels over the years, I still have.

I laughed when I first saw how he had inscribed it: “To Steve, a good friend of the music.” No one has ever been a better friend to the music than Orrin Keepnews.

© -Orrin Keepnews: copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“A tall, gaunt, stoop-shouldered fellow, something more than forty years old, with the face of a sad clown and a general air of vagueness and absent-mindedness about him, Pee Wee Russell hardly seems likely to fit anyone's conception of what a jazz musician should look like.

A total stranger to jazz would probably be a bit surprised to see him pick up a clarinet; after the stranger had heard him play for a while, the chances are that he would be more, rather than less baffled. The growl tones, the slurs and blurs of Pee Wee's music, have been known to provoke bitter arguments. The question seemed almost invariably to be: does he play the best, or the worst clarinet in the world?

The unanswerable argument has died down now; not only is Russell an accepted and almost legendary figure in the Dixieland world, but it must also be admitted that he is no longer on the top rung. In the current New York-Chicago pattern, the top rung and the spotlight belong to a slicker, brasher, brassier type of musician: Bill Davison blasting from the center of the podium or Eddie Condon chatting with the customers are the ones more likely to be either praised or damned these days. And the reason for Pee Wee's slipping out of the spotlight is not only a change in public taste or in publicity. Even those who love Russell's work the best will grant that he is not playing as well as he once played on early Chicago record dates.

Admitting that the fellow has always been a puzzle, and that he is not now a center of attraction — although he is still a respected jazz name, it may seem a bit far-fetched to come right out and claim that Pee Wee is, in effect, an object lesson in the nature of improvised jazz, a living embodiment of the peculiar virtues and drawbacks of this music. I won't deny that that statement may sound like the sort of thing a jazz writer dreams up when he's desperately searching for "significance." But I won't apologize for the claim, either. It seems to me that not only can the enigma of Pee Wee be explained in those terms, but that all of us — or at least that total stranger to jazz whom I invented a couple of paragraphs ago — can get some valuable hints about all of jazz by looking at Pee Wee that way.

Go back to the first time you ever heard Russell on record: for me I think it may have been on the [tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman] Summa Cum Laude [orchestra’s version of] "Sunday." Then recall the first time you saw him — I remember early one evening at Nick's, when the band was sitting at a table near the stand, and I had never seen any white jazzman in person, and I knew without hesitation which one was Russell.

It has become quite a cliche in jazz writing to talk about a musician's style and solos as expressing his "ideas" or his "personality." But notes are not as easily communicative as words, and while one man's inventiveness or power may please you and stir you, it is no real indication as to whether he beats his wife, agrees with Nietzsche, or brushes his teeth regularly. And while I'm not claiming that you can learn these things by listening to his clarinet, it is nevertheless unquestionable that there is an overwhelming unity about Pee Wee. Only a man who looks and acts as he does should be able to play exactly as he does. The wry, shy, ironic humor, the hesitant, almost-humble gestures — these are identical in the appearance of the man and in the sound of the clarinet. Charles Edward Smith wrote in Jazzmen that Pee Wee "looks like the sort of person about whom anecdotes are told"—and I think you can hear that in the music, too.

This sort of thing should not be over-generalized; there are many musicians whose personalities and music are vastly more difficult to isolate and comprehend. But Pee Wee stands as the basic minimum, as a kind of proof that jazz is demonstrably a matter of men creating a music that is what they feel and what they are.

It is also true that Russell is a remarkably unchanging musician. This is undoubtedly at least part of the reason why he is not today the influential figure in jazz that he has been. Whether his playing has declined because of his physical decline, or whether it's the other way around, I wouldn't know. But I would guess that he was living at the same pace, or harder, in the golden era when men as different as Teschmaker and Goodman were clearly being influenced by his playing. It's more likely that the trouble with Pee Wee today is that his kind of music doesn't really exist any more, except for his own playing and that of a very few other deep-dyed Chicagoans. Listen to almost any old White Chicago record, and then listen to a Condon's-type band of today; the difference is immense, but Pee Wee's style is virtually unchanged. If you are as closely tied up with your music as he must be, you either must want to go along with such changes, or else be bewildered and pretty badly hurt by the fact that the world has changed, and the music has changed, and you can't and don't want to change.

I don't know why Pee Wee's music has remained constant, but it isn't hard to guess. The kind of unity of man and music in Russell that I have been talking about certainly indicates something deeply ingrained and single-minded. Anyway, Pee Wee's style must have been formed back when he was playing weekend dates in Missouri, listening to Fate Marable's riverboat band and to Charlie Creath playing rough blues on the cornet in St. Louis. His style is undoubtedly something quite inevitable — inevitable and doomed, I suppose — but it's a wonderful kind of music and it's an awe-inspiring kind of personal dedication.

A certain trombone player, at the recent height of his popularity, took to making Pee Wee something of the butt of his rough-hewn humor, calling him "Pee Wee the People," a joke I always thought was more obscure than it was worth. It may be naive, but I've always thought there was an unconscious embarrassment in the ribbing, a half-realized dealing with someone who had something, as a musician and as a man, that few people ever have — an internal completeness and sense of personal satisfaction. Although Pee Wee himself is undoubtedly quite unaware of all these obscure metaphysical values.

I don't want to get either mystical or maudlin, so I'll stop before I start mumbling about "the peace that passeth understanding" and the like. Instead I'll close with the memory of a night in Boston in 1945. Russell was playing with Max Kaminsky and a loud but uninspired local rhythm section. At the time Pee Wee could rarely be heard over the combined din of band and audience. But for one number everything slipped into place; there was silence and you could hear him playing quite beautiful blues in his accustomed style: growl and blur and more notes hinted at than he or anyone else could ever play.”

Pee Wee’s solo begins at 3:09 minutes -