Jazz Centenaries in The Decade of the 2020's - The Chicagoans: Part 1

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

Austin High School Gang in a non-musical moment.

L to R, standing Eddie Condon [bjo], Dave Tough [dr], Dick McPartland [gtr]., Dave North [p], Bud Freeman [ts], Frank Teschemacher [cl]; 

Front, Jim Lanigan [b] and Jimmy McPartland [cnt].

This decade - the 2020’s - marks the 100th anniversary of many significant dates and events in the development of what Gunther Schuller’s excellent book on the subject categorizes as Early Jazz.

100 years ago, Jazz came up from New Orleans to Chicago and then went east to New York, a migration that took place throughout the 1920s [with a stop-over in Kansas City and a quick left turn to Los Angeles and San Francisco along the way].

Among many other highlights, the contributions to the evolution of Jazz by a group of talented white musicians often referred to as The Chicagoans and overlooked by many Jazz fans when considering important developments in “Early Jazz.”

In considering the significance of The Chicagoans in the History of Jazz, it’s important to keep in mind both the positive as well as the negative attributes of the group as underscored in this excerpt that closes the chapter about them in Richard Hadlock’s Jazz Masters of the 20s [1965]:

“There can never be another group like the Chicagoans, for they represent the coming together of two provincial forces—the New Orleans musical fraternity and the Chicago jazz gang—and the sturdy music that resulted from this meeting. While ingrown cliques will always be with us, it is no longer possible for one self-contained group of jazzmen to find direct inspiration in the work of another self-contained group imported nearly intact from a different part of the country. Today the patterns of change and influence are national and international in scope, a situation that was only forecast before the twenties with the first traveling jazzmen and the first commercial jazz recording. It is a loss, in a way, because the Chicagoans accomplished what they did by playing and listening together. The weak members were not rejected but encouraged, prodded, and helped along until they could stand alone. On the other hand, this very feature of the Chicago attitude may be a clue to the vein of melancholy that runs beneath the blithe music of these men. They were a kind of adolescent gang, and some of them never grew up. There is, after all, something fundamentally sad about an adolescent who is pushing 60. 

As the swing era, during which each of the Chicagoans reached the apex of his creative powers, came to a close, members of the old gang either withdrew from the competitive arena or huddled together for protection again—this time against the shift to modern jazz. Goodman, Krupa, and Freeman explored the new music but failed to become part of it. Only Tough could have done that, and he drank himself into the grave without finishing the job.

So the music of the Chicagoans came and went. Their records tell us how good it was — while it lasted.”

Here’s more from Richard Hadlock’s piece about The Chicagoans.

“THE CHICAGO STOBY is, if one wants it to be, part of the nation's romantic image of the Roaring Twenties, complete with hip flasks, illicit gin mills, Midwestern provincialism, dynamic migration patterns, organized crime, and some new rumblings of social protest. Though these aspects of the decade may lurk in the background, the history of the Chicagoans has to do with their music and how it grew, and that's quite a story by itself.

There were many Chicagoans in jazz, but they are usually discussed as a group, for most of Chicago's young jazzmen of the twenties who became important were part of a loosely knit single gang, the core of which was an almost fanatic, exclusive inner clique. These men listened, practiced, worked, recorded, drank, and finally found fame together. They regarded themselves as a kind of musical family devoted to the task of nurturing in each member a valid form of personal expression, a family bound together by an overwhelming mutual desire to make music just as exciting, but not the same as, that which the men from New Orleans played. Some were highly successful, a few gave up the quest, and others were simply not endowed with enough talent; but their average level of achievement was high and had an influence on later jazz developments. [Emphasis mine].

Any man with a horn who stopped in Chicago for a while was eligible to be a "Chicagoan" if he listened to the right bands and really believed in jazz as a way of life. There was a nomadic, one-handed trumpeter from New Orleans called Wingy Mannone and there was a well-trained clarinetist from Arkansas named Volly de Faut. A good clarinet player from Iowa whose name was Rod Cless became accepted as a "Chicagoan," as did a first-rate pianist from Missouri named Jess Stacy. Even after the hard-core Chicagoans had moved to New York in the late twenties, they went on recruiting new members for the club, some of whom had seldom been west of New Jersey.

The first wave of well-known Chicago jazzmen included drummer Earl Wiley, who worked the Mississippi riverboats and traveled to New Orleans prior to 1920, and Ben Pollack, a highly skilled drummer who landed a job with a direct-from-the-source band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and in turn became an important influence on Chicagoans only slightly younger than Pollack himself. Mezz Mezzrow, a kind of combination jazz preacher, clarinetist, and, later, marijuana dealer, was another enthusiast-musician who discovered New Orleans jazz in Chicago through performers like Tony Jackson, Freddie Keppard, and Sidney Bechet during and just after World War I.

By 1920, a 14-year-old boy named Muggsy Spanier was permitted to sit in the shadows of the Dreamland Cafe's balcony to listen to cornetist King Oliver's New Orleans band. When Spanier began to play creditable cornet a little later, it was Oliver's forceful, bluesy style he went after and came close to capturing. About that time, cornetist Paul Mares came up from New Orleans and put together the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, who played the same sort of music—with perhaps less drive than the Oliver band —and the new group became another model for the Chicagoans.

Other kids were finding out about the South Side dance halls and coming to listen. Those who couldn't arrange to get in free usually sat outside, catching whatever sounds drifted out the windows and doors. By 1923, when Louis Armstrong was appearing with Oliver at the Lincoln Gardens, there would be fifty or more young musicians down front trying to remember every note the two cornetists played. Among the most avid listeners were young apprentice jazzmen like drummers Dave Tough and George Wettling, who were there mostly to learn about Baby Dodds. Every college musician in the area knew about and visited the places where the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and King Oliver played, and commercial band leaders frequently dropped in looking for musical novelties to add to their books.

Some students at Chicago's Austin High School, most of whom had had some musical training, heard a few recordings by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in 1922 and decided to form a band around that style. They had listened to the latest records by popular musicians like Isham Jones, Paul Whiteman, Paul Biese, Ted Lewis, and even the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, but it was the Rhythm Kings who finally struck the right chord. Their activities centered around the home of Jimmy and Dick McPartland, who wound up taking over the cornet and banjo functions in the new band. Frank Teschemacher had played a little violin, so he eventually became the clarinetist. Bud Freeman, who had attended Austin briefly and quit to take a job at Sears Roebuck, obtained a tenor saxophone after an early bout with the C-melody saxophone (an instrument now passé). Other friends filled out the initial unit. Drummer Dave Tough, from the well-heeled Oak Park district, joined the gang and eventually brought a trombonist, Floyd O'Brien, into the fold.

Other teen-age players were popping up around Chicago. Pianist Joe Sullivan, who at 17 had had twelve years of classical keyboard training, began to play popular music in a nonunion gangster hangout in the bohemian sector. It turned out that the club had also hired an authentic jug band from the South, and the group was for Sullivan—whose listening experience had been confined to theater pianists and records by Art Hickman or Paul Whiteman—a first contact with something resembling honest jazz.

In 1922, a precocious West Side boy of 13 named Benny Goodman was playing clarinet remarkably well after only three years of instruction. His sources of inspiration were shifting and improving rapidly, from Ted Lewis and Bailey's Lucky Seven (a New York recording band) to Leon Roppolo (clarinetist with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings) and Jimmy Noone. Goodman studied alongside Buster Bailey (an experienced Memphis jazzman seven years Benny's senior) under Franz Schoepp, an outstanding teacher and symphony man who at one time counted Jimmy Noone among his pupils.

The inner circle at Austin High, including bassist Jim Lannigan (then courting the McPartland boys' sister, Ethel) and pianist Dave North, were rehearsing tirelessly to achieve the sound of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. The McPartlands, as sons of a music teacher, had a slight advantage and led the way. Teschemaeher was also learning fast, but Freeman, without earlier musical training, lagged behind. The Austinites, whose ages in 1923 ranged from 16 (Jimmy McPartland) to 21 (Lannigan), were something less than men of the world at this point. "We were too young to get into Friar's Inn, so the only way we could hear the Rhythm Kings was to go down and stand in the doorway and listen," McPartland recalled. "It was great when someone opened the door and we could hear it louder." Dave Tough knew his way around Chicago, however, and had come in contact with other young musicians who were finding their way into the New Orleans style—clarinetist Don Murray, cornetist Bix Bciderbecke, pianist Dick Voynow, and drummer Bob Conselman were a few. More resourceful than his Austin pals, Dave imposed upon slightly older musicians like Volly de Faut to accompany him to South Side clubs where he could hear Baby Dodds, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong. Through Tough, the Austin crowd began to open its ears to more than just the sounds of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

1923 and 1924 were eventful years for the Chicagoans. A new band grew out of a series of Northwestern University fraternity jobs involving clarinetist Jimmy Hartwell, drummer Vic Moore, and saxophonist George Johnson. Pianist Voynow and cornetist Beiderbecke brought a touch of class to the group, and they called themselves the Wolverines. They decided to stick together, made some records, and the sound of Bciderbecke's cornet became a new major influence on the kids back in Chicago. At the same time, King Oliver's band began turning out recordings on which Louis Armstrong and clarinetist Johnny Dodds could be heard. 

The McPartland-Freeman-Teschemacher-Tough axis was making fine progress as the Blue Friars (named for the Friar's Inn, of course) and began to be talked about by musicians on the South Side. Professionals called them the "wild West Side mob," but alert listeners could tell they were coming into a worthwhile style of their own. Teschemacher was still playing violin a lot of the time, especially when talented guests like Benny Goodman sat in.

Goodman played off and on with the "wild West Side mob" at high-school gym dances or in sessions at public park recreation areas and worked an amusement park job in the summer of 1923 with Jimmy McPartland, but he found that he could make better money with real professional bands. He joined the union the same day that Dave Tough did.

"I got along better than they [the Austin gang] did because I could read right from the start and played correct clarinet," Benny remembered some years later. That word "correct" is the key to a philosophical dichotomy that set Goodman and some others on a course quite different from that traveled by the West Side mob, although their final musical goals were not entirely dissimilar. Goodman, like his fellow music student Buster Bailey, was primarily a clarinetist, and jazz was his favorite mode of expression. For Teschemacher and Freeman, and to a lesser extent their comrades, becoming a jazzman was the important point, and the instrument was simply whatever chance had dropped into their hands. It was a distinction that became more subtle as the performers improved, but it was still there. Curiously enough, Goodman's attitude toward his instrument was much closer to the outlook of the New Orleans clarinetists and several older Chicagoans who came under their direct influence than it was to the West Side gang's musical position. Chicagoans Darnell Howard and Omer Simeon, for example, picked up the clear-toned, flowing New Orleans style, without leaving home, from Lorenzo Tio, Jr. (Simeon was born in New Orleans but began playing in Chicago.) The Tios (junior and senior) had already taught New Orleans reedmen Jimmy Noone, Albert Nicholas, and Barney Bigard. Most of these Tio-trained musicians later regarded Goodman as, at the very least, their equal. It was a judgment not so readily bestowed upon Teschemacher and others in the young Chicago gang.

Chicagoans like Teschemacher, Freeman, Tough, Mezzrow, and Sullivan were probably the first self-conscious students of jazz to appear. For them, the music was not merely a functional aspect of the entertainment world but a challenging art that required deep thought and study. They tried to weed out what they regarded as trivial or tasteless (the side of King Oliver that involved imitations of a baby crying or Clifford King's barnyard squeals on the clarinet) and to listen instead to the musicians who were totally involved with the art of jazz (Beiderbecke, Earl Hines, Armstrong).

About this time Tough was also participating in poetry and jazz sessions at a Chicago bohemian hangout called the Green Mask. Among his intellectual friends there were poets Kenneth Rexroth, Langston Hughes, and Maxwell Bodenheim, as well as an odd assortment of musicians, entertainers (comic Joe Frisco was one), and artists. A few other Chicago jazzmen may have shared Tough's enthusiasm for such gathering places, but most of the Austin High gang was not concerned with much of anything outside music in those early days of discovery.

It was about 1924 when 20-year-old pianist Jess Stacy hit town, after a long apprenticeship on Mississippi riverboats with Tony Catalano's band. Stacy had come under the New Orleans jazz spell in much the same way the Chicagoans had, except that Jess worked more from first hand experience than from recordings. He had spent the winter months in ballrooms along the river, such as the Coliseum in Davenport, where he was charmed by the playing of Bix Beiderbecke. He had heard Louis Armstrong and Baby Dodds on the boats when they put in at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where Jess was born. Like Bud Freeman., he had started out wanting to play drums; and like Joe Sullivan, he had put in long years of formal study and classical training. Like Muggsy Spanier, but unlike the West Side mob, Stacy was in 1924 a thoroughgoing professional. As soon as he arrived in Chicago, he belonged.

Chicago was a vital music center in the mid-twenties, and almost any musician who could carry a tune and go through the motions of "getting hot" found work of some kind. For the young players, nearby summer resorts were a favorite outlet. Youthful patrons, informal surroundings, and an impudent spirit that came from constant defiance of Prohibition Laws added up to a good setting for a troupe of iconoclastic kid musicians. The Blue Friars found work at Lost Lake. Benny Goodman picked up odds and ends, including a lake-boat job with Bix Beiderbecke, an engagement at Waverly Beach in Neenah, Wisconsin, and other casuals in and out of Chicago. Joe Sullivan worked the lakes in Wisconsin or Indiana, sometimes with drummer George Wettling, and was beginning to move away from popular novelty tunes (Get Out and Get Under, San, Abba Dabba Honeymoon., etc.) toward jazz-based material (Panama, Farewell Blues, etc.).

By 1924, most of the Chicagoans had left school (the law then allowed one to quit at 14) and had begun playing music in earnest. Goodman, whom Tough had talked into attending Lewis Institute because classes began at 11:30 A.M., dropped out to take a steady job at Guyon's Paradise with Jules Herbeveaux. Joe Sullivan had played a few dances at Lewis Institute with some of the boys, but continued at Lakeview High School, finally leaving after his second year there. The Blue Friars couldn't have cared less about school, for they were beginning to attract attention as an organized unit.

There were several important people to know in Chicago at that time. They were the men who operated booking offices and found work for individual musicians or entire bands. Charlie "Murphy" Podolsky was a prominent figure in this field, through whom the Chicagoans obtained many of their jobs and thereby met men of similar musical interests from other quarters of the area.

In late 1924, Jimmy McPartland was called to replace Bix Beiderbecke with the Wolverines in New York, leaving the Blue Friars leaderless and somewhat adrift for about a year. They spent much of that time listening, theorizing, discussing, and arguing about jazz. Tough, the youngest, was the intellectual in the gang and was constantly turning over, questioning, and evaluating everything he heard. Teschemacher had improved so rapidly that the others often looked to him as their musical leader and guide. Freeman was still attempting to catch up to the rest, hampered by a lack of fundamental training and the inherent problems of trying to produce an acceptable tone on a saxophone and mouthpiece manufactured before instrument companies learned how to make them very well. Eddie Condon, a one-eared banjo player and promoter who ran into the gang about this time, remembers that Freeman's horn appeared green with corrosion and sounded the way it looked.

A South Side youngster of about 15 heard the gang in a movie theater job about this time. He was Gene Krupa, an intense fellow who had taken up saxophone briefly but had finally settled on drums, and he admired Dave Tough's Dodds-inspired playing. Krupa had worked summer jobs, too, including one at Wisconsin Beach with a group called the Frivolians. In 1924, he was preparing for priesthood, but it never worked out. Like most of the Chicagoans, he became utterly and hopelessly fascinated with playing jazz and with the endless struggle to master his chosen instrument.

Discounting records by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (a hybrid group of Chicagoans and New Orleanians), the first Chicagoan jazz recordings of any consequence were turned out by the Bucktown Five in early 1924. Muggsy Spanier sparked this session with a jumping, biting cornet lead that was right out of Oliver; Volly de Faut, who followed Roppolo on clarinet with the Rhythm Kings and later recorded with Jelly Roll Morton, demonstrated why his graceful, flowing style was highly respected in the Midwest. Spanier went beyond Paul Mares (also an Oliver man) to demonstrate that the lead voice, as he felt it, should be neither behind nor in front of the beat but right on top of it. The result was electric, something like running downhill and trying to keep up with yourself. The Spanier thrust, although seldom enhanced by a flow of original ideas, was a significant factor in the formation of an independent Chicago style.

The Bucktown Five records were, however, all but eclipsed within a couple of months by a brace of Wolverine recordings, featuring the brilliant ensemble and solo work of Bix Beiderbecke. The Wolverines were, of course, a going band rather than a studio pickup group, and their records showed it. Everywhere musicians began copying Bix's solos and the original riffs of the group. It was, in fact, McPartland's note-for-note knowledge of these records that landed him the job as Beiderbecke's replacement later in 1924. Cornetist Bill Davison, who recorded with the Chnbb-Stein-berg orchestra in the same year, also borrowed much from Bix.

As the Wolverines struggled along after Beiderbecke's departure, McPartland gradually replaced each member with one of his old Austin friends. Now reunited, the gang found work through booking agent Husk O'Hare, who even put them on radio station WHT as O'Hare's Red Dragons.

A couple of new reed players appeared on the scene in this 1925-1926 period. One was Rod Cless, whom the gang met on a job in Des Moines, Iowa. The other was Pee Wee Russell, an experienced clarinetist-saxophonist whose musical views have caused many to regard him a front-rank Chicagoan, although he was not noticed much in jazz circles in the city before 1925 and never did put in a lot of time there.

Russell was brought up in Oklahoma, heard and liked clarinetist Larry Shields on Original Dixieland Jazz Band records, and was attracted to in-person performances by New Orleans clarinetist "Yellow" Nunez. He studied violin, piano, and drums before getting to the clarinet. Russell played on an Arkansas River pleasure boat and with the band at Western Military Academy in 1920 and 1921 at Alton, Illinois, not far from the St. Louis area where he was born. For a while, Pee Wee attended the University of Missouri, but he spent most of his time listening to jazz on the Mississippi boats, admiring the band of Charlie Creath (a good cornetist with a haunting, aged-in-wood tone), and hanging out with the small but eager jazz gang around St. Louis. There he met New Orleans players like Armstrong, Baby Dodds, bassist Pops Foster, and drummer Zutty Singleton. Saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, playing with Ted Jansen's band, was already a local hero, and youngsters like trombonists Vernon Brown and Sonny Lee, bassist Bob Casey, and clarinetist Artie Gruner were to St. Louis what the Austin gang and their friends were to Chicago. From time to time, wandering jazzmen like Wingy Mannone and Fud Livingston turned up in St. Louis, too.

Russell, unlike the Chicagoans, was a loner. By 1922, he was knocking about the Southwestern states, playing jobs in Phoenix, Arizona, El Paso, Texas, across the line in Mexico, and in Houston, where there was a stint with the celebrated band of pianist Peck Kelley, which, in 1924, included clarinetist Leon Roppolo and trombonist Jack Teagarden. Russell returned to St. Louis and Herb Berger's band. Later, in 1926, the clarinetist played in another celebrated but unrecorded group, a Jean Goldkette unit fronted by Trumbauer at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis.

It is said that Pee Wee was so enthused about working alongside Bix Beiderbecke in this band that he refused to be fired and continued to play without pay after receiving his notice. He also tried, without success, to get Peck Kelley into the St. Louis orchestra. Russell absorbed all he heard and played as he pleased, working out the details of style by himself rather than through the group therapy approach favored by the Austin boys. Happily, both methods worked out rather well for the men involved.

To be continued.