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“Revolutionaries from the Suburbs
Eddie Condon had it just about right. By the mid-'20s, he wrote, there was so much hot music in Chicago that a visitor to the corner of 35th and Calumet, on the South Side, "could hold an instrument in the middle of the street and the air would play it."
That celebrated intersection was the site of the Sunset Cafe, where in early 1927 Louis Armstrong supplanted Carroll Dickerson as leader of the house band. But it was also something of a focal point for South Side black and white nightlife. Almost directly across 35th was the Plantation Cafe, where King Oliver led his Dixie Syncopators from 1925 to 1927 (and which, as Al Tierney's Grand Auto Inn, had featured white New Orleans cornetist Ray Lopez in 1916).
Above that, upstairs, was the Apex Club, formerly the Nest, where clarinetist ]immie Noone and alto saxophonist Joe "Doc" Poston serenaded after-hours customers with New Orleans-style clarinet-and-alto-sax duets. Within a radius of only a few blocks, between 1924 and 1927, it was possible to hear brothers Johnny and "Baby" Dodds, Albert Wynn, Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, Natty Dominique, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, and dozens of others.
"The New Orleans musicians had everything wrapped up" was the way trumpeter Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham remembered it. Cheatham, from Nashville, hadn't been in town long when he discovered that the Crescent City men were a tight and exclusive clique, and breaking in was going to take time and patience. Rather than hang around, he moved on; but while there he made the rounds, hearing everything he could, listening to Oliver ("He had a nice, quiet tone, and he knew what he was doing every minute"), Freddie Keppard ("very loud... reminded me of a military trumpeter playing jazz"), and a white favorite, Louis Panico ("what a wonderful trumpet player he was!").
Musicians from other cities were arriving all the time, some just passing through, others to stay. Pittsburgh-born pianist Earl Mines, tired of touring vaudeville houses, was one of the few non-southerners who found immediate acceptance with the New Orleans clique. He was with Louis at the Sunset, then crossed 35th to work with Noone and Poston at the Apex.
When black bandleader-columnist Dave Peyton, writing that September (1923) in the Chicago Defender, proclaimed that there were ten thousand jazz bands in the United States, his clear implication was that a good many of them could be found right there in the lakeside city, particularly south of the Loop. By 1923 records and radio were also bringing the newly inflected dance music into more and more homes. Inevitably its energy, its unrestrained and rebellious spirit, caught the imaginations of the young.
The message landed with striking potency in middle-class homes; parents, brought up according to strict Victorian (or church-dictated) values, hated it. Educators (especially music teachers) and clergymen had little good to say about it, particularly in that it seemed one more factor aggravating the more-or-less chronic problem of school truancy. Much of it, moreover, still bore the tang of the forbidden, of smoke-filled ballrooms, of drugs, booze, and illicit sex—all the supposed, exotic mysteries popularly demonized by the last generation to come of age in a Victorian world.
Among youngsters drawn to the music were more than a few who decided early that just listening wasn't enough: they'd have to play it as well. "Their greedy ears," clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow has written,
“drank in the music like suction pumps. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn't down. And jazz, the real jazz, was its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music.”
Even allowing for the excesses of Mezzrow's prose (or that of his "ghost," novelist Bernard Wolfe), it's obvious that many white Chicago teenagers were ready to burst the confines of their well-ordered lives, and that hot jazz and its ambiance seemed purpose-built to help them do it.
Their parents, more often than not, had come here as immigrants, some from other, often economically depressed, parts of the United States, many from even worse conditions abroad. Chicago was America, the dream of something, however small, for everyone. Just being here, in this sprawling, unruly, burgeoning, ever-surprising metropolis was cause for rejoicing, and they attempted to bring their kids up in a comfort and security they themselves, few of them, had ever enjoyed. But kids, as kids will, look for their own ways: often, eternally, they find their parents' ways overbearing, confining, stifling. In a word, not their own. And Chicago in the 1920s was no exception.
Even so, little of Mezzrow's febrile compulsiveness seems to have been in the air the day in late 1922 when a stack of Friars Society Orchestra Gennett records materialized beside the wind-up Victrola at the Spoon and Straw, an ice cream parlor in the well-manicured West Side suburb of Austin. Jimmy and Richard McPartland, stopping in for an after-school soda, found them first; soon they were joined by their pals Jim Lanigan, the brothers Lawrence and Arny Freeman, and shy, bespectacled Frank Teschemacher. All between fourteen and sixteen, they'd been drawn together by an enthusiasm for music, dance bands in particular.
Jimmy, curious, picked up the top record—in later years he would remember it as "Farewell Blues"—placed it carefully on the turntable, cranked up the machine, and dropped the heavy tone arm into place.
"Boy, when we heard that—I'll tell you we went out of our minds," he said, "Everybody flipped. It was wonderful. So we put the others on—'Tiger Rag,' 'Discontented,' 'Bugle Call' and such titles. We stayed there from about three in the afternoon until about eight at night, just listening to those records one after another, over and over again. Right then and there we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys."
... the Friars Society record stimulated their interest, prompting the McPartland brothers to risk their father's wrath and ask for instruments—and to try to persuade Lou Freeman, who made a rather less-than-handsome living as a garment-cutter, to invest in a C-melody saxophone for his son Lawrence, even then nicknamed "Bud." This squares well with Bud Freeman's own account of going every Sunday as a fourteen-year-old to the Senate Theatre, a movie palace that featured a pit orchestra led by Paul Biese, who played a diamond-studded saxophone.
One way or another, and even allowing for a certain amount of embroidery, the excitement of discovery comes through. These Gennett records by an eight-piece white band, half the musicians from New Orleans and the other half from the Midwest, didn't sound like what was being dispensed as "hot" music by Whiteman, Jones, and the other dance bands. These were loose-limbed and buoyant, mixing flowing solos with tightly knit, propulsive ensembles. It sounded free, it sounded worldly, intensely personal; for a bunch of teenagers huddled breathlessly around a Victrola, it was revelation and rebellion”
- Richard Sudhalter, Chapter 9 The Hot Lineage: Chicago and Its Descendants, in Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 [1999]
“These Chicagoans had created a fine, workable method of small-band collective improvisation that accommodated the newer trends in jazz (solo virtuosity, a steady four-to-the-bar swing, harmonic explorations beyond simple triads with added sevenths, an enlarged set of responsibilities for the drummer) while retaining some of the good things in New Orleans jazz (the blues, a "vocal" approach to personal expression, unified collective spirit, a driving on-the-beat momentum, intelligent use of understatement). For some Chicagoans, this formula for small-band swing, with the addition of a relaxed ballad style, served well for a lifetime; others continued to search elsewhere for musical fulfillment.”
- Richard Hadlock, Jazz Masters of the 20s
Here’s the conclusion of Dick Hadlock’s chapter on The Chicagoans.
“The summer of 1928 found many of the Chicagoans in New York. McKenzie, a natural salesman (he had also arranged for Jimmy Noone to record his Apex band in Chicago the previous month), now went to work lining up New York dates for his brood. There was supposed to be an attractive job with Bee Palmer, but for various reasons it fell through. The gang spent a hard summer in a strange city. They found a brief moment of glory backing a dance team at the Palace, but it vanished when a Variety reviewer described the gang as the "poorest 7-piece orchestra on earth," even though a writer for The Billboard suggested that the band was "commendable."
Teschemacher found a temporary job substituting for Gil Rodin in Ben Pollack's sax section for about three weeks. Then the Pollack band itself was laid off, leaving McPartland with the curious distinction of being out of work with two bands at the same time. Goodman had no trouble picking up dates with commercial bands like those of Sam Lanin, Meyer Davis, and Nat Shilkret, but the other Chicagoans had to share a single hotel room and tighten their belts. A quartet recording date with Teschemacher, Condon, Sullivan, and Krupa helped pay the hotel bill. The titles were Indiana and Oh, Baby, again in the key of F. Tesch is heard on alto and clarinet, flailing his way through the two sides without accomplishing very much. His stiff reeds and raucous, forced tone prove unsuitable in this case. Krupa's drumming is overbearing and over-recorded, for he whacks energetically on his tom-toms, crash cymbal, and bass drum as though a full band were present. Sullivan, however, reveals steady improvement and a sensitive touch that could not be heard on previous records.
Freeman, who had turned out a couple of commercial records with Pollack in April, became disillusioned and sailed away to join Dave Tough in France. By September, Bud was back in Chicago again. Tough, too, had not profited very much by his stay in Europe. Most of the work there was decidedly non jazz in character, and by 1928 Dave was working in ships' bands on the Atlantic. He left one disciple in Paris, though, in Maurice Chaillon, who replaced Tough in Danny Polo's band. Another French musician who had heard and been influenced by the McKenzie-Condon recordings was trumpeter Philippe Brun. It was, nevertheless, a poor environment for a young drummer of Tough's ability; despite the flow of good legal liquor and the "cultured" environment, he headed for home in early 1929. (Mezzrow, on his way to see Tough in Paris at that time, passed the drummer going the other way in mid-ocean.)
New Yorkers Red Nichols and Miff Mole were interested in the Chicagoans, especially Krupa and Sullivan, and a recording session was set up that would combine their talents. McKenzie had been talking up Jimmy Noone and Chicago music to Nichols, who seemed ready to give it a try, as long as the date was in Mole's name anyway. The initial attempt was Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble and One Step to Heaven, and the result was one of Nichols' best records. With no bassist, Sullivan and Krupa set the pace. Tesch, as usual, plays flimsy ensemble parts, challenging rather than complementing the cornet lead, but there can be little doubt that he and the other Chicagoans lit a fire under Nichols and Mole. Nichols was a top jazzman in New York, and this recording amounted to a musical test for the newcomers. They outdid themselves and qualified with room to spare.
Krupa, Sullivan, and Goodman, along with a new friend, Jack Teagarden, spent much time in Harlem listening to pianists and big bands. Earl Hines had suggested they look up Fats Waller, who was but one of several outstanding pianists in New York. The music they heard in Harlem deeply affected the Chicagoans, particularly Sullivan, who absorbed the buoyant, strutting Harlem piano approach (the eighth-note left-hand "stride" technique fit nicely into the Chicagoan "shuffle" idea) and combined it with his blues-cum-Hines style. The smooth, even swing and the sophisticated arrangements of the New Yorkers were a logical next step for the still rough Chicago gang, and they began the learning process all over again. Most of them were, after all, in their early twenties and still quite flexible,
Goodman, who was finally finding some security with Pollack at the Park Central Hotel, was especially impressed by Duke Ellington's band and in the summer of 1928 recorded a "Harlem" arrangement, complete with Bubber Miley effects by McPartland, of Jelly Roll Morton's Jungles Blues. At the same session, Benny made a rare appearance on alto saxophone, playing a charming Beiderbecke-like solo on Blue, and turned out a thoroughly Chicago-style performance with Room 1411, the last enhanced by Pollack's skillful drumming. Pollack was one of the first drummers to play four beats to the measure on the bass drum and was actually in a class with Tough and Krupa at this time, but he was too busy as a bandleader to participate in many all-jazz recordings.
The Chicago style had been all but swallowed up in the mainstream of jazz developments by late 1928, and Bud Freeman, back in the hometown, demonstrated some of the new things he had learned in New York on a single interesting Okeh record. Krupa, who had also returned to Chicago because his mother was ill, joined Freeman, Floyd O'Brien, clarinetist Bud Jacobson, and several other friends, mostly from the band working at the Golden Pumpkin with Thelma Terry, to make Craze-ology and Can't Help Lovin That Man in December. Freeman's tone was by now lighter and more graceful, his fingers fast and sure, and his conception quite mature for a saxophonist of 22. Craze-ology reflects his New York impressions, for there are "jungle" effects, a kind of big-band arrangement (even to a saxophone lead) scaled down to three horns and rhythm, and evidence of an interest on Freeman's part in the kind of tour de force saxophone playing that Jimmy Dorsey, Coleman Hawkins, and Frankie Trumbauer had popularized in the East.
Krupa, too, had changed while in New York. He now played crisp rim shots in place of Dodds-like tom-tom thumps, used sudden explosions more sparingly, and concentrated on achieving a more even flow of 4/4 rhythm. About this time, too, he became interested in the work of Cuba Austin, a drummer with McKinney's Cotton Pickers.
Can’t Help Lovin” That Man is a ballad performance, highlighted by a good straight vocal by Red McKenzie (who later became a direct influence on a number of singers, including Woody Herman) and a Freeman solo that is almost pure Beiderbecke-Pee Wee Russell and represents Bud's first of many recorded solos in that vein. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that the final ensemble flare, which formerly would have been Krupa's signal to open fire with tom-toms, found him accenting with afterbeat cymbals but otherwise maintaining a regular pulse.
By 1929, most of the gang was in New York to stay, except for Teschemacher, Stacy, and Wettling, who continued to play for bands like Louis Panico's and Gene Fosdick's in Chicago. Spanier went with Ray Miller and Ted Lewis, and Goodman was still with Pollack, but New York had become home base. Max Kaminsky, a Boston trumpeter who had worked both Beiderbecke and Armstrong into his style, settled in Manhattan, as did Pee Wee Russell, who kept alive playing for bandleaders like Paul Specht and Cass Hagen. Condon, Sullivan, Mezzrow, and Teagarden spent much time listening to bands and forming new friendships in Harlem. In the fall of 1928, they had recorded Makin’ Friends, a fine blues performance featuring Teagarden that again dramatized the new spirit of the Chicagoans. Most of them were becoming firmly committed to the even rhythm of Ellington, Henderson, and other good New York bands. The effect this rhythmic change — four uncluttered, evenly accented pulses to each measure — had on the soloists was of considerable importance. The men had grown up when two-to-the-bar was in general use but was interpreted as four by horn players. It amounted to laying out eight beats in a measure by this new system. Creative use of syncopation and daring double-time phrases were now easier to bring about, and more involved harmonies came naturally as rhythm men broke the monotony of hitting the same chord four times in succession by thinking of new inversions, alterations, and passing chords. The 4/4 revolution — or rather evolution, for the Chicagoans and many others had been leading up to it for a long time — was the first giant step toward the higher creative level at which average jazzmen of the thirties performed.
Dave Tough was back in New York in 1929, but his slight frame and intemperate outlook had led him to illness and irresponsibility. He recorded some fair sides with Red Nichols and even toured in an all-Chicago band fronted by the popular cornetist, but he was not his old self. He eventually returned to Chicago and worked on and off there for the next several years, sometimes substituting for Wettling in Joe Kayser's band and even, at one point, playing for the Capitol Dancing School. Freeman, who was in and out of Chicago during the severest Depression years, remained close to Tough and worked with him whenever possible in places like Carlin's Ballroom.
One group of 1929 Nichols recordings deserves attention, for they include Sullivan, Freeman, Tough, Russell, and Teagarden (a kind of honorary member of the Chicago gang, because he, like Russell, fit comfortably into their musical philosophy). The tunes selected were That Da Da Strain, Basin Street Blues, and a blues called Last Cent. It was a top-heavy session with four horns and two rhythm, the more so because Teagarden, Russell, and Freeman behaved in typical Chicago fashion, ignoring the traditional functions of their instruments in a Dixieland setting, to improvise around the melody. The recordings do show the participants to be close to musical maturity, however, and, for better or worse, typecast in the roles each had to live down over the years — Russell the poignant clown, Teagarden the blues expert, Freeman the bumptious buffoon, Sullivan the muscular stomper, and Tough the forgotten drummer. It was a raw, undisciplined session, perhaps partly in open defiance of the meticulous Nichols, who always remained an opportunistic outsider to the Chicagoans.
Sullivan had by this time adopted the Harlem left-hand "stride" device and was developing into one of the best pianists in New York. With Teagarden, Mezzrow, Condon, and a couple of men from Charlie Johnson's big band, he had made a pair of excellent recordings in early 1929, and there was one very special date at about the same time that featured Joe, Teagarden, Eddie Lang, and Louis Armstrong—no doubt a satisfying experience for a young man like Sullivan, who had looked to Armstrong for inspiration from an early age.
Goodman, too, was in demand for recordings, jazz and otherwise. Leaving Pollack in the fall of 1929, Benny quickly became part of the New York jazz-studio-recording-free-lance gang that included the Dorseys, Eddie Lang, Miff Mole, and Glenn Miller. These men, who usually gathered at a speakeasy on West Fifty-third Street called Plunketts', fared unusually well during the Depression years of 1930 to 1932 because they could read well and perform according to instruction without delay or fuss. Goodman appeared on countless recordings during this period, but his best jazz solos were those he played on several Red Nichols dates. One of these, China Boy, recorded in 1930, is of special interest because it also features Sullivan and Krupa, and it is the same tune that helped bring them into prominence. Goodman, at 21, was now fully formed as a leading jazzman and was becoming a major influence on other clarinetists. His rhythmic figurations, impressive technical equipment, and unfailing ear earned for him respect from all quarters — studio men, dance-band musicians, the jazz clique, and "legitimate" players alike.
Sullivan and Krupa were boiling with enthusiasm for this Nichols date, and they demonstrated that their McKenzie-Condon phase nearly three years earlier was but a rough draft of what they were to become, Krupa, who had made his first recordings with Goodman for Nichols more than a year before (Indiana and Dinah), seemed to stimulate Benny. It was these and later Nichols sessions that led to the profitable association of Krupa and Goodman in the mid-thirties.
For all the brilliance of Goodman, Sullivan, and Krupa, it was Teagarden who stole the show on China Boy and its companion selections, Peg o' My Heart, and The Sheik of Araby. Curiously, on Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble, an old Chicago favorite, Krupa's memories of Mezzrow's sermons seemed to be revived, as he plays in a "busy" style somewhat in the manner of Baby Dodds.
For Teschemacher and Stacy, there was fairly steady work in Chicago, but the exciting days of discovery in that city were pretty much over. Most of Tesch's remaining recordings, made in a fourteen-month period from late 1928 to early 1930, found him in the company of second-rate jazzmen, except for his final date with Bud Freeman and George Wettling. (The clarinetist's last New York recording in 1928 was with the Dorsey brothers and Don Redman, on which Teschemacher played a brief, awkward tenor saxophone solo.) In December, 1928, Tesch recorded Trying to Stop My Crying with Wingy Mannone and Art Hodes (a talented blues-oriented Chicago pianist), but the chief point of interest is a tag lifted from Stravinsky's Petrouchka that Spanier and Teschemacher had used from time to time.
An Elmer Schoebel recording of October, 1929, reveals Tesch and a group of Chicago friends completely caught up in Beiderbecke, even selecting tunes from the old Wolverine book — Copenhagen and Prince of Wails. By this time, Tesch had cleaned up his tone, improved his intonation and control, and settled into a very attractive style that held to a middle road somewhere between Goodman and Russell. Considering this and the notable improvement Teschemacher displayed a few weeks later in a recording session with a Chicago group called the Cellar Boys, particularly on the stirring Wailin’ Blues, it might be reasonable to assume that the clarinetist could have developed into a major jazzman of the thirties, alongside Goodman and Russell. As it turned out, this was his last appearance in a recording studio. Teschemacher's final two years, during which he even took up violin again, were spent mostly in commercial bands like those of Jan Garber and Benny Meroff, although there was a brief job with Jess Stacy in a group named Stacy's Aces. The 26-year-old ex-Austinite was killed in an automobile accident in 1932.
Stacy kept playing around Chicago during the lean years, along with those Chicagoans who had decided not to try New York yet. Freeman and Sullivan turned up on Chicago jobs occasionally, but the hometown boys were now mostly second stringers or younger men like Bob Zurke and the Marsala brothers (trumpeter Marty and clarinetist Joe). Jess worked with Paul Mares's jazz band at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1934 and at a club called the Subway in 1935, at which point Goodman sent for him to join his big band.
Dave Tough was around, too, sitting in and picking up occasional work in places like the Liberty Inn, but his drinking problem had become quite serious. Finally, he made an all-out effort to redeem himself and, after a fling in Ray Noble's American band, secured a steady job with Tommy Dorsey in late 1935.
Krupa spent the anti jazz years of the Depression in a Red Nichols theater band with Goodman and Sullivan as well as in the orchestras of Irving Aaronson, Russ Columbo (again with Goodman and Sullivan, for Benny put the band together), Mal Hallett, and Buddy Rogers. It was no surprise when Goodman asked Krupa to join his new big band in early 1935.
Sullivan passed the years of the early thirties with a succession of odd jobs, from an engagement at New York's Stork Club with Red McKenzie's revised Mound City Blue Blowers to a road trip with Roger Wolfe Kahn. In 1933, he opened as a single on New York's Fifty-second Street at the Onyx Club, a kind of pioneer establishment that led to a mushrooming of many more jazz saloons along the same strip after the repeal of Prohibition. It was at this time that Sullivan first recorded two of his most famous solos, Gin Mill Blues and Little Rock Getaway (a theme going back to a piece from King Oliver's book called Buddy's Habit). After working with Bing Crosby and serving on staff at KHJ in Los Angeles, Sullivan joined Bob Crosby's big band in 1936.
Bud Freeman ended the on-again, off-again years of the early thirties (the Dorsey Brothers, Zez Confrey, Joe Venuti, Roger Wolfe Kahn) by joining Ray Noble's American band in 1935. Dave Tough was there, too, and, indeed, the two Chicagoans seemed virtually inseparable throughout the decade. Shortly after Tough joined Tommy Dorsey, Freeman became a member of the band's sax section. When Tough went with Benny Goodman in 1938, Freeman followed. One month after Goodman fired Tough for missing a Waldorf Astoria opening, Freeman left, too.
Tough's recordings with Dorsey's band indicate the powerful influence this little man held over his fellow musicians. His drumming, now a kind of mixture of advanced Baby Dodds and contemporary Chick Webb, determined the whole character of the band and lent a dignity to performances that didn't always deserve it. His sensitivity, subtlety, and humor formed the perfect foil for Freeman's whimsical solo work, but he could also provide a properly stirring backdrop for the majestic trumpeting of Bunny Berigan, Dorsey's best soloist. Excepting Sid Catlett and Count Basie's Jo Jones, Tough was without equal on the crash and high-hat cymbals.
Krupa took a different path. A drummer of drive and proficiency, he began to be carried away with his role as a featured member of the Goodman orchestra and to play to the crowds rather than to the music. Never bashful, Krupa carried the showy Chick Webb approach to its extreme and sometimes turned Goodman's simple swing style into a montage of frenzied drum solos with orchestral accompaniment
With Count Basie's Jo Jones setting the big-band pace in 1937-1938, it became painfully clear that Krupa was damaging the Goodman ensemble sound. The matter came to a head at Benny's Carnegie Hall concert in January, 1938. Krupa and Stacy were featured on Sing, Sing, Sing, a piece almost guaranteed to bring the audience to the edge of hysteria. Stacy turned in one of the best solos of his career — characteristically subtle, perfectly balanced, reflective, and carefully shaded for maximum aesthetic impact. Krupa, on the other hand, was all clamor and gongs. After the concert, members of the band went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear Count Basie's band triumph in a battle with Chick Webb, the first time Webb had been cut down at the Savoy. It was a fitting way to mark the new direction in which jazz was turning.
Within two months, Krupa left Goodman, and Tough (with Bud Freeman in tow) took over the job of putting the rhythm section back into proper perspective. Dave had by now dropped most of the New Orleans tricks that could still be heard behind the Dorsey band and was concentrating on a personal variation of the Jo Jones approach, which suited Goodman just fine.
The day after Goodman's January concert, the Commodore Music Shop made its first records with Stacy (continuing and probing some of the ideas set forth in Sing, Sing, Sing the night before), Freeman, Wettling, Pee Wee Russell, Bobby Hackett (who had re-created a Beiderbecke cornet solo for Goodman's concert), George Brunis (original trombonist with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings), Condon, and bassist Artie Shapiro. It was Chicago all over again, but with a difference. The Chicagoans were now established musicians of 1938, no longer dependent upon Bix, Noone, and Armstrong for ideas. They still used the collective-improvisation ensemble system, but it came out as valid contemporary music, not a recreation of early forms.
The Commodore recordings brought wider recognition to the old gang, and they went back to make more. Stacy cut several solos, Freeman tried some trio pieces, Jack Teagarden sat in on a few, and a number of friends got into the act — Max Kaminsky, valve trombonist Brad Cowans, Marty and Joe Marsala, Fats Waller, Miff Mole, and Muggsy Spanier. The joy they felt in playing jazz together again after the long dry spell could be heard on each release, and the records began to sell quite well.
The Chicagoans made many small-band records together after that. Freeman, hopeful with this turn of events, launched an excellent eight-man band of his own called the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra. Tough was traveling with Jack Teagarden's big band in 1939, but he joined the Freeman band shortly before it broke up in 1940. Russell and Cowans brought some of the flavor and ideas of the slightly more commercial band Bobby Hackett had fronted a few months earlier. Freeman's unit developed into one of the most cohesive small bands of its time.
Spanier, too, put an outstanding small band together during this period. More tradition-bound than Freeman's, Muggsy's band combined a contemporary rhythm section with ideas borrowed from Oliver, Armstrong, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and the Midway Gardens band. Trombonist Brunis, clarinetist Cless, and pianist Joe Bushkin were Spanier's principal soloists.
The two groups stood as final friendly arguments for each side of the Beiderbecke-Armstrong division that had occurred some ten years before. Spanier played Dippermouth Blues and Big Butter and Egg Man along Armstrong lines; Freeman worked up a library of Wolverine tunes.
After 1940, most of the Chicagoans played in small bands, usually built on a Dixieland pattern, for no one had yet invented a better method of collective improvisation for seven or eight jazz musicians than this basic system of modified counterpoint. Usually, though, the solo passages were of more interest than the ensemble performances, and on the many recordings made by this group of musicians after 1938 can be heard some of each individual's very best work. Russell's melodic and harmonic extensions of Beiderbecke are especially noteworthy and appear on a large share of the Commodore releases. Freeman's explorations along similar lines have been preserved on many recordings, including his provocative trio dates of 1938 and a superb set of 1940 performances featuring Teagarden and Tough. Stacy, too, appears on some of these as well as on many non-Chicagoan dates. His engaging melodic inventions were featured often with the Goodman band and in recording sessions with Lionel Hampton, Ziggy Elman, and Harry James.
Sullivan formed an outstanding swing band about the same time that Spanier and Freeman were fronting their own units. His combination, though it included Chicagoan Danny Polo and New Orleans clarinetist Ed Hall, was a nearly complete break with Chicago. It was a versatile band, one that could do a proper job on the blues (Sullivan worked with blues singer Joe Turner) or slip effortlessly into the contemporary idiom represented by Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Carter, all of whom Sullivan recorded with at this time.
Krupa formed his own big band after leaving Goodman and found a fair measure of success, except for a couple of war years, until 1951. He has seldom appeared with the old Chicago gang, preferring to work with players whose styles are rooted in the music of the early and mid-forties. Krupa has returned to a less flamboyant style in recent years. He continues to influence young drummers through his teaching as well.
Goodman, the most gifted of the Chicagoans, ceased to be a creative force in jazz in the early forties and a few years later seemed to be all but burned out as a jazzman. The story of his contribution to the music from 1931 (when his recording of Basin Street Blues and Beale Street Blues stood as a first definition of the big-band style Benny was seeking) to 1941 is a separate study beyond the scope of this chapter.
Dave Tough worked with a variety of groups during World War II, including Artie Shaw's Navy crew, but he began a whole new musical life upon joining Woody Herman's remarkable big band in 1944. At this point, Tough began listening to a modern young drummer named Max Roach and altered his musical outlook once more (some recordings with Flip Phillips document this change). But his old problem returned, and by 1946 he was back with the Chicagoans, playing in Eddie Condon's New York nightclub. Sullivan had returned to the gang, too, and sometimes Freeman dropped by to sit in with his old friends. Bud, like Tough, had served in the armed forces and had come out of the war with a few contemporary touches added to his old style.
The Tough-Freeman alliance produced a few more records about that time, but ended abruptly in 1948, when Dave slipped in the snow, hit his head, and died. He was 41.
Tough, who always wanted to be a writer, unwittingly composed his own epitaph in this lighthearted passage from one of his 1937 Metronome drum columns:
“Oh, the joy of the wine when it is red! Those lovely summer nights in the Bois with the swift, inner up-take of the Pernod. It turning milky in your glass and the taste of the wine, hard, clean, and tannic, in your mouth, volatile all through you — and you would go to the Birch Tops in the Rue Pigalle and hear her sing The Boy in the Boat, and hope you don't meet Ernest. Those dear, dead days! With us almost dead too!”
A New York steak house called Nick's was home for many of the Chicagoans and their Eastern friends in the forties. They settled in and, with varying combinations, remained for a decade. (At one point, the band at Nick's used a rotation system in order to be assured of a trumpet player. Of several leading hornmen, he who was sober enough to get through all seven sets had the job that night.)
As the years went by, the Dixieland form had started to wear thin, and Freeman, for one, looked for other possibilities. He studied with Lennie Tristano and began working with more modern rhythm sections. Russell, whose health disintegrated in the early fifties, experienced a musical renaissance after his physical comeback and in recent years has been experimenting with some modern jazz ideas. Sullivan and Stacy work sporadically on the West Coast, struggling to maintain their former high standards. Goodman is in a semi-retirement, occasionally emerging to offer a few thin echoes of his old robust style. Of the other Chicagoans, some are still playing regularly (Hodes, McPartland, Mezzrow, Wettling, Spanier), but age and too many years of corrosive speakeasy gin are making it difficult for others to carry on. Many are already gone.
Every few years, some eager recording executive attempts to revive the Chicago style by gathering some of its surviving founders together again. In 1961, an NBC television show was built around such a reunion, and a recording session was organized by the Verve label that included Freeman, McPartland, Condon, Krupa, Sullivan, Russell, and Jack Teagarden. Once more, the old friends ran down China Boy, Sugar, and others, but most of the collective magic had long since vanished. It was just an assemblage of soloists, each with better things on his mind than turning back time. Russell and Freeman had already grown so weary of Condon's brand of Dixieland that both regarded this date as something of a personal affront. The musicians merely plodded through the accepted routines, signed for their money, and fled.
The influence of the Chicagoans on the course of jazz has been strong and direct in some ways, incidental and roundabout in others. No jazz clarinetist of the thirties and forties could escape the Goodman influence, but Benny offered something more than a new level of technical achievement on his instrument. He was one of the first jazzmen to improvise on fairly complex song structures at rapid tempos without falling into a series of clichés or resorting to unmusical tricks. Because Goodman was a superb craftsman almost from the beginning, he was able to develop clean musical ideas and long phrases even at a blistering pace, and his example helped to open the way for other jazzmen. For players like Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum, Lionel Hampton, Chu Berry, Charlie Christian, and, ultimately, Charlie Parker, Goodman was not so much a direct influence as perhaps a breaker of new ground that they were nearly ready to sow.
It is an often overlooked fact that Bud Freeman was a major tenor saxophone stylist who once represented the "other" way for those who would not or could not follow the example of Coleman Hawkins. Freeman's dry tone, often resembling a C-melody more than a tenor saxophone, was anti-rhapsodic and unsentimental, and it appealed to budding jazzmen, such as Lester Young, who could not identify with the heavier, darker sound of Hawkins. However, with the emergence of Young himself as a primary jazz voice, beginning around 1937, Freeman's influence faded rapidly.
Krupa's eminence was not entirely undeserved, although his boyish good looks and stage manner were large factors in the public acclaim for him. Like Goodman, he caused his contemporaries to pause and consider their own technical equipment. Krupa was fast, accurate, and, when he wished to be, a master of dynamics and tonal shading. He also brought to his instrument an unprecedented celebrity. For better or worse, the extended drum solo in jazz grew out of Krupa's display pieces in the Goodman band. The number of drummers, good and bad, Krupa has influenced probably runs into the thousands.
Dave Tough, despite an erratic sense of responsibility and a determination to avoid grandstand tactics of the Krupa variety, was a popular figure and rated high among the best drummers of the thirties. His was an unspectacular influence, for he simply played in the most supportive and tasteful way possible at all times. Tough was a model of restraint combined with positive drive, of steadiness coupled with spontaneous wit. Only Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, and Chick Webb could surpass him in all these qualities. A number of thoughtful modern drummers — Mel Lewis, Shelly Manne, and Ed Shaughnessy are three — learned much from Tough.
Jess Stacy was perhaps the most underrated Chicagoan of all. An unassuming and gentle man, Jess looked on from the wings as Teddy Wilson gathered most of the honors — quite justifiably-through all the most productive Goodman years. But many pianists were listening carefully to both men. Stacy brought a new kind of warmth to jazz piano, quite different from the "hot," iron-fisted fury of Sullivan, the cool precision of Wilson, or the awesome improvisations of Earl Hines. Like Beiderbecke, Russell, and trombonist O'Brien, Stacy's gift nestled in the realm of the artfully understated melodic phrase and the painstakingly measured tincture of inevitability and surprise.
One of the most knowing appraisals of Stacy to appear in print was contributed to The New Republic by Otis Ferguson in 1937. Ferguson first discusses the pianist as a bandsman:
"What I try to do—" Jess says. "Look, I try to melt with the band." It is a simple word, but all the meanings are there in it: nuance, mood, touch, attack, phrasing, harmonic direction, what not. Because it is still in the unspoiled charm of its youth, this jazz music has never troubled to build a complicated breastwork of definitions. Jess and the rest have an active knowledge of how a tune may run, of how the value of a chord may be shifted—by its place in the general pattern (where it rises from and leads to), by its attack, duration, the color of its key and measure of its contrast, the sonority dependent on which of its notes are uppermost.
Ferguson goes on to discuss Jess as a soloist on a 1936 Gene Krupa-Benny Goodman recording:
From the deep background of the blues and from his own feeling, mind and hand, Jess made twelve bars of piano on a record that John Hammond supervised for English Parlophone, The Blues of Israel. That one is a sport all through, but after a few playings the piano stands out as much as anything. It has so completely that old-time pensive mood in the treble, the slurred second and the close three-finger chord hanging a mood of nostalgia around such a simple progression as sol, fa, mi, re: it is given so thorough a support in the constant working bass, whose left hand mingles intimately with what the right is doing. The song hangs on a trill, doubles the time for a swinging phrase, and slows to an ending of sustained chords, beautifully voiced. The analysis is simple, but the effect runs over into those complexities of the musical spirit that cannot be rightly described.
Pee Wee Russell, who replaced Teschemacher in the affections of many Chicagoans after Tesch's death, has always remained something of a musical entity unto himself. The impact of Beiderbecke can be traced in his work, but beyond that Pee Wee is unlike any musician who ever lived. His spidery, almost fragile, melodic inventions are full of unexpected turns and starts that sometimes leave the listener spent from prolonged anticipation of disaster. As Russell once explained his adventurous style to jazz writer Charles Edward Smith, "If you miss, you miss. If you get lucky, you get lucky — but you take a chance. You've got to get lost once in a while."
Because Russell plays to the music rather than to the house, some of his staunchest fans are other musicians. His presence in a jazz band can often be determined by what the men around him play. If boisterous trombonist George Brunis suddenly becomes reflective and introspective or if Max Kaminsky launches a solo that sounds like whimsical Beiderbecke, Russell is probably there. Even on earlier recordings, such as the 1929 One Hour by the Mound City Blue Blowers or Condon's 1933 Tennessee Twilight, it was often Pee Wee who established the mood and the musical tone of the moment. Bud Freeman, for one, has often played solos that are undiluted Russell (Condon's 1933 Home Cooking is an example), and when it has happened, Pee Wee has usually been present.
A number of modern jazzmen have expressed an interest in Russell, but with the possible exceptions of trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, there has been no notable Russell influence on younger players in modern jazz. Pee Wee made a deep impression on Bobby Hackett, however, whose influential ballad style, distinguished by explorations into the upper harmonic reaches of each chord, is admired by musicians of all persuasions.
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.
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