A Review of Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir, 1934-1969 [From the Archives]

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

It's not often that one gets to read first-hand accounts about the early makers of the music - primary source material about Jazz masters like Pops, Duke, Fats, Billie and Eddie Condon.

That's because there aren't too many people around from those halcyon days to tell their stories from a first person perspective.

Timme Rosenkrantz's memoirs is one such book.

It first posted to the blog on April 17, 2012 and I wanted to reprise it to edit out some flaws, add photographs and include the Eddie Condon video which you'll find at the conclusion of this piece.

“This book is not a sociological or jazz-historical work; it is not a refer­ence book on the evolution of jazz over the ages. There are lots of those!

This is a book about my adventures during many, and sometimes long, visits to the jazz capital of New York; about the thrill it has been to meet the great and lesser jazz musicians and their friends. It had to be a happy book about happy people and their music, and it is written by a happy man who is happy because he has been lucky enough to get close to that world, even to live the life he had, so to say, chosen as his own.”

- Baron Timme Rosenkrantz

Every time I’m the least bit inclined to forget bassist and Jazz author Bill Crow’s admonition that “Jazz should be fun,” something comes along to remind me of the import of this remark.

Most recently, it came in the form of Fradley Garner’s superb English adaptation of Timme Rosenkrantz’s Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir, 1934-1969.

As these dates denote, Mr. Rosenkrantz, a Danish baron, spent a good portion of his life in New York City when Jazz was first coming into existence and he offers exciting and enthusiastic glimpses of this time-gone-by in the thirty-six vignettes that comprises the chapters of his memoirs.

Each chapter is a short essay and collectively they form an episodic stroll through the Jazz clubs, theaters and gin joints of Harlem [and later 52^nd Street] during its heyday as the “must visit destination” for any Jazz fan.

Mr. Rosenkrantz’s lovely stories are also a brilliant example of the power of one of William Zinsser’s key points in his On Writing Well when he enjoins us to “ … let the person speak to the reader in his own words.”

The very manageable chapters and the cozy manner in which the stories contained in them are told create a much welcomed first-person narrative at a time when many of the books being published on the subject of Jazz are overly analytic and coldly academic in nature.

Credit for the engaging “tone and tenor” of Mr. Rosenkrantz’s memoirs must be given to Mr. Fradley Garner for his brilliant English translation/adaptation which is replete with a number of explanatory footnotes that help make the book even more lucid.

And while Mr. Rosenkrantz’s commercial Jazz ventures [record producer, record shop owner, concert producer, Jazz club owner] ultimately failed causing him to comment – “You can say I was born under an unlucky star if you want to.” – he’s quick to also acknowledge: “But every so often that star shone brightly and made up for all the sunshine that I slept through.” [p. 186].

Mr. Rosenkrantz was to experience first-hand the old adage: “The best way to make a million dollars in Jazz is to start with two million!”

Yet, it’s difficult to feel too sorry for him, as based on the experiences he shares in his book, Mr. Rosenkrantz met everyone who was anybody in the world of Jazz during its formative years and had the time of his life while doing so.

If this book is a testimonial to anything, it is to the fact that Mr. Rosenkrantz definitely knew how to have fun with Jazz.

Judging from a reading of Mr. Rosenkrantz’s anecdotes, tales and yarns, perhaps the book might have been alternately subtitled: A Danish Baron’s Book of Enchantments, Revelations and Amusements in The Land of Jazz.”

Take for example the title of the work’s very first chapter: Get Off at 125^th Street and God Be with You” which refers to the warning given by his midtown Manhattan hotel clerk when Mr. Rosenkrantz’s asked subway directions to uptown Harlem during his very first trip to New York in 1934.

“God certainly was with” Mr. Rosenkrantz for over the next thirty-five years he was to meet and, in many cases, become personal friends with Jazz luminaries such as Don Redman, Chick Webb, John Hammond, Benny Carter, Billie Holiday, Adrian Rollini, Benny Goodman, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Mezz Mezzrow, Eddie Condon, James P. Johnson, Slim Gailliard and Slam Stewart, W.C. Handy, Stuff Smith, Erroll Garner, Mildred Bailey, Bud Powell, and most especially – Duke Ellington – whom he [I think] correctly refers to as “The King of Jazz.”

Among the book’s many, other enchantments are the following stories from Mr. Rosenkrantz:

- “I'll never forget that first 1934 visit to Harlem!

I walked upstairs from the subway platform at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and blinked twice as I stepped out on the sidewalk. I felt as if I had entered another world. Huge neon signs blinked around me and over me. Beckoning shop windows caught my eye. The traffic was frightening. Music blared from every open shop door. You might think you were standing on Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, or—stretching the imagi­nation—Vesterbrogade, Copenhagen's main street, except for the people around you. They were all people of color. A solid mass of blacks, browns, yellows, grays moved along the broad avenue with a swinging, rhythmic gait that held this Nordic visitor in a trance. Their clothing was gay, their faces animated, their voices rang in the February evening air, as they fairly skipped along under the trees (now uprooted) on Lenox Avenue.

Following the crowd, I walked up the street, past several big movie houses, and suddenly, there I was standing in front of the Apollo Theater.

The Apollo was the last variety theater in New York City. Here the colossal show goes on at ten in the morning and runs nonstop until two the next morning—and to think I had wasted nearly my whole first day in con­versations, cafeterias, and clouds!

In the lineup were the greatest black artists in the world—singers, danc­ers, comedians, strong men and weak women, balancing acts, jugglers, and magicians. And the best Negro bands of the day—plus, of course, a line of the prettiest and darkest chorus girls this white man has ever seen.

And there was nearly always a full house. The program ran over two hours and changed every Friday. In between performances, they showed some Mickey Mouse films and newsreels and a feature film, something with lots of action. The black audience—and it's almost entirely black—demands action. Something has to happen!

Still and all, the films were so bad, I still believe they were chosen to empty the house. They usually succeeded.

My first night, there was a big revue with Don Redman's Orchestra as the main attraction, costarring with the Mills Brothers, those fantastic tap dancers the Step Brothers, and a funny, blues-singing comedian, Pigmeat Markham. He later gained TV fame on the Ed Sullivan Show….” [pp. 14-15] …

- “And then Billie Holiday came on. I shall never forget her, standing there in the dim spotlight. Young and beautiful as a dream, her sensitive, full lips half open; those almond eyes almost closed, as if she were having a blissful dream. Her voice wasn't big, but it crept under your skin and stayed there. She sang like an instrument—sometimes like the softest plea of a saxophone, sometimes like the shrill command of a trumpet. Never had I heard anybody sing like this. You sat there, almost clenching your fists in ecstasy. Her way of phrasing the words was so different, yet so right. You instantly knew that this was the way a jazz lyric should be treated. That voice clutched you like coiled fingers.” [pp. 43-44]

- “Anyone who knew Fats loved him. He had a heart of gold. No one came to him in vain when they were needy. No one could resist his always buoyant and contagious spirit. His laugh could be heard for miles around.

I remember one of our mutual friends, Adrian, a young Dutch composer of whom Fats was very fond. Adrian had come over to New York to try to make it as a composer and arranger, but nothing was happening. To make ends meet, he had taken a job as a wastepaper basket emptier in an office. One night, when the three of us were together, Adrian started dreaming out loud. "If only I could afford to rent a little piano, I could really start writing some tunes and working on arrangements, and get out of that office. It's killing me!"

The very next morning two moving men showed up at Adrian's doorstep bearing a new grand piano. With love from Fats. It had a great sound. I'm sure Fats had taken the time to choose it personally. In fact, he came by often to play it himself, much to the joy of everyone within hearing range on West 87th Street. At least Fats wasn't to blame for our European friend never mak­ing it. "The Flying Dutchman" managed to do a few arrangements and place them, but at last hearing, Adrian was still trying to get paid.” [p. 75]

And here are some of the book’s revelations as recounted by Mr. Rosenkrantz:

- “C-R-R-R-R-R-R-ASH! An ear-splitting drumroll unfolded into a cymbal crash at the other end of the ballroom. Then the orchestra fell in, heralding the arrival of a little hunchback drummer, the greatest in the world, Chick Webb. Something happened to me I shall never forget, impossible to put into words. Only to be felt. And I’ve learned a great drummer is to be felt before he is heard. Chick seemed to turn a light on in me.” [p. 19]

- “Young Garner's father was a singer who played several instruments, as did his older brother, Linton. Erroll was an entirely self-taught musician who hit the keys when he was three years old and never did learn how to read mu­sic. But he played like no other pianist, and his flamboyant style was a delight to the ears. He would start a ballad with a long, discordant introduction that didn't even hint at the melody to come. At last when he swung into it, his left hand lay down chords like a guitar, keeping up a steady pulse, while his right hand never seemed to catch up, improvising chords or playing octaves that lagged way behind the beat for the rest of the number. Just a pinch of Fats Waller added spice.

I was fascinated by this fellow's joyously swinging piano, and I sought him out while Louis Prima was on. Erroll was anything but happy. He didn't know many people in New York and was downhearted. No one was inter­ested in listening to him—Louis Prima was the showman attraction. And Erroll was only making forty dollars a week!

He told me he thought he'd go home soon, as it seemed nothing was going to happen for him in New York. Somehow, I had to stop him. I invited him home to 7 West 46th Street, showed him my rented Krakaur grand, and once he got started, it was impossible to pry him off the bench. Little did I know at the outset that he had a bad case of asthma and couldn't sleep lying down!” [p. 176]

- “An odd commentary on the vicissitudes of life is the fact that Ellington does not like the business of getting from one place to another. He cannot sleep on trains, ships, or in cars, and he especially dislikes flying. Constant traveling for forty years has not changed him at all. Approximately 14,650 sleepless nights account for those heavy bags under his eyes. Come to think of it, he doesn't like to go to bed at home, either. Life fascinates him so much, it seems a terrible waste of time. He just seems to thrive on not sleeping!

On the road, he prefers to play cards with the bandsmen, very often winning all their loot—but he is a gracious loser, too. Until recently, when he bought an apartment in a skyscraper on New York's Central Park West, Duke had a modest little flat on Harlem's Sugar Hill. He fell for New York the first time he glimpsed the bright lights—which, to his imaginative soul, were an Arabian Night's dream.

A born big-city man, he has a deep-seated dislike for expanses of green grass, saying they remind him of cemeteries. Can't bear any kind of outdoor sports; regarded the walk down three flights of stairs in his old Harlem apart­ment as his daily constitutional; laughingly describes himself as "a hot-house flower."

"You have to be careful, Timme," he once told me. "There's nothing more dangerous than fresh-air poisoning!"”[pp. 158-59]

The following excerpts are examples of the book’s many amusements:

- “Pod's and Jerry's, also known as the Log Cabin, at 133rd Street near the corner of Seventh Avenue, was usually the last stop for uptowners and down­towners alike. Here you could bump into celebrities like Tallulah Bankhead, Frederick March, Franchot Tone (or his mother, playing drums), and other New York theater people and Tin Pan Alley types. Many had been slumming at the Cotton Club, where they watched floorshows featuring the Duke El­lington, Cab Galloway, or Jimmie Lunceford orchestras. They'd show up in top hats and tails or dripping in ermines. As a rule, they circulated incognito, wearing oversize sunglasses to make themselves unrecognizable, which never worked nor was it intended to.

This scene inspired Don Redman to write a tune, "Take Off Those Dark Glasses, We Know Who You Are!" Confronted by one of those notables, Harlemites would chant the melody.”[p. 27]

- “A few years ago, Eddie Condon made a tour of the British Isles that is still remembered. With him he had his jug buddies Wild Bill Davison and George Wettling. The tour turned into a contest of how much liquor can be consumed while playing trad jazz. Who won I don't have to guess: Eddie had no peers. But nobody seemed to mind, for this was a very special occa­sion—the very first time the Brits had heard a stomp-down, sure-enough, live Dixieland band….

Arriving in a principal city, they were met early in the morning by the I press, who tracked them to their hotel. They found Eddie in bed with the hangover of all time. He could hardly move, but the interview was important, and the road manager let the scribes in. Eddie lay flat on his back with his hat on. "Go on, shoot!" he growled. Anything else he mumbled was lost as he faded away.

"Mr. Condon, wouldn't it be better if you sat up a wee bit in bed, so we can hear what you are saying?" ventured one of the chaps.

Condon's eyelids stayed at half-mast as he cracked open his lips and croaked, "What the hell do you think I am, man, an athlete?" [pp. 153-54]

- “The New York Herald Tribune [subsequently, The International Herald Tribune] once gave a luncheon in honor of Louis Armstrong at one of the fashionable Paris restaurants. Many prominent people from the literary world and theater were there, as well as music critics and reporters from all over the continent. Louis had asked me to come along.

It was a typical American luncheon with hamburger steaks and three different kinds of ice water. I think Louis had a side order of red beans and rice, his favorite fruits.

There were many speeches, and Armstrong was praised in as many dif­ferent accents.

Then it was Louis's turn to say a few words. Somebody had asked him what his greatest thrill had been on this latest European tour. Louis answered:

"Last week we were playing in Rome. We gave a great concert and those Italian cats went crazy. We could’ve filled the Forum, no question about that, if they had repaired it! Well, the next day my wife, Lucille, and I had a private audience with the Pope. And it knocked us out, man! I told His Holi­ness about my music and about my Swiss Kriss (a laxative), which moves me almost as much as the music, and he was real great, you know?

"'What a beautiful wife you have!' the Pope says. 'Do you have any children?'

"'No, Pops,' I told him. 'But we're still working on it.' And do you know, the Pope fell o-u-t!

And so did everybody at the luncheon party.” [pp. 127-28]

Socrates once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” to which, an acceptable corollary might be: the unlived life is not worth examining.

No words could form a better description of the “Jazz Life” lived by Baron Timme Rosenkrantz as depicted in Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir, 1934-1969.

As Jazz approaches the beginning of its second century, don’t miss you chance to read about what it was like soon after it all began.

For information on ordering the book, go here.

The Great Condon, already into his 4th decade of music here, rips through the venerable standard Royal Garden Blues with the ample aid of Wild Bill Davison (ct), Peanuts Hucko (cl), Cutty Cutshall (tb), Buzzy Drootin (d), J. Varro (p) and Joe Williams (b).

King, Pops and Bix in Chicago from "We Called It Music" by Eddie Condon

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

“There is a paradox here. If Condon and friends started out as avant-garde renegades ("One of the ladies told me it was just like having the Indians in town again"), intent on playing jazz despite the indifference of "the Republicans" who preferred saccharine fiddle bands, they soon became the most cautious of musical populists. The more respectable and intellectual jazz became, the more they relished their reputations as "natural" musicians —the kind who can readily identify with young Eddie's rather disingenuous question, "What's reading got to do with music?" At times, he seemed to regard jazz as little more than a folk art, a non-stop jam session frequently sustained in an alcoholic mist (the children of the Volstead Act, he explains, inebriated themselves with a vengeance, as if to prove that no government could dictate sobriety). That attitude, bound to appeal to fans suffering from unrequited nostalgia, proved contagious, as witness the gee-whiz prose occasionally served up by commentators in the liner copy of Condon's record albums —e.g., ". . .a dozen good guys having a good time. That is, after all, what it is all about" or "This music is roadsters and girls and cutting classes and oranges."  … Condon's best work has a spark of its own, and though he sometimes "conducted" more than he played, the bands that bore his name continued to produce memorable work by Russell, Vic Dickenson, Bobby Hackett, Billy Butterfield, Edmund Hall, Bud Freeman, Kenny Davern, and quite a few other Condon regulars.”

- Gary Giddins, Introduction to We Called It Music

As the title implies, this piece is about two subjects: [1] how the coming together of Jazz trumpet masters Joe “King” Oliver, Louis “Pops” Armstrong and Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke in the Chicago of the 1920s helped shape the development of Jazz after its formative years in New Orleans and [2] a brief excerpt on that subject from Eddie Condon’s autobiographical We Called It Music which Gary Giddins has described as “... a definitive statement on the first generation of white jazz musicians and how they saw themselves in relation to the black innovators that they emulated.”

Eddie Condon (1905-1973) pioneered a kind of jazz popularly known as Chicago-Dixieland, though musicians refer to it simply as Condon-style.

Played by small ensembles with a driving beat, it was and is an informal, exciting music, slightly disjointed and often mischievous. The same could be said of Condon's autobiography, We Called It Music: A Generation of Jazz, a book widely celebrated for capturing the camaraderie of early jazz.

Condon's wit was as legendary as the music he boosted. Here is Condon on modern jazz: The boppers flat their fifths. We consume ours." On Bix Beiderbecke: 'The sound came out like a girl saying yes." On the New York subway: "It was my first ride in a sewer."

When his memoir was first published—to great acclaim—in 1947, he was well known as a newspaper columnist, radio personality, saloon keeper, guitarist, and bandleader. He was the ideal man to come up with an insightful portrait of the early days of white jazz, and his book offers nonpareil accounts of many of the jazz greats of that era, including Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy McPartland, Gene Krupa, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby.

These were the days when jazz was popularly associated with Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin. Condon considered true jazz an outlaw music and himself an outlaw. He and his cohorts tried to get as close as possible to the black roots of jazz, a scandalous thing in the '20s. Along the way, he facilitated one of the first integrated recording sessions.

We Called It Music, with the 1992 DaCapo paperback version published with an introduction by Gary Giddins that places the book in historical context, remains essential reading for anyone interested in the wild and restless beginnings of America's great musical art, or in the wit and vinegar of Eddie Condon.

The following excerpts from Condon’s We Called It Music will give you an idea of the nature of the writing of the book and afford a description about the dynamics between King Oliver, Pops and Bix in the socio-cultural environment that was Chicago in the 1920s. In its own way, it was a melting pot analogous to New Orleans in the preceding decade but with different elements: the Creole Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Wolverines, the Austin High Gang and individual musicians including Benny Goodman and Davey Tough [not to mention Al Capone, the Chicago gangsters and the era of Prohibition brought in by the Volstead Act 1919/1920].

“Ain’t none of them played like him yet,” the title of a Brigitte Berman film taken from a quotation about Bix Beiderbecke attributed to Louis Armstrong, reflects the fact that although the young white musicians in Chicago were heavily influenced by the Black musicians who had come to town primarily from New Orleans, they went on to develop their own musical personalities and styles.

“CHICAGO'S SOUTH SIDE gave jazz a sincere welcome. When King Joe Oliver arrived in 1918 representatives of two bands met him at the station. Eddie Venson wanted him to play at the Royal Gardens Cafe with Jimmy Noone,  Bill Johnson and Sidney Bechet were on hand to persuade him to join them at the Dreamland. The discussion shifted from the station to a bar and reached an amicable decision. Oliver joined both bands, playing early with one, late with the other. There was no one to challenge his title of King except Freddie Keppard. Keppard dropped in at the Royal Gardens one night and Oliver took him on in a "cutting" contest. The consensus was that, "Joe Oliver beat the socks off Keppard!”

Back in New Orleans, where he was born in 1885, Oliver learned music slowly. He began in formal fashion, reading notes and playing with a children's band. Once the children's band went on tour and Joe returned with a scar over one eye; someone had struck him with a broomstick. For a while he was called "Bad Eye" Joe. When he first played with the Eagle Band he was sent home because he played "so loud and so bad." He was confused because the players improvised instead of following the score. Gradually he learned the technique of improvisation and eventually produced a stomp of his own, called Dippermouth.

He went to work in Storyville, and there he heard nothing but praise for Freddie Keppard and Manuel Perez. It irritated him; in his own opinion he was better than both men. He played in a cabaret at the Corner of Bienville and Marais Streets, with Big Eye Louis on clarinet, Deedee Chandler on drums, and Richard Jones at the piano. One night between numbers the musicians began talking about Keppard and Perez. Oliver stood up and walked to the piano. "Jones," he said, "best it out in B fiat."

Jones began and Joe put his cornet to his lips and blew. He walked out into the street and pointed his horn first at the cabaret where Keppard worked, then at the cafe where Perez was playing. He blew with such power that every bed and bar in the neighborhood emptied. People poured into the street and crowded around Joe, while he blew and blew, swinging his cornet from one target to the other. When everyone knew what he was doing and was satisfied with the way he was doing if, he turned and led the people inside. After that he was King Joe.

In Chicago in 1920 he organized his own Creole Jazz Band and took it to California. Returning to the south side he went again to the Royal Gardens, now re-christened the Lincoln Gardens. In 1922 he decided to send for his boy Louis Armstrong to play second cornet. Louis arrived and stood outside the cafe listening to the music, afraid to go in. He couldn't believe he was in Chicago, hired to play in a band with Papa Joe Oliver.

Louis Armstrong learned to play a cornet in the Waif's Home in New Orleans, to which he was sent for firing a pistol within the city limits on New Year's Day, 1913. Before that he haunted Storyville at night, singing in an urchins' quartet, playing on a guitar made from a cigar box. As he grew he played in cabarets, gin mills, and barrel houses. He spent two seasons with Fate Marable's band on the Streckfus river boats.

He composed a tune which later became very popular and sold it for fifty dollars. He was twenty-two when he arrived in Chicago on the night of July 8th. Listening to Papa Joe he thought, "I wonder if I'm good enough to play in that band." He was. People used to say to Oliver, "That boy will blow you out of business." Joe would smile and say, "He won't hurt me while he's in my band."

Before prohibition poured white patrons into the south side cafes there were white boys gathered around the bandstands at the Dreamland and Lincoln Gardens, some of them startlingly young. Musicians were discovering the new music and listening to its masters. Members of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the white jazz orchestra at Friars' Inn, came to listen to their old Storyville colleagues. They listened so well that one of their recordings, Tin Roof Blues, contained more than a surface resemblance to King Oliver's Jazzin' Babies' Blues.

The younger white boys were high-school students — Dave Tough, George Wettling, Francis Muggsy Spanier, Benny Goodman, and a group from Austin High on the west side: Jimmy McPartland, Lawrence Bud Freeman, Frank Teschemacher, and Jim Lannigan. At home these boys practiced and listened to records by the Rhythm Kings and the Oliver band; they were determined to play jazz. They formed small orchestras, played at school dances, and went to the south side or to Friars' Inn to take lessons from the masters of their respective instruments — Baby Dodds on drums, Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Leon Roppolo on clarinet, Joe and Louis on cornet, George Brunies on trombone.

The star of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings was Leon Roppolo, who played clarinet; the driving force of the band was George Brunies, the trombone player. Both were from New Orleans; both were from musical families; both were veterans of Storyville. Roppolo ran away from home when he was fourteen and played in a band with Bee Palmer's act on the Orpheum circuit; the police found him and sent him home. He worked then at the Halfway House in Storyville with Abbie Brunies, George's brother. In Chicago in 1920 he and George and Paul Mares played at the Cascades Ballroom, where the piano was half a tone off. They organized the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and got a job at Friars' Inn on the strength of their version of Wabash Blues. So enchanted were the Rhythm Kings with Chicago life that after work in the early dawn they rode around for hours on the elevated. Roppolo slowly went mad; he liked to lean against a telephone pole with his clarinet and improvise on the rhythm he heard humming in the wires. He stood on the stand at the Friars' Inn and played chorus after chorus while the customers stopped dancing to listen. The manager begged him to stop so the people could sit down and spend some money. When he was harmlessly insane he went back to New Orleans and Abbie Brunies took him again into the band at the Halfway House and looked after him.

They all knew Bix Beiderbecke, the round-eyed, eager-faced youngster from Davenport with the mousy hair and the marvelous ear. They knew the Condon kid from Chicago Heights, too; he was small, quick-moving, clothes-conscious, sharp-tongued, seldom still, and forever organizing parties, dates, and excursions to the south side. They called him "Slick." He was innocently frank with phonies; otherwise he talked in a mixture of understatement and hyperbole. About Louis Armstrong's cornet playing he would say, "It doesn't bother me." In describing Gene Krupa to George Wettling he said, "He's got a seventy-two-inch heart." He was passionately, deeply devoted to jazz, proselyted constantly in its behalf, refused to solo on his own instrument, and pioneered in the appreciation of Beiderbecke. Bix's playing never bothered him; Bix's indifference to clothes and fresh linen and romance did.

Bix was never actually a person; he was a living legend. Nothing which has been invented about him is as accurately symbolical as the everyday things he did. Without effort he personified jazz; by natural selection he devoted himself to the outstanding characteristics of the music he loved. He was obsessed with it; with the aid of prohibition and its artifacts he drove away all other things — food, sleep, women, ambition, vanity, desire. He played the piano and the cornet, that was all; when he was sick the Whiteman band kept an empty chair for him; when he died no one was glad and many wept.

He was born Leon Bismark Beiderbecke on March 10, 1903, in Davenport, Iowa. As a child he reached to the keyboard and picked out tunes; he knew the air of The Second Hungarian Rhapsody when he was three. He took a few lessons; he didn't learn to read music. On the river boats which came to Davenport in summer he heard jazz. He bought a cornet and taught himself to play; his fingering was unorthodox; he developed a round, full tone which was a wonder and a delight to all who heard it.

For a brief period he attended Lake Forest Academy in Chicago; he won prizes in music and flunked everything else. He listened to the jazz bands in Chicago, and when the players knew him and had heard him they asked him to sit in. He jobbed around with small pickup bands through the Middle West until 1923, when Dick Voynow, a piano player, organized the Wolverines. They made records for Gennett, a small recording studio at Richmond, Indiana, owned by the Starr Company, Hoagy Carmichael heard Bix and brought the Wolverines to Indiana University in the spring of 1924; alter eight return visits on eight successive week ends the Bix legend was begun. The Wolverines toot their place as one of the great white jazz bands; their records were a sensation; Bix was on his way.

In Chicago, young Condon and his friends played the records of the Wolverines and waited impatiently for Bix to hit town so they could hear him on the piano and take him to hear Bessie Smith. Bessie was Empress of the Blues. Ma Rainey, another great blues singer, discovered her in Tennessee, singing for $2.50 a week in tent shows. Bessie had a contralto voice of such power and range and tone, of such richness and adaptability, that there was no one to rival or imitate or follow her. She was unmatched; in the days before the depression Negroes stood in line all over the country to buy her records: Empty Bed Blues, Careless Love, Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out, Young Woman's Blues. She sang many of the blues written by Clarence Williams, the New Orleans piano player who migrated to Chicago, opened a music shop on State Street, and became the publisher of his own songs.

State Street was lined with cafes and theaters where jazz bands played — the Elite, the Pekin, the Fiume, the Dreamland, the Panama, the Rose Garden, the Edelweiss and the Little Edelweiss, the Open Air Gardens, and the Vendome and Lincoln Theaters. There was also the New Orleans Babe's Saloon and Restaurant, and, nearby on Wabash Avenue, the Dusty Bottom open air cafe. Wandering from saloon to saloon was a man named Jimmy Yancey, a piano player with a strong, rolling, rhythmic bass. Jimmy had been a vaudeville performer; now he was a favorite at rent parties. When things were low just before dawn he played his Five O'clock Blues. Others picked up his style—Pine Top Smith, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis. It was given a name, boogie woogie.

Jazz was not considered a proper profession for well-bred young white men; band leaders who dispensed popular music were as disapproving as parents who revered Beethoven. The Austin High boys and their friends had to work in cabarets and speakeasies; Al Capone and his lieutenants replaced the madams of Storyville as sponsors for the new music. Playing in small groups, experimenting with techniques, the youngsters developed a style based upon but different from New Orleans jazz. The beat was pushed and nervous, the tympani had the urgent sound of Indian drums; there was tenseness, almost frenzy, in the solo flights of the horns; there was not the unhurried, effortless, relaxed mood of Negro jazz.

Improvisation by adolescent white boys reared in polite homes was bound to be different from the conversational instrumentation of colored men belonging to a minority of thirteen million submerged in the freest nation on earth. It was a fresh expression, a new voice; it was first heard outside its habitat when in 1928 Okeh released a record made by seven of the youngsters: Frank Teschemaker, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Joe Sullivan, Jim Lannigan, Gene Krupa, and Eddie Condon. Condon organized the band, Red McKenzie arranged the recording date.

McKenzie was an ex-jockey, born in Holy Name parish in St. Louis in 1899, the last of ten children, christened William. After breaking both arms in his chosen profession he retired and hopped bells at the Claridge Hotel in St. Louis. Standing on the sidewalk waiting for patrons to arrive he folded a piece of paper over a comb and blew tunes to amuse himself. Across the street a Negro bootblack played a phonograph and beat out the rhythm on his customers' shoes. A young clerk named Dick Slevin came out of Butler Brothers Store with a kazoo' and hummed along with the music. McKenzie crossed the street and joined in. Slevin knew a man named Jack Bland who played a banjo. Bland, Slevin, and McKenzie began playing together. They went to Chicago with Gene Rodemich’s band as a novelty. Isham Jones got them a recording date with Brunswick. They played Arkansas Blues and Blue Blues; the records sold more than a million copies. The Mound City Blue Blowers, as they called themselves, went on tour. In Atlantic City McKenzie met Eddie Lang, another banjo player. McKenzie persuaded him to take np the guitar and join the Blowers. It was Lang who so popularized the guitar that the banjo disappeared from jazz orchestras. Before that happened McKenzie met another banjo player in Chicago, took him into partnership, and brought liim to New York.”

[That other banjo player was Eddie Condon …. To be continued].

The Origins of The Jazz Institute

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

I remember Richard Gehman as one of the busiest writers on the literary magazine scene in the 1950s with his articles appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Harper’s and a slew of other monthly publications.

He generally wrote about subjects that dealt with - broadly speaking - Arts & Letters so in recently tracking back for a used copy of Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz,  guitarist’s Eddie Condon’s “other” book on Jazz [he is widely known as the author of We Called it Music], I was delighted to note that Richard was the co-editor along with Eddie of the Treasury compilation which was published in 1956 by The Dial Press [New York].

Although it’s been at various locations and affiliations on the Rutgers University campus in Newark, New Jersey since 1966-67, perhaps few of its current visitors are aware of the more modest beginnings of The Institute of Jazz Studies as described by Richard Gehman in the following introduction to Marshall Stearns’ Rebop, Bebop, and Bop, which is one of the essays collected into Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz.

“IN JULY, 1954, I did a piece for This Week on Marshall Stearns, who may very well go down in history as one of the most important Jazz lovers of all time. We have decided to reprint most of it here, first because it contains a good deal of information about Marshall available nowhere else and second because it calls attention to the increasing interest in Jazz on the part of the intellectual community:

“I visited Marshall Stearns the other day at his Waverly Place duplex in Greenwich Village. Stearns is tall and loose-jointed, with a sober visage behind dark-rimmed spectacles. He is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, an expert on medieval literature; Harvard Sc.B. '31, Yale Ph. D. '42. Special interest: Chaucer. Extra-special interest: Jazz. In addition to teaching English at Hunter, he lectures on Jazz at the New School for Social Research and New York University.

"People always ask me, 'What's a Chaucer man doing fooling around with Jazz?'" Stearns said. "They seem to think it's a joke. Well, it isn't. Chaucer and Jazz are quite similar: they both swing, they both have the same punch, vitality and guts. Why, they're not far apart at all."

For years, Stearns has been trying to get people to take Jazz seriously as an art form. He defines Jazz as "improvised Afro-American music, with strong European influences." Some people might disagree with this definition. Nothing could be more pleasing to Stearns. He is never happier than when he is surrounded by people wrangling over Jazz. "We had twenty-eight down here last Friday to listen to records," he told me. "One argument lasted until four in the morning. Wonderful."

As a step toward organizing Jazz discussions, Stearns six years ago inaugurated an annual Roundtable on Jazz at Music Inn, Lenox, Mass. The Roundtable is held at the conclusion of the annual Tanglewood festival. Musicians come and play, singers come and sing, and students of Jazz come and listen  —and, of course, argue. Out of the Roundtables has come a more serious, permanent project — The Institute of Jazz Studies, Inc., of which Stearns is one of the founders, the president and executive director.

The Institute, Stearns told me, has a five-point program. It aims to assemble a complete archive of recordings and literature on Jazz and make it available to students. It will sponsor trips by scholars to collect data on the history of Jazz. It will publish material on Jazz, and it will work out a series of Jazz courses on a university level. Finally, it will go on sponsoring the Roundtables. The Institute is non-profit.

Producing a letterhead, Stearns pointed to the list of the Institute's Board of Advisors. It included such disparate names as Louis Armstrong, Stan Kenton and Artie Shaw; Stuart Davis, the painter; Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, writers; Monroe Berger, Willis L. James, S. I. Hayakawa, Lorenzo Turner and Melville J. Herskovits, college professors. "Herskovits, the anthropologist, was one of my sponsors when I applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to write a book on the history of Jazz," Stearns told me. "So was Duke Ellington," he added, smiling.

The book was published in the spring of 1956. Stearns hopes it will be regarded as the first scholarly work on Jazz. He believes passionately that the recent academic interest in Jazz is long overdue.

After all," he said, "it's our only native American music. You could say, too, it's the only art form that ever originated in America. Charles Seeger, former head of the Pan-American Union music division, said once that our music history will be done largely in terms of popular music. It's true. Jazz is a prime force in our popular culture, and I'm interested in trying to evaluate its effect.

"And," Stearns continued, warming up, "I'm not the only one. S.J. Hayakawa, the semanticist, is going to do a study of the semantics of Jazz. Dr. Maurice R. Green, of Roosevelt Hospital, is working on a study of the psychological implications of Jazz in our society; Tremaine McDowell, head of American civilization studies at the University of Minnesota, has incorporated Jazz material into his courses. For the purposes of my book, I've had to get out of English and into anthropology, sociology and even psychiatry."

Stearns now led me on a guided tour of the headquarters of the Institute, which is in his own spacious living room, a room the size of a small concert hall. The ceilings are eighteen feet high and the entire right-hand wall is covered with paintings by Stearns' wife, Betty. The left-hand wall is dominated by huge shelves which reach almost to the ceiling. The shelves contain Stearns' — and the Institute's — record collection.

"We've got about ten or eleven thousand here," Stearns said. "I've been trying to get a sample of everything ever recorded— everything from the music of the American Indian up to classical stuff, and excluding both."

Stearns keeps the Institute's files in several large cabinets. As he pulled out drawers, I saw folders headed AFRICA, BLUES, GOSPEL SINGERS, JAM SESSIONS, LINDY HOP, MUSIC: HINDU, JUG BLOWERS, One cabinet is completely devoted to original photographs, another to letters and diaries of Jazz musicians.

"Been collecting this stuff since I was a boy," Stearns said. He said he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1908, son of a Harvard graduate whose father was a Harvard graduate. The father, an amateur singer, bought him a set of drums when he was thirteen ('To keep me off the streets"). He began drumming along with recordings, then took up a guitar, and finally graduated to C-melody saxophone. He played in small bands around Cambridge but gave up his musical career and followed his father to Harvard. After graduation, Stearns went to Harvard Law School for two years, was bored, and switched to Yale to take up medieval literature. All this time he had been soaking up all the Jazz and folk music he could listen to and developing his record collection. While at Yale he began writing for Down Beat. His first article was a blast at the big, organized heavily-arranged commercial bands. ....”

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is planning more features based on the Condon-Gehman Treasury of Jazz and Marshall Stearns’ The Story of Jazz.

Gary Giddins on Eddie Condon - A New Introduction

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

“Why I Write” - Gary Giddins (December 2012)

The short answer as to why I write is to share what I know and love about jazz, to shine a little light on a mystery for which I’ve never found a rational explanation: how can a nation produce a musical tradition as fecund and flowing as the one erected on the genius of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker and treat it as though it doesn’t exist or exists only in the past or only for those “in the know”?

I decided to be a writer when I was eight, after reading a children’s biography of Louis Pasteur that triggered an epiphany about life and language. Nothing could sway me toward a more sensible direction, especially after I discovered the work of Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, James Boswell and Martin Williams and knew that I had found my mode – criticism – if not my subject. That would come later. Criticism finds the past in the present and vice versa. It filters time’s nuggets and makes cultural signposts accessible, exciting and pertinent. Biography is another way of doing that, with the advantage of a strong narrative, balancing private failings with a critical analysis of public accomplishments that are the only reason we care about the subject. To my surprise, I found an ideal subject in Bing Crosby, which allows me to combine my interests in music and film while tracking the development of American popular culture over three-quarters of a century. I continue to write essays on movies and books as well. But jazz is different: I write about jazz because Louis Armstrong’s 1938 “Jubilee,” which ought to be included in any universal health-care system, is too good a secret to keep.

From, www.garygiddins.com

The primary reason I enjoy reading Gary Giddins' essays, reviews and books is because I learn from them; I always come away from the time spent exploring his writings with perceptions about Jazz and its makers that he informs and ideas about the music that he creates.

[By the way, ideas don’t just exist waiting for someone to “turn a light bulb on over their head” and find them. Ideas have to be made, they have to be created.]

Slowing life down to “smell the coffee” with a chapter from one of Gary’s books is a frequent occurrence in my life, but I must say that I was very surprised during a recent foray when I found a piece about Eddie Condon in his Weather Bird: Jazz at The Dawn of Its Second Century.

The book is a compendium of Jazz essays and reviews that Gary wrote from about 1990 to 2003 in his position as the Jazz “critic” [in the broadest sense of that term] for The Village Voice.

Not surprisingly then, the book contains an overwhelming number of pieces about Jazz artists in performance or on recordings which appeared during that time frame.

But Eddie Condon? He died in 1973 [the same year, incidentally, that Gary began his “Weather Bird” column for The Village Voice] so how does he figure into this compilation’s chronology?

Of course, after turning a page or two, the context for the inclusion of Gary’s essay entitled The Advocate: Eddie Condon was that it served as an introduction commissioned for the 1991 reissue by DaCapo Press of the paperback edition of We Called It Music, a book that Eddie originally co-wrote in 1947 with Thomas Sugrue.

Here are a few more excerpts from Gary’s treatment of the book as well as his “take” on Condon’s music and his place in the development of Jazz.

Weather Bird: Jazz at The Dawn of Its Second Century is still available through its publisher, Oxford University Press, and through retail and online booksellers.  By way of background: “Gary Giddins wrote the Village Voice's "Weather Bird" column for 30 years. His eight books and three documentary films have garnered unparalleled recognition for jazz, including a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, two Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards, five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Peabody, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received national attention for his commentary in Ken Burns's Jazz.”

You can locate more information about Gary at www.garygiddins.com.

“Eddie Condon was a vigorous jazz activist whose barbed tongue and stubborn beliefs were powerful implements for spreading the jazz gospel as he interpreted it. Decades after his death, in 1973, the kind of music he championed was still widely known as Condon-style, though, inevitably, the prophet and his music receded into memory when the last practitioners passed on. They merit our respect all the same. Condon and the success he enjoyed recall a tremulous period in jazz history, when the racial divide was first breached and the very act of playing jazz or representing oneself as a jazz musician conveyed the thrill of anarchy.” …

Though not an important instrumentalist or bandleader, Condon performed on many fine — even important — recordings and fronted countless bands. His accomplishments as a composer were few, yet he helped to codify an enduring school of jazz. He was a radical in his youth and a reactionary ever after, yet he won a lasting respect as one of jazz's most effective propagandists, heralding America's brave new music on the bandstand and off, as a musician, organizer, memoirist, broadcast personality, newspaper columnist, and club owner.

The Condon-style, also known as Chicago-Dixieland (a phrase he disliked), was born in the late 1920s, reached its apex a decade later, and sustained a popular following throughout the '40s and '50s, even though it had long since jettisoned all signs of progressive development. Indeed, predictability was part of its allure. What started out as a scrappy, every-man-for-himself music, hell-bent on capturing the drive and feeling of pioneer black jazz musicians, became a conservative backwater—a respite from the anxieties and cyclical rebellions of modernism.

Played by small ensembles with a driving beat, Condon-style meant a loose-limbed music, inspired by the informality of the jam session and nourished by an intimate ambience that was far too tolerant of journeymen vocalists, roguish bandstand antics, and a petrified repertoire. But it was an honest music at its best, sometimes compellingly so, and it preserved an illusion of effortless musical camaraderie that comforted a generation.

Condon's personality mirrored his music. He worked hard at perfecting a mask of cynicism to hide the sentimentality lurking just below the surface. Had he been the scold he pretended to be, however, he could hardly have gotten away with as much mischief. A genuinely witty man, he made his impudence palatable even to his victims, who quoted Condon's jibes with pleasure. Some of his observations are among jazz's most familiar quotations.  … On modern jazz: "The boppers flat their fifths. We consume ours." On Pee Wee Russell: "He's gaining weight—under each eye." … We Called It Music, the first and most valuable of Condon's three books, includes several lines that have been repeated and rephrased so often most people no longer know where they originated—for example, his elegiac recollection of first hearing Bix Beiderbecke: "The sound came out like a girl saying yes."

In addition to being the entertaining memoir of a jazz musician, We Called It Music, subtitled "A Generation of Jazz" so that everyone would understand what It referred to, is a definitive statement on the first generation of white jazzmen and how they saw themselves in relation to the black innovators they emulated. Read today, half a century after the coming of modern jazz and in light of decades of myth-making revisionism, Condon's memoir brims with far more socio-musical ironies than were apparent on first publication, in 1947. Some of that irony was underscored by a strange supplementary chapter written for an English edition in 1962, and unavailable in the United States for 25 years.

The main text emphasizes the debt Condon's generation owed Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Ethel Waters, and Bessie Smith—the royalty of the new kind of music. "When [Jimmy] McPartland mentioned King Oliver," Condon writes, "smoke came out of his eyes."” …

“Back in 1947, when Condon and Thomas Sugrue collaborated on We Called It Music, Condon was at the height of his fame as a jazz personality. His nightclub, which opened in 1945, met with great success, as did his Town Hall concerts, radio broadcasts, and records.”...

“Condon kept active in the years following the appearance of We Called It Music. His nightclub changed premises in 1958—relocating from West 3rd Street to East 56th Street—and managed to survive until 1967, for an impressive run of 22 years. He collaborated on two more books: Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (1956), a wide-ranging anthology of writings with an accent on literary flair, edited by Condon and Richard Gehman; and Eddie Condon's Scrapbook of Jazz (1973), a hugely entertaining collection of pictures and captions, collated by Condon and Hank O'Neal. From 1964 on, illness prevented him from traveling much, though he embarked on occasional tours and appeared from time to time in clubs and at festivals—his last performance was at a tribute to him at the Newport Jazz Festival-New York in 1972, the year before he died. Two years later, bassist Red Balaban opened a new jazz club called Eddie Condon's on 54th Street. The walls were covered with enlarged photographs of Condon and his favorite musicians; the music was Condon-style, plain and simple; and the place prospered through 1985—40 years after Condon opened his original saloon.”

[We Called It Music, Da Capo Press, 1986, revised 1991]