Jack Teagarden, Basin Street Blues and New Orleans

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

“‘Jack was just a gentle, good-natured, soft-spoken guy,’ said bassist Jack Lesberg, who worked with Teagarden countless times in the 1940s and '50s. ‘Never craved attention, or asked anything special from anybody. Never wanted to put himself forward. Just wanted to play and sing, and let life take care of the rest in whatever way it was going to.’

But all too often life doesn't take care of the rest. Even the yellow brick road can be all uphill, and there are indi­cations aplenty that, for Jack Teagarden, the slope was sometimes pretty steep.”

- Richard M. Sudhalter, The Complete Capitol Fifties Jack Teagarden Sessions [Mosaic MD4-168]

Thanks to its location in a small suburb about a dozen miles west of New Orleans, business trips to visit one of my oldest and largest clients often brought me to The Crescent City.

If truth be told, due to New Orleans’ famed Epicurean delights, my boss spent more time with the client over the course of a year than I did.

His explanation for this disparity was so that he could properly help them savor the wining and dining delights that the city is famous for as his way of saying “Thank You” for their business. In other words, he handled the partying and I took care of business. It was a huge account with a nice commission so I was delighted to do my part to keep it in place.

I generally got called in to smooth over any trouble spots and to do the “minor things” like the contract renewal!

Although the client was located in a suburban community just outside the city, we stayed at one of New Orleans’ downtown hotels, preferably The Fairmont.

And since I usually wasn’t a part of the eating rich foods and staying up late drinking 18-year old Scotch brigade, I often spent my free time walking along streets of the city’s French Quarter; streets whose names had been made famous in the titles of Dixieland Jazz such as Bourbon Street, Rampart Street and Basin Street.

Of course, by the time I got there, with the exception of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and occasional appearances by trumpeter Al Hirt and clarinetist Pete Fountain, Dixieland Jazz had been long gone from the streets of New Orleans, and especially from the French Quarter.

Still it was fun to amble down some of these historic venues in the early afternoon with the refrains of Jack Teagarden singing Basin Street Blues going through my mind. Besides Pops, of course, my earliest memories of New Orleans Jazz are associated with the old 78 rpms of Jack Teagarden music on my father's collection of 78 rpms.

Here are some thoughts, observations and comments about Jack as drawn from the writings of a number of respected authors.

Whitney Balliett, American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, excerpts taken from pages 160-164].

“Jack Teagarden was obsessed by music and by machines. In New York in the late twenties, when he was with Ben Pollack's band, he would some­times play around the clock. He would start at 6 p.m. with Pollack at the Park Central Hotel and would finish somewhere in Harlem, where he had gone to jam, the afternoon of the next day. …

Teagarden's love of machines was an extension of his love of his instrument. He thought of his trombone as a kind of machine, and he spent his life mastering its deceptive, resistant techniques, and redesign­ing mouthpieces, water valves, and mutes. His father, an engineer who took care of Texas cotton gins, taught him mechanics. When Teagarden was thirteen, he replaced the pipes in his grandmother's house, and a year later he became a full-fledged automobile mechanic. As an adult, he re­built and drove two Stanley Steamers. He was a flamboyant inventor. … Sometimes he built machines simply for the sake of building them. He constructed one that filled a room, and when he was asked what it did he replied, "Why, it's runnin', ain't it?"

His trombone and his machines were the interchangeable lyrical centers of his life, and they helped hold it together. It was, in many ways, a desperate life. Women flummoxed him. He was married four times, and none of the relationships worked very well. (He had two children by his first wife, and one by his last.) He had no head for money, and he was a gargantuan drinker—almost in the same class as his friends Fats Waller and Bunny Berigan. He was careless about his health: he had lost all his teeth by the time he was forty, and he had several bouts of pneumonia. He had little sense about his career.  …

Teagarden's demeanor and appearance always belied his travails. He was tall and handsome, solid through the chest and shoulders. He had a square, open face and widely spaced eyes, which he kept narrowed, not letting too much of the world in at a time. His black hair was combed flat, its part just to the left of center. He was sometimes confused with Jack Dempsey. He liked practical jokes, and he had an easy, Southern sense of humor, the kind that feeds on colloquialisms. (Asked once why he slept so much, he said that, like all Southerners, he was a slow sleeper.) …

Teagarden had several different tones: a light nasal one, a gruff, heavy one; and a weary, hoarse, one—a twilight tone he used for slow blues, and for ballads that moved him. He had a nearly faultless technique, yet it never called attention to itself. Opposites were compressed shrewdly in his style. Long notes were balanced by triplets, double-time spurts by laconic legato musings, busy­ness by silence, legitimate notes by blue notes, moans by roars.

Teagarden developed a set of master solos for his bread-and-butter tunes—the tunes that his listeners expected and that he must have played thousands of times: "Basin Street Blues," "A Hundred Years from Today," "Beale St. Blues," "Stars Fell on Alabama," "St. James Infirmary," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "After You've Gone." Each time, though, he would make generous and surprising changes—adding a decorative triplet, a dying blue note, a soaring glissando—and his listeners would be buoyed again. Sometimes he sank into his low register at the start of a slow blues solo and rose into his high register at its end. Like his friend and admirer Bobby Hackett, he stayed in the bourgeois register of his horn, cultivating his lyricism, his tones, his sense of order and logic. Teagarden was a good jazz singer. His singing, a distillation of his playing, formed a kind of aureole around it. He had a light baritone, which moved easily behind the beat. The rare consonants he used sounded like vowels, and his vowels were all pureed. His vocals were lullabies—lay-me-down-to-sleep patches of sound.

Teagarden gathered friends wherever he went. His playing stunned them when they first heard it, and it still stuns them. [Pianist] Jess Stacy:

"I thought he was the best trombonist who ever lived. When I made those Commodore sides with him in 1938—'Diane’ and 'Serenade to a Shylock'—he just walked in, warmed up, and hit out, and he played like an angel. He was an ace musician who could talk harmony like a college professor. He'd sit at the piano after a take and say, ‘Try this chord on the bridge, this C with a flatted ninth,’ and he'd be right. Of course, he was a wizard with tools, too. He always carried a tuning fork. He had perfect pitch, and he couldn't stand out-of-tune pianos. So he'd work at a bad piano between sets until he got it where it didn't drive him crazy anymore. They couldn't make them any nicer than Jack—never any conceit, never got on anybody's nerves."”

Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman [New York: Norton, 1993, excerpts drawn from pages 50-51].

“ …. We never heard anything like it. Such style and good taste and the way he knew his harmonies. It was such a wonderful feeling inside to hear someone do something so well."

Teagarden's warm, richly melodic, blues-drenched playing was com­pletely unlike the technically accomplished but emotionally remote approach to the instrument favored by Miff Mole, the premier white jazz trombonist up to now who was emulated by most other white trombone players, including Glenn Miller. Teagarden's impact upon the Pollack musicians and the rest of the jazz community in New York, black as well as white, can hardly be exaggerated. Gil Rodin thought he was the best trombonist he'd ever heard and claimed that the main reason Miller didn't return to the band was that he was humbled by Teagarden's hands-down superiority and knew everyone else really wanted him.

Benny and Teagarden took to each other's playing immediately. "Benny has always thrilled me," Teagarden said. "When we worked together in the old Ben Pollack orchestra ... he used to leave me so weak I couldn't hardly get out of the chair." For Benny, Teagarden "was an absolutely fantastic trombone player, and I loved to listen to him take solos." According to Pollack, "Benny Goodman was getting in everybody's hair about this time, because he was getting good and took all the choruses. But when Jack joined the band, Benny would turn around and pass the choruses on to Teagarden."

"I got about as many kicks out of hearing Jack play as any musician I've ever worked with," Benny maintained. But the peculiar remoteness that eventually became such a puzzling part of Benny's personality kept it from seeming that way at the beginning. "Benny used to worry me," Teagarden recalled. "He'd keep looking at me all the time, and it got on my nerves. One day I asked him, 'Say, you keep staring at me all the time. Do I annoy you—or is anything wrong?' Benny laughed and said, 'My gosh, no. But the things you play just keep surprising me!' " "Benny was hard to read,"

McPartland agreed. "He'd get a look on his face, and you really didn't know what he thought about anything. But he meant no ill will." "I never was much of a hand for talking about things I like, especially in those days," was Benny's comment on the incident. Bud Freeman claimed that Teagarden's advent changed the style of the band and left a permanent mark upon Benny's playing. "Benny Goodman, up to the time of hearing Jack, had not played much melody. He became a strong melodic player. I'm certain that this influence contributed strongly to Benny's greatness."

Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, excerpts drawn from pp. 709-710; 718].

“… [Jack’s] fascination with things mechanical found its most lasting expression in the unique way he played the trombone, particularly the solutions he devised to its technical problems

He found a solution, based on an intuitive understanding or now brass in­struments work. The higher a trumpet or trombone plays, the closer together the notes … and the more options it offers for producing a given note. Some such alternatives are so naturally out of tune that (on a valved in­strument especially) they can't be used at all. A trombone slide offers a chance to correct such pitch anomalies with often finely calibrated adjustments.

Multiplying this by all the levels of the overtone series makes clear what young Weldon discovered very early: with diligent practice, and relying on an unusually acute ear to adjust intonation, he could play almost any note he wanted (save the very low ones) by favoring positions which kept the slide close to his face.

Jazzmen who heard Teagarden throughout his career were often amazed that such a musical torrent could come of so little apparent slide movement. British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, for one, ‘marveled at the way in which [Teagarden's] huge, square right hand seemed to wave languidly an inch or two in front of his face while the notes tumbled out.’

…. [Lyttelton goes on to say that] ‘It is hard to find a single Teagarden record which he did not enhance with his beautiful, curiously blunted tone, his marvelously fluent articulation, his perfect rhythmic poise and the sheer elegance of his musical thought.’”

Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed., [pp. 1429-30]

“… Teagarden took the trombone to new levels, with his impeccable technique, fluency and gorgeous sound, allied to a feel for blues playing which alluded many of his white contemporaries. …

Teagarden's star is somehow in decline, since all his greatest work predates the LP era and at this distance it's difficult to hear how completely he changed the role of the trombone. In Tea's hands, this awkward barnyard instrument became majestic, sonorous and handsome. By the time he began recording in 1926 he was already a mature and easeful player whose feel for blues and nonchalant rhythmic drive made him stand out on the dance-band records he was making.”

Gunther Schuller, The Trombone in Jazz, in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 631-32].

“Jack Teagarden brought a whole new level of musical sophistication and musical expressivity to trombone playing.

… Teagarden had a very easy, secure high register, and as a con­sequence was one of the first trombonists to develop an abundance of "unorthodox" alternate slide positions, playing mostly on the upper partials of the harmonic series and thus rarely having to resort to the lower (fifth to seventh) positions. Since many of these alternate posi­tions are impure in intonation, it is remarkable how in tune Teagarden's playing was for that time. He had also developed an astonishingly easy lip trill—a sine qua non for today's trombonists, but still a great rarity in the 1920s—and was constantly experimenting with novel so­norities, produced by, for example, playing with a water glass held over the bell of his horn, or removing the bell altogether.

Teagarden was unique among trombonists in playing with a laid-back, "lazy" style, which many observers called a "Texas drawl." He also had quite a reputation as a singer, particularly of the blues, again in a superbly relaxed manner. Teagarden's essentially vocal, lyric trombone style, using lots of what brass players call "soft tonguing," has its parallel in the "slurred speech" approach—almost to the point of mushiness—in his singing.”

Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, [New York: Oxford, 1997, excerpts taken from pp. 82-84].

“Only one other white brass player of the day could approach [Bix] Beiderbecke in terms of individuality and creativity. Jack Teagarden stands out as the greatest of the traditional Jazz players on the trombone, and also left a mark as an important Jazz singer. …

Teagarden had few models to draw on—either on record or in person—during his formative years. The New Orleans tradition, despite its frequent use of the trom­bone, had done little to develop its possibilities as a solo voice. It more often served as a source of counter melodies or rhythmic accents, often linking harmonies with the slurred chromatic glissandi that characterized the "Tailgate" sound, a stock New Or­leans device associated most closely with Kid Ory.

In many ways, Teagarden's playing showed a disregard of formal methods, especially in his reliance on embouchure and alternate positions rather than slide technique; …, by the time of his arrival in New York [1927], Teagarden was already a seasoned musician. …

Teagarden displayed a sensitivity to the blues that few white players of his gener­ation could match. …

Although he was capable of virtuosic displays, Teagarden was most at home crafting a carefree, behind-the-beat style. Especially when he was singing, the lazy, "after-hours" quality to his delivery— incorporating elements of song, patter, and idle conversation—proved endearing to audiences, especially in the context of a jazz world that was only just discovering the potential of understatement. Teagarden was just as comfortable in simplifying the written melody as in ornamenting it.”

And let’s close this overview of Jack Teagarden with these comments from Martin Williams Preface to Jay D. Smith’s and Len Guttridge’s Jack Teagarden: The Story of a Jazz Maverick [New York: Da Capo, 1988].

“Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his in­strument, might have stepped into almost any kind of music and made a career for himself. But one thing that Jay D. Smith's and Len Guttridge's book makes clear is that Jack could not have been any kind of musician except a jazz musician.

A jazz musi­cian simply has to make his music and dedicate his life to it, even though he may not tell you (or himself) why he has to. He may not, indeed, even be able to say why, or need to say why. The need is to make the music and, necessarily, lead the life that makes that possible. All of which has little or nothing to do with ego or acclaim or money. He needs to give his music to the world and he hopes the world will understand.

You will find out about that need in these pages. You will also find plenty of the pranks and boys-will-be-boys anecdotes that seem so prevalent, diverting, and (under the surface) necessary a part of the musical life.

I could say that Smith and Guttridge engaged in a labor of love in researching and writing their book for Jack. But I would also describe it as a labor of infatuation, and

I offer that further description with respect.”

— Martin Williams October 1987”

“Infatuation” is a good word to use with Jack Teagarden’s music.

Jack Teagarden

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

Jack Teagarden (1905-64)

TROMBONE, VOCAL

“A Texan, Teagarden took the trombone to new levels, with his impeccable technique, fluency and gorgeous sound, allied to a feel for blues playing which eluded many of his white contemporaries. He was also a fine, idiosyncratic singer. He was with Ben Pollack for five years from 1928, with Paul Whiteman in the 305, and finally led his own swing orchestra, though it left him broke in the end. He joined the Louis Armstrong All Stars in 1946, stayed till 1951, then led small groups of his own and toured for the rest of his life. He died in New Orleans….

Teagarden's star is somehow in decline, since all his greatest work predates the LP era and at this distance it's difficult to hear how completely he changed the role of the trombone. In Tea's hands, this awkward barnyard instrument became majestic, sonorous and handsome. By the time he began recording in 1926 he was already a mature and easeful player whose feel for blues and nonchalant rhythmic drive made him stand out on the dance-band records he was making.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

“But Teagarden was different, and defining what made him different calls for a brief digression. Creative jazz soloists seem to fall into two general types. There are the proteans, endlessly questing, discovering, reinventing, reshaping—all in pursuit of some half-glimpsed, fugitive perfection. Among these, Coleman Hawkins springs readily to mind: over four decades his basic style took various forms, from silken smoothness to something occasionally approaching brutality. Like composer Igor Stravinsky, he seemed to devise and perfect a given mode or approach only to desert it, again auf der Suche. [literally “in search;” with the connotation of a quest].

Others, by contrast, arrive relatively early at an effective mode of expression, then spend the rest of their days adjusting, refining, polishing their creation to a high luster. Beyond argument, Jack Teagarden belongs to, exemplifies, the latter group: his style "set" quickly, and thereafter changed only subtly. It included not only recognizable patterns but entire "master choruses" on familiar numbers, delivered often enough to become trademarks. There were certain blues solos, all the more beloved for their familiarity; pet cadenzas, richly decorated with lightning triplets and gruppetti of impeccably executed sixteenth notes; set routines on such standards as "Basin Street Blues," "The Sheik of Araby," "Rockin' Chair," and the aforementioned ' 'St. James Infirmary.”

- Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.

“Because he was just the way he sounded — relaxed, warm and wonderfully creative — Jack Teagarden was one of the most beloved and most admired musicians in all of jazz history. He brought to music his own very personal, languid style, singing or swinging the blues on his trombone with a minimum of effort and a maximum of emotion. His admirers spanned two generations, beginning with fellow musicians like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and the Dorseys during the twenties and extending well into the sixties when a comparative youngster, Gerry Mulligan, proclaimed "He has everything a great jazz musician needs to have — a beautiful sound, a wonderful melodic sense, a deep feeling, a swinging beat, and the ability to make everything, even the most difficult things, sound relaxed and easy."”

- George T. Simon, The Big Bands, 4th Ed.

The emergence of Jack Teagarden as an important jazz stylist was a significant feature of the 1920s jazz scene. Big T, as he was affectionately known by his fellow musicians, brought a maturity and a solidity to the sound of the trombone and until late in his life played with a laconic grace that few, if any, on his instrument have equaled. His collaborations with Louis Armstrong — who rated their musical relationship higher than any he had known — was one of the great partnerships in Jazz history. The story of this funny, happy Texan is told with affection and detail in Jay D. Smith and Len Guttridge’s Jack Teagarden: The Story of a Jazz Maverick.

Originally published in 1960 by Macmillan and Company, Martin Williams, the esteemed Jazz author and critic, wrote the following forward to the paperback edition published by DaCapo Press in 1988.

“In 1950, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Louis Armstrong granted a long and generally fascinating interview to the editors of a magazine called the Record Changer. The publication was read by jazz record collectors, so there were many questions about Armstrong's early days and about his musical relationship to his mentor Joseph "King" Oliver. It was the elder cornetist who first brought the young Armstrong out of New Orleans, and who was an early influence on his style. Louis, as usual, was properly respectful of "Papa Joe." But he made it clear that he also wanted to talk about his current "brass team," and about Jack Teagarden. He rated that later musical relationship most highly, higher than any such he had ever known, it is safe to say.

The meshing of Armstrong and Teagarden was a close one musically, no question. And it was partly a matter of Louis's own sizable effect on everybody's music. However much he was inspired by Oliver, Armstrong has offered music something new, something which Oliver, for all his accomplishments and importance, had merely hinted at  — a new rhythmic sense, a new momentum, a swing based on several things, even on a new way of sounding the individual notes. Jack Teagarden was one of the first trombonists to absorb that Armstrong sense of swing in the Armstrong manner.

Teagarden's musical personality and demeanor were distinctly and unmistakably his own, however. Indeed, what Louis contributed could inspire the singularly concentrated ease of a Jack Teagarden on the one band, and (let us say) the stark three-minute dramas of a Billie Holiday on the other. And it could allow each of those artists (and hundreds of others) also to be themselves.

As I say, Teagarden was himself. And he was, technically speaking, a superb trombonist, a superb brassman. In the late 1950s, composer-arranger Bill Russo, himself a trombonist, declared that he had decided that Teagarden was, after all, the best trombone-player — and this at a time when a J.J. Johnson-inspired bebop virtuosity reigned supreme on the instrument, especially among the young. Earlier, Teagarden's 1950 recording of his dazzling variations on Richard Rodgers's Lover (a Broadway waltz converted into an up-tempo 4/4) was admired by young and old alike. And by audiences as well, for Lover quickly became something of a set-piece for Jack, joining Stars Fell on Alabama, Basin Street Blues, St. James Infirmary and I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues as a standard part of his almost-nightly repertory.

Most of the Teagarden standards were slower than Lover, of course, and they partly depended on the singular character of what has been called "the Teagarden aura." However, in those slower vehicles Jack's techniques often showed themselves at their best. His was an art of flourishes and ornaments, but flourishes so discreetly conceived and placed as to enhance and never draw attention to themselves. And his ornaments were executed with perfectly controlled combinations of the right embouchure and slide co-ordination. Perhaps only Ellington's virtuoso trombonist Lawrence Brown could rival them. And they depended on such quick, flexible lip techniques that perhaps only a man like trumpeter Harry Edison, some years later, might have challenged them.

The "live" recordings made at the remarkable 1947 Louis Armstrong All Stars, and of which you'll read more in these pages, were later issued on LP, and they show Jack's art succinctly. Here was Teagarden, mind you, on stage with Armstrong, and Armstrong was the kind of performer who needed only to walk in front of an audience to gain its full attention. And who needed only to blow a few of his powerful, authoritative notes to confirm that attention. In Teagarden's half-chorus solo on Pennies from Heaven (an Armstrong vehicle, after all) Jack distilled that piece's melody line to a simple, all-but-original lyric statement, and then ornamented his own lovely phrases with superbly understated terminal flourishes. And of course he made it all sound paradoxically easy. Then Jack, at center stage, played and sang St. James Infirmary with such totally straightforward, cool concentration that one would be hard put not to hang on to his every note and phrase.

Talk about a Teagarden aura! As if to say, "There is Louis's power (God bless him) and here is mine, and you see they aren't the same."

Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his instrument, might have stepped into almost any kind of music and made a career for himself. But one thing that Jay D. Smith's and Len Guttridge's book makes clear is that Jack could not have been any kind of musician except a Jazz musician. A Jazz musician simply has to make his music and dedicate his life to it, even though he may not tell you (or himself) why he has to. He may not, indeed, even be able to say why, or need to say why. The need is to make the music and, necessarily, lead the life that makes that possible. All of which has little or nothing to do with ego or acclaim or money. He needs to give his music to the world and he hopes the world will understand.

You will find out about that need in these pages. You will also find plenty of the pranks and boys-will-be-boys anecdotes that seem so prevalent, diverting, and (under the surface) necessary a part of the musical life.

I could say that Smith and Guttridge engaged in a labor of love in researching and writing their book for Jack. But I would also describe it as a labor of infatuation, and I offer that further description with respect.

— MARTIN WILLIAMS October 1987”

If you are not familiar with the career and music of Jack Teagarden, you owe to yourself to check it out in all its manifestations and Jay and Len’s biography is a good place to start. [You may also wish to seek out Howard J. Walters, Jr., Jack Teagarden’s Music: His Career and Records although used copies of it are somewhat expensive].

Sure, Jack is one of “the old guys,” but when Jack was a young guy, he was one of the inventors of the music we institutionalize today as “Jazz.” He was a courageous and brave man, who walked the talk and created the foundation for Jazz trombone in his lifetime along with the likes of Kid Ory and Miff Mole.

Imagine, night-after-night, standing next to Pops and playing Jazz!  Over the span of his brilliant career, Louis Armstrong didn’t share the stage with many, but there always was a spot for Big T.

Big T and Little Louie - when Giants Walked the Jazz World.

Edward “Kid” Ory: 1886-1973

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

“There is no confusion these days about what New Orleans "tailgate" trombone playing is all about. Most modern practitioners of that venerable style tend toward an exaggerated down-home aesthetic: screaming yawps, wild-man growls, howling blasts, blaring gutbucket smears. That is, all the unsubtle tricks and tropes that make people think of the trombone as a carnival novelty act.

If the current state of trad jazz trombone is any indication, then the philosopher was right-history does repeat itself as farce. But the first time around, New Orleans slip-horn playing was not the self-parody it has become. All the proof you could ever need is to be found in a new box set from Mosaic records: The Complete Kid Ory Verve Sessions. Recorded in the late 1950s, when Ory was in his early 70s, the Verve sides compiled by Mosaic demonstrate that Kid Ory's Creole trombone playing may not have been particularly complex or harmonically challenging, but for all its rambunctiousness, his music is nonetheless subtle and lyrical.”

- Eric Felten, JazzTimes review of The Complete Kid Ory Verve Recordings [Mosaic Records]

“Kid Ory is neither celebrity nor myth. He was a flesh-and-blood jazzman who arrived on the scene in New Orleans at the same time as the music itself. The man and the music came up together, reached maturity together and, ultimately, faded from the scene together.”

- John McCusker

“Then Jack Teagarden introduced the daddy of the tailgate trombonists, Edward “Kid” Ory. This septuagenarian strolled on stage looking extremely dapper in his white jacket and performed as though he might have been a “kid” for real.

His featured number was the great old standard he himself wrote about 40 years ago – “Muskrat Ramble” – and just to show he was riding with the times, he even shouted out a vocal using the lyrics written just a few years ago by Hollywood writer, Ray Gilbert.

Then Higginbotham and Teagarden joined Ory for a three-‘boned blast at that other perennial favorite – “High Society.”

- Bill Simon, liner notes to the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival appearance by Red Allen, Kid Ory, & Jack Teagarden with J.C. Higginbotham, Buster Bailey and Cozy Cole [Verve MGV-8233].

I had no idea who Kid Ory was when I first encountered him on the evening of July 4, 1957 at the Newport Jazz Festival.

But that wasn’t unusual in those days as I was still finding my way through Jazz. [Frankly I still am.]

The only familiar member of the group Kid Ory played with that night was fellow trombonist Jack Teagarden, whom my father idolized and was probably the reason why he picked that night for us to attend the NJF.

Perhaps another reason was that all of the groups appearing that evening were doing so in celebration of Louis Armstrong’s 57^th birthday.

I found out much later that there was a strong connection between Kid and Pops as Ory had been a member of Armstrong Hot Five when it produced the monumental records that ignited the Jazz world in 1925-1927.

I gather, too, that all of the other musicians on the stand that night in Freebody Park had played in one of the many bands that Pops had over the years including New Orleans-born trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen who had always idolized Louis.

J.C. Higginbotham on trombone, Buster Bailey on clarinet, Claude Hopkins on piano and Cozy Cole on drums all had historical connections to Pops and bassist Arvell Shaw was a member of Pops’ current band in 1957.

Kid Ory’s performance that night was the first time I saw and heard the “tailgate” trombone style that had developed when the first Jazz bands were towed around New Orleans in a horse-drawn wagon and the trombonist was seated at the end of the wagon with its tailgate down to allow clearance for the trombone slide to reach the lower positions on the horn.

By comparison, it was fascinating to watch Teagarden whose trombone slide rarely extended beyond the bell of the horn as Jack had developed a technique that allowed him to lip the lower positions without extending the slide at arms length. This technique involved less slide movement in general and allowed Jack to play the trombone easier at faster tempos.

A year or so after the concert I was a fortunate to find a Verve LP of this concert which was simply entitled Red Allen, Kid Ory, & Jack Teagarden with J.C. Higginbotham, Buster Bailey and Cozy Cole [MGV-8233].

Over the years, I picked-up a little information about Kid Ory from Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s Here Me Talkin’ To You, but I didn’t really understand his significance in terms the development of Jazz from the death of Buddy Bolden until the advent of the first Jazz recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917.

Before he left New Orleans for the West Coast in 1920, Kid Ory maintained one of the hottest bands in the Crescent City which was responsible for giving many young players their start in the music, including giving Louis Armstrong his first gig.

Kid Ory, then, was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trom­bone: Kid Ory And The Early Years Of Jazz tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader.

In 1925 Edward “Kid” Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.

In Creole Trom­bone: Kid Ory And The Early Years Of Jazz (University Press Of Mississippi), author John McCusker tells the story of a jazz musician arriving on the scene in New Orleans at the same time as the music itself. The man and the music came up together, reached maturity together and, ultimately, faded from the scene together.

The tale covers the years between 1900 and 1933 and that period is the book’s main focus. Kid Ory’s remembrances carry the story only to this point, and it would have been difficult to fill the remaining years without his voice. While the tale of his career revival in the forties is interesting, it is far less so than the earlier period and less relevant to the historical question:

“Who was Kid Ory?”

By way of background on the writer of the book that attempts to answer this question, John McCusker spent nearly 30 years as a staff photographer for The Times-Picayune. He was part of the team that shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its immediate aftermath. He was recently hired as staff photographer of the New Orleans bureau of The Advocate. Throughout his career, John has documented the people and places that gave New Orleans one of its many nicknames – The Cradle of Jazz.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles found this insight review of John McCusker’s Creole Trom­bone: Kid Ory And The Early Years Of Jazz (University Press Of Mississippi) in the June 2013 edition of Downbeat.

© -  Jennifer O’Dell/Downbeat, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

 Life of an Overlooked Bandleader

“The way the story of early New Orleans jazz is often told, there's a gap between Buddy Bolden, whose brief career ended with his institutionalization in 1907, and the recordings made by Joe "King" Oli­ver, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong in the early '20s. What gets glossed over are key facets of the music's development: With Bolden suddenly out of the picture, how did his danceable blues and gutbucket wails continue to inspire bands to play "hot," polyphonic music interspersed with so­los? What made that music catch on and spread beyond race lines and outside of the Crescent City? What legacies from this early period later contributed to the death of the Jazz Age?

As John McCusker writes in Creole Trom­bone: Kid Ory And The Early Years Of Jazz (University Press Of Mississippi), the life of one largely overlooked bandleader is a testa­ment to this turning point in jazz that helps an­swer these questions. McCusker states, this is the "story of a jazz musician arriving on the scene at the same time as the music itself. The man and the music came up together, reached maturity together and, ultimately, faded from the scene together."

A longtime photojournalist for the New Or­leans Times-Picayune who moonlighted as a jazz history tour guide, McCusker's pursuit of infor­mation about Ory began in the mid-'90s after someone in his group challenged his dismissive remarks about the trombonist's importance. Mc­Cusker consulted with Bruce Raeburn at Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive, who agreed with the tourist, positing that Edward "Kid" Ory's ca­reer was vital to the development of jazz. Raeburn's suggestion prompted a 15-year research odyssey for McCusker, who worked through— and in part, inspired by—the loss of his home and possessions in 2005, and of his wife just a few years later.

Using oral histories, recordings and what he describes as "loose pages" from an unfinished Ory autobiography, McCusker pieces together the story of a driven young musician who helped usher in the era of so-called "hot" playing, cher­ry-picked and nurtured the talents of Armstrong and Oliver, and eventually made the first record­ings by an all-black New Orleans jazz band. Ory's early recordings, both as a leader and in bands led by Armstrong and Morton, are covered here (along with an in-depth discography), as is his role in the 1940s revival of traditional New Or­leans jazz. But the picture McCusker paints of Louisiana's music scene from 1900-1919 is the book's highlight.

An early follower of Bolden and an astute student of both the music and the music busi­ness, Ory's path was self-determined. He formed a band in his rural hometown of LaPlace, La., with homemade instruments and wrangled gigs at fish fries and picnics until he could buy real in­struments for his young group, who frequently stole off into the night in search of visiting bands such as those led by Bolden or John Robichaux.

Ory showed leadership skills from the out­set, taking careful notice of variances in style, set-building techniques and, in McCusker's words, the "cutthroat and bargain basement" na­ture of New Orleans' music scene. He combined the most successful elements of everything he learned and plowed ahead with a business acu­men as sharp as his musicianship.

During "cutting contests," where wagons carrying bands to advertise shows would battle one another with music, Ory became notorious for pushing his group to win. He promoted his own shows, finding crafty ways with few resourc­es to cut out competition. His tenacity in playing for diverse audiences helped him create what Armstrong called "one of the hottest jazz bands that ever hit New Orleans." (Giving Satchmo his first steady gig didn't hurt.)

McCusker also offers an honest picture of the murky meanings of the term "Creole" from one parish or one New Orleans neighborhood to another during that time. Sight-reading Cre­ole musicians in places like the Seventh Ward, for example, played a different style than the Up­town players Ory identified with, despite his own mixed-race heritage.

Creole Trombone fills a needed hole in re­search about one of the period's most important bandleaders. But the story of Ory's success — and, after his move to California in 1919, his slow movement out of the picture until the 1940s — tells as much about the artist as it does about the development of the music and of New Orleans as a cultural center, making it a crucial text in the canon of Crescent City jazz history.”

                  

You can order copies directly from the publisher ay www.upress.state.ms/.

The following video features Edward “Kid” Ory in performances from the concert that took place at the Newport Jazz Festival on the evening of July 4, 1957 when Kid was joined by Red Allen, Jack Teagarden, J.C. Higginbotham, Buster Bailey, Claude Hopkins, Arvell Shaw and Cozy Cole.  

Jack Teagarden: The Man with the Blues in His Heart by Otis Ferguson

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

The JazzProfiles blog is as much a tribute to Jazz writers as it is an homage to the music and its makers. Jazz authors, editors and critics provide us with insights and information that helps enrich our listening experience.

Although we have previously featured his work on the blog, the name “Otis Ferguson” may still be an unfamiliar one

Malcolm Cowley, his closest friend at The New Republic, the magazine that published much of Otis Ferguson’s writings, had this to say about him:

“Ferguson's name is legendary in the field of jazz. He has been called "the best writer on jazz who ever lived" and "the most brilliant of them all." One of the first critics to write seriously about this native American music, he brought an understanding and appreciation of jazz to an audience far wider than the original small group of aficionados. Professional jazz musicians have been among his most ardent admirers.” [The Otis Ferguson Reader, p. 1].

Malcolm also offered these observations about Otis in his Foreword to The Otis Ferguson Reader:

“I find with regret that the work and even the name of Otis Ferguson are generally unknown to readers under sixty. Older persons are likely to remember the work with pleasure. Much of it dealt with swing bands or unpretentious, well-crafted films and, by extension, with the revival of popular culture during the 1930s, an aspect of the period that is often neglected. Otis—I can't address him coldly as "Ferguson"— approached those subjects freshly, accurately, with lyrical enthusiasm and with contempt for anything faked. Everything he wrote was attentively read in its time, besides leaving echoes in the work of later critics. But the author, who had volunteered as a merchant seaman, was blown up by a German bomb in the Gulf of Salerno, and soon his writing became hard to find except in the back flies of magazines, chiefly The New Republic. Now, after forty years, it is good to learn that the best of the writing, in many fields, is being collected as an Otis Ferguson Reader.”

If you haven’t read Otis Ferguson, you are in for a treat. The following appeared in The New Republic on July 14, 1937.

“Jack Teagarden (otherwise Jackson, Mister Jack, Mister T., Big Gate, etc.) is one of the really high men in the jazz collection, I'll tell you more about it. At the outset it should be said that he has been playing around half his lifetime in a business that sets the most grueling pace of any. On the stand, off the stand, on the train, and up on another stand night after night after night, rehearsals and recording dates, a different hotel and different babes but the same arrangements and iron routine. And the same bottle. Yet a man is supposed to bring it out clean and inspired every time his number is called, and it is a mortal truth that playing it that way in jazz means playing as though you had a fire under you. Teagarden has been on this griddle a long time. Though still a fine musician, he seems tired and cynical, his creation a bit shopworn-which knowing gentlemen have not hesitated to remark or less knowing gentlemen to echo, which in itself is enough to embitter a fellow and make him listless.

Word about him is always going around. He was with Whiteman in the long stretch when they were playing Jumbo and it was getting him down and he was taking more heavily to drink and just about on his deathbed. Then it was over and the word was that Jack was sitting in with the Boys in the Spots and this was a new lease on life. Then he went to Texas and then he and a few others were playing nightly at the Hickory House in a very weary and dispirited jam combination, and it was common knowledge that Jack was taking more heavily to drink and practically on his, etc. Then they were on the road for months, and I saw them in Miami, where they were playing a slew of marches for the greyhound races, and it struck me that Jack did not like marches or greyhounds either, and it didn't help any when he put a dollar on a dog out of sheer boredom and the pooch would stop and go to work on a flea somewhere around the back stretch. Then this spring the Goodman band was playing that New York sweatbox with the odd name of Roseland, crowds bulging the walls out and all, and when the boys finally got away from the stand in the first intermission, the word was that Jack was sitting right on the edge of the platform and his eyes were bugging out, and he was very happy and he had a jug. The new-lease-on-life idea, of course. Now he is down in Texas with Whiteman again and I presume the word is still going around. Well, the point is that a man's bones get weary after a while, and if he doesn't want to go on forever playing it as though it were being torn out of him, and playing for practically marbles, why all right, then. Jack could stop playing as of today and still have more splendor behind him than the latest fourteen-year-old wonder will pick up in the next ten years. Happy is he, in this game, who dies before his time.

Jack Teagarden was born in Texas a little over thirty years ago, with two brothers to follow in the family (Charles plays trumpet beside him in the Whiteman band today). When he was fifteen, he was playing trombone with a brass band, and after that he had jobs with cowboy bands, etc. By the time he was twenty-one, he had come up from Texas and was playing in the Ben Pollack orchestra, which had Benny and Harry Goodman, Jimmy McPartland, etc., and was one of the high-water marks of its time. His face was round, his hair was black and he parted it in the middle and slicked it back. He had a lazy baritone voice that was musical even in speech and Texas all over the place, strong-fibered and rich for singing-though in the early days he made his way wholly on his instrument, which up to his time had been a sort of sliding musical joke.

If there is less doubt today that the trombone is a beautiful horn, full of color and ring and deep power—its high notes played against such exciting resistance, its lows so broad, dark, and hoarse—it is thanks to Jack, along with Jimmy Harrison, Charlie Green, Higginbotham and (with more mechanical verve) Miff Mole, Tommy Dorsey, Bill Rank. I mention these names because no one has quite done for the trombone what Bix Beiderbecke did for the cornet, mastering the instrument completely as a medium for the gusty winds of music that brewed within him. Mole and Rank had that explosive round perfection of each note as hit; Dorsey has a truer singing quality on the "sweet" side than anything recorded; the Negroes (Harrison, etc.) had the raw creative strength. But as an all-around man, Teagarden for me comes nearest to that high spirit in brass. There is the same singing strength and style of his own, the same feeling that this was the instrument with just the timbre and interval to suit him best and he the best suited to it.

He will hit fuzzy ones sometimes, sometimes crowd his horn too much, and often bring back the same variation for a supposedly different theme; but taken at his best, he has that clear construction in melodic lines, that insistent suggestion through complexity of the simple prime beat. And in both tonal and rhythmic attack there is that constant hint of conquest over an imposed resistance which is peculiar to jazz and therefore indefinable in other terms. Something like the difference between driving a spike cleanly into a solid oak block and the hollow victory of sinking it in lath and plaster. Something like what it takes to hold a note and make it build powerfully, or hammer it back in at intervals to dominate a chorus, or come out of a whole burst of notes with three deliberate tones, mounted (as it were) in a sudden ringing silence. Not what it takes, certainly, to play in perfect unison and proper blare a march for Jumbo or the Biscayne Kennel Club—Jack does that, too, as he must to live, but there both instrument and man are merely the highly perfected instrument for somebody else's music —Sousa or whoever. Every man his own composer is the rule in jazz, which is demonstrated once more in the work of Teagarden, building up behind those single-tone vibrato attacks and tortured triplets, running clear in the wide long open beauty of the blues, the lazy rest and slur; every note true to its inner laws of pitch and overtone, true in its relation to the harmonic structure and mood of the piece; the man leaning back against the iron signature or riding it easily, or rampaging on against the van of it like some great brass bull.

Jack has been everywhere, but I suppose the time with Pollack, the first taste of real fame and flush of power were the best for him (his recordings with the Red Nichols outfits are really the best for us). After Pollack he went on the fierce grind of the Mai Hallett organization, along with Gene Krupa and others; and while he has been with Whiteman for years, it is hard to keep track of the men he has played or recorded with meanwhile. He played with the great Louis Armstrong orchestra that recorded "Knockin' a Jug," he is to be heard on some of the works of the Chicago group, he did a lot of jobs with Benny Goodman's recording bands (Someone once remarked that the Goodman family had everything but a trombone. "What do you mean?" one of them said. "We've got Jack"); he was in the movies, has always been featured by Whiteman and Trumbauer, and has made some records under his own name. When Hoagy Carmichael gathered all the stars to put some of his songs on wax, there was Mr. Jackson at the end of "Georgia" playing five or six phrases in as beautiful a mood of invention as you will hear; and when the Venuti-Lang team gathered an "all-star" group to make four sides, there he was again, prominent all the way through, particularly in the best of his recorded "Beale Street Blues";he played one date behind the great Bessie Smith.

And all the time he has been turning out music with a warmth and incessant play of the unexpected that you could never describe, but never confuse with anyone else's. He can take a group of notes in three simple progressions and make them a source of repeated surprise and delight by managing to shift the emphasis, invert the expected order, surge ahead and then hold all and then suddenly bring all out into one of those full measured tones he gets, true in the center and edged with a fine coarse vibrato (the controlled shake of the instrument, the pressure of air to the lips and lips to the mouthpiece—embouchure, if you wish). And, in the measure of his chorus, he always uses the savage velvet of a good trombone, the beat of jazz and lilt of the phrases to arrive at something that is terrific on a leash or sad, or gorgeous, or enchanting with echoes of a better day. His music all through has a true singing quality (though there are many heroes who can be just terrific or technically amazing, those who can throw out a line of notes that will make a kind of song are few and stand at the top) and indeed he can put away his instrument at any time and sing a chorus like an angel. But an angel from Texas, gone a little maverick. They delight to use him for kidding numbers, as witness the classic they did on "The Sheik," but his singing voice goes best with the blues and is a clue to the penetrating, lazy kind of sadness that hangs in his best overtones. I mentioned the "Georgia" number, and there are countless others where nostalgia might be explained by fidelity to content, but when you take the solo (as finely constructed a piece of work, incidentally, as he or anybody else has managed) in a number called "I'm Just Wild about Harry," and hear the phrases drop like an instinctive sorrowing for the sins of the race—then you can tell where he came from and where his heart lies. Running through all his work, singing or playing-“I was born down in Texas, raised in Tennessee” —you can catch the echo of it almost as distinctly as though someone had said it: the heritage, the true lift and music of the blues.

“Said I was born in Texas, raised in Tennessee.” It is an American form, peculiar and beautiful, and its naive turns are never foolish except in the mouths of those who burlesque it without knowing or seeing the enduring strength of its simplicities.

“And there ain't no one woman

Going to make a fat-mouth out of me.”

You have to have it early and have it plenty, it has to come from some reservoir of native experience, combining that expression of the world's sadness with that fine derision for the facts of common life.

(I said a fat-mouth out of me.)

So that old Beale Street jive ("New York might be all right, but Beale Street's paved with gold") seems to lie just behind this man's best work. And I am not joking or filling out an article when I say that Mr. Teagarden's best work is one of those things that has about its edges the strange and awful air of pure creation, something that was brought out because it was born in him like a gift and had to get out. It would be a far far better thing to be Jack Teagarden today, I think sometimes, blowing it out listlessly with Whiteman and perhaps hung over like a chimney full of bricks—and have that much behind you, irrevocable and accomplished—than to be any one of twenty young geniuses breaking out into no matter what art with no matter what talents. For a man lives best by the best that he has done, and so there can hardly be any premature burials of Jack Teagarden, because he has already done pretty fine.”

The New Republic, 14 July 1937