Vic Dickenson - A Melodic Trombonist

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

A recent feature on trombonist J.C. Higginbotham brought to mind Vic Dickenson, Dickie Wells, and Trummy Young.

You don’t hear their names mentioned very much in Jazz circles, although I would suspect that Trummy gets a nod or two occasionally because of his long association with Louis Armstrong, but all three were individual stylists who made their mark on the instrument and the music.

As part of its continuing effort to remember those Jazz musicians who shaped the music during the early years of its creation, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles searched out sources and developed the following profile of Vic Dickenson from Stanley Dance’s articles about Vic that he wrote for Melody Maker [1954] and Down Beat [1964] magazines and as part of the insert notes for Vic’s recordings on the Vanguard label. We’ve also included some material by Michael Shera and Sinclair Traill who reviewed Vic’s Fontana and Vanguard recordings for the Jazz Journal.

What never ceases to amaze me when I research one of these back-in-the-day stories is how much local work was available for musicians outside of the major cities. Of course, one of the reasons for this was if you wanted to hear music then you had to “make it” and not just reproduce it in some sort of technical fashion. The radio and records were making their presence felt but music was still something that you went to hear played by real, live musicians. It was a means to socialize not a form of solitary musing and a way to close out the world with ear buds plugged into an Mp3 player or downloading digitalized music from The Cloud.

According to Leonard Feather's syndicated column, when Vic Dickenson flew out to Monterey, Calif., for the jazz festival there in September 1964, he received a "standing ovation from the youthful audience"  for his "tongue-in-horn trombone ... on Basin Street Blues" A short time before, Down Beat's International Jazz Critics Poll, in which some 52 critics participated, showed Dickenson sharing third place in the trombone section with Lawrence Brown.

This is remarkable at a time when a jazz musician's popularity depends a great deal upon successful phonograph records. There isn't a single album under Dickenson's name in the Schwann catalog, and he has done relatively little recording of any kind in the last few years. During that period he has seldom played in any of the major jazz venues, but he has not been inactive. With pianist Red Richards he has been a mainstay of a sextet called the Saints and Sinners, which plays regularly to a loyal and devoted following in cities like Pittsburgh, Pa.; Columbus, Ohio; and Toronto, Ontario.

There were quite a few persons at the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival early last summer who hurried eagerly down the hill on the festival's last night and into the Riverboat Lounge of the Pitt-Sheraton Hotel, where this group was appearing. With Dickenson in the front line were two other veterans, clarinetist Buster Bailey and trumpeter Herman Autrey. The rhythm section was completed by bassist Danny Mastri and drummer Jackie Williams.

The Saints and Sinners play some Dixieland when they work in that room, but what they were playing about 1 a.m. that particular Sunday was a long-lost Benny Carter song called Blues in My Heart, and they were playing it with feeling and imagination in a neat head arrangement, with backgrounds to each other's solos, as though they were a team.

They have a lot of numbers like that, including a Lonesome Road that rocks at a singularly appropriate medium tempo, and they play them in a way that suggests the Eddie Heywood and John Kirby groups of a few years ago, except that it is more down and more punchy. In their version of Bourbon Street Parade, there's a very effective background figure that Dickenson said came out of Alexander's Ragtime Band.

"I contribute a little," he added modestly. "We all get together, and I give a few ideas."

He is not a little unusual today in his love and knowledge of melodies and in a mind that inclines to original tempos and treatment for them.

"He knows about a million numbers," his friend trombonist Dickie Wells once said, "and he always likes to play melodies."

"That's partly true," Dickenson said. "I like to play the melody, and I want it still to be heard, but I like to rephrase it and bring out something fresh in it, as though I were talking or singing to someone. I don't want to play it as written, because there's usually something square in it. Now, Johnny Hodges, he plays melody; but he makes such beautiful melody because he plays it his own way. He's one of the best soloists I know. You've got to feel it, and Johnny does. He's the greatest alto, I think. Sidney Bechet had a lot of what Johnny has, but it wasn't as smooth and tender. He played with more drive and was rougher."

Dickenson was born 58 years ago in Xenia, Ohio, in a musical milieu. There was an organ in the house, but he never, he noted with sadness, heard his mother play it. His father played a little violin—"folk music, you might call it," he recalled—and his own first instrument was harmonica. "I could play things like There's No Place Like Home" he said, "but I couldn't play them well."

His brother was supposed to be taking trombone lessons but failed to give much time to the horn, which lay about the house, neglected. The time came when the principal at young Vic's school decided to form a band and asked all the children who had instruments to bring them. Vic told him he had a trombone at home but didn't know anything about it. "Bring it on in anyhow," said the principal, who formerly had been a trombone player.

He showed the youngster positions by the solfeggio method and left him to find where they were in every key by himself.

"I had been something of a singer when I was a kid, and that was the way the singing teacher had taught us, so it wasn't too hard to understand," he said. "But it takes time to learn trombone. It's the brass horn most like the violin, and it's a matter of position rather than valve. You just have to learn to feel it, so you won't play this note too flat or too sharp. I used to copy records at first, and I loved Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, but then I got tired of hearing the trombone and wanted to play like the other instruments. The singing and the words meant nothing to me; it was the horns and the melodies that I heard. The trombone's part was too limited, and I learned what everybody played on the records, the saxes and clarinets, too."

Dickenson's father was a plastering contractor, and his two sons were learning the trade in Columbus when Vic met with a serious accident. "I had a heavy hod full of mortar on my shoulder, and a rung of a ladder broke," he explained. "I was bent back double and never could lift anything heavy after that, so I had to quit hard, physical work."

Vic and his brother, Carter, who played clarinet and alto, joined Roy Brown's band in Columbus. A cousin, also a plasterer, was playing piano in it, but only in F-sharp. "And I could play very good in F-sharp," Vic said. This was his first professional band, and after that, he and his brother were in another local group, the Night Owls. Work and money were not plentiful around Columbus, however, and eventually Carter joined a band from Cleveland while Vic went off to another led by Don Phillips in Madison, Wis.

"I was up there until I was fired because I couldn't read," he recalled. " Play the C scale,' the leader said one day. I didn't know the C scale from any other, because I was playing from do-re-mi-fa, but I could pick up the horn and play anything I heard on it. It was just like singing to me. I was fired without being given any notice or transportation back, and that made me mad. I had to play piano and sing to make enough money to leave.

"After that experience, I learned to read and to arrange by myself, from books and by asking questions. That would be about 1926.

"I found that to play melody on a trombone, you had to transpose pieces to a brighter key than the one they were originally written in. I'd heard Claude Jones with the Synco Septet by this time—he was with McKinney's Cotton Pickers later—and been very impressed. He didn't play the instrument like a trombone. He played all over it. Then I heard Jimmy Harrison with Fletcher Henderson's band, which was popular around that time—1926-'29. I also used to buy all the Gennett records by Ladd's Black Aces, and I liked the way Miff Mole played melody, rather than the old way that sounded like a dying cow in a thunderstorm.

"The trombone was late developing as compared with the other horns. Jimmy Harrison and Jack Teagarden both sounded like Louis Armstrong, and they influenced me because they were playing the way I had wanted to play before I heard them."

While he was still studying, Dickenson went to Kentucky for a period and then to Cincinnati, where he took J.C. Higginbotham's place with Helvey's Troubadours.

Then he went back to Madison and a band that contained trumpeter Reunald Jones and some of the musicians he had previously worked with, but this time they were fronted by Leonard Gay.

On his return to Columbus in 1929, he joined Speed Webb's band for a little over a year.

"It was a very good band," he said. "Webb had Roy Eldridge, who used to come down from Detroit with his brother, and Teddy Wilson and his brother. Teddy was crazy about [pianist] Earl Hines and was playing beautifully even then. Seven guys arranged in that band, including Teddy's brother Gus, and every week we had seven new arrangements. Of course, we played everything in the way of dance music in those days — waltzes, pop songs, everything. I did some arranging, but I didn't bother with it much because I found it held me up in my playing. I'd be thinking about the other horns and get mixed up. I wouldn't want to get into it now unless I stopped playing. I imagine that was how it was with Sy Oliver. It's not the same for a piano player, because he's got everything there. Playing a horn is a different thing.

"Sy Oliver was in Zack Whyte's band, which Roy Eldridge and I joined in Cincinnati. Several guys left Speed Webb because there was no work. Zack was playing walk-athons. That was what they were called, but people just danced, for hours and hours and hours. It was like pole-sitting, to see how long they could do it. We'd play for a time, and then another band would take over.

"After we'd been to the Savoy in New York, we went out on a five-band tour with Bennie Moten, Blanche Calloway, Andy Kirk, and Chick Webb. We played all around, and the tour broke up in Cincinnati. The guys weren't making so much, but the ballrooms used to be jammed, and the promoters made money. That was how the Kansas City guys came to know about me. When Bennie Moten's band was splitting up, they sent for me. So I went out there and played with Thamon Hayes for a while. Harlan Leonard was in that band, and later he took it over. I left after a few months but went back the following year."

This time they had a booker and went down the Missouri on a boat, up the Mississippi and on to Peoria, Illinois. From there they went to Chicago, where a lot of negotiating went on but not much happened, Dickenson said. Eventually he got a wire from Blanche Calloway and joined her band. Her brother Cab was famous then, and besides Blanche there was a Ruth Calloway and several other Calloways trying to cash in on the name. "But so far as I know," Dickenson said, "Blanche was the only other one to have a good band, with people like Ben Webster in it."

On records, she did a lot of singing, but in person the band played plenty of dance music. Dickenson stayed with her from 1933 to 1936 and then joined Claude Hopkins. After a year with Benny Carter in 1939, the trombonist joined the flourishing Count Basie Band.

"All the musicians knew me," he remembered, "but it wasn't until I was with Basie that the writers and people seemed to become aware of me. Dickie Wells and Dan Minor were in the section with me. Being with Basie was a big help to me. Dickie and I played the jazz solos, and we had many a nice drink together. There were two or three numbers on which we both used to solo.

"When I left Basie in 1941, I worked with Sidney Bechet. He and I got on fine together, personally and musically. He had a style of his own, and you had to

know it. He just didn't like trumpet players. He said they got in his way."

The next job was with trumpeter Frankie Newton, and Dickenson was with the band at Cafe Society in New York City when Newton's contract ran out. Pianist Eddie Heywood's trio was hired and after about one night of the trio, the boss called to see if Dickenson wanted to come down and play with Heywood. The trombone was the first horn Heywood had. After playing the downtown cafe, they went to California and then came back and played the Cafe Society Uptown as well as 52nd St. By this time the Heywood group was a sextet, with trumpet and alto saxophone added to Dickenson's trombone in the front line.

"I got very sick when I was out on the coast again in 1947," Dickenson said. "I had a lot of trouble with an abscessed ulcer, and I had to hang around a long while and have a second operation. In the meantime, I formed my own band, and it was pretty nice, though the fellows in it were not well known."

When he returned east, Dickenson "played around Boston for a long, long time—about eight years." He went into the Savoy there with clarinetist Edmond Hall and stayed on as a kind of house trombonist until the manager opened his own club downtown. Dickenson took over there with his friend Buster Bailey and stayed on to play first with Jimmy and Marian McPartland and then with Bobby Hackett. After working in New York with Hackett, he went back to Boston and George Wein's Mahogany Hall. Pianist-promoter Wein's appreciation of the trombonist's talent subsequently led to Dickenson's appearances at Newport and in Belgium, Germany, and Japan.

In 1957 Dickenson returned to New York and once more took J.C. Higginbotham's chair, this time with Red Allen and Buster Bailey at the Metropole.

With Red Richards, the story comes up to date. "I'd known Red since the early '30s, when we both lived in Harlem," Dickenson said. "He would go out and play piano as a single, but he and I used to sit down and talk about getting a group together, and the Saints and Sinners really began about 1960. Since then, that has been the main thing."

Today, Dickenson, a musician of considerable and varied experience, still has a number of unresolved ambitions.

"I always wanted to record with my brother, Carter," he said, "but he died earlier this year. He played alto and clarinet very well, and he was due to retire from the mail service in 1964, and then I thought it would be easy to get him to come and make a record with me, if only someone would have backed me.

"I would like to make an album that was really my own, one where I picked the men. Every time I've made a record, someone else has picked for me. I'd like seven or eight pieces, and if I chose them, I would get real co-operation. I have some beautiful numbers of my own, too, that I want to record, but I want my own date—and royalties. I never have had any royalties on any records. When I was in Japan and Australia, people were always asking where they could get my records.

Sometimes I wonder whether companies wait until musicians die before they reissue records, so that they won't have to pay royalties. "One of my numbers was recorded in 1956—What Have You Done with the Key to My Heart?—but it was issued in Europe only. It was a good album, made with Budd Johnson (one of the greatest), Andre Persiany, and Taft Jordan. Some of my numbers like that could use a good singer. You know who I would like to record with— the Mills Brothers! As I said, I always have liked melodies."

"One Man's Road" by Clare Fischer

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

One of the most pleasant associations I ever had during my time playing Jazz back when the World was young was formed during an afternoon I spent in the company of Clare Fischer at his home in the lovely Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles.

My close friend and bassist Harvey Newmark telephoned to ask if I could make a rehearsal with Clare at his home.

Clare was forming a new trio as bassist Gary Peacock had just left for New York and drummer Gene Stone had gone on the road with a vocal group.

Clare was a cordial host and we spent the afternoon making music with occasional breaks to brew coffee. Clare ground his own coffee beans, used a Chemex glass coffee pot and paper filters and produced some of the most delicious coffee I had ever tasted.

The music he made was “delicious," too, and over the years, I followed Clare’s career closely and heard him perform in person on a number of occasions.

I found Clare to be one of the most articulate and erudite persons I ever met, in or out of the Jazz world.

The following piece by Clare is another of the examples that Gene Lees offered in support of his premise that Jazz musicians, on average, are a highly articulate group. Here’s how he explained this argument in the February 1985 edition of the Jazzletter from which the Fischer article  is also drawn.

“Jazz musicians are often extremely well read. They perceive and think subtly and deeply, although they are often cautious — not shy — about whom they share their insights with. If they know you, they'll talk your ear off. I have already dealt, in one of the early issues of the Jazzletter, with a tendency of jazz musicians in the old days to let outsiders believe they were dumb, in both senses of the word. But this was an affectation, growing out of slavery in America — the camouflage of one's intelligence as a way of lying low. It was a bit of an act, that hey-baby-wha's-happ'nin' manner, which eventually developed into a sort of self-satirizing in-joke. Anyone deceived by it didn't know jazz musicians very well. While I have known a few musicians who fit the shy-inarticulate mould, they have been the exceptions. And even then, you never knew when they were merely taciturn, rather than inarticulate.”

By Clare Fischer

“When I read the Jazzletter, I am constantly amazed that I find myself so stimulated. I envy the forum you have created, whether for getting something off your chest or for fine humor. I laugh, sometimes so strongly I'm sorely conscious of doing it by myself. I cry, thankful that I am by myself. I get angry over some inequity you are dealing with. Never have I responded so often to so much from a single source.

You touch on many areas that seem to strike similar experiences in my own life. Language seems to be my undoing. I have, as you have, had interesting experiences in foreign languages. I see such parallels between music and language. But that which is so important to me doesn't seem to mean much to anyone else. And so I know what it is to be a minority in this world.

In whatever area of endeavor — physics, medicine, music, you name it — less than ten percent of the people have real insight and capability. Though the remaining ninety percent are stamped, licensed, approved, given degrees and other approbations by the State, you will search long and hard to find a really good doctor, a really insightful professor, a good musician. Most of them are going through the motions, teachers who have nothing to teach contriving to give the illusion of teaching and firmly convinced that they are doing so. The ninety percent are of course the democratic majority and, as such, make up the membership of the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and N.A.J.E. In this democracy where everyone is equal, few people perceive how unequal we are.

Ears, for example. Most people do not have accurate or perceptive hearing. Each person evaluates what he hears convinced he has the total.

Language goes through its degeneration in a variety of ways, but one of the most common is through not hearing accurately. In old English, those words which we now spell with wh were spelled hw, and even though some scribes transposed this to wh, we continued to pronounce the aspirated h before the w, thus being able to differentiate whale (hwale) from wail, why from Y, what from watt, and where from ware. One of the funniest examples of this deterioration occurs in an Angie Dickenson toothpaste commercial. She does not pronounce the h in "whitest", and since she pronounces intervocallic t like d, "whitest" comes out "widest". Who wants wide teeth? And who wants to save the wails?

The same thing happens with harmonies. People hear to a degree commensurate with their level of understanding. Many are incapable of transcribing solos or arrangements from records because they fit what they hear through what they understand.

The worst ramification is the effect the unperceptive ninety percent have on the insightful ten percent — the American Medical Association fighting off innovative ideas and procedures from the minority; the following of musical styles in vogue by the many and the squelching of the individuals in music. The majority go through the motions, convinced they are playing music. And that is a description of this year's [1985]Grammy awards!

When I was a young musician, having first listened to Meade Lux Lewis, Fatha Hines, Nat Cole, Art Tatum, and Bud Powell, I paid attention to pianists. Subsequently I found more interest in the horn players and composers - Hawkins, the Duke, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster among them. They were mostly sax players, and alto sax players at that. I followed Diz and Bird most devotedly and vividly remember the marvelous unfolding of the bop period. But I soon tired of that unperceptive majority who were aping Parker.

I had a strong black influence in my early years, and worked at the age of fifteen at a Crispus Attucks American Legion Hall with an all-black band. I wore what we called drapes during that period, the only time in my life that I was clothes conscious. I was ostracized by my high school class because of my "mixing". I only knew that this music was alive in a way that contrasted sharply with so much "white" music. I listened only peripherally to the Dorseys and Glenn Miller, being more interested in Ellington, Basie, Henderson and — out of Chicago - King Kolax.

When I went on to college, I roomed with students from Latin America, especially a Puerto Rican by the name of Roberto Fortier. This, the late 1940s, was the heyday of the mambo, and could he dance! I was besieged by Tito Puente, Machito, Tito Rodriguez and many others. I listened, but did not myself attempt to play this music.

It was about this time that I heard Lee Konitz for the first time and, developing now along more sophisticated lines myself, I embraced his work as a devotee. I mean everything he touched brought response of the strongest kind. I transcribed his solos by the dozen. I copied them on vellum so that I could give them to others. This is the one player who influenced me most.

I never cared for Lennie Tristano. He seemed too stiff and tight-assed for me. Lee was loose, with a melodic angularity and harmonic originality. Then what happened? Lee was the talented ten percent pressured by the democratic majority. "He played a lot of notes, but he didn't swing." He did not receive the acclaim he deserved because the ninety percent said Bird, Bird and nothing but the Bird. He didn't sound like Bird. He didn't play like Bird. He was an absolutely original voice.

The era of black political awareness was dawning, and although jazz had been one of the first areas where black-white equality was practiced, now a strong exclusionary attitude set in among many black jazz musicians. Some of it was conscious, some of it was unconscious, as in a wonderful quote from Gerald Wilson in a college listening course: "This was one of the better non-black bands."

To be a white jazz musician in certain circles at that time, one had to carry a passport with visa. Lee Konitz, the sensitive Jewish kid, began chasing after his "black soul", as he was quoted in Down Beat. The result? He has changed radically from what he was originally. He lost his genius and is now indistinguishable from any number of saxophone players. He uses a plastic reed, is capable of squawking, and at times can play extremely out of tune.

Jazz was and is a street music, but as each generation has played it different elements have entered it at different levels: greater instrumental technique, more sophisticated harmonies, more complicated rhythmic structures and those who react against them - - starting with the bop-Dixie conflict and growing, ever growing, until each part has split off from the main stem to the point where there is no main stem. The latest thing seems to be fusion, which many see as a development of jazz but which I contend is a development of rock and roll.

With all this divergence, and knowing that there is no one jazz that is universal, one tries to maintain that element necessary to function totally -- self-confidence. To some it comes early, existing in youthful naivete. To others, like me, it comes late.

I started out to be a classical composer and got sidetracked into jazz. I have been as influenced by Bach, Bartok, Berg, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Dutilleux, Schoenberg, as I have by Ellington, Bud Powell et al. When I play the blues I fuse Meade Lux Lewis' old chord changes with Duke Ellington colors voiced via Stravinsky. I feel I am more influenced as a pianist by what I have explored or developed as a writer, and more influenced by composers than pianists.

When I came to Los Angeles in 1958 I spent much time in East L.A. finding out what Latin music was made of. I had known instinctively that what I heard jazz musicians play for Latin was ersatz. During this period I met and played with Cal Tjader. I wrote several albums for him. Then raising a family took over my life, and I became heavily involved with studio music. For about ten years I did that almost exclusively. When I did play in public the press usually said, "Studio musician fronts jazz group." And all the while I thought I was a jazz musician who played in the studios. Finally, about eight years ago, after a hiatus in Latin jazz of fifteen years, Cal asked me to record and play again with his group. At this time in my life, my late forties, I started with my own group, Salsa Picante, and with my vocal group 2 + 2.

Suddenly everything in my life coalesced — my interest in the Latin culture, my self-confidence, and above all, feeling good about what I was doing.

Unless the instrument is a beauty, I do not play the piano now. I prefer electric pianos, digital pianos, and organ, because the sound sources are so exciting. Plus, with amplification, you don't have to beat your arthritic knuckles to the bone fighting drummers whose dynamic sensibilities are of the Mack truck variety.

Every player has to find those aspects of his own work that are unique in order to believe in himself. When you at last know you are good but do not manifest conceit in talking about it, it seems to me that maturity sets in. I have ample technique, but there are those whose chops leave me in the dust. There are those who play faster and swing harder than I do. But I know my strengths: harmonic voicings and harmony in general, sensitive and innovative melodic turns, with my own sense of rhythmic phrasing.

I'm in virgin territory, blazing my own trails. After years of being influenced by others and developing my own voice out of all of it, I now at fifty-six find myself influencing others. And that's scarey. Here I am, not completely established myself and others are utilizing my stuff before everyone knows where it comes from!

-CF”

The following video features “early” Clare on Things Ain’t What They Used To Be with Ralph Pena on bass and Larry Bunker on drums.

The Sadness of St. Louis ["La Tristesse de St. Louis"] by Michael Zwerin

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

Very few of my business trips to Europe turned out as planned; there was always an inconsistency to them.

I suppose that since I was involved with trying to transfer risk on behalf of my clients to international insurance companies, there was always going to be an element of uncertainty in any of these transactions.

I mean when one of the executives you are dealing with has a sign on the wall behind his desk which states in large bold letters - WE DON’T ACCEPT RISK, WE ARE AN INSURANCE COMPANY! - you know that you are in for some tough negotiations and a lot of inconsistency between what you want for your client and what’s on offer by the insurance carrier [who, as an intermediary, is also your client, but that’s another story for another day].

But whether it was tea and scones in London, cafe au lait and a croissant in Paris, or an espresso and biscotti in Rome, one person that I could always count on joining me for breakfast and consistently bringing pleasure to my day was Mike Zwerin.

This was because Mike, who was based in Paris until his death in 2010, wrote a regular Jazz column for the International Herald Tribune, the English language newspaper that is available on a daily basis in most of the major cities of Europe.

And, Man, could Mike ever write.

For those not familiar with his work, Mike was an expatriate for quite a while having left for Europe in 1969.

Mike was a fine trombonist who became known when he was a member of the Maynard Ferguson band. A strange thing happened on the way to the job. His father died and Mike suddenly found himself the president of Dome Steel. I found it very hard to imagine Mike as the head of a steel company; so did he, and in fact he would stash his horn in his office in New York so that he could slip away to play gigs. Eventually he gave the position up, returned to playing full time, and became jazz critic of the Village Voice [1964-1969] and then its London correspondent [1969-71]. He moved to Paris and wrote regularly for the International Herald-Tribune for 21 years while also freelancing for various European magazines and continues playing.

Along the way, Mike authored an autobiography entitled Close Enough for Jazz that was published by Quartet Books in 1984. There's wonderful stuff in that book. It has a naked honesty that is very rare.

Over the years, Mike was also a frequent contributor to Gene Lees’ Jazzletter which is where the following piece appeared.

Gene used it as one example to support his premise that Jazz musicians, on average, are a highly articulate group. Here's how he explained that premise in the February 1985 edition of the Jazzletter from which the Zwerin article that is excerpted below is also drawn.

“Jazz musicians are often extremely well read. They perceive and think subtly and deeply, although they are often cautious — not shy — about whom they share their insights with. If they know you, they'll talk your ear off. I have already dealt, in one of the early issues of the Jazzletter, with a tendency of jazz musicians in the old days to let outsiders believe they were dumb, in both senses of the word. But this was an affectation, growing out of slavery in America — the camouflage of one's intelligence as a way of lying low. It was a bit of an act, that hey-baby-wha's-happ'nin' manner, which eventually developed into a sort of self-satirizing in-joke. Anyone deceived by it didn't know jazz musicians very well. While I have known a few musicians who fit the shy-inarticulate mould, they have been the exceptions. And even then, you never knew when they were merely taciturn, rather than inarticulate.”

The Sadness of St. Louis

by Michael Zwerin

PARIS

On the Cote d'Azur in the autumn of 1940, Charles Delaunay, secretary general of the Hot Club of France, received a letter from a friend in Paris who told him that all of a sudden the city seemed to be overflowing with jazz fans. On his way north, Delaunay passed through Dijon. He saw posters announcing concerts by Fred Adison and Alix Combelle. Odd. Jazz had rarely left the capitol before the war. The hall was packed and bursting with joy and applause.

Delaunay organized a concert in the Salle Gaveau on December 19. The program included the stars of French jazz, including Django Reinhardt and his new quintet with Hubert Rostaing on clarinet replacing violinist Stephane Grappelli, who was in London. It sold out. But Delaunay was impressed with more than mere numbers. Before the war tout Paris in tuxedos and gowns had fallen asleep to Duke Ellington in a sold-out Salle Pleyel. Now the audience was young, alive, happy — you could feel a certain solidarity. Delaunay repeated the program a few nights later and it too sold out.

Delaunay had read Mein Kampf. He had no illusions about Hitler: "I knew that sooner or later the Nazis would ban jazz, which they did after the United States entered the war. They called it 'decadent Jewish Negroid Americano jungle music/

"I told the musicians, most of whom used to come regularly to listen to records and jam in the Hot Club offices on Rue Chaptal, ‘Go on playing the same songs, whatever you like. Just change the names.'"

So St. Louis Blues became La Tristesse de St. Louis, and Honeysuckle Rose became Le Rose de Chevrefeuille, and Sweet Sue Ma Chere Susanne. Delaunay emphasized in interviews and articles that jazz was now an international phenomenon, a mixture of European (French first), African, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon influences.

An aperitif named "swing" came on the market during the German occupation of France, not such a swinging time.

Etes-vous Swing? and Mon Heure de Swing were hit songs. The sartorial fad modeled after Cab Calloway's zoot suits was called swing, and the youngsters who wore it, les petits swings, came to be known as zazous after Calloway's scat-singing syllables — zazouzazou hey!

Zazou boys wore pegged pants with baggy knees. High-rolled collars covered their hair. Long checked jackets several sizes too large, dangling key chains, gloves, stick-pins in wide neckties, dark glasses, and Django Reinhardt mustaches were all the rage. The girls wore short skirts, baggy sweaters, pointed painted fingernails, necklaces around their waists, bright red lipstick. Both sexes smoked Luckies, frequented Le New York Bar, and cried, "Ca Swing!"

"Swing" became a password. To swing was really zazou. Singer Johnny Hess was crowned King of Swing — even more ersatz royalty than that other King of Swing. Les petits swings related to swing — the music — the way the hippies later related to hipsters. All image, little substance. Ersatz was king.

Zazous were considered decadent by Germans and French alike. They were also bringing a lot of heat down on the music whose name they had co-opted. "We tried to keep our distance from the zazous," recalls Delaunay. The Hot Club sponsored lectures, produced concerts, records and a magazine, Jazz Hot, throughout the Occupation, though with shortages of paper, ink and printing facilities and with so much political and social heat, the magazine dropped its title and appeared in shortened form on the back of concert programs. In 1941, Delaunay wrote, "The interpretation some give to swing is becoming dangerous for our music, their abuses risk leading to the banning of jazz itself."

Hoping to avoid repression, using propaganda for positive ends, he went on to criticize "a turbulent, uneducated youth which, under the pretext of being swing, thinks itself permitted the worst excesses."

Since the time of slavery in the United States, swing has been a metaphor for that disorderly robust state called freedom. And at no time was it more symbolic than under the Occupation.

The late Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand tells of the time in 1943 when he listened to a recording of Sidney Bechet's Really the Blues during a "clandestine jam session" in Frankfurt. The uniformed German soldier sitting next to him to him bragged, "It's my record."

"Why do you like this music?" Tyrmand asked him. "What does it make you think of?"

"Free people," the German answered. "Don't ask me why."

Delaunay's concert programs either left the word "jazz" out completely or qualified it as "Jazz Francais". He told the Germans that jazz had French roots in traditional New Orleans Creole airs and that, for example, Tiger Rag was based on Praline, a Nineteenth Century quadrille. The Germans wanted French collaboration and went out of their way to respect French culture.

At the end of the drole de guerre [in this instance, “phony war”] in 1940, the clean, lean, blue-eyed and clear-headed Germans had attracted French collaboration. Collaboration was not yet a dirty word. Collaboration implied realistic affirmative action.

In his book French and Germans, Germans and French, historian Richard Cobb explores its ambiguities: "There existed on both sides ties of friendship that had been created in the interwar years; and, finding themselves, almost overnight, in control of the complicated administration of a capital city — an event for which they had never planned . . . the Germans sought out in the first place those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen they already knew. A German railway engineer would seek out his opposite number, a German detective would have contacts in the police judiciare . . .

"One of the young (German) university graduates, who was all at once to find himself in charge of Paris publishing, had written a thesis on a French literary theme and had spent several years as a lecteur d'Allemand the University of Toulouse. He embarked on his new task with a sense of personal excitement, for it offered him a unique opportunity to come into close personal contact — sometimes daily — with all the leading figures of the Parisian literary scene. To see him merely as a censor, the obedient instrument of the Propaganda Staffel, would be to oversimplify a relationship that was much more personal and vital. He wanted to get to know as many novelists and poets as possible, and to publish as many of their works as he could. In both aims, he was extraordinarily successful; and at the end of an idyllic four-year stay in the French capital — a city he loved — he could look back to a publishers' list of enormous distinction and variety. His concern throughout had been... to see into print the works of a host of authors whom he admired and liked."

Jazz had something more than the other arts, a certain purity and honesty, that brought "enemies" together under conditions of mutual trust. Many Germans told me that anybody who liked jazz could never be a Nazi, which seems to be generally true. Dutch and Belgian musicians working in Germany during the war jammed with the young members of the Frankfurt Hot Club, formed in 1941. Nobody was accused of collaboration. One Dutch band sneaked the three dots and a dash V for Victory figure into their arrangements.

If you look a little closer, there are exceptions. Werner Molders, swing fan and Luftwaffe ace, switched on the BBC when crossing the Channel to catch a few minutes of Glenn Miller before bombing the antenna. (He later persuaded Hitler to add some swing to German radio.)

But the sound of freedom which the soldier next to Tyrmand heard somehow put jazz above the fray, neutralized it, changed the rules.

"I knew many German musicians who had been in Paris before the war," says the Guadeloupian trombonist Al Lirvat. "Now they were back as soldiers. We talked about music, we played together. I felt no racism coming from them. I never knew anybody who had any trouble for being black, no black person I knew went to a concentration camp. One cafe had a sign in the window, ‘No Jews or Niggers', but that was the French who did that. The French were much more racist against blacks than the Germans."

Lirvat worked in La Cigale in Montmartre. He says that the manager did not want to hire black musicians because he was afraid the Germans did not like gens de couleur. There had been a scene in Dijon. A French woman who refused to date a German officer was later seen with a black musician. Their band had been fired for it.

The leader, a Camerounais who spoke German, complained to the German authorities that the owner of the La Cigale was keeping French citizens from working because they were black. According to Lirvat, a German official who liked jazz issued a permit. "And I can tell you," Lirvat said, "that not only was there never a problem, but the Germans were happy to hear us. They applauded. We had a special authorization to play jazz. If it had been illegal, the authorities would have stopped German soldiers from coming there. We had good relations. We never talked politics. We talked about music and the weather."

They had special authorization?

"Yes. We knew we were playing music that was banned, but we had it in writing. The word ‘jazz' was written on our permit. That's all we played. The French owners were nervous but the place was always full of Germans. There were plenty of Germans who just liked good music. We didn't go out of our way to be friendly. You never knew when you'd fall on some racist nut, but that's not all that different from now."

Delaunay adds: "There were a lot of Germans who liked jazz. Don't forget that. The officials may have suspected what was going on, but they had more pressing worries. We used to have jam sessions in our clubhouse cellar on Rue Chaptal and one German officer often came to sit in on piano. He knew a lot of Fats Waller tunes. He couldn't do that in Germany."

Yes, you could — even in a concentration camp. The Ghetto Swingers were formed in Theresienstadt, an old fortress turned into a model camp to impress the Red Cross. The band's theme song was I Got Rhythm. In a 1960 Down Beat magazine, surviving Ghetto Swinger trumpeter Eric Vogel described their leader-clarinetist Fritz Weiss as "one of the best jazz musicians of prewar Europe. We had quite a good band. We played with swing and feeling, mostly in the style of Benny Goodman."

The Ghetto Swingers appeared in a Nazi documentary about "the good life" in Theresienstadt, but after the film crew and the Red Cross left, the band went on the road to Auschwitz.

Jazz musicians are outlaws if they are serious about what they are doing. There is no valid reason to play this music other than love — outlaw motivation in a money-oriented society. Gypsies, who generally refuse to abide by society's rules, are considered outlaws by regimented systems. A Gypsy jazz musician is a double outlaw. Survival is not easy. Django Reinhardt more than survived.

A relatively obscure culture hero before the war, he became a superstar overnight. People whistled his song Nuages in the street and his name was on the walls of Paris. He lived in sumptuous apartments, gambled in posh casinos, ate in the best restaurants. Bombs frightened him, however, and he lived near the Pigalle metro stop, the deepest in Paris, just in case.

"He was as well known as Maurice Chevalier," Delaunay says. "When he came to town for a concert, people knew that something was going to happen for a change." Even though he was a Gypsy — 500,000 of whom died in the camps — his fame protected him. There was increasing pressure for him to tour Germany, something he desperately wanted to avoid. He resisted by continually raising his price, but time ran out and he tried walking into Switzerland. He was caught. The police found his English Society of Composers membership card. This by itself could have been enough to have him convicted of espionage. The German officer began his interrogation with a smile, "Mon vieux Reinhardt, que fais-tu la?" [My old/dear Reinhardt, what are you doing here?], and freed him with a warning. Another German jazz fan.

Demand for swing music was so great that sidemen quickly became leaders, Saturday night amateurs full-time sidemen. The Americans had gone home, competition was light, and just about any European who could blow a chorus of the blues had all the jazz gigs he could handle.

About the time Swiss clarinetist Ernst Hollerhagen walked into the Schumann cafe, where he was working with Teddy Stauffer and his Teddies in Frankfurt, clicked his heels, raised an arm and greeted his friends with a "Heil Benny!", Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Dietrich Schulz-Koehn was marching along the railroad tracks near St. Nazaire with three other officers. Four American officers came towards them. Small-arms fire could be heard in the distance. The 1944 winter was cold. The men danced and blew on their hands. The day was grey, like on old print of a black-and-white war movie. This was a sideshow, and these men had minor roles.

The main theater had moved to the Fatherland.

A hundred thousand German soldiers were cut off and worn out here on the Brittany coast. The Allies were prepared to let them starve, but civilians were starving too and the Red Cross arranged evacuation negotiations along these tracks. They had been going on for an hour or two a day for two weeks now. The soldiers on the opposing sides got to know each other, took photographs of each other, and traded the prints.

An Afro-American officer who had been admiring Schultz-Koehn's Rolleiflex asked,

"How much do you want for that camera?" .

"It's not for sale." The lanky bespectacled German liked Americans, particularly Afro-Americans. He was more than pleasant about it, but he liked his camera too. But as a matter of fact, there was something he wanted. Schulz-Koehn pulled himself up straight and adjusted his leather coat. It was worth a try. "Do you have any Count Basie records?"

Toward the end of the war, Lulu of Montmartre ran a club called La Roulette featuring Django Reinhardt. Like a lot of clubs, she closed her doors at curfew time and ran a party until it lifted at dawn. English was spoken as well as French and German at Lulu's. Gestapo officers sat alongside British secret service agents, all of whom had their taste for swing in common.

His inaccessibility had made Django something of a legend in the United States, where the press had reported several rumors of his death. Right after the Liberation, he played at an army party. Considering America the big time, wanting badly to appear there, Django tried hard to please. He was, however, quite cool answering an official who asked how much he would want for an American tour.

"How much does Gary Cooper make?" he asked. "I want the same thing."

-MZ

A Footnote

“Like everyone else with a love of jazz, and a certain fascination with its mythology, I had heard the story of the German officer looking for Count Basie records during negotiations. About 1960, fifteen years after the war, when I was editor of Down Beat, the German jazz impresario and writer Dietrich Schulz-Koehn came to Chicago, and it was my not unpleasant duty to be courteous to him.

Over lunch, I asked him if he had heard the story, and knew whether it was true. Yes, he assured me, it was true. I asked how he could be sure, and he said, "Because I was that officer."

Perhaps three weeks later I was in New York, this time having lunch with my friend Alan Morrison, who was the New York editor of Ebony magazine, a warm and pleasant man who was a great friend of jazz and who, I'm sorry to say, died some years ago. I said, "I had a strange experience recently." And I told him of asking Schulz-Koehn about the incident in Brittany.

Alan smiled softly and said, "Did he tell you who the American officer was?"

"No," I said.

"I was."

— Gene Lees