[I'm re-posting this for my friend Marla who was/is a fan of Dick's, both as a musician and as a person.] For a number of years in the late 1980s, drummer Dick Berk led groups at Alfonse’s, a restaurant on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake, Ca.
It was named after Alfonse Sorrentino, one of three brothers who also owned Sorrentino’s Seafood Restaurant which was just a few blocks away at the corner of Riverside and Pass Avenues in Burbank, CA.
Before he settled in Portland, OR in the Pacific Northwest, I got to know Dick Berk pretty well during this period in his career.
Because we both held strong opinions about drums and drumming, we argued about everything to do with them all the time.
Whatever it was - cymbals - his sounded too “dishy” and he thought mine sounded too “clicky;” sticks - he liked a pointed tip while I preferred a rounded ball - bass drum muffling - he played his bass drum wide open while I liked mine to “thud; we never agreed on anything.
Of course, it was all said in jest, and the other musicians knew this was the case, but every so often, a few people would take it seriously and move their drinks away to a new seat at the bar all the while wondering who were those “drum nuts.”
At the time, Dick was trying out different versions of what ultimately became his Jazz Adoption Society and the one I always preferred the best was the group that featured trombonist Andy Martin.
It was hard to improve on slide trombonist Andy Martin as a lead instrument in a Jazz combo, but Dick found a way to do it when he later added valve trombonist Mike Fahn to the group. To top it off he brought guitarist Dan Faehnle and pianist Tad Weed on board and very fortuitously saved the music of this outstanding bunch of musicians on a series of discs that he made for Reservoir Records.
One night I was reflecting on the mentoring role that drummer Art Blakey provided to young musicians in bringing them into the various quintets that he led for almost forty years.
Blakey’s Jazz Messengers proved to be a training ground for trumpeters such as Freddie Hubbard, Valery Ponomarev and Wynton Marsalis, tenor saxophonists Hank Mobely, Wayne Shorter and Branford Marsalis, pianists Bobby Timmons, Cedar Walton and Bennie Green, and bassists including Doug Watkins, Jymie Merritt and Reggie Workman.
After making these remarks, I turned to Dick and said: “Berk, as a drummer who leads bands that nurture lots of young musicians, you remind me of Art Blakey."
Dick looked at me, got a big smile on his face and replied: “You know, man, we finally found something we can agree on!”
Dick Berk passed away on February 8, 2014 at the age of 74.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember him on these pages with the following overview of his career which appeared on the Oregon Life website.
“At 17, Dick Berk was the drummer in Billie Holiday's band. Now the 73-year-old plays most Tuesdays in Hillsboro.
Berk was a talented young San Francisco drummer in the 1950s when musicians and clubs noticed him. He played from 2 to 6 a.m. at the city's legendary Bop City jazz club.
"I'd go to high school during the day and play at night," Berk said with a shrug recently in a booth at Coyote's Bar & Grill in Hillsboro. Tuesday evenings, he backs up Laura Cunard, a Portland singer, and keyboard and left-handed bass player.
He'd sleep between school and showtime and earned $7 a night during the week and $10 on weekends.
"Doesn't sound like much, but in those days you could buy a complete dinner in Chinatown for 45 cents," he said.
Berk turned down a scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work the jazz clubs, causing his mother to be "mad as hell," he added. He eventually went on to study for a year at Berklee College of Music with Alan Dawson, another respected jazz drummer.
He played the clubs and rubbed shoulders with jazz greats from the era, and was recommended to Billie Holiday when Papa Jo Jones left the band.
"Those were big shoes to fill," said Berk.
He recalls playing one night at San Francisco's Black Hawk nightclub and grew so absorbed watching Holiday sing that he actually forgot to play.
"We got along great," he said, in spite of it.
Berk played in Holiday's band, including at the first Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958, until her death in 1959.
During more than 50 years on the road, he went on to back up many jazz legends, including Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O'Day, and played later with modern jazz artists, including Herbie Hancock, Charles Mingus, Milt Jackson, George Duke, Cal Tjader, Jean-Luc Ponty and Blue Mitchell.
As leader of the Jazz Adoption Agency since the early 1980s, Berk is considered important both as a drummer and as a talent scout.
Cunard met Berk at one of Portland jazz man Ron Steen's popular jams. She said before a recent Tuesday evening Hillsboro gig that she's learned more from Berk than from anyone.
"He forced me to step it up," said the classically trained Cunard, 53, who raised her family in Hillsboro and still has vocal students here.
The Tuesday evening jazz jams were the idea of Mike Soto, manager at Coyote's Bar and Grill and a musician himself. He's known Cunard for years and invited her to play at the restaurant to offer live jazz on the metropolitan area's westside.
"The locals seem to enjoy the music," he added.
For Berk, now a Portland resident, the jazz jams are a chance to continue doing what he loves. He has arthritis and fibromyalgia and finds the only time he is free of pain is when he's playing.
"It's one of the mysteries of life," he said. "I'm glad to have the drums to do it."
From the moment he found his father's drumsticks tucked into a box of mementos when he was 6 or 7, Berk knew he wanted to be a drummer. He never had lessons, and to hear him tell it, he never learned how to play the drums.
Berk and Cunard start jamming at 7:30 p.m. every Tuesday at Coyote's Bar & Grill, 5301 West Baseline Road, Hillsboro. For information, call 503-640-7225.
“It was thanks to Bob Cooper that I became one of the Lighthouse All-Stars. … I played with Sonny Criss there, and going toe-to-toe with him was like standing in front of a wheat-eater. I mean, he was geared to play with guys like Sonny Stitt, which I wasn't at the time, and I got beat-up pretty good. He was impressed that I was willing to get up on the stand with him, so we became buddies and he was like a father figure to me.”
- Pete Christlieb
“In the early seventies I met Warne Marsh for the first time at a rehearsal with Clare Fischer's big band. The tenors sat next to each other, and we shook hands as Clare counted off "Lennie's Pennies." Playing Tristano’s line for the first time was like trying to change the fan belt on a car while it is still running.”
- Pete Christlieb
I did get to play with Basie in 1983, when Eric Schneider telephoned and asked me to dep for him during the band's week-long appearance at Disneyworld. Danny Turner and Eric Dixon were in the section, and the first tune every night was "Corner Pocket," featuring me. I had been listening to that arrangement for years, so I didn't have to read it; I just walked up to the microphone and blew the shit out of the solo. On the first night, after I sat down, Basie leaned over to me and said, "What did you say your name was?"
- Pete Christlieb
One of the great benefits of residing in Southern California has been the opportunity to listen to Pete Christlieb perform on many occasions in a variety of Jazz settings.
He is a tower of power on the instrument and plays it with great command, singularity and inventiveness. A few notes and you know its Pete. The kind of original voice all Jazz players strive to achieve seems to flow effortlessly from the bell of his horn.
While playing in a big band, all of his sax section mates pay him the ultimate compliment of looking up at him when he stands to solo and nodding their heads in approval at his creations.
When soloing in a small group, you hate to be the one taking your solo after his. He is such a forceful and singular improviser whether he’s devastating the changes to Cherokee or enhancing the melodic beauty and lyrical poignancy of If You Could See Me Now that it takes the audience a bit of time to deal with the “after shock!”
Sadly, although he’s played with the big bands of Woody Herman, Louie Bellson and Bill Holman, as well as, being a fixture for two decades on Doc Severinson’s “Tonight Show” Band, he has never had a recording contract with a major label.
Not surprisingly for someone who is such a dominant and overriding soloist, Pete holds strong opinions and views about Jazz music and Jazz makers. He has also had a variety of mentors whom he recalls fondly including, Russ Cheaver of the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet, Bob Cooper whose place he took with the Lighthouse All-Stars, and indirectly, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, who had a great influence on Pete’s style, and Warne Marsh, with whom Pete recorded three wonderful albums.
His time on all of these major bands, his influences and his gigs with everyone from Chet Baker to Frank Rosolino are all recounted in the following interview as given to Gordon Jack, Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective [Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2004, pp. 53-60; paragraphing modified].
Gordon’s interview with Pete also appeared in JazzJournal magazinein March, 2000. You can locate more information on the latter by going here.
Despite his nearly forty years in the business, it is still one of the very best kept secrets in jazz that Pete Christlieb is one of the music's most exciting and inventive tenor players. He has worked with Count Basie, Louie Bellson, Bob Florence, and Woody Herman. When we met in 1999, he was a featured soloist with the Bill Holman band at a party to celebrate Vic Lewis's eightieth birthday.
“I was born on March 16, 1945, in Los Angeles. My father was a professional bassoon player at Twentieth Century Fox, and as a youngster I listened with him to Boulez, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, and Villa-Lobos, because our house was full of classical music. Stravinsky often came over to rehearse with my dad, so it is not surprising that I took up the bassoon and, a little later, the violin.
It wasn't until I was about thirteen years old that I first heard some jazz. We had a few Gerry Mulligan Quartet albums lying around the house, and that's when I decided to learn the saxophone, which turned out to be a lot easier than the violin; you press a button and you get a note.
When I was about sixteen, I played in a Saturday morning rehearsal band with some other kids my age, and occasionally somebody good would sit in, to show us how the charts should really sound. The great Joe Maini once visited and played the lead alto chair, and he was so good, it was frightening. He more or less said, "You follow me, kid, and try to stick close to my ass, because we're going down the road and we're going fast!" Man, what authority. It was just fantastic to play in the section with him.
The first road band I played with was Sy Zentner, who gave me a call when I was about eighteen and flew me to Chicago. Although it was a dance band, they had a lot of nice arrangements, and being the solo tenor, I had the opportunity to play a little bit. Of course I wanted to be like Gerry Mulligan and play in a small group, but before you can do that, you have to pay your dues and go to "boot camp" on the road in a bus, just like everyone else.
Sy told me there were also some clarinet parts, so before I left town, I had to take lessons real quick with Russ Cheaver, who was wonderful. He was at Fox with my father and had played many fine clarinet solos in motion pictures over the years, and he was also the lead soprano with the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet. In just three lessons he taught me enough for my chair, which was really "industrial strength" clarinet, where you don't play any lead or any jazz, just a lot of whole notes. Gene Goe, who was the lead trumpet with Basie for a long time, was in the band. The bass player was Jeff Castleman, who had recommended me to Sy. Jeff eventually went with Duke Ellington and married the singer Trish Turner.
When we were playing opposite Harry James at Lake Tahoe, I used to sit in with his band when Sy's gig finished, because Harry's last set was a jam session. We stood next to each other, and he was just outstanding. Even though he was a hell of a drinker, he could always function, and he was such a great instrumentalist, he could play every part in the book. Harry was wonderful, and there was a camaraderie in his band rather like a bunch of guys fighting a war.
I was still too young to get into most of the jazz clubs, where you had to be twenty-one because of the drinking laws, but the Lighthouse served food, which gave them a loophole. Teenagers could go and listen, and that's where I asked Bob Cooper for some lessons. It turned out that he lived a block from our house and knew my father by reputation, and although he was not a regular teacher, I went to him for a couple of years for fine-tuning. If Lester Young had lived that long, I think he might have sounded like Coop, because Bob was such a fluent player.
He started me thinking about new possibilities and other avenues for improvisation, and we studied the old Nicolas Slonimsky book on scales and melodic patterns that everybody has [Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns]. If you really listen, you will hear people quoting from that book all the time. You know, the more I listen to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims from those days, the more I realize how much they influenced me, because they were both highly lyrical "Song in My Heart" type players, just like Bob.
When I was in New York in the early sixties, I used to visit the Half Note and watch Zoot go through his routine of looking away from the bartender and dropping his empty glass fifteen feet from the bandstand. The guy would catch it, fill it up, and pass it right back up to him. Zoot was a clever guy; he was like the Will Rogers of the tenor. Al was also clever and very funny, and together they were pretty wild. I got to know Al well a few years later at the Dick Gibson Jazz Parties in Colorado, and I told him what a pleasure it was playing with someone I idolized as a child. I used flattery as my opening approach, and it worked!
It was thanks to Bob Cooper that I became one of the Lighthouse All-Stars. He was playing on the Dean Martin Show at NBC, so he used to send me to me club as his substitute. I played with Sonny Criss there, and going toe-to-toe with him was like standing in front of a wheat-eater. I mean, he was geared to play with guys like Sonny Stitt, which I wasn't at the time, and I got beat-up pretty good. He was impressed that I was willing to get up on the stand with him, so we became buddies and he was like a father figure to me. I also played a few weeks with Hampton Hawes, who was a sweetheart. And Frank Butler, another genius, was the drummer. This was around 1965, but it wasn't too long before they changed the format and the Lighthouse All-Star era sort of "uglied" away into the sunset, collapsing in a heap of dust.
Soon afterwards, Chet Baker called me for a gig with Terry Trotter, Ray Brown, and Colin Bailey at one of those unattractive little bars near L.A. airport, the Boom-Boom room or some such name. It was a strange part of town, but people were flocking there to hear the great Chet. There was nothing written; he just called tunes and we played. After that, he had another date in Pueblo, Colorado, and he asked me to go with him. If I had been a little older and wiser, I would have asked for the money up front, because at the end of the week I didn't get enough from him to pay my hotel bill, let alone get home. This is what happens when you work for a junkie, so you really have to watch out for yourself.
Musically it was the best because he was playing beautifully, but everything else was a tragedy! I did some tunes alone with the rhythm section that I wanted him to play, and after a couple of times he had them down - he had great ears. Anyway, my wife and I had only been married a couple of months, and here we were in this little hotel in Colorado Springs; eventually I had to wire for money to get home, and that was the end of my career with Chet Baker. I think Phil Urso took my place.
I went back to L.A. and got a call from trumpeter Bobby Bryant, who was in town and making a big impression with Gerald Wilson's band. He wanted me for his steady gig at Marty's down on 58th and Broadway, which featured a hot organ and two-tenor group, along with Bobby.
This was around the time of the big riot in Watts, and the club was located at ground zero there. I waltzed on over, and the first thing they told me to do was to take the battery out and put it in the trunk so I could start my car after the job.
I was replacing Herman Riley for six weeks while he went on the road with Louie Bellson and Pearl Bailey, and the other tenor was Hadley Caliman, who was quite an exponent of the John Coltrane approach. Now I was from the tough "Lockjaw" Davis school, with some Gene Ammons, Coleman Hawkins, and Zoot Sims thrown in, so we went at it like a sword fight in a pirate picture every night! Bobby was on staff at NBC, so he would come in later and get in the middle, saying something like, "O.K., you guys-cool down!"
It was a wonderful experience. I learned the technique of how to really work a rhythm section on the bandstand - what to do and what not to do, and if you are going to play more than two choruses on anything, you had better have a good reason. That job lasted a couple of years, because when Herman got back, Hadley took off.
In 1966 I was at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, backing Della Reese with another two-tenor and trumpet group. Buddy Childers was the leader, and the other tenor was Jimmy "Night Train" Forrest. Della was a big star, but she was a real sweetheart, and it was fun working for her because she didn't act big time at all - just a great gal and one of the guys.
Woody Herman was at the Tropicana, and Buddy used to hang out there all the time, and when our job with Della finished, it was Buddy who recommended me to Woody, because Joe Farrell was leaving. Bill Byrne, who played trumpet and was the band manager, called and asked me to join them at the Chez Club in West Hollywood. I had all the records with Sal Nistico and the '63-64 band, so I was already familiar with the music, and I was like a young lion ready to take on the world - let me have at it! I really roared through the stuff, and Woody was pretty cool.
At the end of the first week, we had a party at his house in the Hollywood Hills, which used to be Humphrey Bogart's old place, and he gave us the "Cook's Tour." We got to this beautiful bathroom, which looked like the municipal plunge. It was like a big swimming pool about eight feet deep, and it would have taken about two hours to fill it up. I said something like, "Hell, Woody, what do you need that for?" and he said "To soak a sore ass, kid. Now keep moving and don't loiter!"
The word was that we were going to Europe, and two days before we were due to split, Woody said he wanted to talk to me. I thought that I had been doing pretty well and he wanted to give me a raise, but he told me that I was not going, which was like a harpoon to the old ego.
Apparently Sal Nistico wanted to come back, and Woody needed him for his big name and crowd appeal, because he would be a big draw in Europe. The deal in those days with big bands was that if they let you go, they had to give two weeks notice or two weeks pay, and as they were leaving straight away, I was supposed to get the money, which was $300. At the time, everyone was making $150 a week unless you were on Basie's band, for instance, where some of those guys were on about $500, and Sonny Payne was probably getting $2,500 a week. Woody said to go and see his personal manager, Abe Turchen, and you can guess exactly what happened; I got nothing but a promise. About a week later, Byrne phoned from Switzerland and told me that, as soon as the plane landed Sal disappeared and wasn't seen again.
They had been using some other guy, but Woody wanted me back. No. had just had a call from one of the trombone players who was booking for Buddy Rich's band, and he offered me $175, so I told Bill I would come back for $225 clear. In other words, they could pay the tax. He replied, "$225 clear? I'll have to ask Woody." I could hear Woody in the room with Bill saying, "Christlieb that S.O.B.! Stan Getz didn't get $225 clear." Then Bill says, "Well, that'll be fine with Woody!"
I rejoined the band in Oklahoma City, and by this time it was a completely different band; everyone had left. Cecil Payne was on baritone, and the other tenors were Steve Lederer and Steve Marcus. With Woody, if you played first tenor, you had all the hip lead parts and the third chair had all the jazz. I was playing second, which was known as "The Bermuda Triangle," where you got nothing. It was the lackluster position in the band, with no fun and no glory. I had no jazz to play except on the last set every night, when I had a couple of choruses of the blues in A-flat on "Woodchoppers Ball." Eventually I told Woody that it was ridiculous, because I had come on the band to blow, so I quit and I never did get my $300!
Around 1970 1 had a call from Louie Bellson, who was rehearsing a band down at the union prior to going on the road with Pearl Bailey. He is the nicest man in the world, and I am still working with him thirty years later.
Just before joining Louie, I had been working at a club owned by Fletcher Henderson's brother, Horace. He had known Pearl for years, and he gave me a note for her. She always did have an ego like a blowtorch, and when I gave it to her, she just exploded and started shouting at me about taking up her time with something she considered trivial. Louie told her to give me a break, and the next day, she bought me an expensive sweater as an apology. During the tour, every time we had a scene, she bought me another one, and I still have about twenty-five beautiful sweaters from getting beat-up by Pearl Bailey!
One night I fell asleep onstage, and she hit me so hard that I fell over and took the rest of the sax section with me, music stands and all! The audience loved it and thought it was part of the act because it looked like the Keystone Cops. Louie told me that when Joe Louis was guesting with them in the fifties, she kept picking on Joe and throwing punches at him. Eventually he said to Louie, "Please tell your old lady to cut it out, because it really hurts when she hits, man. She's got a helluva punch!"
I made the first few rehearsals with Supersax, but I quit very soon because it was so arduous and repetitive. The concept of playing Charlie's solos was beautiful, and when I heard their first record, I was a little envious of the guys who stuck with it, because it took a long time to get it right. It needed a certain personality who would sit down and work hard, but I was not willing to spend that much time. If there had been opportunities to blow, I might have remained, but the guys were so tired from playing about 23,000 notes that, when it reached the point of someone taking a chorus, the saxes needed a rest. That's why Frank Rosolino or Conte Candoli were hired.
In the early seventies I met Warne Marsh for the first time at a rehearsal with Clare Fischer's big band. The tenors sat next to each other, and we shook hands as Clare counted off "Lennie's Pennies." Playing Tristano’s line for the first time was like trying to change the fan belt on a car while it is still running. Afterwards, Warne told me that he was using an album of mine as a teaching device for one of his students, demonstrating which series of notes I used moving from chord to chord. He actually told me things about my playing I didn't know I was doing. He was totally unique, and you will never in your life hear anyone play with quite that same chromatic approach. The Tristano method could be tedious and involved, but Warne made it more palatable and less cumbersome by swinging a little harder. I learned different ways of improvising from him, especially with regard to economy and selectivity.'
I was on the Tonight Show from 1970 to 1990, and it was a great gig with steady money. We made scale, which was $175 per night, plus doubles, although everyone thought we made a lot more because they saw us on T.V. every night. These days, on the Star Trek show, for instance, I play clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, and a little tenor, and in one four-hour call, I take home what I used to make in an entire week on the Tonight Show. All through those years, I had regular offers to tour with people like Count Basie and Harry James, but I always sent one of my students. I kick myself now for turning down some good offers, but why go on the road when I had a steady gig in town?
I did get to play with Basie in 1983, when Eric Schneider telephoned and asked me to dep for him during the band's weeklong appearance at Disneyworld. Danny Turner and Eric Dixon were in the section, and the first tune every night was "Corner Pocket," featuring me. I had been listening to that arrangement for years, so I didn't have to read it; I just walked up to the microphone and blew the shit out of the solo. On the first night, after I sat down, Basie leaned over to me and said, "What did you say your name was?" I told him again, but he wasn't too good on long names, so he announced every number with, "Ladies and gentleman, Pete's on tenor" or "Now we are going to turn Pete loose on . . . " etc., etc. He gave me features on everything and, man, I played high, fast, and loud all week and got to hang out with all those great guys. I have a tape of one of the shows, so now I can tell my grandchildren I played with Count Basie.
Over the years I worked a lot with Frank Rosolino, who had a real gift, and we had a wonderful relationship. He was a great trombone player and scat singer, and he swung so hard, it was like playing with another saxophone, because he had such facility. He was also extremely funny, and on the bandstand he could create total, hilarious bedlam. Sometimes the band couldn't play because we were too busy laughing. I knew nothing about his domestic problems, but they were enough to set him off, turning the whole thing into a tragic Italian opera, where everybody dies in the end, leaving everything in a minor key.
I had been working with Bob Florence, but when Bob Cooper passed away in 1993, 1 took his place on Bill Holman's band, and I have been there ever since. You know, people ask me about "free" jazz, which I have never liked, because there is enough freedom in the legitimate avenues of expression which hasn't been exhausted. Suppose you have eighteen guys together and, after the downbeat, you let them play free. It sounds like they are warming up. Someone has to come in and say, "Stop. Let's get down to business," and that someone would be Bill Holman, who is the leader of the intelligent big band movement.
When Warne Marsh improvised, he could put a phrase anywhere between beats one and four and have it resolve twenty bars later in exactly the same place -displacement, in other words. As a writer, nobody can do that better than Bill Holman, and he is also a master of tension and release. He has a wonderful way of building tension and then more tension until you wonder if it is ever going to release, and when it does, the band is like a juggernaut coming out of the pipe with a momentum that is totally elevating. We have a lot of fun playing his music, but I don't know if every little detail is always right, because if concentration is lost for a second, you can slip out of the cog. I always tell anyone new who sits next to me that if he is playing with me, he is almost certainly lost; we all have our own part. There is nobody in the world who can shine Bill Holman's shoes when it comes to writing for a big band.
I have already mentioned some other influences, but Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis was also very important to me because he was so different to everyone else. Nobody could ever copy his incredibly ornate false fingerings, and he had about fifteen for any note you can think of. He was like a trombone with a plunger, only he was doing it on a saxophone. He could get the timbre, the slant, and the growl, swinging and ricocheting off this note and that note, and when he put it all together, he created a sense of excitement that had you on the edge of your seat. I had known him for years, and when we spoke before he died, I gave him a hug and a big kiss and told him how much I loved him and what his playing meant to me. I also listened a lot to the "Tasmanian Devil" of the tenor, the wonderful Johnny Griffin, who plays fast and furious. Sonny Rollins was important too, for his sound and tremendous command of the horn.
I have several tenors, but my favorite is an old 1949 Selmer with a balanced action, and I use a two and a half Rico plastic reed with a wide-open Berg Larsen mouthpiece, which gives me a lot of flexibility and lets me play. A closer lay with a three or four reed needs too much pressure, because it is like trying to get a diving board to vibrate. You have to blow so hard that you run out of air halfway between an idea and completing the phrase. Why work so hard? Phil Woods has a similar set-up to me, as did Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, but there are exceptions like that good old Washington boy, Corky Corcoran. He had a sound like a tree trunk because he used a five reed on his Link mouthpiece, which had a very narrow lay.
You know, you need other interests in life besides playing and rehearsing with bands every day, which is why I have been involved in drag racing for thirty years. They are the cars that do zero to two hundred miles an hour in seven seconds and need a parachute to stop. I used to drive, but now I just build them for my kids to race. Mechanically they need the same preventative maintenance program that an aircraft has, so with the cars and the music, I manage to keep pretty busy.”
“There is a paradox here. If Condon and friends started out as avant-garde renegades ("One of the ladies told me it was just like having the Indians in town again"), intent on playing jazz despite the indifference of "the Republicans" who preferred saccharine fiddle bands, they soon became the most cautious of musical populists. The more respectable and intellectual jazz became, the more they relished their reputations as "natural" musicians —the kind who can readily identify with young Eddie's rather disingenuous question, "What's reading got to do with music?" At times, he seemed to regard jazz as little more than a folk art, a non-stop jam session frequently sustained in an alcoholic mist (the children of the Volstead Act, he explains, inebriated themselves with a vengeance, as if to prove that no government could dictate sobriety). That attitude, bound to appeal to fans suffering from unrequited nostalgia, proved contagious, as witness the gee-whiz prose occasionally served up by commentators in the liner copy of Condon's record albums —e.g., ". . .a dozen good guys having a good time. That is, after all, what it is all about" or "This music is roadsters and girls and cutting classes and oranges." … Condon's best work has a spark of its own, and though he sometimes "conducted" more than he played, the bands that bore his name continued to produce memorable work by Russell, Vic Dickenson, Bobby Hackett, Billy Butterfield, Edmund Hall, Bud Freeman, Kenny Davern, and quite a few other Condon regulars.”
- Gary Giddins, Introduction to We Called It Music
As the title implies, this piece is about two subjects: [1] how the coming together of Jazz trumpet masters Joe “King” Oliver, Louis “Pops” Armstrong and Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke in the Chicago of the 1920s helped shape the development of Jazz after its formative years in New Orleans and [2] a brief excerpt on that subject from Eddie Condon’s autobiographical We Called It Music which Gary Giddins has described as “... a definitive statement on the first generation of white jazz musicians and how they saw themselves in relation to the black innovators that they emulated.”
Eddie Condon (1905-1973) pioneered a kind of jazz popularly known as Chicago-Dixieland, though musicians refer to it simply as Condon-style.
Played by small ensembles with a driving beat, it was and is an informal, exciting music, slightly disjointed and often mischievous. The same could be said of Condon's autobiography, We Called It Music: A Generation of Jazz, a book widely celebrated for capturing the camaraderie of early jazz.
Condon's wit was as legendary as the music he boosted. Here is Condon on modern jazz: The boppers flat their fifths. We consume ours." On Bix Beiderbecke: 'The sound came out like a girl saying yes." On the New York subway: "It was my first ride in a sewer."
When his memoir was first published—to great acclaim—in 1947, he was well known as a newspaper columnist, radio personality, saloon keeper, guitarist, and bandleader. He was the ideal man to come up with an insightful portrait of the early days of white jazz, and his book offers nonpareil accounts of many of the jazz greats of that era, including Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy McPartland, Gene Krupa, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby.
These were the days when jazz was popularly associated with Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin. Condon considered true jazz an outlaw music and himself an outlaw. He and his cohorts tried to get as close as possible to the black roots of jazz, a scandalous thing in the '20s. Along the way, he facilitated one of the first integrated recording sessions.
We Called It Music, with the 1992 DaCapo paperback version published with an introduction by Gary Giddins that places the book in historical context, remains essential reading for anyone interested in the wild and restless beginnings of America's great musical art, or in the wit and vinegar of Eddie Condon.
The following excerpts from Condon’s We Called It Music will give you an idea of the nature of the writing of the book and afford a description about the dynamics between King Oliver, Pops and Bix in the socio-cultural environment that was Chicago in the 1920s. In its own way, it was a melting pot analogous to New Orleans in the preceding decade but with different elements: the Creole Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Wolverines, the Austin High Gang and individual musicians including Benny Goodman and Davey Tough [not to mention Al Capone, the Chicago gangsters and the era of Prohibition brought in by the Volstead Act 1919/1920].
“Ain’t none of them played like him yet,” the title of a Brigitte Berman film taken from a quotation about Bix Beiderbecke attributed to Louis Armstrong, reflects the fact that although the young white musicians in Chicago were heavily influenced by the Black musicians who had come to town primarily from New Orleans, they went on to develop their own musical personalities and styles.
“CHICAGO'S SOUTH SIDE gave jazz a sincere welcome. When King Joe Oliver arrived in 1918 representatives of two bands met him at the station. Eddie Venson wanted him to play at the Royal Gardens Cafe with Jimmy Noone, Bill Johnson and Sidney Bechet were on hand to persuade him to join them at the Dreamland. The discussion shifted from the station to a bar and reached an amicable decision. Oliver joined both bands, playing early with one, late with the other. There was no one to challenge his title of King except Freddie Keppard. Keppard dropped in at the Royal Gardens one night and Oliver took him on in a "cutting" contest. The consensus was that, "Joe Oliver beat the socks off Keppard!”
Back in New Orleans, where he was born in 1885, Oliver learned music slowly. He began in formal fashion, reading notes and playing with a children's band. Once the children's band went on tour and Joe returned with a scar over one eye; someone had struck him with a broomstick. For a while he was called "Bad Eye" Joe. When he first played with the Eagle Band he was sent home because he played "so loud and so bad." He was confused because the players improvised instead of following the score. Gradually he learned the technique of improvisation and eventually produced a stomp of his own, called Dippermouth.
He went to work in Storyville, and there he heard nothing but praise for Freddie Keppard and Manuel Perez. It irritated him; in his own opinion he was better than both men. He played in a cabaret at the Corner of Bienville and Marais Streets, with Big Eye Louis on clarinet, Deedee Chandler on drums, and Richard Jones at the piano. One night between numbers the musicians began talking about Keppard and Perez. Oliver stood up and walked to the piano. "Jones," he said, "best it out in B fiat."
Jones began and Joe put his cornet to his lips and blew. He walked out into the street and pointed his horn first at the cabaret where Keppard worked, then at the cafe where Perez was playing. He blew with such power that every bed and bar in the neighborhood emptied. People poured into the street and crowded around Joe, while he blew and blew, swinging his cornet from one target to the other. When everyone knew what he was doing and was satisfied with the way he was doing if, he turned and led the people inside. After that he was King Joe.
In Chicago in 1920 he organized his own Creole Jazz Band and took it to California. Returning to the south side he went again to the Royal Gardens, now re-christened the Lincoln Gardens. In 1922 he decided to send for his boy Louis Armstrong to play second cornet. Louis arrived and stood outside the cafe listening to the music, afraid to go in. He couldn't believe he was in Chicago, hired to play in a band with Papa Joe Oliver.
Louis Armstrong learned to play a cornet in the Waif's Home in New Orleans, to which he was sent for firing a pistol within the city limits on New Year's Day, 1913. Before that he haunted Storyville at night, singing in an urchins' quartet, playing on a guitar made from a cigar box. As he grew he played in cabarets, gin mills, and barrel houses. He spent two seasons with Fate Marable's band on the Streckfus river boats.
He composed a tune which later became very popular and sold it for fifty dollars. He was twenty-two when he arrived in Chicago on the night of July 8th. Listening to Papa Joe he thought, "I wonder if I'm good enough to play in that band." He was. People used to say to Oliver, "That boy will blow you out of business." Joe would smile and say, "He won't hurt me while he's in my band."
Before prohibition poured white patrons into the south side cafes there were white boys gathered around the bandstands at the Dreamland and Lincoln Gardens, some of them startlingly young. Musicians were discovering the new music and listening to its masters. Members of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the white jazz orchestra at Friars' Inn, came to listen to their old Storyville colleagues. They listened so well that one of their recordings, Tin Roof Blues, contained more than a surface resemblance to King Oliver's Jazzin' Babies' Blues.
The younger white boys were high-school students — Dave Tough, George Wettling, Francis Muggsy Spanier, Benny Goodman, and a group from Austin High on the west side: Jimmy McPartland, Lawrence Bud Freeman, Frank Teschemacher, and Jim Lannigan. At home these boys practiced and listened to records by the Rhythm Kings and the Oliver band; they were determined to play jazz. They formed small orchestras, played at school dances, and went to the south side or to Friars' Inn to take lessons from the masters of their respective instruments — Baby Dodds on drums, Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Leon Roppolo on clarinet, Joe and Louis on cornet, George Brunies on trombone.
The star of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings was Leon Roppolo, who played clarinet; the driving force of the band was George Brunies, the trombone player. Both were from New Orleans; both were from musical families; both were veterans of Storyville. Roppolo ran away from home when he was fourteen and played in a band with Bee Palmer's act on the Orpheum circuit; the police found him and sent him home. He worked then at the Halfway House in Storyville with Abbie Brunies, George's brother. In Chicago in 1920 he and George and Paul Mares played at the Cascades Ballroom, where the piano was half a tone off. They organized the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and got a job at Friars' Inn on the strength of their version of Wabash Blues. So enchanted were the Rhythm Kings with Chicago life that after work in the early dawn they rode around for hours on the elevated. Roppolo slowly went mad; he liked to lean against a telephone pole with his clarinet and improvise on the rhythm he heard humming in the wires. He stood on the stand at the Friars' Inn and played chorus after chorus while the customers stopped dancing to listen. The manager begged him to stop so the people could sit down and spend some money. When he was harmlessly insane he went back to New Orleans and Abbie Brunies took him again into the band at the Halfway House and looked after him.
They all knew Bix Beiderbecke, the round-eyed, eager-faced youngster from Davenport with the mousy hair and the marvelous ear. They knew the Condon kid from Chicago Heights, too; he was small, quick-moving, clothes-conscious, sharp-tongued, seldom still, and forever organizing parties, dates, and excursions to the south side. They called him "Slick." He was innocently frank with phonies; otherwise he talked in a mixture of understatement and hyperbole. About Louis Armstrong's cornet playing he would say, "It doesn't bother me." In describing Gene Krupa to George Wettling he said, "He's got a seventy-two-inch heart." He was passionately, deeply devoted to jazz, proselyted constantly in its behalf, refused to solo on his own instrument, and pioneered in the appreciation of Beiderbecke. Bix's playing never bothered him; Bix's indifference to clothes and fresh linen and romance did.
Bix was never actually a person; he was a living legend. Nothing which has been invented about him is as accurately symbolical as the everyday things he did. Without effort he personified jazz; by natural selection he devoted himself to the outstanding characteristics of the music he loved. He was obsessed with it; with the aid of prohibition and its artifacts he drove away all other things — food, sleep, women, ambition, vanity, desire. He played the piano and the cornet, that was all; when he was sick the Whiteman band kept an empty chair for him; when he died no one was glad and many wept.
He was born Leon Bismark Beiderbecke on March 10, 1903, in Davenport, Iowa. As a child he reached to the keyboard and picked out tunes; he knew the air of The Second Hungarian Rhapsody when he was three. He took a few lessons; he didn't learn to read music. On the river boats which came to Davenport in summer he heard jazz. He bought a cornet and taught himself to play; his fingering was unorthodox; he developed a round, full tone which was a wonder and a delight to all who heard it.
For a brief period he attended Lake Forest Academy in Chicago; he won prizes in music and flunked everything else. He listened to the jazz bands in Chicago, and when the players knew him and had heard him they asked him to sit in. He jobbed around with small pickup bands through the Middle West until 1923, when Dick Voynow, a piano player, organized the Wolverines. They made records for Gennett, a small recording studio at Richmond, Indiana, owned by the Starr Company, Hoagy Carmichael heard Bix and brought the Wolverines to Indiana University in the spring of 1924; alter eight return visits on eight successive week ends the Bix legend was begun. The Wolverines toot their place as one of the great white jazz bands; their records were a sensation; Bix was on his way.
In Chicago, young Condon and his friends played the records of the Wolverines and waited impatiently for Bix to hit town so they could hear him on the piano and take him to hear Bessie Smith. Bessie was Empress of the Blues. Ma Rainey, another great blues singer, discovered her in Tennessee, singing for $2.50 a week in tent shows. Bessie had a contralto voice of such power and range and tone, of such richness and adaptability, that there was no one to rival or imitate or follow her. She was unmatched; in the days before the depression Negroes stood in line all over the country to buy her records: Empty Bed Blues, Careless Love, Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out, Young Woman's Blues. She sang many of the blues written by Clarence Williams, the New Orleans piano player who migrated to Chicago, opened a music shop on State Street, and became the publisher of his own songs.
State Street was lined with cafes and theaters where jazz bands played — the Elite, the Pekin, the Fiume, the Dreamland, the Panama, the Rose Garden, the Edelweiss and the Little Edelweiss, the Open Air Gardens, and the Vendome and Lincoln Theaters. There was also the New Orleans Babe's Saloon and Restaurant, and, nearby on Wabash Avenue, the Dusty Bottom open air cafe. Wandering from saloon to saloon was a man named Jimmy Yancey, a piano player with a strong, rolling, rhythmic bass. Jimmy had been a vaudeville performer; now he was a favorite at rent parties. When things were low just before dawn he played his Five O'clock Blues. Others picked up his style—Pine Top Smith, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis. It was given a name, boogie woogie.
Jazz was not considered a proper profession for well-bred young white men; band leaders who dispensed popular music were as disapproving as parents who revered Beethoven. The Austin High boys and their friends had to work in cabarets and speakeasies; Al Capone and his lieutenants replaced the madams of Storyville as sponsors for the new music. Playing in small groups, experimenting with techniques, the youngsters developed a style based upon but different from New Orleans jazz. The beat was pushed and nervous, the tympani had the urgent sound of Indian drums; there was tenseness, almost frenzy, in the solo flights of the horns; there was not the unhurried, effortless, relaxed mood of Negro jazz.
Improvisation by adolescent white boys reared in polite homes was bound to be different from the conversational instrumentation of colored men belonging to a minority of thirteen million submerged in the freest nation on earth. It was a fresh expression, a new voice; it was first heard outside its habitat when in 1928 Okeh released a record made by seven of the youngsters: Frank Teschemaker, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Joe Sullivan, Jim Lannigan, Gene Krupa, and Eddie Condon. Condon organized the band, Red McKenzie arranged the recording date.
McKenzie was an ex-jockey, born in Holy Name parish in St. Louis in 1899, the last of ten children, christened William. After breaking both arms in his chosen profession he retired and hopped bells at the Claridge Hotel in St. Louis. Standing on the sidewalk waiting for patrons to arrive he folded a piece of paper over a comb and blew tunes to amuse himself. Across the street a Negro bootblack played a phonograph and beat out the rhythm on his customers' shoes. A young clerk named Dick Slevin came out of Butler Brothers Store with a kazoo' and hummed along with the music. McKenzie crossed the street and joined in. Slevin knew a man named Jack Bland who played a banjo. Bland, Slevin, and McKenzie began playing together. They went to Chicago with Gene Rodemich’s band as a novelty. Isham Jones got them a recording date with Brunswick. They played Arkansas Blues and Blue Blues; the records sold more than a million copies. The Mound City Blue Blowers, as they called themselves, went on tour. In Atlantic City McKenzie met Eddie Lang, another banjo player. McKenzie persuaded him to take np the guitar and join the Blowers. It was Lang who so popularized the guitar that the banjo disappeared from jazz orchestras. Before that happened McKenzie met another banjo player in Chicago, took him into partnership, and brought liim to New York.”
[That other banjo player was Eddie Condon …. To be continued].
