The History of Jazz (17 page)

Within a short while, the students had formed a working band, the Blue Friars— named after the Friar’s Inn, the Chicago nightspot where the New Orleans Rhythm Kings played—in emulation of the new jazz sounds they had discovered. Nonetheless, mastering the transition to improvisation required a practical education, in which study of the Rhythm Kings was supplemented by careful listening to recordings (especially the Wolverines’ sides with Bix Beiderbecke), as well as Saturday night visits to performances (including firsthand appreciations of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band at Chicago’s Lincoln Gardens). Before long, other young players fell into the orbit of the Austin High Gang. Drummer Dave Tough, who was dating an Austin girl, became a close associate of the group. Sometime later, when Tough left the band to travel to Europe, his younger friend Gene Krupa stepped in to play drums with the Austin High crew. Clarinetist Benny Goodman, then a freshman at nearby Harrison High, became acquainted with the Austin High musicians when he attended a performance at a boathouse in Columbus Park. Soon he too was playing with various members of the group.

The 1927 recordings by the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans reveal the ebullient approach of these young jazz players. On “China Boy,” Krupa’s solidly swinging drum work sets the tone for this more insistent style. “He was into a new concept of drumming on those McKenzie-Condon Chicagoan records,” John Hammond recalled many years later. “Gene was rock solid and swinging. … I felt he was the best drummer I had heard up to that time.”
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Joe Sullivan, making his recording debut on this session, contributes a driving solo that further stokes the fire. Jimmy McPartland’s cornet work here may have been less pathbreaking, but nonetheless confirms his growing reputation as one of the finer Beiderbecke disciples of the period—it is not surprising that, even before this session, he had been asked to replace Bix in the Wolverines. Bud Freeman’s tenor work from this period, in contrast, carries a rough-edged, guttural quality. In later years his style would take on a smoother sheen, but what we encounter on these early sides is a bellowing, rumbling growl announcing a ruffian saxophonist, one who gives no shelter and takes no prisoners. Teschemacher, who left behind only a handful of recordings before his death in an automobile accident on his twenty-sixth birthday, is perhaps the most difficult to evaluate of this group. On the McKenzie-Condon rendition of “Sugar,” his loping lines, laced with hints of the blues, show a flair for melodic improvisation, free from clichés, and set an example that later Chicago clarinetists would follow. Yet he is often remembered best for his influence on these other players, especially Benny Goodman, rather than for his own achievements. True, Teschemacher may have lacked Goodman’s virtuosity, yet his few recordings reveal a daring performer, one willing to delve into the dirtier tones and gutbucket sounds more commonly associated with black clarinetists and make them work in a manner that was never merely imitative.

Pee Wee Russell, two weeks younger than Teschemacher, developed an even more stylized approach. The son of a St. Louis bartender and steward, Pee Wee—his formal name was much more elegant: Charles Ellsworth Russell—studied piano, drums, and violin in his youth, but began focusing on the clarinet in his early teens. Like Beiderbecke, with whom he later performed and shared a close friendship, Russell was expelled from boarding school before embarking on a jazz career. Russell later quipped: “I learned one thing: how to get where you’re going on time.”
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The only problem Russell faced after this dismissal was where exactly to go. His travels over the next few years brought him to Mexico, the West Coast, Arizona, Kansas, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Texas (where he encountered Jack Teagarden), back to St. Louis (where he met Beiderbecke), and on to New York—indeed, almost anywhere a paying gig materialized. True to form, like several of the other noted “Chicagoans,” Russell performed infrequently in that city, but was part of a St. Louis contingent that later developed strong ties to the Condon crew.

Some have suggested that Russell’s eccentric style of improvisation defies description. Not true. Jazz writers have had a field day articulating and analyzing its mysterious essence. “Half B flat, half saliva,” was Leonard Feather’s characterization of the classic Russell tone, which was all part of a manner of phrasing that resembled “the stammering of a woman scared by a ghost.” “Much of the time, his sound was astringent,” Nat Hentoff has explained, “as if it had taken a long time to find its way out of that long contorted body and was rather exasperated at the rigors of the journey.” A number of commentators have looked for different levels of intent in Russell’s work, almost as though it were a literary text in which the surface meaning and the symbolic meaning were at odds. “He sounded cranky and querulous,” Whitney Balliett has asserted, “but that was camouflage, for he was the most plaintive and lyrical of players.” Gunther Schuller goes even further in expostulating this theory of “the two Russells”: “At first hearing one of these Russell solos tended to give the impression of a somewhat inept musician, awkward and shy, stumbling and muttering along in a rather directionless fashion. It turns out, however, upon closer inspection that such peculiarities—the unorthodox tone, the halting continuity, the odd note choices—are manifestations of a unique, wondrously self-contained musical personality, which operated almost entirely on its own artistic laws.”
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Bud Freeman offers a far different interpretation of Russell’s muse, reducing it to the classic Aristotelian concepts of pity and fear—with a slightly different twist: “He became a world famous figure because people would suffer with him. They’d say ‘O my God, I hope he gets through this chorus. ’ ” Yet, whether his music is viewed as a Delphic utterance laden with secret meanings, an expression of eccentricity, or simply a style built around various limitations, Russell ultimately succeeded where it counted most: in attracting a devoted following, one that lived vicariously through his embrace of the unorthodox. For those fans who became part of the cult of Pee Wee, there was no other clarinetist half so grand.

Russell’s playing revealed his taste for the bizarre almost from the start. On his 1929 recording of “That Da Da Strain,” Russell opens his solo with a halfhearted attempt to imitate the florid and fluid clarinet stylings pioneered by the New Orleans masters. Alas, with meager success. After floundering energetically in this manner for three bars, Russell abandons this attempt at virtuosity, instead tossing out isolated notes and jagged phrases, offering up all the makeshift sounds—growls that end up as whimpers, staccato jabs that shadow box with the rhythm section, notes bent until they scream—that came to characterize this artist’s oeuvre. His celebrated solo, recorded that same day, on “Basin Street Blues,” relies on a similar knack for raising aberrations to the level of a musical style, only here within the context of the twelve-bar blues. The combination is gripping: blues, the music of pathos, and Pee Wee, the master of the pathological, meet in a surreal halfway land, one where Dixieland and Dada gropingly join hands. Throughout his career, Russell would return to the blues and, in a manner all his own, somehow manage each time to extract the inevitable bloody victory. But though the eccentricities of Russell’s style might temporarily mask the fertile muse inspiring his efforts, they could never hide it. His work was especially effective when contrasted with another player who possessed an equally strong sense of style: whether alongside Coleman Hawkins on “Hello Lola” and “One Hour,” or decades later matching his wits with Gerry Mulligan or Thelonious Monk (whom he “out-Monked,” his fans insisted, with some justification). In a fitting tribute, Bud Freeman lauded Russell’s charisma and creativity, and compared his work favorably with the most illustrious clarinetist of the era, predicting that “in another hundred years, if there is another hundred years, people will talk more about Pee Wee’s records than about Benny Goodman’s.”

Adrian Rollini may have boasted a less idiosyncratic improvisational style than Russell, yet he made up for it in other ways. His choice of bass saxophone as his major instrument was in itself unconventional. This horn has made infrequent appearances in jazz bands in later years (although players with a penchant for experimentation, such as Boyd Raeburn, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell, have enjoyed its penetrating sound). Rollini’s other horns could be even more peculiar: note his use of the goofus, the celeste, and his own creation, the oddly named “hot fountain pen,” a type of dwarf clarinet. He was also an early exponent of the xylophone, marimba, and vibraphone, played the piano, and was a superb, much underrated drummer. This capricious array of instruments has often distracted commentators from the core virtues of Rollini’s playing: his solid sense of swing, his uncluttered, probing improvised lines, and the joyous energy of his solos. Many of Rollini’s finest efforts from the late 1920s find him working in a sideman role, on “Kickin’ the Cat” and “Beatin’ the Dog” as a member of Joe Venuti’s Blue Four; alongside Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer on “Three Blind Mice” and “At the Jazz Band Ball”; and with Miff Mole on “Feelin’ No Pain.” In the 1930s, Rollini continued to refine his saxophone style, as witnessed by the effective “Bouncin’ in Rhythm” from 1935. But his efforts during this period increasingly emphasized his vibraphone playing which, while noteworthy for its mellow tone and smooth phrasing, rarely approached the zest of his sax performances. However, his drum work supporting Freddy Jenkins’s band on “Toledo Shuffle” from 1935 is quite impressive, suggesting that Rollini might have enjoyed a substantial career by focusing on that instrument alone.

Although not as outré as the reed players of the era, a number of white brass players were also developing poised, individual approaches to the jazz art during this period. The so-called New York style of Red Nichols—one of the most recorded bandleaders of the day and a capable cornetist in a Bix vein—and trombonist Miff Mole softened the rough-and-ready urgency of the Chicagoans and other jazz pioneers in crafting a more introspective approach. Their recording of “Davenport Blues” from 1927 provides a good example of their conception of jazz: the melodic lines are infused with a floating quality, resisting the gravitational pull of the rhythm section. One senses an attitude of almost bemused detachment, yet the music retains a bouncy, light swing that keeps the piece rooted in a danceable two-step. Mole’s trombone work in such settings revealed a linear conception freed from the New Orleans tailgate tradition and paved the way for the more modern approach of Jack Teagarden and other later trombonists. Chicago native Francis Joseph “Muggsy” Spanier, in contrast, maintained allegiance to the New Orleans roots of the music, with his clipped, incisive middle-register lines and deference to the ensemble sound. New Orleans–born Joseph Matthews “Wingy” Manone, in contrast, adapted comfortably to the stylistic demands of Chicago although his efforts may have been distinguished less by their musical innovations than through his sure sense of the comedic and his talents as an entertainer. When the Dixieland revival took off in the 1940s, these musicians were well positioned to benefit from the newfound interest in the music’s roots. With few exceptions (Dave Tough’s embrace of more modern styles comes to mind), they remained faithful to the sounds of their youth, whether their personal jazz tradition was in or out of fashion.

Only one other white brass player of the day could approach Beiderbecke in terms of individuality and creativity. Jack Teagarden stands out as the greatest of the traditional jazz players on the trombone, and also left his mark as an important jazz singer. Teagarden had the weakest Chicago ties of the group, with his career beginning in his native Texas while New York served as his home base during most of his glory years. The Teagardens of Vernon, Texas, were raised far afield from the major urban centers of jazz—the city was a former cattle station, a final supply base before a several-hundred-mile journey to the Kansas railhead—but the family compensated by forming a self-contained unit of professional-caliber musicians. In addition to Jack, the family included trumpeter Charlie, drummer Cub, and pianists Norma and Helen. Jack, who was christened Weldon Leo Teagarden (named after a dime-novel hero of the time) was the oldest. He studied piano with his mother during his childhood and later learned baritone horn before settling on the trombone.

Teagarden had few role models to draw on—either on record or in person— during his formative years. The New Orleans tradition, despite its frequent use of the trombone, had done little to develop the instrument’s potential as a solo voice. It more often served as a source of countermelodies or rhythmic accents, often linking harmonies with the slurred chromatic glissandi that characterized the tailgate sound, a stock New Orleans device associated most closely with Kid Ory (hear his definitive work on the 1927 Armstrong side “Ory’s Creole Trombone”) but adopted by many other early players of the instrument. The melodic potential of the horn was first demonstrated in the work of Miff Mole, whose prolific recordings from the late 1920s proved that the trombone need not be relegated to a supportive role, but could stand out in front as a full-fledged solo voice. Mole’s influence on Teagarden cannot be denied, yet it is likely that the Texan had already developed the rudiments of his style well before he heard Mole’s work. In many ways, Teagarden’s playing showed a disregard of formal methods, especially in his reliance on embouchure and alternate positions rather than slide technique. Whatever his sources of inspiration may have been, Teagarden already stood out as a seasoned musician by the time of his first recordings.
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In 1921, while still in his midteens, he joined pianist Peck Kelley’s band in Houston, which also included Pee Wee Russell. Paul Whiteman heard the group during a road stop in Houston and offered Teagarden a job, but the youngster declined. Some time later, when the twenty-two-year-old Teagarden finally journeyed to New York, he brought along a half-dozen years of professional experience in a fertile jazz environment, albeit somewhat distant from the more visible currents of New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. In this new setting, Teagarden was active in the recording studio—in the late 1920s hardly a week passed without his participation in a session—and joined the Ben Pollack Orchestra. Pollack was an admirable drummer and had once propelled the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, but is best remembered for discovering young talent. His orchestra featured, at one time or another, a host of important future bandleaders, not only Teagarden, but also Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Harry James. Over the next several years, Teagarden’s work, with Pollack and in other settings, would establish him as one of the leading jazz soloists of his generation.