I Remember Jazz Read online

  “Whaddya wanna hear?” he asked. I wish I had that night to relive, knowing what I know now.

  “Whatever you feel like playing,” I said. “I never make requests.”

  By now he knew that I, too, was a native of New Orleans. “How ‘bout somethin’ from home!” he announced. “The Milneburg Joys.”

  The intricacies of his performance absorbed my attention. The harmonies, the counterpoint, the completely syncopated rhythms—they were a game to him, a kind of tonal jigsaw puzzle he took delight in solving. Still, you sensed that he didn’t really feel any challenge. He could just nod his head and make the whole thing fall into place, as though he himself had, in fact, invented music. He’d say, “Looka this!” and shower a cascade of chords that somehow all managed to make musical sense.

  When he finished, I said, “Tell me about that number. I see you’re on the copyright with the guys from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings crowd. Tell me who really wrote ‘Milneburg Joys.’”

  “I’ll tell ya, Al,” he explained, “I didn’t really put nothin’ to that but the introduction—this part,” and he played it. “But, of course,” he continued, “the rest don’t amount to nothin’.”

  Suddenly I understood that this characteristic appraisal wasn’t the braggadocio for which he was noted. When you really examine the piece and listen, it’s obvious that the introduction is significant. The rest is just plain old blues.

  The precise instant when I realized that Jelly Roll wasn’t just all talk—an aging musician who had failed to “keep up with the times”—was the same instant that I really knew how to listen to jazz. He was, in fact, creating music more astonishing and ingenious than anything I’d ever been aware of before. Right then I knew that my piano favorites of the moment—Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Bob Zurke, or Pete Johnson—couldn’t have begun to execute, much less think of, the amazing passages Jelly Roll appeared to handle so effortlessly.

  By this time, Jelly and I were casual friends and I found that I just couldn’t stay away from his place when he was playing. One day I was walking in the general direction of the Jungle Club, not planning to go there, when I encountered Jelly heading in the same direction.

  “This is my bookkeepin’ day,” he explained cheerfully. “I got bookkeepin’. After all, I had six more customers besides you this week.” As we passed a Salvation Army retail outlet, he said, “Lemme stop in here a minute, Al. I need to buy a piano.”

  I followed him in and watched as he examined half-a-dozen battered instruments that had all played their last choruses. He hailed the attendant.

  “How much you want for this one?” he asked, indicating his selection.

  “Five bucks,” the man told him without hesitation.

  Jelly gave him the money and called to a derelict type who was going through the motions of sweeping the place. “Wanna make a quarter?” Jelly asked him. In those Depression days that was an offer not to be ignored. The man assented with genuine eagerness. Jelly took a nail file out of his pocket.

  “Watch what I do,” he instructed, as he carefully pried the ivory facing off one of the keys. “You use this nail file and take the tops off all those keys.”

  In a very short time the job was done. Jelly stuffed them all into his overcoat pockets, flipped a quarter to his aide, and told the mana ger, “I got what I want. You can keep the piano.”

  As we walked down toward U Street, I couldn’t contain my curiosity. “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Public relations,” he explained patiently. “I’m gonna sign my name on ’em and give ’em away to my fans for souvenirs.” So far I couldn’t say I’d actually seen anybody that looked like a fan besides me.

  “How about a few for me?” I solicited shamelessly.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. That night when I came into the club he gave me a handful of keys, carefùlly autographed. I still have six left, but sad to relate, the signatures have faded away. There’s not a trace of ink to be found on any of them.

  Just a few nights later, I said to him, “I’ve got to go to the capitol tomorrow. Can I drop you anywhere?”

  “Yeah!” he said brightly. “I’ve got a gig in the Library of Congress.”

  So bright and early the next day, I picked him up in a taxi and delivered him to Alan Lomax.

  John Casimir

  In my own pretensions to civilization I have always scoffed at the practice of or belief in voodoo. Hard as it is to believe, though, thousands of Orleanians accepted it matter-of-factly as I was growing up, and unfortunately many lives were destroyed or impoverished because of this stupid superstition. It seems incomprehensible that there are still those among us who give credence to the alleged special powers of certain charms, potions, and powers. But some people are convinced that they themselves have such powers.

  It’s always seemed to me that musicians, and especially New Orleans musicians, are more susceptible to believing in the assertions of those who claim good and evil mystical talents. They’re as gullible a lot as you’ll ever find. There are exceptions, of course, but the exceptions aren’t common.

  Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen who died in 1903, left thousands of followers insisting that she had been making the city her domain since the mid-eighteenth century. Two of her nephews were jazzmen whom I knew well. Banjoist Raymond Glapion was one; and the other was Alcide (Slow Drag) Pavageau, the renowned bass player in the bands led by George Lewis and Bunk Johnson. Drag was always convinced there were spirits walking beside him. Fortunately, he believed they were good spirits.

  The phonograph record entitled Marie Laveau was made by Oscar (Papa) Celestin and his orchestra in 1954. Discriminating listeners can make out the dulcet tones of Al Rose harmonizing in the background choral singing. It’s a kind of shaky, but not tentative, baritone.

  This vignette is about a man who occasionally claimed kinship to the notorious voodoo queen, although the relationship was never clearly defined. John Casimir was the leader and E-flat clarinetist of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band during the fifties. This parade unit was a New Orleans institution dating back to 1911 and is still performing in 1985 as this is written.

  Casimir, it is fair to say, was irreproachable in his personal and professional life. He was not the sort one would imagine doing harm to anyone. Nevertheless, he inspired great fear among New Orleans blacks, especially among his musical colleagues. The superstitious were convinced that he had been “born with a caul” and that he had a special ability to determine at a glance whether an ailing person would live or die.

  I became aware of Casimir’s unique status in the community when I heard one musician say to another, “Poor Steve ain’t doin’ too good. Casimir passed by his house and left the quarters.”

  I asked what that meant and they enlightened me. “John Casimir,” one of them said, “you see, he got the power. If a man be sick, why the man’s wife might ask John to pass by his house and look at him. John, he can’t make nobody better, but he can tell is the man gon’ be all right. If he gon’ die, then Casimir leaves two quarters on the mantelpiece fo’ the lady who gon’ be the widow. Dem quarters is fo’ his wife to close his eyes with.”

  “Do you believe,” I asked him, “that Casimir can really tell?”

  “Sure I believe it! You bettah believe it! It always like he say. He say the man gon’ die, he die!”

  Several months later, I followed the Young Tuxedo Brass Band through uptown streets during a funeral. Many Orleanians followed brass bands at funerals just to enjoy the exhilarating music. At the end, as the members of the band went their own ways, Casimir seemed to have been left without a ride home. Whoever he’d been expecting hadn’t shown up.

  “Hey, John!” I called. “You need a ride?”

  He came over and got in the car.

  “You really wailed out there today,” I said. “As hot as that sun was, I’m surprised that you all could play that long.”

  “That’s what we on this earth to do,” he assured me.
“Some of us is just meant to play music where the people need it.”

  We had both known the deceased and we spoke of him for a moment. Then John said, “He done last three days. Seven days back I left the quarters by his wife, and then fo’ days back he die.”

  “Do you really believe,” I asked him, “that you can see when a person’s going to die?” We looked each other directly in the eye, he with a characteristically baleful, other-world look. I thought for a moment he was getting ready to announce my own doom. He inclined his head. I was so fascinated I had pulled the car to a stop at curbside.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “I got the sight. Somebody gon’ die, I can look at him and see the death there.”

  “What does it look like?” I pursued.

  “It don’t look like nothin’,” he insisted. “It’s somethin’ you jus’ see. It ain’t like everybody can see it. You got to have the sight.”

  I wanted to know more. “Do you have any charm or gris-gris? Do you have to say anything to the spirits? Do you talk to the person who’s sick? Do you touch him?”

  He shook his head through all my questions. “You got the idea wrong,” he explained patiently. “I don’t need to do nothin’. I jus’ come in and look at the cat an’ I know! I can’t help knowin’. I got the sight.”

  “Everybody around here believes you’ve got the sight,” I agreed. “Do you ever worry that if a sick man sees you in his house it might scare him to death?”

  “Most of the time,” he replied, “I don’t say the man gon’ die—an’ he don’t. I don’t make nobody die. I jus’ be lookin’ in so folks can get ready do they need to.”

  I dropped him at his house, and he invited me in for a drink. I had a Coca Cola and he opened a beer for himself. I noted the crucifix over his bed.

  “You know,” he told me, “there’s a world a whole lot of people don’t know nothin’ about. White folks don’t know nothin’ about it an’ maybe most colored don’t know. But you from here. Born an’ raised in New Awlins an’ you got to know nobody from here never died fo’ true. We say they dead an’ we puts ’em in the grave—but they ain’t dead. They walkin’ aroun’, they talkin’ jus’ like you an’ me. They don’t do no harm. You jus’ don’t never see them no mo’.

  “When I see somebody gettin’ ready to die, I kin begin to see through him, see? He jus’ begins to disappear, see? He jus’ look like you kin see the wall behind of him. When I kin see the wallpaper, you know what I mean?”

  “John,” I asked, “when your own time comes do you think you’ll be able to tell?”

  Casimir shook his head.

  “No. I ain’t gonna know, because sometime before a person like me die, the sight leave him an’ go to somebody else. The first time I knowed somebody was gon’ die it was my grandma. She had the sight but she didn’t know she was goin’. Only I knew she was goin’ and that was the first time.

  “I always feel dyin’ all aroun’ me. Sometimes it’s far away an’ sometimes it’s real close. Today it’s pretty quiet out there. I don’t feel nobody close-by gettin’ ready to leave us.”

  Casimir died on January 3, 1963, seven years after this conversation took place. The funeral was a big one. His band and the Eureka Brass Band were both part of it. I talked that day with Thomas Jefferson, a trumpet player who was a mainstay of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band. I already knew that Jefferson’s head was involved in the peculiarly New Orleans occult. He had already told me of the dreaded “gown men” who haunted the trees along Esplanade Avenue and dropped from the branches on unwary passersby, enveloping victims in their flowing attire and carrying them off mysteriously for dissection in the medical schools.

  “Tell me, Thomas,” I asked him, “do you know if anyone left any quarters at Casimir’s house?”

  He looked nervous.

  “I don’t know, man,” he admitted, “but I know one thing. That power, the sight he had, passed on to somebody. Before too long, we’ll know who it is. That sight don’t ever disappear from this place. You wait an’ see. Somebody’s gon’ be able to tell. One time I thought Willie Pajaud had the sight, but jus’ before he died—he had a heart attack in his bathroom—he called out to his wife an’ he said, ‘This is it, Honey!’ Now if Willie had the sight it would have left him before that and got into somebody else. So Willie didn’t have the sight. John Casimir, he had the sight.”

  There seems to be something endemic among Orleanians that makes it easy for them to place credence in such legends as this. I don’t know how I ever kept from being bogged down in that morass of superstition. New Orleans musicians are not only superstitious, they’re also patient. To them it’s just a matter of time until someone comes forward with the sight. At any rate, I suppose I’ll-find out one day who’s carrying the quarters.

  Frankie Newton

  Not too many jazz fans remember Frankie Newton. He was an exciting and inventive trumpet player, the one that Bessie Smith collectors hear on her final recording that included “Gimme a Pigfoot” and “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon.” Frankie lived in Greenwich Village. Like so many jazzmen, he drank more than was good for him. Also like so many jazzmen, he had all kinds of friends, including the popular painter Beauford Delaney, and authors William Saroyan and Henry Miller.

  A middle-aged black, Delaney had a notorious preference for boys over girls; but in the permissive ambience of the Village of the forties, his straight friends overlooked his amorous vagaries in consideration of his exceptional talent, his boundless cordiality, quick wit, and undeniable wisdom. He was reluctant to sell his work to just anybody, and this idiosyncracy made it necessary for him to reside and paint on the fourth floor of an abandoned warehouse on Greene Street. He didn’t really live in dire poverty, because his more economically stable friends, and a few who were daring and ingenious, saw that he was somehow provided with the necessities of life. A mercenary gun runner for the Israeli Stern Gang in what was Palestine not only stole a refrigerator from a nearby apartment for him, he then tapped the city’s powerline to bring unauthorized electricity into the studio. A telephone was installed the same way. Owners of the building had no idea it was occupied. Friends brought Beauford a pot-bellied stove, which we managed to vent illegally through the roof, and we never went up to visit without carrying a bag of coal, a bottle or two of wine, or maybe a Blind Lemon Jefferson phonograph record that Beauford would play until it wore out. So his studio was a kind of social center that was immortalized in Henry Miller’s book The Air Conditioned Nightmare, in a chapter entitled “The Amazing and Invariable Beau ford Delaney.” As often as not, if I were looking for Frankie Newton during the day and didn’t find him in the bar across from his apartment, the next place I’d look would be Beauford’s studio.

  One day in the early forties some of us were sitting around at Beauford’s on folding chairs and pillows. Saroyan and Miller were there, as was a young male model named Dante whom we all assumed was Beauford’s special friend. Beauford, as usual, was painting and talking at the same time. We suddenly heard footsteps running up the stairs. Most people didn’t run up those four long flights. In burst Canada Lee, without knocking. Canada Lee, once known as a middleweight pugilist, had by then established himself in New York theater circles and, in fact, distinguished himself in Shakespearean roles, especially with his critically triumphant performance as lago (in white-face) in Othello. His breathlessness riveted our attention as he announced, “Frankie’s place is on fire!”

  We all jumped up and ran for the door, fearful that our friend was in danger of injury or worse. We ran the couple of blocks, saw the blaze, and watched the firemen at work. Much to our relief, though, we saw Frankie Newton standing behind the rope barrier watching the blaze.

  “My God!” Saroyan shouted. “Are we glad to see you’re not hurt!”

  “I might as well have burned to death,” Frankie moaned. “My horn, my buzz mute, all my clothes are in there—and I got a job tomorrow night. If I can’t make the job, I got no food
, no money, nothin’.” Then as an afterthought, “I got no place to sleep, either.”

  “How much does a decent horn cost?” I asked, being practical.

  “Maybe seventy bucks. Five for a mouthpiece. I guess I can get a mute for three, four dollars.”

  On the spot, I took up a collection. Twenty from me to start it, twenty from Henry. Saroyan was only carrying fifteen. Beauford had two, Beaufords brother, also a painter, put up ten, and young Dante chipped in the ten he had.

  “Tomorrow,” I announced, “we’ll go up to Teddy’s and get Frankie what he needs.” (Teddy Napoleon, Phil’s brother, was a pretty good drummer, but his main occupation was running a music store near Madison Square Garden.)

  Then we all went to Connie’s Cafe for one of her matchless West Indian dinners, which she let us put on the cuff in those precredit card days. Connie knew a genuine emergency when she saw one. Frankie wasn’t entirely sober yet, not at all interested in food, but he had another drink, which at that particular moment he might well have needed. That night he slept on Beaufords floor.

  Next morning—noon, anyway—after I’d had a chance to go to the bank and get a check cashed, Frankie and I went uptown on the subway. The advertising cards carried these large messages for Bell-Ans, a popular indigestion pill of the day. The previous day’s events had gotten to Frankie, and he felt the need of such a quasimedical measure right then. So we got off the subway, found a drug store, and then settled down in a Nedick’s orange drink stand to give him a chance to ingest his remedy.

  Teddy Napoleon had already read in the papers about Frankie’s misfortune and gave him an unprecedented deal on the things he needed. People from everywhere volunteered aid. Tyree Glenn, the trombone-xylophone player, had an extra tuxedo to lend. (There were few jazzmen as big as Frankie.) We took the “A” train to Tyree’ s place to pick it up.