The D-word

Have you ever found yourself in public proclaiming your love of the jazz, and your proclamation draws the question, “What kind of jazz?” Or, similarly, you’re extolling the virtues of the Southside Aces—as many are wont to do—and your acquaintance asks, “What kind of music do they play?” Have you ever used the word “Dixieland” to describe what goes on?

As with most attempts to categorize jazz, “Dixieland” is the touching off point for a never-ending argument that can often make normal folk uneasy around the Jazz Kooks engaged in the debate. Most of the musicians I know who’ve put one or both feet into this music of New Orleans consider the word a pejorative. When someone asks me to tell him or her just what I do, I never use the D-word. I will start by saying, “New Orleans jazz,” or “1920s and 30s jazz.” If a blank stare is my response, I might list the instruments, “You know, with a trumpet, trombone and clarinet?” I consider these words to be evocative. If that fails, however, to evoke, I pull out the two most powerful words in the jazz lexicon: “Louis Armstrong.” That’s usually as far as I will take it. 

Now ask me why the word rankles me so. Tonight while I pondered that, I found a thread online of people having a good old-fashioned back-and-forth on the subject. One writer stepped into the fray to theorize that Europeans say “New Orleans,” or “Traditional,” and that it’s only Americans who say, “Dixieland.” Another posits that when white people appropriated black people’s jazz, the various permutations fell under the label. The funniest of the bunch discussed an alternate: “I would favor the term “Traditional Jazz” had it not been usurped and demeaned by the banjo chug, funny hat, clarinetitised disease that festered under the shortened form of that name.” This last comment devolved the thread into a fight between attackers and defenders of the banjo. Wow! “Clarinetitised?” I’m glad to be informed that my clarinet could be an instrument of disease. From now on I will take precautions. Perhaps regular inoculations of Jimmie Noone.

I have to be honest. It may be said that I am a tithing member of the Jazz Kooks congregation. I can be just as passionate about the Dixieland question, and sound equally bonkers. As the above example demonstrates, however, any universality on the subject will likely never be achieved. The only possible resolution that can happen will be within the confines of your own experience or sensibilities. For me there is an image—straw boaters, striped vests, armbands, etc.—that accompanies music played at tempos silly fast with a lot of jangly pizzazz. These things do not describe me; therefore I do not play Dixieland. 

I’m trying not to look you in the eye, you with the wise-ass grin, because you are thinking, “Hmm. Same repertoire. Same instrumentation. Aren’t you just one straw boater—a mere accessory—away from Dixieland?” You’ll have to trust me; I am, unequivocally, not. It’s at this moment, however, when I set up camp on the other side of Jazz Kook Lake. I won’t castigate you for use of the word. Recently, I was interviewed for a segment on KUOM, Radio K. My interviewer dropped the D-word a couple of times throughout the segment. And it’s not infrequent that people look to me to clarify what jazz I play by asking if it’s Dixieland. By now I am resigned to the very real fact that that one word, more than any other, much more speedily directs a person toward a nearby neighborhood of where I want them to be. Amazon.com, after all, has a Bestsellers In Dixieland Jazz section which lists everything from The Firehouse Five and Pete Fountain 

all the way up to Louis Armstrong's Hot Five. That being said, I still won’t use it myself. By my reckoning, it would be like if you asked me to drop you off at Murray’s and I pulled up in front of McDonald’s. But go ahead yourself and sling it around willy-nilly. Especially now that you know it makes me wince just a little on the inside and take deep, peaceful breaths. If it’s important to me in the moment, and on occasion it still is, I will dispense unasked-for lessons in Jazz P.C. But it’s pretty rare these days that I can be bothered to do that. What's the point? I have several other ways I can proselytize from the First Book of the Jazz Kook, some of which might even be interesting. In regards to that radio segment there were much more important things to talk about than my distaste for the word. Frankly, that’s usually the case. Take, for instance, this night from last winter at Bennett’s Chop and Railhouse: 

Bennett’s can boast of a horseshoe-shaped bar. One night on break Chuck DeVore, drummer for the Bill Evans New Orleans Jazz Band, and I sat there refreshing ourselves with the beverage of the barley grain. The guys on the other side of the horseshoe, well into the process of testing the strength of their livers, yelled variations of, “You guys rocked!” We accepted this with aplomb, as if to say, “Well, naturally.” “What do YOU play?” one of them yelled at me. I brought the word “clarinet” into the conversation, to which our interviewer blinked, unable to relate. He interrupted the sound of crickets and shifted his attention to Chuck: “What do YOU play?” As soon as Chuck replied, “Drums,” our new pals erupted. Multiplying shouts of, “Yeah!!” and “More cowbell!” tumbled our way, as if Chuck saying, “Drums,” was the echo that caused an avalanche. One of the guys had enough wherewithal to locate the word “Dixieland” from among his beer-shrunken vocabulary, and informed us with the seriousness of a professor that the cowbell was essential to the genre. Chuck congenially replied, “Yep. Dixieland without cowbell is like crackers without cheese.” This was just odd enough to distract our new friends from further conversation. But I still felt something important wasn’t being addressed. “What if you have crackers with herring?” I asked Chuck. Thoughtfully he shrugged, “Well, then you don’t need a cowbell.”

When that man called what we do at Bennett’s “Dixieland,” we could have alerted him to his oh-so-egregious violation of jazz etiquette. But we didn't ruin the scene. It was a hell of lot more fun and funny to roll with it. I’ll repeat, though, that you won’t hear it fall out of my mouth anytime soon. Like calling the Ritz a flophouse. Dom Perignon a grape fizz. Chief Justice Roberts an ambulance chaser. Perhaps I am being a bit la-di-da? I recently heard a story of a nationally known jazz musician who will not allow any advertising of his concerts to contain the D-word. La-di-da or not, I say, “Amen, brother!” But I also might suggest that none of us lose any friendships over semantics.

ARGO

On June 25^th, 2008, one of the best drummers the world ever had the privilege to hear passed away at the age of 78. Donald “Doggie” Berg played drums with the Hall Brother’s Jazz Band and Bill Evans New Orleans Jazz Band, among others. I had the honor of having played with him for several years, including his last job, the night before he died. There are those who could tell a much more complete story of Doggie: Charlie DeVore and Bill Evans to name two. Charlie and Bill spent decades with him after all. I only managed to be lucky enough to be around for one of those decades, so my story is incomplete, but here’s what I saw.

It’s not uncommon for musicians to use the names of other musicians as adjectives when describing or asking for a certain way of playing. For instance, you might say, “He did that Baby Dodd’s thing!” I will even occasionally turn a guy’s name into a verb, as when I request the Southside Aces drummer, Dave Michael, to “Sammy Penn it up!” You could hear a man long-immersed in the history of jazz whenever Doggie played, but his style was so unique, so much an organic function of the man himself. He did that Doggie Berg thing.

The man himself could also sing the hell out of a song. The stamp he put on certain tunes to this day makes us utter phrases like, “That’s a Doggie song.” A short list of my favorites would include “Sing You Sinners,” “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” “Celito Lindo,” (a tune on which Doggie used his career as a Spanish Professor to great advantage), and finally my all-time favorite, “Winin’ Boy Blues.” I only have my memories of him doing that, but take a listen to “Sing You Sinners” from a Hall Brothers recording:

It was through my association with the Bill Evans New Orleans Jazz Band that I had the great pleasure of Doggie’s friendship and jazz mentorship. In fact, it was he who originally pulled me under the collective wing of that band. This was an act, unbeknownst to him, which would eventually lead this clarinetist to make what is tantamount to a blood oath to play the music as long as I can hold up my horn. Back in August of 1998, my friend Mike and I had just returned from the Bix Beiderbeck Festival in Davenport, Iowa. We possessed a deep need to find a source of the music back here in our hometown. One of the cooks at Chang O’Hara’s on Selby Avenue in St. Paul (nowadays called the Happy Gnome and without music of any sort) told Mike about Sunday afternoons, and this band that seemed to be what we were looking for. We showed up one Sunday and took our seats in a back booth. The music began, and what we heard dropped our jaws. This was one of those moments when a whole new universe opens up in front of you. We had just picked up a new Sunday habit.

The first set finished, and before we could push our jaws back up into our faces, Doggie marched off of the bandstand and right up to our table. You see, if you looked around that room on that day, or any other Sunday during the band’s run there, you would have noticed a distinct lack of folk from Mike’s and my generation. We had at least thirty years of catching up to most of the people there. Doggie certainly noticed how we stuck out, and he wasted no time getting to the bottom of it, “What are you two doing here?” 

Those were the first words he ever said to me. It wasn’t the voice of someone accusing you of trespassing; it was the voice of incredulity. What possible reason could two people of our age have to sit ourselves down in front of this band? We told him about Davenport, and how we had developed a real urge to hear the music. He asked us how long we even knew about the music. I said, “Well, I remember when I was about eleven years old [this was twenty years later], my parents took me out to a place called the Emporium of Jazz to hear a band called the Hall Brothers.” He said, “That was us.” My jaw stayed south of my face. I eventually got around to mentioning I played clarinet. “You do?” he said excitedly, “Bring it down here next time. We’ll get you up there.”

And that’s how it started. He invited me into the music without ever having heard a single one of my notes. I began to sit in, first for a couple of tunes at the end of the night, slowly improving until a couple of years later Bill Evans began to hire me. That band patiently saw to my jazz education then, just as they do now. And it all came about on account of Doggie’s curious, gregarious nature. 

I haven’t yet mentioned his mischievous sense of humor. Here’s one of my favorites. The aforementioned Dave Michael, drummer for the Southside Aces, had not yet met Doggie. We were invited to a Labor Day pool party at which many of our local traditional jazz luminaries would be present. Dave and his wife Mindy showed up and were standing next to the pool sort of shyly looking around at a lot of people they didn’t know. Dave had hold of a beer he had just opened. Doggie, resplendent in a pair of drawstring trunks and a very tanned shirtlessness, walked up to the couple. “What kind of beer is that?” he said, pointing at Dave’s beer, “Do you mind if I try it?” Dave said “Sure,” and handed it over. Doggie proceeded to tilt the full bottle up and didn’t tilt it down again until every drop had disappeared. “Pretty good,” he said nonchalantly, handing the empty back to Dave. Then he turned left and jumped directly into the pool. Those were the first words Doggie ever said to Dave.

                                               Pontchartrain Owls at MRB in April of 2008

                                              (you can see Doggie's head behind my left hip)

The April before he died we were in New Orleans. Every spring, members of the Bill Evans band, plus musicians from around the world form a once-a-year band called The Pontchartrain Owls for the French Quarter Festival. We were down there playing, eating, and drinking, like you do. One night a few of us were in a joint called Johnny White’s, on St. Peter Street off of Bourbon Street. Doggie kept buying himself, my wife, Claudia, and me shots of Bulleit Bourbon. You can see my nose in the foreground. Well, you can see my nose in most foregrounds. Anyway...

                                                 Johnny White's, April of 2008

He and Bill Evans regaled us with stories of the jazz life, and we all traded several jokes of the blue variety. A somewhat honed sense of propriety prevents me from printing them here; you’ll have to approach me sometime to get the full skinny. The upshot though, is that a certain joke told by a certain wife of mine burrowed in to Doggie’s mind to stay. Forward to Doggie’s memorial, only two and a half months later, and horn man Dave Braun stood up at the microphone and told how he sat down with Doggie before his last gig, “I was with Doggie before the job that night, and he told me this joke. I believe it was the last joke he ever told.” And with a straight face, Braun went on to repeat that which Doggie had learned from Claudia in that late night session at Johnny White’s. Not your usual funeral fare, I can tell you. Crickets and stifled laughter from the back of the room was all there was to be heard. All the aforementioneds—Mike, Dave Michael, Claudia and I—we were the said laughter-stiflers standing at the back of the room, bent over in delighted disbelief. Doggie’s mischievousness striking from the beyond!

Some time later Mimi, Doggie’s widow, bequeathed to the band-members several of his ties. When I spot my Doggie tie on my tie-rack, it seems as though I can see a whole Doggie standing behind it. The twinkle in his eyes, the ready wit, the fantastic drumming. I will wear that tie this Tuesday when we take the “stand” at Bennett’s Chop and Railhouse. And if there happens to be some Bulleit Bourbon about the place, I may have to bend my elbow a bit. I owe him a permanent and roomy place in my memory. To the Dog!