The Curse—or How Bob French and Butch Thompson Saved The Day

Well, we’ve gone and done it again. On Wednesday, the Southside Aces warbled away into microphones in order to stick a fork into the perfectly barbequed, tender meat of our latest recording. That made me sort of uncomfortable to say. Steve insisted that what we were doing wasn’t overdubbing vocals, but “underdubbing.” If you want to know exactly what that means, you’ll have to ask him. He conducts workshops and autograph sessions after gigs at the Stop and Shop on 17^th and East Lake Street. Confession: I appropriated, purloined, pirated and otherwise directly stole that joke from Erik. Although how do we know Steve doesn’t sign autographs at the Stop and Shop? We don’t keep tabs on him. We again employed Mr. Lance Conrad, the owner and talented engineer of Humans Win! studio (the exclamation point is his). Before our vocal night, we Aces men first spent two chilly February nights up in his Nordeast, Minneapolis joint to capture all the sounds necessary from the brass, reeds, strings and skins. The chill was kept outside, though, as all six of us were staring at each other in this room:

Now with the vocals, we have a carton chock full of jazz, some assembly required. It will be a good handful of months, however, before you can put your ears to it, so until the time comes I’ll be building up your excitement. Can you even tolerate the thrill? All sarcasm aside, I’m actually in a tizzy wanting to get it into your hands! Instead, for the time being I’m going to have to content myself sharing with you some of the originals that inspired us to play and record these great tunes. 

I’m going to begin with The Curse. Over the years, you may have heard Erik announce “Bogalusa Strut” from the stage as his favorite tune. It’s a great song that gets in your hips and stays there, moving you around despite yourself. Back in 2005, when we were figuring out which tunes we wanted to record for our 2006 release, Bucktown Bounce, it was a natural selection. The Aces found the song from a couple different directions. There was Erik, who came to the tune through one of his mentors, the late New Orleans drummer Bob French. 

Bob in the New Orleans Times Picayune. Click here for his obituary

My route to the tune was through my mentor Charlie DeVore of the Hall Brothers Jazz Band. The original was written by Sam Morgan and recorded by his band in 1927. It all came from this:

Bogalousa Strut

In the video, check out the first picture of the Sam Morgan Jazz Band. You can see a young Jim Robinson on trombone. You may also have noticed that Sam spelled his tune  “Bogalousa Strut.” That is how they spell the name of the Louisiana town down there, after all. At some point we jazz folk all dropped the O after the L. Maybe it’s because silent Os are dangerous. 

So while you were listening to that, did you run and get your copy of Bucktown Bounce? Maybe you scanned the tune list up and down and couldn’t find the song. It’s because we simply couldn’t get it done. We tried and we tried, until we got fed up with ourselves and left it alone. “Oh well,” you think. You try to be philosophical because there’s always going to be a tune or two that doesn’t make the cut. We were disappointed, but didn’t yet think of the song as cursed. But then came the 2010 sessions for A Big Fine Thing. Take after take of the tune only served to produce enough wincing to get a headache. I believe Erik was the first to say, “That song is cursed.” What was wrong with us? Dave, our band archivist, likes to point out that we could release a whole album of failed “Bogalusa” takes. Don’t worry. That won’t happen unless we get really famous, pass away after long and glorious careers, and our record company (because we’d actually have a record company if we were famous) thinks they could drag a few extra bucks out of you, the fans, if they released all our garbage. They could call it Bogalusa Cut. Or how about Bunch-a-Losers Strut.

It wasn’t the song’s fault, though, and we still loved it and kept working it out on our many stages. The Bob French version originally guided us. He had even added a vocal about a troubled girl—not in the Morgan version—that we used. On top of that, we began to dig into the Hall Brothers recording. Young Butch Thompson produced an epic clarinet solo with the band building up behind him all the way. He starts out alone, and on each chorus they keep adding instruments until they run out of musicians. It’s exciting stuff. 

Check out young Butch on the left. If you have your magnifying glass handy.

So here we are in 2014, after all this absorption and hard work, ready to break The Curse! Right? For us, it would be a double homage. Maybe The Curse could be overcome by the inspiration of two bands. In fact, Bob just passed away in 2012, and this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Hall Brothers recording. Talk about inspiration! We better do it right.

We set a good Bob French tempo, not quite as slow as he liked to do it, but still with that great mischievous bounce that he perfected. Like a man walking by a bunch of women hanging out on a stoop. We all relaxed into that for a couple of minutes, followed by the middle section, where the rhythm guys laid down a couple of choruses by themselves. This was so we could “underdub” Bob’s vocal later. Then came my clarinet odyssey, the Hall Brothers portion of the homage, where I was supposed to burble along by myself to start things, just like Butch did half a century ago. What happened? Dave accidentally played through for a bar, almost yelling an expletive as he did it. 

You have to understand something. Dave NEVER makes a mistake like that. I’m not exaggerating. He NEVER does. We all finished the take, sort of pounding away at it with a lack of dynamics born of frustration, and looked at each other mystified. None of us blamed Dave. It had to be supernatural causes. Did The Curse grab Dave’s arms and force him to play through, like some sort of evil windup monkey drummer?

I’d like to build the drama here. Tell a story of a baker’s dozen of takes each ruined mysteriously. A mistake here, a power outage there, the ghost of a Gypsy woman appearing before Robert pointing her long, bony finger at him, a ceiling tile falling on Zack’s head. The camera spinning around the room showing the men, pale and sweaty, lashing out at each other in frustration as the tension grows and the night wears away, but then…just when they were going to throw in the towel someone grittily says, “We’re going to break this curse if it’s the last thing we do!” They take deep breaths and you see a finger hit the record button, and they valiantly forge on to victory! That’s a good tale, but I’m actually glad I don’t have to tell it that way. As it turned out, victory was right around the corner. We got it on the next take. No drama, we just plain got it! The Bob French mischievousness combined with the Hall Brothers buildup is story enough. The Curse was lifted, and I can’t wait for you to hear it. 

Highlights of 2012

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of me coughing and hacking after blowing the dust off my blog. I pulled it down off the shelf and decided not to bring it into the Goodwill along with the four extra Thesauruses and those skinny-Tony pants. I’ve had a week to ponder the year past—from Buttons to Aces, Eagles to Santaphones—and I want to tell you some about it. 

January

2012 began with me at the Aster Café with Patty and the Buttons. The café had just given us a raise, a rare occurrence in the world of playing for restaurants. A propitious start to the year for sure. Andrew “Diz” Gillespie joined us on his drums, and baritone sax man Scott Fultz also found a place on the stand. We gave the crowd what for all that afternoon, blazing away on “Big Chief Battle Axe” to finish. On our last, ferocious chorus I caught Diz in my peripheral vision coming out of his seat to put his whole body into the last note of the day. The crowd roared. The Aster’s raise is money well spent, I don’t mind saying.

February

The Aces were again the house band for the Best of Midwest Burlesk. During the last show of the weekend, we surprised the cast by removing our black and whites to reveal what a jazz band looks like performing in red Union Suits. We liked this so much, we made it a part of our Christmas album. Now everyone can own a copy of us in our long underwear:

March

The Southside Aces featured the music of the Hall Brothers at the Fraternal Order of Eagles Aerie #34. Several of these monthly features would be in my top ten musical experiences of the year. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, just to name some. And Erik loves MC-ing the raffles. In fact, he is unsure which is more exciting for him at this point, playing the music or drawing raffle tickets. I know I’ve painted a couple pictures of the scene there in the past, but I can’t resist giving you a couple more. I overheard this shouted bar conversation from my vantage in the ballroom: “Hey, Rick! What was that that shot my dad’s finger off?” A man, presumably Rick, laughed and answered, “I think it was a Red Ryder BB Gun.” Another barstool percher weighed in, “No, that’s how you shoot your eye out.” Another time, I was there with Patty and the Buttons when I heard an impassioned monologue from another Eagles Denizen. I had joined the conversation with the smokers out on the patio when she launched it: “I don’t understand our government. They work so hard to get Americans to quit smoking and drinking, but those are the two vices we got that they make the most money from! Now, I don’t drink that much,”—we had to take her word for that—“but I’ve been smoking for forty years and I’m never going to quit! With all the taxes I pay for smoking, you wouldn’t think they’d want me to quit! Look at me!” she yelled, waving her cigarette aloft, “I’m a patriot!” The Eagles, ladies and gentlemen.

April

The Aces played at the Social Dance studio. Erik came running back down 38^th Street during our second break, dismayed that the Tom Thumb a couple blocks away was closed for the night. He was SO hungry. A somewhat perpetual state for that man. “I think I’m going to order a pizza!” Sure enough, Pizza Luce showed up during the third set.

May 

The Midwest Lindy Fest had the Buttons on the Anson Northrup riverboat. Some of you may not know this, but Patty is a genius at target marketing. Looking to capitalize on the swing dancer’s ability to sniff out a deal, he offered them an extemporaneously-created contest he entitled Once Over Lightly. “The first dancer to come up to the stage with a Summit for me gets a free CD. Now,” he added the fine print, “if there is more than one Summit, the band will take care of them, but we can only give away one CD.” In the second set, “The first person to bring a whiskey for Tony gets a free CD.” The third set Once Over Lightly contest procured a Bombay Saphire for Meat Plate. 

May also saw me on the stage of the Cedar in a Butch Thompson band. For anyone there, this had to be one of the most memorable concerts ever. We had just finished “Mournful Serenade,” the third song of the second set, when poof! No lights or sound! The West Bank had been thrown into a brownout on account of a blown transformer. Charlie DeVore yelled out into the darkness, “Well, I guess they’ve already cut the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund!” Butch was feeling certain that they would stop the show, given as how they only had flashlights and some crepuscular light creeping in through the thrown-open back doors. I urged him on, “We can play in the dark! We don’t need power!” He agreed, sat back down at the piano, and a few seconds later cheers erupted in the crowd when they heard my foot stomp off “Isle Of Capri.” We finished the tune to the loudest cheers of the night. Our drummer, Peter Johnson, shouted, “They like us better when they can’t see us!” We played for forty minutes in the near-dark, including a great moment when everyone got really quiet, both band and crowd, to hear Charlie sing “Mister Johnson.” And the dancers danced! Shadows, moving about the Cedar.

June

Near the end of the month, the Bill Evans New Orleans Jazz Band played several tunes to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Doggie Berg’s death. My favorite moment of that night at Bennett’s was when I had the opportunity on a break to sit next to Mimi, Doggie’s widow, and share a few quiet words. She was tearful at first, but then she smiled, determined to shake it off. “You know what Doggie would say right now?” she asked me. “Let’s all get drunk and be somebody!”

Later that week, Lance Conrad, owner of Humans Win! recording studio in Nordeast, Minneapolis: “What could be better than a New Orleans Christmas album recorded in the middle of summer by an atheist Jew engineer?” Indeed. Not much can be better than that. The Southside Aces went into his studio at the beginning of a Twin Cities heat wave. I’m sure folk in Southern climes are accustomed to accompanying their Noels with dripping sweat, but it’s a bit surreal for we Northerners. I remember the day in late May when I sat at my piano in nothing but a tee-shirt and madras shorts, hammering out an arrangement of “The Christmas Song.” I looked out my open window across the short space between mine and my neighbor’s house. I imagined the conversation he had with his roommate later that night. 

Roommate: “Were you just humming ‘Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire?” 

Neighbor: “I guess I was.”

Roommate: “What’s wrong with you?”

Neighbor: “I don’t know. It’s in my head for some reason.”

July

The Mississippi River Fund hired the Aces for the first in a series of chautauquas, this one entitled, “Drinking The River.” A band playing New Orleans music, a Mississippi River brewery historian, a waste treatment scientist, a singing Park Ranger, and a dude in fur-trapper attire walk onto a paddleboat. No punch line, this really occurred. I want to know what kinds of things have to happen in your life in order to find yourself in the position to make some of your livelihood by slipping into your fur-trapper getup…not for the purpose of trapping fur. Of course, some people want to know what happened in my life that I find myself making my livelihood playing eighty-year-old music on a clarinet.

The Buttons also had their fare share of July fun. We were at a farm helping a couple celebrate their nuptials, when we met a man, six feet six, eighteen-inch beard, wearing a kilt, and claiming to possess skills at the arts of Jews harping and gargle-singing. I feel more certain than anything else ever, even than of the love of my dearly departed mother, that that particular list of attributes has never been applied to just one person before. I have trouble deciding on my favorite line of the night. “I recently attended a Jews harp convention.” Or, when he gargle-sang “Harvest Moon” with us, “You can’t use beer because it foams up too much.” Or, “I haven’t worn pants since last September.”

August

Sidney Bechet feature at the Eagles, special guest Henry Blackburn. One of the best concerts of the year. While getting set up, Henry had trouble with his clarinet reeds. He looked at Steve Pikal and me and said, “The reed is the most important thing.” He paused, smiled, and said, “Actually, it’s Attitude number one, reeds number two, and…” he trailed off, pausing again to consider. “And talent, number six.”

At the end of the month, the Buttons play “Corinna, Corinna” in the Ramberg Senior Center at the Minnesota State Fair, accompanied by 42 trombones. That sentence can stand alone.

September

In one week, I play a kielbasa Fest, a beer fest, and an oyster fest. What a delicious week! At Meritage’s 2^nd Annual Oyster Fest, the Aces experienced the pleasure of being booed by St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and his cohorts. This on account of the band being “all the way from Minneapolis.” It was in good fun, but Erik still made an effort to calm down the border tensions by offering up Dave as our Ambassador to St. Paul, him living over there on Snelling after all.

October

Halloween playing jazz and Balkan folk music with Sam Miltich up north in the Grand Rapids VFW, dressed as the historied Dallas Cowboys coach, Tom Landry. Another sentence that needs no further elaboration, right?

November

On the 21^st, the Southside Aces released the video for the title tune to their Christmas album, “Santaphone,” our paean to the adventures afforded by procrastination. Friend and fellow musician, Roc, said it helped him to feel better about shopping at 6:45 on Christmas Eve. We followed up two days later by the release of the album itself. 

December

The Santaphone CD release party. The band and a cavalcade of guest singers, plus a spare sousaphone player, entertained the biggest crowd the Aces have ever seen at the Eagles. Charlie DeVore’s clucking chicken vocal on “Winter Wonderland” may have been one of the best uses of a chicken vocal I’ve had the pleasure to hear. You’d think that there would be a narrow range of uses for such a thing, but seeing as how I’ve spent a lot of years around Charlie, I know this not to be the case.

Maud Hixson knocked “Sleigh Ride” out of the park that night. This was an especially proud moment for her. She had confessed to the song being somewhat her nemesis: “I’ve been putting that song off for so long. Every year, I would tell myself I was going to do it, than I would avoid it until Christmas was past. It’s like that scene in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when the pet shop is on fire. Pee Wee keeps running in saving animals. Each time he passes the snake cage, he makes faces and shudders and saves the other animals instead. Finally, just the snakes are left. He fills both his fists full, runs back outside screaming, holding them over his head, and faints on the sidewalk. That’s me doing ‘Sleigh Ride.’”

Finally, you should know that I’m writing to you as a full-time musician. I ended my year by jumping with both feet into being, as George Lewis called it, a “musicianer.” For many years I worked as a reflexologist at a local hospital to support my musical habit. I now get to awaken every day with only music ahead of me and it feels great! It must, because I seem to be using some form of the word music in every single sentence. I am a happy man, even when my good friend Bill ribbed, “You’ve left gainful employment to become a musician.” I love my good friends. And I loved my year of music. 

The Lineage Of Inspiration

“Hey, Rick! What was that that shot my dad’s finger off?” If I’d had any doubts about where I was, if, as the medical professionals say, I wasn’t oriented to place, then that woman’s shout brought me into focus. My place in the world on this night was the Fraternal Order of Eagles, Aerie #34.

I was in the ballroom, and the shouting went on in the bar, so I wasn’t privy to the visual. A man, presumably Rick, replied with a laugh, “I think it was a BB gun. A Red Ryder BB gun.” Another man’s voice weighed in, “No, that how you shoot your eye out.” The woman who was the source of the inquiry had had enough. She was intent on the truth. “Come on, you guys! What was it that shot his finger off?” The men just kept laughing. We would never find out.

I was there to play some jazz music, not compare gunshot wounds. The Southside Aces would feature the Hall Brothers Jazz Band. It was like an Inspiration Funhouse of Mirrors. The Aces inspired to play the music of the Hall Brothers inspired to play the music of King Oliver, Sam Morgan, etc. Hall Brother stalwart, Charlie DeVore, has unerringly guided me to all those original inspirers as well, thus the reflections break off, come back, go deeper, sometimes become moderately distorted. Speaking of distorted, how about this analogy? But the jazz music can be a funhouse, and the owner of the carnival, Charlie, would himself be seated in the cornet chair. Stop me! Enough already!

We wouldn’t be able to get our guitarist for the night, Mark Kreitzer in his chair until at least halfway through the first set, so we had to behave like a combination brass band/dance band. Charlie suggested we begin with “Bugle Boy March.” “Do you know that one?” he asked. I shook my head and Erik said, “Not yet. But we know ‘Bourbon Street Parade.’” Who doesn’t? So we started the night roasting that chestnut. Steve sang “My Blue Heaven,” and we rendered “I Want Somebody To Love” in a sweet but stompy fashion. Just then, Mark knocked on the ballroom side-door to be let in. The band, aided by Charlie’s vocal, went on with “We’ll Understand It Better By And By.” Mark put the Western in the Swing warbling “Jambalaya On The Bayou.” As per usual, I called a waltz for the good folk at the Eagles, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Charlie asked, “Do you guys play the verse?” Erik answered with mock terseness, “Not. Yet. Charlie, you’re pushing us!” We then stuck a fork in the set with our good friend, David West, singing “San.” We did know the verse on that one. 

Dave had brought the record sleeves of his entire collection of Hall Brothers albums and 45s. He had affixed them to the curtain behind the band. This meant we were even more of a visual spectacle then usual. Audience members came in closer during the break to peer at all the artwork.

The feature set was a doozy. As Charlie would say later, “I love playing all those songs, but I’ve never played them all in one set!” I risked the ire of the dancing crowd by having Charlie give some historical context as to just why we were playing these songs. Why the Hall Brothers played them originally. I have to say he conducted himself rather circumspectfully, if I may take liberty with the usage of the word. I know it’s a dance, and the dancers like when a band moves along, but I believe everyone in that room benefited from an understanding of the lineage of performance. 

Our first tune, for instance. The Sam Morgan Band in New Orleans records “Bogalusa Strut” around 1927. A young Jim Robinson plays trombone in that band, and goes on to be one of the main trombonists of New Orleans jazz from the fifties through the seventies, and was one of several New Orleanians who mentored the Hall Brothers. The Hall Brothers go on to record the song themselves in the sixties. In that recording, Butch Thompson takes a gazillion choruses on his clarinet. The band arranges to break it down so that on his first chorus he’s all by his lonesome. They then start the layering with the bass, going chorus to chorus adding rhythm men one at a time, finally Russ Hall on the trombone and Charlie on cornet. It’s a great record. So here we are in 2012, and I have the temerity to recreate that moment. I hold myself together, and we’re off!

“Sing You Sinners” was Hall Brother Doggie Berg’s vocal. Doggie, of course, is no longer with us (I wore one of his ties in honor of the occasion), so Charlie did the singing. It involves stops, key changes, odd forms, and a coda. All the Aces had huddled up before the set to go over the roadmaps on several of these songs. Mark already was beginning to doubt his memory on this one. Dave helped him out with some pointers, but especially when he said, “And if you don’t get it, it’s all right. You’d only be blowing history.” 

The Luis Russell tune, “Saratoga Shout,” was a bit rough but solid. Charlie sang “Waiting At The End Of The Road.” We ripped up “Stevedore Stomp.” Then Charlie sang what’s become one of his classics, “Mister Johnson.” We finished with what might be my new current favorite, “Deep Henderson.” The band loves it. The dancers expressed specific enthusiasm for it. And with that, history circles around once again. Charlie told me about the Hall Brothers whipping dancers into a frenzy out on the Funky Butt Dance Floor at the Emporium of Jazz with “Deep Henderson.” Here we are decades later moving a new generation of dancers around. Talk about deep. 

We hold a raffle during these features. Erik told the crowd we would be “raffling off an actual Hall Brother.” We didn’t, of course, but we raffled off their recordings. We always have a food portion of the raffle as well. A trip to Ingebretsen’s, Minneapolis’ own Scandinavian store on 16^th and east Lake, and I had procured a jar of herring in Cajun Sauce. Erik wove this story, “Since we’re a band of Minnesotans, with some Scandinavian heritage in there, playing the music of another band of Minnesotans who play the music of New Orleans, we thought Cajun herring was appropriate for the occasion.” What could be better to represent a Minnesota/Louisiana connection than Scandinavian/Cajun pickled fish?

The third set was looser now that the history was, well, history. Butch Thompson sat in. He wore his Sorrels and a green knit cap. He sat down and apologized for his attire. “No, it’s great,” I assured him, “You’re providing a direct tie-in to the Eagles.” This is funny, though it may sound a bit snooty. But it’s true! When we show up in our New Orleans black pants, white shirt and tie, we invariably stick out. But truth be told, the Eagles only has to look at you once up and down and they accept you as you are. Have I mentioned how I love this place?

The music of the last set began with “It’s Tight Like That,” vocals by Charlie and myself. Charlie spun Mary Ellen around the dance floor while Butch and I sweetened up the night a bit with “Sweet Lorraine.” When Charlie stepped back onstage, Erik said on mic, “Hey Charlie, nice of you to show up.” Charlie charmed us with “A Porter’s Lovesong To A Chambermaid.” Then the absolute surprise of the night! Butch Thompson sang! He and Charlie harmonized on “Ready For The River.” A great Jimmie Noone moment. The evening finally ended with Steve singing “Going Down To New Orleans.” 

This, people, was a fantastic night of music. It really brought clarity to the lineage of inspiration up here in Minnesota, at least as I’ve experienced it. Charlie and Butch are perhaps two of the speediest people I know when it comes to sidestepping compliments that run along the lines of “You guys have inspired us to play this music!” They quickly point to the originals of the music, saying they deserve all the credit. But I wouldn’t be playing this music if it wasn’t for all those Hall Brothers and their commitment to playing the music that inspired them.