Between Chops and Ears

It’s been awhile since I last blessed you with my ramblings and pontifications. I expect your anticipation must be at it’s keenest, for sure. I occupied my last month with a not-so-minor obsession with Sidney Bechet. I was asked to provide a presentation on the great jazzman for the OLLI Cats. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute has a special group that grew out of a jazz history class, and has been meeting regularly for several years now to, among other jazz activities, listen to folk like me orate. I was extra pleased to be able to put my love of jazz history to work.

I’m not going to give you the whole Sidney spiel. It would encompass a lot more information than I believe blog etiquette allows. Instead, I’m going to focus on an aspect of Sidney that I find fascinating, and which also made me examine my own playing and music philosophy closely. It was his competitive nature, always brewing up excellence or acrimony, or both, often in equal parts. 

But first, there may be those of you who are saying, “Sidney who?” Let me tell you how you may have crossed paths with his music recently, other than in front of one of my bands. If you took yourself to see Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, Bechet’s recording of his own composition, “Si Tu Vois Ma Mere,” was what you heard during the entire opening sequence of shots of modern Paris. Sidney knew a lot about Paris from the ‘20s through the ‘50s, where he spent a good portion of his life off and on. He began life in New Orleans, a clarinetist who was so determined, and worked so hard to be the best from those earliest beginnings, that by 1911, at the age of 14, he was already considered a phenomenon. And not one of those, “Isn’t that cute how the kid can play his horn?” kind of phenomenon. His dedication to his craft made him a professional musician even before he became a teenager. He certainly was a great clarinetist, and he would play it throughout his career. The instrument on which he gained the most fame, however, was the soprano saxophone. He began playing one in 1920, influencing saxophonists then and now. Let’s hear that soprano in on that old tune, "China Boy," from quartet recordings with cornetist Muggsy Spanier. The Bechet/Spanier Big Four:

Many people say he was an equal to Louis Armstrong in his musical prowess. By the early 1920s the two of them were so far ahead of other musicians in terms of their facility for improvisation, that they forever changed the roll of the soloist in a band. We are fortunate to have these two jazz giants on record together. Several sides were recorded in the mid-1920s, and a reunion album in May of 1940. This finally meanders me around to the point of this piece. The competition. John Chilton wrote an excellent biography called Sidney Bechet, the Wizard of Jazz. In it he describes the meetings of Louis and Sidney: “Whenever Armstrong and Bechet met, each man knew instinctively that he was facing his closest rival in the jazz hierarchy. In those days they always greeted each other effusively but they made no effort to meet socially. They might share an animated conversation about the merits of New Orleans food, but such talk never took place around a meal table. No one ever recalled seeing them out on the town together.”

Both men were competitive, but Sidney took it to some eye-popping levels. And not just in his music life, but in EVERY aspect of his life.

On Cooking
Sidney’s friends said that if he had ever decided to abandon music as a career, he could have been a chef. Trombonist Clyde Bernhardt: “He liked to cook different kinds of Gumbo, Creole Beef Gumbo, Chicken Gumbo Spare Ribs Creole Style. Sidney Bechet didn’t like to hear me say that John Marrero or Simon Marrero, or any other New Orleans people could cook good Creole food. He wanted to be rated the best Creole Food cook!”

On Women
1928 in Paris, Sidney and another musician got in a gunfight over what one witness described as an argument over a chord progression. Other witnesses suggested, however, that the chord progression dispute was just the last straw for Sidney, who didn’t appreciate the other musician’s good looks and smooth ways with the fairer sex. Clarinetist Claude Luter, with whom Sidney worked throughout the fifties, told this story: “He loved to find the girls, but if anyone in the band found a girl that Sidney liked the look of, he would show his displeasure by cutting out all of that musician’s solos, often for nights on end, sometimes for a whole week.”

On Dogs (yes, I said dogs)
The summer of 1926, Reed-player Garvin Bushell: “At 5 a.m. in Berlin there came a knock on my door at the hotel. I asked who it was, the reply was, ‘Sidney, open up!’ With all of that talking my Great Dane, Caesar, began to roar then another dog began barking out in the hall. Sidney had brought his Doberman to challenge my Great Dane to a fight. I thought it best not to let Sidney and his dog in; he left making all sorts of threats to me and my dog if ever we met again, so I made it my business to stay out of his way while he was in Berlin.”

How does all of that affect my musical philosophy? It doesn’t. I’ve never had a need to best another man in the kitchen, or to worry about the size and strength of my dog over another man’s dog, or to punish a man for liking a woman to whom I took a fancy. And, so far, I haven’t pulled a gun out on one of the Southside Aces over a chord progression. Where I’ve learned something these past few months is through Sidney's main expression of that competitive urge, his music.

That scoundrel I described above managed to be an extraordinarily poetic scoundrel with his descriptions of jazz and the jazz life. His autobiography, Treat It Gentle, read like an epic poem. “New Orleans, that was a place where the music was natural as the air. The people were ready for it like it was sun and rain. A musicianer, when he played in New Orleans, was home; and the music, when he played it, would go right to where he sent it. The people there were waiting for it, they were wanting it. That music, it was like where you lived. It was like waking up in the morning and eating, it was that regular in your life. It was natural to the way you lived and the way you died.”

But I beautifully digress. I was about to explore the musical side of his competitive urges. I took that side road, however, to show you something of the depth and warmth of his love of the music. He was no mere ice-cold gunslinger, as the stories below may seem to suggest. Here's another example: “When you’re really playing ragtime, you’re feeling it out, you’re playing to the other parts, you’re waiting to understand what the other man’s doing, and then you’re going with his feeling, adding what you have of your feeling.” That was a man professing his love of the ensemble playing in traditional jazz. Right? It's a wonderful description. I would agree with him. To me, it’s the highest point of this art. Solos give me satisfaction, but in the middle of great ensemble play is where I soar. Perhaps the point could be made that if I possessed the skills of a Louis or Sidney, it might be that I would take more of a shine to soloing. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Almost all of my hair-raising thrills in music have come as a result of the whole band swaggering around, chasing each other, each man leaving space and filling space at the exact right moments, with the occasional collision only adding to the excitement. I know that Sidney knew that feeling; he describes it more than once. And he even said words disdaining the practice of “cutting contests,” where two or more musicians go after one another in musical one-upmanship. So how does it come to be that Chilton can tell this story about Sidney's early days in New Orleans? 

“Bechet and his friend, Emile Barnes, used to operate together in seeking out any challengers; Barnes called these musical contests ‘cutting hay.’ Barnes and Bechet went to dances with their clarinets hidden in their back pockets. Barnes usually sat in with the band first and proceeded to cut his opponent with a display of superior skills, but if the home clarinetist proved difficult, he would then have to face the overwhelming power of Bechet’s playing.”

Or the time somewhere around 1924 that Coleman Hawkins made statements to the effect that New Orleans musicians didn’t know how to play jazz. Sidney sent him a note naming the time and place; it was a duel! Duke Ellington said it was a duel that went on all night. According to bassist Wellman Braud: “Bechet blowing like a hurricane embarrassed the Hawk. He played and continued to play as Hawkins packed his horn, and as he walked out angrily Bechet followed him outside and woke up the neighborhood; it was six o’clock in the morning.”

Or in the mid-1930s when Sidney played with the Noble Sissle orchestra. Pianist Charlie Lewis: “Bechet was not sociable, he often argued with other musicians because he thought they were stealing one of his choruses.”

Stories the likes of those are scattered liberally throughout his career. Yet I believe in the last years of his life, when he said those words about ensemble playing, he fully meant them. The man possessed an uncanny ability to hold two seemingly contradictory truths inside himself at the same time. I would bet that he loved wholeheartedly to play ensemble. He just was going to make sure that everyone within earshot knew who the best player was in that ensemble. Sidney did not suffer any cognitive dissonance with this. You either kept up with him or you didn’t, usually the latter. But even if a musician couldn’t quite run with his musical company, that musician’s level of play might rise just for trying. If you did keep up with him, some stunning music could be produced. Let’s go back to that May, 1940 session with Louis Armstrong, when Sidney picked up his clarinet again on “Perdido Street Blues.” This recording is one of my absolute favorites. Listen to Sidney swoop and growl, and Louis build a fantastic blues over the riffing front line! 

My lesson in all of this has been simple. Play hard, listen hard. I have to be careful that my innate Midwestern politeness, such a fine thing in other arenas, isn’t a deterrent to good jazz. It can be a dangerous thing for a musician’s development to sublimate everything to the ensemble. You won’t get in anyone’s way, sure, but you’ll also be forgetting to contribute. On the other hand Sidney, on an occasion or six, musically stomped all over another man or a whole group. This I also wish to avoid (and maybe I have a ways to go before I need to worry about that particular pitfall). Where’s the middle? Somewhere between Chops and Ears. Somewhere between “Listen to that clarinetist!” and “Listen to that band!” I say go after it! Don’t “save” your best playing for a solo. Whether you’re keeping up or lifting up, the band’s going to sound better. 

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!

A Big Fine Thing

“Quietly we waited for the playback. When it came, pounding out through the big speaker, we listened stiffly for a moment. We had never been an audience for ourselves. Then Joe’s piano chorus started and smiles began to sprout. MacParland, Tesch, Bud, Lannigan—as each heard himself he relaxed. At the finish we were all laughing and pounding each other on the back…When we walked out of the studio that day and headed for the Three Deuces we weren’t even close to the sidewalk: everybody wanted to buy the first drink. ‘Wait until the records come out and people hear them,’ we kept telling each other. We were convinced that if the public were given a chance to hear our music it would like it and understand what we were trying to do. We were young, very young.”

This is from Eddie Condon’s book We Called It Music. Condon told this story about recording with Okeh Records early in his career. Even at the green age of twenty-two he was one of the oldest in a band that included the then 18-year-old Gene Krupa on drums. The McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans recorded four sides in December of 1927: “China Boy,” “Sugar,” “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” and “Liza.” This was the first time for these guys to hear themselves on record and, per usual, Condon delivers a perfect description of the musician’s common condition. 

Today I’m experiencing some of that levitation Eddie talked about. On Thursday night the Southside Aces had the extreme pleasure of releasing our third recording, entitled A Big Fine Thing. It’s been nearly five years since the last time we created some musical posterity, and eighteen months since we started hammering away on this project. I had no idea how heavy a long anticipation could be on the metaphysical shoulders. A five-year gestation could drive anyone a little kooky. But when I held the real thing in my hands, and began listening, all of that went away. I smiled until I hurt my face. “I swear,” I told Erik Jacobson later, “the finished CD sounds even better!” He vigorously nodded in agreement, practically shouting, “I know!” You’d think it was the first time either of us had been on a record, the way we giggled like schoolgirls. Well, pretty manly-sounding schoolgirls, but we did giggle. It is technically impossible for our duplicated disks to sound better than the master disk to which we’d been listening for several months, but the music on a master is still somewhat theoretical in terms of its existence. A Big Fine Thing is now a tangible record, available to the whole world. That IS better.

We unleashed the disks at the Eagles Aerie #34 in South Minneapolis. How is it that I can at once feel so at home at the Eagles while still being caught up in the excitement of visiting a strange new land? The Aces have been performing there several months in a row now, but when I leave my house in Phillips to drive the five minutes to that squat little building I feel an adventurous tingle. Refer to my previous treatise on the Eagles for a fleshed out picture. My wife, Claudia, and I arrived early to set up. She was done up for the affair, what Cab Calloway might call “togged to the bricks,” including silver Devil Doll bangs sitting atop a short black and yellow dress that was within shouting distance of high black boots. She stepped out of the ballroom to get a drink at the bar. She returned with tales of drink-buying offers from several of the gentlemen attached to their stools. “I still got it with the middle-aged barflies!” she reported. Erik ate his $7 steak dinner special while Duke Ellington small band recordings warmed up the assemblage, which was, well, beginning to assemble. Ahh, the Eagles. Finally all six Aces sat on the stage, ready to go. I took a deep breath, and at 8:15 counted off the first tune of the night, incidentally the first tune of the album, Lil Hardin Armstrong’s “Perdido Street Blues.”

Three tunes later and I already knew it was going to be a great night. This may sound like I'm a Boasting Barney, but as Don Meredith once said, “If you can do it, it ain’t braging.” The band was “in the pocket,” as we like to say when things are swinging loose but with swagger, with the fire in the belly. The swinging was easy and powerful, as if the Eagles was the batter’s box, the Aces were Harmon Killebrew, and the jazz was the Louisville Slugger on his shoulder. And the crowd made me giddy. Jazzhounds, dancehounds, boozehounds, and blood relatives. We had them all, in various combinations. I commented several times, “Imagine this many people coming to see a jazz band in the year 2011!”

Over two hundred people nested in the Aerie that night. One of my favorite musical moments was when Rick Rexroth reprised his debut recording from A Big Fine Thing, joining the band to sing “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.” It afforded me the opportunity to tell the crowd my original tip to Rick on how to sing it. Rick has pipes, let me tell you, but he occupies himself as a history teacher, husband and brand new father, not as a singer. So he asked me how we wanted it done. Knowing he was more of a singer than I am, and a smart soul to boot, I gave him these vague instructions, “Somewhere between a New Orleans front porch and the St. Olaf Choir.” He stepped into the studio a week later and dropped all of our jaws. Your GPS couldn’t have found the center between those two points better than Rick! 

A mob like that, and a night of swinging such as the one the Aces provided for that mob, will tend to imbue a man with overwhelming optimism about the future of the music. Some may pronounce my optimism unrealistic. But just like Condon, perhaps my naivete comes from being so young…ahem...I am twice the age he was in 1927, but I still share that sense of idealism about an art I love so much. Condon’s records did end up selling pretty well, but as his eye-rolling about his own youth suggests, the world didn’t exactly figure out the McKenzie Condon Chicagoans. Here it is almost eighty-four years later, however, and I think I understand perfectly what they were trying to do. 

Listen to tunes from A Big Fine Thing here