George Lewis [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520311022

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A Jazzman from New Orleans Tom Bethell

University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1977 by The Regents of the University of California ISBN 0-520-03213-8 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-3872 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Dave Comstock

To my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. "The City Was Filled with Music" 2. "I Just Admired the Clarinet" 3. 'Twenties: "A Natural Liviri " 4. "Man, That Was Some Band" 5. 'Thirties: "I Played Because I Loved to Play" 6. Discovery: "He Mentioned George 'Strode'" 7. Climax: "You Won't Be Disappointed, Mr. Russell" 8. American Music: "The Band Really Swung..." 9. Stuyvesant Casino: "Bunk Had His Ways ..." 10. Transition: "No Colored Dance Hall Operating" 11. 'Fifties: "Dixieland Fans Yelling for Favorites" 12. 'Sixties: "The Appeal Is Largely Visual" 13. Death: "Move the Body Over" Appendix 1. George Lewis Talks about New Orleans-Style Music Appendix 2. George Lewis Discography by Tom Bethell, George W. Hulme, Graham Russell, and Tom Eassie Notes Bibliography Index

fx 1 4 32 50 78 96 122 141 157 182 268 225 249 270 281 291 365 371 381

Acknowledgments M y thanks to the many who helped with this book. First, to those who granted interviews: Carolyn Buck, Sid Davilla, Frank Demond, Cie Frazier, Nick Gagliano, Bob Greene, Robert Greenwood, Avery Kid Howard, Earl Humphrey, Percy Humphrey, Allan Jaffe, Edna Kelly, Louis Keppard, Shirley Lewis, Mildred Major, Peter Papin, Joe Rena, Beale Riddle, Dorothy Tait, Lawrence Toca, John Ventress, Joe Watkins, Johnny Wiggs, Chester Zardis, Emma Zeno and, not least, George Lewis himself. My thanks also to Richard B. Allen and the staff of the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University, New Orleans, for their cooperation. And to E. Lorenz Borenstein, who for years has acted as an unofficial patron of the arts in New Orleans. Many thanks to those who answered letters: Louis Armstrong, Rudi Blesh, George H. Buck, John van Buren, William E. Jaynes, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Lewerke, Ken Grayson Mills, Norman E. Pierce, Robert Reinders, Dr. Edmond Souchon. Especial thanks to my discographical collaborators: Tom Eassie, Ed Lewis, George Hulme, Graham Russell. And to two photographers: Dick Tolbert, Leo Touchet. I am grateful to my editor, Alain Henon, whose numerous suggestions considerably improved the manuscript. Above all, I would like to thank William Russell, who provided access to his unpublished diaries recording his trips to New Orleans in the 1940s, and much other useful information and advice. T.B.

Introduction lhe name of George Lewis first became known to me when I began to listen to traditional jazz bands, primarily Ken Colyer's, in England in the mid 'fifties. The clarinetists in these groups were said to be strongly influenced by someone in New Orleans called George Lewis. The best of the Lewis records, I was told, had come out on an obscure label called American Music, issued by an apparently eccentric gentleman in America named William Russell, who only pressed the records in tiny quantities, and wouldn't re-press them when they ran out. At that time in London, it seemed that everyone was trying to get the American Music records—exotic ten-inch LPs made of red vinylite. Eventually I bought some acetate dubbings of these records at Dobell's Record Store in London. I listened to them with amazement. Here was a music nobody had told me about: a rather complex yet free polyphony, played with such swing, such relaxation, by some rather elderly Negroes in New Orleans who, one learned, couldn't even read music. Who were these people? What was this music? The clarinetist on most of them, playing an extraordinarily agile contrapuntal part with a wonderful tone, was this George Lewis, apparently also a stevedore. A few years later, in January 1959, I met Lewis while he was staying at the Imperial Hotel in London. He had come over with his band for a European tour. A small frail-looking man, thin, faultlessly dressed, with dark overcoat and leather gloves, met me in the hotel lobby. He was infinitely courteous, with the

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manners of royalty. He drew on a cigarette from a tapered holder. He was also infinitely reserved—as inscrutable as a diplomat. We waited for two of his bandsmen to join us, Slow Drag Pavageau, his bass player, and Joe Watkins, drumer. Presently they came into sight, negotiating the staircase with the caution of Alpinists. Then we went outside to a cafeteria next door to the hotel. Lewis had three mouthfuls of egg and chips and resumed his cigarette. Slow Drag, who uttered hardly a word, produced a pipe and gazed serenely into the middle distance. Joe Watkins remarked on the New Orleans-style brass band that had awaited them, so far from home, at London's Euston Station. George Lewis remained an enigma, with very little to say about the music he played. There were hardly any dance halls left in New Orleans, he did say. Most of them had been turned into churches. "Choiches," he pronounced it. A week later I spoke to him again at the hotel, with his manager Dorothy Tait standing by his side and emanating an ill-defined hostility toward all who came near her charge. George answered questions as skillfully as a lawyer. His specialty seemed to be telling people what they wanted to hear. A few years later I went to New Orleans and became better acquainted with George, recording him a number of times myself, and eventually embarking on this biography. George remained, to the end—even on his death bed—cordial, polite, and friendly, but the personal reserve never left him. It was always understood that the book would be about him, yes, but not really in any personal way. Not why his marriage to his first wife did not work out (he would have been shocked had I asked him that); but, perhaps, why his partnership with Bunk Johnson did not work out. In a sense, then, this is a symbolic biography.

Introduction

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George Lewis's life perfectly illuminates the rise and fall of New Orleans jazz in its hometown, which is my real subject here. The new musical language appeared abruptly, unexpectedly, at just the time he was born, and by the time he died nearly seven decades later, it too had run its course, with a "Jazz Museum" installed as its monument. The music had also come to a peak (as I believe) at about the time of his discovery, and the recordings he made then—the American Music records I had first listened to—also happen to demonstrate Lewis playing at or near his personal peak. In the early decades of this century, a remarkable number of men began playing in this new style of music, all born within a few years of one another, all living within a few miles of one another in one medium-sized, otherwise unremarkable town. About ten such individuals, including George Lewis, have already been the subject of full length biographies, and no doubt a dozen more studies will be written. Quite clearly, then, these practitioners were the beneficiaries, above all, of the time and place of their birth. The new musical language, for a while, possessed great strength and radiance, rapidly traveling across the globe. It was transmitted by musically untutored men, who had no theories about what they were doing, who explored the new idiom unconsciously. More than anyone, George Lewis embodied these characteristics; more than anyone, he personified the music.

2 "The City Was Filled with Music"

George Lewis was born in New Orleans on July 13, 1900, at a time when racial relations were deteriorating all over the South. New Orleans was no exception. A few days before Lewis's birth a race riot (the Charles Riot) had broken out in the city, leaving twelve persons dead. Blacks were rapidly becoming disenfranchised, and following the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimizing the doctrine of "separate but equal" facilities for the races, numerous Jim Crow laws were passed limiting the civil rights of blacks. These changes would have an important influence on the new musical language of jazz that was abruptly and quite unexpectedly developing in New Orleans at the time of George Lewis's birth. The thirty-five years that had passed since the end of the Civil War were years in which blacks had much greater educational and social opportunity than they would have again for the next half century. The early jazzmen—those who were young men at the turn of the century—had in nearly every case received substantial formal musical education. By contrast, those of George Lewis's generation were not taught to play music. Instead they copied what they

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heard around them—by ear. They quickly learned to improvise. And so the formal marches, the polkas and the mazurkas, were transmuted into something new. Recent research in New Orleans, particularly that of Henry A. Kmen at Tulane University, suggests that a number of widely accepted propositions about jazz origins and history are now in the process of revision,1 and this book belongs to that "revisionist" school. The new findings, it should be added, are generally in line with what other historians (notably C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow) have found in contemporaneous but non-musical research into social history in the Deep South. First of all, condensed into a paragraph, here is the "old" view that is being challenged: in the nineteenth century and earlier, blacks were brought to the United States as slaves, but in New Orleans they were allowed to perpetuate their African tribal dances in a public meeting place called in French "Place Congo" or Congo Square. Following Emancipation, then, jazz swiftly emerged as a manifestation of the new civil liberation of blacks. Thus it was an Afro-American form of music that was admittedly "primitive" in its early stages—it could hardly have been otherwise because the early jazzmen were not far removed from those who rattled the jaw bones of oxen in Congo Square. In any event, jazz swiftly grew more sophisticated (producing in short order technically accomplished musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton), until the hometown development of jazz was dealt a severe blow by the "closure" of the city's legal red-light district, known as Storyville, in 1917. At that point, jazz moved "up the river" to Chicago and other spots, and thus New Orleans's role in jazz history more or less came to an end. The revisionist thesis may be summarized as follows: by the turn of the century, when jazz was

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first heard, the African past of blacks in New Orleans and elsewhere was extremely remote—much more remote, in fact, than the European past of most white Americans. The slave trade had been declared illegal in 1808, and recent studies of plantation papers, New Orleans newspapers, and other documents indicate that very few new slaves arrived in the United States from Africa after that date. Secondly, the Congo Square gatherings stopped far earlier than has hitherto been claimed in almost every book about jazz, including Gunther Schuller's widely acclaimed history.2 Henry Kmen has nailed this point down firmly in a recent article entitled "The Roots of Jazz and the Dance in Place Congo: A Re-Appraisal." He notes that "sometime shortly after 1835 the Congo Square dances ceased."3 This is fifty years earlier than had hitherto been claimed. The mistake may be easily traced to the uncritical repetition, in book after book, of one misleading account published in 1939 in Jazzmen, the pioneering jazz history. Thirdly, interviews with the surviving pioneers of jazz, in addition to recordings and photographs, consistently refute the notion that the early jazzmen were primitives. Rather the reverse seems to be true. Almost to a man, the earliest jazzmen received musical training and were "note readers." This has been definitely established in the case of Buddy Bolden, for example, who is reputed, probably correctly, to have been the leader of the first jazz band. The "jazz" came, then, not in the liberation from slavery but in the liberation from the European approach to music—that is, playing from a score. In this light then, jazz may be simply viewed as an American rather than as an Afro-American phenomenon. Furthermore, the "closure" of Storyville had a minimal impact on the course of New Orleans jazz,

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as Al Rose has shown in his recent study of Storyville.4 Not that Storyville really closed, of course. After 1917 prostitution was no longer legal within its confines, and this may have thrown a few piano players out of work, but that was about the extent of it. It is true that an outward migration of New Orleans jazzmen was underway, but a majority stayed behind. Storyville's saloons and dance halls were still open, as they were all over the city. Finally, the claim is made in this book that New Orleans jazz continued to develop stylistically until the 1940s. The "New Orleans revival" of that decade (which is explored in detail in later chapters) was not a revival of anything musical in the sense of a repetition of something that had gone before; the music heard in that decade was, quite simply, new music. After the 1940s the jazz in the city continued to change, but, it will be argued, the change from about 1950 on was merely deterioration, not stylistic development. It may be noted that two widely accepted views of jazz history are not disputed in this book: that New Orleans did indeed play a major role in the emergence of jazz; and that almost without exception, all the great New Orleans jazzmen were black. It is this second view which has probably resulted in the misconception of jazz as a form of Afro-American music. In view of the remoteness of the African roots and Congo Square activity, the Afro-American theory seems to depend tacitly either on the mysterious action of "race memory," or on genetics (blacks having a better "sense of rhythm" and so on). Both views are rejected here. There is a much simpler way of looking at the matter. In the early days of jazz in New Orleans there were, in fact, about an equal number of black and white jazzmen, but just about all the good ones were

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black. Why? For the same reason, I submit, that nearly all the great boxers have been black: the black jazzmen were "hungry fighters," hungry in their case for recognition, and jazz being the one artistic channel open to them—in short, one of the few "careers" they were not obstructed from pursuing—they were determined to make the most of it. The new mood of racial intolerance at the beginning of the century, then, may well have provoked an artistic response from blacks. There were many things that they were not allowed to do, but they were permitted to play music. It would become a profession, then, for many, but perhaps more than a profession: a solace. As a result, it seems, the black musician often had something more significant to say than his white counterpart. "Big Eye" Louis Nelson, an early New Orleans clarinetist who exerted some influence on the young George Lewis, may have subconsciously recognized this. At the time of the Charles Riot of 1900 he was playing bass, his first instrument, at the 28 Club with Charles "Buddy" Bolden. Big Eye's father was killed in the riot, and Big Eye himself was nearly caught by the mob. "I remember that night well," he said. "It caused me to dig down deeper in my music, more so yet." 5 He gave up the cumbersome bass and took up clarinet—an instrument it would be easier to run with if another mob was chasing him. "My father will be buried on Monday," he said, "and as soon after that as I can I'm going to look for another instrument to try out." 6 Buddy Bolden was determined to carry on, too, buying another cornet to replace the one that had been smashed in the riot. On the other hand, Lorenzo Tio, Sr., the Mexicanborn clarinetist who went to New Orleans in 1885 for the Cotton Exposition that year, and whose classically

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trained style was so influential that he may be said to have introduced the clarinet to jazz, reacted to the new racist mood differently. Around the turn of the century he decided to leave the city, never to return. George Lewis never heard him play. But Tio's son remained in New Orleans, and he too became an important influence among New Orleans clarinetists. Coincidentally, just at this time the new musical language of jazz was beginning to emerge as a distinctly new synthesis (just as ragtime was, further north—it was a period, as it were, of national creativity) and the new music was perfectly suited for a whole generation of blacks to use as a means of communicating their feelings. The stage was set. An older generation, wellschooled, was available for the younger men such as George Lewis to listen to, admire, perhaps even take a lesson or two from. Their ancestral background may have been African, but the synthesis, the musical melting pot, was American; George Lewis's ancestors came from Senegal, but to understand his music, and the New Orleans setting in which he was born, he should be thought of as having not an African but an American past. George Lewis's appearance suggested Africa, perhaps—with his dark brown skin, full lips, tightly curled hair, and slender build it is not difficult to visualize his Senegalese ancestors—but what is known about his past makes it clear that his African past was extremely distant. Most of what is known about his ancestry concerns his mother's side of the family. Although the date is not known precisely, the slave ship that brought his mother's great grandmother to New Orleans probably arrived during George Washington's presidency, and certainly before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. As a result of extreme longevity on his mother's

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side, a few African memories are actually recorded at third hand in Lewis's case. His mother, Alice Williams Zeno, died at the age of 96 and had an excellent memory, which did not fail her when she was interviewed two years before her death. Her recollections were based partly on her childhood friendship with her grandmother, Zaier, who died in 1910 at the age of 101. Thus Alice Zeno had access to a first-hand account of life in New Orleans as far back as 1820 or earlier. As a child Alice would go for walks in New Orleans with Zaier, whom she admired. "I'd follow every step she made," Alice recalled. "She'd tell me, 'C'est la rue du Canal,' or 'C'est Esplanade.' And they had an old brick house, I remember, on Esplanade, on the side of the banquette, where the brick would fall in dust. And my grandmother told me: 'You see, that is where they sold 'niggers,' where they traded slaves.' I was only a child when she took me there." Then Alice told about the time when Zaier talked about her mother (George Lewis's great greatgrandmother), who was "stolen from her country." Alice Zeno said: "Her mother was taken to that house, after she was stolen from her country, you see, when she say she was eight years old. But she couldn't speak nothing at that time. And they had an old man here that bought all the Senegalean 'niggers' that he could, an old man that they called Pajacaud. He was a Senegalean, and he translated, and that's where my great grandmother began to learn how to speak. "Well, she say she was eight years old and they had gone to bed by the lagoon—not lagoon, 'lagoon' is Spanish—by the river anyhow. And she said they saw a man coming, and he had pretty things in his hand, and that must have been red beads and things, you know, like that. And he made them come to get some, and that's how they brought her here. They

Alice Zeno, 1943 (William Russell)

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stole her from her country. She was only eight years old, my great-grandmother. "And then my grandmother, Zaier, was christened in St. Charles Parish, because her master was Charles Perrette, in St. Charles Parish. My grandmother was a slave, she was a slave you know. She was tall, but strong as a lion. She used to have to sell for her mistress, because they didn't even have stores like they have now. They would make big bundles and go. Carry them on the head. She'd be gone sometimes a whole month. She was selling along the coast, because they didn't even have stores. She was a hundred and one year and fifteen days when she died, my grandmother. She died on the fifteenth day of January, 1910."7

Alice Zeno remembers that she learned a few Senegalase words from her grandmother, "some words, because I used to be right by her all the time, and she could speak her mother's language. I'd say, 'Gagan, show me, tell me, yes tell me.' And she would tell me. Sometimes she say, 'Adabra.' That means 'good for nothing.' That Senegalese. 'Sal-le-come-sayrum, si-ye come-sayrum' means 'good morning everybody.' "But my mother and aunt and them, they didn't want to hear that. 'Ooh!' she'd say, 'Go talk with Alice.' And I loved it. I followed every step she made. She had so many grandchildren, you know, and she took such interest in her children. I liked what my grandmother cooked, too. It was fine. She used to make funny dishes, you know, her home dishes. Red beans and bananas, that comes from Senegal. And they had okra cooked with sweet potato. And my grandmother used to cook gumbo, too, and sweet potatoes. It was called 'painpatat.' They had that in Africa. That's their food. "I miss my grandmother," Alice concluded. "I wish she were here. You know, she was over a hun-

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dred when she died, so I know she'd be just like a monkey if she were, but I miss her." 8 Alice Zeno's knowledge of Senegal extended to one or two phrases and a few recipes; she knew nothing about the music. All she could say was that "they didn't have music like they got now, in my grandmother's time. They'd sing, sing all the time, and dance. No instruments. They'd sing and dance. Sometimes my grandmother would sing, but I don't remember what; just that Song of Haiti, something about a revolution. I remember that." Zaier, Alice's grandmother, was a slave, as was her great-grandmother. But her mother, Urania (born about 1840), was not born into bondage, and when we come to Alice's own life the tenor of her recollections changes abruptly from faint memories of Africa to the cosmopolitan world of Creole New Orleans.* She was born on St. Claude Street, on June 7, 1864— "Oui, in 1864," she repeated. "I was born in the month of June, and the war was over, everything was all right, settled by the month of April the following year." Shortly after Alice was born, her mother, who was doing housework for the Mazerat family in New Orleans, took the infant Alice with her to the Mazerats— "as soon as she could go back on the job." Therefore Alice learned to speak fluent French before she spoke English, for the Mazerats were a cultured New Orleans family who apparently took responsibility for Alice's education. "They had me in the house like *Some confusion surrounds the word "Creole." Strictly speaking, the word refers to a person descended from the original French or Spanish settlers of Louisiana. However, it is frequently also used, especially in New Orleans jazz circles, to describe a person of mixed Caucasian and Negro blood—that is, a mulatto. Among New Orleans blacks the word generally has this meaning, as it usually does in jazz books. In this book, the word "Creole" has this meaning. When George Lewis talked of Creoles, he meant light-skinned blacks.

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a child—white child/' Alice recalled. "They didn't want my mother to have anything to do with me. I was fully four, five years old when I spoke nothing but French. No Creole, no other language but French. That's how I got it so good." The next phase of Alice Zeno's life takes us to an even greater remove from tribal Africa. When she was older, probably in her 'teens or early twenties, George's mother went to work as a maid for Grace Elizabeth King, the New Orleans author of Creole stories, Louisiana history, romances, and belles-lettres. The experience made a considerable impression on her ; the Kings were one of the most cultured and prominent families in the city, and Alice Zeno not merely worked there but lived "en famille," absorbing, in the process, an education more extensive than she would otherwise have received, as she herself pointed out. Charles Gayarré, the early Louisiana historian, was a friend of the family, and Charles Dudley Warner, another author, sometimes came to stay. The family and their circle of friends frequently went to the opera, then flourishing in the city, and more than anything else it was the popular arias of the day that Alice Zeno retained in her mind and sang for George as a child. Sometimes musical soirées were held in the King household, as when Charles Dudley Warner and his wife came to stay in 1891. In her last book, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters, Grace King gives the following description: Mrs. Warner was a musician of the highest class, even among professionals. . . . We gave her a musicale and invited some of our best local musicians to hear her play—a musicale that has not been forgotten. She expressed frankly her surprise and her pleasure in hearing what was entirely new to her, the Creole rendition of the classics, with an added sentiment and a variation of color different from the rather cold expression of the north.9

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These polite "musicales" were, no doubt, considerably isolated from the extraordinary musical melting pot of New Orleans in the 'nineties, but we are closer to the truth, nevertheless, if we picture Alice Zeno, if not in the music room, at least listening through the door and enjoying what she heard, than if we visualize her gyrating to the beat of a drum in Congo Square. The King family, Alice Zeno recalled, lived on Rampart Street, between Canal and Common. "They had Mrs. T. J. Semmes across the street," she said, "Mrs. McCall, and Mrs. Morris, but then all those people moved uptown because the neighborhood had gotten to be so bad. I was the housegirl and maid for Miss Nina King. Nina was the youngest one. I don't know if she's alive now. I know Miss Annie died. But Miss Nina was a debutante then, and I was her maid, and did the upstairs work." Later in life Alice Zeno surprised everyone who met her with her alert, well-educated mind, her collection of books in different languages whose contents she was familiar with, and her knowledge of history and literature. She went on to say something about how she acquired this education. "When I was working at Mrs. King's they had— well, it wasn't a school. It was just like you and I are conversing here. If it was French that day, they had an old lady called Madame Girard, she was French, and Charles Gayarre. Well, you spoke nothing but French. And the next day it was maybe the Spanish class. Well, that was Capitan Escheviser. And they had Herman Gessner; with him it was German. They'd call me and they'd speak to me in German and ask me things in German—no other language but the language of the day. But when I was young, I was young and foolish. I'd laugh. And one day Miss Gracie told me: "'Ha! Petite fille! You have an opportunity of

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learning things you will never be able to pay for, and you're there giggling and giggling.' "After a while I say, 'Well, I think Miss Gracie is right. Let me stop giggling and pay attention to the opportunity that I have.' So that's where I began to catch on. A little German, a little Spanish, and, oh well, I know French good." George's education, by comparison, was less effective, and it was something of an embarrassment to him that his mother's schooling, albeit informal, had been more extensive than his. Curiously enough, this was no isolated instance, but one so widespread as to be almost a general rule among George Lewis's contemporaries. Most black people of George Lewis's generation received a schooling that was sketchy at best and terminated at about the sixth grade, when they were sent out to earn a few badly needed dollars. This education gap between the generations may have been widespread only in relatively cosmopolitan cities like New Orleans, which had a sizable free Negro population earlier in the century; but in any event, it is a mistake to assume that the educational opportunity open to blacks has steadily improved since Emancipation. In fact, until recent decades, a case could be made for the reverse conclusion. "We think we have it easy now," Alice Zeno commented in 1958. "No, no, those were the better days!" In 1894 Alice married Henry Louis Zeno. Both were 30 years old. He had lived for most of his life near Mandeville, a small town on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, north of New Orleans. He died in his late fifties (probably in 1922), and not much is known about his life or family background, except that his father was a Negro slave and his mother a Choctaw Indian. Thus George Lewis's racial background is one-fourth Indian. Henry Zeno seems to have been an independent, solitary man who preferred

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the Mandeville countryside to the social, urban milieu which his wife enjoyed and benefited from. He made his own living, before he came to New Orleans, trapping, hunting, working occasionally as handyman and carpenter, and living in a log cabin. We may guess that the Choctaw blood in him was dominant, and that he did not particularly relish life in New Orleans. He seems to have hankered after the piney woods of Mandeville, and after about eleven years of marriage, when George Lewis was five, he went back across Lake Ponchartrain and rarely returned. Alice Zeno scarcely mentioned him in recorded interviews, confining herself to the observation that they were married in the then incompleted St. Joseph's Church on Tulane Avenue. At the time of her marriage, Alice Zeno had switched employers and was working for the Renshaw family, as she did, on and off, for years. "I've been in that family since Gladys Renshaw was fourteen years old," she said. And once again, she spoke of her employers with relish and affection. "Judge Renshaw had, I believe, nine girls and two boys. Ah, but that was a man worth imitating! He had such nice manners, so quiet, so serious, so charitable. Oh, I liked the judge very much. I stayed with him till he left this earth. Gladys Renshaw, every time she come there to my house on St. Philip Street, my old 'two-by-four,' she say, 'Well, Alice, you still have the spirit.' And I say, 'I'm going to have it till I die.'" 10 Not long after her marriage Alice Zeno had to take temporary leave of the Renshaws. Her first child was on the way. "When I had my children," she said, "I never went nowheres. Stayed right there with my children. I had my first child—she would be 63 years old now—in 1894, I believe she was born. But she died very young." Two further children, a son, Henry, and a daughter, Marguerite, were born, but both died

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in infancy. Marguerite lived long enough to be christened at St. Augustine Church on February 20, 1896. Four years later, on July 13, 1900, George, the only child to survive, was bom in his parents' small house on St. Claude Street, between Barracks and Governor Nicholls. He was christened Joseph François Zenon* on August 10, and baptismal documents at St. Augustine Church record that he was "child of Henry Louis Zenon, and Alice William." Although he had been christened Joseph François, from his first day on earth George Lewis was never called by those names. "You see," his mother explained, "I had already lost three children before I raised George, and I was so outdone, so discouraged, I was losing my mind. So when George came, my mother said, 'Call him George; it'll be good.' "I said, 'Well that's i t . . . we call him George.' Everybody call him George, but he wasn't christened George. Well, I can't complain." 11 George was also given his father's middle name, Louis, and it was this name that he adopted, in anglicized form, when later in life he had his name legally changed to George Lewis. It wasn't that he thought this name more suitable for a musical career, although he once said that George Lewis was an "honest name," but simply that everyone called him that, and when "Joseph Zeno" would be called out during roll calls when he was a member of the Square Deal Club, he never could learn to respond to it. The only sensible course seemed to be to change his name to what everyone knew him as anyway. (In fact, his name was not legally changed to George Lewis until October 1944.)12 * Toward the end of his life George said that "the priest made a mistake" and should have written Zeno. It is curious, nevertheless, that his sister was baptized "Marguerite Zenon" four years earlier. But George's mother herself spelled the name without the final n, and it is spelled that way in this book.

George Lewis, First Communion, 1910

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When George Lewis's mother was asked about her son's early interest in music, she was at a loss to explain how it arose. "I don't know where George got that music from," she said. "None of my family were musicians, not that I know of. My father was a cigar maker, and my grandfather—I never knew him." George's style of music was also seemingly something new to her; at least she didn't remember hearing anything like that as a child. She went on to say something about her early musical recollections and experiences. The music which she heard in the 1880s, and thereabouts, was evidently far from primitive music. She first commented that she hardly ever heard George play, even suggesting that she had never heard him playing with his band, and had only occasionally heard a few records. Then she went on: "When I was young, I never did hear music like that. It was that they would play with music you see, the [written] note. But now they play by routine. That's what they call jazz, eh? They never had that when I was young. They never used the word 'ragtime' either, in my days. They didn't know what that was. In my days they didn't have that, ragtime. They had more so string bands. Violins, cornets, accordian, and bass. I don't remember that they had drums when I was young. They'd have flutes, yes, and they'd have violins. And as for horns, well, they'd have cornet. I love the violin, and another instrument I like very much is violoncello. Played just like a little bass. What do they call it in English? 'Sello,' that's it. 'Sello' is pretty. You know, Alphonse Begette used to play sello upstairs where we lived. "For dances, when I was young, they'd have waltzes and quadrilles. Oh, it's so long since they don't have quadrilles. Quadrille was pretty too, oh yes. It was, let's see, three or four men, two men and four ladies. A man would take a girl and waltz to her. And you'd

"The City Was Filled with

Music"

21

have one on each side. And then he would dance in the middle of the floor. 'Twas pretty. And the polka and the schottische. They don't dance polka now. But a long time they danced polka, and mazurka. At a dance, before the quadrille time—they'd give about two or three quadrilles a night—but before the quadrille come, they would play a waltz, you'd have to waltz around the floor. Lancers and varieties, that's in quadrille, and 'balancé, balancé,' that's in quadrille too." Mrs. Zeno was asked if she remembered, or heard, any of the rougher music her son later played, the blues, for instance; or if, when she was young, they swung the music in church as they would in later years. "I never heard any blues," she replied. "If they had any blues I didn't pay any attention to it, you know. They had music in church, of course. The Kyrie Eleison, the Gloria, the Credo, all the masses. But they didn't clap hands in church, not at all. But now they dance by the music in the church, you know.* Well, the times change, and the music has changed, too. No, I didn't hear the music George plays until after he was born, birthéd." Although Alice Zeno claimed that she didn't know where her son "got that music from," it is quite clear that George, from his youngest years, was so surrounded by the newly emerging musical language of jazz that he could not have avoided noticing it. Before he was five years old, George's parents moved to a house on St. Philip Street so close to one of the most important dance halls in the city that the young George, playing in the yard, heard the music every day of his life. Hopes Hall, as it was called, was situ* Alice Zeno would have attended Catholic churches exclusively, where the services—and the music—were less likely to be influenced by local customs. Baptist and "Sanctified" services were a good deal more tumultuous.

22

"The City Was Filled with Music"

ated in the Tremé section of New Orleans, and in the Tremé there was so much music that only a deaf man could have avoided noticing it. Economy Hall and Globe Hall were nearby; parades through that section were an almost daily occurrence; and for good measure, many of the best jazz musicians in New Orleans lived in that part of town. William Russell, who was to play an important part in the subsequent discovery of George Lewis and documentation of his music, has emphasised the importance of the early exposure to music which George Lewis, like so many New Orleans jazzmen, received. "It's something you have got to hear when you're one day old," Russell has said. "If you don't hear it then, there's still a chance you might amount to something as a musician, but not very much of a chance. That's why the New Orleans musicians were so good, and why there were just thousands of them,- not hundreds but thousands. Practically everybody who was here in the old days that I talked to played something. Any musician you'd talk to would tell you that their brother played this and their sister played that, their father and their uncle, too. Half those families were so musical that almost everybody in the family would play. It's surprising, both white and colored, all over town, and they couldn't miss that music. The city was filled with music. Anybody that you talk to among the old timers will tell you the same. "You could hear the music all over town. So a baby one day old would start hearing that music, and he'd have it in his system. Jim Robinson admittedly started late, but he heard that music, even if it was his mother singing in the Magnolia Plantation. It got into him even if he can't remember it. As for George, one can hardly imagine the music he heard at Hopes Hall. Everyone from Mr. Bunk on down." 13 We cannot be sure exactly what the music George

"The City Was Filled with Music"

23

heard at Hopes Hall sounded like, but it is surely erroneous to assume that it sounded much the same as it did when record companies started coming to New Orleans twenty years later. Probably even the rougher musicians then playing—men like Buddy Bolden and Freddie Keppard—played with more formality and restraint than is generally recognized. In some jazz books, much is made of the uptowndowntown distinction, a theory that the rougher, hotter musicians lived and played uptown (on the "American" or upriver side of Canal Street), while the better schooled "Creole" musicians lived and played downtown. There is probably very little truth to this. Lewis, at any rate, who would have to be classified in the hot, untutored school, lived all his life in the downtown Creole section, and there are so many similar counter-examples that they make nonsense of the theory. George himself did not give any credence to the uptown-downtown distinction. A far more likely theory is that in the early days of New Orleans jazz, virtually everyone played in a relatively legitimate, disciplined style, regardless of neighborhood, and as the years passed the music became rougher and more improvized as fewer jazzmen bothered to learn to read music. "I heard a lot of music from the time I can't remember," George said, "and I would say I was born with this music. My mother and father separated when I was five years old, and at that time I lived directly opposite Hopes Hall. So I heard a lot of music there. Every Monday they would have banquets for the societies, the benevolent associations. The men would parade, and every year the ladies' societies would have banquets, too. Then, when I was six years old, we moved to 1226 St. Philip Street. The yard where I was living—we were living in the rear, of course—gave right onto the back of Hopes Hall. I

24

"The City Was Filled with Music"

could hear the music just as good as I can see you. They would start it out around noon, and it would last till six. By invitation only. We could hear the music, and we would dance out in the yard, as kids. I heard Freddie Keppard there; I heard Manuel Perez there. I heard Willie Cornish and Bunk Johnson there. I heard a lot of oldtimers—they used to play right there. Now on the front they had a big porch where the bands used to come out and play. Before they went in, they played two tunes just to attract people's attention. So I heard the music from my earliest years."14 Apart from Buddy Bolden's Band, which he stressed he never heard, George was lucky enough to have heard the best bands in the city at that time: Manuel Perez's Imperial Band, the Superior Band with Bunk Johnson on trumpet, and Freddie Keppard's Creole Band. A few years later King Oliver's Band, including Kid Ory on trombone and Johnny Dodds on clarinet, became one of the foremost bands of the day. They played regularly at Economy Hall on Ursulines Street, a few blocks from George Lewis's house. "I never heard Buddy Bolden, and I never heard Jelly Roll Morton," George Lewis stressed. "People will tell you they heard Buddy Bolden play, but I don't believe most of them, unless they're oldtimers. They've got people who say they heard Bolden that I know never heard him. I have heard people who played with him, and I've played with some of them. Old man Jimmy Johnson was one, the bass player. Now I played with him. Willie Cornish was another one from Bolden's band I played with. We played together in the first Eureka Brass Band. He was a friend to me, I can tell you that about him. Because he helped me out a lot. Many times I didn't have money to buy food for my kids, and he helped me in that way. "But I never heard Buddy Bolden play. I don't want to say something that isn't true, and I don't want

"The City Was Filled with Music"

25

to say anything that I don't know to be true. Because too much has been said, and written, that just ain't so. I heard of Bolden, but I'd be telling a lie if I said I heard him. But I did hear a lot of those oldtimers in my early years. The music was all around you. I heard it on the streets, and I heard it at Hopes Hall." Of the many trumpeters George heard at Hopes Hall, one who much impressed him was Manuel Perez, a light-skinned "Creole" musician then leading the Imperial Band, and one of the most influential trumpeters in the city. A well-educated musician, Perez played with a firm, faultless approach that impressed many of the younger trumpeters then growing up, not a few of whom took lessons from him. " I heard Manuel Perez many times," George said. " I heard him but never played with him, because there was a prejudice among them people—segregation. Some of those Creole bands wouldn't hire a man whose hair wasn't silky. And some of the halls wouldn't accept you in there. There was one on Robertson Street like that, Jeunes Amis Hall. You wasn't accepted there. And they would look at you hard if you was playing in that band. I don't say Manuel Perez ever segregated anybody I know of. But everybody in his band was light-skinned, you know. "Manuel Perez went like hell on trumpet; he was very strong. I knew him ; I was playing here when he died, and before he got sick, when his mind kind of went away from him. And he played jazz, not just straight music. I would say he played something like Peter Bocage, when Peter was in his prime." Another trumpeter George remembers well was Freddie Keppard, the first musician to take a Negro jazz band to Chicago (in 1917). "Now, I used to hear Freddie practically every Monday night at the Hopes Hall," George said. "He played for banquets. Now he was rough. Freddie was very rough." In truth, Freddie

26

"The City Was Filled with Music"

Keppard may have been one of the earliest exponents of the rougher style. He had considerably less musical training than most of his contemporaries, and as his older brother Louis recalls, he used to entertain the audience at Hopes Hall with all kinds of freakish whinnying and neighing effects on the trumpet. When Freddie decided it was time for a break so that he could go and have his "lunch," he would whinny on his trumpet like a horse in a stable. (Some of these barnyard effects can be heard on the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's recording of Livery Stable Blues—the first jazz record. It is more than likely that these effects were copied from Keppard's repertoire. Keppard himself had been given an earlier recording offer than the ODJB, but he turned it down, fearing that everyone would copy his stuff.) Louis Keppard recalls that the one trumpeter in New Orleans Freddie feared was Willie "Bunk" Johnson. Born in 1879, Bunk was a few years older than Keppard, and certainly had more technical training. If there was a street corner cutting contest, when two bands advertising a job the next day accidentally met at the same corner, Freddie generally felt confident of "victory" over the other band, unless he had encountered Bunk's Superior Band.15 Bunk Johnson is one of the few trumpeters in New Orleans about whom almost all who heard him in the old days speak of with unreserved praise; he could "drive down the blues," and yet play with delicacy and unfailing refinement of taste. His knowledge of music—"majors, minors, and diminisheds,"—was a source of admiration from those less well-schooled. We shall hear a good deal more of him in this book, as it was through the discovery and subsequent recording of Bunk that George Lewis himself came to light. George knew little about Bunk in the old days in New Orleans, merely stating that he heard him at Hopes

"The City Was Filled with Music"

27

Hall. Bunk left New Orleans early—around 1914— and rarely came back to his hometown. And Bunk was something of a loner, too, a "wanderer," as one musician put it, not a good mixer. But through the accident of their shared discovery, the careers of George Lewis and Bunk Johnson are linked, and their names stand together as virtual synonyms for the later "revival" style of New Orleans jazz. From his earliest years, it was the clarinet, of course, which George Lewis particularly noticed and particularly admired. " I heard all the instruments, of course," George said, "but I just admired the clarinet. I don't know what it was, but something about the clarinet hit me, just like, you know, you see something one time and then the more you see it, the more you want it." Who did George especially notice and listen to in those early years? "Lorenzo Tio was one," George recalled. "Not his daddy now, I never heard him, but Tio his self. Big Eye Louis Nelson was one. Alphonse Picou was another. And then they had Johnny Brown; he was in the drayers business, you know, with a horse and wagon. I would say that Big Eye Louis was exceptionally good. He played at one time nothing but C clarinet, which I found out after I came out, and started to play music. "I heard George Baquet a lot. He was a good clarinet player, and to me he was better on the E-flat clarinet, you know, although I never heard him too much in dancing places. He was one of those, well, I call 'em yellow people, that though they're all colored sells it as an all-white band. And his brother, Achille Baquet, even got a chance to play with a white band. Just like this man that used to rent all the instruments, Dave Perkins. Everybody thought he was a white man, but he was colored. He rented drums, trumpets, and everything. He lived up round the Garden District, but I never knew exactly where because

28

"The City Was Filled with Music"

I never rented from him. But every Mardi Gras parade, he was in there with a white band, playing mellophone or trombone, he was in there. "But I'll tell you the truth, in my early days I thought all those clarinet players were good, those I heard on the street. I know they all couldn't have been as good as I thought they were, but Big Eye Louie during them days was pretty good. I liked him a lot when he was playing C clarinet, but then he got onto B-flat, and it seemed like there was something then he didn't do. Because he had mastered the C clarinet, he really mastered it. Now maybe the years was going on, and something else was coming on, you never can tell. "I heard Sidney Bechet, too. I'll tell you what I thought of him, he was rough, he was really rough. And I heard Johnny Dodds, I heard him a lot of times. He was about like you hear on the records. When I heard him he was with Ory's band, with Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet. They used to play at Economy Hall. "Jimmie Noone was another one. I heard him play. Jimmie Noone was real smooth, and quiet, you know; he had a quiet style. He had a big tone, but he was real smooth in his playing. He had something like the Albert Nicholas style. Another clarinet player I heard in the early days, and he was an oldtimer, was Charlie McCurdy. He played in John Robichaux's Band. "I heard the white bands, too, I heard a lot of them. Well now, there was one guy I heard, Tony Giardina, who used to play a lot of clarinet. He played on the order of Bechet's style, when Bechet was around here; rough, rough. And Leon Ropollo, too, he played a lot. I knew Tony Parenti, and he played a lot, played much more than he's playing now. I knew Tony all my days, almost. All my days I'd meet Tony, and his brother Georgie.

"The City Was Filled with Music"

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"So I would say I heard a lot of clarinet players around here, and I thought a lot of them were good. I could tell the difference between who sounded good to me and who didn't. I was conscious of something about the sound of the clarinet, something I could feel that I can't put into words. And I knew that that was what I wanted to play." Of the clarinetists George Lewis mentions as having impressed him when he was young, all were older than himself, of course, and significantly, all had received more musical education than George would. The only possible exception to this was Sidney Bechet, who, born in 1897, was close to the same age as George. And it was Bechet who played "rough," as George put it. Johnny Dodds, born earlier (in 1892) also played in a relatively rough style, but he learned to read music, unlike George Lewis and Bechet. All the earlier clarinetists mentioned, Big Eye Louis Nelson, Alphonse Picou, Lorenzo Tio, Jr., and Charlie McCurdy, played in a more refined, classical, "sophisticated" style, all had received some musical education (especially Tio and McCurdy), and all belonged to an older generation of New Orleans jazzmen born in the era of Reconstruction rather than in the later days of segregation. Surely then, the correct way to understand how jazz developed in New Orleans is not to say that there was a hot uptown style and a "legitimate" downtown style, and then the two blended, but that the hot, rough style was a later development, emerging out of the more classical approach, a change which was perhaps a product of, or at least simultaneous with, changing social conditions in the city. In any event, whatever the style or stage of development, by the time he was ten years old George Lewis was beginning to feel a stronger and stronger urge to play an instrument himself, and it wasn't

30

"The City Was Filled with

Music"

long before he told his mother about his wish. Alice Zeno vividly recalled the time when her son first mentioned his ambition. "George wanted a clarinet, you know," Alice Zeno said, "and as he was always small, I thought he wouldn't live to see fifteen years. So I said to him: " 'I'll give you a violin, but I'll not give you a clarinet, because you'll die before you're fifteen years old.' "And he'd say, 'Oh no ma, I don't want no violin. I want a clarinet. "I said, 'You know about clarinet and blowing like that? I don't believe it's good. I'll give you a violin but I won't give you a clarinet.' "Well, I never did give it to him, until one day I sent him to bring a basket of clothes by Dr. Grima on St. Louis Street, because I used to wash plenty—shirts and more so. I had sent him around the corner to bring some clothes, and I don't remember if I gave him a nickel or a dime. When he come back I say: "'Well now, go bring Mr. Edgar Grima's clothes: shirts and collars.' They wore collars detachable then, you know. And he say: "'Ma, can I get a flute?' "I say, 'Now, I just gave you—' I don't remember if it was a nickel or a dime. "He say, 'It only cost a dime.' "I say, 'Well, go ahead and get it.' " 'Twas Kirby's, which is now Wool worth, eh? It was Kirby's where he got that little ten-cent flute, and that's where he start. He got that music from that little ten-cent flute, and I never gave him a clarinet. Ten cents, that's all I ever spent for his music. I never paid a nickel to nobody. And he play and play that little flute. Sometimes he drive me crazy. But I wanted him to play because he wanted to be a musicianer. So that's how, you see, he bluffed me, by getting that

"The City Was Filled with Music"

31

little flute; and he got it. He said he'd keep it as long as he live—a souvenir." As his mother said this, George Lewis, who was listening to her account, went into a back room and returned shortly with an old metal fife. "That's the little fife!" His mother exclaimed. "That's that terrible little thing! It make good music though. And play? He used to play good. George used to play everything he heard. He practiced, and try, make a mistake, and come back till he play it right." Then she started to sing an old melody she used to sing for George when he started out on fife. It was an aria from one of the operas popular in earlier New Orleans days. "I used to sing that for him all the time, you know," she said. "They had a young man next door who used to play the flute, and I used to come out on the gallery and would hear him. His name was Raoul Tomat. And he played that tune so well; he kept the note and everything. So I taught George that. I used to sing that all the time, till he got it. Oh, he played that good! I love music, oh, I love music. "It's George's idea, you know, being a musicianer," his mother concluded. " I have to accept it. But I don't like the idea of him being away so much, so much. And he's so worn out, you see. But of course, that's his trade. He's got to have some kind of trade. I tried to make him take another trade, but he didn't see nothing but that music. Well, of course you have to respect children's ideas. If you try to make them take other things that they don't want, they don't be successful. No, I'm proud of his trade."16

2 "I Just Admired the Clarinet" George Lewis's formal education constituted a brief episode in his life and barely impinged at all on his "trade"—his later career as a musician. He soon forgot most of what his teachers attempted to drill into him, and no doubt for most of his schoolroom hours he had other things on his mind, primarily the part-time jobs he had to work at to help out his mother. His schooling, he surely knew, would be little more than an abbreviated and somewhat irrelevant episode in his life. In the end he learned to read and write, but that was about the extent of it. By 1906 public education for blacks was beginning to deteriorate rapidly. Alice Zeno soon noticed that her son was beginning to lag behind for his years, and so she sent him to a nearby private school where the principal, Medard H. Nelson, was noted for his strictness. Tuition was a dollar a month for the 25 students in the school, who were both black and white. "In those days pay schools weren't segregation schools," George said. Public school had been "too easy, too much aplaying, the teachers didn't care what they got into you," George said, but this soon changed at Professor Nelson's school, at Barracks and Burgundy (now

"I Just Admired the Clarinet"

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Mother Cabrini's Playground). Pupils were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, "a little bit Spanish, a little bit French," all for a dollar a month. Professor Nelson, who was black, was a stern disciplinarian, "and if he come to whip you, he'd whip anybody, color didn't mean a thing to him," George said. "There's a big high school named after him now. He was due to become a priest, but he never finished out with it. He was tall, wore a Prince Albert coat and striped pants like they used for a wedding, and boots. He always had a piece of silk, and he rubbed it between his teeth. He wore cravat ties, and he'd throw 'em away after one wearing; he was very strict about your appearance when you came to school. Your fingernails had to be clean, trousers and stockings neat, shoes shined, hair combed, everything." No music was taught in the school—the only music included in the curriculum was heard at morning prayers. At the end of the day, Professor Nelson would send the children home individually at different times if they lived in the same neighborhood, to deter street fighting. Sometimes George Lewis would be left sitting at his desk long after his classmates had gone home. Eventually Professor Nelson would look in. "What am I punishing you for?" he would ask. "Nothing." "Oh, I punished you for nothing? Well pack those books and go on home." George Lewis stayed in school until he was just thirteen, then he went to work, laboring at a variety of menial tasks. "George Lewis has evidently worked hard all his life, even as a boy," William Russell noted after talking to George in 1943. "When I bought a T &) P Quarterly with picture of Toulouse Street Landing and steel sheds he said that's just the way it looked when he worked there as a boy, and recollected how

34

"I Just Admired the Clarinet"

they'd tell him to shift and move great big boxes and he'd wonder how he could ever do it." 1 Meanwhile, George Lewis couldn't help noticing the music all around him. Alice Zeno believed that George had "bluffed" her by getting a flute when she was only willing to condone a violin; but as George recalled it later, he had originally tried to buy a violin, but when he got to Kirby's on Canal Street, with some money earned by fetching laundry for his mother, he found that they were out of violins. Even at that time he didn't particularly care for the instrument, however. It used to "excruciate my blood," he would say. And so, although his mother thought he was "too delicate, this that and the other," to play a wind instrument, he bought a flute at the shop instead. "I went home," George said, "played it, and I almost drove my mother crazy for three or four days. Then I started to play little tunes, better every day." George Lewis was still playing his transversemouthpiece flute at the time of the severe hurricane which hit New Orleans on September 29, 1915. Alice Zeno remembered the storm vividly. "The storm," she said, " I remember the year of the storm. I told him, I say, 'George, prepare your soul, we may all be in judgment before the day is out.' But he kept on with that music, kept on with that. He put his head at the foot of the bed, and his foot at the head of the bed, and there he was, playing. Oh my soul! But about six o'clock, when they said if it last five minutes more it would have swept away the city, he ran then, he ran to me and fell and called me. The wind pass through the house, all the slates and everything had gone, and it looked like the house was crumbling. I said, 'Give your soul to God.' And he stayed like that until the terrible hour passed."2 About this time other young musicians began to take note of George's efforts on the flute. One of the

"I Just Admired the Clarinet"

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first to do so was the drummer Joe Rena, a contemporary and schoolmate of Sidney Bechet, and the older brother of Henry "Kid" Rena, who was recorded at the beginning of the New Orleans "revival" in 1940. The Rena brothers were typical of the younger generation of jazz musicians then emerging in New Orleans. The younger men soon began to upstage the older generation, and they became the trend-setters for George Lewis's generation. The best-known member of this second jazz generation was, of course, Louis Armstrong, who joined King Oliver in Chicago in 1922. A much larger number of jazzmen stayed at home, however, and one or two, notably Buddy Petit, achieved reputations in New Orleans which approached Armstrong's. In the course of his life, George Lewis played with nearly all these musicians who did not go "up the river," and a study of his life is therefore a study of the developing jazz style in New Orleans. It was around 1915 that an important change in instrumentation took place—a change probably brought about by the changing jazz style: the banjo began to supersede the guitar. Although the banjo was an old instrument, it had not been used at all in the earliest jazz bands; the guitar was. But with its louder and more ringing tone, the banjo gave a stronger and more emphatic beat to a band, and this stronger beat no doubt became necessary as the horns began to adopt a more freely improvised polyphonic approach. An early and infuential banjo player was John Marrero, whose father Billy Marrero had played bass with Bunk Johnson in the Superior Band, and whose younger brother Lawrence, also a banjoist, would later become an important member of George Lewis's band. Like Joe Rena, Lawrence Marrero was impressed by the changing musical scene in New Orleans around the time of the First World War. The older musicians, Marrero commented, used to take more pains with

36

"I Just Admired the Clarinet"

their playing, whereas the younger ones would come out and start playing jobs when they only knew one or two numbers. Marrero remembered times when a musician might start playing a job, and if he was considered too inexperienced by the other bandsmen he would be summarily sent home before the night was out. The great New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds, at the outset of his career, was more than once embarrassed in this way while playing with his brother Johnny Dodds at Economy Hall. Sometimes, in those years, organizations giving a dance would hire two bands and retain only one of them after the first set. The other was dismissed. All this tended to encourage good musicianship. But by the time George Lewis started to practice on his flute the times were changing, musicians were less likely to read every note they played, and the changing fashion gave birth to an era of musicians in New Orleans, all born around the year 1900, who demonstrated in their playing a nice balance between formal training and creative improvisation; between tuition and intuition. The great New Orleans jazzmen, George Lewis among them, belong to this period. Those born earlier, we may surmise from the music of the few who were recorded, tended to play with the classical formality which was the prime characteristic of the earliest jazz,- while those born later in New Orleans (after about 1908) either abandoned traditional jazz entirely, taking up other forms such as rhythm and blues, or played it sloppily and derivatively. In the early years of the century, kids in New Orleans with musical ambitions would often get together in small groups called field bands. They would roam the streets, playing for anyone who would listen. Jose Rena played drums in such a group (with a homemade drum), while his brother Henry played comb and

"1 Just Admired the Clarinet"

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tissue paper and Sidney Bechet played fife. George Lewis also played flute in such a group, playing for "kid parades," as he called them. The youngsters would do their best to emulate the brass bands they heard on the streets all around them, earning a few pennies for themselves in the process. The brass bands George particularly remembers from that time were the Excelsior, the Original Tuxedo, the Onward, and the Imperial Brass Bands. Hearing brass bands parading on the streets must have been among his earliest musical experiences, as the bands marched past his home on St. Philip Street on their way to Hopes Hall just around the corner. And he looked forward to the day when he would himself become a member of one of these grand bands leading the parade. The early brass bands that George Lewis heard played with a regimental formality that would have been hardly conceivable to the 1970s remnants of the tradition—rag-tag groups bopping along to a boogie woogie beat. Moreover, the early formality of the New Orleans brass bands persisted, by all accounts, into the early 1920s, when the recently formed Eureka Brass Band, for instance, was composed of musicians who could not improvise and did not even consider themselves to be jazzmen. The claim that brass bands and "street parades" were a major influence in the formation of the New Orleans jazz style has been greatly exaggerated. Something like the reverse appears to be true: brass band music in New Orleans gradually adopted the jazz idiom that began to emerge around the turn of the century. As the new musical language became jazzier—in the 1920s—so, in an imitative way, did the jazz bands. It is true that the 1940s "revival" bands in New Orleans sometimes have a "street parade" sound

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"I Just Admired the Clarinet"

to them, but then the so-called revival style was a later style, and not, as is frequently claimed, the late discovery of an archaic period of ja-z history. Looking back further into the past, there was probably little that was unique to New Orleans about the brass bands in the city during the nineteenth century, and we may be sure that at that time they would have sounded little different from brass bands in other American cities, although the New Orleans bands may well have been of a higher standard musically, because of the large numbers of well-trained musicians in New Orleans at that time, many of them from Europe. After the Civil War blacks soon took over the white custom of burying the dead with musical accompaniment. Burial societies and benevolent associations multiplied, one of their chief functions being to provide a band for the funeral of the deceased member. Most of these societies were formed by and for the better-off light-skinned Creoles, but there were organizations for black men, too, and as a young man George Lewis joined such a group, the Square Deal Boys. These societies resulted in a day-to-day demand for live music and thus supported a good many jazzmen in New Orleans. The brothels of the red light district had little to do with the matter. So George started out playing a fife, and he played in field bands which imitated the brass bands, whose style, in turn, was influenced by the emerging jazz idiom in the city. Joe Rena remembers walking down Governor Nicholls Street one day, probably around 1916, and hearing someone playing in the back who reminded him of Sidney Bechet's playing. "I heard a flute playing," Rena said, "and I was wondering who it was. He was in the back section of the house, and I must have stood there 15 minutes

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listening at that fellow. I didn't know who it was, but I said to myself, 'Man, this fellow can play up some fife. So I went in back there and I said, 'I'm Rena.' He told me who he was—he was George Zeno then, you know, he didn't change it to Lewis until later. We got to talking and I said, 'Look, you play that flute mighty good. I think you could make a good clarinet player, a good clarinet player.' So we talked some more, and he played a couple of pieces. Then I said, 'How do you make your sharps and your flats?' There ain't nothing but natural notes on a fife, you see, only the six holes. So he told me how he covered the top of the hole and blew hard to make a sharp, and covered half the hole to make a flat. "So I started to entice him to get a clarinet. I told him, I say, 'Look, I think we may need a clarinet player.' I was playing with my brother then. I kept on talking with George, and then he went up on Rampart Street and he got him a clarinet—a B-flat clarinet. I would go out to his house all the time. After he got the clarinet I would stick with him, you know. He was living there with his wife Emma—common-law wife, because they weren't married at that time. Anyway, they stayed there, and what he used to make on that flute, he made on the clarinet. He got to playing real good, so that everybody wanted him, you know, a lot of fellows wanted him to play with them. "Later on he played with our band for a while, my brother's band. We had such a good, wonderful band, I guess you must have heard talk of that? Anyway, our regular clarinet player, Zeb Lenares, had a style of his own, you know, but look like to me he was a little kinda 'off.' He didn't have the real harmony, like George Lewis. You see, George Lewis, with all that stuff he played, he stayed right there in the harmony, in the chords, in the keys. A born musician. So I used

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"I Just Admired the Clarinet"

to tell my brother all the time, 'Let's try to get us a real good clarinet player.' And then we did hire George on occasions, but he was never regularly with us." 3 George Lewis bought his first clarinet about 1917 or 1918. Later in life George evidently wanted people to believe that he had started playing earlier than this, but there are several good reasons to disregard his later claims. When he was first interviewed, by William Russell in 1942, George said he had not started until he was 17. ("Didn't start on clarinet until 17 years old. George never tried to copy anyone on clarinet, and no one especially influenced him," Russell noted down.) This was corroborated the following year, at the time of the Climax recording session. Russell wrote at that time: "In 1917 he got a real clarinet and played with a little band over the lake in Mandeville, called the Black Eagle Band." 4 Also in 1943, a young jazz fan named Ronnie Stearns, who had attended the Climax session, began corresponding with Lewis and sent him a clarinet as a token of his admiration. Lewis responded with a series of letters, one which included a short account of his life. Part of it ran: When I was 16 yr I saw a home on S. Rampart for $4.00. I told my mother. She did not want me to buy it at first, but the people where I lived talked to her about how good I played flute—thought I might make a good clarinet player some day, and play some simple tune after one day practice. At the age of 17 we went and live in Mandeville, La. I play with a band called Black Eagle—getting better more and more.5 In the fall of 1945 George Lewis traveled to New York with Bunk Johnson to play at the Stuyvesant Casino. That winter he was interviewed by Art Hodes, the interview being published in Hodes' magazine The Jazz Record in the form of a short autobiography

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called "Play Number Nine." A passage from it follows: "When I was sixteen years old I got a real clarinet. I bought it with my own earnings and paid four dollars for it. About that time my family moved to Mandeville, and I stayed with my aunt through the summer. I learned how to play the clarinet, and in a year I joined a band. It was called the Black Eagle Band."6 A short account of George Lewis's life, purportedly in his own words, was published in Melody Maker in 1956. By this time there was a significant change in the date, but he adds some important details: "In 1912 I began teaching myself clarinet. I never had a lesson in my life. I didn't read any tutor books. My system was Albert—never touched a Boehm clarinet. I just picked up the fingering—part naturally and part from other players in New Orleans. I've never been able to read music. My first professional job was St. Joseph's night, March 19, 1914, with the Black Eagle Band."7 In 1961, Dorothy Tait's book on George Lewis was published in England (a former newspaperwoman, she had managed the George Lewis band intermittently after 1954). In her narrative, the clarinet purchase took place in 1910, and in subsequent interviews, Lewis stuck to that date. For instance, when interviewed by the Tulane University Jazz Archive in 1958, Lewis said: "I got my first clarinet about 1910, or something like that. The first clarinet I had was, like I always say, a cheap one. And the next one my father bought for me. But I never paid no money for a teacher, or nothing like that." 8 George Lewis's earlier accounts are, of course, inherently more probable, while independent corroboration makes it certain that he did not start playing clarinet until he was about 18. (It may also be noted that George's memory for dates was poor, and his tendency was always to date events in his life earlier than they were.)

George Lewis and his father, c. 1917

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We may be sure then that it was around 1917 or 1918 that Lewis bought his first clarinet at a pawnshop on South Rampart Street, for $4.00, having earned the money by shining shoes. It was no doubt in bad repair, as he had noted, but he soon put it in order and started to find his way around the instrument rapidly. His skill with the fife must have helped considerably,- like nearly all New Orleans jazz clarinetists, he was playing an Albert system instrument, which was widely preferred over the more modern Boehm fingering system. The tone of the Albert system instrument was broader and louder, and more suitable for a jazz band. "My heart was set on the clarinet," George Lewis said. "I don't know what it was, but I was conscious of something about it. I just admired the clarinet." Although Lewis often said that he never took any music lessons, later in life he mentioned that he did pay one or two visits to a "professor," as his first wife Emma Zeno corroborates. His name, George recalled, was Professor Delmas. "I know all the signs of the music," George added, "but I can't read. And I want to tell you something else: many of the musicians around here, colored, and some of the white ones, they can't read. You say you're going to read a book? You pick it up and you go right on. You don't say, 'Uh, I,T,E,M, . . . item,' you say 'item' right off. That's a reader. So the guy who rehearses it, comes back and makes it over, he's a speller. And most of the musicians around here are spellers, not readers." George remembered that when he was practicing his clarinet at home a man who shared the yard with him would sometimes complain—especially if he squeaked. The man would call out: "Hey there, George, way up them stairs there, who's got them birds?" So George would play softer and softer, using all the time a harder and harder reed. "And by playing soft

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Clarinet"

I got a very good tone when I was only a beginner," he explained. "I play a different tone, although I say it myself, from any other clarinet player." George was then living on the edge of the Tremé section of New Orleans close to Congo Square, and a block or two from the French Quarter. He lived in this neighborhood continuously until he moved across the river to Algiers in 1952. In the earlier years of the century, the Tremé was the cultural hub of black life in the city—a thriving community with schools, churches, and dance halls. In recent years this historic section was largely destroyed to make room for a "cultural center" and a park dedicated to Louis Armstrong. As late as the mid-1970s, however, Zeno's Grocery Store still stood at the corner of Ursulines and St. Claude Streets, managed by George's son Joseph, while down the street St. Augustine Church still survived. There George was baptized and made his first communion. Blandin's Funeral Home is barely a block away, where a group of young musicians from different parts of the world played at George Lewis's funeral. And above Zeno's grocery, George's first wife Emma Zeno was still living in 1970 with her oldest daughter Mildred. "George was 17 when I first knew him," Emma recalled, her memory still sharp, her mood cheerful. "He was 17 and I was 18 when we first got together. And we got to going along together, and we lived together for quite a while before we married. At that time, when we met, he was playing that little piccolo he had. He didn't have no clarinet, not when I first met him, and he wasn't playing in a band at that time. We were living on St. Peter Street right here in New Orleans when he first picked up playing clarinet. They told me there used to be an old hall close to where we lived. Globe Hall, they called it. But that was before we were living there. Anyway, I think it was a used

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clarinet that George had gotten, so he started picking up, going here and there, and running over it until he come to get better and better. "He had one note he wanted to learn," Emma Zeno continued, "and what it was I don't know, but he couldn't get it. So he went to see a music professor. I remember he was a dark, heavy-set old man, and I think it was 25 or 35 cents to get that note, to learn that note from that man. George used to have a little bitty small piccolo and he'd get it good on that, but he couldn't get it on the clarinet. So that's the only time I know that he paid that man to learn, you know. "And then he went on playing and playing, till he started playing with little three-piece bands, you see, and going about here and there, playing for advertising. I think it was on wagons, or something. I don't know who it was George was playing with at that time. Joe Rena I remember, he used to come by, and Mr. Henry, his brother, but that must have been later he played with them. There were so many, and I don't remember the first. You see, when George got to playing like he did, well, I didn't go around nowheres associating where he was; never was a person to go about nowheres, like I tell you. "We moved over the lake to Mandeville later, and he played down in old Mandeville with some band, but I don't remember the names. Oh Lord! There was a tall man, Mr. Hosea, played a bass. The Black Eagle Band? The names! But I don't remember who they were now, except for Mr. Hosea, I remember him. I'll tell you, by me not going about, made me didn't know anybody."9 Although George's first paid job was evidently with the Black Eagle Band in Mandeville, he had undoubtedly sat in with a few pickup groups in New Orleans, played occasionally on advertising wagons, as his wife suggests, and generally gigged around with youngsters of his own age. The red-light district

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known as Storyville had been declared illegal in 1917, but this had greater repercussions in the pages of jazz books than in the lives of jazzmen, and in 1918, when we may assume that George Lewis was playing his first tentative notes in public, there was a great deal of work in New Orleans for musicians. On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, we know that George was playing in a pickup brass band which accompanied draftees from the Custom House on Canal Street (where an induction station was located) down to the Southern Railroad station. Apparently, it was a part of the spirit of the times to march the soldiers to the station with brass band accompaniment. George recalls playing on both sides of the river after the Armistice notice that afternoon.10 In March 1919, Mildred Zeno was born in Charity Hospital in New Orleans (she was George and Emma's first child), and at that time George Lewis was working at Joe Rouzon's bakery on Orleans Street. Not long after Mildred's birth, Rouzon told George that they needed someone to work in Rigolets, a fishing village on the northeastern shore of Lake Ponchartrain. The work involved cooking and caretaking at a fishing camp there. They "made a nice living" there, Emma recalled, until the infant Mildred took sick because of the damp climate. The family returned to New Orleans, and had not been there long when George's father told them about a vacancy in Mandeville. "The doctor said the child would be better off around the piney woods somewhere," Emma said, "so we went over there. And I liked it. It was very good. My fatherin-law lived in the next block, and I've done well, the baby got well and everything." As a child George frequently crossed the lake in the summer holidays and spent a month or two with his father, whose occupation changed with the season: he was at different times fisherman, trapper, baker's

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assistant, carpenter, and general handyman. At one point he was a cook on one of the lake steamers. He was not musically inclined, although George says that his father once bought him a clarinet, another time a C-melody saxophone, and on another occasion he tried to make a permanent reed by shaving down a piece of goat's horn. (It didn't play properly, however.) No doubt George's budding career as a musician and, indeed, the new musical style in which he played, seemed strange to his half-Indian father, who preferred to spend his time hunting and trapping in the piney woods. "Mr. Henry, George's father, stayed at his own home, you see," Emma Zeno recalled. "We were renting from a lady. It was only $4 a month, and a nice good place. A good place we had. Plenty of back yard, and we had a garden. I bought me a hog for 75