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Armstrong took the dance steps he had been practising in front of Funky Butt Hall and tried to make some money with them on the streets, as teenage boys still do in New Orleans. By 1910 he was also selling newspapers as a helper to a white boy named Charles, who had realized that he could make more money by farming out delivery to younger children. Armstrong picked up copies of the New Orleans Item at the corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue and peddled them from streetcars. But newspaper boys were supposed to be white, according to Jim Crow, so the arrangement got him in trouble with the law, perhaps for the first time but not for the last. Running with older boys, he learned how to multiply his earnings through gambling, shooting dice, coon can, black jack, and African dominos. Gambling gave him change enough for a new pair of short pants.(From Street Hustler, p. 90)
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Honky tonks or 'tonks' as the musicians usually say - were simple places that thrived on illegal gambling. Most tonks had a pool table with blocked pockets so that the surface could be used for shooting craps. When the police made their rounds, the table was instantly converted back to shooting pool. In addition to gambling, a tonk usually had some combination of prostitution, alcohol, food, and at least one musician, often an ear-playing pianist. Many, many ear pianists drifted in and out of the tonks, playing nothing but blues. Their names likewise float in and out of the oral histories - Jasper Black Pete, Birmingham, Game Kid, Stack O. Lee, Leon Alexis, Tink Baptiste and so on. Cornets were not typical, though around Liberty and Perdido the tonks were a little more elaborate and sometimes rbought in small bands. Armstrong remembered one gambler calling his cornet a "quail" - "Listen to that cat blowing that quail." (From Lessons with Oliver, p. 112)
Quote:
Bold clothing was part of the image of the hustler, a social designation that conflated pimping and gambling. Assertive clothes symbolically contradicted Jim Crow subservience, marking the hustler as a man who did not play by the common rules, an outsider immune to the normal racial, domestic, and economic pressures. The hustler was someone who had escaped the curse of endless unskilled drudgery and poverty. Baby Dodds said that in 1918 Armstrong dressed like a 'low class hustler' because "that's what Louis wanted to be in those days." He wore a tight collar that kept popping when his neck sweled from the pressure of playing the cornet. All of his earnings disappeared through gambling. Hustlers liked tight trousers, tailored, if possible, by Burtenard and Wager's - "They knowed how they wanted their clothes and they'd fit em that way," said Jelly Roll Morton. Gold belt buckles and gold initialing flashed alongside diamonds inserted in teeth, ties, garters, and socks. As a special attraction, a little light bulb, energized by a pocket battery, flashed in the toe of a shoe. The hustler's walk, known as "shooting the agate," advanced at a slow tempo, one suspender lifted off the shoulder, arms stiffly out to the side and index fingers pointing down; this was the look that helped keep a "fifth class whore" under control. Flashy visual display was an integral part of the musical scene surrounding early jazz, which was an extroverted, ostentatious kind of music - "brassy, broad and aggressively dramatic," as poet and critic Amiri Baraka has described Armstrong's playing of the 1920s and 1930s. (From Musicians as Men, pgs. 200-201)
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Far from irrelevant, Storyville caused a huge spike in the music business during the 1910s. Musicians were drawn to it for the simple reasons that the work was steady and the money good. "The sporting district come to have all the best musicians because the pay was every night," said Big Eye Louis Nelson. "Just take the corner of Iberville and Franklin - four saloons on the four corners, the 25s, 28, The Pig Ankle and Shoto's. Those places had eight bands amongst them. Four on day and four on night." There were also lots of tonks, gambling traps for the visiting plantation owners, sailors, and even wealthy New Orleanians who enjoyed slumming alongside longshoremen. Jelly Roll Morton witnessed an occasional dash of biological class warfare in thse tonks when lower-class'bums' discreetly flicked lice on the fancy-suited rich men from St. Charles Avenue. (From Movin' On Up, p. 258)
Heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek
Heaven, I'm in heaven
And the cares that hung around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak
When we're out together dancing (swinging) cheek to cheek
Oh I love to climb a mountain
And reach the highest peak
But it doesn't thrill (boot) me half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek
Oh I love to go out fishing
In a river or a creek
But I don't enjoy it half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek
(Come on and) Dance with me
I want my arm(s) about you
That (Those) charm(s) about you
Will carry me through...
(Right up) To heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we're out together dancing, out together dancing (swinging)
Out together dancing cheek to cheek
Just in time
I found you just in time
Before you came my time
Was running low
I was lost
The losing dice were tossed
My bridges all were crossed
Nowhere to go
Now you're here
And now I know just where I'm going
No more doubt or fear
I found my way
For love came just in time
You found me just in time
And changed my lonely life
That lovely day
(Musical interlude)
I was lost
The losing dice were tossed
My bridges all were crossed
Nowhere to go
Now you're here
And now I know just where I'm going
No more doubt or fear
I found my way
For love came just in time
You found me just in time
And changed my lonely life
That lovely day
Breathing hurts in weather that cold, but whatever the problems of being winterbound in the City they put up with them because it is worth anything to be on Lenox Avenue safe from fays and the things they think up; where the sidewalks, snow-covered or not, are wider than the main roads of the towns where they were born and perfectly ordinary people can stand at the stop, get on the streetcar, give the man the nickel, and ride anywhere you please, although you don't please to go many places because everything you want is right where you are: the church, the store, the party, the women, the men, the postbox (but no high schools), the furniture store, street newspaper vendors, the bootleg houses (but no banks), the beauty parlors, the barbershops, the juke joints, the ice wagons, the rag collectors, the pool halls, the open food markets, the numbers runner, and every club, organization, group, order, union, society, brotherhood, sisterhood and association imaginable. The service trails, of course, are worn, and there are paths slick from the forays of members of one group into the territory of another where it is believed something curious or thrilling lies. Some gleaming, cracking, scary stuff. Where you can pop the cork and put the cold glass mouth right up to your own. Where you can find danger or be it; where you can fight till you drop and smile at the knife when it misses and when it doesn't. It makes you wonderful just to see it. And just as wonderful to know that back in one's own building there are lists drawn up by the wives for the husband hunting an open market, and that sheets impossible to hang out in snowfall drape kitchens like the curtains of Abyssinian Sunday-school plays. (-- pgs. 10-11)
Listen:
Jazz
By Toni Morrison
Narrated by Lynne Thigpen, a frequent Morrsion narrator
Two more swing doors closed off the head of the stairs from whatever was beyond. The big man pushed them open lightly with his thumbs and we went into the room. It was a long, narrow room, not very clean, not very bright, not very cheerful. In the corner a group of Negroes chanted and chattered in the cone of light over a crap table. There was a bar against the right hand wall. The rest of the room was mostly small round tables. There were a few customers, men and women, all Negroes.
The chanting at the crap table stopped dead and the light over it jerked out. There was a sudden silence as heavy as a water-logged boat. Eyes looked at us, chestnut colored eyes, set in faces that ranged from gray to deep black. Heads turned slowly and the eyes in them glistened and stared in the dead alien silence of another race. (Chapter Two at p. 7, describing a bar along Central Avenue in Los Angeles in about 1940)
Listen:
Farewell, My Lovely
CD Audio
Read by Elliott Gould, who might have been born to read
Chandler aloud
Central Avenue Sounds Jazz in Los Angeles
Edited by Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steve Isoardi, Jack Kelson, Horace Tapscott, Gerald Wilson, and Marl Young
..., I will never forget my arrival in San Francisco: we came in through a huge fog bank, and suddenly there was a cutoff, just as if somebody had drawn a line in ink, and the sky was completely clear, and looming up over us was the Golden Gate Bridge. As an introduction to San Francisco, you just cannot beat that. (footnote omitted)
We docked across the bay in Richmond, but I had a little time off, so I took my duffel bag and my recently acquired Gibson and got a lift over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. Walking up the Embarcadero, I passed a saloon where a traditional jazz band was playing Ace in the Hole, a song I had never heard before but that became one of my favorites. I went in and introduced myself to the band. I had just picked up my pay, so I was relatively solvent. Not for long, though. In one wonderful afternoon they introduced me to the mysteries of steam beer and poker dice, and I remember very little else. (-- p. 52)
Another popular Ace in the Hole:
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook Vol. 2
CD Audio
Featuring the track, Ace in the Hole, by the legendary Cole Porter
Quote:
Ace in the Hole
Sad times, may follow your tracks
Bad times, may bar you from sak's
At times, when satan in slacks
Breaks down your self control
Maybe, as often it goes
Your abe-y, may tire of his rose
So baby, this rule I propose
Always have an ace in the hole
Sad times, may follow your tracks
Bad times, may bar you from Sak's
At times, when satan in slacks
Breaks down your self control
Maybe, as often it goes
Your abe-y, may tire of his rose
So baby, this rule I propose
Always have an ace in the hole
Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Return of a Virtuoso Following a debilitating stroke, the incomparable jazz pianist
Oscar Peterson had to start over
By Marya Hornbacher
January, 2005
Quote:
Peterson's talents as a composer, which have been largely overshadowed by his strengths as a performer, began with a dare. "My bassist Niels Pederson said, 'Why don't you write something?' I said, 'Now?' He said, 'Yeah! You're supposed to be so big and bad. Go ahead.' I figured he was getting a little uppity so I'd face this challenge. So I wrote 'The Love Ballad' for my wife." Likewise for Canadiana Suite, which he recorded in 1964. "That was started on a bet," he says, chuckling. "I had been messing with Ray Brown" - Peterson is a notorious practical joker, and Brown was one of his favorite victims - "I would go steal his cuff links and what have you. And he said, 'Why don't you make good use of your time instead of messing with me? Why don't you go write something?' I said, 'What do you want me to write?' I was in a very cavalier mood. He said, 'You know, Duke [Ellington] has written a "this suite" and a "that suite," why don't you go write a suite?' I said, 'OK, I'll be back.'" Peterson chuckles. "The first piece I wrote was 'Wheatland,' and I started on 'Blues of the Prairies.' And I called Ray over. He said, 'Well, when are you going to finish it?' I said, 'Ray, we gotta go to work! I would, but ' - and he said, 'Well, finish the so-and-so thing. Two pieces is not a suite. Canada's a big, big country. What're you gonna do about that?'" A sweeping musical meditation on the grandeur of the Canadian landscape, Canadiana was hailed by one critic as a "musical journey." (-- p. 62)
Court and Spark
CD Audio
By Frostback legend Joni Mitchell
Quote:
Help Me
Help me
I think I'm falling
In love again
When I get that crazy feeling, I know
I'm in trouble again
I'm in trouble
'Cause you're a rambler and a gambler
And a sweet-taIking-ladies man
And you love your lovin'
But not like you love your freedom
Help me
I think I'm falling
In love too fast
It's got me hoping for the future
And worrying about the past
'Cause I've seen some hot hot blazes
Come down to smoke and ash
We love our lovin'
But not like we love our freedom
Didn't it feel good
We were sitting there talking
Or lying there not talking
Didn't it feel good
You dance with the lady
With the hole in her stocking
Didn't it feel good
Didn't it feel good
Help me
I think I'm falling
In love with you
Are you going to let me go there by myself
That's such a lonely thing to do
Both of us flirting around
Flirting and flirting
Hurting too
We love our lovin'
But not like we love our freedom
Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo
By Brooklyn PR wildman Martin Espada
Read nicely by the author
CD Audio
Quote:
Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo Achill Island, Ireland, June 200
Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain
like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant.
Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain.
We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace,
room full of poets' books leaning rumpled, half-asleep.
All night a radio sang in Irish, tongues sod-hard with lament
or celebration. The the BBC news, and the announcer's lips
pinching the name: Tito Puente, The Mambo King, dead in New York.
I would listen to Tito's records and see my father years ago:
black hair shiny as the spinning disk, combed slick
before the dance. I learned to spy on his mambo step,
drummed the pots and kitchen tables of Brooklyn.
I saw Tito Puento too, hammering timbales on the Jazzboat
in Boston Harbor, brandishing drumsticks over head
to scatter the malevolent spirits that grabbed at his hair.
Guadalupe pushed backstage to return with Tito's drumstick,
splintered from repeating, always repeating the beat of slaves.
Here, on this island, I rehearse the Irish word for drum:
bodhran, gripped by hand like the pandereta,
circle of skin and wood for the grandchildren of slaves
to thump as they sang the news in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
Again today the rain grays the graying stones.
We shake away drizzle in the pub dwarfed by mountains.
In brown Guiness light we squint to see
the posters of their Easter dead: James Connolly
bellowing insurrection the Citizen Army,
the year 1916 ablaze above his head, numbers torched
like the pillars of an empire's monuments to itself.
The bartender says Connolly eyed the firing squad
strapped to a chair in the stonebreaker's yard,
gangrene feasting on his wound so he could not stand.
I tell the bartender that Puerto Rico has its Easter dead:
a march on Palm Sunday, colonial police intoxicated
by the incense of gunsmoke, Cadets of the Republic
painting slogans on the street in their belly-blood.
That was Ponce in 1937, and Rafael still says:
My mother left in a white dress and came home in a red dress.
Tito Puente is dead, and we are in a pub on Achill Island
plundering the jukebox, flipping between the Wolfe Tones
and the Dubliners til we discover Tito's Oye Como Va.
The beat is a hand slapping the bar, heads nodding
as if their ears funneled a chant of yes-yes, yes-yes,
and when we shoot a game of pool in his memory
the table becomes a dance floor at the Palladium,
cue ball spinning through a crowd of red and green.
Now James Connolly could dance the mambo,
gangrene forever banished from his leg.
(Also published in the author's collection, Alabanza,
at pgs. 205-206)
It was on a night just as dark that I met up with her again a year or two later in Paris. I must have written to her once or twice to thank her, and to ask how she was getting, but she had not replied - she was not the kind of person who writes letters - so it was through the newspaper that I found out that she was going to sing one evenening at the Mars Club, in the Impasse Marbeuf. I had lost contact with Michel Magne, and it was my husband who accompanied me that night. We arrived well before she did, at the dark little nightclub, a thousand leagues and more removed from Eddie Condon's gigantic place, more intimate and more intimidating, too, because that night there was a real audience, if a limited one. Toward midnight, as I was beginning to get impatient, someone pushed open the door and came, followed by a noisy group of people.
It was Billie Holiday - and yet it wasn't. She had grown thin; she had aged; and her arms bore the ever closer tracks of needles. She no longer had that innate assurance, that physical equilibrium which had conferred on her such marble-like serenity amid the storms and dizzy turbulence of her life.
... I don't remember any more - accompanied rather hesitantly by a quartet that tried to follow the unpredictable vagaries of her voice, which itself had become a little uncertain. My admiration was such - or was it the force of memory? - that I could not belp bud admire her, despite the awful, ridiculous shortcomings of this meager recital. She sang with eyes lowered. She would skip a verse and have difficulty catching her breath. She clung to the piano as if to a ship's rail in stormy seas. ...
After those few snatches of song, she came and sat with us for a moment. She was in a hurry, a terrible, because she was leaving the next day, I think, for London, or somewhere else in Europe, she couldn't remember where exactly. "Anyway, darling," she said to me in English, "you know I am going to die very soon in New York, between two cops." Of course I swore she was wrong. I could not and did not want to believe her; all my adolescence, those years that were lulled and entranced by her voice, refused to believe her. So my first reaction was total amazement when I opened a newspaper a few months later, and read that Billie Holiday had died the night before, alone in a hospital, between two cops. (From Billie Holiday, pgs. 10-14)
The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it’s real,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,
I’m back on Boogie Street.
You lose your grip, and then you slip
Into the Masterpiece.
And maybe I had miles to drive,
And promises to keep:
You ditch it all to stay alive
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Editor's Note: Even at 70+, Frostback wordsmith Cohen still provides one of the most eloquent answers to the age-old question, What the hell do women want, exactly? The song was about the only thing we could actually hear in this inaudible remake of French classic, Bob le Flambeur. The song arrives just in time to decorate a late night/early morning panorama of the French Riviera and deflect attention from the devastated visage of the once beautiful Nick Nolte.
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