The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

heard that it was Big Eye. There was much more than jazz, however, that I wanted to learn about New Orleans, and after a reasonable effort I gave up the search for those musicians who stayed behind, after their comperes, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Sechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zutty Singleton had gone up ' the Mississippi to Chicago and Kansas City. Missing these pioneers, I tried to obtain the album in which Heywood Hale Brown recorded the New Orleans jazz of Kid Rena, Big Eye, Alphonse Picou, James Robinson and other oldsters. It came late, almost too late in their lives, this putting on wax what was probably closest to the fine old source stuff of jazz. Five music stores, including the largest in New Orleans, not only did not have the album, but had not heard of it (New York would be the place to get that, they cracked) ; and they looked quizzically at me when I asked if they knew of Rena. I should not have* been surprised ; my first day in New Orleans I noticed that Frankie Masters (a sweet "name-band") was playing the Hotel Roosevelt. And at a prom at Southern University up country, I had heard a Negro band from New Orleans play sweet jazz to which the collegians danced sedately, with only a bit of genteel jitterbugging. The vocalist was a chit of a girl. I could not help thinking, when she ventured a diluted blues, how Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith would have snorted at this child being sent to do a woman's work. The record shops catering to Negroes were doing a booming business in blues (Big Maceo, Yank Rachal, Bea Booze, and Lil Green) and gutter smut (She Want to Sell My Monkey and Let Me Play With Your Poodle), but they didn't stock albums, especiallv an album by somebody named Rena. Never heard of him. Basin Street was another disappointment. I knew that at the very time when the famous blues came out, Basin Street already belonged to the lost past: That's where the light and the dark folks meet Heaven on earth, they call it Basin Street. Even in its glory, it was a short street to have spread so much joy and jazz abroad. But I was not ready for its change of name to North Saratoga Street; after Canal and Rampart what New Orleans street could be more widely known than Basin? Only a stone's throw away from the notorious section it magnetized is now the Lafitte Housing Project, trim and model. Across the iron picket fence the Southern Railroad trains rumble "down the line," but the street itself is quiet, with warehouses and commercial buildings where the bordelloes and gaudy saloons flourished. Sole memento of the vanished era of plush and lace, mahogany furniture, long mirrors and costly paintings, is a semi-pretentious white house, graying in the railroad soot. Behind these long arched elegant windows, boarded now, reigned that internationally known purveyor of octoroon and quadroon beauties, Lulu White, whose diamonds and other gems made her resemble "the electrical display of the Cascade at the late St. Louis exposition." This had been a show-place of Story ville, the red-light district, where over a hundred musicians, white and black, were regularly employed in the restaurants and cabarets. Many of the bandsmen later became drawing cards in the cities of America and Europe. In the "palaces," however, the piano was the favored instrument, and the pianists, so frequently Negro, were called "professors." "Professor" Tony Jackson was legendary, famed for his version of the "Naked Dance" ; he is dead now, and so, more recently, is "Jelly Roil" Morton, who started as a mere "winin' " boy and whose memoirs recapture much of the lost resplendence and ribaldry. A third "professor," Spender Williams, composed Mahogany Hall Stomp to celebrate Lulu White's place, Shim-MeShe -Wabble to celebrate one of the entertainments provided there, and Basin Street Blues, to celebrate the whole region. The last blues was elegiac even then (thirty years ago) : Don't you want to go with me Dozvn the Mississippi . . . Rampart Street : and I thought of Ida Cox's plangent blues of the old times : / want to go down to Rampart Street I ivant to hear those colored jacc bands play . . . Across Canal to South Rampart, where Louis Armstrong, before finding harbor at the Waif's home, had sat on a coal cart skatting out his wares in what he hoped was a bass voice, where he and Sidney Bechet later played on the same advertising wagon, where Clarence Williams, backed by some of the best young musicians, played piano at the Red Onion Cafe, and laid up memories for Red Onion Blues, Gravier Street Blues, and Baby, Won't You Please Come Home. Gravier Street was still ramshackly enough to stir a blues feeling, but the jazz bands weren't around. Rampart was a busy street, lined with offices, perfume stands, beerjoints, clothes stores, groceries, and record stores. But it wasn't 8