Playboy's History of Jazz and Rock, Part Three: Some Like it Hot

New York City, 1925. Bix Beiderbecke had just hit town. Fellow cornettist Red Nichols invited Beiderbecke to room with him at the Pasadena Hotel near Columbus Circle. Beiderbecke moved in and together they rented a piano.

And threw parties. Babe Ruth was probably there for some, since he and Beiderbecke were pals. Ruth liked hot jazz as much as Beiderbecke liked baseball--and both loved to party.

Nichols recalled a memorable party in the biography Bix. One night, jazz violinist Joe Venuti began wondering which key predominated on the piano--if all the keys were hit at once, which would win? Such cosmic thinking was no doubt fueled by bootleg gin. Music theory during the Jazz Age: Venuti said he had a plan and took bets on the outcome. A few nights later, they were back, partying again at the Pasadena. Before anyone knew what was happening, Venuti and a few other musicians muscled the piano to the window, lifted it up and dropped it from the fifth floor into the alley. Nichols remembered an enormous crash and snapping piano wires but said, "There was no hint of any pitch."

So the experiment failed.

This was what F. Scott Fitzgerald named the Jazz Age--jazz meaning more than mere music. It was more like rebellion on all fronts. World War One had blown away sunny Edwardian idealism, leaving in its place The Lost Generation, with its angst and existential humor, as seen in the mordant craziness of the art movements of the time--Dadaism, surrealism and the rest. Skirts went up, to reveal the much-coveted ankle and more. Cheap Model T Fords put cars and their back seats in the hands of more and more horny teenagers, providing an easier means of finding somewhere private to make out than ever before. Freud was in vogue, insisting that everything was ultimately sexual. James Joyce was having Molly say yes yes yes yes. People other than Einstein were beginning to understand Einstein.

Beiderbecke was the family bad boy, James Dean with a cornet--though not quite so handsome. His straight German upper-middle-class family in Davenport, Iowa, did everything it could think of to keep him from being a jazzman--a calling akin to pimping or robbing churches as far as it was concerned. During a visit home late in his brief career, Beiderbecke found all the records he'd made and dutifully sent home sitting there in a stack, still in their mailing wrappers.

Despite all that encouragement, Beiderbecke was hardly out of his teens when he became the first important white jazz player. During his short, troubled life--which ended in 1931 when he was drowned in bootleg gin at the age of 28--he was a cornettist second only to Louis Armstrong.

Only a few years earlier, Beiderbecke had been a student at Lake Forest Academy in a northern suburb of Chicago, 86'd from home by his father in hopes it would cure his jazz fever. It didn't. Night after night, Beiderbecke slipped out of the dorm, heading for the downtown clubs where they played the jazz he loved.

There was plenty to hear. Ever since World War One, more and more jazz musicians from New Orleans had been drifting North to try their luck in Chicago. By the Twenties, they had included cornettists Louis Armstrong, Freddie Keppard and King Oliver; the Dodds brothers, Johnny on sax and clarinet and "Baby" on drums; clarinetists Sidney Bechet and Jimmie Noone; Jelly Roll Morton, who had stretched ragtime piano into jazz; blues singers such as Bessie Smith, who was originally from Tennessee; and ragtime-blues pianist Tony Jackson, just an "old head" who had started out playing in New Orleans whorehouses and moved to Chicago in 1912.

For this habit of ducking out to Chicago and ignoring most of his classes, Beiderbecke was thrown out of school. To him it was more a relief than punishment. Soon he was leading the jazz life he'd been yearning for. He landed a job in a Lake Michigan excursion-boat band; gigs at a couple of Midwest lake resorts followed. After the fall season, he tried once more to please his father by going to work as a clerk in the family coal and lumber company. But by the following summer, he was back playing on excursion boats, and in the autumn of 1923, he was working at the Stockton Club outside Hamilton, Ohio, a Mob-run combination speak-easy/gambling joint/whorehouse north of Cincinnati.

After a major-league New Year's Eve brawl between rival gangsters, Beiderbecke regrouped as the Wolverine Orchestra, where life was a bit quieter. The Wolverines mostly played dance dates at cornfield colleges: Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and Indiana University in Bloomington, where Beiderbecke became pals with Hoagy Carmichael. But by the end of the following summer, he was playing New York and selling batches of records--and at 21 was becoming a star.

If Armstrong was warm gold, Beiderbecke was cool silver. Even in his "hot" solos, there was a certain European classicism, stateliness, melancholy. He hit notes as if they were velvet punches, his solos like a young Muhammad Ali in slow motion. And he might not have been doing it--or thrown pianos out of windows--if it hadn't been for Armstrong.

It's hard for those who only remember him grinning and singing Hello, Dolly! on The Tonight Show or mugging through movies such as High Society to appreciate how profoundly Armstrong influenced the history of jazz. If jazz before him was Newtonian physics, Louis introduced Einstein and relativity theory. He was Beiderbecke's idol--his and practically every other jazz musician's.

Later claiming to have been born on the Fourth of July in 1900 (the real date was August 4, 1901), Armstrong was playing cornet in the Kid Ory band--New Orleans' best--by the time he was 19, and by 21, he was on the Mississippi riverboat circuit, where Beiderbecke, still in high school, first saw him.

When Armstrong got off the train on Chicago's South Side one hot August night in 1922, wearing an old-fashioned New Orleans box-back suit, he was a plump, friendly young man carrying a cornet case and not much else. No one would have guessed that a revolution was packed inside that case.

Musicians weren't the only ones heading for Chicago. After the war, many Southern blacks began moving North, looking for jobs and a shot at equality. Carl Sandburg wrote in 1919, "Twenty years ago, fewer than 50 families of the colored race were homeowners in Chicago. Today they number thousands."

Many blacks made more money than they had in the South, but the Chicago race riot of 1919 was a clue that they weren't particularly welcome. As more blacks arrived and began moving into formerly all-white South Side neighborhoods, according to one Chicago historian, the friction produced "a kind of guerrilla warfare." Twenty-four bombings in two years preceded the July day in 1919 when, triggered by a rock-throwing clash at a beach, a riot began that led to the drowning of a black teenager. In the next five days, fighting, shooting, stabbing and pillaging left scores injured and a half dozen or more dead. White mobs grabbed blacks from streetcars and roamed black neighborhoods, trashing and burning homes. Finally, the governor sent in the state militia.

Welcome to Chicago.

But the newcomers managed to have their fun. By the early Twenties, the action centered on 35th and State: Dreamland, the Sunset Cafe, the Plantation Club, the Vendome Theater, Lincoln Gardens, plus Midway Gardens down on 60th Street, and the dance halls of Riverview, an amusement park on the West Side.

Armstrong was lured to Chicago by Joe Oliver, a man whose nicknames included King, from his days as the top-gun cornettist in New Orleans, and Bad Eye, for the way his eye popped out when he was really blowing. He'd been a friend--a mentor, of sorts--of young Armstrong's back in New Orleans and now, in 1922, wanted him to come North and join his Creole Jazz Band, already Chicago's hottest outfit and a fixture at Lincoln Gardens.

This section of the South Side was a little like New Orleans' famous District, its clubs providing pleasures of all sorts, generally illegal. Most were owned or "protected," thanks to Prohibition, by bootlegging Mobsters with gun lumps in their suits. This was Al Capone's turf, his scarface familiar in neighborhood clubs.

On the North Side, a smaller, complementary but mainly white jazz scene was developing at places such as the Rendezvous Club at Clark and Diversey and the Three Deuces, named as a parody of a famous Mob whorehouse called the Four Deuces, and Uptown's Green Mill Lounge on North Broadway, which is still in business as a jazz club and looks about the same as it did in the Twenties.

From the first, Armstrong couldn't help blowing his good friend Oliver away--even while trying not to--so radiant was his talent.

Within a few nights, "The first ten rows at the Gardens was nothing but musicians," said trombonist Preston Jackson. Many of them were young and white: "You could see such people as Paul Mares and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Muggsy Spanier, the Dorsey brothers.... Also the fellows from that particular school in Chicago--George Wettling, Frank Teschmacher and that bunch."

"That bunch" came to be known as the Austin High Gang, from the high school most of them attended on the West Side. The leader was Teschmacher, who convinced four of his high school buddies that they could successfully imitate the records of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings--a popular white jazz group originally from New Orleans--to which they were listening so eagerly.

In 1922, they formed what may have been the first garage band: Jim Lanigan on piano, Jimmy McPartland on cornet, his brother Dick on guitar and banjo, Bud Freeman on C-melody sax and Teschmacher on alto. Jimmy McPartland, at 14, was the youngest and Lanigan, at 17, the old man.

As they learned to play, they began to get gigs, as did other white Chicago kids still in or barely out of high school--drummer Dave Tough, pianist Art Hodes and teen whiz Eddie Condon, a guitarist/banjoist/pianist from Indiana, who moved in 1928 to New York to front his own band and do session work, backing Armstrong and Fats Waller, among many others. In the Forties, he opened the eponymous club that was to be a solid rock in the New York jazz scene for many years.

Another kid in the crowd was boy wonder clarinetist Benny Goodman. He'd been a beaver from the beginning, studying at Hull House when he was ten, because it provided instruments. Born in Chicago in 1909, Goodman entered a talent contest (imitating vaudeville star Ted Lewis) when he was 12 and got his first union card the next year. At the age of 14, he was playing on those Lake Michigan excursion boats, where he and Beiderbecke first crossed paths.

Then there was clarinet/sax player Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, the first white hipster, who loved black music and black culture to the point of trying to become black. In 1942, his draft card read, race: Negro. During various stints in jail, usually on drug charges, he passed as a light-skinned black so he would be put in the black cell blocks, where he felt more at home. Part of a tough high school/poolroom Jewish gang, Mezzrow was 15 when he was caught in a stolen Studebaker in front of a police station. Like Armstrong, he had learned to play music in reform school. His autobiography, Really the Blues, is one of the great jazz books, the story of a middle-class white kid from Chicago's Northwest Side who became pals with both Beiderbecke and Armstrong--and who, for a time, peddled marijuana.

And all these young white guys went to see Armstrong whenever they could.

Hoagy Carmichael, who as an undergraduate lamenting the loss of a girlfriend had composed Stardust on the lawn in front of the Indiana University library, recalled seeing Armstrong at Lincoln Gardens with Bix, smoking a little "muggles"--slang at the time for marijuana.

"The joint stank of body musk," Carmichael recalled, "bootleg booze, excited people, platform sweat. Then the muggles took effect and my body got light. I ran to the piano and took the place of Louis' wife. I had never heard the tune before, but, full of smoke, I somehow couldn't miss a note of it. The muggles carried me into another world. I was floating in a strange deep-blue whirlpool of jazz."

The addition of Armstrong to the Oliver band marked one beginning of Chicago-style jazz, different in several respects from the older New Orleans style. For one thing, it featured solos. Armstrong was the first of the virtuoso soloists who played above and around and sometimes apart from the band. You can hear a consummate performance on his 1928 Hot Five West End Blues, with Earl Hines on piano. Probably the finest single performance in all of jazz, it's a record that has been more lovingly analyzed at greater length by jazz critics than any other.

Also in Chicago, the beat began changing--in part to accommodate the greater technical flair of the horn and reed players, who were learning to play more complex lines faster. And you could play it even hotter by doubling the beat and speeding up the tempo. The white groups were especially susceptible to the speed factor, Beiderbecke and the Austin High Gang often playing as if they had dogs snapping at their heels, youthful exuberance masking some lurking fear that it might all collapse if they didn't keep tearing along. So from the oom-pah oom-pah two-four of New Orleans emerged the tick-tick-tick-tick of four-four time--the beat that became the battery for the big bands soon to come.

In 1923, the Oliver band landed in Richmond, Indiana, to cut its first records. For a few years, this nowhere Indiana town was practically the jazz (continued on page 151)Jazz and Rock(continued from page 96) recording center of the world. The Starr Piano Company there had a little recording studio, where it produced records on the Gennett label--mainly to promote its pianos. Nearly all the jazz artists--Jelly Roll Morton, Beiderbecke, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Bessie Smith and Armstrong, among others--passed through.

This was before electric microphones. The musicians had to aim their instruments toward a great cornucopialike horn. Drummers could only clip-clop wood blocks, since real drumming made the stylus cutting the wax disc at the other end of the horn fly out of the groove. And the Gennett studio was next to the railroad tracks, so recording had to stop every time a train passed. But for a while, the Gennett label was the Sun Records of the early Twenties, for bands both black and white.

The sides the King Oliver band cut on April 6, 1923, included Armstrong's first recorded solo, on Chimes Blues; not particularly inspired for him, but he briefly soared above the rest of the band.

Armstrong changed the whole game, thanks in part to Lil Hardin, a foxy lady who played piano in the band. She studied music at Nashville's Fisk University before moving to Chicago in 1917 and going to work as a song demonstrator in a music store. Armstrong liked her right away, after noticing her rolled-down garters as she pumped those piano pedals. At first, she was put off by him--too fat and country green--but she changed her mind after hearing him play. In February 1924, she became the second Mrs. Armstrong. (The first, Daisy, had been a New Orleans "working girl" three years older than he.) Hardin taught him to read music more easily, urged him to further develop his own style--and to leave King Oliver.

Reluctantly, Armstrong did so in June 1924, when he accepted an offer to join Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra in New York. Hardin stayed on in Chicago playing piano with Oliver.

In New York, a slightly different jazz scene was developing. Musicians were less directly influenced by New Orleans players; most had more formal training. They were evolving a big-band style that would take over from Chicago's hot small groups by the end of the decade.

One such musician was young Duke Ellington, born in 1899 and raised in Washington, D.C., in comfortable circumstances that included music lessons from an early age. He hit New York in 1923, joining the band of Wilbur Sweatman, whose main claim to fame was that he could play three clarinets at once--the first Roland Kirk! By 1927, the Duke Ellington Orchestra was headlining at Harlem's famous Cotton Club, which used black dancers and musicians but did not allow blacks in the club.

One of Ellington's rivals was Armstrong's new boss, Fletcher Henderson, whose middle-class background was similar to Ellington's. He was an odd duck in the history of jazz--made more poignant by his chemistry degree from Atlanta University. From song plugging in a New York music-publishing house, he drifted into arranging sessions for Black Swan, the first black-owned record label, gradually falling into the role of bandleader at Broadway's hopping Club Alabam. From 1924 to 1934, his orchestra was a regular headliner at the Roseland Ballroom.

Some greats passed through his band--among them Coleman Hawkins, the godfather of bebop, who played tenor sax in a brand-new way, and Don Redman, a sax player and arranger whose use of groups of horns as "sections" playing against one another was a breakthrough for the big-band style of the Thirties. Pre-eminent among them was that of Benny Goodman, who in 1933 bought a bunch of Henderson/Redman arrangements to start his own big band, which Henderson later joined as an arranger.

From 1924 to 1925, Armstrong played in Henderson's group--with legendary results. Critics note the pre- and post-Armstrong Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, which went from being a slightly stiff, conventional dance group to a new breed of jazz band.

During this short time in New York, Armstrong played on more than 40 recording sessions with the Henderson band; he also made some small-group records with the Clarence Williams Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies, the latter featuring Hardin on piano.

These sessions included clarinetist/soprano-sax player Sidney Bechet, four years older than Armstrong and already something of a legend in England and Europe after touring there with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919 and 1920. Bechet went back in 1925 for an extended stay, touring Europe and Russia, and spending 11 months in a Paris jail in 1929 for being involved in a "shooting incident." Bechet was, according to the authors of Louis, "perhaps the only jazzman in the mid-Twenties who could live with Louis in a no-holds-barred ensemble improvisation." They were forgetting about Earl Hines, but otherwise, it was true.

With Henderson, Armstrong was also doing recording sessions with such women blues singers as Ma Rainey, Chippie Hill and some of the many unrelated Smiths--Clara, Trixie and Bessie. The first popular blues record had been Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues (with Willie "The Lion" Smith on piano) in 1920. In six months, it sold 1,000,000 copies--double platinum for the time. In a country of fads, it set off a blues craze, and record companies scrambled to sign up blues singers--especially women.

The best were Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who had played on the same Southern minstrel circuit together, with Smith as the young protegee of Ma and Pa Rainey, who billed themselves as "the Assassinators of the Blues." Ma Rainey was no beauty--short, heavy, bucktoothed. And she was bisexual.

Bessie Smith came from a similar mold. Heavy but handsome, she was born in Tennessee around 1895, and after touring with Rainey for a year or so shortly after World War One--doing vaudeville comedy as well as singing--she went off on her own, recording her first hit (written by Alberta Hunter) in 1923, Downhearted Blues. It sold nearly 750,000 copies, and she was a star.

Soon she was wearing furs and touring with her band in its own Pullman cars--something black musicians who could afford it did at the time, as a way to avoid racist hassles at hotels and restaurants. Like Ma Rainey, Smith was bisexual and sometimes made the managerial mistake of sleeping with the girls in the show. She also drank too much and could get as mean as a snake after a bottle or two.

Some of her songs are warmly sexual. Lyricist Andy Razaff and Clarence Williams, her regularaccompanist, wrote some for her that were well beyond suggestive, including I'm Wild About Tthat Thing and You've Got to Give Me Some--which goes:

Said Miss Jones to old butcher Pete,

I want a piece of your good old meat...

I crave your round steak, you gotta give me some.

Armstrong left New York after a year. Hardin had tired of their separation and gave him an it's-me-or-them ultimatum. He was also tired of the Henderson band's lack of discipline--guys showing up drunk or not showing at all--the leader's lackadaisical attitude spilling over into the music.

So, in 1925, Armstrong returned to Chicago, to more work than most people could handle. He started out with Lil's Dreamland Syncopators, soon doubling at the Vendome Theater as part of Erskine Tate's Symphony Orchestra, 15 pieces with strings providing a live sound track for silent movies and accompaniment for the vaudeville acts between features. Armstrong became one of the solo acts, jumping on stage from the orchestra pit, cornet in hand, his lifelong trademark handkerchief in the other and doing Heebie Jeebies, his first hit, which had sold 45,000 copies in three months after its release in March 1926. Its scat singing--another first on a popular record--was supposedly inspired by Armstrong's dropping the lyrics during the recording session and faking it the rest of the way. Grace under pressure.

Soon, he left Lil's band. Their marriage was skidding around by then--with frequent blowups in which they repeatedly split up the bank account and he moved out--and Armstrong was showing an interest in Alpha Smith, a cutie who also worked at the Vendome.

Armstrong could be found, too, at Lincoln Gardens or the Sunset Cafe, where he joined the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra, playing for the after-hours sporting crowd till nearly dawn. The Dickerson Orchestra's mascot was a pink ceramic pig that was placed at the feet of any band member who hit a wrong note--or, in Beiderbecke's coinage, a clam.

The piano player at the Sunset was Earl "Fatha" Hines--the Louis Armstrong of jazz piano. His playing was more modern, unpredictable--more trumpetlike--than that of anyone before him. As Armstrong had liberated the horn, Hines freed the piano. Gunther Schuller says in Early Jazz, "In its rhythmic counterpoint, Hines's style attained a complexity of the two hands that had probably never been heard in jazz before." Hines's association with Armstrong produced classic results.

Born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, in 1903, Hines started out on cornet as a kid--his father played one in Pittsburgh's Eureka Jazz Band--but blowing it made Earl's head hurt, so he switched to piano when he was nine. He dropped out of high school to tour with the otherwise forgotten Arthur Rideout's Orchestra at the urging of Lois Deppe, an otherwise forgotten male crooner with the band. Hines was 18 when he joined Deppe in Chicago--and just 21 when he became part of Carroll Dickerson's Orchestra with Louis Armstrong, who was only two years older.

Their collaborations in 1927 and 1928 under various Louis Armstrong imprints--the Hot Seven, the Hot Five and the Savoy Ballroom Five--blew people away. These easygoing, no-sweat sessions, pretty much tossed off in afternoons before work, produced one jazz classic after another: West End Blues, Muggles, Basin Street Blues, Tight Like This and Weather Bird.

Schuller wrote of their 1928 collaboration on Weather Bird:

Both musicians here anticipate for a moment the future of jazz; they are unencumbered by theincessant "chomping" of a rhythm section and project strong linear shapes that propel the music forward--airy, jagged lines and rhythms that even then pointed toward the bop lines of the Forties. Here the two masters are years ahead of all other jazz musicians.

If they were the future, the Jazz Age was almost history. The wild, twisting road race of the Twenties was zooming toward its end. The October 1929 stockmarket crash put out the first of the party lights, and the gathering Depression soon shut down many of the rest. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 put the speak-easies and the Mobsters out of business--or at least sent them in search of new scams.

The flappers' hot times were giving way to Dagwood's home fires burning. In fact, Dagwood and Blondie are symptomatic: When the comic strip began, Blondie was a fast-times flapper and Dagwood her would-be beau. By the early Thirties, they were at home with the kids, Dagwood making midnight sandwiches and sleeping on the couch.

With less money to throw around, fewer people were going out to clubs--or buying records. The market for jazz records crashed along with Wall Street, and there was a new competitor: radio. As more and more commercial stations came on the air during the late Twenties--the first had been Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1920--they filled their weekend evening slots with live bands. Most were just dance bands, but you could also hear Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, so you could get your jazz at home, for free.

Many bands broke up, with former headliner Sidney Bechet working as a tailor in Harlem by the mid-Thirties, and other black players, such as Coleman Hawkins, bailing out for Europe, wherethey could still get work--especially in Paris--and suffer less discrimination as well.

The music was changing along with the times. The raucous, small-group Chicago style was giving way to the big bands, whose sound was not only bigger but sleeker, more streamlined, more corporate than the Hot Five's and Seven's had been--Duesenbergs compared with the rattletraps of the Twenties--safer and more refined.

Something was lost for what was gained. Twenties jazz had an adolescent joyousness--like being 19 years old and living away from your parents for the first time. Just like the classic TV shows of the early Fifties, which are celebrated for their fresh, ingenuous unself-consciousness, jazz in the Twenties hadn't yet looked in the mirror too often.

Beiderbecke's death in 1931 was a tombstone for the era, his obituary that of the time--a bop-till-you-drop kind of guy, gone too soon. He played out his last few years with the famous and well-staffed but basically corny Paul Whiteman Orchestra, where he was something like the house hippie of the Sixties--proof that the Whiteman Orchestra was truly a jazz band, which it mainly wasn't. But Whiteman had the best known and best paying outfit of the time, and the band always traveled first class. Beiderbecke was attracted to that; it provided a certain legitimacy he'd been seeking despite all his rebellion. Also, Whiteman was paternal. As Beiderbecke began failing, too weak to play, Whiteman kept him on salary for nearly a year. Beiderbecke died of pneumonia after going by train from New York to Princeton to play a gig with some old friends.

But there remains an image of him in happier times, a snapshot of the Jazz Age itself, from a story told by Mezz Mezzrow in his autobiography.

It was August 1926. Mezz was still in Chicago and had just gotten a copy of Armstrong's latest record, Heebie Jeebies. That night, he got together with some of the Austin High Gang--Bud Freeman, Dave Tough and Frank Teschmacher--and they played Heebie Jeebies over and over. At two in the morning, Teschmacher was inspired: "This is something Bix should hear right away! Let's go out to Hudson Lake and give him the thrill of his life!" Hudson Lake was a small resort town 50 miles east of Chicago in Indiana. Beiderbecke was playing an extended gig there. The musicians piled into Mezz's "green monster" and took off into the night, singing snatches of Heebie Jeebies as they tore along dark, leafy Route 12.

Beiderbecke and a few fellow band members--including Pee Wee Russell and Frankie Trumbauer--had rented a fairly disreputable cottage near the dance hall where they played every night. Their good nutritional intentions, in the form of two fresh bottles of milk delivered daily to the back porch, often went forgotten--sometimes 30 or 40 bottles accumulated. Beiderbecke was known for sleeping in his clothes, cradling his cornet like a Teddy bear. A fixture in the bedroom he shared with Russell was a jug of corn whiskey between the beds. The cottage had two essentials--a record player and a piano. Sort of a low-rent fraternity house.

"That morning," Mezz remembered, "as soon as we grabbed those cats out of their pads and played Heebie Jeebies for them, they all fractured their wigs. 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' Bix kept chuckling as the record played, and his long bony arms beat out at the breaks, flailing through the air like the blades of a threshing machine.... Soon as it was over, he grabbed it from the machine and tore out of the house, to wake up everybody he knew around Hudson Lake and make them listen to it."

Mezz said of this and other times at Beiderbecke's broke-down palace:

Time flew by like in a dream and we hardly knew the world existed outside of that greasy shack. Maybe we just weren't the outdoor type.... Bix sat at that beat-up piano for hours, sometimes making our kind of music and sometimes drifting off into queer harmony patterns that the rest of us couldn't dig. The rest of the world melted away; we were the last men left on earth, skidding on a giant billiard ball across a green-felt vacuum with no side pockets, while Bix crouched over his keyboard in a trance, barleycorned and brooding, tickling bizarre music out of the ivories.... We had some wonderful, out-of-the-world times with Bix at Hudson Lake, whole days and nights when the clock stopped and we blew our tops playing music and clowning. They were some of the best times I ever had.

"The joint stank of body musk, bootleg booze, excited people, platform sweat. I had never heard the tune before, but, full of smoke, I couldn't miss a note of it." --Hoagy Carmichael

"Said miss jones to old butcher pete, I want a piece of your good old meat. You gotta give me some oh, give me some. I crave your round steak, you gotta give me some."--Bessie Smith

"Armstrong liked her right away, noticing her rolled-down garters as she pumped those piano pedals."