an opinion. It is a music that cries out for expression. Most of all, it is a music about freedom. Freedom
of expression, of spirit, and of a lifestyle of the people who play jazz because they love it. One time
somebody asked me why, why do I play out in the park on Sunday afternoon and this and that. I just said
for the joy of swinging.
The legacy of today's jazz goes back to the turn of the century when a new music swept the Midwest.
That music was born of traveling musicians and black banjoists who worked, listened, and played while
spreading its rhythmic vitality in the streets, parks, and at world fairs. That music was ragtime. Well,
Indianapolis was no different than any other ragtime center. They took basically a march, which they
had learned from Susan from the bands in the park, and they played it off the beat.
If you hear the beat in the left hand, the oompa of the tuba going like this. They simply added some
cornets and trumpets in the right hand and played slightly off that oompa sound and it came like this.
Now that is Joplin, but it was the basic device in ragtime. It was called syncopation.
And it existed all over the country. It was followed here in Indianapolis. It was practiced by the Striden
piano players in New York and the pianists out in Kansas City. Indianapolis's great virtue, I think,
was that they had a lot of publishing here. They were able to write down their music. They were able
to get it out and get it played across the country. Indianapolis was the center of the bouncy rhythms,
but other cities like Fort Wayne, Hammond, Lafayette, Marion, and Decatur also reveled in this new exuberance.
Ironically, at a time when blacks were relegated into teaching, preaching, and performing, their music
with its Afro-American tradition emerged into American society. Recordings in the 1920s, and of course
remember that the industry was very young then, the records that were considered real jazz records or
records that came out of the kind of jazz background, blues, what have you, were not considered genteel enough
for white people to listen to. One example of a recording by a black artist was done by Jesse Crump
at the Jeanette Studios in Richmond. Jesse Crump played at the Golden West Saloon up on Indiana Avenue.
Now, he and Herb Duerson and some others are sort of like bridge figures between ragtime and the great
blues era of the 30s when you had some tremendous blues players there right on Indiana Avenue. So they
play something that's sort of in between.
In New York, we probably would have called it stride piano. But out here, it's still ragtime. Mr. Crump's
rag is very fast, very pyrotechnical, lovely piece. And that was a bridge figure between ragtime and
the blues. Another composer was May Afterheide, who studied classical piano and published 19 songs in
her career.
Julie Niebergahl composed three swinging rags, but she chose performing over composing and played piano
at movie theaters like the Colonial. Another Indiana notable was J. Russell Smith. He played at the
Severn Hotel with his band that included Reginald Duvall and Noble Sissel. Sissel formed a lifelong
association with UB Blake, and Smith went on to New York to work with W.C. Handy and James P. Johnson.
Indiana's most famous son, Hoagy Carmichael, was inspired by Duvall. Instead of him, he was high-brown,
long-fingered, played a lot of piano, and helped me gain my first conception of harmony and jazz. Hoagy
promoted tours for the famous Wolverines that featured Bix Beiderbecke. This is Hoagy Carmichael's band
from IU, and it made a record in Richmond, Indiana in 1928. I'll play a little bit of it, but you can
see how the college influence came on.
That's kind of an arrangement in the head. They call those head arrangements. So everybody knew his
part, but they played the same way every time, pretty much. Jeanette Records in Richmond acted as a
magnet for all eager orchestras. The first group to record jazz was a white group called the original
Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917. But it had nothing to do, I think, with the fact nothing to do
with it being predominantly a white phenomenon. The thing is that the major exposure for jazz in the
early years was for young white players. The original Dixieland Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings
and groups like that. But certainly King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong were all very,
very big in the so-called race record market. So that
while the major exposure might have gone to the young white players. Basically the music, its genesis
was within the black community. Ballrooms, dance halls, and river boats constantly vibrated to the rhythms
of the Charleston, the jitterbug, and the foxtrot. Yet it was a time when the temperance movement was
pushing for prohibition. It was also a time when young men and women pulsated to the pleasures of jazz.
jazzy rhythms were also heard on college campuses. I have a theory and I guess it's borne out by some
facts I discovered when I was doing a book on jazz. I made it on Indiana jazz in particular and I followed
very closely the story of the college bands and I thought that the college musicians were probably
responsible for a great deal of the carrying on the tradition as you say because they were able to be
together and owe
long periods of time over a whole year at least before somebody graduated and they were replaced. And
the net effect was that they were able to play a lot together, experiment. They didn't always have to
please a public or please dancers, although they did play for dances. But they could practice on their
own and develop new things. And as big bands or other bands came to campuses to play dances, they would
go and sit in with these other musicians and they would trade
what they used to call borass sessions in college. Everybody who I've talked to remembers the borass
sessions. And what it amounts to is what we call a rap session today, a musical rap session. So there
was a trade between the college men and the professional union musicians who were coming in and playing.
So they were influencing each other all the way.
Other groups in the swing era included the Parisian Redheads, who relied on henna and wigs to keep their
namesake accurate. Other all-girl bands toured around the Midwest, too, but the Redheads played ballrooms
like Chicago's Aragon and Trinon. Most every group, though, fell victim to the grinding road tour with
changing club dates, low fees, and broken down vehicles. But they also enjoyed great musical pleasure.
From the 30s to the 40s, Indiana bands flourished in the musical styles of Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman,
and Fletcher Henderson. While others kept their bands segregated, one man thought an interracial band
would work. During that era around, just before prior to World War II,
I made up in my mind that I was going to have an interracial band, because during the war, most of the
musicians were being drafted into service. And it was the shortage of musicians. And then I also figured
this, that why not? Because I was the type of fellow, regardless of your color, creed, or race, I was
at the top.
And several of the fellows told me, said, it won't work. I said, why not? And they said, it still won't
work because Indianapolis has never supported an interracial group. I said, well, I think it's going
to work. And it did. Brothers experienced the grueling hardships of a musician's life. Well, to be perfectly
frank, when it wasn't organized, nowhere near organized.
like it is today, see. It was just a struggle. Catch-is-catch-hand type of bases, see. It was really
a struggle, really a hassle. And we just didn't have the opportunity. And a lot of times we had jobs,
had a chance to get a job out of town, didn't have any money. How we gonna get there? You know, getting
there was a problem. We could get back because we'd get paid, but then getting there, I mean, we had a,
It was a hassle back in the 30s. It was really a hassle. The end of World War II brought about many
changes in American life. Music was one change, and jazz was about to surface in a new and exciting
form. With the advent of the Second World War,
It was no longer feasible for big bands to travel as much as they would have at another time simply
because of the war effort which meant limited gas supplies. It meant that there were that you had also
a basic problem with manpower because the young people who were a certain age were of course
being conscripted and going into the service. You also had the fact that the recording industry was
seriously curtailed simply because the same
same raw materials that made records were the things that you used to make war products also. Couple
that with the fact that then there was a 20% tax levied on all entertainment that went into clubs or
went into theaters if there was dancing or singing as a part of the thing. In other words, you know,
entertainment in the largest sense. So what many club owners did was
go then to strictly small group performances with no dancing or what have you as a way to circumvent
that particular problem. All of these things ultimately led to the demise of the big band. Yeah and
bebop of course separated everything. That's where the public got separated and everything from jazz
because the bebop was more mental and not as just human sounding as some of the music in the 40s. When
the bebop came along it was more abstract kind of music.
took more imagination to listen to it, so there was a kind of a separation in the public. When I came
out on in 46, bop was a thing. So nobody had heard Bird. I had some
beautiful musicians in the Army, they never had heard of Charlie Parker. And I was trying to tell them
how they can't play it and they just couldn't believe it, you know. So after the war was over and everything,
they got to hear him, you know. In the case of bebop, jazz musicians were by and large disenchanted
with the large ensembles that afforded them very little opportunity to actually improvise.
Also, they were playing primarily for dancing, which meant a certain length solo, what have you. And
a lot of this was taken somehow or another offset by the jam sessions at the time. But it was just something
in the air. New ideas about rhythm, new ideas about how melodies work. Some jazz musicians found their
old values threatened with the advent of bebop.
others were eager to explore this new language. It's a language which I find to be a very romantic language.
Bebop also has like certain kinds of sociological implications in that it was the music, it was the
period in which jazz musicians began to first perceive of themselves as artists rather than entertainers.
I'm not sure it was to the same degree of the same degree of
art-for-art sake that was to happen in the 1960s with groups like the New Jazz People, the Avant Garde,
but certainly a time when jazz musicians were very aware of their stature and who they were and the
importance of the music. I started playing with Jimmy and Cole in 1948. I believe it was. We were going
to Butler University, playing a science, a nightclub,
On Meridian Street. I can't remember what the block was. 1110. 1110 Meridian. And we had a small group
and then from there we went to Cincinnati for a short stay at the cotton club. I had to come home about
five or six months
We've been playing together for a long time. In the 40s, there were any number of large bands, I think
immediately, people like Jimmy Coe and Eldridge Morrison. And of course, J.J. had come through these
same bands when he left Christmas Alex in 1942 to go to New York. But in the late 1940s, there was a
proliferation of both jazz clubs and young players coming. I mean, you know, coming on the scene.
For instance, on Indiana Avenue, from roughly down around City Hospital, which it was called at that
time, down to the corner of Indiana and Ohio Street, there were countless clubs, I think, of places
like the Red Keg, the Onrays, the Sunset Terrace, the Cotton Club, and it went on and on, where jazz
was gaining a foothold, where you had
sessions that went on virtually nightly, where most of the things we have come to see as the Renaissance,
you know, as basically the bebop era. You know, these were happening in Indianapolis, just like they
were happening all over the country. During the 50s, we were playing big band music with the trumpet,
alto, tenor, baritone, sax, and three rhythm, because we had some very good players, including Pookie,
Joe Mitchell, Bill Boyd on baritone,
We had a great drummer, Earl Fox Walker. We had a piano player who is now a noted organ player, Jack
McDuff was in the band. The way Jack got in the band, Earl Grandy was supposed to go to Cincinnati with
us, and at the last minute, he couldn't go, so we took Jack McDuff as a substitute. But like I say,
we played big band music with a small group. And that was our bag. It made good solos. Solos would have
leaned toward the bop thing, because that was what was going on then.
The state of Indiana is still one of the foremost states in producing top-flight jazz musicians.
You know, where else are you going to find a Freddie Hubbard and a Virgil Jones, you know, coming out
of the same town? Or go back further than that to a Roger Jones, who was like one of the really great
trumpet players, or still is. And then you look up and then there's a Wes Montgomery, you know. And
that doesn't even talk about the fact that Jennings, Bill Jennings, who was the great left-handed guitarist, was also
working in and around Indiana and Floyd Smith. Now that's three of the seminal guitar players in one
city. Look at the fact that in 1962 when J.J. was acclaimed the number one trombonist in the country
in the critics' poll, two of his disciples, Sly Hampton and myself, were the new stars. You know, that's
another set where you got three people from the same city, you know. So we're in good shape, man. And
I think that, of course, the universities
in the area have done much to help perpetuate the myth of Indiana jazz. Learning jazz wasn't easy, and
the approaches to learning jazz were as varied as the player's personalities and circumstances. I first
got into jazz when I was a trumpet player.
which was my first instrument I played. I listened a lot to Miles Davis, people like that. Later I became
interested in the bass, and there was a player here for the music school who was actually a classical
major, but he's a great jazz player named John Clayton, who later played with Count Basie, Monte Alexander,
and others. And he really set me right as to certain fundamentals of playing good jazz, and I'm very
much indebted
to him more than anyone. Not to be redundant, but there's a piano player in Indianapolis named Claude
Sifferlin that I feel like I've learned more from since then, since John, than anyone else. 43rd Street,
the village, cats on the corner, you know, that's the school, the school was.
get out there and see it and hear it with your own eyes and ears. That's what scared me. I wasn't influenced
by a music school at all. I don't think there's any best way to learn jazz. I think there are a lot
of different ways. It turns out that one of the most expedient manners of which one might learn jazz
is via an institution. Simply because now things have been codified. There are ample books. There are
plenty of records. There are people who have the know-how to communicate
in a very short period of time, a year, perhaps, what it takes people in the street, 10, 15, 20 years
to learn. I can teach in a year what it took me 20 years to learn. Maybe that's why my books are so
expensive. But it doesn't really matter. The main thing is that that's one way. There are other people
who learn strictly in the streets. Also they had the, which I think a lot of us have forgotten, they
started the National Stage Band Camp here in Bloomington at Indiana University. Ken Morris had one that's
been about 22 years ago.
where students could come young and old and learn to play in the big band. And then for a week,
you know, and then a couple years later, Stan Kenton kind of got hooked up with that. I don't know if
you remember that or not, but there was a lot of people like Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett and so forth
who attended those camps. And they all started right here in Broomington. It was very early, the first
ones, the band camps, jazz camp. Then I started teaching in about the, gee, 60s, I guess. And then from
there, I realized there was a need for kids to practice at home.
which records and things like John and I practice with now, so we started putting out the play along
records. That was the beginning of that. That was the reason for it. If I hadn't been involved in those
summer camps, I don't think I would ever be doing what I'm doing now. It seems as time goes on, things,
the business scene and the commercial scene becomes more and more, has a greater hold on the music scene.
There's so many,
A lot of people that were my idols at one time have pretty well gone commercial, and it's a bit difficult
to understand. I mean, obviously, they're going for better money. There's very little money to be made
in jazz in performing. A few make a lot, and the rest make very little, I would think, if you could
agree on that.
To me, jazz has always been a rebellious music and a very intelligent one, if I might say. And I'm a
little disappointed that it is being commercialized today because to me that was a very philosophical
issue that jazz was trying to make. We're so conditioned by Top 40 Radio that most people just aren't
exposed to jazz enough. They're not exposed to a lot of good things in the arts enough.
because if you listen to Top 40, it's music to be thrown away. It's disposable music. It's like,
you know, recyclable aluminum cans. You know, Top 40 rock, that's what it is. You're supposed to listen
to it once or twice for about three weeks and listen to it a lot for three weeks and then never hear
it again. Whereas this music, I mean, I'm playing right now, Billie Holiday, 1956. This record is 26
years old, almost to the day. It was recorded two days before today in 56.
And you're going to be listening to this record in 100 years if we're still around there are record
players. We're in a period which I think is one of synthesis. I think every 10 years or so you get a
period where it's, you know, the upheaval, the turmoil, the catalysts of the new generation. And then
we go through a period where it's like kind of an assessment, a kind of a synthesis. And I'm not sure
where we are now, but we're in a period of coexistence where
There's a kind of symbiosis between all of the kinds of jazz music. There are the revivalists like Warren
Bache and even musicians around Indianapolis who are still committed to earlier styles. Then you've
got the stronghold of the bebop players, which is essentially what Indianapolis is by and large. But
then you've got like at the same time free jazz, you've got fusion music, you've got punk rock, you've
got it all.
The original material written by our guitar player, our keyboard player, it's kind of a cross between
funk and contemporary jazz, traditional jazz, blues, you know, just whatever what we feel, you know,
is basically what it boils down to. Most of us have a second job. I don't think we rely on our music
as our primary income, and I think we all have that in common.
second job situation. I think Bloomington doesn't have that demand for jazz where you rely on it as
a permanent source of employment.
It's not possible to really make a living playing jazz in Indiana, and it's not really possible in most
places in the world. New York City might be one of the exceptions, but even there it's difficult. So
essentially, if you want to be a full-time musician, you have to do other things and branch out into
other areas, such as playing in Indianapolis, for example, the Starlight Musicals, or playing in the
studios, or playing in a variety of rock bands and anything that comes along. But it is more and more
possible to play
jazz purie for the art of it and the enjoyment of that art form. The other problems are merely communication.
Many of the gigs that we've been doing down here are not people who are all from Bloomington, so we
have communications hassles and also transportation hassles. If somebody is coming up from Cincinnati or
from Fort Wayne or sometimes like I say, you know, people coming in from out of town or whatnot. It's
a little difficult and financially it's difficult for this kind of gig to pay enough money to even cover
those traveling expenses. The beautiful thing about jazz is that the full life expectancy or the full
life length of jazz has been because of the quality of the music and because of what the music is.
without support of anybody. In the recent years, it has started to be subsidized and somewhat supported
by the government of this country. But it lives on its own quality and its own strength. Jazz is a city
type of music, but I really enjoy the environment out here in the country.
breathing fresh air. It has a lot to do with improvisation and how improvisation you encounter things
that you don't know about what's going to happen. And you just plod your way right through. And life
and jazz have a lot of similarities like that. But also, this type of life is just a whole lot more
enjoyable to me than the rat race of a city.
And playing jazz is something I enjoy quite a bit also.