Music: Horn of Plenty

In an ABC studio on the third floor of Manhattan’s RCA Building, the Candid Microphone show had just gone off the air. The boys in the studio orchestra slowly began to pack up their instruments before heading for home or a Sixth Avenue bar. One man, a short, slender trumpeter with a tiny mustache, was in a hurry. Robert Leo Hackett stowed away his shining horn, flung out a hurried good night and left. Twenty minutes later he slipped into Nick’s famed Greenwich Village jazz-and-gin mill, and stepped to the leader’s place on the stand where five other musicians were waiting.

For six weeks, Bobby Hackett had been doing his own double-in-brass. He went through his routine studio chores with easy, sweet-playing confidence. Then he went to work downtown, playing the most melodic hot trumpet in the land. So far the pace was telling on neither the man nor his music.

Winter Week. In the middle of the hot weather slump, when 52nd Street nightclub owners looked glumly at rows of empty tables and cried the blues, Nick’s joint on West Tenth Street was having what the surprised musicians themselves called a “winter week.” The iron-man stunt was giving Bobby (who, like all hot jazzmen, is an authority on hard times) some memorable paydays. ABC pays him $165 a week for a 40-hour week for 20 hours of actual playing. Grace Rongetti, Nick’s widow, pays better than that, complaining only when Bobby gets tied up at the studio and has to send a substitute down.

Eleven years ago, Hackett, then a young (22) guitarist in Joe Marsala’s band, dropped in at Nick’s old beer-and-sawdust joint, played some self-taught cornet and was hired on the spot to lead the band in a bigger place that Nick was starting. On opening night, the thin, bashful kid from Providence found himself giving the downbeat to such hot-jazz bigwigs as Trombonist Georg Brunis, Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, Guitarist Eddie Condon and powerhouse Negro Drummer Zutty Singleton. In the cult-ridden, vociferous world of hot jazz, Hackett became an overnight sensation. Erudite Manhattan jazzophiles went learnedly ga-ga over Hackett’s musical kinship to the late great Bix Beiderbecke. Author Dorothy (Young Man With a Horn) Baker came night after night to listen and finally, to Hackett’s considerable embarrassment, to write a moony, swoony tribute to his “dignity” in Vogue.

Sad Sweetness. Actually, Hackett’s playing didn’t show the great Beiderbecke’s hallmarks—the exciting, edgy undertones of heat, or the restless, spontaneous search within a severely disciplined pattern. But it did show, then and last week, a beautifully clear melodic line, tasteful invention and a sad sweetness that tempered everything he played from Embraceable You to Jada.

Like most good “hot” men, Hackett has left the congenial jazz beat to get some of the big money paid by name bands (he played with Horace Heidf, Glenn Miller and Glen Gray). Like the rest he soon found that the music considered dreamy by dancers is strictly dreary to the men who have to play it night after night. But hot jazz, Hackett says, has been standing still for too long, clinging to the old tunes and the old phrasings (bebop he considers a passing fancy) : “It’s not easy, jazz. Nothing very important has happened since Louis Armstrong. He played everything, and better than anybody.”

Hackett has a working musician’s scorn for the jazz sob sisters who say that the true jazzmen would rather play “pure” music in a trap. Sure, he says, jazz musicians have a sentimental feeling for the “stuff.” But he is convinced that any of them who can read music (a lot can’t) would quit jazz tomorrow for the security of a radio studio job. Says Hackett: “Look, a good job, clean work, regular, no traveling. I’d be satisfied to stay there 20 years. Nick’s is a place you can go when things get tough, but between jazz and the studio, I’ll take the studio.”