Music: Fresh Air on 52nd Street

Never had Manhattan’s tawdry 52nd Street, “Swing Alley,” been so loud with such brassy bad taste. Eager visitors to the former Main Line of American jazz stood uncertainly before the cellar joints housed in lugubrious brownstones, read the screaming poster promises of the “terrific” stuff inside, but usually hurried on when they heard the noise coming out the door. There were a few familiar names—”Hot Lips” Page, Maxine Sullivan, Georg Brunis—but few fresh performances. The street was full of has-beens and never-wases. It took a tin-eared hepcat to stand it. But last week, after many a season, music was back on 52nd Street.

In a flashily upholstered saloon called Dixon’s, a new outfit was packing in the big names of the nation’s popular-music industry. It was called the Joe Mooney Quartet, and consisted of a clarinet, guitar, bass and (of all things) an accordion.

Two months before, an eager young jazz enthusiast named Michael Levin, editor of Down Beat, had dropped in at Sandy’s, a bar-&-grill joint in Paterson, N.J. He found the barflies listening to the Mooney group in reverent silence, saw Proprietor Sandy shoo out paying customers who dared talk above the music. Levin listened for six hours, went completely overboard, and started a one-man Mooney campaign. He coaxed musicians, bandleaders and managers into making the trip to Paterson to hear “the most exciting musical unit in the U.S. today,” devoted nine columns to Mooney in Down Beat, started his fellow editors worrying that their trade paper had gone goofy about an accordion quartet. Last week they had stopped worrying.

Jazz without Labels. For short, smiling Joe Mooney, 35, it was a sweet triumph. He had played piano in a dozen forgotten bands, arranged music for Fats Waller, Jane Froman, Jack Teagarden, Paul Whiteman. In 1935, he bet someone that an accordion could be made to swing, learned to play the thing and became accordionist in Whiteman’s band. Then in 1943 an auto accident put him in a cast for 18 months, left him with a permanent limp. Last March he rounded up Clarinetist Andy Fitzgerald, Guitarist Jack Hotop and Bass Player Gate Frega, sold them on his basic idea: “Erase the labels from music. Stop thinking about ‘jive,’ ‘swing,’ ‘sweet’ and ‘jump.’ Just play music.”

At Dixon’s the Mooney four last week came up with more fresh musical ideas in an evening than most full-size bands get in a season. Bandsmen like Duke Ellington and players from other orchestras dropped in after hours to listen. Not since the wonderful first days of the Benny Goodman quartet had they heard the unit discipline that keeps all four men inside the same melodic scheme, yet leaves each musician free to create a succession of original and often exciting figures.

It is Mooney himself who makes the quartet spark. He does the arrangements they start from, writes many of the tunes, provides every cue during the improvisational passages, and sings the vocals in the soft style of Nat (King) Cole. Sometimes he switches from accordion to piano, astonishes fellow musicians by playing contrasting figures with right and left hand simultaneously. The other three members of the quartet watch Mooney closely, and with evident admiration. (He cannot watch them: he is blind.) Their cue from Mooney is often merely a smile or change of facial expression.

By week’s end the quartet was as hot commercially as its own playing of Wild

Dog. Its contract carried a minimum guarantee of $1,750 a week; every important recording company in the country had put in a bid. “Pops” Whiteman had signed them for a 13-week spot on the ABC network beginning this week, intends to announce each program himself. Says he: “For four or five years we’ve had nothing but screaming. It’s almost unexplainable the way a crowd will quiet down and listen to Joe and his boys. I’ll bet they’d listen for an hour without making a noise if they didn’t have to let their breath out now and then. They’re the greatest musical group I’ve heard in the last ten years.”