Music: Two-Beat at Tiffany’s

Los Angeles jazz fans, eager for more of the blast and blare of Memphis Blues and Black and Blue, peered through the haze of a nightclub called Tiffany’s one night last week at a sight seldom seen in such society. Fat old Clarinetist Darnell Howard had laid down his licorice stick, was making his way to the stand with a big white cake decked with three blue candles. He set the cake down, beckoned to a little cornetist with a droopy leprechaun face, bade him stand up and take a big bow. Francis (“Muggsy”) Spanier, whom some Dixieland experts consider the best white jazz cornetist in the business,* grinned sheepishly. It had been just 30 years since Muggsy Spanier first split the smoky air of a dive in his native Chicago with a broad burst of brass.

With his fans† giving him a special anniversary hand, Muggsy and his new Dixieland band were celebrating the best way they knew how: rocking off chorus after chorus of High Society and Jazz Me Blues, right from the heart. Like many another veteran of the Chicago Dixieland era of jazz, Muggsy was riding the crest of a new wave of the old jazz.

Sweetening. Muggsy well remembers the old wave. He had learned his broad, lazy, middle-register style as a scrawny kid, sitting on the curb outside Chicago’s Pekin Cafe, listening chin-in-hand to the stream of notes pouring from the golden horns of Joe (“King”) Oliver and Louis (“Satchmo”) Armstrong. He got his first job at 14, blew his head off from 8:30 at night to 4:30 in the morning for $25 a week.

In the heyday of Dixieland and Prohibition, Chicago Gangster Dion O’Banion, the sparetime florist, used to stuff dollar bills in the bell of Muggsy’s horn while he was playing. (“The more he stuffed, the sweeter the music got.”) Like many another jazzbo, Muggsy drifted out of jazz into the bigger money. There were eight years with Ted Lewis’ band—until “I just got tired of playing When My Baby Smiles at Me.” As with many another jazzbo, there were spectacular years with John Barleycorn, until Muggsy wound up “dying” of a perforated ulcer in New Orleans’ Touro Infirmary. Saved by an emergency operation and convalescing, he composed his jazz classic, Relaxin’ at the Touro. He also learned that “you can’t play and drink. You can’t drink and sell pencils, as a matter of fact—they fall out of your hand, don’t they?”

Filling. Since those days, except for one brief (1939-40) episode when he had his own Ragtime Band and made some famous collector’s items for the Bluebird label, Muggsy has been passing most of his working time as an unspectacular, if solid, fixture in Chicago and Manhattan jazz joints. Now, at 44, and playing as well as ever, he had suddenly become one of the rages of the West Coast. With his new handpicked, six-piece combo, Muggsy filled San Francisco’s Hangover Club last month, is doing equally well at Tiffany’s.

Says Muggsy, who is inclined to believe that Dixieland’s future stretches ahead as far as the nation’s: “We just play the way we feel. We’re playing American music and Americans like it.”

* And, after Louis Armstrong, second best alive.

† One new fan: British Ballerina Moira (Red Shoes) Shearer, who after listening to a frantic chorus, asked Muggsy: “Tell me, do you find ballet dull?”