Jazz: The Grand Old Man

Cutty and Zutty were there. So were Peanuts, Woody, Yank, Wingy, Red, Pee Wee and Willie the Lion.* Sammy Davis Jr. was supposed to come, but he pleaded “fatigue” at the last minute and didn’t show. Just as well: he would have seemed out of place at this reunion of jazz’s elder statesmen, come to celebrate one of their own.

They called it “A Salute to Eddie Condon,” the famed, feisty guitarist who has reigned for some 25 years as public defender of “old style” Dixieland. Staged at midnight in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, the event had all the makings for a Great Moment in jazz history. Bob Crosby and Johnny Mercer came in from the West Coast. Woody Herman and his 16-piece band were bussed uptown between shows at a Times Square jazz emporium. All told, 43 musicians gathered to pay homage, many of them the founding fathers of “hot jazz,” ragtime’s carefree child born in the backrooms and basements of Chicago in the mid-1920s.

Out of the Cellar. Trumpeter Wingy Manone got the audience of 1,800 tapping their feet with a blistering Tailgate Ramble. Trumpeter Billy Butterfield chimed in with a sweet and solid delivery of Singing the Blues. Crosby led ten enlistees through a lively, give-and-go session of Royal Garden Blues. But betwixt and between, le jazz hot tended to run lukewarm, and when it was over at 3:20 a.m., the Great Moment had never quite happened. M.C.s Crosby and Mercer did their best to keep the music flowing as freely as the whisky backstage, but the profusion of talent was largely wasted in the confusion of an erratic format.

Condon was the first to insist that Dixieland jazz was worthy of being lifted out of the dingy cellars and onto the concert stage. He helped inspire the whole cult of jazz critics, who could spin out columns on the flittering trumpet solos of Bobby Hackett. To prove his point, in 1942 Condon promoted a highly successful series of jazz “concerts” at Manhattan’s Town Hall. During cool jazz’s dominance, Condon doggedly ran his own club in Greenwich Village. He organized the bands, promoted Dixieland indefatigably, arranged for the recording sessions.

“Up and Leapin’.” At Carnegie Hall, Condon appeared to lead his crusty cronies through some “up and leapin’ music.” “Eddie’s the guy who got us the jobs when we needed them,” says Bass Player Bobby Haggart. The Carnegie Hall “salute” was, in fact, a benefit for Condon, 58, who will use the proceeds ($2,700) to help pay his hospital bills for a recent operation. “The youngest guy at Carnegie’s Hole,” says Condon, “was the doorman. There are not many young guys around who are interested in playing the old unconfined jazz. Music has survived some strange invasions but we’ve done an awfully good job of being relevant for quite a few years. We’ve raised some hell in our time.” As an elder statesman, Condon is probably too gloomy. Fact is that Dixieland music is experiencing something of a renaissance. At debutante balls and bar mitzvahs, on campuses and at country-club dances, Dixieland bands are discoursing anew on an old theme that Eddie Condon kept alive.

* Trombonist Robert (“Cutty”) Cutshall; Trumpeters John (“Yank”) Lawson, Henry (“Red”) Allen, Joseph (“Wingy”) Manone; Drummer Arthur (“Zutty”) Singleton; Clarinetists Charles (“Pee Wee”) Russell, Michael (“Peanuts”) Hucko; Bandleader Wood-row (“Woody”) Herman; Pianist Willie (“The Lion”) Smith.