Music: Jam Session

Jazz—the real McCoy—has been defined as “collective improvisation.” The Pentecostal gift of tongues is most likely to descend on jazz musicians when they are not hampered by printed notes. Improvisatory rituals, or jam sessions, are seldom open to the public. They take place in recording studios, or in musicians’ homes. In Chicago, where U. S. jazz flowered in its second* great period, there used to be great jamsessions in hotspots after closing time. Then Union Boss Jimmy Petrillo, unableto see why a musician should play overtime for nothing, put his heavy foot down. In Manhattan last year a Friday Club for jam sessions was founded by Paul Smith, adman and amateur guitarist, and Eddie Condon, band leader and top-notch guitarist. The Friday Club folded because its jam sessions, like many good ones, mingled Negroes and white men, and there were objections from patrons of the hotels where it met.

Last week another jam project was under way near New York City, in Toto’s Green Haven Inn, founded in Mamaroneck by the late famed circus clown. Mixed aplenty, Sunday-afternoon sessions were open to any expert jazzman. Four Sundays of it had built a typical jazz following, equal parts suburban jitterbugs and reverential male grownups. In every audience there was at least one know-it-all who bothered the players with technical questions, and one high-school editor who inquired: “Do you think real jazz is on the decline?”, whereupon everyone grabbed for his drink.

Pacesetter at last Sunday’s session, as at earlier ones, was saucer-eyed, head-bobbing, jelly-wristed Zutty Singleton, Negro drummer, pronounced the greatest of all time by French Expert Hugues Panassie. Baby-faced Artie Shapiro, once a child wonder at 16, slapped the bull fiddle.

Saxophonist was Bud Freeman. Negro Roy Eldridge blew a clear, jabbing, powerful trumpet. And when the band got in the groove with Strut, Miss Lizzie, the thin, brilliant, swooping clarinet runs of lean, sardonic Pee Wee Russell brought Toto’s Green Haven Inn to its feet.

*The first in New Orleans in the early 1900’s