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ALABAMA BOUND |
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has now spread New Orleans music all over the globe. . . . Papa Tio, who taught all the best clarinet players in New Orleans was not a hot man himself. He played straight classical clarinet, sometimes at the opera house, but he and his son Lorenzo Tio taught Omer Simeon (my favorite of all clarinet players), Sidney Bechet, Pops Humphrey, Albert Nicholas, George Baquet, and Big-Eye Louis Nelson. These were the men who taught all the other guys to play clarinet. George Baquet was the earliest jazz clarinetist. He played with Bill Johnson's Creole Band, the first jazz band to tour East out of New Orleans, but now he is just a corn-fed player in a Philadelphia movie house. Lorenzo Tio came along next. He taught the New York boys all they knew about jazz, used to play on a riverboat running from New York to Albany, drank too much whiskey and caught a cold and died in New York. He was a real swell Creole and wore his high-top shoes till the day he died.
I guess the best trombone players were Frankie Dusen, Eddie Vincent, Kid Ory, and Roy Palmer. Roy, who was no doubt the best who ever lived on the hot trombone was a funny guy, very ugly and very good natured and never on time. His main idea was not the trombone, but to be a first-class auto mechanic, and he was always so greasy on the job that, in later days, we used to pull the curtain so you could only hear the trombone and not see him. Every time you wanted to have Roy play a job, you would first have to find him; you'd look for a sign in a window that said—"Music Taught On All Instruments"—that was Roy, although he couldn't play anything in the world but a trombone; and you would always have to help him get his old, beat-up trombone out of hock. Even then he wouldn't play anything but little short jobs, because he wanted to get back to his mechanic work. He was the idol of George Bruneis, the original trombone with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and the best white trombone I ever heard. Of course, George was just a kid back in 1908. |
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