© Howard Waters Jnr
March, 1957 Teagarden Talks By John Tynan
© DownBeat Magazine
"This 20 percent tax is murder," said Jack Teagarden.
"Take myself for example. Where we're working now, at Astor's in the Valley, I can't
sing a note because of the tax. It isn't only that I like to sing, but people come to the
stand all night wanting me to sing particular tunes. It keeps me busy explaining why I
can't."
Now in his 44th year as a trombonist, Teagarden, 51, hopes for early abolition of the 20
percent entertainment tax which, he points out, is seriously limiting his scope in clubs
as musician and entertainer. Since his first vocal recording, on Red Nichols' "After
You've Gone" in 1930, Jack's warm, woolly singing style has become synonymous with
jazz vocalizing.
"Particularly since my Capitol album was released," Teagarden continued,
"people seem to want to hear me do the tunes we recorded. The worst of it is, they're
all vocal numbers and, if I did sing a chorus, the place could get into trouble, very
serious trouble with the tax officials. It's particularly rough on us because, for one
thing, it cuts our repertory in half." He shrugged. "But what can you do, except
hope they kill it soon?"
After decades on the road-with Paul Whiteman in the '30s, his own big band which he led
from January, 1939, until 1947, the with the Louis Armstrong small group till 1951,
Teagarden today is comfortably settled in a big home perched on a cliff in the hills above
Hollywood with wife, Addie, and son, Joe, now 5.
"Sure wish I could stay put," he said wistfully. "It takes me less than 15
minutes to drive to the job from here. I'm tired of traveling," he sighed. "Why,
one year we didn't have but three weeks to relax at home."
"One year?" put in Addie. "Believe me, there were many years."
"Guess I'll be off to Europe in March," Jack continued. "Gotta admit I'm
looking forward to the tour, though. Joe Glaser's setting it up right now."
Aiming to cover "as many countries as possible," the Teagarden itinerary will
definitely include England and Germany, skipped when he was last in Europe with Louis
Armstrong.
"Right now," said Jack, "it looks like I'll have Bobby Hackett along. And
I'd sure like to get Bud Freeman, too É There's a young fella from New Orleans, Pete
Fountain, plays clarinet, that I'd love to have along. Heard him at a concert last year
and he sure knocked me out.
"One thing, though, is that I'd want everybody in the band to be pretty well-known
over there. I think it'd help a lot. I'd rather have a real good outfit and not make a
cent on it than to take a band where I'd have to carry the load myself."
A grin split his broad, leathery face. "Tell you something: Unless I've got good guys
around me, I'm no good. Guess you could call me strictly an inspiration man. Louis is that
way, too. He's gotta be in good company. The better the company, the better Pops will
blow."
Close association with Louis Armstrong over the years has firmed a conviction in
Teagarden's mind that "...Louis can't do anything wrong. The sound is there-and the
beat. There's never a doubt in his mind as to what he's going to do, and no matter what
everybody else is doing, Pops just goes right ahead.
"Funny thing about Louis," he continued, "I've seen him play jazz for
audiences that go for Lombardo and that kind of music. Yet when he's through playing, they
come up and tell him, 'Louis, that's the sweetest trumpet I've ever heard.' I used to get
a real kick out of that. Something else, too: I've never yet seen Louis Armstrong fail to
please anybody with his playing. It's something innate with him-he just can't miss."
Although Jack has completed a second album for Capitol (a collection of spirituals
including "Lonesome Road" and "Jericho"), he's already thinking ahead
to the next one, which will probably be set within the format of a smaller jazz band.
"I just wish there was more material," he said, troubled. "Sure wouldn't
want to rehash the old Dixieland standards. I've done them all over and over. Take
"Fidgety Feet," for instance. Everybody's played the heck out of that one. I
think the next album could probably be show tunes. There are so many good ones to choose
from. Main thing is, if we can hit on material that'll get played on the air then we'll
have something."
Making records "that'll get played on the air" seems an important consideration
in Teagarden's mind these days. Playing his kind of jazz, he feels, forces him into a
special category anyway, but he doesn't want to find his records restricted to just the
two-beat disc jockeys.
"I don't want to put down the disc jockeys," he emphasized. "They're
thinking of their listeners-and their sponsors. They try to slip in a Dixieland record now
and then, but most of them are scared of becoming typed as Dixie jockeys, which is easy, I
guess, in their business. But they could do a lot to help jazz-all kinds-if once in a
while they played a good jazz record.
"For me, especially, this would be important. I'm bending over backwards these days
trying to please the people with my kind of music, but I don't know if I'm reaching them.
It's frustrating trying to fit yourself into this new world of music. You feel so insecure
in what you're playing."
For all the uncertainty of being a recording artist necessarily competing for sales in
today's long-play jungle, Jack Teagarden's musical integrity in what he plays and sings-on
or off the record-remains unquestioned. Paying just tribute to his honesty, Johnny Mercer,
in an intriguing note on the liner of Jack's album, This Is Teagarden (Capitol T721),
noted also that the big Texan "... has never had a headache."
Queried on this, Jack laughed. "Well, it goes back to our Whiteman days," he
chuckled. "See, on this bandstand Johnny used to sit right above the trombone
section. He was, and I guess still is, a chronic sinus sufferer, and always had a
headache, it seemed. He'd look down at me and ask, 'How ya feel tonight, Jack?' I'd say,
'Why, just fine, Johnny. How you?' Then he'd moan, 'Man, my head is killing me. Don't you
ever have a headache?' And the truth is, I never have."
Aside from the immediate future for Teagarden, which includes his European tour and more
recording, he clearly states his credo which he's always followed a past and present
conviction, a future guide:
"Just want to go on playing as long as I'm able. I don't want to show off or outplay
anybody. Just want to stay in the race-and to keep on plugging."
© DownBeat Magazine
CLASSIC ARTICLES - © DownBeat magazine
July, 1963 Three In The Afternoon
The following discussion took place on a Sunday afternoon in Count Basie's dressing room
during the recent Jazz Supports the Symphony concert at Chicago's Civic Opera House.
The conversation began while Basie and his band were on stage, and Jack Teagarden (who
also was featured at the concert), Maynard Ferguson (whose band was playing in Chicago
that night), and members of the Down Beat staff waited for the bandleader.
After much good-natured bantering, the conversation turned to the problems brass players
have with their teeth.
Teagarden: Whenever anybody asks me how I keep my hair, I ask them
how they keep their teeth. Because I don't have any teeth, you know.
Ferguson: That's all right, man. I don't have mine, either. I deteriorate faster, that's
all.
Down Beat: Could you play better when you had your own teeth, Jack?
Teagarden: No, I don't think so. I've got a better range now. Maybe I've lost a little
thing in one way and gained it in another. But I don't think I've suffered from it really
at all. I swore it wasn't going to become a mental block to me. It's just like you find a
new ball bat, and you just pick it up and slug with it instead of figuring out how you're
going to hold the thing.
Ferguson: I think a lot of guys got a lot of fear of that.
Teagarden: I did at first until they got the teeth out, and I put my horn up.
Down Beat: Are all of them false?
Teagarden: I don't have a tooth in my head, not a one.
Ferguson: Fantastic.
Teagarden: I had a disease called pyorrhea, which is hereditary, I guess, in my family. I
never had a toothache till I was 36, and I never had a cavity, but they just got loose and
fell out. But it didn't stop me for a week even. I went right on.
Down Beat: How are your teeth, Maynard?
Ferguson: Mine are fine. I went through the same thing, except I was full of theories that
said let's not bother trying to re-create the faults in my own teeth. You know, the space
between the front ones and everything like that. It's all like you yourself trying to go
into the instrument rather than trying to pull the instrument into your mouth -- that's my
theory. So I had all these magnificent theories down so cleverly that I couldn't miss.
Within four days they had filed down all my front teeth, put caps on, and I went right to
work. It was fine the first weekend because I felt that I wasn't supposed to be able to
play at all, so, therefore, the fact that I could play adequately was just fine. But the
next week. You know every time you go in there they shoot you with Novocaine, and you get
those scars on your gums. My gums were swollen, and I had a lot of problems for about a
week and a half. I started to get nervous about it, and I started thinking maybe this
isn't going to work -- I think that's where a lot of guys make a choice between whether
they're going to get mentally hung up on "I will never be able to play such and such
a way again" or else they're just going to say, "It will take care of
itself." Now it's turned out to be better.
(Count Basie enters.)
Basie: Jack, I've been looking for you.
Teagarden: Ah! I waved at you when I came in.
(Confusion of greetings all around.)
Band Boy: Two more numbers -- then you're back on.
Basie: Right.
Teagarden: Our paths don't cross too often. I think the last time I saw you was at the
Playboy festival. Then once in France.
Basie: Oh, Lord, that was so! Yeah.
Teagarden: Have you seen Louis lately?
Basie: No, I haven't seen Pops in a long time.
Teagarden: I miss him by hours sometimes.
Basie: We're either ahead of him -- or behind him, which is the wrong way to be, behind
him, you know. But we worked seven, eight days down in the place in Washington together.
Boy, that was great. That was the greatest thing I ever did. Man, we just play eight bars
of that theme and nothing is going to happen in the next three minutes.
Teagarden: That's right. Nothing but applause!
Down Beat: Count, why did you keep a big band going, when it became increasingly difficult
to keep bands going?
Basie: 'Cause I was simple. There's nothing else I could do. I can't play in a small group
because you have to play too much. And, then, I guess I'm simple -- I just like that
sound, that's all. Excuse me, gentlemen.
(Teagarden and Basie leave to go on stage for finale; 10 minutes later, they return.)
Down Beat: Count, you've had a band since the middle thirties. When you came up within the
so-called big-band era, people were dancing, right?
Basie: Absolutely.
Down Beat: Was business good then?
Basie: Well, that was the dance era.
Down Beat: Now, today, there are just a handful of big bands -- two of the best being
yours and Maynard's. How does today differ from the thirties as far as people dancing? Do
people come to hear the band more than they come to dance? Do you play more concerts than
you do dances? Just how is it different?
Basie: I think we play more concerts. I know we do, and we get to play a few dances,
mostly at the universities, colleges, and things. But as far as our dance career is
concerned, it's been kind of beat. But for the last year or so it seems as though it's
picking up a bit. That's mainly due, I guess, to the wonderful work the disc jockeys have
been doing on instrumentals throughout the country.
Down Beat: Can you call your band a jazz band and be a dance band at the same time?
Basie: I think you can.
Down Beat: Why?
Basie: I don't know, but I think you can.
Ferguson: Basie's band always sounds like a jazz band to me -- if I may insert that -- and
I know what Basie's doing when he plays an arrangement for dancing and when he chooses
certain numbers when he's on the concert stage. At times he will play numbers for dancing
that he wouldn't play on the concert stage. But many of them overlap. It's not like the
old saying "he has two separate books." I don't know if anyone ever really had
two separate books -- I think that was just a phrase.
Down Beat: Maynard, do you play more concerts than dances?
Ferguson: Yes, I would say so, if we are to include jazz clubs as concerts.
Down Beat: When both of you play dances, are some of the kids hard to get on the floor? In
other words, Count, do you have to play different now than you did in the thirties to get
people dancing?
Basie: If we're playing a dance, we find that slower melodies fill the dance floor. It's
still more of a listening audience that we have, especially if we have the teenagers, but
if we do have the older people, naturally they're not going to dance so much, because
their dancing has become cut in half too -- unless you play a little slower so they can
get together and reminisce a little.
Down Beat: In the thirties!
Basie: They were doing the Lindy Hop in those days. Sometimes you couldn't play too fast.
That's when they were really doing the Lindy.
Ferguson: Basie, did you see that again in Sweden?
Basie: Yes, yes, I did.
Ferguson: You know, when we played the dances in Sweden -- the first night I played
nothing above a medium tempo, and I thought, "Gee, they dance to that awful
easy." And then I started getting into these faster things that really are the things
we play in the jazz clubs. They are melody dancers in Sweden. If you play well-known jazz
standards, and you play them fast, they'll just start walking around the floor, and they
all do it like puppets -- they all do it together.
Down Beat: What do you mean melody dancers?
Ferguson: They love American jazz standards. By that I mean, I would have been a smash hit
if I would have had "Honeysuckle Rose" in the book. I was speaking about the
commercial dance public, for which you could play very hip music.
Down Beat: The average age of your band, Maynard, is about 26?
Ferguson: Right.
Down Beat: And, Count, the average age of your band is!
Basie: Don't say it!
Down Beat: But what can be said about the youth of Maynard's band as opposed to the polish
and massive musicianship of your own band -- men who have played longer?
Basie: You just said it. They just played longer, not that they played any better, they
just played longer! Let me tell you something -- we haven't been old all these years. Like
the teenagers now -- well, we were playing to their parents, and they were young then. I
mean, like we haven't always been 90 years old. Twenty years ago, remember, I was 20 years
younger too.
Down Beat: If you and Basie have to play more concerts and dances than you do jazz clubs,
do you think this compromises you as jazz musicians leading big jazz bands?
Ferguson: One of the greatest things to do is to try and always find out how you can be
happy in what you do, and one of the things I spend a lot of time on is seeing how I can
play jazz at a dance. And I think that in Jack Teagarden's day he did a great job -- days
when you could have just played the melody and they could have danced. Instead, you
figured "I'll start off with the melody, then I'll go from there and do my own
scene."
Teagarden: Start my melody first. I've given this a lot of thought because I've lived
through this whole generation. I'm almost 58. I think if the television and radios would
have more programs like this ["International Hour: American Jazz"]! For
instance, this will be talked about for several weeks -- like when they had the Timex
programs, the great shows that they had about once every six months -- there was a lot of
comment, but there was nothing solid. The have to keep it up, have some live music on
television, and it'll make people come back to listen to music again -- they just don't
get to hear enough music. Then, I think a lot of the fault of where the dancing went was
the musicians themselves. Now, I'm not criticizing us. We're all a little bit of a ham in
a way, which I guess is true in any business. But you just can't go out there and play
every number fast to show off your technique. You've got to play some numbers for the
dancers! Dancing is a romantic recreation. Play four tunes for the public and one for
yourself; "Star Dust" and a lot of pretty things -- it's real beautiful for
romantic dancing -- and then let them all ride.
Basie: You sneak one in.
Teagarden: You sneak one in.
Ferguson: Jack, one thing I've always felt, when you play at a university -- when Count
Basie or Maynard Ferguson play for a prom, where we won't have as many esthetic kicks,
shall we say; nonetheless, the whole student body comes to that dance. And I'm sure Basie
puts on a jazz concert for them in the middle of the evening just as I do, and what
happens is that you gain a lot more new fans for jazz in general as well as for yourself
at the dance than you do at the concert.
Teagarden: Suppose a person comes up to you and tells you, "You know, I proposed to
my girl, who's my wife now -- we've been happy for 30 years -- at a dance you were playing
and you played a certain waltz. Would you play that for us again?" I never ignore
requests like that. Play a waltz, play a rhumba, or anything that a person would ask for,
and I think you make more friends that way and will make dancing be a pleasure again.
Down Beat: Stan Kenton has said that the future of the large jazz bands as opposed to
dance bands lies in the colleges. Maynard, you were touching on this when you were talking
about North Texas State and the high-school bands. Kenton holds that the colleges will be
the places where musical progress will be made because there's no economic pressures. They
don't have to worry about where they're going to be working tomorrow and how to keep the
band together. Is this valid or will the greatest things still be done by the working
bands?
Ferguson: I believe the greatest things will be done by the working bands. You're going to
get those little young geniuses out of college! I don't mean that. I just can't tell you
how impressed I was with the North Texas State band-lab setups -- I mean all the bands. I
heard five bands in a row, and they were all about 18 men, 22 men, whatever size they
wanted. Here's an example of the teaching that went on there: Johnny Richards had done an
album for Kenton, Adventures in Time. They played the arrangements from that whole album,
and they played almost flawlessly. Sure, there were little weaknesses here and there, and
it is true that they had had the whole semester to work on this music, but it was just
astounding to me how great it sounded! The way these kids would fight over who was going
to play with what band! All this interest is going to spread! We do have a problem in the
big-band field today: everybody wants to blow and everybody wants to be a soloist. The day
of the fifth trumpet player is gone, in terms of a guy being happy to do it. He may be
happy to do it while he is developing. But supposing I, as a bandleader, want a great
fifth trumpet player. I want a guy who's really going to play those parts and isn't going
to be saying, "Well, isn't it a drag that I don't get to solo." It's a thing
that has always kept me from adding more men to my band; I feel that I can keep 12 young
guys happy in my band, and I'm really not convinced that I can keep 20 of them happy.
Down Beat: Do you call this a problem, Count?
Basie: I agree heartily with Maynard. No comment on this because he's telling the absolute
truth.
Down Beat: Returning to an earlier question, can a big jazz band call itself that if it
has to depend somewhat on dances in order to exist?
Basie: As far as I'm concerned, I only have one book of things to play. I don't have
anything arranged for concerts. I play the same type things for dances as I do for
concerts. I don't know how Maynard has his!I do, too -- Maynard has a real mixed book, you
understand what I mean? But we aren't smart yet or something like that or we just haven't
gotten into it; you understand? Now Ellington and these guys have really got concert
bands. They play wonderfully for dancing too. But we -- the guys will say, "Well,
look, Basie, what are you gonna play?" and I say, "The same old beef stew."
Teagarden: This thing has got to start from the top. It has to be that fellows who are
sincere at radio stations play it so it can be heard, not just put it on the shelf. And if
it's played and it's heard, then it creates more demand for music, more interest.
Otherwise it's an uphill pull all the way. If you make a record and it never gets played,
then you don't draw a crowd; the guy goes out of business, and then we all flop.
Basie: I guarantee one thing, what you need is a record -- if you can get a record, it
helps an awful lot.
This article also appears in the book, "Down Beat: 60 Years of Jazz"
© DownBeat Magazine
Memories of Jack Teagarden by Barney
Bigard
Jack was the most fabulous of men. He drank a lot—practically all the time
in fact—but he always could play and never showed that liquor. You can’t
tell a man how to live his life, but Jack just loved that liquor.
He used to take his whiskey and put it in the bottle along with one of
these old Benzedrine inhalers, after he broke the paper off. He’d leave it
for ten or twenty minutes and if he felt that liquor getting to him then
he’d take this inhaler concoction and drink the whole thing down. Right
quick, he would feel as fresh as a daisy. That’s the way he lived, like
that. He never bothered anyone. He was just a quiet man. A real wonderful
guy to be around, but when he played his horn, he really played it, believe
me.
I first heard of Jack when I was in New York with Duke. We had a "battle of
music," as they used to call those concerts with two bands. That was the
first time I saw him and, incidentally, he was too drunk to play. That is
the only time I ever saw him in that shape in my life. He was actually
sleeping on the bandstand and what’s more it was his band. Jack Teagarden’s
All Star Band. So naturally I said, "Is that the great Jack Teagarden?" The
guys in Duke’s band that knew him had such respect for him and his trombone
playing that I knew I had to be wrong. Later when I heard him play another
time he really astounded me. There was no trombone player like him.
He used to be crazy about a guy called Jimmy Harrison, that played with
Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, and this Jimmy was crazy about Jack too.
They used to pal around quite a bit and they stole a lot of ideas from each
other. He also liked Miff Mole a whole lot as a trombone player, and,
naturally, Tommy Dorsey.
See, Jack never really was right for the job of leading a band. He just
didn’t have the right personality for it. He was too quiet a man, too
subtle. He would even speak in a Texas drawl to announce the songs. He was
never in a hurry for nothing. Always relaxed to the point of seeming to be
lazy. But he wasn’t lazy by a long shot, it was just that when you heard
him talk or play he let everything roll out so easy. He played a lot of
fast stuff on his horn but I used to like to hear him play the pretty
stuff. Played it just like he talked: with a drawl. Just beautiful.
He never got angry about anything, either on the stand or off it. He and
Louis were friends from way back and they got along just great. Louis knew
about his drinking habits, but he didn’t care. It was Jack’s business, you
understand. Jack was a guy that never showed that liquor in his playing at
all. I mean, he played the same way drunk, or half drunk, or stone-cold
sober. So Louis couldn’t tell him anything as it wasn’t interfering with
his work. I guess we all hated to see him drink so much just because we
loved him so. He always had his faculties about him. I’ve never seen the
man stumble, wallow or wave. You’d never know he was drunk. Never.
The funny thing was that Jack always drank whiskey. Straight whiskey. So
he always kept a pint in his trombone case to take a nip during
intermission. Anyway, Arvell Shaw found out that he had that bottle in
there and he was too cheap to buy his own whiskey, so every night, just
when we would be in the wings about to go on stage, Arvell would run back
right quick and take a big gulp. Same thing after intermission was over
too. Jack couldn’t figure it out. At the end of every concert the bottle
would be almost empty. He would say, "God! This bottle’s almost gone.
Someone must be stealing my whiskey." Of course we didn’t say nothing, even
though we knew who was laying into that bottle. One night Jack got smart,
so before the show he half emptied the pint of whiskey and took a leak into
it. He just put it back in the trombone case and carried on as usual. So
Arvell took a drink from it and came out on the stand all mad. "Somebody
done peed in the bottle," he yelled, right out there on the concert stage.
He was mad with everyone in the band, and yet he was the one stealing the
whiskey. He never stole any more, because he didn’t know what in hell would
be in that bottle.
Apart from his trombone, Jack’s other love was steam engines and miniature
trains. I remember once we were just leaving a gig in Washington, DC, and
we got out by the wharf and saw this little circus. It was closing down
full swing and most of the side-shows had packed up and gone, but Jack
spied this little guy holding part of an engine. He watched him walk over
to where he had this steam engine stashed away. So Jack went over to the
man and asked him if he wanted to sell this whole big engine.
The guy was glad to because the circus was going out of business. Jack gave
him $200 and all he took was the thing that produced the steam and made the
whistle blow. He left the rest of that junk right there.
If we played a long engagement someplace and you went into Jack’s hotel
room, you’d see nothing but all kinds of wires, little whistles and steam
engine things. He told me that he learned about all that stuff when he was
a kid. One time, we were checking into a hotel and he had this great big
trunk like a sailing trunk. He had all his contraptions in there, all this
iron and steel stuff. So the bus driver helped him put this trunk on the
sidewalk and here came the bellboys. "Which one is yours, Mr Teagarden?"
"This one, this one and this trunk." Do you know, those bellboys had to
send for help to get that thing up to his room. He was quite a man.
The girls all used to flock around Jack. He had that sort of personality
where they would want to "mother" him; to take care of him. They all
thought they were on to something big when he would ask them to come up to
see the steam engines in his hotel room after the show. Those poor chicks
would just sit on the bed waiting for something to happen, while Jack laid
out on the floor blowing the whistles and making the engines work.
Jack was the only white guy in the band and when we went down South he
couldn’t stay in the same hotel with us. We went to Norfolk, Virginia, one
time and Jack used to love red beans and rice, so he had to walk all over
town all by himself to find some of those beans. Apart from the separate
hotels we never had any trouble in the South, and we played all over:
Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi. I heard once that in some book they say
that Louis wouldn’t play New Orleans on account of the racial situation
there with a mixed band. Well we played New Orleans in 1949, I think, and
we had no trouble. We never played any night clubs, just a concert and a
couple of pre-carnival balls. In fact they crowned Louis as "King of the
Zulus" which is like making him King for the Mardi Gras period. See, Gene
Krupa had broken down a lot of that colour shit in the South before we got
there. He went to Texas to play a fair or something, and the folks gave him
static about the coloured guys in his band. Gene told ‘em, "Well! If they
don’t play. I don’t play." That was that. They all played.
A lot of people feel that the white boys couldn’t play like the coloured
boys. That might have been true in the early days but it’s a bunch of
baloney today. It all depends on who’s playing the horn. Jack was one of
the greatest trombone players that I ever heard, and you take this boy Bob
Havens, he is a fine trombonist. He plays with Lawrence Welk now, but he
was a disciple of Jack’s. In fact Jack influenced a whole generation of
trombonists, just like Earl Hines did at the piano, or Louis.
Jack had a good sense of humour, but he wasn’t a guy to laugh heartily. He
just got his kicks out of various things. He really enjoyed the way we
played Twelfth Street Rag with all that cornball stuff. It’s on one of our
records even. We were just going into it one night when he said, "Let’s
make a fool out of this thing." And we played it as cornily as we possibly
could. Just hammed it up and it broke up the place. After that we kept it
in the program just that same way.
Another thing: Jack Teagarden was a man with a great ear. And he was a
terrific reader on top of that. The thing with Jack and me was we never
read anything much all the time we were with Louis and he used to say to me
the same thing as I told other people: "Man, this reading is just getting
away from me. I must find some time to ‘woodshed’ it a little to get my
standard back where it was." We never found time for anything in that band.
We were always travelling so much.
He hit ninety-nine point nine per cent of the notes that he went for. Very
seldom he made a mistake or "fluffed" a note. See, he rarely tried to
experiment on the bandstand or hardly ever went to making something he
wasn’t sure of making. He never went in for that stuff.
The only dress clothes that Jack ever wore was our band suit. He never was
a guy to spend money on clothes. There was never anything flashy about the
man. His best outfit was his band suit, but as long as he was presentable
he didn’t care.
I used to love to have a chance to hear him sing too. He would sing those
duets with Louis, like Old Rocking Chair, and he would sing things like
Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone, or Stars fell on Alabama. We used
to stand behind him on the stage and sing, "Bricks fell on Alabama." We had
so much fun with Jack in the band. His favourite song on the trombone was
Lover. He always used to love to play that one.
Jack was married several times and had three children, I believe. One, by
Addie, his last wife, was called Jack Jr and one was named Joe. I forget
the other one’s name. The oldest was a handsome boy, and he was going with
some oil-heiress from Texas. She was supporting him and he was playing
trombone pretty good, but I haven’t heard anything about him for the last
few years. Maybe that money changed his mind about the trombone.
Jack had got an offer to form his own band and that’s why he quit our band.
I guess somebody talked him into believing it would be something bigger and
better, but it fizzled. He kept a band going but there wasn’t much made out
of it. Meantime’ Trummy Young had replaced Jack with us. Trummy stayed for
ten years or so and then he decided to go to live in Hawaii. At that time
Jack was supposed to come back into our band. They had the contract all
signed, and Jack was working out an engagement in New Orleans. One morning
they went to get Jack from his motel room and he was dead. Just dead. That
liquor killed him in the end, if you ask me. Anyway they contacted his wife
Addie in Florida and she came over to New Orleans.
They flew his body out here to Los Angeles. The casket was closed because
his face was so stressed from the liquor he had been drinking. I guess they
didn’t want nobody to see it. The funeral was here at Forest Lawn. I was
one of his pall bearers.
Excerpts taken from the Autobiography of Barney Bigard, ‘With Louis and
the Duke’ Published by Macmillan Press, Music Division, 1980
(Thanks to Tom Barnard for transcribing these
excerpts)