Empire of Sin (19 page)

In 1900, when Ory was just thirteen, his mother died, followed less than a year later by his father. The boy had to move in with his older sister’s family on the sugar plantation. But he was already making plans to leave, pinning his hopes on a fine new banjo his father had bought for him two weeks before his death. Ory worked a series of hard-labor jobs for the next few years—first at a lumberyard, and then for a bricklaying crew (where his drunken, abusive overseer would sometimes rouse the boy from sleep to play him some blues on the banjo). All along, though, he was honing his musical skills, branching out from the banjo to the instrument that would later make him famous—the trombone. When he was about sixteen or seventeen, he bought himself
“an old beat-up valve trombone” for $7.50 and started practicing with it. The instrument was so riddled with holes that he had to stuff them with soap to get a decent tone. This worked all right at first, but after playing for a while he’d find himself blowing bubbles. Finally, he borrowed $100 to buy real instruments for the rest of his band. “
Then we had some real rehearsing with the honest-to-God instruments,” Ory wrote, “and decided we were good enough to play at the [local] ball games.”

The ultimate goal, of course, was to move to New Orleans and make a living there, but Ory had promised his mother before she died that he wouldn’t leave LaPlace until he was twenty-one. In the meantime, though, he and his friends took weekend trips into the city to hear the bands they emulated. On one such trip in 1905, Ory went to Werlein’s Music Store on Canal Street and bought a new trombone. Later, as he was trying out the new instrument at his older sister’s house on South Robertson Street, a passerby heard him and knocked on the door.

“
Young man, are you blowing the trombone?” the man asked.

Ory told him he was.

“Well,” the man continued, “you know who I am?”

Ory didn’t.

The man said: “I’m the King.” It was King Bolden himself, and he was apparently quite impressed by Ory’s playing.

“I’d like to have you work for me,” Bolden said. “You sound very good.”

Ory was thrilled, but since he was still only eighteen years old, his sister put an end to all such talk. “Oh, no, he has to go back home [to LaPlace],” she insisted. “He can’t leave home now till he’s twenty-one years old.”

But Ory did keep in touch with Bolden. Whenever the young trombonist and his friends came to town, they’d seek out the members of the Bolden Band wherever they were playing—at Johnson Park, Odd Fellows Hall, or the dance hall on Perdido Street (also used as a Baptist church) where Bolden played so often that it was soon better known as “Funky Butt Hall.” And although Ory did admire many of the other bands in town—including that of
Robichaux, from whom Ory learned the more polished manner of playing that was later to characterize his own mature style—Bolden was his first and arguably his most influential favorite.

So many of the young players around New Orleans at this time cited their first taste of Bolden’s music as a seminal experience. Sidney Bechet, who would become
perhaps the greatest jazz clarinetist of all time,
first heard Bolden playing on the street when he was seven or eight. He was never the same afterward. As the youngest child of a traditional Creole family, he had often been taken by his mother to the French Opera House on Bourbon Street to hear some of the great soloists of the day (Enrico Caruso was an early favorite). But Sidney seemed more inspired by the syncopated music he heard on the streets of New Orleans. When he was barely six, his mother found him
trying to blow the nozzle of her douche like a horn. Mortified but amused, she responded by giving the boy a small fife to play with. He practiced on it for hours at a time and soon mastered it. Then he started playing his brother Leonard’s clarinet on the sly. One day his mother heard him secretly practicing under the porch. She was about to scold him for fooling with his brother’s possessions—but then she heard what the boy could do with the instrument. She immediately arranged to get him his own clarinet and sign him up for formal lessons.

Sidney proved to be a disobedient student. A series of old-school Creole teachers wanted him to practice scales and classical marches, but the boy had his own ideas. Then came the day he heard Bolden. It was during a street parade when Bolden and his band got into a cutting contest with the more traditional Imperial Band. Sidney was mesmerized—at least until a stick-wielding cop came along and spoiled the fun. “
[It] was down there around Canal Street somewheres,” Bechet would later recall. “I was awful little then—and a policeman come along and he looked at my head and he looked at my ass, and he smacked me good with that stick he was carrying. I ran home then and I was really hurting some, I couldn’t even sit down for dinner that night; and my mother, she took one look at me and she knew right away where I’d been.”

His parents and teachers, and even his older brother, Leonard, didn’t approve of Bolden’s brand of ratty music. (“
Us Creole musicians always did hold up a nice prestige,” Leonard Bechet insisted.) But that’s the kind of music Sidney wanted to play—“all of those interpreting moans and groans and happy sounds,” as he later put it. And his musical taste sometimes got him into trouble. “
No, no, no,” his teacher Luis “Papa” Tio would tell him. “We do not bark like a dog or meow like a cat!” The admonition fell on deaf ears. Bechet began to model his clarinet playing on the rough Uptown style of “Big Eye” Louis Nelson, from whom he even took a few lessons. These were much more to his taste: “
Some musicians played the tune prettily,” he later said, “but I like the playing that makes me want to dance.”

At his brother’s twenty-first
birthday party in April 1907, ten-year-old Sidney had a chance to show off what he’d learned. His mother had booked the band of cornetist Manuel Perez to play for the party. But at the last minute Perez had sent a replacement band, led by the young Creole cornet player Freddie Keppard (whose style of music may have been a bit earthy for the proper Mrs. Bechet). Keppard’s clarinetist—the ubiquitous George Baquet—was late for the gig, so the band started playing without him. Sidney saw his chance. “
I knew I was too young for them,” he later recalled, “but I sure wanted to play along with them all the same.” So he began improvising a quiet clarinet accompaniment to Keppard’s lead. But he did it from another room, not wanting to risk being publicly reprimanded by the older musicians.

As the story goes, Keppard heard Sidney’s clarinet and thought it was Baquet warming up in the other room. But then Baquet himself showed up, and the identity of the phantom clarinetist was revealed. Baquet was impressed, and (despite taking some hearty ribbing from the other band members) he sat little Sidney down right next to him. “
He kept me there all evening, playing right along beside him,” Bechet remembered. “That night, I guess I was the richest kid in New Orleans. You couldn’t have bought me for a sky full of new moons.”

To hear his contemporaries tell it, Bechet was—in a city full of great musicians—a phenomenon, a natural who could play virtually any instrument he touched. “
I used to see Sidney around [violinist Armand] Piron’s barbershop,” one musician recalled.

Now, Piron had a house full of every kind of instrument. So this little boy, he come in one day and pick up the flute. “What is that?” he ask Piron. “That is a flute, Sidney,” Piron tell him. So Sidney start right in playing it. Show Piron what
is
a flute. Put that down. Walk over and pick up a saxophone and say, “What is
that
?” “That’s a new something they call a saxophone, son.” “Well, it look like a pipe to me, I see if this pipe will make a tune.” And be damn if he didn’t start making the thing just talk!

The boy soon became so accomplished that Baquet himself would sometimes employ him as a substitute. According to Sidney’s brother, Leonard, “
When Baquet wanted to lay off, he used to come and speak to my mother and ask could he take Sidney to play in his place for the evening.” Mrs. Bechet, the old-school Creole lady, was reluctant. “We didn’t want to jeopardize our family by mixing with the rough element,” Leonard explained. “We worried a lot about Sidney, when he’d be out playing. So, when Baquet would come for Sidney, Mother would insist that he be sure to bring the boy back and not lose him. Baquet would promise, and he’d generally bring him back about two in the morning. Sidney would bring money home to Mother and tell her don’t worry, he was all right.”

Mrs. Bechet may not have been happy about her son playing in saloons and dance halls, but it was the type of compromise that Creoles of Color increasingly were forced to make in 1900s New Orleans. Any difference between Creoles—often educated, urban, and middle-class—and African Americans—the children of slaves more recently arrived from the countryside—was gone now, at least in the eyes of whites. “Negro” and “disreputable” had become functionally synonymous, and many younger Creoles, in response, began rejecting their parents’ now-outdated scruples. In any case, Mrs. Bechet’s strong-willed and irrepressible son had made his choice of lifestyle, and there was little she could have done to keep him “respectable,” even if she had tried.

But not every young Creole musician was pulled into the orbit of Bolden and the other Uptown jazzmen. Jelly Roll Morton—né
Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe on October 20, 1890—was a Creole pianist who affected a casual disdain for the music of what he called “
Uptown Negroes.” A musician of stunning originality himself, he was busily developing his own unique blend of piano-based ragtime, dance music, and blues—a “Spanish-tinged” style that would eventually have its own claim as the prototype for the kind of music still a decade away from being known as “jazz.”

Like many Creoles of the era, Morton (who changed his name from La Menthe because he “
didn’t want to be called Frenchy”) grew up in an atmosphere saturated with music. His godmother paid for guitar lessons for the boy when he was very young; by the time he was seven he was already an accomplished musician, playing in
a three-piece string band that performed late-night serenades for their neighbors in the Seventh Ward. One day at a party, he heard a man playing “
a very good piece of ragtime” on the piano and decided that this was the instrument for him. He began studying with a series of teachers—some better than others—and was soon proficient enough to have something of a reputation around town. One Saturday night, he and his friends were on a wild jaunt through the Tenderloin when they were approached by someone looking for a pianist to fill in at one of the District’s houses of ill fame. Young Morton (he was about fifteen at the time) agreed to go along, but insisted that his friends come too for moral support. As he later told the story:

I was so frightened when I first touched the piano [that] the girls decided to let me go immediately. One of my friends spoke up, “Go ahead and show these people you can play.” That encouraged me greatly and I pulled myself together and started playing with the confidence of being in my own circle. “That boy is marvelous”—this was the remarks of the inmates. Money was plentiful and they tipped me about $20.…

At the end of the night, Morton was offered a job as the brothel’s regular “professor.” He hesitated at first, worried what his proper Creole family might think. But eventually he took the position and merely told his family that he had switched to the night shift at his regular job at a barrel-making factory. He soon became a denizen of the District, and one of its most evocative chroniclers: “
The streets were crowded with men,” he would later recall. “Lights of all colors were glittering and glaring. Music was pouring into the streets from every house. Women were standing in the doorways, singing or chanting some kind of blues—some very happy, some very sad, some with the desire to end it all by poison, some planning a big outing, a dance, or some other kind of enjoyment. Some were real ladies in spite of their downfall and some were habitual drunkards and some were dope fiends.…”

The young Creole professor became a favorite among the brothel women, who often wheedled big tips for him from their customers. Soon Morton had “
more money than I ever heard of in my life.” He eventually had a diamond implanted in one of his front teeth and bought a loud new suit with a Stetson hat and a pair of St. Louis Flats shoes with toes that turned up almost to his ankles. He was wearing those clothes when he ran into his great-grandmother on the street one Sunday morning. She was just returning from church, and it was quite obvious to her that the same was not true of her great-grandson. It was to be a life-changing encounter for Morton. When she heard about it, his grandmother, whom he had been living with since his mother’s death the year before, kicked him out of the house. At the age of sixteen, he was now on his own. And although his Creole pride would keep him somewhat aloof from the mainstream of the Uptown African American music scene—unlike Bechet, Keppard, and some of the other younger Creoles—he soon became an important force in the development of New Orleans jazz (though, as Louis Armstrong would later remark, “
no matter how much his Diamond Sparkled, he still had to eat in the Kitchen, the same as we Blacks”).

Creoles weren’t the only players succumbing to the attraction of the new sound. By 1905 or so, the music had become popular enough in saloons and dance halls to start making an impression on the city’s young, working-class white musicians. Some of the best bands in New Orleans during this era were those of “Papa” Jack Laine, a white bandleader and entrepreneur who often had several groups playing around town at once. Laine’s Reliance bands generally played sweet, reading from music with little of the improvisation or “bending” of notes so characteristic of the Uptown black bands. But
Laine had a few musicians in his fold who took an avid interest in the hotter style. Cornetist Nick LaRocca, trombonist Tom Brown, clarinetist Larry Shields, and several others who played with Laine’s groups were soon blowing their own version of the new sound. And although LaRocca in particular would deny the influence (in fact, he, like Jelly Roll Morton, would later claim to have invented jazz himself), reports of white musicians listening in on performances of the black bands are too numerous to be ignored.