J is for Jazz 004: JACK TEAGARDEN

JACK TEAGARDEN
c 1940

 

 

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.

 

JACK TEAGARDEN  
DownBeat 
March 1957

  



 

The trombone has never been the most celebrated or the most popular instrument in the history of jazz.  While fans of trad jazz and swing have been eager to praise the work of trumpeters, saxophonists and pianists, they have generally been less willing to offer the same praise to trombonists unless, like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, they also happened to be high-profile bandleaders with long strings of catchy well-known hits to their credit. 

 

Thankfully, this was never the case with Weldon Leo (or John) 'Jack' Teagarden.  'Big T,' or 'Big Gate' as he was sometimes known, was to the trombone what his friend and future boss Louis Armstrong was to the trumpet –– a virtuoso of such staggering originality that he permanently altered the public's perception of what it was possible to do on his instrument and influenced, either directly or through a gradual process of musical osmosis, every trombonist who followed him.  Teagarden's seemingly effortless ability to extract every subtle nuance of feeling and emotion from the trombone was so unprecedented that Glenn Miller, then a young sideman sharing the bandstand with him in Ben Pollack's orchestra, once refused to play a solo after he had finished one, declaring that he had no intention of embarrassing himself by 'trying to beat that!'.

 

JACK TEAGARDEN, c 1928

 

 

 

Teagarden also happened to be an equally gifted vocalist whose laidback, behind-the-beat phrasing was every bit as distinctive as his supple self-taught instrumental technique, influencing dozens of singers (including his friend and occasional collaborator Bing Crosby) who were instantly captivated, as were audiences everywhere, by his ability to combine maximum entertainment value with a profound and deeply moving feeling for the blues.  Teagarden is still regarded by some critics as being the only truly authentic white blues vocalist the jazz tradition has ever produced.  The critic Gunther Schuller, author of the groundbreaking study Early Jazz (1968, reprinted 1986), called him 'a remarkable and wholly unique singer, undoubtedly the best and only true jazz singer next to Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong (whom he, unlike dozens of others, did not imitate).'

 

Teagarden was born on 20 August 1905 in the town of Vernon, Texas into an extraordinarily musical family.  His father Charles, an oilfield worker, was a semi-professional cornet player while his mother Helen taught piano and played the organ for the local church.  Jack's siblings –– sister Norma (piano, born 1911) and brothers Charlie (trumpet, born 1913) and Clois (drums, born 1915) –– would all go on to become professional musicians in adulthood, frequently sharing the bandstand with their more famous (but not necessarily more talented) brother.  Helen Teagarden was still appearing on stage with her eldest son at the age of eighty, playing piano solos during the intermissions of his shows and occasionally joining him mid-set to perform a well-received duet or two.

 

In November 1918 Teagarden's father died of influenza, forcing Helen to move her young family to Nebraska so they could stay with relatives while she got back on her feet emotionally and financially.  While in Nebraska, thirteen year old Jack began accompanying her on the trombone when she performed at parties or at the local cinema where it was now her task to provide the musical backgrounds for silent pictures.  He returned to Texas in 1919 (or perhaps 1920, sources disagree) to live with an uncle and soon joined the San Angelo Municipal Band and a small local dance orchestra led by Cotton Bailey.  Attracted by the more vibrant nightlife in nearby San Antonio, he quit both bands and moved to this city in late 1920 (or early 1921), eventually gaining a nightly residency at a roadhouse called the Horn Palace Inn, leading the jazz quartet he had gone on to assemble in the meantime.

 

It was while working at the roadhouse that Teagarden met a pianist from Houston named Peck Kelley.  They hit it off immediately and Kelley soon asked the young trombonist to join his band –– a somewhat casual arrangement which persisted until 1925 but did not prevent Teagarden from joining Doc Ross's Jazz Bandits in 1924 or from moonlighting with other Texas-based 'territory bands' like the Original Southern Trumpeters.  During his time with Kelley he was also offered a position in the orchestra of Paul Whiteman –– at that time the most popular bandleader in the country, host of his own weekly radio program and a hugely successful recording artist into the bargain.  The trombonist refused Whiteman's offer, deciding to remain in Texas to pursue a quickly abandoned career in the state's oilfields.  During this period he also married for the first time and became the father of two sons.

 

In November 1926, with Whiteman's unrescinded offer to spur him on, Teagarden offered to drive a friend from the Jazz Bandits to New York City so the friend could take part in a recording session.  It didn't take the kid from Texas long to fall in love with the city or find his own sources of regular freelance work in its many speakeasies and hotels.  Within a few months he was offered the first trombone chair in the Chicago-based orchestra of white bandleader Ben Pollack and making his recording debut as a member of the Kentucky Grasshoppers –– a pick-up band featuring other moonlighting members of the Pollack organization. 

 

By the end of 1928 he was a firmly established star, wowing audiences and his fellow musicians alike with the bluesy, relaxed, seemingly effortlessly crafted solos he played each night during Pollack's year-long residency at New York's Park Central Hotel.  He remained with Pollack until May 1933, often sharing the bandstand with his brother Charlie and making many now legendary recordings as both a sideman and a leader (including a version of Basin Street Blues as a member of The Louisiana Rhythm Kings in 1929).

BASIN STREET BLUES 

THE LOUISIANA RHYTHM KINGS
1929

RED NICHOLS [trumpet]

JACK TEAGARDEN [trombone, vocal] 
& others

 

Teagarden worked as a freelancer for most of 1933, then in December accepted a new offer to join the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.  Whiteman's band did not play jazz as such –– its arrangements tended to be of the light classical, highly structured variety that its white, ultra-conservative fans liked to tell themselves was jazz –– and neither Jack nor his brother Charlie, who again joined him on the bandstand not long afterwards, were especially happy to be playing such safe, decidedly 'unswinging' music every night.  (Although they must have been grateful to receive their weekly paychecks when so many other musicians were struggling to make ends meet as a result of the Depression.)  Nevertheless, the Whiteman era saw the trombonist make several of his finest recordings, including the first version of A Hundred Years From Today –– a tune that would forever after be associated with him.  

 

   

 A HUNDRED YEARS FROM TODAY

JACK TEAGARDEN & HIS ORCHESTRA 

Recorded 26 May 1941

A remake of the original version but equally good  

 

JACK TEAGARDEN and LOUIS ARMSTRONG, c 1944

 

 

Teagarden's contract with Whiteman expired in 1939, finally allowing him to form his own band –– the first of many failed attempts to break into the big time under his own name that saw him rack up debts amounting to $46,000 before he finally abandoned the experiment roughly one year later.  (He would be plagued throughout his life by financial and romantic problems, which probably accounted, along with his niteowl lifestyle, for his lifelong habit of heavy alcohol consumption.)  Undaunted, he formed a second big band in 1940 which he was able to keep on the road by sacrificing his trademark blues sound for the sweetly sentimental arrangements that the outbreak of World War Two soon made so popular.  Although it became difficult to keep the band on the road as petrol rationing and the draft took their respective tolls on its ability to travel and hire the best musicians, it kept the trombonist in steady employment until 1946, when nearly every major band of the swing era was forced to disband thanks to the arrival of a frenetic and, to some ears, new 'tuneless' style of jazz dubbed be-bop.  Virtually overnight, swing was out and be-bop was in, forcing the previously crowded ballrooms in most North American cities to shut their doors for good.

 

  

BODY AND SOUL

LOUIS ARMSTRONG & THE ALL-STARS

LOUIS ARMSTRONG [trumpet, vocal]

JACK TEAGARDEN [trombone]

EARL HINES [piano]

BARNEY BIGARD [clarinet]

ARVELL SHAW [bass]

COZY COLE [drums]

Recorded live at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium

30 January 1951

One of the most beautiful trombone solos ever recorded!

 

Ironically, the death of swing encouraged another old-timer named Louis Armstrong to return to his roots and break up his own big band in favor of forming a new, scaled-down group that he simply chose to call 'The All-Stars.'  Teagarden joined The All-Stars in November 1946 and remained with the group until September 1951 when, encouraged by the growing resurgence of interest in traditional or 'Dixieland' jazz, he left to form his own sextet, employing several members of his immediate family as sidemen (or sidewomen in his sister's case).  Forming his own band also allowed him to pick and choose the gigs he wanted to play, meaning he could at last take a break from touring and spend more time with his fourth wife Addie and their children in his new home base of Los Angeles.  The Jack Teagarden Sextet, which successfully toured the Far East in 1958-1959 as musical ambassadors for the State Department, remained popular throughout the 1950s and only began to lose favor with the public with the arrival of the new decade.  In 1961 Teagarden recorded what many consider to be his finest full-length album Mis'ry And the Blues, a Verve LP which, along with its 1962 follow-up Think Well Of Me, served as poignant reminders of everything that made his music so haunting and timelessly appealing.

    

 

MIS'RY AND THE BLUES

JACK TEAGARDEN & HIS SEXTET

1961

JACK TEAGARDEN [trombone, vocal]

HENRY CUESTA [clarinet]

DON EWELL [piano]

DON GOLDIE [trumpet]

STAN PULS [bass]

BARRETT DEEMS [drums]

 

In December 1963, separated from Addie and with steady work now becoming much more difficult to find, Teagarden arrived in New Orleans –– the city he always said he loved best of all those he had ever lived or worked in –– to begin an extended engagement at a club called the Dream Room.  Depressed about his future and physically weakened by six years of constant touring (his precarious finances had made it necessary for him to return to the road in 1957) and several months of prolonged heavy drinking, he allowed a cold he'd caught to develop into pneumonia –– a condition he'd first been diagnosed with in the 1940s and had suffered recurring bouts of ever since.  He refused to go to hospital to be treated for the disease and died, alone, in his room at the city's Prince Conti Motel on 15 January 1964.   His friend and collaborator, the trumpeter Bobby Hackett, said this of him after his death:

 

I sometimes think people like Jack were just go-betweens.  The Good Lord said, 'Now you go and show 'em what it is,' and he did.  I think everybody familiar with Jack Teagarden knows that he was something that happens just once.  It won't happen again.  Not that way…

 

 

 

One listen to Teagarden's music should be enough to convince even the most hardened cynic that Hackett was right.  To this day he remains a touchstone for his fellow trombonists, a white performer who played and sang with black musicians at a time when mixed-race bands were practically non-existent and very much frowned upon by the majority of his white countrymen, particularly in his native south.  In recent years his music has been widely re-issued on CD, usually in compilations which allow listeners to gain a good general overview of what, in anyone's terms, still rates as a remarkable career.     

 

 

 

 

 

Biographical Sources:  

     

Liner notes for Texas Tea Party: Original 1933-1950 Recordings by JOE SHOWLER (Naxos 8.120585, released 2001).  

 

The Virgin Encyclopedia of Jazz, edited by COLIN LARKIN (2004).

 

Jack Teagarden: King of the Blues Trombone, a website maintained by his son JOE TEAGARDEN.    

     

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the JACK TEAGARDEN website operated by his son JOE TEAGARDEN:

 

 

 

https://jackteagarden.net/       

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

     

 

 

 

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Last updated 2 October 2021 §

 

Of Time and the River (1935) by THOMAS WOLFE

Penguin Modern Classics UK, 1984

 

 

Eugene did not know if their way was a good way, but he knew it was not his… And suddenly the naked empty desolation filled his life again, and he was walking on beneath the timeless sky, and had no wall at which to hurl his strength, no door to enter by, and no purpose for the furious employment of his soul… He felt the slow interminable waste and wear of grey time all about him and his life was passing in the darkness, and all the time a voice kept saying: ‘Why?  Why am I here now?  And where shall I go?'

 

 

The Novel: Of Time and the River is a novel I first read twenty-one years ago.  It is so episodic, so packed with rhetoric, lavish description and the kind of sweeping Whitmanesque prose-poetry which Wolfe excelled at writing that I’m not fully certain it qualifies to be called a novel in the way we generally understand and apply the term at all.  It might be more accurate to call it –– and the same description could easily be applied to nearly all of Wolfe’s work –– a uniquely North American form of fictionalized autobiography, one writer's attempt to make sense of the world by viewing it through the prism of his own intensely-felt experiences and sometimes punishing emotions.

 

Eugene Gant, who was also the central character of Wolfe's debut novel Look Homeward, Angel, is a largely undisguised portrait of the novelist himself –– a young southerner struggling to find his way as a Harvard student and then as a college graduate, teacher and fledgling writer in the teeming ‘man-swarms’ of Boston and New York City.  Wolfe’s passionate, heartfelt style captures all the loneliness, self-obsessiveness and uncertainty of Eugene’s quest to discover some kind of higher purpose to his life, beginning with the death of his father from prostate cancer and ending with him meeting the woman –– Esther Jack –– who is destined to become the great love of it (as well as being the bane of it in many ways) in the tumultuous years ahead.  (Eugene/Wolfe's story continues, with his alter-ego now renamed George Webber, in his final two novels, The Web and the Rock and the prophetically titled You Can't Go Home Again.)  The book is personal, confessional and, at a whopping 1035 pages (in my Penguin edition anyway), often verbose and, at times, maddeningly self-indulgent.  But throughout it all Eugene/Wolfe never ceases to ask himself, and the reader, the same three vitally important questions –– ‘Who am I?’, ‘What do I really feel about my life?’ and ‘What should I really be doing with myself?’

 

Although Of Time and the River is written from a young man’s perspective, it remains capable, seventy-seven years after it was published, of stirring the emotions of anyone who can recall asking the same kinds of questions of themselves and life in their own vanished youth.  Eugene embodies the in-born urge so many young people seem to have (and generally seem to lose by the time they reach their thirties) to devour everything they feel life owes them in one tremendous, all-consuming gulp.  He wants to experience and possess everything and he wants to experience and possess it now, before the river of time sweeps him and the possibility of him ever finding the happiness and glory he feels is his natural birthright away with it forever.  Of Time and the River is really the story of a young, enthusiastic, sometimes easily overwrought man learning to come to terms with the idea that 'home' is a place he will never actually find, that there is truly no place on earth –– the narrow-minded resort town he was originally so desperate to flee, the teeming cities of Boston and New York, foreign countries like England and France –– that can ever match the idealized vision of 'home' he carries round inside his head.

 

 

THOMAS WOLFE, 1929

 

Like many North American novelists of the early to mid-twentieth century, Wolfe was incapable of writing about anything that was not somehow directly representative of or at least closely based on his own experiences.  He had little to no concept of narrative and almost every character he created was a portrait of someone he was  personally acquainted with –– a habit which often landed him in trouble and made him so unpopular in Asheville, his home town, that he felt uncomfortable about returning there after becoming famous and scrupulously avoided doing so until 1937, the year before his death.

 

Nor was Wolfe interested, as his more marketable contemporary Ernest Hemingway was, in reducing life to its minimalist, cause-and-effect essence.  His aim as a writer was not to offer the reader neatly packaged slices of life but rather to present them with a vision of life in its entirety –– excluding nothing that made it interesting or difficult and including everything that, in his view, did.  His work is not often read these days and that's a great pity.  His was and remains an important voice in North American literature, a reminder of a time when people turned to great novels, and the great novelists who wrote them, to help them understand not only how to live their lives but also what they should be living for.

 

 

Home of THOMAS WOLFE in Asheville, NC

 

The Writer:  Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the youngest of eight children, was born in the North Carolina resort town of Asheville on 3 October 1900.  His father was the local stonecutter, carving tombstones and funeral monuments between bouts of excessive drinking, while his mother kept the family going by running a successful boarding house and shrewdly buying up much of the town's most valuable real estate as it became available.

 

Wolfe lived in his mother's boarding house as a boy, where he was exposed to many different types of people from many different walks of life, while the rest of the family shared the original family home with his father.  Wolfe was to have a lifelong love/hate relationship with Asheville, which he would call 'Altamont' in his fiction and whose citizens he would often lampoon and criticize without taking too much trouble to conceal or even partially obscure their identities.  Not that anyone in town would have been rushing to pick a fight with him.  He was so tall and physically imposing by the time he reached puberty that he had trouble fitting through doorways and was forced to write standing up, the top of a refrigerator often serving as his makeshift desk.

 

Wolfe was also a talented scholar, able to absorb enough Greek and Latin by the age of fifteen to win a scholarship to the University of North Carolina.  He edited the college newspaper and decided to become a playwright after taking a drama course which resulted in two of his plays being performed by the college's student theater company.  This encouraged him to apply for a post-graduate course in play writing being taught at Harvard University by Professor George Pierce Baker.  (Eugene O'Neill, who was at this time virtually inventing modern North American theater all by himself with cutting edge dramas like The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie, was a former pupil of Baker's.)  Wolfe was admitted to the course and left for Boston in 1920, where he stayed for the next three years, writing plays that failed to spark the interest of even one Broadway producer.  In 1924, realizing that he could better express what he wanted to say about life on the page than the stage, he quit his part-time job as an English instructor at New York University and sailed for Europe with the aim of transforming himself into a novelist.

 

He remained in Europe for most of 1925, visiting England, France, Switzerland and Germany while frantically compiling material for what, four years later, would become his first published novel.  (Wolfe loved Germany and was very disturbed, on his second visit there in 1936, to see what Hitler and his SA brownshirts were doing to it.)  During the voyage back to New York, he met and fell in love with Aline Bernstein, a married Jewish woman eighteen years his senior.  (She appears, virtually undisguised, as 'Esther Jack' in Of Time and the River.)  They had a passionate but stormy affair –– Wolfe, like his father before him, was by this time a routinely heavy drinker –– which lasted five years, during which time Aline supported her young lover financially and did everything possible to encourage and promote his work.  Wolfe returned to Europe in 1926, where he began working steadily on the novel he had now decided to call O Lost.  It was this long unwieldy manuscript which eventually found its way to the publishing house of Charles Scribners Sons and to the desk of its most astute editor, Maxwell Perkins –– the man who had discovered F Scott Fitzgerald and also been responsible for publishing Ernest Hemingway's debut novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).

 

Perkins soon realized that O Lost was a work of genius but one that would never be commercially successful because it was much too verbose to appeal to the so-called 'average' reader.  He asked Wolfe to cut the novel, which Wolfe reluctantly did, and went on to publish it in October 1929 under the new, more evocative title of Look Homeward, Angel.

 

THOMAS WOLFE, 1937

 

Following his final break with Aline Bernstein, Wolfe spent the next four years traveling, drinking and writing an even longer multi-volume novel he referred to as The October Fair.  Perkins liked the novel but, worried again that it was too long to sell in a market so badly affected by the Depression, again urged Wolfe to pare down his manuscript, which Scribners subsequently published in 1935 as Of Time and the River.  Although the book became Wolfe's only American bestseller, it was something of an empty victory for the novelist, who felt that much of his best and most affecting writing had been needlessly deleted or unnecessarily tampered with by Perkins.  This effectively ended their working relationship and saw Wolfe leave the house of Scribner to sign a new contract with the rival firm of Harper and Row.

 

Sadly, Wolfe did not live long enough to see his third and fourth novels through the presses.  (The Web and the Rock appeared in 1939, with You Can't Go Home Again following it into bookstores one year later.)  In 1938 he left New York to make his first trip west, giving his manuscripts to his new editor at Harper and Row for safekeeping while he was gone.  He caught what was originally diagnosed as bronchial pneumonia in Seattle and spent three weeks in hospital, where his condition was eventually re-diagnosed –– correctly this time –– as tuberculosis of the brain.  Although he was operated on by the best neurosurgeon in the United States it was too late.  The disease had spread too far and he died several weeks later, on 15 September 1938, without ever regaining consciousness, although not before Max Perkins received a final heartfelt letter from him in which he acknowledged the vital contributions the editor had made to both his life and his work.

 

Charles Scribners Sons first US edition, 1935

 

Wolfe was a major influence on many of the writers who followed him even though his reputation had begun to fall into serious decline by the mid-1940s as the vogue for lyricism gave way to a new, post-war demand for 'unpoetic' realism.  Nevertheless, it is doubtful that Jack Kerouac would have written his first novel The Town and The City (1950) or that James Jones would have written his first unpublished novel They Shall Inherit The Laughter (1944-1947) or gone on to publish his bestselling masterpiece From Here To Eternity (1951) had they not had the example of Thomas Wolfe and Look Homeward, Angel to serve as their guide and inspiration.  (Jones and Wolfe even shared an editor in Max Perkins prior to the untimely death of Perkins in June 1947.)  Wolfe also influenced writers as different from him, and from each other, as Ray Bradbury, Pat Conroy, Robert Cormier and Betty Smith, author of the popular 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit THE THOMAS WOLFE SOCIETY, a North American organization which publishes The Thomas Wolfe Review, a subscription funded scholarly journal examining '…all aspects of Wolfe’s career, criticism, bibliography, biography, and in general, news of interest to readers of Wolfe.'

 

 

 

http://www.thomaswolfe.org/

 

 

A biography by DAVID HERBERT DONALD titled Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe was published by Little, Brown in 1987 and remains widely available, as does Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life by TED MITCHELL which appeared in 1997.

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 11 August 2021

 

The Write Advice 016: NORA EPHRON

NORA EPHRON

1941–2012

 

Reading is everything.  Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.  Reading makes me smarter.  Reading gives me something to talk about later on.  Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.  Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.  Reading is grist.  Reading is bliss. 

I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being A Woman (2006)




I hate adjectives.  I also hate similies and metaphors, just can't do them, never have been able to…The problem, though, is how to do without adjectives.  If you write about food, you can't really do without them; but if you do with them, you run the risk of writing sentences like 'The fish was juicy but the sauce was lumpy,' or 'The sauce was creamy but the veal was stringy,' or, to sum up, 'The noun was (complimentary adjective) but the other noun was (uncomplimentary adjective).' 

Heartburn (1983)




Use the link below to read the obituary of writer, journalist and director NORA EPHRON who died of leukaemia on 26 June 2012:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/nora-ephron-prolific-author-and-screenwriter-dies-at-age-71/2012/06/26/gJQAMOtN5V_story.htm
 
 

 

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