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| 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.
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!'.
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| JACK TEAGARDEN, c 1928 |
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).
1929
& 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.
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| 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.
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.
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…
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.
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