The Mayor of MacDougal Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

merits and both took their positions to ridiculous extremes. The modernists were aesthetic Darwinists, arguing that jazz had to progress and that later forms must necessarily be superior to earlier ones. The traditionalists were Platonists, insisting that early jazz was “pure” and that all subsequent developments were dilutions and degenerations. This comic donnybrook dominated jazz criticism for ten or fifteen years, with neither side capable of seeing the strengths of the other, until it finally subsided and died, probably from sheer boredom. Before that point, though, a lot of otherwise sensible people had made asses of themselves. 4 I remember a friend during this period telling me that he had been on his way to some big jazz festival but had discovered that Charlie Parker was playing, and was so disgusted that he turned around and drove home. This made perfect sense to me.
    Being an adolescent, I was naturally an absolutist, so as soon as I became aware that this titanic tempest in a teapot was going down, I had to jump one way or the other. As a result, I turned my back on a lot of good music. When I was twelve or thirteen, Charlie Christian was my favorite guitarist, I had amassed a huge collection of the Benny Goodman sextet, and I listened to bebop and modern jazz. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I had come to regard all of that music as a sorry devolution from the pure New Orleans style. I was convinced, intellectually and ideologically, that the traditionalists had the better of it, and that led me to a lot of good music, but it also led me away from a lot of good music and toward a lot of truly terrible music. It was an ideological judgment rather than a musical one, and it was stupid. It turned me on to Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, but also led me to support any aggregation of toothless incompetents over Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. I gave away all my Gillespie records and acquired recordings of old New Orleans relics, many of whom had probably never been very good even in their youth and prime.
    I also switched from guitar to tenor banjo, since according to the canons of those times, guitar was not a proper instrument for a traditional jazz
band. (I have since seen pictures of the most canonical New Orleans jazz bands, such as Buddy Bolden’s, and they show guitars to have been at least as common as banjos back at the dawn of jazz, but I did not know that in 1953.) I did not like the banjo much—it clanged like some kind of wind-up toy, and I had trouble fitting my fingers on the neck—but there was a lot of pressure on me. So I switched over and quickly became one of the worst tenor banjo players on the trad scene. And to be the worst at tenor banjo, you’re really competing, because that’s a fast track. I couldn’t keep time in a bucket, I kept blowing the chord changes, and no sane jazz musician would ever have hired me, except for one thing: I had a loud voice and I didn’t mind taking vocals. A lot of people who played jazz at that point—and some even today—thought that taking vocals was infra dignitatem: a real jazz musician didn’t sing. (Just as a real jazz musician didn’t dance.) Exceptions were made for a few of the older guys, like Jack Teagarden or Louis Armstrong, but a lot of people stopped taking Mose Allison seriously as a pianist the minute he opened his mouth.
    In addition, working in clubs that had no sound systems of any kind, anyone who wanted to be a singer had to be able to make do without a mike. I had a very loud voice—as some wit remarked at the time, “When Van Ronk takes a vocal, the hogs are restless for miles around”—and if the key was right, I could cut through a seven-piece band. (That was the standard trad outfit: trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass, drums, and of course a banjo. If there was a little extra money, they would sometimes add a second trumpet, because a lot of those guys liked the Yerba Buena’s