The Mayor of MacDougal Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

serious about music. When the first Cro-Magnon started to bang on a bone, he was probably ready to show the second Cro-Magnon how to do it. Musicians are sweet people, and if you really care about music and want to learn, they will rally to you and do what they can to help you, even if you don’t know shit from Shinola.
    Of all the older musicians, the one I remember most fondly was Clarence Williams. Clarence was originally a piano player out of New Orleans, and he had come up to New York around the time of World War I. By the early 1920s he had established himself as just about the key figure in jazz in New York, and he was well qualified for the role. He was a damn good piano player, but more than that, he was a composer and songwriter, a publisher, and what they called a “record contractor.” In those days, when a record company wanted to record some tunes, it would get hold of someone like Clarence and he would be given a budget to cut a certain number of sides. The rest was up to him: he would pick the tunes or write them himself, arrange them, pick the musicians, choose the recording studio, pay all the expenses, and whatever money was left over was his pay. Clarence arranged a lot of sessions for other people, and also plenty for himself under various names, the most famous of which was Clarence Williams and His Blue Five, a shifting group that at times included people like Louis Armstrong.

    Where Clarence really earned his place in history, though, was when the blues boom took off. Around 1920, there was a fluke hit, a thing called “Crazy Blues,” recorded by a black singer named Mamie Smith. It came out of left field and sold close to a million copies, and all the commercial record companies immediately went into feeding-frenzy mode. One of them, Okeh records, called Clarence and said, “We want one of those.” So Clarence went down south on a talent hunt and came back to New York with this hot young blues singer, and her name was Bessie Smith. Following the old rule of “finders, keepers,” Clarence became the contractor for Bessie’s early records. That meant that he not only played piano on a lot of them but got to write—and more importantly, publish—the songs, which was where the money was.
    When I knew Clarence, he was retired and had a little place on 125th Street called the Harlem Thrift Shop. It was his office and hangout—as far as I could see, he never actually sold anything out of there. All that he had in that shop was his own self and two pianos. It was a tiny place, but he squeezed the second piano in there because what he was running was a kind of clearinghouse for piano players. If some out-of-town pianist was passing through New York, he would stop by to say hello to Clarence, and of course a lot of piano players lived in the city as well. So there I was, at sixteen and seventeen years old, sitting in a corner and listening to Clarence Williams play piano duets with James P. Johnson or Willie “The Lion” Smith or Joe Sullivan, people like that. I would sit in a corner, with my eyes like saucers. I mean, I was a schmucky little kid in some ways, but I was not so dumb that I didn’t know how lucky I was.
    Clarence liked to play a game that seems to be a favorite with most composers. As far as I can figure out, its name must be “And then I wrote . . .” because it always starts with the composer playing an arpeggio, smiling at whoever is listening, and saying, “And then I wrote . . .” and going into a tune. A lot of them were pretty familiar tunes, but some were real rarities, and there were a couple that I kept in my repertoire from then on. I also heard a lot of stories, gossip, and musician talk. At the time, I found some of it pretty shocking, because these musicians were the creators and inventors of the music I loved, and it turned out that quite often they were cantankerous old curmudgeons who hated each other’s guts. For example, if you got Clarence Williams onto