Crouch - Considering genius: writings on jazz

My interest in jazz began as a boy while growing up in my hometown of Los Angeles, where I was born in 1945. My mother had many old 78-RPM recordings of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller. It was in the middle fifties and the sound of jazz was rarely heard anywhere other than in the homes of record collectors and the clubs where musicians earned their livings in the underground world of the night life; for the most part, people listened to rhythm and blues. I did not become aware of jazz in its contemporary and popular style until high school, because Lou Donaldson was on the jukebox at Miss Harriss, where everyone went to buy hamburgers after Jefferson High School let out. The hamburgers were sold by a monstrously large woman who had a giant mole on her nose and probably could have balanced a glass of water on her backside with no difficulty. She took orders, served the burgers, and collected the money with such arrogance that the salt on the meat seemed an extension of her personality.

I believe Blues Walk and The Masquerade Is Over were often played by Bubble-Up, a track star, ladies man, and serious rumbler if the occasion called for it. Bubble-Up was one of those young men who always seemed to know what was happening and he could even pass for twenty-one when he wanted. This meant that he even mentioned, while smoking a Salem cigarette, that he and his boys had gone to Hollywood, where he saw Miles Daviss band and the band of John Coltrane, whom I had heard referred to by an older jazz fan as Johnny Coltrane.

Before I was out of high school I had started a jazz record club to which we would bring our recordings, listen to them, and discuss what we thought we were hearing. My homeroom teacher, who was also the choir director, sponsored the club and she would be there as we played our records and discussed them. She was a big-legged white woman with tobacco stains on her teeth and, for all of her sophistication, such terrible taste in clothes that she seemed always on the way to an audition for the part of an eccentric. I remember her mentioning the great recording of Black and Tan Fantasy that had just been made by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, which she always played at the end of a semester of her music appreciation class. For that classs conclusion she borrowed CharlesMingus Presents Charles Mingus from me in order to discuss what she thought was the remarkable manner in which the bassist and drummer Dannie Richmond varied time and tempo on All The Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freuds Wife Was Your Mother.

At that point I was not really a fan of Armstrong or Ellington, though I had become enamored of Ellingtons music through an album that my mother owned. It was In a Mellotone. I was taken most by the mutes and the power of Ben Webster, the satin lyricism of Johnny Hodges, and the deep feeling of Ivie Anderson.

My mother was quite a handsome woman who had inherited Indian blood from her mother by way of a Choctaw whom her great grandfather had married in Mississippi some time after jumping ship. He was, before taking his leave, working on a Portuguese vessel that took him into its employ during a visit to his native Madagascar. His ship was in America during the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863 and he later told his progeny that the first thing he heard was the sound of those big guns going off. Moms was proud of the fact that she was often mistaken for an Asian Indian and she loved Ivie Andersons singing, which she had often heard at the Elks Club on Central Avenue when the great Dukes band came to Los Angeles. But, alas, she dismissed Anderson as startlingly homely, no matter how good she sounded. Yes, she could be competitive with other women and contemptuous of those she considered less than attractive, a tendency that remained in place until the very end of her life.