Word: dixielanders
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...licorice stick, was making his way to the stand with a big white cake decked with three blue candles. He set the cake down, beckoned to a little cornetist with a droopy leprechaun face, bade him stand up and take a big bow. Francis ("Muggsy") Spanier, whom some Dixieland experts consider the best white jazz cornetist in the business,* grinned sheepishly. It had been just 30 years since Muggsy Spanier first split the smoky air of a dive in his native Chicago with a broad burst of brass...
With his fans† giving him a special anniversary hand, Muggsy and his new Dixieland band were celebrating the best way they knew how: rocking off chorus after chorus of High Society and Jazz Me Blues, right from the heart. Like many another veteran of the Chicago Dixieland era of jazz, Muggsy was riding the crest of a new wave of the old jazz...
...heyday of Dixieland and Prohibition, Chicago Gangster Dion O'Banion, the sparetime florist, used to stuff dollar bills in the bell of Muggsy's horn while he was playing. ("The more he stuffed, the sweeter the music got.") Like many another jazzbo, Muggsy drifted out of jazz into the bigger money. There were eight years with Ted Lewis' band-until "I just got tired of playing When My Baby Smiles at Me." As with many another jazzbo, there were spectacular years with John Barleycorn, until Muggsy wound up "dying" of a perforated ulcer in New Orleans...
...house of fans long to warm up. Benny gave the beat for Don't Be That Way. From then on, as Benny himself remembers it, "they were shrieking. They wanted to tear the place down." For three solid hours it went on, through One O'Clock Jump, Dixieland One-Step, I'm Comin' Virginia, Shine, Big John's Special. A roar went up after Trumpeter Harry James's first solo. There were screams after Benny's first liquid clarinet work, and Pianist Jess Stacy's five choruses in Sing, Sing, Sing...
...Washington, D. C., and met a heavy dark-haired young trombonist-pianist named Laurence J. Eanet '52. It didn't take long for them to discover two important facts about each other--that they were both starting at Harvard as freshmen that fall, and that they both loved Dixieland jazz...