Word: jazzed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though he sometimes slips into their highfalutin language, Jazzman Condon scorns the earnest critics of jazz-and once earned the gratitude of his colleagues by his cavalier attitude toward a French expert on le jazz hot. Said Eddie: "I wouldn't think of going over there and telling them how to jump on a grape...
Mother Hen to Jazz. There were good men on the bandstand: Saxman Bud Freeman; cocky, stocky Trumpeter Wild Bill Davison, who blows the horn out of the side of his mouth; zoot-suitish Clarinetist Joe (Little Sir Echo) Marsala, Drummers Dave Tough and George Wettling-all members of ragtime's Valhalla (Chicago branch) who have kept on playing jazz the old way, even after their pal Benny Goodman called it swing and made it a million dollar baby. There were no music stands or orchestrations to be seen at Eddie Condon's. "That's for organized slop...
Condon's men worked until 4 a.m. Sometimes Condon sat in, picking solemnly and matter-of-factly at his guitar. He doesn't play as much as he used to, now that he's a bandleader, but he has been around when some of the best jazz has been played. Condon acts as mother hen to as undependable a brood of gifted musicians as James Petrillo has in his roster. Eddie got them together first at Town Hall jazz concerts. They seemed willing to follow him-even when they couldn't follow everything he said...
...fellow Chicagoans: Trombonist Milfred ("Miff") Mole, Cornetist Francis Xavier ("Muggsy") Spanier, who play a half mile away, at Nick's in the Village-where Condon played until about two years ago. (Twelve blocks away, Manhattanites could hear the far more virile and exciting New Orleans Negro jazz of Cornetist Bunk Johnson-TIME, Nov. 5.) Some of Nick's parishioners were scattered among Condon's opening-night audience, lost among the celebrities and the Hoosiers. "You know, Hoosiers," explained Condon, himself the ninth child of an Indiana saloonkeeper: "the Paramount-once-a-week, glass-top-bus crowd. They...
Condon calls his new jazz temple "Town Hall with booze." ("Our music stimulates drinking. They figure in order to understand it, they got to do like the fellow playing it.") Few people, even among fellow players, follow Condon's own habits: boilermakers (whiskey with a beer chaser) at the bar and milk at home (he thinks milk will keep away ulcers...