Word: spanier
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...music wafting out of the examination room and down the halls at New Orleans' Ochsner Medical Center last week sounded like an import of old-time Chicago jazz, played from the heart. It was. Francis ("Muggsy") Spanier, 58, was in the room, flat on his back, swathed in surgical drapes, holding up a borrowed cornet with his free right hand as he launched, predictably, into St. Louis Blues. Next came a more or less reverent When the Saints Go Marching In, and then a throbbing medley of old familiar blues...
...Spanier's playing sounded as hot and sure as ever, but that was not what Dr. Alton Ochsner Jr. and his colleagues were interested in. They were more concerned about the inaudible signals they were receiving through the patient's draped left arm. Through one of the veins in that arm they had threaded a thin plastic tube (catheter) right into Muggsy's heart. The doctors were observing the pressure changes inside his heart while the great horn man was blowing, to see whether he could go on playing without putting too great a strain...
Having toured the U.S. women's club lecture loop, British-born Ginette Spanier, directrice of Paris' Balmain fashion house, had a few words about American women yearning to be chic. "American women are so frightened about doing the wrong thing," she said, "and sometimes you can't blame them. There are so many fashion writers in America now that the poor dears are absolutely battered by waves of instructions. That's why when I speak to them, they seem to feel they're getting the God's honest truth. And they ask the most...
...Lewis might have reached the top as a straight musician without his top hat, cane and patter. His free-riding clarinet was imitated by the young Benny Goodman, and his band gave asylum to such latter-day jazz greats as Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy Dorsey and George Brunis. His recording of St. Louis Blues sent hepcats of the '20s as far out of this world as people got in those days. But Ted was too much of a showman to stick to music. Today it is not the Lewis clarinet that people come for, but the sleepy smile...
YOUNG Benny's inspiration was the true blues that Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and dozens of other greats brought up from the South. His companions were jazz-crazy youths named Davey Tough, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, Bix Beiderbecke. Fame came to all of them; Benny copped the crown...