Jazzmen, Armed Services Edition, 1939, Edited by Frederic Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith
New Orleans
New Orleans
“Callin’ our chillun home”
A FANTASTIC and wonderful city. A city with a hundred faces. The hard face for commerce and the soft face for making love. Scratching figures on the back of an envelope where the girl with the deep dark eyes waits on counter. Smell of burnt coffee and sound of ships. The deep face for a sad life and the pinched face for poverty. Maching, singing, laughing. The silver and copper laugh of the prostitute, and the toothless chuckle of the old man who remembers Buddy Bolden of Bogalusa.
Every writer makes his own city. The city of fine living and free spirit, woven into the dream of a poet. The city of brass bands and military marches, grand balls and rowdy lakefront parties. The city of Lulu White and Mahogany Hall, Josie Arlington and the palm tree growing crazily there in a vacant lot. The thin young man who drinks too much, looking at Congo Square, squeezing the last acrid sweetness out of sight and sound.
Come on and hear
Come on and hear
This is our city, not so far from Madame John’s legacy, but carrying with it another legacy, the dark human cargo of a Yankee slaver, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, raising a thin glass above a fringed cuff, drinking the drink and shattering the glass into tiny tinkling fragments. Bamboula and tinkling glass. Flat voices of invitation behind shuttered cribs. Canal street murky yellow with night, her standards the Carnival colors, symbols of transient ownership, like a mistress smiling in turn at her lovers. Up Rampart beyond Canal. That’s Uptown. That’s Bolden territory. Perdido by the gas works. Maybe there used to be a cypress swamp there but nobody remembers now. Everybody remembers Bolden and his barber shop and his scandal sheet and his ragtime band, playing a new music that didn’t have a name of its own. (They say the word for it came from Chicago “down around 22nd”; they say it came from an Elizabethean slang word meaning hit it hard and from an American slang word meaning it don’t mean a thing but it costs real money around 22nd.)
Don’t look for the eagle on the Eagle Saloon. And don’t look for Masonic hall because it’s a vacant lot. But listen hard some night, listen hard at the corner of Rampart and Perdido and you’ll hear a whacky horn playing an uptown rag, way out and way off, filling out the tune. That would be King Bolden, calling his children.
If you want to know why ragtime (the first) wasn’t jazz, and why uptown rags weren’t just a new ragtime but had to wait for a trip up the river to get a name out of the barrel, well, listen to that horn. There’s a little of it in Louis and in Joe Oliver and in Bunk. Maybe if you listen hard (standing on the corner of Rampart and Perdido where the old Eagle sign blew down one night) you’ll see what Bunk meant when he played that way, and what Louis meant when he played that way, and what Buddy Bolden meant what he said,”You can’t play without the king.”
Maybe you’d go down Perdido where there aren’t any sidewalks, even today, and where the battered houses squat in patterns of poverty, with a hedge or a flower or a puny palm tree out front, trying to say what poverty can’t say…
I knows how to write!
And maybe you don’t think this has much to do with jazz, or the city we’d like to build for you. But if you want to go with the saints to the funeral (to a slow march) you want to know where he lived and died, don’t you, and what he was up against because his skin was black or white or maybe a shade in between? You want to know why he came from the beat side of town (but wasn’t beat) to play down in Storyville where they wanted the blues slow and mean and the rags fast and dirty, to play for a gangster out at Pontchartrain (the big shot from Chicago who threw the dough around), to play in the brass bands Carnival day and on the wagons Sunday night.
Maybe you’ll turn back, see the slave ships unload their flesh-and-blood cargo, see the trickle from the plantation country...free bewildered black skin, coffee skin, saffron skin, coming to the hard city of commerce, soft city of song, martial city of music, dream city of silver and copper laughter. And you’ll find the answer, you’ll know why it just began there, not somewhere else.
You have to think of New Orleans the band city or it will be hard to understand why it couldn’t have happened on the levee at Memphis, on the waterfront of Savannah, or on the Gulf Coast with the deep, sobbing blues. You think of the band city, the opera, the funerals and the balls, you think of the Creole Negroes:
“Jazz came from uptown.”
“It was that raggedy uptown stuff.”
Elsewhere they forgot the music that they had brought with them, and they forgot the words. In Carolina all that would be left would be the blues and a children’s nonsense game with some words that might have come over in the hold of a Yankee clipper or might have been made up out of the sharp phonetics of children at play.
In New Orleans you could still hear the bamboula on Congo Square when Buddy Bolden cut his first chorus on cornet. You could still hear the bamboula and you couldn’t see a note of written music. Whatever he learned he put away when he started off on the real tune. It was something like Bunk: If you put down what Bunk played, he would say, do you think I’m a fool, I can’t play that!
Cajun or Creole, black or white, the others heard. They heard because their lives were part of that life, and because the music didn’t draw a color line. White or black or a shade between, they listened hard when the Bolden Band pointed its horns towards Lincoln Park, because that was the King.
Every writer makes his own city. The city of fine living and free spirit, woven into the dream of a poet. The city of brass bands and military marches, grand balls and rowdy lakefront parties. The city of Lulu White and Mahogany Hall, Josie Arlington and the palm tree growing crazily there in a vacant lot. The thin young man who drinks too much, looking at Congo Square, squeezing the last acrid sweetness out of sight and sound.
Come on and hear
Come on and hear
This is our city, not so far from Madame John’s legacy, but carrying with it another legacy, the dark human cargo of a Yankee slaver, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, raising a thin glass above a fringed cuff, drinking the drink and shattering the glass into tiny tinkling fragments. Bamboula and tinkling glass. Flat voices of invitation behind shuttered cribs. Canal street murky yellow with night, her standards the Carnival colors, symbols of transient ownership, like a mistress smiling in turn at her lovers. Up Rampart beyond Canal. That’s Uptown. That’s Bolden territory. Perdido by the gas works. Maybe there used to be a cypress swamp there but nobody remembers now. Everybody remembers Bolden and his barber shop and his scandal sheet and his ragtime band, playing a new music that didn’t have a name of its own. (They say the word for it came from Chicago “down around 22nd”; they say it came from an Elizabethean slang word meaning hit it hard and from an American slang word meaning it don’t mean a thing but it costs real money around 22nd.)
Don’t look for the eagle on the Eagle Saloon. And don’t look for Masonic hall because it’s a vacant lot. But listen hard some night, listen hard at the corner of Rampart and Perdido and you’ll hear a whacky horn playing an uptown rag, way out and way off, filling out the tune. That would be King Bolden, calling his children.
If you want to know why ragtime (the first) wasn’t jazz, and why uptown rags weren’t just a new ragtime but had to wait for a trip up the river to get a name out of the barrel, well, listen to that horn. There’s a little of it in Louis and in Joe Oliver and in Bunk. Maybe if you listen hard (standing on the corner of Rampart and Perdido where the old Eagle sign blew down one night) you’ll see what Bunk meant when he played that way, and what Louis meant when he played that way, and what Buddy Bolden meant what he said,”You can’t play without the king.”
Maybe you’d go down Perdido where there aren’t any sidewalks, even today, and where the battered houses squat in patterns of poverty, with a hedge or a flower or a puny palm tree out front, trying to say what poverty can’t say…
I knows how to write!
And maybe you don’t think this has much to do with jazz, or the city we’d like to build for you. But if you want to go with the saints to the funeral (to a slow march) you want to know where he lived and died, don’t you, and what he was up against because his skin was black or white or maybe a shade in between? You want to know why he came from the beat side of town (but wasn’t beat) to play down in Storyville where they wanted the blues slow and mean and the rags fast and dirty, to play for a gangster out at Pontchartrain (the big shot from Chicago who threw the dough around), to play in the brass bands Carnival day and on the wagons Sunday night.
Maybe you’ll turn back, see the slave ships unload their flesh-and-blood cargo, see the trickle from the plantation country...free bewildered black skin, coffee skin, saffron skin, coming to the hard city of commerce, soft city of song, martial city of music, dream city of silver and copper laughter. And you’ll find the answer, you’ll know why it just began there, not somewhere else.
You have to think of New Orleans the band city or it will be hard to understand why it couldn’t have happened on the levee at Memphis, on the waterfront of Savannah, or on the Gulf Coast with the deep, sobbing blues. You think of the band city, the opera, the funerals and the balls, you think of the Creole Negroes:
“Jazz came from uptown.”
“It was that raggedy uptown stuff.”
Elsewhere they forgot the music that they had brought with them, and they forgot the words. In Carolina all that would be left would be the blues and a children’s nonsense game with some words that might have come over in the hold of a Yankee clipper or might have been made up out of the sharp phonetics of children at play.
In New Orleans you could still hear the bamboula on Congo Square when Buddy Bolden cut his first chorus on cornet. You could still hear the bamboula and you couldn’t see a note of written music. Whatever he learned he put away when he started off on the real tune. It was something like Bunk: If you put down what Bunk played, he would say, do you think I’m a fool, I can’t play that!
Cajun or Creole, black or white, the others heard. They heard because their lives were part of that life, and because the music didn’t draw a color line. White or black or a shade between, they listened hard when the Bolden Band pointed its horns towards Lincoln Park, because that was the King.
Old Willy Cornish said the crowd would be over there, with Robichaux, and Bolden’s Band would start right out like the killers they were. You could see a glow on his very dark cheek and the soft voice seemed to come from back there, wherever his eyes were. He said that was
Callin’ our chillun home.
Charles Edward Smith
