Jazz? Swing? It's Ragtime

In tall and feathery words, an ecstatic esthete in the New Republic called it "New York's most important musical event of several decades." The music of Bunk Johnson was not as good as all that, but by last week it had become Manhattan's undiscovered hot jazz sensation of the year.

Four nights a week, in a barren, gym-like hall called Stuyvesant Casino on Manhattan's tawdry Lower East Side, Bunk and his six fellow jazzmen from New Orleans gave out with rocking hymns like When the Saints Go Marching In, drum-heavy parade music like High Society and Maryland, My Maryland, and the quick-paced I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate ("she shakes like jelly on a plate"). Their tunes were old; their playing was steady beat, banjo-plunking, authentic New Orleans--and meant to dance to. Bunk and his bandmen couldn't understand why almost no one got up to dance.

Instead, the audience of three or four hundred sat with mouths agape, listening. Mostly the audience was in its thirties: they didn't swoon and scream, like bobby-soxers; they talked about the art of it. Many had the conspiratorial smugness of insiders.

Willie ("Bunk") Johnson is a 65-year-old steel-wool-haired Negro cornetist who was a New Orleans hit 30 years ago when the great Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong was just a kid following him around, carrying his cornet, getting lessons from him. Bunk played in the sporting houses on Basin Street, in the saloons above Canal Street, and in the band wagons that rode around town with the slidehorns hanging out over the tailgate. He went barnstorming for as little as $5 a week and tips. Twelve years ago Bunk lost his teeth and gave up playing. A Pittsburgh jazz fan found him, a toothless stooped laborer in the rice fields at New Iberia, La., got him some false teeth and raised money for a horn (TIME, May 24, 1943). Said the New York Herald Tribune's highbrow critic Virgil Thomson: "[Bunk] is the greatest master of blues or off-pitch notes ... an artist of delicate imagination."

Clarinetist George Lewis, 45, who stops the show with long cadenzas that few contemporary jazz clarinetists could match, has been working as a longshoreman in New Orleans about five days a month-- when the coffee boats come in. Trombonist Jim Robinson, 53, a crack tailgate man (he calls it "cellar-playing") worked in a New Orleans shipyard during the war. His last job: picking up nuts & bolts. Drummer Warren ("Baby") Dodds, a New Orleans alumnus, played drums for 20 years in Chicago, helped teach such top drummers as Gene Krupa, George Wettling, Ray Bauduc, Dave Tough, and quit steady work because it gave him high blood pressure.

Together, without rehearsals, they go through a nightly repertory of about 20 old pieces, along with an occasional unfortunate stab at such contemporary favorites as Bell Bottom Trousers. If the audience--or the band itself--likes a number, Bunk plays it again, sometimes a third time, each version entirely different. Bunk calls their style of playing ragtime ("they call it jazz, swing, they change the name. It's ragtime").

Last week the two white jazz aficionados who brought Bunk to Manhattan (and have barely broken even on their investment) rented the hall for six weeks. Bunk signed a recording contract with Decca. Bunk Johnson, at 65, was apparently about to discover that there was money in his music--whatever the longhairs wanted to call it.

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