Those Old Faces

Chicago's jazz fans last week were in blue heaven. After years of moaning that all their local boys had fled to the fleshpots of two coasts for fame & fortune, the jazzbos had all come home to blow.

Cornetist Jimmy MacPartland, who sparked the jazz revival in a smoke-filled joint in the Loop called the Brass Rail Theater Bar (TIME, May 5), had moved to a new Loop bar, and taken his followers along, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Out on Chicago's bleak Northwest Side, Louis Armstrong had blown in town and out again, with his new sextet. Those who knew their way around the neon wilderness of the Negro South Side could still sometimes find Jimmy Yancey and Albert Ammons pounding out noisy boogie in a couple of dingy cafes.

The best jazz of all was to be heard in a basement club on the Near North Side called Jazz Ltd. There the big name was grizzled old Soprano Saxman Sidney Bechet (TIME, March 31), whose last club engagement in Chicago was at the Deluxe Cafe in 1918, when he came out of New Orleans' Storyville after the whorehouses were shut down during World War I. Old Sidney, who had recently been favoring one side of his mouth because of an infected tooth, sounded all the better for a new store tooth. Playing alongside him was a trombonist named Munn Ware, whom Chicagoans consider the best new horn in the business.

In a newly renovated cellar club called the Blue Note (formerly Lipp's Lower Level), the big names were a couple of refugees from Manhattan. New York's Swing Street (52nd) and Greenwich Village were in the doldrums: many of the honky-tonk joints there were billing shows like Burlesquer Lois De Fee's "Rumba A-peel." Muggsy Spanier, who looks like a waterfront Noel Coward, and Trombonist Miff Mole, who looks like a middle-aged dentist, were playing music that had a lot more drive to it than it had had at Nick's in the Village.

Last week Muggsy closed his baggy eyes and rolled around low in Royal Garden Blues, with the sharp, brittle staccato that identifies all "Chicago brass." (Once when a name bandleader asked him to play high, Muggsy growled: "Aw, go get a piccolo player.") Explained one jazz fan: "Muggsy's from the South Side. He plays best at home."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.