Nice Jumps

As the train puffed in, Nice's station shook with yelling and whistling. Flop-coated French zazous (hepcats) raced alongside. France's best "jazz hot" band let go a welcoming riff as big-eyed Louis Armstrong and his U.S. delegation stepped down.

Nice last week was holding the first International Jazz Festival. Jazz fans from all over Western Europe (including G.I.s given special leave from Germany) flocked to it. In Nice's plum-plush opera house, they heard jazz from seven nations, including three brands of U.S. stuff. Ex-Ellington Trumpeter Rex Stewart and his sextet, garish in grey-green homespun and corn-yellow ties, set the joint jumping. But when Louis & his boys/- burned a way through Rockin' Chair, St. Louis Blues and That's My Desire (with 200-lb. Velma Middleton rocking the lyrics), the fans really got what they came for. A forest of microphones carried the music over the French national radio, the BBC, Swiss. Belgian and Monte Carlo stations, the Finnish, Polish and Swedish networks. When the sessions in the opera house were over for the night, players from all the bands swarmed into Nice's nightclubs to play jam sessions until dawn.

By midweek, the U.S. jazzbos -- Satchmo, Stewart and Milton ("Mezz") Mezzrow -- had won the wildest ovations. By comparison, the polite jazz of the Swiss, the Belgians (who went in for bebop) and the British got only polite applause. But the festival's local wonder was an un known young (24) French clarinetist named Claude Luter. When Claude blew out Canal Street Blues and High Society and one of his own called Abouche, sentimental Drummer Baby Dodds (whose late brother Johnny played clarinet with King Oliver) said tearfully: "That kid is terrific. I'd almost think Johnny was playing." Shy, sandy-haired Clarinetist Luter, in fact, learned jazz during the war by listening to old King Oliver records.

Luter, whose band plays for free drinks in smoky student hangouts in Paris' Latin Quarter, was the prize find of French Jazz Pedant Hugues (Le Jazz Hot) Panassie, who helped organize the festival. Panassie had been denounced in angry manifestoes for picking an unknown like Claude Luter to represent French jazz. Uninvited French big-timers like Violinist Stephane Grappelly (Quintette de Hot Club de France), after popping off in the Communist press, grumpily consented to appear at the festival's closing session.

At week's end, with Nice already drunk with jazz, the international festival reached a shattering finale in Nice's Hotel Negresco with all of the bands blaring in turn. (Satchmo Armstrong was presented with a Sevres vase sent by France's President Vincent Auriol.)

Said a white-haired usherette at the Nice opera house, preparing for next week's opera season, "It will be good to get back to oldtime tranquillity. My head is like a swollen squash."

/- Trombonist Jack Teagarden, Clarinetist Barney Bigard, Pianist Earl Hines, Drummer Sid Catlett, Bull Fiddler Arvell Shaw.

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