Way Down Yonder

The pudding-faced man in the hash-slinger's hat and white starched jacket was blowing his heart into an old World War I bugle. Behind him in shirtsleeves the other musicians waited their turns, the rhythm section keeping a steady beat. Out front the 550 people who had crowded into the old New Orleans dance hall above the shoeshine parlor and magazine stand stamped and crowed; at the finish they were on their feet and yelling.

Since last October such tours de force at the Dixieland Jamborees have become a regular weekly occurrence at 116 Royal Street in New Orleans' wrought-iron and rosewood French Quarter. On Sunday afternoons the old town echoes for blocks around with the apoplectic blasts of Sam DeKemel's dented bugle,* the wailing and hiccuping of Irving Fazola's expert clarinet, the riffs and fakes of the other blowers and tooters of the band.

Nearly a year ago Dr. Edmond Souchon, socialite physician, and other solid citizen members of the New Orleans Jazz Club started occasional sessions in the old hall to revive interest in the blues and ragtime of Dixieland jazz, which had been turning almost morgue-cold in the city of its birth. They had thrown out a net for local musicians who knew the seldom-changed Dixieland repertoire, dragged in several first-rate extemporizers. Biggest catch was balloon-jowled "Faz" Fazola, who ranks with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw as a clarinet acrobat.

The dance-hall proprietors saw money in the music, decided to make the session a regular Sunday feature. They added some imitation street lamps, a little iron lace, and a New Orleans traffic court officer--oldtime Dixielander DeKemel--who started playing Tiger Rag* from his waffle wagon back around 1921, when he found it attracted customers. Then they let the public in for a dollar a head. It was not long before bobby-soxers and debs, soldiers and deckhands, sailors with their dates and a sizable contingent of prosperous middle-aged listeners were pouring in to hear how Dixieland sounded. Tourists roaming through the narrow streets of the French Quarter in search of local color came, too.

Now as the band pounds and rides its way through such oldtime New Orleans exercises as High Society, Dipper Mouth Blues and Muskrat Ramble, the audience, quickly catching the beat, usually ends each solo stomping and shouting for more. The old stuff is so powerful, claim the Dixielanders, that bop addicts who have come to sneer are overcome and stay to be converted.

*Playing Dixieland on the bugle is not easy. Sam says: "You got to have a tough lip to blow a bugle this way. You got to use your tongue, your throat and your stomach to push out those sharps & flats because you don't have any valves." *In those days, called Jack Carey.

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