Jazz Begins at 40

"Clyde," says Bandleader Turk Murphy, "is the Lawrence Welk of Dixieland jazz. His music breathes happiness and chloroform."

He was talking about Bandleader Clyde McCoy, who for years has been regarded by the cool set as perhaps the moldiest fig (jazz lingo for oldfashioned) ever to lift a trumpet. But moldy or not, Trumpeter McCoy has a sizable following, passionately devoted to the chirpy, foot-jiggling style the fans think they remember from the misty corridors of their youth. Last week, after a five-year layoff, "Clyde McCoy and His Waa Waa Dixieland Band" were winding up a successful stand at Manhattan's Roundtable before taking off on a Midwest tour, during which they expect to cash in on a burgeoning craze for facsimile Dixieland--brassy, frenetic and foursquare.

McCoy springs few surprises. A trim, energetic man at 56, he leads his seven-man band through Hot Lips, Basin Street Stomp, and other items of Dixieland "sugar stuff." The arrangements are as predictable as a TV script, and the sound is unexceptional. With his horn in his right hand and his left hand flashing an outsized diamond as he carves out the rhythms, McCoy demonstrates that he can still make a trumpet caterwaul, growl, wail, or punch out notes of brassy clarity.

Originally a trombone player, McCoy says he switched to trumpet when his trombone slide kept knocking off ladies' hats during choir practice at the Methodist Church in his home town, Portsmouth, Ohio. In the '30s, Bandleader McCoy was a consistent winner of a jazz-magazine poll labeling him "The King of Corn." The title never bothered him.

After his cross-country tours and the fabulous success of his various recordings of Hot Sugar Blues (which sold more than 5,000,000 disks), he retired wealthy in 1955, was lured back only by the new Dixieland boom.

The boom is everywhere. San Francisco now has Earl ("Fatha") Hines, Kid Ory and Marty Marsala. Chicago has Art Hodes, Bill Reinhardt, Franz Jackson and his Dixieland All-Stars, a popular and authentic group, the average age of whose members is 65. In New Orleans the big names are Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, Mike Lala. And almost anywhere the Dukes of Dixieland can be heard. "The customers," explains one jazz critic, "like to get loaded and imitate trombones."

As for the cool, modern "chamber jazz" groups, McCoy feels they are doomed, because "people want nostalgia today. I cater to the 40-year-olds who have expense accounts and memories, not to kids who buy Cokes and hot dogs."

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