[Dixielandjazz] What or Who to discuss

[Charlie Hooks]

on 7/13/02 11:11 PM, Don Gumpert at dongumpert@cox.net wrote:

> You mean, like the night we had a session after hours at a club I was
> playing in during the Gaslight Square era?  Several musician friends stopped
> by - Charlie Venura, Gene Krupa, Barrett Deems, Ray Brown (bass), Frank &
> Freddie Assunto, etc.

    Which club was this, Don?  Near Olive and Boyle?  I was in the English
Department at Southern Illinois University, the Alton campus just across the
river, while the Edwardsville campus was being built from 1958 through 1961,
when I returned to Michigan.  The Crystal Palace was going in those years
with Fran and Jay Landesman writing things and producing things (before they
fled to Spain to beat a tax rap).  I first saw (beg ital) The Nervous Set
there, with Fran Landesman's words to Tommy Wolf's "Spring Can Really Hang
You Up The Most" before it opened in New York.  Everyone knew early on that
"Spring....Most" would be a standard.

    Across the street was a band led by the great black Sousaphone player,
Singleton Palmer, playing his ass off.  Then back across the street again
was a clarinet virtuoso whose name I really can't recall, but whose
"favorite hobby..drinkin'..." I can recall clearly.  Help me out here...a
good player, good showman, quite admirable.  A couple of buildings south of
the Crystal Palace...  Somebody out there knows this guy, and he deserves
mentioning.    

    Those were good years, good fun.  [I wasn't playing professionally just
then, having stopped awhile to attend to academic business.  I returned to
Ann Arbor the year before Dan Havens, my close friend back at Michigan,
arrived in Edwardsville.  Now there is a bunch of memories--just ask him!
We founded the Boll Weevil Jass Band (featuring Street Parades, Funerals,
Parties, and Dances) back in Ann Arbor about 1954, with Havens/Hooks/
Montgomery/Teachout/ Shannahan/ a white drummer from the Ed School and a
black banjo player from the business college, neither of whom could play.]

    But those years of the Gaslight Square, Olive and Boyle, Era:  arguably
the very last of the great OKOM music in that most OKOM of cities: St.
Louis.  Boy! I'm proud to have been there!  I was lucky, that's all.

Charlie