[Dixielandjazz] Strippers & Jazz Joints

[Charles Suhor]

On Feb 19, 2005, at 3:16 PM, George Thurmond wrote:

>             Any other of you  dirty old men happen to remember Lili 
> Cristine
> (The Cat Girl) who entertained us back in the '50's at Leon Prima"s 
> 500 Club
> on Bourbon Street?

Yes--both Al Belletto and my brother Don played clarinet and sax in the 
pit band for Lily Christine at the 500 Club in the '50s. Below is a 
description of some of the strip joints and jazz in New Orleans during 
that era.--Charlie Suhor

"In postwar New Orleans, striptease clubs were sites of both
employment and after-hours jam sessions for early modernists.  Most of 
the
clubs, aptly called strip joints, were a sorry mess.  To understand 
this we
must beam back imaginatively to the cultural milieu and physical
environment of the late 1940s.  In recent years we have grown 
accustomed to
partially or totally nude waitresses and dancers in supposedly
sophisticated, even posh, settings for middle class and wealthy patrons.
The contemporary idea that nice folks will frequently stare at bare 
boobs
during a power lunch or that lap dancing is okay as an occasional lark
would have incomprehensible to all but a few safely closeted 
intellectuals
in New Orleans of the forties.  Yes, a solid citizen might take 
out-of-town
friends to a strip club under the guise of slumming or seeing how the
wicked and wretched live.  But there was no patina of urbanity or
justification by reference to consenting adults or alternative 
lifestyles.

"The settings were typically dingy and the dancing artless.  Strippers
disrobed while walking arhthymically across the stage, embellishing the
stroll with bumps and grinds.  B-girls and prostitutes worked the dark,
ill-smelling rooms, soliciting watered-down drinks and sometimes 
"rolling"
hapless customers (i.e., robbing them after drugging or clobbering 
them).
A variety of narcotics was available, and they took their toll on
musicians, entertainers, and prostitutes.

"At the turn of the decade a few clubs aspired to the dubious status of
classy exotic dance nitery.  On the theory that gauche is a step up from
sordid, they featured better-known strippers or those who had a
gimmick--Candy Barr, Lily Christine (the Cat Girl), Evangeline (the 
Oyster
Girl--the slimy mollusks sliding seductively down her body), Kalantan,
Allouette LeBlanc (who twirled tassels that were affixed to pasties), 
Blaze
Starr (Governor Earl K. Long's mistress), and Stormy, whose success led 
to
a follow-up act, Stormy's Mother.  Only in New Orleans: in the
squeaky-clean fifties, the Sho'Bar had a radio show in which 
comedian/emcee
Lenny Gale touted the club's strippers and vulgarian red-hot-momma 
Carrie
Finnell with the energy and aplomb of today's infomercial hosts.

"Not every strip club hired jazz musicians, of course, but among those 
where
modern jazz was played behind dancers or at after-hours sessions were 
the
Gunga Den, Prima's 500 Club, French Opera House, Old Opera House, Puppy
House (later called the Sho'Bar), Stormy's Casino Royal (Iater Dan's 
Pier
600, then Al Hirt's), Club Slipper (later, the Dream Room).  Another 
club,
the French Casino, was away from the river on Canal Street between 
Rampart
and Claiborne, near the Texas Lounge jazz club and the Brass Rail, the
early rhythm and blues club where Paul Gayten held forth.

"For a variety of reasons, modern jazz was acceptable accompaniment 
behind
the dancers and inbetween introductions and chasers for the comics and
other post-vaudeville acts at the strip clubs.  There was seldom any
attempt to depict the stripping as  a species of terpsichorean art.  It
mattered little. then, what the background music was like, so long as 
the
drummer caught the bumps and grinds.  There was an aptness of sorts in 
the
very unfamiliarity of the new music.  Its heavily accented phrases and
"weird" harmonies became part of the decidedly countercultural, 
borderline
verboten ambience.  In the absence of musical freedom of any sort in 
most
other venues, many modern jazz artists chose to make a living in the 
clubs.

"Jazz-for-strippers has some built-in musical problems, of course.  Some
dancers and club owners allowed little or no freedom.  They wanted to 
hear
the clichés of exotic pit band music, e.g., a slurpingly seductive sax, 
a
growling trumpet--as if the customers were actually listening.  And as
anyone who has ever seen a classic strip show knows, the  drummer's 
role is
inherently invasive.  The music, whatever the style, is pitted against 
rim
shots, rolls, cymbal crashes, and tom-tom and bass drum thrusts that 
must
be coordinated with the dancer's gyrations, all without losing the basic
beat. Percussively, a challenge. Musically, a triple-forte nuisance.

"But not a stopper. Amazingly, jazz accompanists were relentless and 
could often play
wonderfully amidst the random triple-forte percussion accents.  It
appeared to me that they were not so much mentally blocking out the din 
as
visualizing it as an asymmetrical phenomenon that was part of the
performance, like the Kafka tale where the regular disruption of a 
ceremony
by a leopard was handled by making the leopard a part of the event.

"Among the early modern jazz musicians who worked at the strip clubs 
were Al
Belletto, Mouse Bonati, Sam Butera, Benny Clement, Fred Crane, Tony
D'Amore, Johnny Elgin, Bill Evans, Don Guidry, Pete Kowchak, Black Mike 
Lala, Tony
Mitchell, Brew Moore, Bruce Lippincott, Joe (Cheeks) Mandry, Joe Morton,
Fred Nesbitt, Earl Palmer, Joe Pass, Bill Patey, Chick Power, Pete
Monteleone, Mike Serpas, Frank Strazerri, Don Suhor, Bob Teeters, and 
Louis
Timken.

"Timken remembers hearing Mississippian Brew Moore (later one of Woody
Herman's Four Brothers saxmen) at the Gunga Den in the late 1940s, with 
New
Jersey-born Joe Pass (known, among other things, for his later 
recordings
with Oscar Peterson) running a bass line on guitar in the lower 
register to
compensate for lack of a string bass.

"Pass is cited by Spedale as stating that he stayed in New Orleans
for ten months in 1949 to play for strippers because after 3 a.m., "we
could jam, and that's what kept me here . . . . In 1949 there was as 
much
good jazz and good players happening here as in, say, Chicago; 'cause 
you
could live here relatively cheap and you could play--all night and all
day!" Tenor saxophist Jerry Boquet, who as a leader hired players like 
Moore and Mandry, recalls integrated jam
sessions in 1948-49, broken up by the gendarmes, only to move down the 
street and start again at another club."

 From "Jazz in New Orleans--the Postwar Years Through 1970" by Charles 
Suhor (Scarecrow Press, 2001)