[Dixielandjazz] Strippers & Jazz Joints

[dingle at baldwin-net.com]

Charles Suhor wrote:

>
> 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 happen the only repiste form C&W or early 
> R&Bing 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)
>
>
>
>
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When driving at night to get to the next town after a one-nighter in a 
sting of endless single engagement with several bands, Chuck Cabot and 
later Ted Weems,
the only relief from the usual twang and whine radio music was a live 
shot from N.O. with the Al Belletto Sextette, playing some  fine charts 
in the relative style of Shorty Rogers or Dave Pell -- but with a little 
live perfomance zing. Loved the band and the memory of that fine group 
still lives on years later.
Thanks for mentioning Al in your post. In years where a good share of 
nearly 90,000 miles a year of one-nighters was spent within range of  
the clear channel
New Orleans AM  riding in Texas, Oklahoma, La, and surrounding midwest 
and mid-south stops, this band's broadcasts were like a good massage of 
the soul.
We drove on at night since jumps were sometimes 300 and more miles apart 
and we could arrive, check in a motel and get a good span of sleep 
before putting on the wool worsted tuxes and doing it all over agian. 
For years I thought of it as doing my stay in Hell paid for in advance. 
Somehow, in thinking back, it wasn't all so bad at that. At least I had 
great chops!!
Don Ingle