[Dixielandjazz] Horn of plenty - Bobby Hackett

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here's some insight about jazz and jazz musicians from a 60 year old  
interview with Bobby Hackett.
Shatters some illusions about professional jazzmen. Note the last 2  
paragraphs.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

 From Time Magazine - Aug 23, 1948
In an ABC studio on the third floor of Manhattan's RCA Building, the  
Candid Microphone show had just gone off the air. The boys in the  
studio orchestra slowly began to pack up their instruments before  
heading for home or a Sixth Avenue bar. One man, a short, slender  
trumpeter with a tiny mustache, was in a hurry. Robert Leo Hackett  
stowed away his shining horn, flung out a hurried good night and left.  
Twenty minutes later he slipped into Nick's famed Greenwich Village  
jazz-and-gin mill, and stepped to the leader's place on the stand  
where five other musicians were waiting.
For six weeks, Bobby Hackett had been doing his own double-in-brass.  
He went through his routine studio chores with easy, sweet-playing  
confidence. Then he went to work downtown, playing the most melodic  
hot trumpet in the land. So far the pace was telling on neither the  
man nor his music.

Winter Week. In the middle of the hot weather slump, when 52nd Street  
nightclub owners looked glumly at rows of empty tables and cried the  
blues, Nick's joint on West Tenth Street was having what the surprised  
musicians themselves called a "winter week." The iron-man stunt was  
giving Bobby (who, like all hot jazzmen, is an authority on hard  
times) some memorable paydays. ABC pays him $165 a week for a 40-hour  
week for 20 hours of actual playing. Grace Rongetti, Nick's widow,  
pays better than that, complaining only when Bobby gets tied up at the  
studio and has to send a substitute down.

Eleven years ago, Hackett, then a young (22) guitarist in Joe  
Marsala's band, dropped in at Nick's old beer-and-sawdust joint,  
played some self-taught cornet and was hired on the spot to lead the  
band in a bigger place that Nick was starting. On opening night, the  
thin, bashful kid from Providence found himself giving the downbeat to  
such hot-jazz bigwigs as Trombonist Georg Brunis, Clarinetist Pee Wee  
Russell, Guitarist Eddie Condon and powerhouse Negro Drummer Zutty  
Singleton. In the cult-ridden, vociferous world of hot jazz, Hackett  
became an overnight sensation. Erudite Manhattan jazzophiles went  
learnedly ga-ga over Hackett's musical kinship to the late great Bix  
Beiderbecke. Author Dorothy (Young Man With a Horn) Baker came night  
after night to listen and finally, to Hackett's considerable  
embarrassment, to write a moony, swoony tribute to his "dignity" in  
Vogue.

Sad Sweetness. Actually, Hackett's playing didn't show the great  
Beiderbecke's hallmarks—the exciting, edgy undertones of heat, or the  
restless, spontaneous search within a severely disciplined pattern.  
But it did show, then and last week, a beautifully clear melodic line,  
tasteful invention and a sad sweetness that tempered everything he  
played from Embraceable You to Jada.

Like most good "hot" men, Hackett has left the congenial jazz beat to  
get some of the big money paid by name bands (he played with Horace  
Heidf, Glenn Miller and Glen Gray). Like the rest he soon found that  
the music considered dreamy by dancers is strictly dreary to the men  
who have to play it night after night. But hot jazz, Hackett says, has  
been standing still for too long, clinging to the old tunes and the  
old phrasings (bebop he considers a passing fancy) : "It's not easy,  
jazz. Nothing very important has happened since Louis Armstrong. He  
played everything, and better than anybody."

Hackett has a working musician's scorn for the jazz sob sisters who  
say that the true jazzmen would rather play "pure" music in a trap.  
Sure, he says, jazz musicians have a sentimental feeling for the  
"stuff." But he is convinced that any of them who can read music (a  
lot can't) would quit jazz tomorrow for the security of a radio studio  
job. Says Hackett: "Look, a good job, clean work, regular, no  
traveling. I'd be satisfied to stay there 20 years. Nick's is a place  
you can go when things get tough, but between jazz and the studio,  
I'll take the studio."