[Dixielandjazz] FW: Franz Jackson

Mon May 26 02:06:13 PDT 2008

 Yves Francois remembered Franz Jackson:
<http://keepswinging.blogspot.com/2008/05/franz-jackson-remembered-1.html> (
or short http://tinyurl.com/5wy4ex )
and
<http://keepswinging.blogspot.com/2008/05/franz-jackson-remembered-2.html> (
or short http://tinyurl.com/64m4pr )

Durium
http://keepswinging.blogspot.com

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com
[mailto:dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com] Namens Stan Brager
Verzonden: zondag 25 mei 2008 20:10
Aan: Hans Koert
CC: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List
Onderwerp: [Dixielandjazz] FW: Franz Jackson

Here’s a more in depth obituary of Franz Jackson.

Stan

Stan Brager

From: owner-duke-lym at concordia.ca [mailto:owner-duke-lym at concordia.ca] On
Behalf Of Steve Voce
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 11:52 PM
To: duke-lym at concordia.ca
Subject: OT: Franz Jackson

>From today's The Independent:

Franz Jackson: Sax player in the golden age of jazz

Saturday, 24 May 2008 

The last survivor of the golden age of jazz when King Oliver and Louis
Armstrong walked tall in the Chicago of the Roaring Twenties, the
saxophonist Franz Jackson played with bands led by Fats Waller, Earl Hines,
Roy Eldridge and Fletcher Henderson, among others. Those bands were part of
the spine of jazz in the first half of the last century.

Having played with Armstrong and with Jelly Roll Morton, whom he befriended
late in Morton's career, Jackson became a legend in his home town of
Chicago, playing there for more than 70 years. His gruff tenor sound lacked
the niceties of his idols, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Lester Young,
but he got to the top of the Chicago scene simply by outliving everyone
else.

"Originally, I was going to be a clarinet player but at that time all people
wanted to hear was Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young," he said: 

So if you wanted anybody to listen, you played the tenor sax as they did.
Well I went into the store to buy a tenor – I was about 14 or 15 – and the
guy said "Man, you don't learn how to play on a tenor, you learn on an
alto." So I bought an alto and tried to figure that out. 

The boy particularly admired two of Duke Ellington's musicians, the alto
player Johnny Hodges and the clarinettist Barney Bigard. Bigard was one of
the many New Orleans musicians who had migrated up the Mississippi to
Chicago.

Jackson played by ear, but lessons with an ex-Fletcher Henderson player,
Jerome Pasquall, paid for by his mother, pointed him in an orthodox
direction and he soon learned to read music. He got his first break at 17
when the Milwaukee bandleader Shuffle Abernathy came to Chicago and wanted a
sax player. When he wasn't playing with Abernathy, Jackson joined some of
the renowned émigré New Orleans players who travelled to Memphis and beyond
to play jobs in the south:

We ballyhooed on a truck and would go to Memphis and then to New Orleans.
We'd take an empty mail cart, put a piano in it and put it on the truck.
Albert Ammons, later famous for his boogie-woogie playing, was the pianist
and the New Orleans guys included trumpeter Punch Miller and trombonist Al
Wynn. And there'd be a bar. When we stopped people would come up to the
truck for a drink. We'd do that all the way to New Orleans. When we'd get
[there] we'd give a dance, stay the night and come back the next day. 

In 1931 he joined the band of Cassino Simpson, forgotten today but then an
eminent musician, and worked in the ill-fated bands of Reuben Reeves, a fine
trumpeter who never quite made it. When Carroll Dickerson, famous for
leading the band that backed Louis Armstrong, came to Chicago in 1932 he
took over a nightclub band that worked directly for Al Capone and the mob.
"You didn't make a big salary," said Jackson: 

But you got your money every night, because the next night the joint's
liable to be burnt up or gone, or padlocked across.

You could pick up anything in tips in the Prohibition period, because you
never knew who'd come in. There might be four or five parties during the
night and you could pick up 17 or 18 dollars a night, which was good then, a
week's salary for some people.

By 1936, Jackson was working for another of the New Orleaneans he admired,
Jimmy Noone, the clarinet giant with the beautiful liquid tone. But in those
days, Jackson was always a progressive player and when the chance came to
join the innovative trumpeter Roy Eldridge who led the band at Chicago's
Three Deuces, he did so.

When Ben Webster, chased by debt-collectors, left the Fletcher Henderson
band in a hurry in the summer of 1938, Jackson got his job. But he returned
to Eldridge in November that year and the two went to New York. 

Jackson made his first records as a leader in 1940 and that year toured
coast to coast in Fats Waller's big band. In October 1941 he toured again,
this time in California with Earl Hines. Back in New York, he worked in
Waller's small groups and as the clarinettist in the sextet led by the brass
men Red Allen and Jay C. Higginbotham. Jackson played in the New York clubs
with various leaders until, in 1946, he toured the Pacific playing for
troops in the first of many USO (United Service Organisations) tours
sponsored by the US military in the late Forties and early Fifties.

Returning to Chicago he formed his own band, the Original Jass All Stars in
1947. Although, having been familiar with Dizzy Gillespie's ideas in his
younger days, Jackson was au fait with bebop, he chose to ride the
tradition, and the Jass All Stars included the New Orleans veterans Bob
Schoffner and Al Wynn. By now, Jackson was emphasising his Louis
Armstrong-inspired singing and it added considerably to the band's
popularity. The band was a colossal success and held various long residences
in the Chicago area over subsequent decades. 

The Jass All Stars visited New York in 1968 and undertook more USO tours to
Vietnam and the Far East. Jackson formed another band, the Jazz
Entertainers, in Chicago in 1980 and toured Europe as a soloist in 1981. A
glutton for work, in 1990 he joined the band led by the younger Chicago
trombonist Jim Beebe and continued to appear at festivals and jazz clubs
throughout the world. He was scathing about the advent of rock, which, if
anything, consolidated the appeal of Jackson's brand of jazz.

"Rock came along, where anyone can turn on the amplifier, pick up a guitar
and make a big chord. Big deal. To play a jazz horn you've got to work six
or seven years before you can even get a decent sound. But who cares? If
anyone wants to listen to that stuff, that's their problem. "

Steve Voce

Franz Jackson, saxophonist, clarinettist and bandleader: born Rock Island,
Illinois 1 November 1912; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Niles,
Michigan 6 May 2008.

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