It was, I sometimes feel, around the turn of the century that I met Art Hodes. The late John Hammond drove me out to the butt end of Staten Island to hear “a Chicago piano player waiting to get his 802 card.” We found him in a beer parlor, playing waltzes—but when the last drunk had left, Hodes leaned over the keyboard of the upright and let us hear it. He was a thin man—thinner than God made spinach—a kind of rueful knight of jazz. But he had it all in his fingers and his head—the blues and the gutbucket music that came up from New Orleans—the good, the righteous, the moldy-fig jazz.
Art Hodes moved upward and onward, perhaps aided by a bunch of Jelly Roll Morton arrangements that I pressed into his hand some time later. There were jazz musicians with much more technique than Art, but few could match him in the body and soul of what he played. He never gave in to the big-band money, perhaps because he knew that, playing the swing-cwm-pops of the era, he would have begun climbing walls. But his dedication to the music got him a following among jazzmen and aficionados. You could hear him night after night, in the jazz joints that still existed in Greenwich Village or on 52nd Street. His first recording was made by Dan Qualey, a Yiddish-speaking Irish bartender who put every nickel he had into cutting the best there was in piano jazz.
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