Jazz in the Thirties

It was a time of excitement, of the new and the old blending, when the music went ’round and ’round and came out here. We drove through the dark avenues of Staten Island to hear the after-hours piano of Art Hodes, toothpick-thin as he hunched over the keyboard—out of the Chicago barrelhouse school and playing beer hall gigs until he got his 802 cards. We walked the streets of Harlem, looking for cellar joints where the loud rich voice of an alto or a horn cut the cigarette smoke. In Greenwich Village, Bud Freeman and the old Austin High gang blasted out their own version of Dixieland’s 2/4 beat. But singing through the brash texture was Bobby Hackett’s sweet, poignant cornet—evoking in tone and phrasing the half-forgotten Bix Beiderbecke.

At Carnegie Hall, at the Paramount Theater, and in the dancehalls of Westchester, we stamped our feet and rocked to the big-band blare of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Count Basie and Andy Kirk. Or we sat in the open-shirted atmosphere of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, caught up by the tutored plangencies of Duke Ellington.

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Ralph de Toledano

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It was a time of excitement, of the new and the old blending, when the music went ’round and ’round and came out here. We drove through the dark avenues of Staten Island to hear the after-hours piano of Art Hodes, toothpick-thin as he hunched over the keyboard—out of the Chicago barrelhouse school and playing beer hall gigs until he got his 802 cards. We walked the streets of Harlem, looking for cellar joints where the loud rich voice of an alto or a horn cut the cigarette smoke. In Greenwich Village, Bud Freeman and the old Austin High gang blasted out their own version of Dixieland’s 2/4 beat. But singing through the brash texture was Bobby Hackett’s sweet, poignant cornet—evoking in tone and phrasing the half-forgotten Bix Beiderbecke.

At Carnegie Hall, at the Paramount Theater, and in the dancehalls of Westchester, we stamped our feet and rocked to the big-band blare of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Count Basie and Andy Kirk. Or we sat in the open-shirted atmosphere of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, caught up by the tutored plangencies of Duke Ellington.