Dixieland Jazz – New Orleans style. In 1950 New Orleans Dixieland Jazz had once again become the rage in night clubs from Los Angeles to Chicago and New York City. Ex-pats from New Orleans who had migrated North during the 1920s were playing the gin joints and concert halls, and record producers cut new and re-released old recordings. The music jammed the airwaves. But how was that hometown music doing down in New Orleans? Curious, “Look” magazine sent a staff writer and photographer to the Big Easy in March 1950 to take a look at the state of Dixieland Jazz in the city that gave that two-beat tempo its birth. And what they found surprised them.
In a June 6, 1950 article titled “Dixieland Jazz is ‘Hot’ Again,” “Look” writer Joseph Roddy and photographer Stanley Kubrick (yes, that Stanley Kubrick) interviewed many of the big names in New Orleans style jazz. Roddy wrote about the 19th century origins of jazz, the closing of city’s red light district Storyville, and jazz’s migration north. He also concluded that while jazz “was again being dished up and devoured with deadly seriousness and much commercial success all over the country,” it was on life-support in New Orleans.
The article also included photographs of top names then playing – Alphonse Picou, Sharkey Bonano, Oscar Celestin, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Pee Wee Russell, and dancer Isaac “Pork Chop” Mason. But most of all, Roddy and Kubrick focused on George Lewis, the great New Orleans jazz clarinetist, who Roddy and Kubrick described as the musician who “plays the very best New Orleans” style jazz in the city.
Seen here in this 1950 photograph in Lewis’s backyard is Lewis on clarinet with Ragtime Band members Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavageau on bass fiddle, Jim Robinson playing “tailgate” trombone, “leather-lunged” Elmer Talbert on trumpet, and – as Roddy described him – the “saintly-looking ex-boxer” Lawrence Marrero on banjo. Sitting in on drums was Kubrick himself, who left the magazine later that year to pursue a highly successful career in movies as a writer, producer and director. (His many later credits included “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Shining,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Standing in the doorway is Lewis’ mother Alice Zeno.
During the interview, Lewis said he hoped the revival of jazz in other cities would one day return to New Orleans. Until then, Lewis and other members of his band, unlike their colleagues in northern cities who made a living playing music, had to work menial jobs to support themselves. Lewis was a stevedore, Talbert a laundryman, “Slow Drag” painted houses, and Robinson was a porter. Nevertheless, wrote Roddy, their “music is from – and apparently for – another world.”
That “another world” brought Lewis international fame during the 1950s and 60s with numerous and successful tours to Europe and Japan, where he was mobbed by fans. He and his band also were regulars at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter.
After his death in 1968, at the age of 68, the Times-Picayune praised Lewis as a “key figure in the revival of interest in New Orleans jazz.” Following his traditional jazz funeral led by the Eureka Brass Band, a friend of Lewis’ described him to Times-Picayune reporter Paul Atkinson: “He was a stern musician – inflexible in character. His was a constant search for quality.”
As the processional band passed Lewis’s house on the way to the cemetery in Algiers, it droned out that traditional but mournful tune, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
