In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey

Festival Time

56 GOING MY OWN WAY 5'3" and a great dancer. She’d have on a miniskirt and I’d be wearing bell-bottomedhip-huggers.Weweretheonlywhitepeopleintheplace, so we weren’t hard to spot. Another waitress, Naomi Peskin, told me I needed to upgrade my wardrobeabit.ThroughRobertL.Jones,whowasnowworkingfull-time forGeorgeWein,IhadmetCharlieDavidson,agreatcharacter,whohad TheAndoverShopoffofHarvardSquare.Hehadoutfittedjazzartistslike Miles Davis, so Naomi and I went in there to see if he could make me a three-piece pinstriped suit. There was one hitch. I wanted the pants to bebell-bottomssoIcouldwearthemovermycowboyboots!Thiswasa first for Charlie, but he did it. I could now go dancing in style. I had also boughtausedMercedes190sedan,soIwastryingmybesttolooksharp. Finally, though, the combination of life in the fast lane, working too much, and the increasing difficulty of making ends meet financially for the Club caught up with me, and toward the end of 1967 I told the board thatIwasgoingtohavetogiveitup.AtthatpointourgoodfriendByron stepped back in and tried to pick up the pieces. I don’t feel good about the way I behaved. Byron, Betsy Siggins, Nancy Sweezy, Dan Bump, Manny Greenhill, and the rest of the board tried to make a go of it, but the finances didn’t add up, and they finally decided to close the Club in April of 1968. FESTIVAL TIME I wasn’t there. I was in New Orleans! Ralph Rinzler had been hired to produce a Jazz festival there, but had taken a job at the Smithsonian Institution to start up an American Folklife Division, so he asked me if I’d be interested in taking his place in New Orleans. He also asked me if I wouldbeinterestedinsteppingintohisroleastalentcoordinatorofthe NewportFolkFestival.ItalkedtoGeorgeWeinandtheboardaboutitand it was decided that I would start to work full-time that summer for the FolkFestivalandwouldalsoassistRobertL.JoneswiththestageproductionoftheNewportJazzFestivalandthefestivaltouringpackageshows . Inthemeantime,IwenttoNewOrleans.Itwasaninteresting,somewhat strange scene. The head of the festival was an older, fairly conservative man named Durel Black. When Ralph suggested me for the job, Black asked me to come down to New Orleans and meet with him. 57 FestivalTime Durel was definitely a son of the old South. He was courtly and hospitable and took me to lunch at an all-white businessman’s club where all the waiters were black. He liked Dixieland Jazz and had already lined up artists like Pete Fountain and Al Hirt, and it became clear that that was pretty much his idea of Jazz. However, there was a group of people there who had a different point of view. Al Belletto, who ran the Playboy Club, was an alto sax player who’d played with Woody Herman. A TV newscaster named Doug Ramsey was also into contemporary Jazz. Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton and Branford, was a highly respected teacher and player. There was a band called Willie T. & The Souls, who had been befriended by Cannonball Adderley. So these people wanted a festival that included elements other than Dixieland. After talking to everyone, I thought I could probably figure it all out and become kind of a fifth column for them while satisfying the Durel Black contingent. FollowingsomeofRalph’sleads,Igottoknowalotofthelocalpeople fairlyquickly.AllenJaffe,whoranPreservationHall,knewalloftheolder musicians and was my way in to the four major marching bands. He had sought out all of the musicians from the early era of New Orleans Jazz and created Preservation Hall as a venue for them. Through Allen I met Danny Barker, who was a leader of this group and an extremely knowledgeablehistorianofNewOrleansJazz.ThroughhimImetapiano playernamedArmandHug.Hewasprobablyclosetoeightyandplayed the entire Jelly Roll Morton repertoire. He had a regular gig at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, and I used to go hear him often. One night we were talking ,andIaskedhimifhe’devertraveledontheroad.Hesmiledandsaid thathe’dhadaweekendgiginBiloxioncebuthadtocutitshortbecause hegothomesick!ThatwastheNewOrleansattitude.Whygosomewhere else when you had everything you could want right there? I also became friends with Richard Allen, who ran the Jazz Archive at Tulane University. Richard knew everybody and everybody knew him. He knew when and where the marching bands would be playing at a funeral, a baptism, a first communion—every day of the week there was somethinggoingon.RichardhadanassistantnamedEleanorEllis,who happened to know of an apartment for rent right next door to hers in the French Quarter. I could just catch a glimpse of the Mississippi from my balcony. She took me to an old dance hall called Luthjen’s over in a neighborhood the other side of Esplanade. There was a big sign over 58 GOING MY OWN WAY the dance floor which said, “ABSOLUTELY NO JITTERBUGGING!” We didourbesttoobeytherules,butsometimeswe...