Joined at the Hip: A History of Jazz in Twin Cities

7: Twin Cities Jazz Celebs

79 7 Twin Cities Jazz Celebs “ [Historians say] Minneapolis cannot lay claim to a defining jazz artist in the way New Orleans can claim Louis Armstrong or Kansas City can claim Charlie Parker. Here, the jazz historians are wrong.” —Max Sparber, playwright The Twin Cities may rightfully lay claim to myriad fine jazz musicians. Many of them never left the confines of the twin towns. Others ventured out and returned. Still others made their homes in Minneapolis and St. Paul for some years or decades and then went on to fame and fortune, or obscurity or worse. Lester Young (1909–59) Tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Lester Young, one of jazz’s finest, most influential players, spent the better part of a decade (1926–36) in Minneapolis . Biographer Douglas Daniels asserts that “Minneapolis stands out not only as the place where Lester Young adopted the tenor sax and developed his craft” but it is also where he “acquired his distinctive way of holding the instrument out to the side.” Young, born in Mississippi, was introduced to the world of professional performance at a very early age in the Young Family Band, also known as the Billy Young Jazz Band. Lester’s father, Willis Handy Young, moved the family to a large house at 573 Seventh Avenue North in Minneapolis in 1919–20. A Minneapolis relative may have helped coax them 80 Joined at the Hip to the area, but another likely hypothesis is simply that Willis wanted to distance his family from the racially charged Jim Crow South. The band toured on the road, mostly in the Midwest, in the early twenties. It appears that it played its first Twin Cities–area gig on November 1, 1925, and then hit the road again in April 1926. Minnesota winters were a new phenomenon for the players. Band trumpet player Leonard Phillips said, “I’ll never forget it. When we went to play, we never saw the ground. There was snow up there. So, we went in and played the dance, and everything was packed and everything was nice.” He remembered that Lester’s father “already had this big house rented up there in Minneapolis for all the musicians. Some people who’d been on the show before, he knew them, were taking care of the house. All of us stayed in one room, Lester, Pete Jones, and I, so we had a good time playing, good food to eat. There was a big room where we’d rehearse practically every day. We didn’t have a job right after that one. We made ten dollars, which was a lot of money then, for that night.” Lester and “Phil” Phillips attended grammar school in Minneapolis along with Lester’s younger sister, Irma, and his brother, Lee. Lester became an avid record collector in Minneapolis, something that helped hone his style and sound. Once the band had established a firm base in the area, it did less traveling. That meant hearing fewer bands, so records became a more important music resource. By the winter of 1926–27, a lot more jazz was making it on to 78-­ rpm discs, and newly utilized microphones rendered a better sound. At home in Minneapolis, the trio of Pete Jones, Phil Phillips, and Lester Young would make its way to the record shop almost daily to preview discs. The three bought a few each time and built up a good-­ sized collection. The Young Family Band evolved into an eleven-­ piece big band known as the New Orleans Strutters. It was booked into the Radisson and­ St. Paul hotels along with other Twin Cities locations. The South Side Ballroom, a black and tan club near Washington Avenue at Minneapolis’s Seven Corners, provided another venue. It was there that they played and sang such current favorites as “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Five Foot Two,” “Tiger Rag,” and a lot of waltzes. The band became one of the most in demand in the Twin Cities and virtually the only one of that size. Lester’s brother Lee Young remembered the band’s early days in Minneapolis : “That was probably the best band there was in Minneapolis . . . Twin Cities Jazz Celebs 81 [Willis] had a chance to go on the Orpheum circuit [but] they wanted him to cut two men out of the band. He was a high-­ principled man, and he would not. Everybody was just dying...