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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520229839 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2001 |
| Series: | Music of the African Diaspora , #3 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 306 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
JAZZ ON THE ROAD
Don Albert's Musical LifeBy Christopher Wilkinson
University of California
Copyright © 2001 Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-22983-5
Chapter Four
Don Albert, Southwest Territory Bandleader1929-33
The Dominiques' stay in New Orleans was brief. Although he quickly found work in Bebé Ridgley's Tuxedo Orchestra, Albert Dominique discovered that he could not earn the kind of wages that he had received from Troy Floyd. However hospitable the city may have seemed in other ways, to remain there would require continuously scuffling for gigs while working at a nonmusical, low-paying "day job," such as the one he had held at the Crescent City Mattress Factory prior to his departure in 1926. The only alternative would be to seek employment outside New Orleans. But, early in September 1929, before he could begin looking, a telegram arrived from an acquaintance named Bernard Goldberg, offering to lend him approximately one thousand dollars with which to form a band. Goldberg proposed to book this band for engagements in Dallas between October 12 and 27, during the Texas State Fair.
An entrepreneur in the entertainment business, Goldberg may have managed the Alphonso Trent Orchestra at one time and most certainly had heard Floyd's band play at Shadowland and perhaps also in Dallas. His offer could not have come at a better time, and Dominique quickly began to round up interested musicians. At the same time, he decided to adopt a professional name. The fact that Texans apparently had a hard time with "Albert Dominique" was surely one factor in his decision. Goldberg argued for a change as well. "Albert Dominique" sounded too formal, not the name of a bandleader. In the words of his son, Kenneth, the name simply "wasn't catchy." The other Creole musicians that Dominique encountered in Texas largely kept to themselves, spoke only French except when absolutely necessary, and, having completed their engagements, promptly returned to the sanctuary of New Orleans. Dominique, however, had successfully launched a career far from home and had every reason to believe that he could successfully lead a band. To adopt what could be taken for an "Anglo" name was a small price to pay to realize his dream.
His choice of "Don Albert" was partly explained in a letter he wrote to Richard Allen in 1969. Bernard Goldberg suggested that he formally adopt "Don," a nickname he had been given by one of Floyd's musicians. The suggestion was probably made while Dominique was organizing his band during the fall of 1929. Six months earlier, he had been identified as "Albert Dominique" in a list of Floyd's personnel published in the Chicago Defender-the only occasion during his career in which his given name ever appeared in print. Although in the letter Dominique implied that he could have kept "Dominique," "Albert" seemed preferable. It was shorter and without any particular ethnic associations. Although to his audiences he would always be known as Don Albert, he never legally changed his name. Nonetheless, because it was central to his professional identity, for the rest of this narrative I shall refer to him by his adopted name.
Don Albert planned to form an eleven-piece ensemble, the typical size of dance bands at the end of the 1920s. He named it "Don Albert and His Ten Pals." As bandleader and Chicago Defender columnist Dave Peyton noted, an ensemble of this size "will enable the leader to handle the modern jazz symphonic orchestral arrangement," that is, the typical commercial chart of that time. Most of the musicians that Albert hired had been playing in two New Orleans bands led, respectively, by Bebé Ridgley and Sidney Desvigne, neither of which was enjoying regular bookings. Having recently arrived in town after spending several years in Baton Rouge, reed man Herb Hall recalled being surprised that, as far as Desvigne's band was concerned, "weren't too much happening."
Albert lured three men away from Desvigne: reed man Herb Hall, singer Sidney Hansell, and pianist Al Freeman Jr. From Ridgley's band, he took saxophonists Louis Cottrell Jr. and Arthur Derbigny, as well as banjoist Ferdinand Dejan. Drummer Albert "Fats" Martin, was an unknown quantity, but, as Don Albert later recalled,
Somebody told me, well he's a good drummer at the Astoria [Hotel on South Rampart Street], an' he came all the way out to the house on Miro Street, an' he looked like a rag'muffin. I said, "Man, this fellow can't play no drums." Well, he gave me a good story about he was playin', an' he could play an' all this, that, an' the other, 'bout "Red" Allen an' Guy Kelly. I said, "Well, this cat might to be able to play somethin' anyhow. We'll try him out."
Albert hired two brass players not at the moment affiliated with a band. Trombonist Frank Jacquet had one advantage over would-be competitors: he owned a Dodge touring car. "Whether he could blow or not, I was gonna use him because he had transportation," Albert recalled. As it turned out, Jacquet, a "straight" (i.e., reading) trombonist, could also "blow," and did so throughout the band's entire history. Henry Turner became the band's tuba player. Albert had to wait until he got to Dallas to find a second trumpet player.
With the possible exception of Turner, all the sidemen had prior experience in New Orleans bands, and all were "finished" players. The majority were also Creoles of Color: Cottrell, Dejan, Derbigny, and Hansell came from the Seventh Ward, Hall from the sugar plantation town of Reserve, Louisiana, up the river from New Orleans, and Jacquet from Lake Charles. Albert Martin may have been a Creole as well. Pianist Al Freeman, born in Columbus, Ohio, was not, and Turner's ethnicity is unknown.
From New Orleans to Dallas to San Antonio
A convoy of three automobiles carried the newly formed band non stop to Dallas. Although Arthur Derbigny's Model T Ford and Jacquet's Dodge made the trip without incident, Albert's Chrysler broke down near Tyler, Texas. Upon arriving, the musicians checked into a hotel, no doubt located in Deep Ellum. Albert may have gone first to the Tip Top in search of a second trumpet player, but probably found his man, Hiram Harding, at the North Dallas Night Club. Harding had started out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a band called The Southern Serenaders. He then joined a small band organized by Terrence "T." Holder after Andy Kirk took over Holder's Clouds of Joy. It had become the house band of the North Dallas Night Club when the establishment opened in March 1929, and Holder's group may have stayed there into the fall. If so, Harding may have been ready for a change. Once hired, he remained with Albert's band until its demise in 1940.
As Herb Hall put it, "Because the band was formed so quickly, we had to have some music." Thanks to a fortuitous meeting with the leader of a white band playing at the Adolphus Hotel, Albert was given "a whole trunk full of arrangements."
With further assistance from Goldberg, following the dance dates in Dallas the band traveled to San Antonio to become the house band at a San Antonio nightclub, the Chicken Plantation, whose manager, Raul Estes, needed a replacement for Floyd's band, which was then about to tour Oklahoma. Assuming the Dallas engagements ended about the same time as the State Fair-Sunday, October 27-the Ten Pals might have started working in San Antonio early in November 1929. They remained at the Chicken Plantation for six or seven months, time enough to pay off Goldberg's loan. The steady employment and reliable income earned from leading a house band also allowed Albert to bring Hazel and little Kenneth to San Antonio.
When Estes closed the Chicken Plantation to take a job as head gambler at Shadowland, Albert and his Ten Pals moved there as well, becoming the house band for eighteen months. With both the time and a place to rehearse, the Ten Pals created their own head arrangements of blues and popular songs and reworked stock arrangements to make them sound more interesting and to allow the players' individual timbres to assert themselves. Their initially local audience started to grow when the band began broadcasting from Shadowland over San Antonio's clear-channel, fifty-thousand-watt radio station, WOAI.
Radio not only carried the sound of the Ten Pals away from south Texas, it also brought the sound of such eastern bands as Fletcher Henderson's and Duke Ellington's to the attention of both this and numerous other bands in the Southwest. Albert's band entered the picture at just the time when the distinctive styles of territory ensembles were giving way to a more national style as they adopted elements of the repertories, arrangements, and sounds of these and other "name" bands. As evidence of this influence, Albert recalled that his band played its own arrangements of several of Duke Ellington's compositions.
Over time, the stability of the Shadowland job became a mixed blessing. The pay was reliable, but the audience was small. Albert and his sidemen began to grow restless, particularly after reading accounts of Alphonso Trent's northeast tour and of Troy Floyd's successful engagements in Mexico City and Monterrey, published in both the Chicago Defender and the San Antonio Register, the city's black weekly newspaper.
These days, a tour by a professional ensemble is a complex operation. Engagements have to be negotiated, advertising arranged, ticket sales initiated, transportation, accommodations, and meals organized -not only for the performers but also for their road crew, all details handled by a nationally organized agency. Such was not the case when Don Albert and His Ten Pals began to think seriously about going on the road. To propel itself toward national prominence, the band had to take care of its own business. How it did so reveals much about Albert, his values, and his ambitions. Unlike Floyd, Albert believed strongly in sharing with his sidemen the responsibilities of running the band while retaining authority as its leader. This arrangement worked because most of his musicians shared his ambitions. The Floyd band had been a large frog in the small pond of Texas dance music and jazz, but Albert and his Pals wanted to swim in larger and deeper waters.
Of the many risks involved in touring, the most obvious were financial, given the deepening economic slump of the early 1930s. Going on the road traded the certainty of a house band's guaranteed salary for the chance to make more money. Albert, no doubt, took to heart the words of bandleader and Defender columnist Walter Barnes Jr.:
Times have changed-and how. Bands, I mean big bands, are now taking to the road rather than hold one stand indefinitely. There's more money on the road and in barnstorming, even one-night jumps.... Radio has so popularized good music that the smaller towns want and are willing to pay to hear good bands in person.
Engagements in "the smaller towns" would be essential to the success of any tour by the Ten Pals.
The band required reliable transport to travel. Driving to Dallas and on to San Antonio by car made sense, but would not do for extensive tours. In the event of a flat tire, an accident, a wrong turn, some musicians could get separated from the rest, fail to turn up for hours, and thus jeopardize that night's performance. A bus would keep everyone together while also carrying instruments, uniforms, music stands, publicity placards, and other necessary paraphernalia. Hiring a driver would enable players to sleep between engagements. Outfitted with signs identifying the ensemble traveling within, the vehicle could also serve as a rolling advertisement.
To promote solidarity and to raise the necessary start-up funds, Albert organized the Ten Pals as a "commonwealth band." All members, having an equal interest in its success, shared equally in its prosperity and suffered equally in times of adversity. At the end of each one-night engagement, or once a week during an extended stay, the band's earnings were divided into shares, one for each player. Albert received a second share to cover operating expenses, including fueling and maintaining the bus.
Troy Floyd had paid his men a fixed salary (when he paid them at all) regardless of the income he received for his band's performances. The commonwealth principle ensured that everyone would profit equally from what was anticipated to be the band's increasing success. In the best circumstances, the band received a guaranteed amount for a job plus an additional percentage of the host establishment's profits for the night. More often, it played "percentage dates," receiving only an agreed-to portion of the venue's receipts. Although the musicians could easily see how large a crowd was and thus estimate fairly accurately what the band's earnings ought to be, in later years, Albert made a point of watching as customers paid to enter a venue to make sure his players received their due. For all of its promise, however, the chief virtue of the commonwealth principle was one of necessity: Albert really had nothing else to offer his musicians except the chance to share equally in the fruits of their collective labor.
Whereas some bands applied the commonwealth principle to all decision making, this was not true of the Ten Pals. Albert did the hiring and, reluctantly, the firing of musicians. Although tours may have been discussed by the players in advance, no evidence indicates that they decided when and where to travel or that they voted whether or not to accept a particular engagement. In talking with Howard Litwak and Nathan Pearson about this aspect of his work as a bandleader, Albert said, "The commonwealth part came in where the money was concerned, but I selected all of the jobs."
Albert delegated the day-to-day operations of the band first to pianist Al Freeman then, after Freeman's departure, to reed man Louis Cottrell Jr., whose job it was to keep the books, pay the players, and call rehearsals. At times, Cottrell was assisted by Frank Jacquet and Fats Martin. Albert's practice of appointing musicians from other sections than his own to manage the band continued a tradition characteristic of many New Orleans bands in the past.
The band's "treasury," the first manifestation of the commonwealth principle, began to accumulate during the Ten Pals' tenure at Shadowland. Later to have many uses, at first it enabled the band to acquire a small, second-hand bus in which to tour. In 1980, Herb Hall explained to Sterlin Holmesly that the treasury was started with money the band received for playing requests at the night club:
They were gamblin', so the guy [would] go into the back and win him a little money, come up and give us a tip, you know what I mean.... Well, we had enough money to buy an old used bus. And so that's what we did. We bought the bus.
So essential (and possibly so decrepit) was this bus that once it was purchased, the band always set aside the funds necessary for its maintenance before paying itself a night's wages.
Continues...
Excerpted from JAZZ ON THE ROAD by Christopher Wilkinson Copyright © 2001 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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