Stars of David and Sons of Sicily: Constellations Beyond the Canon in Early New Orleans Jazz

Abstract

This essay explores the interaction of Jews, Italian Americans, Latinos, Creoles, and African Americans in the early development of New Orleans jazz, and argues that a paradigm emphasizing the confluence of traditional ethnic influences is insufficient to explain the origins of jazz in this city. Rather, trans‐ethnic cultural exchange deriving from the “crazy quilt” demographic configurations of some New Orleans neighborhoods, furthered by a common attraction to new forms of musical expression among young people, enabled the creation of new vernacular—and specifically American—identities for musicians through the communal act of performing jazz. The attraction to and assimilation of black vernacular performance practices by Sicilian Americans especially fueled this process. In challenging the Eurocentric musical canon that prevailed in early twentieth‐century New Orleans, jazz musicians formed associations based on mutual interest in developing and sharing new practices, and by sometimes subverting the ethnic and racial social boundaries prescribed by segregation and other ethnocentric conventions in the process.

Notes

¹ “Jass and Jassism,” Times‐Picayune (New Orleans), June 20, 1918, 4. A full‐text reprint of this editorial can be found in “Jass and Jassism,” African American Review 29 (Summer 1995): 231–232.

² MacDonald Smith Moore, Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 131 and passim. Michael Gold, editor of The Daily Worker, held a similar view but inverted the value judgment. See S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 100.

³ See, for example, references to “Jass and Jassism” in Charles Edward Smith, “Land of Dreams,” Jazzmen, eds. Charles Edward Smith and Frederic Ramsey, Jr. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 268, and Charles Suhor, “Jazz and the New Orleans Press,” Down Beat, June 12, 1969, 18. For contemporaneous letters, see, respectively, W.T.N. to Editor, July 2, 1918, Times‐Picayune, July 4, 1918, 6; Fair Play to Editor, June 20, 1918, Times‐Picayune, June 23, 1918, 8; and M.C. to the Editor, June 29, 1918, Times‐Picayune, July 2, 1918, 8.

⁴ See Michael Paul Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 4.

⁵ For perspective on the early development of jazz in New Orleans as a dance‐driven trend, see Lawrence Gushee, “The Nineteenth Century Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 14 (Spring 1994), 1–24.

⁶ One such musician who gained public recognition but has been consistently overlooked by jazz critics and historians is Louis Prima, whose composition “Sing, Sing, Sing” became a hit for Benny Goodman and an anthem for the Swing Era; yet Gunther Schuller mentions Prima just once in his monumental study of the period, The Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), stating only that he once employed the clarinetist Sidney Arodin (p. 802).

⁷ For an historical overview of ethnic and racial diversity in New Orleans neighborhoods, see Richard Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006), which provides a useful survey of demographic configurations throughout the city over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

⁸ The reception in New Orleans to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first recording, “Livery Stable Blues”/“Dixieland Jass Band One‐Step” (Victor 18255, 1917, 78‐rpm), illustrates this point, as evident in an advertisement by the Music Department of Maison Blanche, a local department store: “Made by New Orleans musicians for New Orleans people, it has all the ‘swing’ and ‘pep’ and ‘spirit’ that is so characteristic of the bands whose names are a by‐word at New Orleans dances.” Times‐Picayune, April 15, 1917, n. p.

⁹ Louis Cottrell, Jr., interview by William Russell and Ralph Collins, August 25, 1961, transcript, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (henceforth “HJA”).

¹⁰ See, for example, Charles Edward Smith, “White New Orleans,” Jazzmen, 43–46.

¹¹ Ibid. 45,. and George Vital Laine, interview by William Russell, March 26, 1957, transcript, HJA.

¹² On Jews in New Orleans, see Bobbie Malone, Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist, Southerner, 1860–1929 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 34–55, and Irwin Lachoff, “A Historical Introduction,” in Jews of New Orleans: An Archival Guide (New Orleans: The Greater New Orleans Archivists, 1998), 11–22. See also Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “Jewish Jazzmen in New Orleans, 1890–1940: An Overview,” The Jazz Archivist 12 (May 1997): 1–12.

¹³ Constitution and By‐Laws of the Crescent City Musician’s Protective Union (New Orleans: Malus and Hofline, 1894), 30.

¹⁴ Eddie Edwards, interview by Richard B. Allen, July 1, 1959, transcript, HJA.

¹⁵ Howard Jacobs, “From One Picnic—Five Weddings,” Dixie Magazine, Times‐Picayune, April 2, 1967, 26, and “Mike Caplan Rites Today,” Times‐Picayune, March 2, 1980, Sec. 1, 16. Caplan curtailed his music activities when he became recorder of the Jerusalem Temple in 1935.

¹⁶ Harold Peterson, interview by Richard B. Allen, August 6, 1979, transcript, HJA.

¹⁷ The Early Bird, “Night Life, Entertainers, Jazz Bands,” The Prelude, November 1929, 10.

¹⁸ Ray Benitez, interview at Monk Hazel’s funeral, March 6, 1968, transcript, HJA.

¹⁹ Godfrey Hirsch, interview by Richard B. Allen and Curtis D. Jerde, November 10, 1987, audio tape, HJA, and “Night Life, Entertainers, Jazz Bands,” 10–11. Stratakos began his career as a drummer with Johnny Bertucci’s Band in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1920.

²⁰ Armand Hug, interview by Richard B. Allen and Paul Crawford, July 14, 1960, transcript, HJA.

²¹ Santo Pecora, interview by Richard B. Allen, November 9, 1972, transcript, HJA.

²² Johnny DeDroit, interview by Richard B. Allen, December 4, 1969, transcript, HJA.

²³ The above material is from Godfrey Hirsch, interview by Richard B. Allen and Curtis D. Jerde, October 20, 1987, October 27, 1987, and November 10, 1987, audio tape, HJA.

²⁴ Prima on lessons from Rena in George Lewis, interview by Tom Bethell, November 1, 1968, transcript, HJA; on lessons from Collins, Father Al Lewis, interview by Richard B. Allen, Lars Edegran, and Hans Lychou, February 21, 1972, transcript, HJA.

²⁵ Luke Schiro, interview by Richard B. Allen, December 5, 1967, transcript, HJA.

²⁶ Harold Dejan, interview by Barry Martyn for New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, May 10, 1999, transcript, HJA; and Mike DeLay, interview by John Bentley and Paul Affeldt, November 14, 1970, transcript, HJA.

²⁷ Guy Lombardo, Auld Acquaintances (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 218–220.

²⁸ Arthé Agnes Anthony, The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920 (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Irvine, 1978), especially 143, 150–155. For additional information on Sicilian and African‐American collaboration in Tremé in the 1920s, see Tony Scherman, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), passim.

²⁹ For elaboration, see Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 76.

³⁰ Beginning with Robert Goffin’s Histoire du Jazz (1945), and continuing through articles by Tom Piazza (1977), Julia Volpelletto Nakamura (1986), Garry Boulard (1988), Bruce Raeburn (1991), and Guido Festinese (1998), there has been a growing body of information on the role played by Sicilian‐Americans especially in the origins and early development of jazz; see subsequent notes for full citations.

³¹ See, for example, Diana Taylor’s distinctions between cultural hybridity and mestizaje in her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

³² David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 14.

³³ Thomas Fiehrer, “From Quadrille to Stomp: The Creole Origins of Jazz,” Popular Music 10 (January 1991): 22.

³⁴ See Russell M. Magnaghi, “Louisiana’s Italian Immigrants Prior to 1870,” in A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History, ed. Carl A. Brasseaux, vol. 10, The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1996), 580–602; and James Dorman, “The Great Migration,” in Italian‐Americans in Louisiana: A Better Life, ed. Joel Gardner (New Orleans: American‐Italian Federation of the Southeast, 1983), 14–18, in which he writes: “Except for a sprinkling of refugees from the Northern Italian uprisings against Hapsburg and Bourbon rule from 1820–1849 or the risorgimenti from 1859–1871, only a few immigrants came from north Italy or anywhere on the Italian mainland” (14–15).

³⁵ Henry A. Kmen, Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791–1841 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 151, 234; and Charles E. Kinzer, “The Tio Family and Its Role in the Creole‐of‐Color Musical Traditions of New Orleans,” The Second Line, Summer 1991, 18–27. Kinzer notes that “Gabici was known to teach free‐colored students, and the 1850 U.S. Census shows that he lived next door to two aspiring young musicians of that class” (19, 21). See also Lester Sullivan, “Composers of Color of Nineteenth‐Century New Orleans: The History Behind the Music,” Black Music Research Journal 8 (1988): 54. Dorman notes: “True, antebellum New Orleans had 915 Italians in 1850, the highest total in the country, surpassing even the 833 Italians residing in New York City; but they fit into an earlier pattern of accommodation that had absorbed Creole Italians—that French‐speaking mélange that had always lived in the city, the nation’s oldest, most complex melting pot in North America.” Dorman, “The Great Migration,” 15.

³⁶ From the obituary “George Paoletti Ends Brilliant Musical Career: Death Claims Former Leader of Old French Opera,” The Times‐Picayune, November 15, 1924, 3; and the advertisement “Price List of Musical Records, Etc., The Louisana Phonograph Company, Ltd.,” The Phonogram: The Official Organ of the Phonograph Companies of the United States, April‐May 1892, vii.

³⁷ From the Warren Easton High School literary magazine, Old Gold and Purple, October, 1921, 17–18; and Godfrey Hirsch, interview by Richard B. Allen and Curtis D. Jerde, November 10, 1987, transcript, HJA. A drummer with the bands of Louis Prima and later Pete Fountain, Hirsch studied with Paoletti as a member of the Junior Shrine Orchestra.

³⁸ Constitution, By‐Laws, and Price List, Musicians’ Mutual Protective Union, Local No. 174, A. F. of M., of New Orleans, La., 1904–1905 (New Orleans: William Miller Print, 1904), 49–54; and notes by Lynn Abbott from Soard’s New Orleans City Directories, 1892–1925, contained in “Paoletti, George A.,” persons vertical file, HJA.

³⁹ Dorman, “The Great Migration,” 15. In other words, for the white elite, Sicilians were considered to be “non‐white,” as were Hispanics, Jews, Creoles of color, and African Americans. On violence against Italians, see Edward F. Haas, “Guns, Goats, and Italians: The Tallulah Lynching of 1899,” North Louisiana Historical Association Journal 13 (Spring and Summer, 1982): 45–58.

⁴⁰ Ethelyn Orso, “Sicilian Immigration into Louisiana,” in A Refuge for All Ages, 603–607 (on Sicilian population and Arbreshe). Orso gives the Sicilian population in 1910 as 24,000, but the Italian‐American total is listed as 18,581 for Orleans Parish and 2,455 in Jefferson Parish in the 1910 U. S. Census. Within the Italian‐American population of New Orleans in 1910, 8,065 were foreign‐born, 8,016 were native with both parents foreign‐born, and 2,499 were native with one parent foreign‐born, thus more than tripling the statistics for 1900. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Abstract of the Census with Supplement for Louisiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 63, 586, and 592.

⁴¹ Thirteenth Census, 594; and Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 116. Dominguez notes that such listings do not distinguish between African Americans and Creoles of color in providing statistics on “Negroes.”

⁴² Guido Festinese, “Palermo‐New Orleans, New Orleans‐Palermo: un doppio cerchio nella storia del jazz,” in Contemporary Sicily, 1998, conference program (Rome: Edizioni La Centrale dell’Arte, 1998), 24–27.

⁴³ Fiehrer, “From Quadrille to Stomp,” 32.

⁴⁴ Italian Hall was also the site of the Jones and Collins Astoria Hot Eight recording session with Sidney Arodin (a black band recording with a white clarinetist) in November 1929. This session further illustrates the broad range of multi‐cultural activities that could transpire in a social space otherwise dedicated to the preservation of Italian heritage.

⁴⁵ “Here’s That Noted Jazz Band: Palace Has One of the Best Jazz Outfits in the Whole Country,” New Orleans States, May 11, 1919, p. 7.

⁴⁶ For band affiliations, see Al Rose and Edmond Souchon, New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).

⁴⁷ As quoted in John Chilton, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 18.

⁴⁸ See Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet: Ménage à Trois New Orleans Style,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 88–101; and Gene Anderson, “The Genesis of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band,” American Music 12 (Fall 1994): 283–303.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 294.

⁵⁰ Was this behavior a product of racial shame or an alternative to bichromatic racial perspectives? Burton Peretti describes Achille Baquet as “fooling” the white bandleader Jack Laine through passé blanc. Burton Peretti, Jazz in American Culture (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 43. Since Achille’s father, Theogene, was in 1902 not only the leader of the Excelsior, a prominent Creole marching band, but also the founder and president of Local 242, the first “black” American Federation of Musicians union in New Orleans, it seems very unlikely that Laine would not have known about Achille’s “people.” Baquet later worked for the white trombonist Happy Schilling and then headed to New York City, where he and the white New Orleans trumpeter Frank Christian performed with Jimmy Durante. Achille’s brother George, another clarinetist, toured with Bill Johnson’s Creole Band and eventually settled in Philadelphia, where he lived as a black man. Given simplistic racial categories based on the bichromatic strictures of “whiteness,” some Creoles simply thought of “white” as the more appropriate category (Plessy v. Ferguson notwithstanding), and yet not all did, so households were divided on the issue. The tragedy is that individuals were forced to choose their color, since an identity based on Créolité was no longer an option. Perhaps this is why identity as a jazz musician—a creative professional judged by merit—mattered so much on both sides of the color line.

⁵¹ Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “Jazz and the Italian Connection,” The Jazz Archivist 6 (May 1991): 1–5.

⁵² Tom Piazza, “The Un‐Cool School: Italian‐Americans in Jazz: 1917–1977,” Identity (May 1977), 26–30, 62.

⁵³ Julia Volpelletto Nakamura, “The Italian American Contribution to Jazz,” Italian Americana 8 (Fall‐Winter 1986): 23.

⁵⁴ On the Tios, see Charles E. Kinzer, “The Tios of New Orleans and Their Pedagogical Influence on the Early Jazz Clarinet Style,” Black Music Research Journal 16 (Fall 1996): 280. Solfeggio also appealed to students who could not at first afford instruments. See Tony Parenti and Tony Sbarbaro, interview by Richard B. Allen, June 29, 1959, transcript, HJA.

⁵⁵ Auguste‐Mathieu Panseron, ABC Musical, Dédié aux Mères de Famille, ou Solfège, 79th ed. (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1888).

⁵⁶ Panseron, ABC Musical, front matter. The copy held by the Hogan Jazz Archive was acquired as part of the John Robichaux sheet music collection. For further information on the use of solfeggio by Manuel Perez and Arnold Metoyer, see below. See also Ernie Cagnolatti, interview by William Russell, Ralph Collins, and Harold Dejan, April 5, 1961, transcript, HJA, for information on use of Panseron method.

⁵⁷ See, for instance, Auguste‐Mathieu Panseron, with J. Reese Fry and Felice Dorigo, The ABC of Music, or, Progressive Lessons in the Rudiments of Music and Solfeggi (New York: S. T. Gordon, 1846), Auguste‐Mathieu Panseron, Solfeggi for Two Voices (New York: G. Schirmer, 1890), and Auguste‐Mathieu Panseron, Panseron’s ABC of Music: A Primer of Vocalization Containing the Elements of Music and Solfeggi (Boston: Ditson, 1908).

⁵⁸ See Arnold Loyacano, interview by Edmond Souchon, September 29, 1956, transcript, HJA.

⁵⁹ Garry Boulard, “Blacks, Italians, and the Making of Jazz,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 16 (Spring 1988): 64. Boulard is also interested in the “ethnic role” played by Italian‐Americans in the development of jazz and in their affinity with the black community, especially evident in the expressive use of brass bands in street processions and funerals.

⁶⁰ See Joshua Berrett, “Louis Armstrong and Opera,” The Musical Quarterly 76 (Summer 1992): 216–241.

⁶¹ Dominick James LaRocca, interview by Richard B. Allen, May 21, 1958, transcript, HJA.

⁶² Arnold Loyacano, interview by Edmond Souchon, September 29, 1956, transcript, HJA.

⁶³ “Il connait Emmet Hardy, et Joe Oliver devient son ami. Le noir et le blanc eprouvent l’un pour l’autre une grande admiration.” Robert Goffin, Histoire du Jazz (Montreal: Lucien Parizean et Cie, 1945), 87. Guarente also played with Bennie Mars’s Brass Band while he was in New Orleans, possibly when Montague Korn was in it.

⁶⁴ See “Anthony Maggio,” Overture 35 (December 1955): 13.

⁶⁵ Santo Pecora, interview by Richard B. Allen and Lars Edegran, November 9, 1972, transcript, HJA.

⁶⁶ Manuel Manetta, interview by William Russell, Nesuhi Ertegun, Richard B. Allen, and Robert Campbell, March 21, 1957, transcript, HJA. See also Bill Russell, New Orleans Style, compiled and edited by Barry Martyn and Mike Hazeldine (New Orleans: Jazzology Press, 1994), 124.

⁶⁷ Alex Bigard, interview by William Russell, Richard B. Allen, and Ralph Collins, April 30, 1960, transcript, HJA. See also Joe Darensbourg, Telling It Like It Is, ed. Peter Vacher (London: Macmillan Press, 1987), 28–32.

⁶⁸ Manetta interview, March 21, 1957; Jelly Roll Morton, Jelly Roll Morton: The Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 7, Mamie’s Blues, Riverside RLP 9007, 1957, LP.

⁶⁹ As quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1950), 93.

⁷⁰ Jack Weber (as told to Phyllis Humphrey), “Fakers Taught Rappollo How to Play!! Early Day New Orleans Jazz Experts Thought It Would Ruin Them If They Read Notes,” Down Beat, March 1939, 9, 12, 39.

⁷¹ For details, see Kevin Herridge, “Old Algiers, ‘The Brooklyn of the South,’” a walking tour brochure (New Orleans: Friends of the Algiers Courthouse, 2001).

⁷² Natty Dominique, interview by William Russell, May 31, 1958, transcript, HJA. In response to Russell’s suggestions that the surname is French or Spanish, Dominique replies, “It is supposed to be Italian.”

⁷³ Russell, New Orleans Style, 140–141.

⁷⁴ For a discussion of the Seventh Ward and Dominique’s musical relatives, including his nephew Don Albert (Albert Dominique) and cousins Alex and Barney Bigard, see Christopher Wilkinson, Jazz on the Road: Don Albert’s Musical Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), especially 3–11.

⁷⁵ Dominique interview, May 31, 1958; Russell, New Orleans Style, 140–159; and “Natty Dominique: Interview,” interviewed and transcribed by Bob Rusch, Cadence, July 1981, 18–19.

⁷⁶ “Obsequies of the Late Ernie Joseph Cagnolatti, 1911–1983, Tuesday, April 12, 1983, Greater Asia Baptist Church,” funeral program, “Cagnolatti, Ernie,” persons vertical file, HJA.

⁷⁷ Ernie Cagnolatti, interview by William Russell, Ralph Collins, and Harold Dejan, April 5, 1961, transcript, HJA.

⁷⁸ Yolanda Johns to the author, e‐mail correspondence, May 22, 2002. Ms. Johns also states: “About three years ago we had a Cagnolatti reunion in N. O. entitled ‘Sweet Melodies of Time’ which was a tribute to the many talented musicians in my family.” The accomplishments of famous jazz musicians on the “black side” of the family may have been a special inducement toward recognition and involvement from the “white side,” thus illustrating another way in which association in the jazz community could ameliorate racial and ethnic division and enhance bonding, albeit belatedly.

⁷⁹ Joe Margiotta, interview by Jean Huckins, July 1, 1974, transcript, HJA.

⁸⁰ Sharkey Bonano, interview by William Russell, November 9, 1966, transcript, HJA.

⁸¹ Myra Menville, “Wings—Self‐Explained,” The Second Line, Spring 1977, 4. Also see Wingy Manone and Paul Vandervoort II, Trumpet on the Wing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1948), 3–13.

⁸² Garry Boulard, Just a Gigolo: The Life and Times of Louis Prima (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1989), 61–62.