Jazzman Who Tells It Like It Is

I keep thinking of a line the old saxman Dexter Gordon says in “ ‘Round Midnight”: “I’m tired of everything but the music.”

The better the jazz musicians are, the more the travel, the one-night gigs, the unending insecurity, the smoke, the noise and the distracted audiences must get to them. But making the music makes the rest endurable. The same truth emerges from the Charlie Parker story, “Bird,” directed by Clint Eastwood and due later this fall.

How the sidemen in the big dance bands adjusted to playing the same charts, note for note, night after night, year after year, I don’t know. I also think of Bix Beiderbecke, trapped in fussy arrangements during his brief stay in the late 1920s with the Paul Whiteman band and looking to the brief solo breaks like a man watching the sky through a small window in a cell.

There aren’t many really accurate and unromanticized inside accounts of the jazz life. But I ran across a fine one a few months ago. It’s “Jazz Odyssey: The Autobiography of Joe Darensbourg, As Told to Peter Vacher” (Louisiana State University Press, $19.95).

Darensbourg was born in Baton Rouge in 1906 to a French-speaking Cajun family. After many a musical adventure, including travel with carnivals and medicine shows and a long residency in the Pacific Northwest (which is under-reported as a fertile home for jazz), Darensbourg settled in Los Angeles.

(Los Angeles has been a congenial home for jazzmen, and if classicists like Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky have been comfortable here, so were men like Jelly Roll Morton, Rex Stewart and many another pioneer--including Darensbourg--who finished their days in Southern California.)

Vacher, an English jazz journalist, taped some 40 hours with Darensbourg, who died at 79 in 1985. The book was originally published in England under the livelier title, “Telling It Like It Is.”

The tapes are edited into chronological coherence, but Vacher has wisely left them unpolished. For once you hear the author’s voice, free-form grammar, confessional candor and all. A real man emerges in every line and Darensbourg was obviously a good storyteller who helps you see it all.

Shoemaking was his father’s--and the family’s--trade, but his father was also an amateur cornet player. “I think music would have been his life had he not married young. He was slick and he loved life.”

He bought young Joe a clarinet and forced him to practice. “I might be outside playing baseball and then I’d think about my uncle which was on the circus, make a bee-line inside and grab my clarinet. . . . I’ve gotta learn to blow this thing. So that’s what motivated me. From that and loving to be ‘round animals, the glamour of the circus parade, I went on to meet all these wonderful musicians and fabulous people all over the world. Nothing will ever top the thrill of playing with Louis Armstrong or even the first time I played with Papa Mutt Carey, but if it wasn’t for loving the circus, I’d probably have been a bricklayer or wound up with a shoe shop like the rest of them. Instead I got to see the Pope in Rome, Westminster Abbey in London, St. Peter’s Square, the Orient--all through the clarinet.”

Darensbourg’s largest fame probably arrived with a group he formed called the Dixie Flyers, named after one of the major North-South trains from the early days. A recording the group made of W. C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues” sold a million copies, he remembered. It featured his own low-register solo in a technique he called “slap-tongue clarinet.”

As he explained it: “You create a suction with your tongue right against the reed. You make a stiff staccato and pull your tongue back from the reed at the same time. Not too many guys can do it now.” He said he’d bitten through two mouthpieces trying to master the technique. That was in his medicine-show days, before amplifiers, and “you could get a really full sound with slap-tongue.” It drew the crowds to the tent.

He revived slap-tongue during a concert he was playing with the great Dixieland trombonist Kid Ory. Ory was furious, but it went over big. “It’s nothing but a gimmick but a pleasing one,” Darensbourg said.

Over the years he drank more than was good for him, as he admitted, and he had some chaotic associations with the ladies until he met and settled down with his last wife, Helen, who changed his ways.

He played at Disneyland, toured with various groups and enjoyed the great traditional jazz revival of the late ‘40s and after, when his warm, lyrical and individual improvisational style received the recognition it deserved.

His conversations with Vacher spanned 20 years. In one of their last talks, Darensbourg, already slowed by heart trouble, said: “I know I’ll be playing until I cut out. I don’t ever want to stop. I pick up my horn every day. I still love to play, blow something, and once in a while I’ll go round the clubs and play for free.”