HOW I DISCOVERED BUNK WHILE I WAS LIVING IN BELGIUM IN 1959 AND WHY IT TOOK ME SO LONG

by Marcel JOLY

The answer to the second part of the question above is very simple, it's the name of a man: Hugues Panassié.

I was still very young (about 11 or 12) when I was already attracted by all kinds of American music. The first tune I knew was 'Because of You'. At the age of fourteen I delivered a lecture on jazz in class although my knowledge of the subject was almost inexistant. I didn't even know Louis Armstrong was black! Then the rock and roll wave arrived and I became an ardent fan of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Very soon after this the first of a long series of coincidences put me in class next to a guy who was good friends with another classmate whose mother was British. Every Summer vacation both boys spent time in England. When they came back they were full of stories about the fantastic music they had heard over there. Their hero was Chris Barber. I can still see them on the school playground chanting 'I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream'. With my renewed interest in jazz I went to the public library to see what I could find out about this fascinating music, not having the faintest idea that this was the start of a life-long quest for the Holy Grail.

Before I go on with my story I need to tell you something about my country. Belgium is a bilingual country: in the northern part people speak Flemish (Flemish and Dutch are like English and American), in the Southern part they speak French. Very few Belgians in those days knew
any English, not even the higher educated ones. So it was only normal that the books about jazz that I found in the library were written in Dutch or French. I ignored the ones in Dutch because they looked (and were!) very amateurish and concentrated on the ones written in the language of Molière. Two names came to the fore: Robert Goffin and Hugues Panassié. The first one was a Belgian lawyer and poet who actually wrote the first documented book on jazz, 'Aux frontières du Jazz' published in 1937. The book that would become my Bible was 'Le dictionnaire du Jazz' by Hugues Panassié. I took it home and kept it for months. Nobody else asked for it! I copied large parts of it by hand because I didn't have a type-writer and xerox-machines were still science-fiction. In the end I knew that book almost by heart. Later I would get a present from my girlfriend (who later became my wife and still is): she bought me a pocket-book called 'Jazz, van New Orleans tot Cool', a translation in Dutch of 'Das Jazzbuch' written by Joachim Ernst Berendt. I still think that this book, published in 1953, is an excellent introduction for a newcomer in the jazz field. For me it opened my mind, I became aware that Panassié's ideas were not the only ones on the subject.

By that time I had started buying records, first 78's to play on our old phonograph (with an electric motor but still with steel needles!). The harvest was poor and I remember my excitement when a new department store opened in the town where I lived and offered 78's at 15F (the normal price was 60 F) including many Sidney Bechet recordings on the Vogue label. Hugues Panassié said Sidney Bechet was OK, so my joy was complete. On my 18th birtday my future wife bought me a portable record player on which I could play LP and 45 rpm records. I was really on my way now and the first LP I bought was one by Louis Armstrong containing 12 numbers recorded by the Hot Five. Soon I had LP's by Jelly Roll Morton (the General solo session), Sammy Price, early Ellington, Basie etc. According to Panassié I was listening to 'le vrai jazz', the real jazz.

Much later I became aware how much the Belgian attitude towards jazz was influenced by the French writers. The jazz world in France (and in Belgium of course) was divided in two camps bitterly opposed. On one side were the followers of Panassié for whom jazz ended after the swing period. On the other side of the fence were the followers of Charles Delaunay. Panassié and Delaunay had worked together a lot before World War II. After the war Delauney became enchanted by the new developments in jazz when the first records by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie arrived in Europe. This meant the end of the collaboration (for Panassié bebop was NOT jazz) and from then on it was real war between the two of them.

Within the boundaries of this story it makes no sense to dwell further on Delaunay and his cohorts unless to state that they were too busy with the new style of jazz to pay much attention to the revival of the New Orleans style. A lot of time and energy was spent in the two leading French jazz magazines (Delaunay's 'Jazz Hot' and Panassié's 'Bulletin du Hot Club de France') by fighting each other. Although my natural sympathy went to Panassié - I was never too fond of bebop - I have to say Jaz Hot's polemics were much funnier than Panassié's. The latter was
at his best when he was writing about something he liked. His enthusiasm was the kind that would send you to your record shelves to play again the records he was raving about in purple prose. When he was writing about something he disliked he became mean, vulgar and very childish. His favourite nickname for Delaunay and his friends was 'les zazotteux' which meant exactly nothing. The other side called Panassié 'le pape de Montauban' (the pope of Montauban, after the village where Panassié lived) and this nickname was full of meaning. Indeed the Hot Club de France had become more of a religeous sect than a democratic jazzclub. The members were expected to accept all of Panassié's ideas without any reservation. Those who had the nerve to say or write something which was not completely in accordance with these ideas were excommunicated without any chance of redemption unless they were willing to confess their errors in public. Panassié was a real fanatic and sometimes his behaviour was really funny. Somewhere in the sixties (and I am jumping ahead of my story now) I had been reading some issues of the Bulletin borrowed from a friend. and I wanted to subscribe. The only way to get the Bulletin was to become a member of the Hot Club de France. So I
wrote to Panassié, showing exagerated respect, and asked to become a member of the club. The 'pope' didn't answer himself but I received a letter from Madeleine Gautier, his life companion and most faithful disciple. Madeleine wrote me that it was unusal to become a member
unless you were introduced by two regular members; in my case, because I showed so much respect, they were prepared to make an exception. The only thing I had to do (besides paying my membership dues of course) was to promise that I never would talk in public about bebop as being jazz!

“Where is Bunk in all this?” I can hear you think. Well, that's exactly the point: Bunk was nowhere in Panassié's world.. Strangely enough, while he was always waving the New Orleans flag in all his writings, Panassié took no interest at all in the revival. A possible reason for this attitude could be found in his character. In 1938 he had been in New York for 5 months (this resulted in his best book 'Cinq mois à New York') trying to start a kind of New Orleans revival around Sidney Bechet, Tommy Ladnier and, strangely enough, Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, one of the few white jazz musician he considered to be equal to their black colleagues. Although they made some fine recordings (not specifically pure New Orleans in character) his efforts hadn't the results he had expected, especially not in the States. When a couple of years later some unknowns like Bill Russell and Gene Williams brought Bunk Johnson back out of oblivion and even succeeded in making him the talk of New York for a while, all this without asking Panassié's blessing, the pope of Montauban decided that he would have nothing to do with all this nonsense. Let's have a look what he had to say about Bunk in his 'Dictionnaire du Jazz': “He was rediscovered by enthusiastic but misguided amateurs in 1941, made a number of records, played in California and New York, and enjoyed a second but unfortunately undeserved fame. Johnson was undoubtedly a remarkable musician in his youth, as all who heard him in New Orleans at the beginning of the century have said (he could hardly ignore this after
what his God, Louis Armstrong, had said about Bunk), but the records he made at the end of his life, the only ones he ever made, show neither swing or invention nor any of the qualities which go to make up good jazz trumpet.” Let's see what he had to say about George Lewis: “Enthusiasts of the 'New Orleans revival' have attributed to him greater merits than he can honestly be said to possess.” Big Jim comes off best: “Gained a certain fame by recording with Bunk Johnson in the 1940's. A mediocre soloist, but a good ensemble musician in New Orleans style numbers.” How, for heaven's sake, do you expect the young, naive jazz loving kid I was in those days, to go out and look for records by these men? Add to this that Panassié had succeeded in surrounding himself with a bunch of faithful disciples who propagated in France and in Belgium completely the same ideas. Michel Perrin, for example, in his 'Histoire du Jazz' (Encyclopédie Larousse de poche - 1967) doesn't even mention George Lewis and says about Bunk: “They made him make records which, unluckily, don't give any idea about his past splendor”.

It's time now for another in those series of coincidences I mentioned above. In 1959 I was studying physical therapy in Antwerp. In the school was a basement room where we spent time between classes and ate our lunch. In that room we had a record player. Those of us who had records at home brought them along to play them on the old machine. One day a fellow student brought three funny looking 10” records with him. The sleeves looked somewhat amateurish, the records were pressed on red vinyl and had a light blue label; the label's name was simply 'American Music' (LP 644 by Bunk and LP 639 and 645 by George Lewis and Kid Shots, so that you know right away what I'm talking about). A fourth record looked more 'normal', it was on the Philips label (which distributed Columbia in Europe in those days) and the artist was again Bunk Johnson, the title 'Last testament of a great New Orleans Jazzman'. To show you I was already an 'educated' jazz lover, I must say I was familiar with almost all the musicians who were with Bunk on his last recording session, people like Ed Cuffee, Garvin Bushell and Don Kirkpatrick. To show you my ignorance in the field of New Orleans music, I have to admit that, except for Bunk himself and Baby Dodds, all of the musicians on the American Music LP's were completely unknown to me. You want to hear something funny? Looking at the photo of George Lewis on LP 639, where he is wearing a parade cap, my first impression was that he was a policeman or a sailor!

After almost 40 years I can still feel the emotion I experienced when I first heard the American Music records. I never had heard music like that but I knew right away that this was the music I had been looking for. I asked if I could take the records home with me to listen to them properly and I could. I played them again and again and the more I listened the more I loved what I heard. How much I had learned to love Louis and Bechet and Morton, this music touched me more emotionally than everything I had heard before. I couldn't get enough of that strong, clear trumpet sound of Bunk, his style devoid of pyrotechnics but with such an inner riches. The bitter-sweet tone of George Lewis made me shiver. I never heard a more exciting trombone than Big Jim's. On these records I really 'heard' Baby Dodds's wonderful drumming. A week later I was able to buy three of the four records because the owner needed money to go out in the weekend. I was a poor student in those days. My parents gave me 5 F a day to buy two coffees. I drank water and saved the 5 F. The price of a normal LP was 250 F, I remember I payed 100 F a piece for LP 644, LP 645 and the Philips LP by Bunk! I had to borrow the money from my parents...

Next coincidence. Two years later I was doing an apprenticeship at a local hospital, told one of the nurses about my interest in jazz and found out that her husband was a jazz collector and would I like to come to their house and meet him? That's how I met my old friend Roger de Keersmaecker. Right on my first visit he gave me a spare copy of American Music LP 643 by Bunk. I also took home a little book 'Jazz - New Orleans' by Samuel B. Charters and a bunch of issues of Jazz Monthly, the best British magazine in those days. Charters' book became my new bible. In Jazz Monthly I read about recording sessions for Riverside going on in New Orleans and somewhat later the first Icons began to arrive. Soon I was on the mailing list of a British drummer, a guy called Barry Martyn, who had started his own record label called MONO. I just missed the first issue which was already sold out. Limited editions were limited editions in those days.

If someone would have told me then, that twenty years later I would ask Bill Russell, the legendary man behind American Music, to draw me a map to go to New Iberia to visit Bunk's grave, I would have called him a lunatic. How could I expect that I would spend hours and hours in that little apartment on Orleans Street, year after year, listening to that same Bill Russell - who had become like a guru to me - telling about George, Baby, Jelly and, most of all, about Bunk. Life has been good to me...

To close this little story, before I bore you all to death, one little snippet of new (?) information about Bunk. When I was in New Iberia I visited the rice plant where Bunk had worked now and then. The man in charge of the plant introduced us to an old black man who had worked there all his life. Oh sure, he had known Bunk. He remembered hearing him play the saxophone in a local dance band (the Banner Band? He couldn't remember). “The saxophone” I asked “are you sure? Wasn't it the trumpet or the tuba?” I mimed both instruments. “No” he said “It was the saxophone” and he mimed that instrument. Bunk was reported to hate saxophones - and so did Bill Russell! Did Bunk really play sax in New Iberia? Since I first wrote this little story, I found out he did!

- Marcel JOLY

First published 1997 in the Flemish printed version of the Jazzgazette