I’ve been a huge jazz fan ever since I started to pull out my dad’s old records and give them a spin, when I was a teen in the early 80s. He had some primo stuff from when he was a teen in the 50s, which was a very good era to be a white teenager checking out new jazz LPs; there were mainstream jazz records coming out then that are now rated as classics. My dad was in the right place at the right time; even some of the most commercial jazz of that era— Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, etc.— still sounds pretty hip today.
Jazz has been a lot of different places since then, but I find that most people of my acquaintance give it the cold shoulder. It’s tricky to find a way in, if you don’t have someone to hold your hand and guide you through the inferno. And you may have gotten the impression that jazz is dull and pretentious and impossible to enjoy; certainly a lot of jazz fans are circumstantial evidence for this assumption.
I got lucky with my way in. I’d never met a jazz snob (that would come later), and my dad’s records were just sitting there. And some of them were stone classics.
PEE WEE RUSSELL
Today we’re going to look at Pee Wee Russell, a clarinetist who felt it was his job to sound different from everybody else on every gig he ever played. He was one of the weirdest jazzmen alive in 1927 when he went pro, and he’s still damned odd a century later.
Russell mostly worked in contexts that sound very old-fashioned in 2024. He was playing old time jazz back when it was just called jazz, and he got typecast as old-fashioned when the so-called swing era (a marketing term) cranked up.
For those of you have never heard Pee Wee— here he is on an Eddie Condon record. As a soloist, was a subversive force on this ensemble, but paradoxically, he was an expert at improvising countermelodies against the trumpet lead voice.
Love Is Just Around The Corner, 1938
Pee Wee’s clarinet can be heard sailing above the ensemble after the sax solo intro. Because of his piercing timbre, he sounds like a nut standing on a chair in the back of a room and yelling over the mayor. But his note choices actually fit beautifully with the collective improvisation going on. He’s standing on that chair inventing terrific counterpoint with the underrated Bobby Hackett on cornet. More on Hackett later: he would go on to play the lead on Jackie Gleason’s popular mood music records in the 50s, and while he’s pretty unbuttoned here, you can hear his Mozart-like perfection even in this hell-for-leather performance.
Pee Wee comes in with his break at :47, and he just dominates the side after that. It’s as if the nut standing on the chair grabbed the mic and got everybody’s attention.
Four-string guitarist Condon was one of those guys you find in the music business with modest talent for music, but an outsized gift for self-promotion. Condon’s smartass persona and hustling repertoire kept the older style alive on records, in bars, and on radio, and every NYC jazz player who didn’t throw the older idioms away as they aged wound up playing with Condon off and on for years.
Pee Wee spoke in interviews of his sadness at being typecast as a comedy relief figure in the Condon orbit. To be fair to people that mocked him then and now, he was physically absurd; drunk much of the time, he listed to the side when he walked. He looked like he was struggling to get around on the deck of a ship that was busy cutting through some rough waters.
Decades ago, I was chatting with an old drunk white guy who had seen Pee Wee on one of his last gigs; he demonstrated Pee Wee’s walk for me, and this was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
So, sure, Pee Wee’s drunken reprobate persona was comical. But despite Condon’s wisecracks, you can hear Pee Wee almost single-handedly making this recording immortal. It does help a lot that George Wettling was on drums; there were lots of decent drummers in Condon’s orbit, including Gene Krupa, but none of them swung more than Wettling.
Except, of course, for Dave Tough. He was more subtle than Wettling— a Wettling record usually skewed raucous— but if you had Dave Tough behind you, you were going to swing. Everybody knew how swinging Tough was, and he got hired by various martinets of the era. Eventually they’d get tired of his drinking and unreliability, but while the honeymoon lasted they made some of their most swinging records. He’s another forgotten master I’ll return to later.
From a 1939 Condon session, Pee Wee with Dave Tough on drums, There’ll Be Some Changes Made.
You can hear Dave changing up his approach every time a new section comes around; this cut cycles through a lot of different moods in three minutes, and his drumming anchors all of it.
I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll, Pee Wee at an Eddie Condon Town Hall gig, 1944. Here he begins his break in his growly bluesy mode, and wanders up into his wailing register after the crowd applauds, thinking he’s done. Then the ensemble comes back in and he keeps improvising beautiful lines. He uses this basic formula on a lot of the Town Hall performances.
Pee Wee certainly cut a lot of classics with Condon-led groups, but here’s an interesting example of what could happen when Pee Wee was treated like a leader and not a sidekick. This is from the 1932 Billy Banks sessions.
On this side, Bugle Call Rag, you can hear Pee Wee trading breaks and improvising counterpoint with another now-forgotten master, trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen. Condon actually is in there somewhere, on banjo, but nobody else in the room thought Pee Wee was a joke. Zutty Singleton is behind the drums, swinging like mad.
The Billy Banks sides, with a few slightly different star-packed lineups, can all be found on the complete Rhythmakers sessions, downloadable from ITunes.
This is a good album showing the odd transitional period between the early New Orleans period and the big band era. It’s got lots of Pee Wee and Allen, and other luminaries; Fats Waller plays on some cuts, and Tommy Dorsey shows up too, playing one of his hotter early breaks. No disrespect meant to the later jazz that people today are more likely to give a damn about, but jazz used to be more fun. This is a collection of jazz recorded back when jazz records were like scratchy Prozac.
Fast forward now to some highlights from Eddie Condon’s many 1940s Town Hall extravaganzas.
This is Peg O’ My Heart, a vehicle for yet another forgotten master, trombonist Miff Mole. Mole could swing like hell when you asked him to, but this is mostly him in his heartbreaking lyrical mode. After Miff gives us a lesson in melody playing, Pee Wee manages to play it mostly straight and still give us plenty of his Martian wobble. It’s an epic version of this nostalgic number, with a little taste of the raucous toward the end.
Fats Waller had recently left the planet, and this next item comes from was a show were all kinds of jazz musicians paid tribute to him. Walker’s Squeeze Me gives us more of Bobby Hackett, with Pee Wee playing counter lines behind Hackett’s cornet, and another of his crazy breaks where he takes a great band to a world of alternate reality. (Duke Ellington was backstage during this performance. I bet he dug it; he liked musicians who didn’t sound like anybody else.)
Pee Wee was in Louis Prima’s group for a while, before Prima made the famous records we hear on him today.
His sides with Prima are very nice small-to-medium ensemble jazz, with decent trumpet breaks from Prima himself.
This is a pretty swinging for a goofy novelty number— Mr. Ghost Is Going To Town.
Pee Wee comes in around 1:25.
Pee Wee was on his best behavior on a couple of Teddy Wilson sessions produced by John Hammond. It’s fun hearing Pee Wee doing a much more genteel version of the collective improvisation style at the top of this performance of When You’re Smiling— an impeccable blend with Hot Lips Page on trumpet and Chu Berry on tenor.
This is one of those many small group recordings that set a standard for that sort of jazz setting. The swing era tends to be remembered more for the big band stuff, much of which is wonderful. But it’s these small group things that really show a sublime side of jazz, one that was mostly left behind when bebop came along. You can find echoes of it in some of Parker’s work if you look for it.
Check out Chu Berry’s break, too— he was one of the hottest soloists at the time, a respected peer of fellow tenor masters Hawk and Lester, but he died in a car crash not long after this session. He also rates his own essay, which I’ll get to one of these days.
Pee Wee is featured here on a long blues improv, from a Town Hall show. The blues wasn’t his strong suit, maybe, but he really did something weird and poignant with it on this masterful performance.
This essay, I should say, is nothing like a best-of collection on Pee Wee Russell. Ten cuts is not even close to enough. When you’re a Pee Wee fan, you just keep collecting whatever you can find, in whatever context we are lucky enough to hear him. Pee Wee is mostly forgotten today, but he was a white jazz musician who Armstrong and Hawkins both dug. There’s an embarrassment of riches recorded on him, because no matter how much he was the butt of jokes, he worked all the time. You can hear why on the recordings collected here.
Pee Wee takes us out on a rare performance of Bix Beiderbecke’s obscure I’d Climb The Highest Mountain, Bix being the patron saint of all white early adopters of jazz. Pee Wee and Bix used to be roommates. I read somewhere that they had a car that didn’t run, and they used to use it mainly for its mirrors, when they had to shave because they needed to go among polite society that evening.
Bix’s liver didn’t survive the Fitzgerald “jazz age,” but his drinking buddy Pee Wee kept his legacy alive for decades, in the many eloquent statements he managed to make even in his weirdest clarinet breaks. Bix was one of jazz’s most lyrical players, and underneath all the outré approaches to tone color, Pee Wee had some of that Beiderbecke DNA in common with his departed pal.
(Pee Wee seen above with his colleague, trombonist Miff Mole.)
You had fun writing this, didn't you? I thoroughly enjoyed reading and I'm going play those clips later.
Tremendous article. I learnt a lot from this, but was astonished that I know "Peg O'My Heart" very well, because it was used in a dramatization of a novel that I used to listen to a lot to get to sleep years ago! Miff Mole has to be the best moniker ever.
Your dad had a great record collection. Thanks for sharing.