Madame John Dodt's Legacy #43...
by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana

For some centuries now, I have suggested - with more than a touch of la-dee-dah jocosity and facetiousness - that the Jazz and Heritage Festival is missing an immense bet by ignoring and otherwise cold-shouldering a significant part of the local heritage, i.e. the queer one. My mind always drifts to the site of that immense pink tent (definitely the one Schiaparelli called Shocking, or heliotrope or old lavender) wherein one might see, day after day, the TT's and Corner Pocket danseurs, the cream of the local drag world, Connie Marcelle as a one-woman-gospel-tent, all the guitar-twanging Lesbian folkies the ear could stand, myriad cabaret artistes - they know who they are - maybe all of this emceed by Becky Allen as her badd self, or Mickey Gil as the Viennese Dr. Daddy-O, directed by Carl "The Cajun Cukor" Walker and underwritten by Barbara Motley (just so we could see the luscious Su "Gonczilla" Gonczy working the son-et-lumiere dials like the deranged teenage protegee of Ernest Thesiger) with additional funding from the manufacturers of Get Set, the publishers of Bound & Gagged, and the management of Petunias. But alas, this is a pipe dream without the hash, and in the bowl, or bowel, of an empty pipe is just where it's going to sit...and since, as Kafka says, that can never happen, it might be as well to have a brief historical look at an imaginary Les-Gay Jazz Fest, and who might we drag up on the stage, not literally either...

Jazz as a music has become ever more elitist and impenetrable and coterie-ish, which may be why some pressing need was felt for a lollapalooza like Ken Burns' PBS series which ended a bit prematurely about forty years ago - frankly I'd be more interested in Bob (Bazooka) Burns' Jazz but that would end even earlier and would include Martha Raye and Louis Prima, and you can imagine what purists and cognoscenti would make of that. There's really no Jazz Babylon with all the sexual tattle on jazz musicians and what escapes with a hiss of scandal from the closed ranks of jazz scholars turns out to be either tarted up in the speculative or either so sensational as to be utterly grotesque (several years ago, in Donald Clarke's Wishing On The Moon, I read the news that when Billie Holiday ran out of veins literally Everywhere Else, she'd shoot horse into her vulva, and I thought to myself, I just don't need to know this, somehow; though Clarke tattled on just about every muff Lady Day ever dived, or dove). Two books that sort of redress the balance, or try to in respectively solemnly personal/theoretical and giddily gossipy ways are John Gill's Queer Noises and Boze Hadleigh's The Vinyl Closet, but the former is a collection of essays on random subjects, and the latter is all over the map and out of date to boot.

Jazz men and women are considered to be sexless because well, that's not what the music is all about - but oh, it is, it is. (Never mind the origins of the terms "jazz" and "rock-and-roll" and all that etymological harrumphing, the sex lives of jazz people are curtained off like an old fashioned passion pit from any sort of scrutiny.) As examples of the speculative, there is the persistent rumor that Miles Davis died of HIV, specifically PCP pneumonia, and that despite his showy fondness for cruising-and-bruising white girls, he also enjoyed a gent or two, hence the persistent rumor that the Bitches' Brew LP has all queers on it - this is something like the old story about Alla Nazimova filming Oscar Wilde's Salome, in a famously ornate and financially disastrous silent version, with an all queer cast and crew as some sort of hommage to Oscar. The other great example is Bix Beiderbecke, probably the most famous of all white trumpet players of the early period who died young and relatively (i.e., publicly) unknown and unrecorded (i.e., you almost need the hearing apparatus of a canine to distinguish Beiderbecke from the noisy ensembles on those period records - people have constructed entire careers on same), drank himself to death and into romantic legend, just wanted to play, was no hand with the ladies, etc. etc. Whether or not Beiderbecke was fruit, as they used to charmingly call it in my youth, has occupied sufficient ink to fill several institutional sized swimming pools and enough paper to fell a couple square miles of trees, but of course no one knows now and No One Ever Said Then. The latest person to come forth with this precious grail-like knowledge is Richard Sudhalter in his book, White Jazz, and he does enough huffing and puffing to blow down the little pig's brick house, and then he claims in a footnote that He Alone Knows the truth but that he's not telling. He doesn't tell how he knows, either. Beiderbecke is probably the most curious case (primarily because so much is made out of his presumed "orientation," much more than is made out of, say, Benny Goodman obviously marrying for money and social connections) ...and certainly the highest ranked in the jazz pantheon of any queer men.

Women are another matter, since jazz is a notoroiously butch and virile form, or is at least perceived that way by its defenders-admirers. Many of the old time classic blues royalty were almost all, to a woman, bulldaggers - Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, the sublime Ethel Waters, the notorious Gladys Bentley, as well as the man who accompanied, coached, and composed for so many of them, Porter Grainger. Far more tongues have wagged about Billie Holiday, the cabaret diva Mabel Mercer, Carmen McRae, than have ever stopped to wonder about the nelly, Miss-Girlish patois that the great saxophonist Lester Young used as his private lingo or why so many men performers are such exquisite fashion plates and ghetto dandies. Like operatic tenors, it's hard to believe they're straight, but I assume most of them are, even the late and extremely bizarre Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the blind multi-instrumentalist and avant-gardist who came out on the stage of Municipal Auditorium some decades ago when Jazz Fest was barely even in diapers, swilling around in some sort of insane-looking vinyl or leather confection that prompted my older sister, sitting with me in the audience - a biological sister not the other kind, sisters - to exclaim, "He looks like something out of Scorpio Rising!" which I found an unimprovably astute comment.

There's room also in our big tent for the well-chronicled: Billy "Sweetpea" Strayhorn, muse and collaborator to Duke Ellington (bandleader and pussy hound and dapper dan extraordinare), Hot Club de France swing violinist Stephane Grapelley, the shrieking, pommaded-n-pompadoured Esquerita (progenitor of the styles of Little Richard and a thousand lesser male divas) if only to represent that era when jazz slid into rhythm-n-blues, and of course sister-from-another-planet Sun Ra, whose outfits may have influenced George Clinton's fashion sense but whose Aliens-Visit-Ancient-Egypt-and-Radio-City-Music-Hall-Simultaneously! stage shows and music are strictly sui generis. And for good measure, that most perverse of dance teams, Clifton Webb and Libby Holman, performing that most perverse of fake-jazz production numbers, "Moaning Low," and Frances Faye banging 'em out on the ivories, dedicating "this next one to the girl I love" as she apparently once did on the Ed Sullivan Shew back in the late Jurassic, resulting in a near-blackout on her TV appearances ever after.

For so-called World Music, King (or is it Queen?) of the Tango, Carlos Gardel, Charles Trenet (the subject of more jokes in French movies than one cares to count, but myself I adore Le Fou Qui Chante), that slinky blonde Suzy Solidor who cut such a dangerous swath through the Lesbian world of 20s and 30s Paris, loving 'em and leaving 'em, ending respectably as an antiquaire at Cagnes-sur-Mer, and maybe even that gravel-voiced old Mexican dagger Chavela Vargas who is twice as tough and butch and bold as any mere male ranchero singer and always sounds as though her heart is caught in a vise....

And let us not forget our local roots...the great (but alas unrecorded, so enlarged and also reduced to legend, like jazz's supposed pappy Buddy Bolden) Storyville composer and piano professor Toney "Dago" Jackson, admired by all, including the notoriously begrudging Jelly Roll Morton. It was common knowledge that Jackson was a sissy, but that doesn't seem to have been held against him; whether he was a happy man or not, most details of his life are effaced by time, but in response to one old-time trumpeter who made the mistake of telling Al Rose that Jackson was happy-go-lucky without a care in the world, Rose wrote irascibly and no doubt correctly in his book on Storyvile: "Oh, to be an epileptic, alcoholic, homosexual Negro genius in the Deep South of the United States of America! How could you have a care?" Jackson who wrote Pretty Baby - apparently for a trick, hence the association of the name with Storyville, and the title of the lovely, underrated Louis Malle movie, which also features as primo footage of Frances Faye, incidentally, as one can get outside of her Forties soundies and her appearance with Bing Crosby and Martha Raye in the 1937 picture Double Or Nothing. In Pretty Baby, a character dimly suggested by Jackson was essayed by Antonio Fargas whose inscrutability, coupled with his penchant for playing black nells, was just right as a portrait - and this probably sums up many queer jazz men and women - of a man that everyone admired and no one bothered to know.