Drummer in a Museum

The American Museum of Natural History called it a "lecture and demonstration" on The Origins of Primitive Rhythms. But what a thousand Manhattan youngsters heard one day last week was a thumping, banging hullabaloo that set their feet atwitch, their elbows aquiver. Crouching like a witch doctor over a clattery battery of traps, perspiring, floppy-haired Gene Krupa beat out African war dances and eight-to-the-bar boogie-woogie bumps. Between beats Mr. Krupa, a scholarly thumper as well as one of the world's best drummers, explained which was which. The Museum had asked him to drum up its educational program. And he banged out a reply to Park Commissioner Robert Moses, who lately pronounced Manhattan museums "stuffy" and unattractive to the young.

Lecturer Krupa's workout underlined a well-known point: that U.S. jazz sterns from Africa, via the Southern Negro. Drummer Krupa played records of drum-work by the Royal Watusi, a tribe of seven-footers. He banged on the Museum's signal drums, war drums, dance drums. He showed how his own famed Blue Rhythm Fantasy (scored for 14 percussion instruments) is based on Bahutu chants and dances, in which the savage hand-clapping is pure eight-to-the-bar.

Gene Bertram Krupa, 32, is one of the Chicago boys who practiced jazz in the 19205, and one of the few who turned it to commercial success. His father, a Chicago alderman, sent him to a Catholic college to study for the priesthood, but within two years Gene Krupa was beating it out in Midwestern bands. He rode to fame with Benny Goodman's orchestra, battering frenetically and taking elaborate syncopated cadenzas. He devised three facial expressions to fit his moods: for dreamy music, "my eyes look far away and my jaw drops"; for speedier work, "I look like a fielder trying to catch a fly ball with the sun in his eyes." The No. 3 expression, unclassifiable, was for moments of hair-tossing, gum-chomping abandon, during which Drummer Krupa yelled over & over (he said): "Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops!"

Gene Krupa is a serious student of timpanology, an admirer of such virtuosi as Vishnudass Shirali, who has pounded and patted twelve drums for Hindu Dancer Uday Shan-Kar. Also Gene Krupa is, today, where popular musicians like to be when they settle down: in the money. He has his own band which, however conventional its brand of swing, brings in the jitterbugs. "I like to see them go crazy," says Gene Krupa. "I sure do."

sb sb sb

Three years ago, when Benny Goodman played at Manhattan's Paramount theater, jitterbugs cavorted in the aisles--so wildly that police were summoned. Psychiatrists gravely speculated on what made the bugs jitter. Last week came an answer: they were hired to. Haled into a Manhattan court was Irving ("Schnitz") Davidson, boss of an organization called "The 200 Characters," who could be had to dance in aisles, make a fuss over celebrities arriving in railroad stations, mob people for autographs, carry instruments for orchestra players. Charged with assault on a muscler-in on his trade, Boss "Schnitz" was let off with a suspended sentence and a warning to break it up.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.