Jazz at 5:30

It is about time that lovers of hot music had a chance to listen to it in comfortable seats, without getting sinus trouble, and free from the compulsion to get junky with cut whiskey at speakeasy prices.

So wrote an avid amateur jazz musician. Paul Smith, in a Manhattan jazz concert program note a month ago. Last week Manhattanites had their fourth chance of the season to hear jazz-authentic, impromptu jazz-in the plush seats of Town Hall.

On the stage were some of the greatest of jazz improvisers: gaunt, lean-fingered "Pee Wee" Russell, famed for his hoarse clarinet tones; bobbing, supple-wristed

Zutty Singleton and round-faced "Kansas." ace Negro drummers; Trombonists Benny Morton and Jay C. Higginbotham; bright-eyed "Hot Lips" Page and tiny Max Kaminsky; Bassist Billy Taylor; James P. Johnson, veteran Negro hot pianist. Twelve in all took turns. Unceremonious master of ceremonies was assertive, sharp-jawed Eddie Condon, who did what leading was done while he strummed his guitar.

What the concert aimed to do was to revivify a form of popular music which had lately become much less popular. In the 1920s, when jazz flourished in Chicago, there used to be great jam sessions in hotspots after closing time. By 1936 hot jazz had weaned a commercially successful but adulterated form of itself: swing. Today, it is commercial swing und the smooth, symphonic arrangements of name bands that make big money and attract jitterbugs.

Phonograph companies have practically stopped issuing hot jazz records. If jazz could be given the needle, Guitarist Condon was the man to do it. An oldtime member of Chicago's Austin High gang, he organized bands for the first great jazz records of the Chicago school in 1927. Ever since he has been a catalyst of jazz, who never takes a chorus himself.

Last week's slim audience didn't bother Eddie Condon. Nor did it discourage his backer, bespectacled Ernest Anderson, onetime adman and CBS executive. For next season he has arranged eleven biweekly Town Hall jazz concerts for Eddie Condon, with more possibly to come, at the same unseasonal (for jazz) hour as last week's: 5:30 p.m.

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