A Club of His Own

Eddie Condon once tried to tell a New York Daily Newsman, in the plainest language he could muster, about his troubles in making the "real jazz" pay enough for tea for two, or keep body & soul together night & day: "We bled to death. We were eating off each other's wrists. We had one paper hat right on the hook but when we mentioned money he jumped back in the icebox." Another potential sponsor died during negotiations: "He went cool on us. They had to throw dirt on him."

Last week, in spite of all, Guitarist Eddie Condon got a nightclub of his own, where for the first time he was "eligible on both sides of the bar." Eddie Condon's, an incongruously plush spot, opened its doors in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and let out some of the loudest and longest renditions of Tea for Two and I've Found a New Baby to be heard since Prohibition.

Mother Hen to Jazz. There were good men on the bandstand: Saxman Bud Freeman; cocky, stocky Trumpeter Wild Bill Davison, who blows the horn out of the side of his mouth; zoot-suitish Clarinetist Joe (Little Sir Echo) Marsala, Drummers Dave Tough and George Wettling--all members of ragtime's Valhalla (Chicago branch) who have kept on playing jazz the old way, even after their pal Benny Goodman called it swing and made it a million dollar baby. There were no music stands or orchestrations to be seen at Eddie Condon's. "That's for organized slop," Eddie said.

Condon's men worked until 4 a.m. Sometimes Condon sat in, picking solemnly and matter-of-factly at his guitar. He doesn't play as much as he used to, now that he's a bandleader, but he has been around when some of the best jazz has been played. Condon acts as mother hen to as undependable a brood of gifted musicians as James Petrillo has in his roster. Eddie got them together first at Town Hall jazz concerts. They seemed willing to follow him--even when they couldn't follow everything he said in his elliptical, corner-of-the-mouth mutter. Boasts Eddie: "There's not a blood relative in the band. . . . No red beards. The boys can dress as they please as long as they have shoes on."

Most conspicuous absentees at Eddie Condon's opening were some of Condon's fellow Chicagoans: Trombonist Milfred ("Miff") Mole, Cornetist Francis Xavier ("Muggsy") Spanier, who play a half mile away, at Nick's in the Village--where Condon played until about two years ago. (Twelve blocks away, Manhattanites could hear the far more virile and exciting New Orleans Negro jazz of Cornetist Bunk Johnson--TIME, Nov. 5.) Some of Nick's parishioners were scattered among Condon's opening-night audience, lost among the celebrities and the Hoosiers. "You know, Hoosiers," explained Condon, himself the ninth child of an Indiana saloonkeeper: "the Paramount-once-a-week, glass-top-bus crowd. They stick around hoping to get into a picture. I don't mind the Hoosiers. They can come down, sit down, shut up, drink and get charged."

Condon calls his new jazz temple "Town Hall with booze." ("Our music stimulates drinking. They figure in order to understand it, they got to do like the fellow playing it.") Few people, even among fellow players, follow Condon's own habits: boilermakers (whiskey with a beer chaser) at the bar and milk at home (he thinks milk will keep away ulcers).

Though he sometimes slips into their highfalutin language, Jazzman Condon scorns the earnest critics of jazz--and once earned the gratitude of his colleagues by his cavalier attitude toward a French expert on le jazz hot. Said Eddie: "I wouldn't think of going over there and telling them how to jump on a grape."

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