Dixieland Revisited

Three stocky men, looking more like merchants than musicians, line up on the little bandstand in front of a three-man rhythm section. Unsmilingly, almost diffidently, they raise clarinet, trumpet and trombone; the trumpeter stomps out a beat, and the air pulses to the ambling rhythms of Dixieland. The place is Nick's, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, the time is any night of the week (except Monday), and the trumpeter front and center, blowing bright and raucous phrases where they count most, is Phil Napoleon himself, back at the jazz business after two decades.

Brooklyn-born Napoleon, 51, thinks of his return as a kind of mission. Somewhere, he feels, jazzmen have gotten off the track, both the latter-day Dixielanders and the bopsters, who seldom let you hear the tune. "These kids, now, all on a 'progressive' kick, don't know what they're listening to because they don't know where it came from." Phil Napoleon is doing what he can to set things straight by taking the young crowd back to first principles: "This music we're playing, it's so old! I had to work hard to remember it."

Listen & Learn. When he was eleven, Napoleon ran away to New Orleans, began working out his own way of playing the trumpet ("I was playing before Louis Armstrong got out of the Waif's Home"). At 16 he formed his own Original Memphis Five, soon found himself proprietor of one of the most popular little outfits in the U.S. For a while, a youngster named Bix Beiderbecke, who was to die at 28 and become a jazz immortal, carried Phil's horn for him, listening and learning. Between 1917 and 1925 the Memphis Five made 3,011 records.

By 1926, "symphonic" bands were the rage. Napoleon organized one of his own. Among its 15 members were Glenn Miller, Russ Morgan, Joe Venuti, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw. It anticipated the age of swing by half a dozen years, but never caught on outside of Brooklyn. Phil Napoleon left the jazz business and became a trumpeter-of-all-work at N.B.C. There, for 22 years, he played "Stravinsky one hour, soap opera the next." Finally he decided he was ready to quit playing.

A Special Thought. But there was too much of the old music in him for that; friends pried him back to Dixieland. "I didn't know whether I could stand it," he says, "but I wanted to play the old music --the two-beat, the natural beat (once you get into the four-beat, you begin to jump up & down)--just once more before I died." He was afraid the "kids wouldn't like it," incredulously found there was an eager new generation that "doesn't even remember Benny Goodman."

An older crowd has been turning up too, people who once courted to Phil's music, and can hardly believe he is the same man. "They forget I started so young," Phil says. For them he blows the old tunes--That's A Plenty, Milneburg Joys, High Society, Tin Roof Blues. For the departed jazzmen whose music he is reviving, he has a special thought: "I keep thinking of that good band up there with Gabriel. Of course Gabriel's the greatest--Bix is probably playing second horn up there--it must be a wonderful band."

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