Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
In nearly 20 years of writing the Secret History of Chicago Music, I’ve never tackled prewar jazz. The Windy City has been an important center for bebop and avant-garde jazz, and it was also a major player in jazz’s early history. The “Chicago style” has meant different things to different jazz musicians over the decades, but in the 1910s and ’20s, it meant a heavy New Orleans influence. The Crescent City’s “Dixieland” sound had evolved from ragtime, blues, and local marching-band traditions, among other things, and when it arrived in Chicago, its characteristic small-group collective improvisation got faster and showier.
This “hot” style was in large part developed and popularized in south-side dance halls and cabarets by Black musicians from New Orleans. They included some of the most famous and influential figures in the history of jazz: Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago in 1922 and spent most of the decade in the city, Jelly Roll Morton lived here in the mid-teens and mid-’20s, and King Oliver first moved to Chicago in 1918. Exciting sounds imported from New Orleans also inspired a group of white middle-class teenagers on the far west side. The Austin High Gang, as they’re often known, aren’t as well remembered as these giants, but they helped create the foundations of Chicago jazz.
Traditional New Orleans jazz combos employed violin, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone on the front line, though as volume levels rose in the 1910s, violins fell out of favor. The rhythm section might include drum kit, piano, guitar or banjo, and bass or tuba. In the 1920s, saxophones entered the picture in a big way, and improvised solos became popular—you can hear the latter development in recordings from famous groups of the time, among them Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Armstrong’s Hot Five.
In 1922, a kid named Jimmy McPartland used to hang out with his friends at an ice cream parlor across the street from Austin High School. He’d been playing the violin since he was five and would soon take up cornet. “Every day after school, Frank Teschemacher and Bud Freeman, Jim Lanigan, my brother Dick, myself, and a few others used to go to a little place called the Spoon and Straw,” Jimmy McPartland told Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff for their 1955 book Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It. “You’d get a malted milk, soda, shakes, and all that stuff. But they had a Victrola there, and we used to sit around listening to the bunch of records laid on the table.”
One day those records included new sides by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white band working in Chicago that had been founded by Crescent City expats looking for better gigs (and whose lineup also included local players). When the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released the first jazz recordings in 1917, they’d been marketed as novelties, but the New Orleans Rhythm Kings made it clear that they considered their music a legitimate genre, not a fad.
In the 1920s, the recording industry was still new, and broadcast radio was even newer. Much of society considered jazz “the devil’s music,” but teenagers have always loved to dance—and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings had a seismic impact on the Austin High Gang. The Kings would famously record with Jelly Roll Morton for Gennett Records in 1923, but the songs McPartland and his friends fell in love with were cut in 1922.
“I believe the first tune we played was ‘Farewell Blues.’ Boy, when we heard that—I’ll tell you we went out of our mind,” McPartland said. “Everybody flipped. So we put the others on, ‘Tiger Rag,’ ‘Discontented,’ ‘Tin Roof Blues,’ ‘Bugle Call,’ and such titles. We stayed there from about three in the afternoon until eight at night, just listening to those records one after another, over and over again. Right then and there we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys.”
The Austin High Gang (or the Austin High School Gang, depending on who’s talking) didn’t necessarily call themselves that—at first they took the name “the Blue Friars” after the Friar’s Inn (60 E. Van Buren), a reputed gangster hangout where the New Orleans Rhythm Kings played. The kids often stood outside to hear the band, since they weren’t old enough to get in.
In the gang’s early configurations, McPartland played cornet, his brother Dick played banjo and guitar, Bud Freeman played C-melody saxophone, Frank Teschemacher played alto sax, and Jim Lanigan played piano or drums. (Later Teschemacher would acquire a clarinet, and Lanigan soon switched to tuba and bass.) Of the five, only Freeman didn’t also play violin. Eventually the group grew to include drummer Dave Tough (from Oak Park High School), trombonist Floyd O’Brien, and pianist Dave North.
The young musicians couldn’t read music—as McPartland’s future wife, pianist Marian McPartland, would later recall, their attitude was “if you read music, you’re not a jazz player.” They learned tunes by ear, beginning with “Farewell Blues,” and played wherever they could, mostly at high school fraternity parties and afternoon “tea dances.”
In 1923, Freeman and the McPartland brothers saw Louis Armstrong play with King Oliver at Lincoln Gardens on the south side. “I knew at once I was hearing a master,” Freeman is quoted as saying on a page maintained by Stanford University. “Louis was the great American voice—a genius—and his guide and idol was King Oliver, and nothing would ever be the same again.”
Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who’d guested with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, wasn’t much older than the Austin High Gang, but he was well ahead of them musically—he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, and the gang idolized him. While Beiderbecke was gigging as the star soloist of a “territory band” called the Wolverines, he used a night off to take Freeman and Teschemacher to see clarinetist Jimmie Noone and his combo play with Bessie Smith. “She had the most fantastic voice I’ve ever heard,” Freeman said. “From then on, I bought every Bessie Smith record I could find.”
Beiderbecke also took Jimmy McPartland under his wing. As Marian McPartland recalled, “Jimmy just loved it when Bix said to him, ‘I like you, kid. You play like me, but you don’t copy me.’” She also remembers hearing about Bix buying her future husband a new cornet, because at that point McPartland was still scrambling for money.
Beiderbecke helped McPartland get a gig as his replacement in the Wolverines when he left the band in 1924. McPartland recruited other members of the Austin High Gang into the band, but that arrangement only lasted a couple years. It’s hard to say exactly what became of the group they were playing in, because promoter Husk O’Hare had bought the rights to the name and maintained several simultaneous bands called the Wolverines in the late 20s to capitalize on the popularity of the original.
In 1927, four members of the Austin High Gang cut the sides that would properly launch their careers—and the sessions for those two 78s, released by Okeh in 1928, seem likely to be the only time such a large contingent of the original group ever recorded together.
Banjo player, guitarist, pianist, singer, and bandleader Eddie Condon, a contemporary of the gang and equally important to early Chicago jazz, assembled a band called McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans. Sponsored by singer and comb player Red McKenzie, the group included McPartland, Freeman, Teschemacher, and Lanigan, plus Condon on banjo, Mezz Mezzrow on cymbals, Joe Sullivan on piano, and (most famously) Gene Krupa on drums. The four songs they released became popular enough that their version of the standard “Nobody’s Sweetheart” was reissued in 1930 as part of a Parlophone split with Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra. These celebrated sides have appeared on numerous LP and CD compilations since.
This success effectively dissolved the Austin High Gang, insofar as they were still a coherent group—but only because the members separately started landing higher-profile gigs, mostly in New York City. Condon also went on to have an impressive career, and he’d often hire his old Chicago cohorts—Freeman wrote Condon’s hot 1934 single “The Eel,” for instance, and played a swinging and much-beloved solo on the tune. In 1956, Condon closed another circle by recording the live album At Newport with Louis Armstrong.
On and off from the late 1920s till the late ’30s, Freeman and Tough’s wide-ranging careers would include gigs and recording sessions with big bands led by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. During that era, Freeman and Coleman Hawkins could arguably be said to have represented the two main schools of tenor saxophone in jazz—and in 1957 they were paired on the Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart LP The Big Challenge.
Freeman returned to Chicago in 1981, where he wrote his autobiography and led beloved ensembles locally. McPartland also enjoyed a long and celebrated career, and Teschemacher (who died in a car crash in 1932) retains a reputation as a groundbreaking player.
When Freeman passed away in 1991, critic John Litweiler (who’d recently finished an 11-year tenure as director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago) eulogized him for the Reader. He also nodded to the Austin High Gang, describing one of the ways their legacy extended beyond the musical. “In the heyday of the first Chicago school, Freeman and his friends were an important bridge between early jazz and the swing era,” he wrote. “Along with their slightly older friend, cornetist Beiderbecke, they were the source of many of their era’s romantic attitudes about jazz: jazz is liberation, jazz is honesty, jazz is social protest.”
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
