"It was the greatest Chicago-style band I ever heard. You have no idea of the power of that band. Bill played this blazing hot lead and Brunies was all over the place with his trombone. Astounding! Dick Carey (who played piano at Condon’s for a while) told me that guys used to come in to see Brunies ‘execute low.’ He could move that slide around faster than almost anybody else. Those records are still great."

Some, at least, of Conrad’s prejudice against Chicago style had dissipated. But it was Brunies, the New Orleans native, who impressed him the most. "He was a tailgate player, and he would hit those wonderful, big round, low notes that I never heard any other trombone player produce. He had a lot of volume, but it wasn’t the volume that did it. It was the sound, a huge fat brass sound. What I loved about Ory and Brunies was that their trombones sounded like brass instruments.

"Dr. Thom Mason, who heads the jazz program at the University of Southern California, says that one of his gripes is trombonists who try to sound like sax players. He isn’t talking about Jack Teagarden. Teagarden, for all of his amazing technique, is a lusty player."

Rudi also introduced Conrad to Tony Parenti, who invited him to come along on a date at the Tip Toe Club in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was his first time with a "real band."

"I was concerned because I didn’t know the New York book. If Parenti called an Ory tune or a number I had played with my California band, I was relatively safe. If not, I had to figure it out by ear. Fortunately, most Dixieland isn’t so complicated in terms of chord changes. A trombone can just wait for the trumpet to have his say and then fill in. If you are working with the chords, you are safe — more or less."

"I guess it went okay because I was invited to come back to the Tip Toe Club with a band of my own. It was my first job leading a bunch of pros. I hired all the guys that I idolized. I had Henry Goodwin on trumpet; Edmund Hall on clarinet, James P. Johnson on piano, Pops Foster on bass, and Baby Dodds on drums.

"There I was, this skinny 18-year-old playing my first professional gig and leading these music giants. I’m petrified. Henry Goodwin was very sweet and helped me through it. He’d lean over and whisper, ‘We just played a blues. Don’t you think we ought to do something with more zip?"

Around 1949, Conrad teamed up with young Bob Greene, still recognized today as the premier Jelly Roll Morton stylist, in forming a New Orleans-style quartet. They had Bob Lovett on clarinet modeling himself on Johnny Dodds. Baby Dodds himself was their drummer.

"Baby loved us. We were playing the stuff he liked and this just knocked him out," Conrad says.

Although bebop was beginning to make inroads, jazz -- traditional jazz -- was still to be heard in bars all over town. Down on the Lower East Side, there were the Stuyvesant Casino and its nearby clone, Central Plaza, catering on weekends to college students and to underage kids carrying phony IDs.

Conrad’s quartet landed a session at the Stuyvesant Casino, where Bunk Johnson had achieved fame four years earlier. Conrad’s first tune, "Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby," brought down the house. The audience recognized that here was something sounding authentic; yet it was being played by kids -- and with a stamp of approval from no less than Baby Dodds.

Next Page>>

"The leader was Tom Sharpsteen, playing then as now like George Lewis. On trumpet was R.C.H. Smith emulating Mutt Carey. The piano player was Russ Gilman playing like Jelly; the drummer, John Joseph, doing his best to sound like Baby Dodds". "We’d often walk from bar to bar in Hollywood, asking, ‘Hey! Can we play here? For free?’. We didn’t even pass the hat; we just wanted to play."

They would play anywhere, relatives’ homes, at the house of Ray Avery, owner of the famous Los Angeles record store where musicians hung out, anywhere. Their first paying job was a "battle of bands" at the Pasadena Elks Club. Conrad surmises that they won because "we were the cutest. The girls gave us the most applause."

Another coup was an invitation to play on the radio show emceed by Floyd Levin, who today is the dean of traditional jazz commentators.

Then, Conrad recalls, "the ‘Record Changer," which at that time was the big magazine for our kind of music, announced a contest for bands that had never recorded. The prize -- they would put the winning record on the market. We added Spencer Quinn on banjo and Ralph Ball on tuba. To our amazement, we won. "Tom Sharpsteen says to me, ‘You’re the leader.’"

"I protested, ‘I don’t even know how to kick off a number.’ But they insisted. I figure it was because I was the loudest. At any rate, they changed the name to the ‘Tailgate Jazz Band.’

"Finally, we got ourselves a job at the Beverly Caverns, playing nights that Kid Ory was off. We had jobs, so the union took us in. We played a lot of Ory tunes and Ory arrangements, stuff that nobody else was doing. We were there a couple of weeks and Ory drops in. He is aghast. All those years building up his reputation and here are these kids doing his stuff! He gets us fired and kicked out of the union. I could understand. He is still my idol.

"Later, he showed me how to cook and eat crawfish gumbo, although he would never reveal his secret spot for catching crawfish."

It was 1950. His movie contract had run its course and Conrad returned to New York City. Rudi Blesh, too, had moved to New York to become jazz critic of the New York Herald Tribune. He and Harriet Janis not only became good friends, they became partners. In the late ‘40s, they produced the weekly network radio show "This is Jazz." They wrote the book, "They All Played Ragtime" (1950), the first serious investigation of that art form. They established the Circle Record label and recorded, among others, Louis Armstrong, Ory, Sidney Bechet, Wild Bill Davison, and the budding Conrad Janis.

Rudi took him on the rounds of the New York jazz scene. At Condon’s, he heard the "Commodore Band" — Wild Bill Davison, cornet; George Brunies, trombone; Pee Wee Russell, clarinet -- who had recorded for the Commodore record label.