Joined at the Hip is a long-awaited and needed chronicle of the jazz scene in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a metropolitan area that for decades has hosted performances by the greats and has made its own contributions to America’s music.
California journalist Jay Goetting, who worked here as a young jazz bassist, says that he’d noticed the lack of a history of Twin Cities jazz and had begun such a project when he learned of the work of Kent Hazen and Dave Sletten, who produced and hosted the radio show “Twin Cities Jazz Remembered” on KBEM-FM in the 1990s. Sletten and Hazen accumulated many hours of interviews with local jazz figures whose heydays dated from the 1920s to the present. They were organizing their radio interviews and other materials into a book, but that was stalled by Sletten’s death from cancer in 2000. A brief effort to help by Twin Cities Jazz Society board members in the mid-2000s didn’t bear fruit.
The Minnesota Historical Society gained custody of Sletten’s and Hazen’s source materials. With permission and help from Hazen and Catherine Sletten, Dave’s wife, Goetting knitted together more than 80 years of history – including his own updates – and the Minnesota Historical Society Press issued the result in April.
The book is a portrait of generations of jazz musicians joining an evolving musical culture in the hip Twin Cities. It begins with the riverboats, which after World War I brought the sounds of New Orleans to this end of the Mississippi, where polkas, waltzes and sentimental songs were popular. Sousa-style marches and ragtime, too: Evangeline Green published “The Green Rag” in 1913, and her brother Everard (my grandfather) was a trombone-playing pharmacist after his graduation from the University of Minnesota in 1910. But they had no knowledge of jazz before the 1920s.
Reedman Frankie Roberts, born in Nebraska in 1905, was one of the links to the early days whom Sletten and Hazen interviewed on several installments of their radio show. Roberts moved to Minneapolis with a band in 1924 as the Jazz Age was reaching its peak.
After six months at the Marigold Ballroom, Roberts’ band was replaced by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, “a famous recording and touring band of white New Orleans musicians who influenced a generation of players in the Twin Cities and many other places where they performed,” Goetting says. According to Roberts, the Rhythm Kings’ six-month engagement was a watershed in the early growth of Twin Cities jazz.
The Dixieland chapter does a good concise job of covering the traditional-jazz revival that the likes of Doc Evans, Red Wolfe and Harry Blons started in the 1950s and the Hall Brothers sustained in vigorous life from the 1960s through the 1980s.
“The Hall Brothers group and their close colleagues formed the nucleus of a traditional jazz scene in the Twin Cities that was unrivaled outside New Orleans,” Goetting writes. In one of many colorful passages in the book, he relates the story of the band’s genesis, the 1957 meeting in a New Orleans paddy wagon between St. Paul cornetist Charlie DeVore and Wisconsin drummer Don “Doggie” Berg, followed in 1958 by DeVore getting to know Stan Hall through Jim McDonald’s Dixieland Record Heaven in south Minneapolis. The band and its backers created their niche in Twin Cities jazz history by performing the music authentically and bringing old New Orleans players as well as the best contemporary musicians to Minnesota. Goetting, thanks to the radio interviews with Stan Hall, DeVore, Butch Thompson and others, explains the significance of locations including the Record Heaven, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Jinx Brady’s Garage in Stadium Village, and the Emporium of Jazz in Mendota.
The Doc Evans Festival was held every summer from 1999 into the 2000s in Albert Lea, Minn., featuring Minnesota bands that included some of the remaining musicians who’d played under the legendary bandleader. Goetting interviewed Allan Evans, Doc’s son, to add that more recent episode of Minnesota history. My only quibble with a fact in the book is in this section. A photo from the Doc Evans Festival is identified as the Bourbon Street Boys, a fine group led by guitarist Reuben Ristrom. The group in the photo is the Bill Evans New Orleans Jazz Band, however, including Evans, Charlie DeVore and Doggie Berg of the old Hall Brothers band plus Dave McCurdy (banjo), Tony Balluff (clarinet) and Steve Pikal (bass), who also played with the Bourbon Street Boys that day and was wearing a Bourbon Street Boys Hawaiian shirt.
Chapters also cover racial discrimination (including a first-person anecdote of Goetting’s, one of several from his playing days), the musicians’ union, the vocalists, the strip clubs on old Hennepin Avenue, jazz (less of it) on the radio. The foreword by Kamman, who’s also credited as a close collaborator on the book, provides perspective that only he can give, drawing on his six decades or so of radio work in the Twin Cities and New York. The author keeps himself in the background, with only those few hints that he was on the scene in the 1960s.
Goetting recognizes the work of bandleader-saxophonist Ted Unseth, who founded the Wolverines Classic Jazz Orchestra in the 1970s, brought back 1920s trumpeters Rook Ganz and Jabbo Smith, and has labored to revive the old-style big band with the Americana Classic Jazz Orchestra. The final chapter, titled Jazz in the New Millennium, is an optimistic look at contemporary Twin Cities jazz musicians, tempered by an observation by the late trombonist Stan Haugesag that the rise of disc jockeys and the decline of unionism have made musicians’ work scarcer.
There are two appendices – a list of Goetting’s (all-time) Twin Cities All-Stars; Music Venues Over the Years – and each chapter is documented with a thorough list of sources. This book will be a valuable resource for music historians from now on.
Dick Parker is a retired journalist who has played banjo and guitar in traditional jazz bands for 31 years, including a period with the Bill Evans New Orleans Jazz Band, successor to the Hall Brothers group. His brief history of the Hall Brothers band is included in the Minnesota Historical Society's MN150 exhibit. He is a member of the Twin Cities Jazz Society’s Board of Directors. This review is reprinted from the TCJS CODA, May issue.
Joined at the Hip is available in cloth, $29.95; 240 pages including notes, appendices, index; 60 B&W photos. Published by Minnesota Historical Society Press: www.mhspress.org, www.10000books.org. Meet Jay Goetting and Leigh Kamman on Saturday, May 7, 8 pm at the Artists’ Quarter, 408 St. Peter Street, St. Paul. Book signing followed by music by the Atlantis Quartet at 9 pm (music cover $10); www.artistsquarter.com
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