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Jazz Aficionados

Now, one of the men who came to work on the Chronicle before
the war was a fellow called Peter Whitney, and he'd come from
Yale. Peter was a friend of mine. He'd been at Tamalpais School
with me. He was one of the early jazz aficionados who began to
collect records in the early thirties. He had amassed quite a
collection.

American jazz can be a very esoteric subject. You'll find
good academics at Cal and so on that really follow it and they
know the personnel of all these different old bands. Jelly Roll
Morton got to be very big by this time. He was a black pianist.
Bix Beiderbeck was the idol of the whites--a trumpeter. There
was a whole group, as I say, of jazz aficionados; I don't know
what else to call them. It was their life. Some of them were in
themselves not terribly musical, but they had good ears and they
began to amass indexes and records and all of this kind of thing.

Riess: And what do you think the attraction is? Is it to the music or
is it the exoticness and the blackness?

Newhall: Oh, I think it's to the music. I cannot explain it. Every man
is an island, but there is a great group of people who I think
respond to this kind of black-white jazz theme. I really do. I
mean, gee, they know the name of the drummers, you know--Joe
Jones and Lionel Hampton, who later became a vibraphonist, I
think. Did he die or not, do you know? They're almost all gone,
by the way. Almost, if not all. And Jonah Jones, the trumpeter.
And the Hawkins brothers, Erskine and Coleman Hawkins.

I should interject somewhere that I have absolutely a deaf
ear to what is called classical music. I admit it. I'm sorry,
it just leaves me totally behind. I can listen to a symphony or
two but I've had it after a while.

Riess: Is it boring?

Newhall: I just don't get it. Honestly. It may be that I am reacting
against my early music lessons when I had to sit down and learn
the names of the composers and look at their pictures and read
their histories and try to play their music. Once in a while in
a ballet I could pick up on a theme and try to find out what the
composer was doing. I think the greatest music--.

I will not argue about it, because obviously some of the
classical masters--I think particularly Mozart and Beethoven, I
suppose, and maybe Schumann--some of them were marvelous, but
it's just not my bag. Furthermore, there is nothing I can hear