Fine And Mello

 This piece was originally intended for Scat, an interesting little magazine that appeared in New Orleans about a year before Katrina, and was never revived afterword. Published and edited by the lovely and mercurial Elena Reeves, Scat  was supposed to be modeled on the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker. But even though I am a faithful New Yorker  reader, I was never able to strike the exact tone Elena was looking for, even after a rewrite, so the story was rejected.  Nonetheless, Scat was fun and different while it lasted, and published some great New Orleans writers like Joshua Clark and John Pult.

 

It’s almost midnight at the Spotted Cat, a compact Frenchman Street watering-hole–named, no doubt, for the main motif of its Indonesian import furniture. Tables are full, and it’s standing room only in the small space between the bandstand and the bar. Tenor man “Jumpin’ Jerry” Jumonville launches into “Satin Doll.” Then, from the bar, there’s a trumpet harmony, the player unseen through the crowd. After a couple choruses, the trumpet takes a solo, ringing out from behind the listeners, floating over their heads. His sound has a little of Louis Armstrong’s biting attack, a little of Harry James’s lush sweetness. Jack Fine is in the house.  

Although playing from the bar is his trademark, “I like to add a sense of drama,” he says– Fine also takes the bandstand regularly, as a member of clarinetist Doreen Ketchens’ world-traveling band, and on with many other New Orleans artists.

 The native New Yorker, now in his seventies, left home at age 14. “It wasn’t because my parents were bad people,” he says, “ I just had an insatiable drive to explore.” Fine traveled the country, selling magazine subscriptions, and working odd jobs. Running errands for a family of gangsters who owned nightclubs gave him his first exposure to jazz. He joined the military, just after World War II, and was discharged and returned to New York in 1950. 

 The early 1950s were a time of heady cultural ferment in New York in all the arts—painting and literature as well as music. Fine landed a position with Commodore Records, the first American record label founded exclusively to record jazz. Commodore had achieved notoriety in 1939 by releasing Billie Holliday’s controversial recording of an anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit.” Little recording was done during the war, because vinyl was rationed, but after the war, it resumed with a vengeance. Commodore concentrated on the artists that the other fledgling jazz labels, like Blue Note and Signature, weren’t recording. While Blue Note got a reputation for presenting the ground-breakers and modernists, Commodore recorded many of the finest players in the more traditional vein. 

 In addition to his duties with Commodore, and his budding career as a professional musician, Fine was, “hanging out all over the place.” He says, “I was hanging out with all the great cats. I was hanging out with Lester Young, I was hanging out of 52nd Street when 52nd Street was still alive. I remember so many nights at 4 0r 5 in the morning when we would get going with Lester Young, Slam Stewart–really great cats.”

 Interestingly, Fine says he didn’t try to copy other trumpet players, even with all the greats around him. He claims his biggest musical influence and inspiration was the Belgian gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt. He bought his first Reinhardt recordings at age 13. Since he didn’t own a phonograph, he took them to his friends’ house to play them, and they laughed at him. “It was then,” he says, “that I knew I wasn’t like everybody else.” 

 In 1956, Fine started his own group, and worked regularly at the Rivera, at the corner of7th Avenue and 3rd Street, and at the Cinderella, on West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village, a club that Fine also managed for a time. He sometimes worked with the late New Orleans guitarist /banjoist Danny Barker, and met other Crescent City musicians. 

 The 1950s, according to Fine, was a period when artists were “…cross acculturated—the painters, writers and musicians hung together.” Berhardt Crystal, brother-in-law of Commodore Records owner Milt Gabler, had an art gallery were Fine met the likes of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollack. 

 His literary interests led Fine to a staff writing job with the Village Voice, then just starting our as a weekly newspaper. The staffers were expected to wear more than one hat: Fine remembers, “we sold papers, we sold ads, we wrote copy. It was the center of a lot of activity. The paper, what it wrote, its position–was something that was very much needed in New York at that time. It represented a fresh look at the scene, culturally and politically, because all of us were involved in something in the Village at that time, and it was very vibrant.” 

Around this time the Village  Voice also started the Obie Awards, for Off Broadway theater productions, which help to put it on the map culturally. Fine himself actually had speaking parts and provided music for an number of Off Broadway productions.

  As the Voice became one of the main mouthpieces for the Left in America, Fine developed his own take on politics: 

 “I was never an official Communist—I was never an official anything, for that matter. But I was surrounded by a lot of very radical people, and I had read Marx. I had developed a strong feeling, almost like that intuitive feeling about music—that maybe there was something about Marx, and watching the political and economic scene is the world that would have residual effects. It’s like watching an audience, and how they react. I started to feel that way about money. So I did play the market, and I did make some money. I bought stocks thinking they would be proactive to certain political and economic situations around the world, and it worked. I always laughed, because I had  friends in the market who asked me, ‘what’s your system?’ I would say, ‘I play the market according to Marx,’ and they would ask, ‘what firm is he with?’”

  An appreciation of cultural mobility is one of the things Fine enjoys about living in New Orleans, where he moved in 1996.

   “You know where I had the pleasure of that, just the other night?  I went to a poetry reading at this place on St. Peter and Dauphine, and Andrei Codrescu, who I know very well, showed up. We dig that kind of scene, you know? Well, that what it was like in New York.”

  By all indications, Jack Fine as found the kind of scene in which he has always thrived. he has found it. In addition to his gig schedule, he is writing a memoir. Musically, he remains true to his initial inspirations, “I’ll always love Django, Debussy, and New Orleans jazz.”