By Janet Sommer

Anyway, then I went to a boarding school in Denmark, and I had my little clutch of records and some of the older kids always wanted to borrow them because they wanted to dance to them, so they let me kibbutz on what they were doing, because I said "If you're going to play my records..." They didn't have such a concept as disc jockey, but I didn't want to leave my records unattended. So, that was kind of an in with the older kids, and there was one older boy there who was somewhat reclusive... it was a weird boarding school, it was very progressive, but the age ranged from ten to twenty, it was across the board. He was in his late teens, but he was a serious jazz fan and he had quite a nice collection and because he realized I was interested, he would invite me to his room and play records. He was kind of reclusive, but he could relate to me, so, I learned something from him.

We escaped to Sweden in 1943, and there again I was in boarding school for awhile, and there were some kids there who had records, you would get into that almost all the time. There was also jazz on the radio, albeit not a great deal, and of course radio during the war, we were mostly listening to BBC and stuff. During the war in Denmark, jazz became very popular, as it did throughout Nazi occupied Europe. It just was something that had to do with the fact that, first of all, the Nazis hated jazz and tried to suppress it, although they didn't really know what it was, and then it was kind of symbolic of America, and freedom, and as the Nazis never failed to point out, it was black music, and it was Jewish, and to them it was a negroid, Bolshevik, Jewish conspiracy against culture. But it became very popular, and Svend Asmussen, who was a terrific violinist, who is still active and in his eighties now, and still playing wonderfully well, was very popular in Denmark. So, I got to hear all that.

After the war, coming back to Denmark then, the first American band to come to play was a big band led by Don Redman, that turned out to be his last hurrah as a bandleader, although he continued to be active as an arranger, and it had been put together with the help of this Danish jazz Baron, Timme Rosenkrantz, whom I became friendly with much later, here in the States, but who was a fairly famous jazz presence in Denmark. That's why they played in Copenhagen, and I went to two of the four concerts, they were all sold out, it was a big event. And the star of that band was Don Byas, who was then in his prime and was a marvelous tenor player. He was the most... the thing that really grabbed me. The piano player in the band was somebody with whom I later became friendly as well, who was then just about twenty-five years old, and that was Billy Taylor, who was not yet Dr. Billy. There were some other good people in the band, Peanuts Holland was a very good trumpet player and singer, somewhat like Hot Lips Page, but it was mainly the full impact of this orchestra, and the fact that they were the first Americans... there were two white guys in the band, who interestingly enough were the only real beboppers in the band, a trumpet player named Allen Jeffereys and a trombone player named Jack Carmen, they were the two boppers in the band. The other guys were a little older... Don Byas, of course, had worked with Dizzy and so on, but he wasn't really a bopper. The big event of that concert was Don playing Laura, 'cause he was a great ballad player and he really milked that, and it brought down the house.

Shortly after that, in April of 1947, my mother and I finally came to the States. My father, who had escaped from Vienna in '38 and made his way, barely, was interned by... he went to France and was eventually thrown into a camp by the French, and then managed to make his way, when France fell apart, to Marseille, and was one of the people, one of the many people, whose eventual rescue was facilitated by this great American who came to Marseille especially to try to save all the Jews and other people who were being hunted by the Nazis. Varian Fry is his name, there was a big exhibit at the Jewish museum in Manhattan a couple of years ago about him, and somebody is making a documentary about him now who wants to interview me. He was instrumental in getting a lot of people out, 'cause the American Consulate, which was under the aegis of the State Department, was not very interested in getting too many people into the U.S. because, as we know now, there was considerable resistance in some quarters against getting... It was okay if you were Albert Einstein.

Anyway, he finally made his way to Morocco with a Honduran passport, which was something that you could buy, and that was something that Mr. Fry did, the kind of stuff that he would work out. And from Morocco to Lisbon, and in Lisbon he finally got a boat to New York, in 1941. So by the time the war ended, 1946, my father became a citizen and after that he was able to bring us in. In case you wonder why we weren't together, when the Nazis entered Austria, I had scarlet fever, which at that time was still considered a serious illness, now it's nothing, but you had to be quarantined and all sorts of things. So I couldn't travel, but my father, who was a writer, by then he had written and published his first novel and he had really stopped working as a journalist, but for many years before that he was the Cultural correspondent for a major German newspaper in Vienna, and had, among other things written various anti-Nazi things even before Hitler came to power. He had been warned by somebody who had a foot in both camps, that he had been put on the Gestapo blacklist, so it wasn't just that everybody wanted to get out of there that was Jewish, but he really had to get out of there in a hurry. So he got one of the last trains out and then we were separated. My mother was Danish by birth, with a Danish father, so she was able to get us into Denmark, which wasn't that easy either. Afterwards, in that intervening year, before war broke out in Europe, it was impossible for us to get into France, which was very fortunate, because if we had gotten stuck there, God knows what would have happened. And my father couldn't get into Denmark, the Danes wouldn't let him in, they had us there but they wouldn't let him in. So, we visited my father in Paris in the Spring of 1939, and that was the last time I saw him until I arrived in New York in the Spring of 1947.

What I say about coming to New York is that, most people, when they come to New York, want to see the Empire State Building, I wanted to see 52nd Street, which I had read a lot about... I had by that time started to read some books on jazz and so on, I read Panassie and a couple of other things, and I had my little clutch of records, serious record collecting began on my part when I was about 15, and I started, sort of really taking potluck because I didn't have much money, as a kid. I did a little work after school, but I found a second hand store where they had lots of cheap records and I sort of found my way and picked up things that looked interesting, and eventually became quite enamored of Ellington, so what I had in my collection at the time was a few hundred 78's, which my mother didn't really want me to bring with me, but I insisted on doing that... a goodly number of those were Ellington things. I sort of started listening to Armstrong, but he didn't really impact on me until a little later.

So anyway, I did go to 52nd Street, although I was only 17, so supposedly not admissible to clubs, but I could get by, and I learned how to handle that, because even though it now seems ridiculously inexpensive, in those days if you wanted to sit at a table, there was usually a minimum or a small cover charge like a buck twenty five or something, and beer at the bar would be seventy five cents, but I learned, when I became slightly friendly with musicians and they gave me some advice about how to handle that, that the thing to do would be to order a beer, and not pour it in the glass, but drink it from the bottle which was opaque so the bartender can't see how much might be left in it. The other thing was, when you ordered your first drink, to give the bartender a nice tip and then he would leave you alone for the rest of the night. So, those were little tricks of the trade I learned. You think of seventy-five cents as next to nothing, but the thing is that, in those days, 1947, 1948, you could get a complete lunch for sixty five cents, especially at a Chinese restaurant... you could get a three course lunch for sixty five cents. Cigarettes were seventeen cents a pack, and the subway was still a nickel. And at Nedicks, which was a chain, you could get a hot dog and an orange drink for fifteen cents. T'wasn't bad.

Gradually I became more involved with the music, I started meeting musicians and becoming friendly with them. Interestingly enough, the first time I went to Harlem it was with a girl I had met. In those days there was a lot of left wing activity in New York that was involved with folk music, which I had no particular yen for, but at one of these folk music things in the Village, something with Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand, both of whom are still alive, God bless 'em, I met this girl who was very attractive and very hip, and she found out that I liked jazz, so she took me to the Apollo, that was the first time I went to Harlem, and saw no less than Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band, with Chano Pozo, and it was absolutely marvelous. Slightly later also, this girl introduced me to somebody who became very important in my life, though nobody really knows very much about him any more, and that was a little trumpet player, and when I say little, he was really short, and everybody called him "Face," his real name was Nat Lorber. He had actually been born in Harlem when there was still a Jewish community in Harlem, in 1920, and then was raised in both the Bronx and Brooklyn. He was about nine years older than me, and he was still living at home when I met him and had a couple of younger siblings. His parents still spoke Yiddish at home and he was fluent in that, and his father was a garment cutter. He had become sort of hypnotized by jazz when he was in his mid-teens, and taught himself to play trumpet, he had a few lessons with Charlie Colon, who was a great teacher, and just died a few months ago. But he was basically unschooled, he could barely read music and was not very sophisticated in terms of anything having to do with harmony and theory, but he had a marvelous ear and he had a terrific sound... He was a Louis Armstrong fanatic, and played a lot like Louis, but everybody did before the advent of bebop, and he knew everybody and was extremely conversant with the entire New York Jazz scene from Harlem to the Village, even to Brooklyn, and wherever there was something going on. He knew about jam sessions and all these things... Nat and I became fast friends, most of the time he wasn't working, he would have what he called, in the slang of the period, a "slave", which was like a day job. He'd be a messenger or something... But I was working by then, I had various jobs. I started out at Time, Inc. as a kind of trainee messenger, which was very good because I learned the City backwards. It was interesting at Time-Life, there was Union activity, I joined the newspaper guild and even ran for some office, but lost. I was making a little dough so, that isn't the reason why Nat befriended me, but I was able to pay for both of us. Then there was three of us for a while, the third person, Steve, was my age and actually also originally from Vienna. He couldn't make up his mind at the time whether he wanted to be a drummer, he was very good, kept very good time and was especially good on brushes, or a poet, which is what he eventually became. He acquired, in later years somewhat of an underground reputation, his name was Steve Trop. Steve was very well read... So the three of us were an unlikely trio, one thing that we had in common was that we were all Jewish.

continue...