Devil Sent the Rain (15 page)

I have started making up my own Charlie Chan–like aphorisms and proverbs. For an hour or so after watching one of the movies, I respond to almost everything Mary says with a gnomic proverb, and I have given up trying to make them make sense. It is a nervous tic, and it is making her crazy, but I am having trouble stopping. Earlier today she asked me, in passing, if I had called the roofer, as I had promised to. We've been spending a lot of time calling the roofer.

“List of tasks like five-course meal,” I said. “Can't eat all at once.”

“Stop it!” she almost screamed.

Chan was the creation of a writer named Earl Derr Biggers, who based the character on a real Honolulu police detective and former cowboy named Chang Apana, who died in 1933. Although there were three screen incarnations of Charlie Chan before Warner Oland, beginning with George Kuwa in the 1925 silent serial version of
The House Without a Key
, Oland really established the character for the moviegoing audience with his portrayal in 1931's now-lost
Charlie Chan Carries On
. Oland, who emigrated from Sweden as a child in 1892, had played Al Jolson's father in
The Jazz Singer
, as well as the Asian villain Fu Manchu several times before landing in the role of Chan. He was apparently also something of an intellectual badass, who translated Strindberg's plays into English, according to Chan scholar Howard Berlin, and Ibsen's
Peer Gynt
, according to the somewhat more reliable Chan scholar Ken Hanke. Except I thought Ibsen wrote in Norwegian. Whatever.

In any case, Oland went on to play the detective in fifteen more Chan movies, from
The Black Camel
, also filmed in 1931, in which he costars with Bela Lugosi, to
Charlie Chan in Monte Carlo
, in 1937. They are real movies, by and large; well costumed and photographed, well directed. The four films in
Charlie Chan, Volume 1
were made, like the rest of Oland's Chan films, for Twentieth Century Fox in 1934 and 1935 and follow Chan to four “exotic” locales—London, Paris, Egypt, and Shanghai. Oland's manners are unfailingly excellent, and his character appealing, with the sense of great intellectual, and probably physical, resources kept under exquisite control. He is charming and polished.

Toler was picked by Fox to succeed Oland after Oland's death in 1938, and stepped into what would have been Oland's role in
Charlie Chan in Honolulu
, going on to make ten more for Fox before the studio dropped the series. After some searching, Toler moved to the low-budget house Monogram for another eleven. The
Chanthology
box contains the first six of the eleven he made for Monogram. After Toler's death, the all-but-forgotten Roland Winters stepped in for six more, and that was it, unless you count the 1950s TV series starring J. Carrol Naish, which I haven't seen since I was a kid.

There is no question that Toler is slightly stiffer and less expressive than Oland. Also the scripts and, in most cases, the direction are not as good—characters are more stock, and the interactions between Chan and his various assistants more formulaic, dropped in like set pieces. On the other hand, Toler has a hard-boiled edge that can be just the thing on certain days. And his Charlie Chan has a saltier sense of humor than Oland's. At one point in
Meeting at Midnight
, Toler's Chan excuses himself briefly from a tense meeting with the police inspector, and when he returns, claiming to be psychic, he begins telling the inspector what size shoe the man wears, mentions that the inspector is in fact a size eleven but insists on wearing size nine and a half, and claims that the inspector changed barbers the week before, along with a few other things in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes's lists of deductions. Naturally, the inspector is nonplussed and asks Charlie how he can know these things, and Charlie Chan says, “Oh—merely telephoned your wife in next room.”

Toler was variously assisted and hampered in his efforts by his son Tommy, played by Benson Fong (there were other sons, played by other actors, but Fong was Number One during the Monogram years), and his chauffeur and aide-de-camp Birmingham Brown, played by the great black comedian Mantan Moreland. They are constantly bumbling around and getting lost, and Moreland gets scared every time he hears a suspicious noise or the lights go out. The infamous Stepin Fetchit appeared in one title in the Oland series,
Charlie Chan in Egypt
, but Moreland was a regular feature of the Toler Monograms.
The Scarlet Clue
even includes one of his vaudeville routines with fellow comedian Ben Carter, in which they answer each other's unfinished sentences, in grand jive manner:

Moreland: “I haven't seen you since . . .”

Carter: “Longer than that.”

Moreland: “I moved over to . . .”

Carter: “How can you live in that neighborhood? Where I'm living I only pay . . .”

Moreland: “It ain't
that
cheap, is it?”

And so on. I could watch that stuff all day. It is worth asking why such a great detective has such hapless assistants, and the only thing I can figure is that Mantan was there to discharge any anxiety white audiences might have felt about being outclassed by an Asian. They could still at least feel superior to the easily scared Moreland. The joke is that Moreland was inserted into the series by Monogram in an attempt (successful) to draw black audiences, who loved him, to the films. Interestingly, Warner Oland's Chan was unfailingly gracious to Fetchit's lame-brained character in
Charlie Chan in Egypt
, whereas Toler is almost always a little snotty or at least condescending to Moreland.

In any case, the Chan films always run on a carrier frequency of racial and ethnic tension. Of course, so do the Indiana Jones films. But despite the high adventure and comic-book thrills, the vision of humanity in the latter has started grating almost intolerably. The superficiality of perception about the Other is just too hard to take these days—an astoundingly capable white guy, both impossibly erudite and impossibly physically dominating, kicking ass throughout a world full of menacing foreign stereotypes—the will of the West, under constant siege. It is all too much like the mentality behind our foreign policy, and it isn't funny anymore, if it ever was. I'll admit it—I used to laugh at Karen Allen, being kidnapped in that basket, yelling, “
You can't do this to me; I'm an American
.”

Yes, of course. “
I'm an American
.” That's what the people waiting for food and medical help at the Superdome and the Convention Center were saying. They waited five days for any semblance of help or order to begin trickling in. The people stranded on interstate overpasses for days said it too, as did the people whose parents died in hospitals and nursing homes because there was no evacuation plan in place. The administration can build cities in the desert halfway across the world but it let New Orleans drown. “
I'm an American
” . . . the words are starting to burn coming out.

Calm down . . . deep breath. I need to be more like Charlie Chan. Charlie Chan always takes the high road. He is not the compromised, ambiguous private eye of film noir, certainly not a ladies' man—mainstream American movies weren't ready for an Asian ladies' man yet—and he is partly defined by his marriage and his many children. Charlie Chan stands for the Right Order Of Things. He is disinterested, except in the truth. He has intelligence, self-control, courage; he facilitates marriages getting back together, lovers being reunited, people's names being cleared. He is gracious to the weak, unafraid of the powerful, and he always offers a moment of truth, when he sums things up for everyone, points the finger at the One To Blame, calls a spade a spade. Charlie Chan listens. He listens hard, and he uses his head.

I need to call the roofer. I need to check on the umbrella policy. My friends have left town and I need to call the air-conditioning guy, and I need to vacuum the floor. But I can barely get off the couch.
Calling Inspector Chan
. . .
Calling Inspector Chan
. . . Just give me a minute, here, and let me get myself together.

From
Bookforum,
September/October 2006

 

“Charlie Chan in New Orleans!” was my second piece for
Bookforum.
The following article was the first. In November 2005, during a swing I made through New York City, Eric Banks had invited me to think about writing something for the magazine, and I immediately suggested a review of the just-issued box set of the complete and unexpurgated recordings that Jelly Roll Morton made for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1940.

Morton was one of the great characters of New Orleans, and his recorded memoirs are a grand picaresque of the southern and western United States in the period after Reconstruction, with a focus on New Orleans around the time jazz was created. Morton summoned an entire lost world out of memory; having just written
Why New Orleans Matters,
I could relate. The Morton Library of Congress box provided an eerie sense of comfort during a time when New Orleans was in a coma, fighting for its life.

Blues Streak

L
ong before the levees were breached in Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans seemed to many outsiders like the lost continent of Atlantis. Its most characteristic celebrations have always had a funerary cast—from jazz funerals to the literal “farewell to the flesh” of the
carnevale
traditions that gave rise to Mardi Gras. The city's sense of the present is inextricable from its palpable past (not for nothing is its most famous musical landmark called Preservation Hall). Largely for this reason, some say that the city isn't really even part of the United States, alien as it is to the American ethos of clean-slatism and endless self-reinvention. But the flip side of the chameleonic New World desire to start fresh has always been a deep vein of guilt and nostalgia, and from that standpoint New Orleans is wholly in the American grain. The fact of mortality casts a persistent light on all activity there and gives the city's culture its deep chiaroscuro, its spiritual keel—even, or especially, in the midst of the greatest revelry.

As far back as the 1930s, when the pioneering works of jazz scholarship and criticism were being written, New Orleans already seemed like a long-ago place. Works like Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith's
Jazzmen
and Rudi Blesh's
Shining Trumpets
presented a romanticized vision of the city in the wake of Reconstruction, with all its shifting roles, racial and ethnic ambiguities, and ruptured social and political axioms. Those tensions, and the ongoing effort to resolve or at least contain them, formed the atmospheric conditions that made jazz possible. Legendary characters and locales clung to the names of equally legendary streets like crystals to a string—Rampart Street and Perdido Street and Basin Street, Economy Hall and Storyville, the Great and Unrecorded Progenitors like Buddy Bolden and Papa Jack Laine and Buddy Petit, spoken of by men a half generation younger with the sound usually reserved for the gods themselves . . .

Jelly Roll Morton, jazz's first composer, one of its best early pianists, and its most potent storyteller, was a product of this time. Born sometime around 1885, he grew up in New Orleans and cut a broad swath through its red-light district, not just as a pianist but as a pool hustler, card sharp, and pimp. Early on he began to travel, and he functioned as a sort of Johnny Appleseed of jazz, making his way through the Gulf Coast, the Mississippi Delta, California, St. Louis, Memphis, and other locales before settling down for a while in Chicago. There, in 1926, he began a series of recordings under the name Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, in which his compositional and orchestrational skills came to their greatest flowering; the Peppers recordings are, along with those of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, the high-water mark of New Orleans jazz on record.

In 1928 Morton moved to New York City, where big-band swing was already germinating in the ensembles of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and others, and Morton's brand of finely tooled small-band orchestration was marked for the remainder table. Morton himself, however, was slow to recognize this, and when he did he was unable to find the key that would allow him to adapt. His persona, formed in the hothouse environment of Storyville, had worked all right in Chicago, which was still full of recent Southern émigrés, but it was less suited to New York's world-wise cosmopolite tempo. That his importance was not universally acknowledged offended his sense of justice, and he let it be known, but nobody wanted to hear it. Morton struggled against the tide for two years, but in 1930, as far as the record-buying public was concerned, he disappeared off the face of the earth. Although a few of his compositions, most notably “King Porter Stomp” and “Wolverine Blues,” became swing-era big band staples, between October 1930 and May 1938 Morton participated in exactly one recording session—as a sideman.

During that time Morton bounced around from place to place with the road narrowing in front of him, before finally finding a perch in the rocks in Washington, D.C., where he worked as maître d', bartender, and entertainer in a tiny nightclub and waited for fate to knock once again. And in May 1938 it did, in the person of Alan Lomax, son of the seminal American folklorist John A. Lomax and himself already a significant collector of folk materials for the Library of Congress. The enterprising young man, tipped off to Morton's presence at the nitery, invited the antique figure from Years Gone By to record some songs at the Library's Coolidge Auditorium, hoping to turn up a new ballad or two, or perhaps some blues verses that hadn't been documented.

Lomax was by his own admission wary of jazz, which he felt at the time was killing the folk music that he loved and to which he was ideologically committed. But he quickly realized that Morton was more than just another down-on-his-luck pianist, and over the course of the next three weeks or so, with a follow-up session in December, he recorded nine hours of Morton's reminiscences of the early days of New Orleans jazz, his travels through Mississippi, Memphis, Mobile, St. Louis, and Los Angeles; the cutthroats and hustlers and musical and funeral traditions of the Crescent City; as well as Morton's demonstrations not just of his own compositions but those of Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, and many others.

After decades in which they appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in various forms, these recordings have finally been issued complete by Rounder Records as
Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax
. It would be difficult to overstate not just how important they are, but how interesting, how enjoyable. From the first words, Morton takes us away, away, to a far-off land and time, playing the song “Alabama Bound” softly, under his recitative:

And immediately we have the entire thing in a nutshell—restless traveling, deep South locale, long-ago times, music as a medium of social competition and status, the constant relation between place and expression that is at the center of any understanding of American life. Morton reappeared just as the world was beginning to circle the drain toward World War Two and America was only a few years away from the Faustian realization that it could in fact dominate the globe. Over those soft background chords, Morton speaks and sings a world back into existence, and, along with it, his own place in that world, summoning the pre–World War One America that had given him his chance to create himself in his own image. He restates the tension between Old World and New, the primacy of multiethnicity, superstition, and magic, and attention to the handmade as opposed to the mass-produced. His phrasing, a mixture of high diction and low slang, alternately awkward and deft, enthusiastic and self-conscious, is itself a music that is rare to hear.

Morton also had a natural tendency to codify. In these recordings he outlines his principia of jazz music, the delicate balance among the voices of the ensemble, the importance of dynamics and attention to correct tempos, the crucial role played by the rhythmic displacement he called the Spanish Tinge, the central compositional role of riffs and breaks. He took the tacit operating assumptions of jazz and made them into conscious animating principles. Morton had an essentially dramatic imagination, for which the instruments of the jazz band functioned as the dramatis personae of an ongoing musical narrative. This understanding of jazz was also the subtext of many New Orleans loyalists' antagonism to the well-oiled machine of 1930s big-band swing.

The Morton recordings were first commercially issued in 1947 on the Circle label, in a small edition intended for specialists and collectors, and with boxy, horrible sound that may have contributed to their allure for some of the more Atlantis-minded fans. Lomax also published a book in 1950, titled
Mister Jelly Roll
, stitched together from Morton's winding narrative. In the 1950s the recordings were issued again, this time on the Riverside label, one of the premier jazz labels of the decade, a version that got much wider circulation. They were also subsequently issued on the Australian collector's label Swaggie and in fragmentary form in many other places. In 1993, Rounder put out a four-disc series of the music and not the talking, and included for the first time some of the formerly suppressed, X-rated songs that Morton performed for Lomax only after repeated urging. But the omission of the spoken material was a major missed opportunity, for it is the interaction between the storytelling and the music that gives this material its enduring claim on our attention and that places it near the center of the map of American vernacular historiography.

These sessions, in fact, marked the birth of the oral-history idea, the starting place for everything from Studs Terkel's Homeric compendia of American proletariana to Legs McNeil's
Please Kill Me
, the premise being that the sound, the actual spoken language, of participants in American life, whether on the macro or the micro scale, can give us more of a sense of the texture of lived life than a macerated and processed, disembodied, “objective” history. Of course the idea of personal history was not new, and the popularity of such vernacular and personal memoirs as those of Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Adams had long since established the value of an intensely subjective witness to larger historical patterns in American culture. But with these sessions the idea got lashed to the technology of sound recording for keeps.

Lomax had a rationale behind all of his work—namely, the advancement of the vernacular culture of the masses, as opposed to the high culture that represented the social structures of the elite. This was a strong motivator for him; it gave his work its moral and ethical topspin, as well as contributing to some of his blind spots and his occasionally idiosyncratic sense of proportion. John A. Lomax, in his 1940 Library of Congress interview with Atlanta bluesman Blind Willie McTell, kept prodding McTell to sing some “complainin' songs.” “Don't you know any songs like ‘Ain't It Hard to Be a Nigger, Nigger' . . . ?” To some extent, you can hear his son trying to pull some of the same strings in the Morton interviews. In places you can hear Morton's annoyance with Lomax's attempts to steer him, although they are all between the lines.

At one point, for example, Morton is decrying the idea that jazz is frantic and loud. “Somehow,” he says, “it got into the dictionary that jazz was considered a lot of blatant noise and discordant tones, and as something that would be even harmful to the ears. . . . Jazz music is based on strictly music. You have the finest ideas, from the greatest operas, symphonies, and overtures, in jazz music. There's nothing finer than jazz music because it comes from everything of the finest class music.”

Here Lomax clears his throat in what sounds to me like discomfort at what he takes to be the class anxiety in Morton's rundown, and asks for an example of the kind of discordant jazz Morton is talking about.

“Well,” Morton replies, “it's so noisy it's impossible for me to prove to you, because I only have one instrument to show to you. But I guess the world is familiar with it. Even Germany don't want it, but she don't know why. . . . You can't make crescendos or diminuendos when one is playing triple forte. You've got to be able to come down in order to go up. If a glass of water is full, you can't fill it any more. But if you have a half a glass, you have an opportunity to put more water in it, and jazz music is based on the same principle. . . . I will play a little number now of the slower type, to give you an idea of the slower type of jazz music. You can apply it to any type tune. It depends upon your ability for transformation.” As he plays his example, he remarks, “I've seen this blundered up so many times it has given me the heart failure.”

The values implicit in Morton's nostalgia have everything to do with the sense of possibility implicit and explicit in the ideal of a multicultural society, a multicultural
culture
—the grand oxymoron that actually seemed to come to life, for a while, in certain cities, and in the work of certain of our greatest artists. In fact the actualizing of that principle may be one gauge, maybe the strongest, for the worth and magnitude of a body of work—the degree to which an artist can sustain a dynamic set of tensions among disparate social, class, regional, and ethnic elements—whether that of Herman Melville or Duke Ellington or Bob Dylan. In any case, Morton was a true auteur, and he always rooted his organizing vision in the principles he found in the life of the community that gave birth to jazz. My guess is that this is the secret of Lomax's fascination with him—that Morton's ego as an individual was harnessed in service to what was ultimately a communal ideal.

The Rounder Records box is the first time all of this material has been available in one package. It also includes a full CD of interviews that Lomax conducted with a handful of Morton's contemporaries, including clarinetist Alphonse Picou and banjo and guitar player Johnny St. Cyr, who recorded with Morton's Red Hot Peppers as well as Louis Armstrong's Hot Five. In addition, there is an excellent booklet containing reproductions of photos, newspaper stories, and old advertisements, along with solid annotation by John Szwed and a copy of the newly reissued paperback of Lomax's
Mister Jelly Roll
.

The set arrives, too, at a moment in which the fate of New Orleans is once again at the center of the national narrative, and Morton's love and nostalgia for his birthplace will give anyone with ears a clue to why New Orleanians love New Orleans. Describing the high jinks during a celebratory parade at the dawn of the twentieth century, Morton goes on and on, until words fail him and he says, “It was really a swell time. . . . We had plenty fun, a kind of a fun I don't think I've ever seen any other place. Of course there may be nicer fun, but that particular kind . . . there was never that kind of fun anyplace I think on the face of the globe but New Orleans.”