1940s TIP TOE INN
Tip Toe Inn with Kid Ory´s Quartet .
Kid Ory tb and b, Red Mack ( Morris McClure) tp (the identification has been questioned) , Alton Redd dm, Buster Wilson p.
Tip Toe Inn was one of the clubs where Kid Ory played when he re-emerged in 1942/43.
The adress was 714E Whittier Boulevard, Los Angeles.
(Published in ”Eye Witness Jazz No.2, July 1946).
Tom Cundall comments: "Their drive was terrific, and though a trifle rough
to untrained ears they always played the real stuff and I expect they
are still packing them in at the Jade, a sort of oriental spot at which they appear".
(The magazine was edited by Ralph Venables and Cliff Jones, and published by
Clifford Jones, 110 High Road, Willesden, London N W 10).
Here we reproduce an article by trombonist, author and teacher James Leigh, telling about the his encounter with Kid Ory at the Tip Toe Inn in 1942 or 1943:
He states that Charles Mingus was playing bass, LZ Cooper piano, and Kid Ory doubling on saxophone. Unfortunately, he does not say who played the trumpet.
Reprinted from The Frisco Cricket, courtesy of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation
Record Shops & Old Masters
With "Record Shops & Old Masters," we present the first in a series of five articles by trombonist, author and teacher James Leigh, who reminisces on more than 55 years in the Traditional Jazz Scene in the SF Bay Area and beyond...
I was born and raised in Southern California. For Christmas, 1942, I was given a copy of "American Jazz Music" by Wilder Hobson. As a result, I began collecting jazz records before I turned 13. That meant patronizing the Jazz Man Record Shop, then on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.
A dark, beautiful, unsmiling, formidably knowledgeable young woman ran the place. This was Marili Stuart, née Morden. There, in the smoky after-noon light, the shade on the glass front door half-drawn and the 78 rpm collector's items sleeping in their stiff tan sleeves, the religion of the place was impossible to miss: framed blow-ups of Kid Ory, Papa Mutt Carey, Buster Wilson (and a young Turk Murphy) lined the walls. On these premises the New Orleans masters, living or dead, were the gods; everybody else was just a musician.
"Tell Ory I Sent You..."
Even before he had come all the way back from Post Office work and chicken farming in East L.A., Marili told me one afternoon that I "ought to go hear Ory." With huge excitement I had listened to his all-star band on Orson Welles' radio program, but that band was still nowhere else to be heard, and had it been I would have been much too young to get in. I made this excuse to Marili, who shook it off: "Go on, they won't care. Tell Ory I sent you."
I took the long streetcar ride out to Watts and the Tiptoe Inn, where Ory had a quartet gig on weekends. I sneaked in fast past the cop at the door, feeling thin, white, scared, and foolishly underage. The place seemed vast, the large crowd half-black, half-Latino.
On the bandstand in the middle of the dance floor, Ory and the pianist, L.Z. Cooper, were eating a little intermission supper out of a blackened saucepan, New Orleans style, just as described in the book "Jazzmen," my new bible.
Told I was a friend of Marili's, Ory gave me an avuncular smile and promised the cop, who'd pursued me, that he wouldn't let me "make any trouble." The cop vanished, and I gaped at this lively little yellow man who had given Louis Armstrong his first job as a musician, had recorded with the Hot Five and with Jelly Roll Morton's very best Red Hot Peppers. Fifty years hence, who can recall all the details of an encounter with a historical figure? Not I. I stayed for a set. The dance floor was packed. Ory doubled on alto saxophone. The only tune I'm positive I heard was "My Gal Sal."
The drummer was Alton Redd, the bass player a big strong kid just out of his teens — Charles Mingus, barely old enough to vote, and still a couple of years shy of meeting Charlie Parker. Styles differ, but any working musician will tell you that a gig is a gig. Riding the streetcar home that night, I felt as if I had just celebrated a rite of passage — my first live jazz. The music had its hooks in me for keeps.
1972 Yellow Pages
Map of Los Angeles and the location of Tip Toe Inn
Jazz Writing 1946. BI-Monthly booklet of the Jazz Appreciation Society.
Joe Darensbourg remembers the Tip Toe Inn.
(”Telling it like this” by Joe Darensbourg).
