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Excerpts from Jazz on the Barbary Coast
Reb Spikes
Published in the Frisco Cricket Spring 1998
When I visited San Francisco [ca. 1907] I think they just called the
music ragtime. I wasn't playin' music
then; I learned later from my brother Johnny. . . . They could have
called their music jazz. It was called jazz
music in 1914 when I came back to San Francisco, because we were called a
jazz band then. I don't now how
the name originated.
* * *
Adam Mitchell was kind'a the king of clarinet jazz. He's the first I
ever heard playin' that was and the
best I ever heard. We all called him Slocum and I don't know where or
how he got that nickname. I don't
know if he's the originator of jazz clarinet but I heard Slocum playin'
jazz in 1907. He was doin' all the stuff
that you hear Benny Goodman and all those guys doin', but he was doin' it
back then. Slocum could whine
and cry on that thing, and do all that blues stuff; he was a sensation,
that's all. He came to Frisco with the
minstrel show, and Purcell hired him, and took him off the minstrels. I
think he was with Busby's Minstrels
when he came to San Francisco. He set San Francisco wild and he was
talked about all over town. He played
there all those years between 1907 and was there when I went back in
1914. I went there and went with Sid's
band; he was still there and we played together for a number of years.
Everywhere we'd play, people would
admire him. He was a stick-out jazzman.
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