Sample of Interview Transcript
Close

Interview with Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham
Interviewer: Mr. Chris Albertson
Washington, D. C.
April 1976

MR. CHEATHAM: All it was. I had a pleasure of playing in Nice, of course the festival, I was thrown in all kind of groups, I had to play with all kind of bands, there, Earl Hine ---British band, German band, a French band and then the last engagement there was very --was a very interesting group, I -~ it was three trumpets, Bobby Hackett, Clark Terry, and myself. And you should've heard that --you should've heard that.

MR. ALBERTSON: In 1950, you took another vacation in Europe and, although, I guess it was a vacation, you did some concerts, did you with the Hot Club of France?

MR. CHEATHAM: Yes. Well, I went to Europe, at that time, mostly to get away, I was having a little matrimonial problem. And I just went to that, I took my horn, said I'm going to stay over there. Something stopped, me the war, no it wasn't the war, I didn't seem --after I got there, I didn't seem to like it, because I didn't know too many people, and the French musicians, they didn't seem to be very happy about American musicians being over there. I found that true.

MR. ALBERTSON: Really?

MR. CHEATHAM: Yes, because I had one of the saxophone players, I met, very fine --on that engagement that I made' played in Nancy, France, for Buck Clayton, Buck had two engagements the same night, one in Nancy and one somewhere else, so that was so many tickets sold, that they sent me to Nancy, to play in Buck's place, and that place' was packed, I never saw a place like that, Buck Clayton was somewhere else. The manage he was biting his fingernails, he was worried, running looking at me, and running around, I don't know what he was talking about, and the musicians all seemed, they were --they left, in fact they were in one part of the place louder than the other., they didn't socialize with me at all. Even on the train up, there --one would come and say do you know "Royal Garden Blues? I say I forgot~ Royal Garden Blues, man, I said, I've been playing it all my life and somebody asked me, do you know this, I says, look, don't worry about the concert, about the music, if that's the type music you're going to play, don't worry about it. But they were all worried, all, man, they were nervous, every one of them.

And so the manager said, he hoped, he was afraid that he was going to have problems with the box office, giving them the money back. Cause Buck wasn't there.

MR. ALBERTSON: Uh-huh.

MR. CHEATHAM: So, he came in, I said look this -- just don't bother me, I said, what are you going to play? So they wrote out some songs, tunes to play, and I know everyone of them, and the routines were the standard routines. So, we went out there and the opened up and played, and we played, I forget what we played, but whatever it was, the house came down. The whole place was in an uproar of applause. We did a whole half a concert and while I'm playing good, and solo playing you could hear come on Buck, come on Buck, allover the place. And at the intermission, the impresario, came out and announced that Buck Clayton wasn't there, see? That's he's being replaced by Doc Cheatham, something happened, blah, blah, blah, but I got such a round of applause that it didn't matter to the –

MR. ALBERTSON: So the first part they thought you were Buck?

MR. CHEATHAM: Yeah, they thought I was Buck Clayton. So we finished the concert and everybody was happy and they had drinks and things, then they came up there and oh, man, they shook my hand almost broke my arm, the musicians they all friends and everything, they –

MR. ALBERTSON: Who were these musicians?

MR. CHEATHAM: I don't know. I don't know any of them, than, Don~, was on one of them, he and Bishop, the drummer –

MR. ALBERTSON: Uh-huh.

MR. CHEATHAM: --Wallace Bishop and Don Byas, only two that I can --the others musicians, I didn't know them and I've never seen them since.

MR. ALBERTSON: Now when you played with. the Hot Club, I guess Django was still alive, wasn't he?

MR. CHEATHAM: Django was still alive, yes.

MR. ALBERTSON: Yes. Did you play with Django?

MR. CHEATHAM: I never played with Django, no.

MR. ALBERTSON: Did you ever meet him?

MR. CHEATHAM: I met him, yes. I met him in Paris and I also met him here.

MR. ALBERTSON: Uh-huh.

MR. CHEATHAM: But I've never played with w. --him.

MR. ALBERTSON: What do you remember of him?

MR. CHEATHAM: Well, I only met him, because he -- I didn't --he hadn't --didn't ever have too much to say to me because I was just --he didn't know too much about me. I was just another handshake, I guess. He didn't know much about me, that's the way it appeared, so I naturally I knew about from all his recordings. I thought he was a great --I never came in contact with him, kind of a loner type of person, I think. From what I understand. [Pause]

MR. ALBERTSON: Okay, now let's talk about trumpet techniques?

MR. CHEATHAM: All right.

MR. ALBERTSON: Talk about what --I mean you learn to play the trumpet from --was it N. C. Davis?

MR. CHEATHAM: Yes.

MR. ALBERTSON: Now what you learned, how did that differ from what you then learned later from hearing people like Louie Armstrong, how did that differ?

MR. CHEATHAM: Well, the thing about it --N. C. Davis was a military man, and h~ knew how to teach kids, and most of the things we were doing were marches, and we had a few little simple overtures that we would play, and church music, ---cause we had to do that because the thing was organized through the Phillips Chapel Church. So we played no --nothing with jazz in it at all. So naturally we would be jazzing and fool around on our instruments maybe a few minutes before, at rehearsals before the teacher would come, before Mr. Meredith would come in and then he would resent that very much and bawl us out for playing, you know, dance music or jazz, trying to play it. And that's what broke up the thing.

But, I went to high school --when I was in high school we had a high school band and we could --we could play anything but jazz or popular music, dance music. We only had, to play marches to bring the kids in the auditorium and take them out. Sometimes we playa little simple something for a while, someone sang or something, but jazz was looked down on as evil music in those days.

And that's why I went to this Dan Stafford who was At the Barberton Bijou, then he took me out on jobs, he couldn't play but one song and in one key and only two/three fingers, he was a jive artist, but he had a lot of contact with the white people there, they would always use Dan on these jobs at the country club, private homes, and things. And he was a one leg musician and they used to --when they drank --they drank a lot of home brew in those days, we played places where we'd have to go out of the house in the back yard to drink home brew, everybody did it, cause when they take the top off the bottle, it --the foam would shoot up so high and you couldn't open it in the house, so everybody was in the back yard, drinking home brew. Then when they get drunk round about half way into the dance, then they'd --there'd be a lot of pistol shooting around the place. Then, you know, Dan, sitting at the piano would stick his leg out and they would take pot shots at Dan's wooden leg, cause they knew he had a wooden leg, so they would shoot at his wooden leg, sometimes they'd hit him, sometimes they'd miss it.

And Dan had a roomful of legs, some of them were all broken and shot up --we were --played a private party one day, --one night and Dan wanted to go up to the men's room, so they --he's coming down the steps, cause the men's room --the bathroom was upstairs, he was coming down the steps with his wooden leg, hopping, and one old guy said, Dan, I'm going to shoot that leg, and Dan said, just as long as you shoot this one and he stick it out and the guy shoot it, bam, and knock the whole bottom off his leg. ..,

But he was well liked, like that. He didn't care. And he made a little extra money, from being a barber, playing around those places. He would take me, and he'd give me a couple of dollars, sometimes, you know, and he didn't --and as I say, only one song, we would play one song all night long and we played around it. So that was experience right there that I got, to take one song and play it many different ways. -You take a song like, "Rose Room," you can record it under a 1,000 different titles. Or any other song, and record it under so many names, because you've learned to play around it, for- get about the melody --you never go to it at all --and make I up things around the melody. That's the thing that I learned in Nashville.

MR. ALBERTSON: Just play against the chord.

MR. CHEATHAM: Yes, play against the chord and you can playa 1,000 different songs.

MR. ALBERTSON: Now I remember years ago I played trumpet and I took lessons from the first trumpet player with the Danish Symphony Orchestra, and he was in deep shock when used vibrato.

MR. CHEATHAM: Right.

MR. ALBERTSON: Cause that was against all the rules --

MR. CHEATHAM: Well, I guess in your time --but in my time vibrato was the thing and I was taught to use vibrato my shaking the hand. Moving the hand back, I do it know, some-- times. And later years they taught it my lip movements, I learned that way, too, but I found that I was cutting my lip. Too much. It wasn't natural. Cause you have to do it natural in the beginning, then it comes natural. But I learned it. I studied to do it from the lip movement, because in '26, and the jazz trumpet players would --were using vibrato by shaking their head up and down. I – Louie did that, he always did ---that. You know, shaking his head up and down.

MR. ALBERTSON: Yeah.

MR. CHEATHAM: We used to practice that. Shaking our head --moving our head up and down when we played trumpet, back in the 1201 s, did that in New York with Shirley Clay, and we worked together at the --at this dancing school down there. With Bimgie Madison1s band, I played down there. With Shirley Clay, we used to --why we practiced shaking our head, playing jazz courses, to get that sound like Louie did.

MR. ALBERTSON: What about playing, for instance, with the valves half way down? Was when you were first taught by Mr. Davis?

MR. CHEATHAM: Uh-huh.

MR. ALBERTSON: Did he teach you that or did you -- did every tone had to be clear?

MR. CHEATHAM: Every tone had to be clear.

MR. ALBERTSON: So--

MR. CHEATHAM: He didn1t know anything about jazz. Everything was clear, everything was exact.

MR. ALBERTSON: Where did you really learn about -jazz?

MR. CHEATHAM: Well that started, as I say, when I got to Chicago, I knew more about it --was getting to see what it was all about.

MR. ALBERTSON: Uh-huh.

MR. CHEATHAM: There were a few bands that came through Nashville, there, with trumpet players like Ed Swayzee and Joe Hayman, they came through there with a band called the Clowns, they all had clown suits on. They came through there with a show. And that's the first time I ever heard jazz. Only time was when the traveling bands would come through Nashville and play the Bijou Theater. Then we would sit -- wouldn't have to play, but we would go in free every night and we'd hear these different bands. Groups. Some very good ban and that's my first hearing of bands out of --you know, Nashville, because there was nothing in Nashville .-- jazz.

MR. ALBERTSON: Uh-huh.

MR. CHEATHAM: We'd get a record, I'd say it was Johnny Dunn, but all of this --all of this --the main things that I learned about jazz was in Chicago. When I --at the end of the show, when the show broke up and I went around -. Little Mitchell, you remember Little Mitchell, hunchback Mitchell?

MR. ALBERTSON: George Mitchell?

MR. CHEATHAM: George Mitchell.

MR. ALBERTSON: Uh-huh.

MR. CHEATHAM: Guys like that. And all the rest of them. Then I began to hear things.

MR. ALBERTSON: But before you came to Chicago, you had heard records?

MR. CHEATHAM: Records, oh yes, Johnny Dunn, and Paul Whiteman, Ted Lewis, that was all.

MR. ALBERTSON: But did you wonder when you heard those records, did you wonder how they did it?

MR. CHEATHAM: Yes. I did.

MR. ALBERTSON: And did you experiment?

MR. CHEATHAM: I experimented, sure. I --in fact I copied the exact things that they were doing. I was doing the same thing. Harmon mutes --the wa-was and all those kind of things, I did all that.

MR. ALBERTSON: So, by the time you actually got to Chicago and heard this music live, and saw the musicians, the trumpet players on stage or wherever, you had already figured out how they created the various effects, it --is that it?

MR. CHEATHAM: Yes, but you did --they weren't doin the things in Chicago that I had learned, that was all finished because the things I had learned, that was corny. When I got to Chicago. You wouldn't dare play like that, that do-wacka- do, stuff in Chicago. When I got there. Those are things I. learned from the records.

MR. ALBERTSON: So what --for instance, what did you learn --what was the main thing you learned from hearing Louie Armstrong?

MR. CHEATHAM: The things I learned from Louie Arm strong are the things that I heard during discussions that Louie Armstrong had with other musicians at times. I wasn't .in on it, but I was standing back listening. They'd always -.. try to tell a story with your horn. Whatever you play, try to make a story out of it. Don't just go up there and blow some- thing, you know, that you'd --you don't know what you're doing, making a lot of noise. Say, always try to tell a little story on each thing that you play. That has always stuck by me, rig until today. He said, make a little story out of it. And to present it so that the people will turn around and look and listen. Cause you can play --you can playa solo in a place where people are drinking and eating, and they don't pay you no mind, they keep on drinking and eating and talking loud. But you can shock them with something effective, that will make them turn around and stop, all of a sudden, and listen. That I've never forgot.

Close

Institute of Jazz Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
John Cotton Dana Library
185 University Ave.
Newark NJ USA 07102

Hours: 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM, Monday - Friday
Call for Appointment
Tel: (973) 353-5595
Fax: (973) 353-5944