4 Lynn's Musings: Cactus Jack and Harry Partch

Lynn Ludlow (left) and Jerry at Thanksgiving 2019.

By Lynn Ludlow

 

  Jerry Schimmel put his schoolbooks aside to tune in every afternoon to “Cactus Jack.”  His real name was Cliff Johnson. He spun country and western tunes as host of a KLX radio show from Oakland in the 1940s. Well after his death, a friend confided that the disc jockey loathed what he called “hillbilly” music. He loved old jazz.

  Cactus Jack might follow the Oklahoma Sweethearts (“Don’t Steal Daddy’s Medals”) by spinning “Irish Black Bottom” by the Yerba Buena Jazz Band in the two-beat rhythm of the New Orleans Jazz Revival. The sponsor, Thirtieth and San Pablo Furniture Warehouse, may not have noticed. Jerry did. He was hooked for life.

 As his friend Tito reports, Jerry played piano for one band, banjo for another, but he took me and others to hear Kid Ory, Muggsy Spanier, and Meade Lux Lewis at the Club Hangover, Tin Angel, Sail ‘N, Italian Village, William Tell Hotel, Earthquake McGoon’s and all the other Frisco clubs where Turk Murphy’s band played “1919 Rag” and “Cakewalking Babies.”

 Turk tuck away his trombone to sing “Ace in the Hole” with gravelly nostalgia for the lost world of the Barbary Coast and its urban neighbor, Chinatown. “This town is full of guys,” he began, “who think they’re mighty wise…”  

   Between numbers, Jerry would praise the era’s talented white musicians (Lu Watters, Turk Murphy, Bob Helm, Wally Rose, Claire Austin, Pete Clute). They were curators, as he put it, for the musical of the Black jazz geniuses of the early 20th century (King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and so many more).

    Old-time jazz lost its ace in the hole with the death of Turk Murphy in 1987. No more clubs in Frisco. No more regular gigs. Cactus Jack is long gone. Jerry said he was still playing his jazz CDs, but in recent years he preferred the kolos and tamburicas of Balkan music.

   

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  Harry Partch recognized Jerry’s musical gifts. The experimental composer built his own musical instruments to fit his 43-tones-to-the-octave theories of  “just intonation.”

  At his studios in the old Marinship offices in Sausalito, Partch recruited Jerry to play the harp-like Kithara for performances and LP recordings by the Gate 5 Ensemble of  “Ring Around the Moon” and “Castor and Pollux.” (I played the “Surrogate Kithara.”)

  Jerry later played an adapted guitar in Partch’s memorable outdoors adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2jHtfk2ljM)

    Partch soon left for three years as composer-in-residence at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Jerry left for graduate school in Berkeley.

 

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Found in Jerry’s files:

  “Linguistics erupted during the building of a city staircase on the path next to my home on Bernal Heights. A hodgepodge of babble erupted among the workmen (Mexican and Salvadoran), foremen (Dublin), city engineers (Cantonese) and architects (shouters in English).

  “Those times in my driveway were always real macho, everybody in boots and jeans, some in hard hats and orange safety vests, waving drawings in the air when the wind wasn't blowing sheets of paper halfway down the boulevard.  I usually wore matching jeans and boots as well, when I wasn't in pajamas, so I fit in just fine.

  “Conversations, actually semi-arguments, sometimes whole arguments, were punctuated with expletives, the “f” word being the most popular.

  “It was always the f...... post, dig a f...... trench, pour the f...... cement or especially when someone did not follow the drawings and had totally f..... up.

    “The only woman on the site was slim, young and Asian. After several mornings of expletives from the international brigade, I asked how she handled the blue language.  

   “After a pause, she replied calmly with unaccented English, “It makes my day.”

 

* * *

  Folk music began to bloom in the late 1950s.

   “The songs we sang were taken from Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly and the Weavers,” Jerry would write. “We came out of the political atmosphere of left-liberal Berkeley and San Francisco Bay Area and were concerned about civil rights, civil liberties, social justice, and the antiwar movement.”

 

* * *

 Rare is the token connoisseur who gets away from the catalogues, online auctions, and price guides. But when Jerry began to write his prize-winning “Chinatown Tales” series, his need for context took him to the streets. Written for The Papers of the Pacific Coast Numismatic Society, the tales include “Stories & Brass Checks from Ross Alley and Old Chinatown,” “Grant Avenue and Dupont Street,” “Waverly Place and Stockton Street,” and “La Chinesca” (the Chinese community in Mexicali).

       In Jerry’s free tours of the historic community hemmed in by skyscrapers, he always escorted his guests to a walkway of lingering death.

       From the narrow sidewalk on Jackson Street, he would walk uncomfortably between dingy brick walls. Too narrow for an alley, the no-exit passageway held garbage cans, padlocked doorways, and a history of shame. Too ill or wasted to service their johns or further enrich their pimps, kidnapped sex slaves were given rice and water and dropped off in Chinatown’s dead ends.

  “This,” Jerry said, “is where they came to die.”