Continued: Hawley Ades

Don Bigelow

In 1930, Hawley joined the Bigelow orchestra, introduced not by Bert Lown but rather by the band's ("lousy") drummer, Dick DeVaughan, whom Hawley had met on a club date. This Bigelow group had 10 pieces, a typical size in those days: three brass, three reeds, plus drums, banjo, bass, and violin. It was a tasteful, society-type orchestra, with an occasional jazz accent. After Hawley joined, the band played at the New York's Park Central and Commodore Hotels, toured Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then had an extended run at Yoeng's Chinese American Restaurant at 1609 Broadway (at 49th Street).

I laughed when Hawley first told me he had played in a Chinese restaurant. But Yoeng's and its competitors, such as the Palais d'Or (where Hawley later played), were no take-out places, but rather spacious dining and dancing spots. Charlie Barnet describes the genre in his autobiography:

"I met some guys who had a job at the Golden Pheasant Restaurant at Twenty-third Street on Union Square. Like many other Chinese-American restaurants around the city, it used a band at three sessions -- lunch, dinner and supper. They had bands from four pieces on up and there was dancing at nearly all these places, even at lunchtime when businessmen would come in and dance a little bit, maybe with their secretaries. Paul Tremaine, whose theme was "Lonely Acres,"  had a real big band at Yoeng's and was known for numbers like "She'll Be Comin' `Round the Mountain," although they would mix in a little jazz here and there." Barnet, Those Swinging Years, p.10 (1984).

Hawley Ades sometimes played in the band of Rudy Vallee (above), but Vallee was never present at those gigs. (Photo: Randy Richards Collection, Mississippi Rag files)

Don Bigelow had inherited a modest fortune derived from ancestor H.B. Bigelow, a successful manufacturer who served as Governor of Connecticut (1881-83). Bigelow led a band in 1928 at the Hack-Ma-Tack Inn in Cheboygan, Mich. (a bit of arcana found on the Internet). He picked up another band in North Carolina, and in mid-1930 followed Paul Tremaine into Yoeng's. From a Doug Clark article on the Web, I learned that Yoeng's, his favorite luncheon spot in those halcyon days of yore, served a full course meal for 55 cents (www.tuxjunction.net/clark.htm).

Yoeng's had a Columbia network radio wire, and the Bigelow band broadcast for an hour at noon each weekday, and sometimes in the evening as well. Hawley's mother was able to hear the broadcasts at her home in Albany, N.Y.  Hawley did some arranging with the Bigelow band, following the guidance of Arthur Lange's Arranging for the Modern Dance Orchestra (1925). The Lange book was the "arrangers' bible," according to Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords, p. 89 (1999). Hawley still had his copy in 2008. Hawley remembered that his first arrangement for Bigelow was of "Alice Blue Gown."

Larry Funk

The Bigelow band recorded a few sides for the Melotone label in 1931. But while Hawley liked Bigelow, after a year he felt the band did not have a future. So, in mid-1931, Hawley joined Larry Funk "and his Band of a Thousand Melodies," then playing at the Palais d'Or at 1590 Broadway (48th St.), another Chinese American restaurant with a resident dance band. Funk had succeeded in that venue B.A. Rolfe, who had left the Palais d'Or after a several-year residence to lead his band on radio's Lucky Strike Hour.

A postcard of the Palais d'Or reveals a rather sumptuous space with a huge oval dance floor surrounded by tables for dining, with the bandstand up front. Paul Whiteman called this venue the "largest café in New York City"; he appeared there for four years, 1920-24, when it was the Palais Royal, which went bankrupt after a prohibition raid by the Federals. Among the players in the Funk band were a veteran one-armed trumpet player, name not remembered (not Wingy Manone), and Macy Irish, a classmate of Hawley's at Rutgers who later played with Red Nichols and Gus Steck at the Blue Hills Plantation in New Jersey, and then led his own band there and at the Bound Brook Inn.

Jack Pettis was a fine musician, but his ethics were questionable. (Photo: Duncan P. Schiedt Collection)

Jack Pettis

The Funk job did not last long, so it was back to the booking offices. In late 1931, the Bernie office booked Hawley on a Pennsylvania tour as pianist with Jack Pettis and His Pets. Saxophonist Pettis had some fame as an original member of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and then soloist with Ben Bernie's orchestra. He was a pioneer jazzman on the C-melody saxophone, he and Trumbauer being close to its only jazz exponents. A Ben Bernie 1925 DeForest Phonofilm (available on YouTube) has Pettis playing supposedly the first jazz solo on film on "Sweet Georgia Brown," a Bernie composition. Starting in 1926 Pettis made a number of records, most under the Pets banner, with such later luminaries as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden. These three were not on the 1931 Pennsylvania tour, but Pettis still had with him an able trumpet player named Bill Moore.

The 1931 Pettis tour came to a grinding halt in Scranton the day after Christmas, when Hawley and the other Pets awoke to find out that Pettis and his road manager, Jeff Bernie, had fled the scene, leaving them stranded. Hawley and his bandmates managed to get back to New York. Hawley, a mild-mannered fellow in general, did not make a big stink about Pettis with Herman Bernie and, as a result, got several more jobs through the Bernie office, including one ("very rough") cruise to England on the U.S.S. Leviathan.

Hawley never saw Jack Pettis after Scranton, but Pettis did reappear in New York briefly. He played at the Terrace Room of the Hotel New Yorker in May-June 1932 and appeared on radio remotes through September 1932 (www.jjonz/us/RadioLogs).  Pettis appeared at one Chicago jam session of NORK alumni in 1936 (Lost Chords, pp. 31, 227). He had one record session in Los Angeles in 1937 and made some radio broadcasts there in January and early February of that year. Thereafter, the record grows hazy. Some Internet information says he married a lady named Molly and died in Chicago in 1940 (www.Answers.co/topic/jack-pettis; www.genforum.genealogy.com/pettis). Others, probably more accurate, say he married Taddy Keller (of the singing Keller Sisters and Lynch), eventually settled in Oklahoma City around 1956-57, and died there on August 24, 1963 (www.jazzage1920s.com/kellersisters; www.network54.com/forum). 

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PART II NEXT MONTH: Memories of Paul Whiteman, Irving Berlin, Fats Waller and Fred Waring

August 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

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