Betty Smith started working at the Blue Note in 1950, when she was 19. She remained there in the all-purpose capacity of waitress, press liaison, girl Friday, and gofer for nine years, nearly but not quite up to the night the club shut its doors for good. She still gets a bit misty about those last few months. “It was probably the most fabulous jazz club that ever was, the Taj Mahal of jazzdom,” she says, “but the writing was on the wall. If I was anything but chickenshit, I would have stayed, but I couldn’t afford it.” By the summer of 1960 the air was out of the balloon, and within a few months more the Loop, the night owl’s paradise, would be dead. A whole way of life was going under with the Note, she knew, and as a single parent to two little girls she had no choice but to head for higher ground.
If the jazzman of the 1950s did not resemble his shady counterpart of the speakeasy era, neither did Holzfeind fit the stereotype of a money-grubbing Loop boozemonger and flesh peddler. He certainly was no conventional swinger or hipster. A family man with a wife and three kids on Balmoral Avenue, Frank enjoyed golf, reading, fishing, bowling, and gardening at home with his family. He kept up his membership in the Saint Louis Browns fan club. Before Sunday matinees at the Blue Note, he worshiped at Saint Cornelius at Long and Lieb. Bald and bespectacled, Frank Holzfeind looked like somebody’s college professor, not the proprietor of a jazz club patronized by a hundred thousand people a year.
Frank H. Holzfeind (pronounced “find,” not “fiend”) left his home town, Milwaukee, in 1920 at age 20. He had lost his job as attendant in a mental institution, whose director concluded that Holzfeind’s absences were the result of too much Italian wine. When he arrived in Chicago, he had $1.50 in his pocket, 50 cents of which went for a room at the YMCA. He first found work as a machinist, then moved to a $6-a-week boarding house. When a strike closed down his shop, Holzfeind found work selling brushes in the neighborhood around 47th and Peoria. (“My customers used brushes primarily for two things: scrubbing whiskey bottles and toilet bowls. I was known as the company specialist in those fields. They weren’t the same brushes, of course.”) Another venture took him to North and Wells to purvey a game of chance called a punchboard. If you sold four chances you made a dollar, and in Chicago in 1920 you could live on a dollar a day.
Out of the El Grotto, one of the first musicians to work for Holzfeind at Lipp’s was trumpeter Henderson Smith, a 15-year veteran of the south-side scene then with the Little Sax Crowder Quartet, led by Bob Crowder, who had played tenor in the great Earl Hines band in its last stand at the Grand Terrace before the war. Besides Sax and Smitty, the quartet included Crowder’s wife Ruth as singer and pianist, and bassist Leonard Bibbs.
Up two steps from the main floor on the Dearborn Street side was the second level of booths, where most of the waitress traffic passed down a broad aisle. Four more steps up to the front was a gallery overlooking the bandstand; most friends of musicians sat here. Because of the acoustics afforded by the Note’s marble walls and floor, there wasn’t a bad seat for listening anywhere in the room, but here you could almost reach out and touch the musicians, see the pianist’s fingers or the interplay of a drummer’s sticks. Socialites and publicity hounds preferred sitting at tables down front, where they could be seen, but their view was mainly of shoelaces. The third or fourth row back offered a better view than ringside, and on most nights, customers could find Frank Holzfeind seated there at his regular table and perpetual martini, greeting customers as they were seated.
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Gaillard’s act, a popular one at the young Blue Note, was a sort of funnies with music. He was the author of “vout,” a language built from nonsense syllables, and his unique renditions of ditties like “Down by the Station” were peppered with “roonie”s, “rootie”s, and “voutie”s. (To the truly hip in the audience, this was cornball stuff, mimicking the slang of modern jazz and mocking the substance; even by 1950, bop had yet to hit Chicago in a big way.) Offstage, the voluble Slim was a teetotaler who nonetheless managed to generate some legends of his own. In one of them, his fear of heights was traced to the trauma of riding an elevator in the Empire State Building when an airplane collided with the skyscraper. From that moment, Slim refused to ride elevators, and after-hours party-goers in Chicago still talk about his waiting alone in the lobby for food sent down from a bash at a top-floor apartment or hotel room.
As he remembers it, Chicago’s jazz renaissance was already gathering momentum before the Blue Note came along. He was a frequent patron at the Jazz Limited on Grand Avenue at State Street, which featured the traditional New Orleans wailing of Sidney Bechet, but this was hardly the only jazz corner out in the city’s neighborhoods. On a single night, Dick recalls having stood in the lobby of the Hotel Sherman–he couldn’t afford the cover charge–to hear Charlie Ventura’s group with Kai Winding in the Panther Room, followed by an el ride up to the Argyle Show Lounge beneath the tracks, where Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were holding forth with the quintet. Half a block down the street was trumpeter Roy Eldridge, and another el fare up to Howard Street brought him to the Club Silhouette with Slam Stewart and the Detour, a nearby piano bar hosting Art Tatum. In the wee hours, he returned to the Loop to catch Bechet’s late show. “And it all cost me only a bottle of beer in each club.”
