Since 1963, it has been strange but true that one of the best places to hear traditional, New Orleans-style jazz was 540 miles away in culturally dissimilar San Antonio.
The life of the man who made it so, Jim Cullum, Jr., was celebrated Aug. 31 in a fitting tribute to one of the true greats of the art form’s unfortunately rare breed.
Cullum, who died Aug. 11 of a heart attack at age 77, had joined his father in helping launch the jazz club The Landing as one of the very first establishments on what became the city’s internationally famous Riverwalk. For a quarter-century until 2012, some 200 radio stations nationwide carried Cullum’s weekly Riverwalk Jazz broadcast.
It’s hard to describe, for those who aren’t jazz purists, just what a miracle it seemed that San Antonio should be one of the few great repositories of the New Orleans sound. Before swing, R&B, and rock-and-roll took over, traditional jazz, of course, had been popular coast to coast. But even then, most of its great practitioners were New Orleans natives, either in the Crescent City or living as transplants in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles.
Nonetheless, the Riverwalk Jazz show was an auditory oasis for people like my late father, Haywood Hillyer III of New Orleans, who thought that even 1940s big-band “swing” music was a too-modern debasement of the purist’s jazz of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.
So true to the music’s original form was Cullum’s band, and so infectiously listenable, that my father taped the show off the radio for purely private use (which is legal), week after week, for several years on end. I can still distinctly hear the introductory theme, as “sponsored by See’s Candies,” in my mind’s ear.
For Dad’s 70th birthday a decade ago, my wife and I treated him to a night at The Landing, during the entirety of which Dad’s smile was as wide and constant as I’ve ever seen it. Between sets, he and Cullum struck up a long conversation — Dad had made a habit in segregated, late 1950s New Orleans of sitting in back alleys with old black jazz musicians between their sets, so he had stories Cullum could appreciate — and the cornetist was memorably warm and engaging.
As good as the radio broadcasts were, the live sound was even better. It was precise as Cullum himself insisted it should be, rather than coming through electronic speakers: “Here, you hear the music through the instruments, and that is a big deal. I play the cornet, and when you hear that sound, it’s not the speaker vibrating, it’s my lip.”
Cullum himself played with the music genre’s most legendary figures, including Armstrong. He played at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. And, through his official recordings, as well as on Dad’s old cassette tapes, he will play as blessedly long as jazz enthusiasts like me will listen.
