All Schools Dig Bobby Hackett - Pat Harris and Art Hodes

© Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected, all rights reserved.

“Figuratively and literally, the international reputation of Creole cooking owes more than a little to peripatetic musicians from New Orleans. Their preferences in tunes and dishes are well known to the jazz audiences throughout the world.

Bobby Hackett has taken the familiar ingredients and, like a good chef, added that distinctive touch which makes his an entirely personal interpretation of the traditional.

Bobby Hackett’s integrity as a musician has never been questioned in the course of his long career. Time and circumstances have shifted the backdrop behind him frequently, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but the music that has

proceeded from his mellow horn has always had dignity, warmth and a feeling of commitment. Without either bowing to fashion or ignoring it, he has managed to maintain and express an individual conception of what is right and proper in his chosen field of musical endeavor.

Like all jazzmen of his generation, he was profoundly influenced by Louis Armstrong, the creator of what is virtually the classical language of jazz. Bobby was soon fluent in it, and he uses it skilfully to communicate emotions basic to humanity, rather than those concomitant with sociological or political postures.

Never an exhibitionist, he often plays with an aerial mobility that suggests an affinity with another famous cornetist, Bix Beiderbecke. Had the latter lived, we do not know how he would have reacted to the pressures and rewards of the last three decades. Probably, like Bobby, he would have gone his own way, impervious to demands for technical extravagance and blatant eccentricity, because he too had studied the art of the master cooks from New Orleans, those great teachers who arrived in Chicago during the ‘20s.”

• Stanley Dance, insert notes to Bobby Hackett Creole Cookin’

© Copyright ® Pat Harris and Art Hodes, copyright protected, all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright approval.

The following is from the February 9, 1951 issue of Downbeat and is part of its “Bouquets to the Living” series. The magazine initiated the series in the late 1940s and early 1950s during a period when there was a major rift between musicians from the earlier periods of Jazz and those who favored modern Jazz who sometimes referred to their elders as “moldy figs.” It was Downbeat’s way of recognizing the contributions of the surviving musicians who were the earliest makers of the music.