S03E04 – John Kirby, Winchester, 1908

John Kirby ha portato l’eleganza della musica da camera nel cuore pulsante del jazz dimostrando che il jazz può essere preciso come Beethoven e allo stesso tempo libero come la strada.

Winchester (Virginia), 1908

There are cases in which coincidences are so crazy that it is truly hard to believe they are just that. How is it possible that two great double bassists and tubists and band leaders of the swing era were born in the same geographical area less than 200 miles apart, with the same surname and with very similar musical inclinations? Sure, there are exactly ten years between the two: Andy, born in 1898 in Kentucky, and John, born in 1908 in Virginia. But what if I told you that Andy’s family suddenly moved 2,400 kilometers west in the very first days of January 1909, just a few days after John’s mother—the second of our protagonists—gave him up for adoption?

If you’re lost, it doesn’t matter. This story is a divertissement, a game, a collection of coincidences that are and remain coincidences. If we were talking about rock music or pop music in the modern sense of the word, there would surely be a forum somewhere (wow, what a vintage word that is) discussing it; there would be a group of people gathering to debate it with irrefutable evidence, PowerPoints (I apologize to graphic designers for this violent word) with album covers turned upside down, and so-called web scientists claiming that double-bass-ism is a genetically transmitted syndrome. Don’t worry, I’m a double bassist myself—no double bassists in the family, assuming I really am my parents’ child.

“The value of coincidences is equal to their degree of improbability,” said Kundera. Andy and John are not brothers; there is no evidence to prove it, and although they had similar careers, played the same instruments, and both founded two important orchestras, they did so in two different, distant cities and never even shared a single musician. A coincidence, then—however incredible and amusing. Or maybe not?

We have already talked about Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy in the sixth episode of the first season of *Lost in the Shuffle*, dedicated to Mary Lou Williams, so we won’t talk about him today. This, in fact, is the story of John Kirby, born John Kirk in Winchester, Virginia, on the last day of 1908.

Reverend Johnson and his wife Nancy lived in a small house at 442 Kent Street, right across from the railroad… it was—well, it still is there—a mouse-gray wooden house, one story, a small front porch, four rooms in all including the living room and kitchen. The reverend was an African American pastor in an African American neighborhood in a city where African Americans had it pretty bad, though better than in other places.

“Nancy and I spent many afternoons together; she taught me how to sew, I helped her with the laundry, we played cards. When the reverend came into the house carrying that child in his arms, with his 32-tooth smile, we were doing just that—playing cards… Nancy jumped to her feet and said, ‘Are you crazy??? Where did you get that white baby—do you want us to get lynched?’ But no, the reverend just kept smiling and repeating: a gift from the Lord, a gift from the Lord.”

That’s how John Kirk came into the world, in an uproar. His mother, Dolly, left him at Reverend Johnson’s church a few days after New Year’s. She said he had been born on New Year’s Eve and that she couldn’t take care of him, that she had the blues devils and he would suffer because of it. She insisted that with the church he would have a better life. She begged the reverend for forgiveness and disappeared forever. At first glance, John did in fact have a strange, ambiguous complexion, but if you looked closely—come on—it was clear he wasn’t white. Besides, he changed a lot. The abandonment of a white child would have meant a sea of trouble, but black children meant nothing to lawmen. In fact, the reverend reported the matter to the authorities and obtained the adoption. John Kirk, adopted son of Reverend Washington Johnson and his wife Nancy.

Powell Gibson was a thin man, rather tall, about thirty-five years old. He went around well dressed, with a very determined manner. He came to Winchester to run the Winchester Colored School, the school for African American boys and girls, but from his attitude alone it was clear that he would not be just a bureaucrat. In Winchester there were only a few hundred African Americans, and for most of them segregation seemed acceptable. The motto was: “stay away from whites, don’t cause trouble, and disappear when necessary.” Obviously nothing happened: whites enforced segregation, African Americans endured it in silence. Schools, restaurants, theaters, public transportation, public restrooms, and drinking fountains were segregated. There were schools and restaurants for whites; there were no restrooms or drinking fountains for blacks. Black people could serve and wash dishes in white restaurants, but they could not enter through the main door, let alone eat there. That was what the Jim Crow laws dictated, a system of racial laws in force until the 1950s. The newly appointed principal Gibson found the Jim Crow laws disgusting, but at the same time he had a great desire to live.

His idea was to create a parallel system—a parallel city—to that of the whites, but of higher quality. A city within the city. He encouraged and helped in the creation or improvement of restaurants, theaters, and concert halls for black people. He invested heavily in his school, giving it a humanistic and artistic orientation. His intention was to use the school to train musicians, directors, actors, but also accountants and administrators who could one day form the cultural backbone of this parallel city. In 1916 the Winchester Colored School changed its name, getting rid of that racist adjective, “colored.” A great celebration, with a concert by the students of the music class, inaugurated the birth of the Frederick Douglass School, named after a famous anti-segregationist.

That was, most likely, John’s first concert—he was eight years old.

“The Jim Crow laws were a system of racist and segregationist laws enacted in the United States starting in 1865, the year Lincoln abolished slavery, and legally dismantled in 1965, even though we still suffer from their effects today. They could be federal laws, such as segregation on public transportation, or local ones, such as residential segregation in some cities in Pennsylvania. The original goal, especially in the southern states, was to nullify the end of slavery by effectively preventing freed slaves from truly living, thus forcing them to remain in the service of their former masters as their only means of survival, thereby maintaining white supremacy. Jim Crow was not a Highlander-like politician who lived for two centuries; ‘Jim Crow’ was a caricatured and racist theatrical character, born in the nineteenth-century minstrel shows: a black man portrayed as ignorant and buffoonish.”

Choosing a musical instrument is an illusion, a journey, an unconscious search. Sometimes you are convinced that the instrument you have had in your hands for years and studied carefully is the right one, and then one morning you wake up and discover that it isn’t. Conservatories are full of musicians who graduate on an instrument they will never play again. This is because you don’t choose the instrument; the instrument chooses you. And it does so only when you are resolved, when your journey reaches a turning point, when you understand who you are, make peace with your character and your expectations, and allow yourself to be who you truly are. Only then does the instrument that represents you appear. Yes, kind of like that saying attributed to Confucius: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” It was the same for John.

Principal Gibson looked at him and placed the trombone in his hands. It was the beginning of the journey. He began to play it with interest. He was an introverted boy—reserved, taciturn. The trombone gave him a new kind of social life, one in which it was not necessary to speak.

“Powell was a strict but fair man. You wanted to play an instrument? Fine—but you also had to study the piano. He used to say, ‘The piano helps you visualize music and the connections between notes,’ and it was true! Studying harmony was easier. Even understanding Bach was easier at the piano. Powell made us play jazz, yes, but he also wanted us to study ‘white’ music properly, the music of old Europe.”

It is 1928 and John is a promising trombonist. He is twenty years old and has just settled into the small service room in the basement of Jacob Hopkins down in Madison Park, one of Baltimore’s four Black neighborhoods. Baltimore is a peculiar city: eight hundred thousand inhabitants and a strong, well-organized Black community that nonetheless lives segregated in clearly defined areas. Baltimore was the pilot city for the residential segregation project, declared unconstitutional in 1917 but enforced de facto until the 1950s. Old Jacob plays the banjo but is too lazy to go out, and he points John toward a couple of good places.

Chance, coincidence, luck, destiny. What is it that truly governs the events of this world? That evening John first goes to the Maryland Roof Garden, but he is thrown out—private party of refined Black people, the “beige,” as they called Black people who put on airs like whites. Then he goes to the Comedy Club, where a police raid is under way. Nothing. So what now? The Royal Theatre is not a club; it’s a theater that, during that period in 1928, stayed open after the shows for dance nights and late-night jam sessions. It is there that John meets Jimmy Harrison, a trombonist almost his age, just a little older. An encounter that would change John’s life forever, and for which John must surely have been grateful to the universe—and so are we.

“Fletcher Henderson—well, Fletcher Henderson needs no introduction. Jimmy Harrison played trombone in his orchestra. He was an affable, generous guy. He played very well, had excellent musical ideas, and often went out of his way to help others. Fletcher kept insisting that he study the tuba bass that the orchestra needed, but he hated that instrument. It was he who insisted that John study that damn tuba.”

John and Jimmy become friends. John can hardly believe he has found such a great musician who actually takes him seriously. He hangs on his every word. When Jimmy tells him that yes, the trombone is cool, but playing more instruments—even within the same family—gives you more chances to work and to fit in, John listens. For the entire time Henderson’s orchestra is booked at the Royal, John spends his days there. He listens to rehearsals, enjoys the concert, and when the band sleeps, eats, or gets drunk, he takes advantage of the band’s tuba and practices it.

When Henderson’s orchestra packed up, the ground seemed to give way beneath John’s feet. It didn’t take long before he too left the Madison Park basement, heading for New York.

“New York is always New York—it steals your heart and empties your wallet,” people used to say. John is in the city, literally vomited out of a bus at Penn Station, and he rushes uptown to Harlem to Jimmy. He doesn’t have a dollar to his name—not even a wallet. It is September 1929, but no one yet knows about the imminent economic crisis to come. Jimmy is a highly established trombonist in the city and has plenty of work; he passes some of it on to John, who begins playing with Bill Brown and His Brownies. He still doesn’t have a home. At night he plays with Bill Brown down in the Village, then he waits for dawn and unloads crates from trains down at the Chelsea market. One night they play at the Chimney in the Village; there the evenings end early, around three o’clock. John heads down toward Chelsea. It’s bitterly cold, and he holes up in warehouse 22. There’s a warm corner there, piles of cardboard, and you lie down on them while waiting for the first train to unload at 5:30. He sets the trombone case under his legs and closes his eyes—for just a few seconds.

“When that night John’s trombone was stolen, he was clearly desperate. He had no money, the stock market on Wall Street had already crashed, and the prospects were bleak. As always, Jimmy Harrison saved him. He lent him a trombone he had at home—of course—but then teased him for weeks. He would say, ‘See, John? It’s destiny telling you to take that damn tuba more seriously.’ The two of them were always together. John took all the double bookings that came Jimmy’s way, plus jobs of his own. He had become unbelievably good. And when the tragedy happened, when Jimmy suddenly died… well, John’s destiny was written. I know one shouldn’t say it, but it was his good fortune. Jimmy was John’s good fortune in every possible way.”

John took all the jobs Jimmy couldn’t take—he always had, ever since he arrived in New York. That was how he entered Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, which was more than happy to welcome a trombonist who also played the tuba superbly. But Henderson was never satisfied. The economic crisis was raging, and jazz was moving faster and faster. The double bass was becoming increasingly prominent on the music scene, gradually joining the tuba. There were orchestras that had both tuba players and double bassists. Henderson aimed to have someone who could play both, and so he put the double bass in John’s hands. He even paid for the lessons John took from Pop Foster, who had also come to the double bass from other instruments and was the father of slap bass—or so they say. Pop, who had played violin and banjo in New Orleans with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, was now in New York, teaching double bass to John Kirby.

Yes, because the transformation was now taking place definitively. John Kirk, trombonist from Winchester, Virginia, appears on his first recording on December 2, 1930: a 78 rpm record featuring *Keep a Song in Your Soul*, with him on tuba; and then in December 1931 on *My Gal Sal*, where in the liner notes a young John Kirby appears on double bass.

“It was Pop Foster who advised John. ‘John Kirk is a bland name—you need something more catchy. And if you want to sell yourself as a double bassist and even start your own band… well, there’s already an Andy Kirk around, same instrument, bandleader. Find something more convincing and original, kid,’ he told him.”

John Kirby had very clear ideas. He played in the best dance halls in New York, and he did so with one of the finest arrangers of his time. From Fletcher Henderson he would learn a great deal about writing, but also about himself—about what he wanted to do and what he liked doing. So when Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra collapsed under the blows of the economic crisis and the advance of the new, Kirby was at the peak of his form. In 1936 Henderson made one of his last recordings as a bandleader before becoming the arranger for Benny Goodman’s orchestra. During that session, Kirby already knew exactly what to do.

Kirby is already writing. He is deeply drawn to classical music—he listens to Haydn, Mozart, Bach. Dance music is fine, of course, but he wants something more for his own music. He wants to explore, to expand the language of jazz. He has the right venue and the right people in mind. On 52nd Street, just below Central Park, there is the Onyx Club. Kirby is a tall man with a light complexion; he had always been told that he should take advantage of that light skin, that he should exploit his “looking white.” I don’t think he needed subterfuge or tricks—his talent and determination were probably enough to convince the boss of the Onyx Club to lend him the space at closing time so he could carry out his experiments.

He initially brought together drummer O’Neill Spencer, pianist Billy Kyle, and trumpeter Charlie Shavers. A quartet, but it wasn’t enough for him. He added Buster Bailey on clarinet and Russell Procope on reeds. The Onyx Club was not a ballroom; it was a small, elegant, sophisticated club—a place where people went to listen to music in silence. It was a modern venue for its time, a forerunner that hosted live and radio recordings, anticipating the era when jazz would spread widely over the airwaves. It had hosted Henderson’s orchestra and regularly featured Benny Goodman’s groups. To make things happen you need the right people and the right places. And so the John Kirby Onyx Club Band was born, the club’s resident band.

“In the newspapers they called it ‘the biggest little band in the land.’ It had a precise, elegant style, a compact sound built on truly complex arrangements. It was one of the most modern and enjoyable bands of that period, and you could hear it every week at the Onyx Club—and each time it was different. That’s where Maxine Sullivan met John Kirby.”

Maxine Sullivan was a young singer and aspiring showgirl. She was very intelligent, ambitious, and determined. She frequented the Onyx Club for some time, right during the period when Kirby was carrying out his experiments there and making his first recordings. The two fell in love and got married—of course. It was an intense marriage, from which a wonderful idea was born: bringing that music to the radio. Maxine sang beautifully and had a sharp mind; John wrote well, knew everyone on the music scene, and was ambitious. And the Onyx Club? Well, as we said, it already hosted radio recordings. And CBS—the Columbia Broadcasting System—had its headquarters right there, on the corner with Broadway, less than 200 meters from the Onyx Club. The two organized a pilot recording, a test that the Columbia managers—regulars at the club—liked very much. It was Sunday afternoon, April 7, 1940, when *Flow Gently, Sweet Rhythm* went on the air. It was the very first radio show ever hosted by African Americans.

“It was a blast—great music, great guests, and nonstop jokes. It featured major musicians like Goodman and Coleman Hawkins. CBS was thrilled and the ratings were good. Then Maxine and Kirby split up. You know how it is—those explosive, intense relationships. Love without measure, and hatred just as boundless.”

Even though the Onyx Club remained home base for Kirby, it wasn’t enough. His music needed to evolve, to grow from a chamber dimension into something more orchestral. While other orchestras aimed for sheer power and visual impact, the big-band spectacle, Kirby wanted to expand into something larger while preserving precision and refinement. He envisioned an ensemble of seven to ten players—a small swing symphony. This idea was born within the CBS program itself, as he found himself writing for formations of that kind and enjoying it. It was during one of the final episodes of the program that he wrote *Rehearsin’ for a Nervous Breakdown*, probably while being hounded by the tensions and responsibilities of the show and by his increasingly strained relationship with Maxine.

“A new 78 rpm recording by the John Kirby Orchestra, an expanded version of the celebrated sextet with the addition of Charlie Dixon’s guitar (formerly a banjoist with Fletcher Henderson), a second trumpet, and a trombone. The pieces *At the Crossroad* and *Rehearsin’ for a Nervous Breakdown* offer a true small swing symphony: complex yet fluid harmonies, an impeccable balance between winds and rhythm section, a subtle classical sensibility, and an elegant interplay of counterpoint. An ensemble that plays with the lightness and precision of a chamber quartet, bringing swing onto terrain of rare refinement. Completing the lineup, alongside the well-known masters of the horns, is the addition of Charlie Dixon’s guitar—already appreciated as a banjoist in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra—together with a second trumpet and a trombone that thicken the interplay of voices without ever weighing down the sonic fabric. For readers who frequent Midtown, this will come as no surprise—expect new recordings!”

John Kirby’s is a story of courage, pragmatism, taste, and silence. He spoke little and acted a great deal, they said. A tireless worker, a water carrier, others called him—typical of the double bassist, the glue between harmony and rhythm, between drums and piano. Always in the background, yet absolutely fundamental, especially in swing. In the end, the double bass met his character. Kirby’s journey—from trombone to double bass, from Winchester to New York and then onto radios across all of America—was complete. The Second World War took many musicians away; few were left playing in New York. Kirby worked as an arranger, kept himself busy, but in the end his fate was that of many great artists. In 1951, at just forty-three years old, a sudden heart attack took him away forever, consigning his music to history.

Kirby is not dead as long as we keep dancing to and listening to his music. From *9:20 Special* to *Schubert’s Serenade*, from *Beethoven Riffs on an Efferent Blues*, if today it is possible to move our feet in swing time while enjoying melodies drawn from classical music, it is in large part thanks to him.

---

Il podcast è scritto da Guido Maria Bianchini e Marta Leoni.
Voci di Guido Maria Bianchini e Laura Magni.
Sigla e montaggi di Guido Maria Bianchini.