Weldon Leo "Jack" Teagarden (
August 20, 1905–January 15, 1964) was an influential
jazz trombonist and
vocalist.
Born in
Vernon, Texas, his brothers
Charlie and Clois "Cub" and his sister
Norma also became noted professional musicians. Teagarden's father was an amateur brass band trumpeter and started young Jack on
baritone horn; by age 10 he had switched to
trombone. He first heard
jazz music played by the
Louisiana Five and decided to play in the new style.
Teagarden's trombone style was largely self-taught, and he developed many unusual alternative positions and novel special effects on the instrument. He is usually considered the most innovative jazz trombone stylist of the pre-
Bebop era, and did much to expand the role of the instrument beyond the old tailgate style role of the early
New Orleans brass bands. Chief among his contributions to the language of jazz trombonists was his ability to interject the blues or merely a "blue feeling" into virtually any piece of music.
By
1920 Jack Teagarden was playing professionally in
San Antonio, including with the band of pianist
Peck Kelley. In the mid
1920s he started traveling widely around the
United States in a quick succession of different bands. In 1927, he came to
New York City where he worked with several bands. By
1928 he played for the
Ben Pollack band.
Within a year of the commencement of his recording career, he become a regular vocalist, first doing blues material ("Beale Street Blues", for example, and later doing popular songs. He is often mentioned as one of the better white male jazz vocalists of the era.
In the late 1920s he recorded with such notable bandleaders and sidemen as
Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Jimmy McPartland, Mezz Mezzrow, Glenn Miller, and
Eddie Condon. Glenn Miller and Teagarden collaborated to provide lyrics and a verse to Spencer William's' 'Basin Street Blues
, which in that amended form became one of the numbers that Teagarden played until the end of his days.'''
In the early
1930s Teagarden was based in
Chicago, for some time playing with the band of
Wingy Manone. He played at the
Century of Progress exposition in Chicago.
Teagarden sought financial security during
The Great Depression and signed an exclusive contract to play for the
Paul Whiteman Orchestra from
1933 through
1938. The contract with Whiteman's band provided him with financial security but prevented him from playing an active part in the musical advances of the mid-thirties swing era.
Teagarden then started leading his own
big band. In spite of Teagarden's best efforts, the band was not a commercial success, and Jack was brought to the brink of bankruptcy.
In
1946 Jack joined
Louis Armstrong's All Stars. Armstrong and Teagarden's work together shows a wonderful rapport, in particular their duet on
Rocking Chair. In late
1951 Teagarden left to again lead his own band, then co-led a band with
Earl Hines, then again with a group under his own name with whom he toured
Asia in
1958 and
1959.
Teagarden was also a prolific and popular singer. He sang in a lyric baritone-tenor voice. His singing is best remembered for duets with
Louis Armstrong and
Johnny Mercer.
Teagarden appeared in the movies
Birth of the Blues (1941),
The Glass Wall (1953), and
Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959). He was an admired recording artist, featured on
RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, Capitol, and
MGM Records discs. As a jazz artist he won the 1944
Esquire magazine Gold Award, was highly rated in the
Metronome polls of 1937-42 and 1945, and was selected for the
Playboy magazine All Star Band, 1957-60.
Teagarden was the featured performer at the
Newport Jazz Festival of 1957. Saturday Review wrote in 1964 that he "walked with artistic dignity all his life," and the same year Newsweek praised his "mature approach to trombone jazz."
Richard M. Sudhalter writes (in 'Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz', Oxford University Press 1999): "The late trumpet player Don Goldie, who spent four years in Teagarden's band and had known him since childhood 'always got a feeling that a lot of happiness was locked away inside Jack, really padlocked, and never came out...just this feeling of sadness. It was always there'.
"Jack Teagarden died, alone, [of
pneumonia] in his room at the Prince Conti Hotel in the
French Quarter of
New Orleans on January 15,
1964. He was only 58. "I sometimes think people like Jack were just go-betweens," Bobby Hackett told a friend. "The Good Lord said, 'Now you go and show 'em what it is', and he did. I think everybody familiar with Jack Teagarden knows that he was something that happens just once. It won't happen again. Not that way..."
"...Connie Jones, the New Orleans cornetist working with Jack Teagarden at the time of the trombonist's death, was a pallbearer for the wake, held at a funeral parlor on leafy St. Charles Avenue: 'I remember seeing him there in a coffin, a travelling coffin. They were going to fly him to Los Angeles for burial right after that. The coffin was open and I remember thinking 'Boy he really looks uncomfortable in there'.
"'Not that he was that tall. Maybe five foot ten or so, at most. But he was kinda wide across the shoulders - and most of all he just gave you the impression he was a big man, in every way. In that coffin, - well, I can't really explain it, but he seemed to be scrunched up into a space that was too small to contain him'".
He was buried at
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills in
Los Angeles, California.
The coda of Teagarden's recording career is the album "Think Well of Me", recorded in January 1962 and made up of his singing and trombone playing, accompanied by strings, on compositions by his old musical associate
Willard Robison: available on Verve CD 314 557 101-2
