Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir, 1934-1969 by Timme Rosenkrantz (2012)
Imagine you could visit Harlem when “Harlem was en vogue” (to quote a good book) and when all the legendary jazz clubs were crowded every night with the jazz masters in their prime. Well, to enjoy this rare privilege is no longer possible but there are still the stories of those days. And the tales. And the memoirs. And now there are the colorful and detailed memoirs of one lucky and adventurous jazz aficionado and jazz journalist who left his native Denmark to become a native of Harlem where he spent most of his time from 1934 until his death in a New York hospital in 1969.
Timme Rosenkrantz’s numerous accounts of, let’s say, meetings with Chick Webb at the Savoy, chats with Slim and Slam, encounters with Lady Day, the discovery and first recordings of Erroll Garner, long parties with Duke Ellington and sessions spent together with most of the New York sidemen in virtually every back room together with concerts and cutting contests in any club open back then; and there were quite a few. This is Baron Rosenkrantzt’s own story, he generally refused to highlight his aristocratic background and thus mainly introduced himself simply as “Timme.”
His account thus not only puts back on the map many of the clubs that disappeared long ago, it also puts into words that very excitement many so-called “Harlem guidebooks,” those road maps for white slumming, were trying to communicate: a hard to believe tale of nightclubbing, battle-of-the bands, lindy-hopping, heavy partying and performances by the finest jazz musicians of all times.
And after making friends with Ellington and Armstrong almost every door opened for him, a rare privilege for a white person in those times. The index at the end of the account lists most of his friends and people he met then; thus including about every musician, club owner, jazz composer and showbiz person that left a trace in Harlem’s jazz history of the 1940s to the early 1960s.
This may bring to mind just another memoir of roughly the same time, namely “Really the Blues” by Mezzrow/Wolfe. However, “Timme’s” account is far more lively, fresh and also very funny. Take this paragraph in which he recounts how he is not admitted to the Renaissance ballroom because he is too early, enters into a discussion with owner Bob Douglas who then grants him admission when Timme states that he wants to attend a meeting of the Danish West Indian Society. “I was introduced … and when I pulled out a postcard I just happened to have of the Little Mermaid stature in Copenhagen harbor and passed it around, there wasn’t any dry eye or throat in the office. Everybody knew who she was except Douglas, who asked if all the ladies in Copenhagen had fishtails. I assured him that she was an exception. All the others have cocktails.”
Jazz columnist and editor Fradley Hamilton Garner masterfully added just the right amount of structure and minor changes to the so far unpublished account of the Baron who first wrote down his memories in Danish, and then provided an English-language version together with his companion Inez Cavanaugh. Parts of it were already published in the 1960s. For the first time now his memoir is available together with extensive notes, discography and index. All that needs to be added to a possible second edition will be a map of Harlem of the times; but then … after reading the first chapter this map will be visualized in the reader’s mind all by itself, so colorful is his report.
Baron Rosenkrantz, seeing himself mostly as a musical layman and not as a musician (even though in his early youth in Copenhagen he was member of a jazz band), may have tried to foster certain musician’s careers while running in this lifetime both a record label and a records shop; however, he never was the “unwanted” kind of white patron squeezing and exploiting the original artists. Rather he sought their presence to enjoy the luxury of their music and conversation. And, respectively, many musicians recall him and his presence as a delightful detail in the tumultuous days of Harlem’s high time in the late 1930s and mid 1940s.
The “Jazz Baron” thus left his own mark on jazz as producer and arranger; more than 40 pages of discography show his impact on recordings with Fats Waller, Don Byas, Teddy Wilson, Charlie Ventura and many, many more.
Better than any 90-minute documentary on the history of Harlem in the 1940s Timme’s memoir is a rare treasure of countless anecdotes, stories, facts and insights (as well as some fables) on the way the jazz masters lived, loved and worked and how many myths, lores and legends started circulation.
For any scholar of jazz this book is a must-have.
Review by Dr. A. Ebert (2012)
Timme Rosenkrantz and Fradley Hamilton Garner (ed.) Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir, 1934-1969 (Studies in Jazz 65). Scarecrow Press, 2012, 297 pages.