“The Ballad of Eddie Rosner.”
A little story that tells of History in these days when that same History is being stolen from us.
It's not short but, trust this unworthy storyteller, here lies the material for a Novel.
And there's the Music!
It's not short, but really, what do you have to do these days? (Oh, you've realized it's not exactly a review, even if there's a record to gather what History hasn't taken away).
Intro
The French will never admit it and it still irks them a bit, but in Berlin, you could hear the best Jazz outside of the States.
At Hotel Adlon, besides tasting the best Pfannkuchensuppe in Berlin, you could witness the best musical show in all of Germany: that of the Weintraubs Syncopators!
Stefan Weintrauben, the orchestra leader, quickly noticed that Polish boy of Jewish origins, a former child prodigy (he started with the violin at 6 but then discovered Jazz), who stole the scene every night.
His name was Adolph Ignatievich Rosner, Ady to everyone, and he was a force of nature!
His routine with two trumpets always drew applause from the audience. And Ady had that “swing,” despite being white, and he held the stage like few could. Not a small feat in an orchestra like the Syncopators which put on a crazy show: cabaret sketches, disguises (they often played in wigs and women's clothes), various skits...
A very young (and beautiful!) Marlene Dietrich also noticed them when they ended up on the set of “The Blue Angel” and she was dazzled.
Soon the Syncopators became Ady’s band.
Take 1- Stormy Weather
What was our Eddie doing the morning of October 29, 1929?
For sure, nothing could have made him imagine the storm that was about to break from across the Ocean. America was the homeland of “his” Music, what the hell did he know—he—about Wall Street, the stock market, and all the messes happening there?
However, the clouds from Wall Street didn’t take long to reach Berlin too. And soon that storm swept away the Weimar Republic and its parties.
History had come knocking, for the first of a long series of times, at Eddie's door.
Soon Germany began to fill with guys who loved the goose step and military marches and hated Jazz.
And the Jews.
Take 2- Don’t Trust A Man Who Can’t Dance
Goebbels was born with a club foot.
“Pes equinovarus” the doctors call it, he claimed to have been injured in war. The truth was he never could go to war.
Is that why he hated dancing?
He certainly hated a lot of other things: dodecaphony, abstract art, symbolism, impressionism, homosexuals, blacks, communists, and all those other “degenerates.”
And, above all, he hated the Jews.
Goebbels invented this story of “degenerate music.”
So, after a while, numerous groups of friendly brown shirts with a healthy appetite for rough play began to constantly show up at Syncopators concerts.
Soon enough, there were no more concerts for the Syncopators.
“It's not a good time to play Jazz, not even if your name is Adolf,” Eddie once said, who despite everything, could still smile under his mustache.
Take 3- Giant steps
Eddie was sharp and understood the hint. He went to Poland, formed a band, and began touring Europe: Denmark, France, Italy, Finland.
It was at one of these concerts that he met Louis Armstrong. Louis was so impressed that he left him a note: “from the white Armstrong to the black Rosner.”
Thus the legend of the “white Louis Armstrong” was born.
Meanwhile, Eddie recorded for major record companies of the time, like Odeon and Columbia. Soon he was the highest-paid musician in Poland. He married Ruth and continued playing. Convinced that History would leave him alone.
Take 4- Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day)
What was our Eddie doing the morning of September 1, 1939?
Whatever he was doing, this time Eddie immediately understood that History was coming to knock—for the second time—at his door!
He had believed to be safe, convinced that no one would be so foolish to set Europe ablaze for that Danzig hole!
Yes, he knew the Nazis: they were dangerous but didn't believe to this extent! He didn't even know who Molotov and Von Ribbentrop were.
He just wanted to play his Jazz.
Take 5- Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams
Staying in Poland becomes dangerous for a jazz musician with Jewish origins (he had never even realized he was Jewish!). It's time to leave.
Eddie could go to America, they know him well there. There are Satchmo, Duke Ellington, and many others who know him.
But no. Eddie decides to leave for the Soviet Union, even though he doesn’t know a word of Russian! Isn't Music a universal language?
It's not a strange decision: great Jazz was being played in the Soviet Union in those years!
Didn’t you know?
Take 6- Wherever I Lay My Hat Is My Home
Jazz has a birth date in the USSR: October 2, 1922.
That day, a grand Jazz music concert took place in Moscow. The musicians were mostly amateurs, but that music immediately captivated everyone.
This was the music of the African-American minorities, oppressed brothers. That music also seemed like a great tool for political struggle.
In those years, the famous American jazz bands of Frank Witers and Sam Wooding would arrive in the Soviet Union. Their success would be sensational.
In Moscow and Leningrad, the first Jazz orchestras were formed, and besides the classics of the American repertoire, you could also hear compositions by Russian authors.
So Eddie, disguised as a Wehrmacht officer, after an adventurous journey with his Ruth, arrives in Belarus, in Byalistock, then from there to Lvov, where to earn a living he accepts an engagement for the local "La Bagatelle" for which he forms his orchestra.
Take 7- The Two Tsars
Pantelejmon Ponomarenko had a benign face of a Russian peasant but don't be fooled, he was a real tough nut. More than once, he stood up to Beria and during the war, he was the head of the partisan command before becoming the First Secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party.
Ponomarenko loved jazz and one day, by chance, showed up at “La Bagatelle.”
Almost had a stroke: the guy playing in that dump of a place was a prodigy!
Pantelejmon didn’t think twice: he took our Eddie and commissioned him to form the first State orchestra of the Republic of Belarus.
Pantelejmon had seen well.
The success was enormous: Eddie gained fame and money, toured all of Russia, played for the troops (taking great risks but gaining earnings and privileges) and for the people. In 1945 he played in Red Square before a massive crowd.
He lived in a house overlooking the Kremlin and was known as "the golden trumpet".
One day, Ponomarenko made him a strange request: he took him to a completely empty concert hall and ordered him to play.
Eddie did what was requested of him.
Only later did he learn that there, among the empty chairs, hidden in the penumbra was Stalin. The new Tsar wanted to hear that phenomenal musician he had heard so much about.
The golden trumpet, the white Armstrong, the Tsar of Jazz.
Take 8- The Party’s Over
What was our Eddie doing on February 9, 1946?
Certainly, he was not at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow listening to Stalin who, in a famous speech, definitively broke relations with the West and soon with everything that seemed, in his eyes, "pro-Western".
Like Jazz.
History had come knocking at his door again.
Take 9- Fruit Juice
In his last years, Zdanov was forced by Stalin to drink only fruit juices.
Yosif had long chosen him as his successor but although Andrej Aleksandrović was 18 years younger, Yosif feared—and rightly so—that his protégé's excessive love for vodka could ruin his plans.
Zdanov hated what he called "Formalism" and that bourgeois "cosmopolitanism" that looked to Western models as something to imitate. He didn't yet have it in for jazz but with the music of Muradeli and Shostakovich, and those like them who abused dissonance, people like Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and Klebanov.
What really pissed him off were that hen Achmatova and those little poet friends of hers, acmeists, and mainly that Mikhail Zoshchenko, with his bourgeois and corrupting satire.
Now, our Eddie, certainly hadn't read "The Story of a Monkey" nor had he ever listened to "The Great Friendship", nor was he someone who liked "to abuse dissonance" but, he had already experienced that, if you open the gate to censorship, the wind that comes out—little by little—sweeps everything away.
Take 10- Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar
Eddie soon realized the air had changed and decided it was time to say goodbye to the Paradise of the Proletariat.
On the morning of November 27, 1946, the Russians caught Eddie trying to cross to the West with his family. They arrested him and took him to Lubyanka.
Eddie stayed seven months at Lubyanka and was not treated as an esteemed guest certainly.
They tortured him and made him sign a false confession through beatings. Eddie became a public enemy and received a sentence of 10 years. They sent him to Khabarovsk, in eastern Siberia, and then to a gulag in Magadan, on the banks of Kolyma.
Take 11- I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
Eduard Petrovic Berzin was the camp director of Khabarovsk, down in Magadan.
Eduard had studied Fine Arts, had intellectual aspirations, and remembered that "zek", he knew who Eddie Rosnan was: he was the "golden trumpet", the "white Louis Armstrong"!
Thus, in that hell of withered bodies and shaved heads, Eddy once again found his path thanks to music: Berzin asked Eddie to form a “Gulag Band” to liven up their evenings and perform shows for the camp detainees.
To those men rendered nearly blind due to avitaminosis and who walked holding onto one another, the regime demanded they also be subjected to the language of re-education. To this end, in every lager, there was the "Kulturno-Vospitatelnaya Cast of the GULag"—the educational-cultural section.
In those ice prisons, you could find a small library and a club where concerts, theatrical performances, political discussions, chess competitions, and even football matches were meant to be held. And for those detainees who were (or claimed to be) artists, comedians, or musicians or something of the sort, all this equaled salvation: shorter work shifts, special clothes, the chance to sleep in better-maintained and heated barracks.
Even as a "zek", Eddy Rosner found success again and, in Magadan, even a real theater to play in. Berzin himself had it built in 1933, convinced that Art had to survive even in that snow desert.
Eddie found, once more, what—in one way or another—we can call "success" and even found love. A love that had the eyes and smile of Marina Bojko-Prokofieva.
Marina gave him a second daughter and Eddie wrote a lot of music for her.
Take 12- Someone to Watch Over Me
The heart of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to all as Stalin, gave out on the night of February 28, 1953, but no one dared enter to see what had happened until the evening of the next day. It took at least another three days for him to finally pass away while, around him, decisions were being made about what to do.
The news was announced on March 5.
So here is History, coming once again to knock on Eddie's door.
Things didn’t change right away, it took about a year, but in '54, Eddie was granted amnesty and could return to Moscow.
Meanwhile, comrade Khrushchev began to dismantle Stalinism and try to thaw the "Cold War."
Nikita Sergeyevich did not disdain contacts with the West. And Jazz came back in vogue.
New groups emerged, books were published, and films dedicated to this genre were made. In 1964, the legendary jazz club “The Blue Bird” was also created in Moscow. Foreign musicians were again welcomed into the country. Jerry Mulligan and Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and many others came.
Take 13- Day by Day
And our Eddie?
By now you've understood what kind of man he was! He didn’t just sit idly: he formed another group, the “Estraden Orchester,” and found—yet again—success!
He resumed performing, being called to theaters, radio, and even television. The great American jazz musicians remembered him: Duke Ellington wanted to meet him, even thought about some collaboration; Benny Goodman welcomed him backstage.
But it wasn’t easy.
The police watched him. They didn’t trust him.
“Today he plays jazz, tomorrow he’ll betray the Motherland,” was a saying heard increasingly often in Moscow.
Take 14- The Rhythm Of The Bones
“Muzika na rebrach,” “Music on ribs” or “bone music,” was the slang name for the jazz and the first rock’n roll records that circulated clandestinely among young Russians.
Vinyl was an unattainable product and so Russian sound technicians engraved on medical X-rays. Even today those “records” are sought-after collectibles.
Eddie recorded dozens of them. He was among the first to play rock’n roll beyond the curtain. Today those records are all lost, disappeared who knows where and how.
Yes, because the good times didn’t last long, and things quickly started to go sour for poor Eddie again.
Take 15- A Kiss to Build a Dream On
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, had an immense passion for cars, the world powers knew this and never failed to gift him new ones. One day—his mother—whom he was proudly showing his cars to, said: “nice, yes. But if the Bolsheviks return?”
Now, it isn’t that Leonid hated Jazz, no, he hated all that wasn’t Russian, and saw in pro-Western trends a sign of decadence.
Stifled by the new climate of restoration, Eddie was dismissed from the Hermitage Theater, where he had worked for years, and transferred to Gomel in Belarus, with his second wife Galina. In Gomel, he led a small provincial philharmonic.
He was tired, Eddie.
Adolf, Jack, Ady, Eddie Ignatevic, Edy Rozner, Zek, Mr. Smiling, Pinhas Ben Hzak, here they are all the names he had performed under in his career. How many lives had he lived? How many times had he risen high, fallen, and climbed again?
He was tired, Eddie.
Now he wanted to return to “his” Germany. Where he started from, where it all began. But the more he asked for a visa to leave, the worse light he put himself in with the authorities.
He had become little more than an old nuisance and was making enemies. Dangerous enemies.
Take 16- The September of My Years
It was the American ambassador in Moscow who eventually intervened in 1974. Who knows, maybe, once upon a time, when young, he had listened to some piece by Eddie and one of his orchestras?
And so Eddie finally returned to Berlin.
But the Russian government found a way to make him pay: they confiscated everything, money, documents, recordings, mementos. He was hit with damnatio memoriae, his name erased, his music made to disappear, his records destroyed, every documentation about him deleted.
And in Berlin, they didn't treat him any better: nobody remembered him, nobody was interested in his music.
It's the '70s, German youth are engrossed in strange, atonal, experimental, mysterious music. The only accepted Jazz is the most extreme free. On the radio, echoes of cosmic couriers are heard, they call it “krautrock.”
Eddie didn’t even have the necessary documents to get a meager pension; even attempts to obtain compensation as a victim of racial laws failed; no one even thought of him for an honest revival or critical revaluation.
He went to live in a grimy little apartment on Bergfriedenstrasse in the Berlin-Kreuzberg district and died there, in total solitude, on August 8, 1976.
Outro
Good jazz has continued to be played in Russia, there is even good one today in that grotesque imitation of a Democracy that is Putin's Russia, but excellent jazz was produced in the '60s and '70s.
And anyone who played it knew well who Eddie Rosner was.
Now, no matter how much you try to destroy, no matter how much History tries to take away lives and memories, it is always impossible to make everything disappear.
Something always remains.
In Moscow, Eddie's music is still played, at the Moscow Jazz Club, founded by Alexey Bateshev, for instance.
And even we can still listen to something from him.
In this record from the "Soviet Jazz Legends" series, for example.
It's worth it. For a lot of reasons.
Ady Rosner (1910-1976) the greatest white jazz musician of all time. Even if no one knows it.
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