The Austin High Gang

The Austin High Gang by Charles Edward Smith From "Jazzmen," by Frederic Ramsey, Jr. & Charles Edward Smith Harcourt, Brace & Company - New York, 1939 

In 1922 five kids from Austin High School out at Chicago's west end, got up a little band. The buff brick high school they attended was so much like others it was hard to describe, and the boys themselves were the sort who might have gone on to college but for their interest in music. All played violin except Bud Freeman, the greenhorn of the bunch. Their interest in music, brought to a head when they first played together, was so keen that they played and practiced in school, in their homes, and even in the vacant apartment of a house owned by the father of one of them. "The poor people downstairs," Jim Lannigan commented, "they finally had to move out." 

Jim Lannigan played piano in the little band. Jimmy McPartland played cornet and his older brother Dick played banjo and guitar. Bud Freeman played C-melody sax, at that time a popular instrument for home study, and changed to tenor sax a few years later after the band had got under way professionally. Frank Teschemacher was also a member of the original group. At this time he was learning alto sax, but still played violin. The ages of the group ranged from Jimmy McPartland, the baby, who was a mere fourteen, to Jim Lannigan, seventeen. Dick was seventeen before the first season was over, Teschemacher sixteen, and Bud Freeman slightly younger. 

Drawn together by a common ambition, they went as a group to theaters, parties, and restaurants. Coming from comfortable middle-class homes they could, in the beginning, pursue their musical ambitions as a hobby, a circumstance that gave them much more freedom of choice than would have been the case with a different background. At that time the Al Johnson Orchestra, heard in a local theater, was their inspiration, though it was not to last long.

It did, however, give them the incentive they needed and they improved rapidly. Soon they were good enough to play at the afternoon high school dances that were then becoming popular in Chicago. These dances, held usually from three until about five thirty, had the endorsement of the Parent-Teacher Association, no doubt on the theory that they were a healthy social outlet for youthful energies. Over at Hull House was a band made up of neighborhood kids, most of them from the tenements. There, membership in the band was a double inducement. Some, like Benny Goodman, joined it to get a chance to play on a real instrument; others were chiefly interested in the fact that the band got a free trip to summer camp. 

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