Art Hickman and His Orchestra

By Bruce Vermazen

Arthur G. Hickman was born June 13, 1886, in Oakland, California, to Robert and Lucinda Hickman. Robert ran a restaurant at the time, but later he would be a saloonkeeper, a cigar maker and dealer, and a bricklayer. Lucinda had been in vaudeville. Besides Art, they had a younger child, Pearl. Around 1900, the family moved to San Francisco. Although Art lived in Los Angeles for a few years in the ~20s, he maintained a San Francisco residence with his parents and sister throughout his adult life. Soon after the move to San Francisco, young Art was employed as a Western Union messenger. In a 1928 interview, he said, "I used to greet with joy the chance to deliver a message to some hop joint, or honky-tonky in the Barbary Coast. There was music. Negroes playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music! There is where all jazz originated" (San Francisco Examiner, 4/11/28, p. 6). He also said that ill health later "drove" him to become a musician, but it's unclear what he meant by the remark. By 1913 he was the entertainment manager at the Chutes Theater in San Francisco (SF Call-Bulletin, 9/3/38). He had no formal musical training, but he became a drummer and played piano by ear.

The San Francisco Seals were training at Boyes Hot Springs in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, in late February and early March of 1913, and Hickman came along "to do a little fraternizing with his friends the newspaper correspondents" (ib.), among them E. T. "Scoop" Gleeson, who wrote for the San Francisco Bulletin. As Gleeson told the story 25 years later, Hickman suggested to the team~s management that he bring up some of his musician friends from San Francisco to put on some dances, and they took him up on it. The instrumentation of the band is unknown, except that it included a banjo. One source says that Hickman played piano in the band, another that he played drums.

Two things happened to render the Boyes Springs engagement fateful. One was that James Woods, the manager of the luxurious Hotel St. Francis on San Francisco's Union Square, heard the band and hired it to play at the hotel after the Seals training period was over. Woods continued to be a valuable patron to Hickman, and at the end was one of his pallbearers. The St. Francis gig was the jumping off point for Hickman~s fame, and it was one of the dining and dancing spots in the hotel after which Hickman named his most enduring song hit, "Rose Room" (1917).

The second thing was that, as far as anyone has discovered, the word "jazz" first saw print in a "Scoop" Gleeson article reporting on the Seals training session. Gleeson didn't clearly apply the word to the music that the Hickman group played, although perhaps he meant to when he said that the team's "members have trained on ragtime and 'jazz' and Manager Del Howard says there's no stopping them." The first mention of the word goes like this: "Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old 'jazz' and they promise to knock the fans off their feet with their playing. What is the 'jazz'? Why, it's a little of that 'old life,' the 'gin-i-ker,' the 'pep,' otherwise known as the enthusiasalum [sic]." So while the term might be used to describe peppy music, it wasn't a term specifically for a kind of music. At the end of the piece, there's another "jazz"/music juxtaposition: "The players are just brimming over with that old 'Texas Tommy' stuff and there is a bit of the 'jazz' in everything they do" (SF Bulletin, 3/6/13, p. 16).

In a 1919 interview, Hickman added some details to the story, still leaving it unclear whether his band's music was called "jazz" in 1913: "Hickman does not like the use of the word 'jazz' in relation to music. 'It has no association with music,' he said. 'It means something effervescent. The word was born in the first training camp of the San Francisco Seals at Boyes Springs, many years ago. The boys, not being allowed to drink, would ask for the bubbling water of the springs, calling it "jazz water." Gradually, the word was carried to the ball ground, and when action was wanted, the boys would call out, "come on, let's jazz it up." That is how an orchestra with life came to be known as a "Jazz orchestra." But none of us like the word,' added Hickman" (SF Examiner, 10/12/19, W16:4).

Whether or not Hickman's music was called "jazz" in 1913, one of his Boyes Springs associates, Bert Kelly, a banjoist, claims to have used the label "Jazz Band" professionally beginning in 1914. So the application of the word to music seems to have begun at about that time, and in that circle. Although the word seems to have been known in New Orleans and much of the rest of the United States at that time as slang for sexual intercourse, New Orleans musicians didn't begin to apply the word to their music until they came north, in 1915 or 1916, and found the word already in use there. (See Peter Tamony, "Jazz: The Word, and its Extension to Music," JEMF Quarterly, Spring 1981.) No doubt this etymological fact contributed in some confused way to Hickman's later reputation in the San Francisco press as the originator of jazz.

In February of 1914, after a stint as manager of the Grand Theater in Sacramento, Hickman returned to the Seals training camp at Boyes Springs, and "arranged for a moving-picture operator, together with a lot of entertainers, to pass the nights away" in "nightly shows . . . right on through the season" (SF Chronicle, 2/27/14). Later in the year, Hickman played with banjoist Bert Kelly and pianist George Gould at the St. Francis, and finally brought in a larger group, the nucleus of the orchestra with which he first recorded. An unpublished manuscript by Bert Gould (no relation to George) gives three independent sources for the following lineup of the 1914 band: Walt Roesner, trumpet, Fred Kaufman, trombone, Frank Ellis, piano, Frank De Stefano and Marc Mojica, banjos, and Hickman on drums. By 1917, the band also included banjoist Ben Black, Hickman's close collaborator for the next five years.

At some point in the late 'teens, Hickman took the important step of adding saxophones to his group, although he was not the first to do so. More important for his later fame was the addition of two particular saxophonists, Clyde Doerr and Bert Ralton, and that step seems to have been taken in 1919. Saxophones had been gaining in popularity all over the United States just before 1914, and had even begun to appear in printed orchestrations by 1916. The Six Brown Brothers, former multi-instrumentalists who by that time were playing saxophones exclusively, were well known through their numerous phonograph records and their appearances in the Broadway shows and subsequent road tours of Fred Stone's hit vehicles, starting with "Chin Chin" in 1914. W. C. Handy had included a saxophone in his dance orchestra in Memphis as early as 1909 (Henry O. Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 1926, p. 90, fn.), and Reid Badger's biography of James Reese Europe, A Life in Ragtime (Oxford, 1995), gives lineups including a saxophone for several African-American bands in the period 1913-1916. There is no way of knowing whether Hickman was even the first dance band leader to include two saxophones. Given that, by 1919, large numbers of printed arrangements included parts for both alto and tenor saxophones, it seems somewhat unlikely. But Hickman did more than just add saxes to a dance orchestra. He added two players with strong musical personalities to a band that developed a strong musical personality for itself, attracted the attention of San Francisco, which was a much more important city in those days than it is now, and finally attracted the attention of New York.

The saxophone team that created a sensation on both coasts was made up of Clyde Doerr and Bert Ralton, both of whom, according to Bert Gould, joined Hickman in early 1919. Doerr came from Coldwater, Michigan, where he had played alto sax since high school. In 1914, he completed a Bachelor of Music course at the King Conservatory in San Jose, California, concentrating on violin, but in 1916, in order to get a job at the Techau Tavern, just down Powell Street from the St. Francis, he dusted off his alto. Hickman heard him there and hired him for the St. Francis. Bert Ralton, whose real surname was Rolfe, had been playing in west coast vaudeville before Hickman lured him into the Rose Room.

Hickman was busy also as a pianist, making duet piano rolls for the QRS company with such well known roll artists as J. Russel Robinson, Pete Wendling, Max Kortlander, and Lee S. Roberts. The first results were issued in February of 1918, and before the Art Hickman Orchestra ever recorded, 22 more had been issued.

In the winter of 1916-17, jazz became a craze in New York. But it wasn't the jazz that Art Hickman and the lads were playing for the fox-trotters in the Rose Room. The craze began around a white group from New Orleans that inaccurately billed itself as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The ODJB, as they are now generally called, created a sensation playing for dancing at Reisenweber's Cafe in Manhattan, and their success was compounded when their first recordings were released in early 1917. One part of the public's response was a host of imitators, some from New Orleans, but most from elsewhere, who picked up the Band's frenetic style as well as they could and added further dimensions of frenzy. The instrumentation for these groups generally followed that of the ODJB: cornet, trombone, clarinet, piano, and drums.

The craze continued through 1918 and into 1919. During the War (April 1917-November 1918), the Victor Talking Machine Company, who had released the first records by the ODJB, negotiated with Hickman to record his orchestra, but had to back out when the federal government took over half of the Victor plant for the war effort (SF Call and Post, 8/23/19). Then in 1919, the Columbia Gramophone Company, Victor's chief rival, struck a handsome deal with the band. They were brought to New York in a private Pullman car, equipped with a piano, in order to record an unusually large number of titles (21) in eight hard-working days spread over two weeks in September. (The recording data come from Brian Rust, The American Dance Band Discography, 1917-1942 [New Rochelle, NY, 1975], cited below as ADBD.) Evenings they were to play at the Biltmore Hotel Roof, an engagement arranged by James Woods. Hickman's own pay was reported to be "between $30,000 and $40,000."

New York in 1919 was primed to welcome the Hickman Orchestra for many reasons. One was that the jazz craze had gone on for a long time, and the dancing public was looking for something new. Another was racial politics. In his biography of James Reese Europe, Reid Badger has documented the dominance, in the mid-'teens, of African-American groups in New York's dance-band field, and the perception, on the part of white musicians, of a threat in the popularity of those groups. The proliferation of mostly white jazz bands, along with the temporary absence of many African-American musicians who were fighting in the European war, substantially changed the relative market shares of the two ethnic groups, but the jazz bands were still too wild, noisy, and sexy for many older and richer customers who tended to think of wildness, noise, and sexiness as more "colored" than "white." New York's affluent whites, as well as its white dance musicians, whether they knew it or not, had a psychological niche ready for the new music from California.

The Hickman group enjoyed a huge success at the Biltmore. Florenz Ziegfeld, Broadway's biggest impresario, took advantage of their presence and got their services for a week (Call and Post, loc. cit.), playing for dancing on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre between the finale of the "9 O'Clock Revue" and 1 a.m. (Variety, 9/19/19, p. 9), and boosting profits (Variety, 9/26/19, p. 14). They were also engaged to play at the gala home-coming luncheon for General Pershing and the opening of a posh club at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel (SF Examiner, 10/7/19).

For the 1919 New York trip, the band consisted of Steve Douglas, violin, Walt Roesner, trumpet, Fred Kaufman, trombone, Clyde Doerr, alto and baritone saxes, oboe, and clarinet, Bert Ralton, soprano and tenor saxes and clarinet, Frank Ellis, piano, Vic King, tenor banjo, Ben Black, plectrum banjo, Marc "Mo" Mojica, banjo-mandolin, Bela Spiller, string bass, and Art Hickman, drums and piano. Spiller is mostly inaudible on the records, and the three banjos are placed far from the horn.

Art Hickman's new style of jazz became the talk of the big town. The wind instruments in early jazz bands had largely followed a military-band model, with a cornet lead, trombone counter-melody, and clarinet obbligato, rhythmically supported by an unmilitary drum kit and piano. Hickman's sound retained the polyphony of the horns, but with more voices and a much greater fluidity of ensemble role. One or other of the saxophones played lead much more often than the trumpet, and the texture shifted frequently, using no discernible formula. Although books about early dance bands often credit the Hickman group with having the first saxophone section, Doerr and Ralton hardly every played a harmonized line (on records, at any rate), in the way that Paul Whiteman made standard. The arrangements, in general, seem to have provided minimal frameworks for constant playful improvising rather than setting down exactly what notes were to be played. Only rarely on the records is there anything like a hot solo, but three piano duets by Hickman and Ellis from the 1919 sessions are worth noting, on "You and I," "Rose Room," and "Hold Me." ("June," from the 1920 sessions, has another outstanding duet. Except for "Rose Room," Hickman and Ellis cut these same titles for QRS rolls.) The Orchestra was such a hit in the fall of 1919 that Ziegfeld offered Hickman $2500 a week to stay in New York. He refused. Said Ziegfeld, "When a jazz band of ten men refuse to play three hours a night for $2,500 a week it makes one wonder whether money is worth anything after all. . . . They're crazy about San Francisco, so the only thing I could do was wish them a pleasant journey" (SF Examiner 10/7/19).

The band received a hero's welcome back at the St. Francis, with Hickman now the Hotel's assistant manager in charge of music. The first fruits of their Columbia efforts were released in early 1920, and in San Francisco, Columbia dealers successfully employed the gimmick of selling the first four "by the set only" (Talking Machine World, 2/15/20).

Ziegfeld's money turned out to be worth something after all, and on May 29, 1920, the Hickman organization closed at the Union Square venue and left two days later for twenty weeks in the "Ziegfeld Follies of 1920," reportedly making Hickman "the highest paid orchestra leader in America" (SF Examiner 10/30/20). For two weeks before he left, according to reports, "his departure took on the dignity of a Bernhardt farewell. Civic bodies gave him banquets, society leaders chipped in for gorgeously engraved cups, and there was a burst of forensic fireworks nightly in the Rose Room . . ., and to cap the climax when he and the ten members of the band went to the station to take the private car Mr. Ziegfeld had placed at their disposal three bands and a cheering crowd were there to see them off" (ib.).

The "Follies" tried out in Atlantic City, where, coincidentally, Paul Whiteman's Orchestra was performing at the Ambassador Hotel. Clyde Doerr, who had lived at the same San Francisco address as Whiteman (but a year earlier), briefly visited with the up and coming bandleader. It would be interesting to know whether the two groups had any further contact at this time. Hickman had been the most celebrated bandleader in San Francisco while Whiteman was still a sideman there, and Whiteman's band at the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles in 1919 had almost the same instrumentation as Hickman's, except for having only one banjo and (in photos) two tenor saxophones. However, by 1920, when Whiteman first recorded for Victor, his approach to music seems to have been rather different from Hickman's, owing to the services of arranger Ferde Grof. According to Clyde Doerr in a 1970 interview, Jimmy Thompson and his partners, owners of the Palais Royal and several other New York night spots, had been trying unsuccessfully to get Hickman to stay in New York when the "Follies" ended. As in 1919, Hickman insisted on returning to San Francisco. The Thompson organization instead hired Whiteman, a break that ultimately issued in his "coronation" as the King of Jazz, a title already conferred upon Hickman by the San Francisco Bulletin as of August 12, 1919.

Once again, Hickman wowed Gotham. During the "Follies" tryout, they recorded again for Columbia, as they did on nine more occasions during the show's run. The revue, headlined by Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor (for the first week only), and W.C. Fields (Fields also collaborated on the "book"), and with six Irving Berlin songs sprinkled throughout, was a thundering success. The Orchestra appeared only in the show's finale (Variety, 6/25/20, p. 15), and after the show played for dancing on the Roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre, as in 1919. The Jerome Remick Company bought a full-page ad in the July 2 Variety to announce their purchase of the rights to Hickman and Ben Black's "supreme ballad fox-trot," "Hold Me." During June of 1920, according to Variety (7/9/20, p. 5), the Orchestra's disc of "Along the Way to Damascus" and "Rose of Mandalay" was Columbia's best seller. Just before the Orchestra left New York, they appeared in a Pathe newsreel, which played San Francisco's California Theatre during the first week of November.

Two 1920 sources quote Hickman on the difference between his music and the kind of jazz current earlier. An item in Talking Machine World for 7/15/20 says, "Art Hickman . . . insists that his orchestra, now playing on the Ziegfeld roof, is not a jazz band. 'Jazz,' says Mr. Hickman, 'is merely noise, a product of the honky-tonks, and has no place in a refined atmosphere. I have tried to develop an orchestra that charges every pulse with energy without stooping to the skillet beating, sleigh bell ringing contraptions and physical gyrations of a padded cell." In an Examiner interview upon his return to San Francisco, the racial component is more explicit, although the model for the image is probably Ted Lewis: "People [in New York] thought who had not heard my band . . . that I was a jazz band leader. They expected me to stand before them with a shrieking clarionet and perhaps a plug hat askew on my head shaking like a negro with the ague. New York has been surfeited with jazz. Jazz died on the Pacific Coast six months ago. People began to realize that they were not dancing, that the true grace of Terpsichore was buried in the muck of sensuality. If I can make New Yorkers appreciate the true spirit of the dance I will be happy and I will be glad that I came to the Ziegfeld Roof" (10/30/20).

Although Hickman resisted the blandishments of the metropolis, two of his key sidemen defected at the close of the 1920 "Follies." Bert Ralton and Vic King became popular free-lancers, ultimately teaming up to form what became first the New York-Havana Band, playing a long engagement originally offered to Hickman at the Gran Casino de la Playa in Havana, then the Savoy-Havana Band at London's Savoy Hotel. Marc Mojica also seems to have left by this time. Hickman replaced Ralton with Walter Beban, an ex-Marine from San Francisco who had played in vaudeville before the War, sometimes touring with Sophie Tucker.

The band returned to the St. Francis on November 4, 1920 and its heightened lustre made it even more of an institution in its home town. In February 1921, the band recorded again for Columbia, but this time at the St. Francis, in one of the Borgia Rooms. Since mid-1920, Hickman had been "Western director of musical productions for the Columbia Co.," according to Talking Machine World. By this time, the Orchestra had only one banjo (Ben Black), but an unidentified second trumpet had been added, audible only on five sides. Hickman also made an unissued test pressing (described in Bert Gould~s manuscript) as a solo pianist. In September of 1921, the group inaugurated the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and it seems to have stayed there for a while. Hickman, again through the good offices of James Wood, had quit the St. Francis to take the post of director of music for both the Ambassador and Alexandria Hotels in Los Angeles. But the band that had startled New York continued to break up. After the 1921 Columbia sessions, Clyde Doerr accepted an offer from Harry Yerkes to return to New York for recording work, becoming a bandleader first at the Club Royale, then at Chicago's Congress Hotel. Walt Roesner returned to San Francisco in 1921 or 1922 to play and arrange for Paul Ash's symphonic jazz orchestra. In 1922, Frank Ellis and Ben Black also returned, Ellis leading a dance orchestra first at the Cliff House, then at the St. Francis's Garden and Fable Room (formerly the Rose Room), and Black fronting a twenty-piece symphonic jazz group at the California Theatre.

In June of 1923, James Woods hired Hickman as assistant manager and amusement director of the new Los Angeles Biltmore, which opened on October 1 with great hoopla. A new version of Hickman's Orchestra played in the Supper Room, broadcasting regularly on KHJ via one of the first remote radio hookups until at least the end of 1925. It's not clear what musical role Hickman played in the Biltmore band, or in Art Hickman's Concert Orchestra, which also broadcast from the hotel. KHJ schedules often announced the former's director as Earl Burtnett and the latter's as Edward Fitzpatrick. In June 1924 and March 1925, according to ADBD, Art Hickman's Orchestra recorded for Victor, directed by Earl Burtnett and featuring Roy Fox on trumpet. The 1924-5 band cut some very hot sides, especially "Patsy," "G'wan With It," and "If I Stay Away Too Long From Carolina." It isn't known whether Hickman played on the sides, but the second and third of those mentioned feature solos by a drummer playing with brushes. The arrangements, though very impressive (especially on "Patsy"), are much more conventional than those of the 1919-21 band. In September 1925, Hickman resigned from his managerial post at the Biltmore, although he continued to manage the orchestra and to broadcast (LA Times, 8/4/25). He hoped to return to his career as a songwriter.

In 1926, Hickman was leading his orchestra with the "Ziegfeld Follies Revue" in Palm Beach, when he became seriously ill (SF Examiner, 1/17/30). He moved back to San Francisco. In March of 1927, the Orchestra recorded for Victor at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco (ADBD), now conducted by Walt Roesner, who was free-lancing after two years with Paul Ash and two more fronting his own symphonic jazz group, the Super-Soloists. The style of these records, possibly due to Roesner's influence, is much more like Whiteman's than that of the 1924-25 sides. "I'll Just Go Along" even opens with a quote from Dvorak's "Symphony from the New World."

Hickman's name was still big enough in the east that he was offered spots in both "Show Boat" and "Good News" (both produced in 1927), but he turned them down, probably because of his failing health. In 1928 he returned to the St. Francis as a bandleader (SF Examiner, 4/11/28). But by the summer of 1929 he was in St. Francis Hospital, suffering from "overwork and nervous exhaustion" (SF Chronicle, 12/31/29), but also from Banti's disease (LA Times, 1/17/30), which involves anemia, enlargement of the spleen, cirrhosis of the liver, and fluid in the abdominal cavity, symptoms not unlike those of advanced alcoholism. That same year, Hickman was enshrined in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Abbe Niles's article "Jazz" (vol. XII, pp. 982-4), in the fourteenth (1929) edition, after giving a quaint account of the music's history, says that "before the official appearance of jazz, New Orleans, if not other places, had genuine negro jazz bands, obscure and illiterate, but playing a violent form of this music, chiefly marked by a polyphony of strange tone-colours and instrumental effects." He reviews the ODJB and some of its followers, and then says, "The inevitable movement to modify the hideous noisiness of early jazz was led by Art Hickman, a California orchestra leader, and later taken over by Paul Whiteman,...The present-day 'sweet' jazz, sprung from the Hickman-Whiteman reaction against cacophony, is opposed to 'hot' jazz" (983). The accolade must have been gratifying, but it came very late in the game.

In an interview two weeks before Hickman died, he told a reporter, "In the early spring I plan to get back into the work harness and do a talkie on the history of jazz for Florenz Ziegfeld" (SF Chronicle, 12/31/29). Surgical intervention failed. The end came on January 16, 1930. The story of Hickman's death ran on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner under the headline, "Art Hickman, Founder of Jazz, Dies." The accompanying story told its readers, "The man who took the tom-tom throbs of San Francisco's old Barbary Coast negro rhythms, adapted them to the wail of the saxophone and twang of the banjo and gave the world its first jazz music, died yesterday afternoon at the St. Francis Hospital." It backed up the headline with the false claim that "The Encyclopedia Britannica credited him with being the originator of the jazz tempo, the man responsible for the music that has swept America and the other continents in the past fifteen years."

Although the kind of jazz that Hickman "founded" turned out to be a dead end, he made a genuine contribution to the world's popular music that resulted in an enormous amount of pleasure for the listeners and dancers of three decades. The many strong currents of the unending stream of popular music, and the gentler ones too, inflect and mingle with one another in unpredictable and untraceable ways. Foundation and origination are concepts of doubtful applicability to segments of the flux. Jack Hyatt, Hickman's interviewer at his 1928 comeback, reported that a teenaged Art had been challenged by the saying that "A thing can only be done first once." Hyatt ended the article with a newsman's cynicism: "Hickman has done something no one else has done. Turned his back on New York" (SF Examiner, 4/11/28). But that's harsh. Hard as it is to pin down what it was, he did something important first.

I want to thank the following people for their ideas and their help in research:

Steve Abrams, Margaret Downie Banks, Eric Bernhoft, John Gill, Tim Gracyk, Alan Hall, Patricia Hall, Peter Mintun, George Morrow, Paul Price, Olly Wilson, and librarians and staff at the Doe and Bancroft Libraries of the University of California, Berkeley, the Los Angeles and Oakland Public Libraries, and the Shrine to Music Museum at the University of South Dakota.