He's Back! - New Jersey Jazz Society

wo things I can live very well
Twithout are personal war
recollections and record reviews.
Yet these two seemingly disparate prejudices
constitute the basis for this month’s little piece
for members of NJJS. With the hope that two
negatives will make a positive or, perhaps
better, that two wrongs will make a right,
I’m this month violating two of my own
better judgments to send you this offering
along with best wishes for the New Year.
Still with me? I’ll be as brief as possible.
Following my enlistment at the beginning
of this country’s involvement in WWII, I
spent most of 1942 in a special Signal Corps
training school at Fort Monmouth. Upon
completion, I spent a year at national
headquarters in Washington and then went
on to a couple years of service in General
Stilwell’s headquarters in New Delhi. Our
office worked very closely with a corresponding
service of the British Air Force,
also headquartered there.
One day, on official business, an officer
of the RAF visited our compound. It so
happened that I had been having a
discussion with another person in my
department about music, and in that
discussion I mentioned my personal
liking for the piano playing of Earl Hines.
At that moment WWII was temporarily
placed on hold as the British officer,
overhearing my remark, dropped official
business and said, “Well, I’ll second that
opinion, too.”
This is how I met Britain’s very important
jazz critic Sinclair Traill and, through him,
one of the most exciting jazz pianists I’ve
ever heard.
About the time that this little exchange took
place, the US Information Service set up an
Armed Forces Radio Station in New Delhi.
Part of the package was a tremendous
February 2009
Classic Stine
By Jack Stine
NJJS President Emeritus
JerseyArticlesJazz
Stilwell, New Delhi…and all that jazz.
supply of recorded music, and desiring the
opportunity to check out what was in it I
offered to be the station’s early morning disc
jockey. Every morning from 6 ’til 8:30, I was
in a dream world of the best of jazz and
popular music of the time. The AFRS
station — VU2ZY were the call letters —
was a pretty modest rig. It had a radial range
of about 100 miles, just inclusive enough to
include about all of the service operations in
central India. Airplanes used our signal to
home in on at Delhi, and that drove the
official operations at the airport crazy, but it
was a crazy theater of operations anyway so
it all fit in very nicely.
The day I met Sinclair Traill in our office he
of course knew who I was because of my
morning radio program. On the other hand,
he himself had a regular weekly radio
program of jazz that emanated from the
BBC studios in New Delhi. One of the
differences in our respective shows was that
his went as far as South Africa, Australia,
and Singapore while mine could only go
about 50 miles in either direction.
Another difference in our programs was that
Sinclair had enlisted the services of a young
private from the RAF ranks to play piano
examples of various jazz styles he had
programmed. The fellow’s name was Lennie
Jacobus and he had a talent that could only
be described as prodigious. Plainly he had
listened carefully to the recordings that
reached Britain before the war, and he could
ape the various styles of Teddy Wilson, Art
Tatum, Jess Stacy, and of course the player
who had instigated our friendship in the
first place, Earl Hines.
I was Sinclair’s guest on his program many,
many times during my two years in New
Delhi and during those times Lennie and
I became fast friends. He was a skinny,
nervous guy, had trouble standing still or
sitting quietly. Always he seemed to be
listening to music in his own mind, nodding
…as any surviving
veteran will recall,
friendships
fashioned during
the service were
pretty fragile things.
in agreement, while his fingers seemed to
work their own filigree accompaniment to
music that only he could hear. When he
talked, it was the sound of a syncopated
delivery, rapid fire yet totally understandable
and perfectly logical.
Countless evenings after VU2ZY had gone
off the air, Lennie and I would go into the
station and play recordings from the
station’s trove, often until it was almost time
for me to go on the air at 6. The station
owned a nifty olive drab Steinway upright
and Lennie loved the instrument, would
often hang on long enough to play a few
things on the air during my program from
6 to 8:30. We had a great relationship, but,
as any surviving veteran will recall,
friendships fashioned during the service
were pretty fragile things. People shipped
out at the army’s discretion, breaking old
bonds and setting up new ones. Better still,
wars sometimes ended and soldiers went
home to the certainties of civilian life.
This last is how my friendship with Lennie
Jacobus ended. Having established what you
might call squatters’ rights to my place in
New Delhi by way of being one of the first
US soldiers to arrive there, I was abruptly
put on the first troop ship after the Japanese
surrender to return to the States. I didn’t
even have a chance to say good-bye to
Lennie Jacobus, and I never saw him again.
But the story isn’t quite finished.
It will be next month.
JJ
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