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You probably haven't heard of cornet player Red Nichols. After all, he's been dead for 40 years. Few of his recordings remain popular in the digital-music era, and his early fame was later eclipsed by such band leaders as Glenn Miller.
Yet Nichols, who was born in Ogden 100 years ago today, was a seminal figure in Dixieland jazz. He recorded with everybody from Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey to Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Hollywood made a movie about his life. And his fellow musicians revered him: Jazz great Louis Armstrong once said, "When Red wanted, he could outblow them all."
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Nichols' birth, Ogden's Union Station will host a concert of Dixieland jazz on Saturday night. Two bands will showcase Nichols' music, birthday cake will be served to 500 guests, and Nichols memorabilia - including one of his cornets - will be on display.
"By the time we're done, people will be a lot more familiar with Red Nichols," says event organizer C.J. Santoro, a Salt Lake City drummer and jazz buff who has been trying for years to keep Nichols' legacy alive in Utah. Santoro plays in the East Street Band, a Dixieland sextet that will perform Saturday.
The Red Nichols Story, a 1997 biography written by Philip Evans, Stanley Hester, Stephen Hester and Linda Evans, offers the following details of Nichols' life:
Nicknamed for his thatch of auburn hair, Ernest Loring "Red" Nichols showed rare musical ability at a precocious age. The son of a Weber State University music professor, he took trumpet lessons at 4 and was playing solos in his dad's band at age 6. One story has him playing as a child for renowned composer John Philip Sousa, although historians debate the veracity of the tale.
By age 12, Nichols was playing at dances in and around Ogden. By 16, he left Utah and formed his own traveling jazz band, making him one of the youngest band leaders in the country. Although skilled on several instruments, he preferred the cornet, a brass horn that is a smaller cousin of the trumpet.
At 17, Nichols made his first record. That same year, he moved to New York City, where his musical skills got him steady work in bands, at recording sessions and on Broadway. He even was part of a group that did experimental acoustic recordings for inventor Thomas Edison. All this while still in his teens.
"You could call him a pioneer, really," says co-author Stanley Hester, a Michigan-based music collector who owns thousands of Nichols' recordings. "Some musicians will hit a dead note once in a while. But I never heard him do it."
Nichols began appearing as Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, the band that would become his trademark. (Nichols and Pennies - get it?) He scored a million-selling record - a huge feat at the time - played with George Gershwin's long-running musical show and served as conductor for Bob Hope's first radio show in 1936.
Then came World War II. Nichols tried to enlist, but the military wouldn't take him, so he spent several years working at a shipyard. Around the same time, his teenage daughter and only child, Dorothy, was stricken with a poliolike illness that weakened her legs.
Nichols resumed his musical career in 1944, by now almost exclusively in Southern California, where he and his wife had settled. During the next two decades he played with such stars as Al Jolson, Dinah Shore, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee and Dean Martin. Nichols' popularity even extended overseas - in 1960, the State Department sent him and the Pennies on a three-month tour of the Middle East.
Around this time, Hollywood produced a schmaltzy movie about Nichols' life. Called "The Five Pennies," it starred Danny Kaye as a country boy who makes it big on the New York jazz scene but quits at the peak of his fame when his daughter Dorothy develops polio. Nichols provided the music for the film.
Red Nichols remained popular until his death of a heart attack in 1965 in Las Vegas, where he and his band were playing an engagement at the new Mint hotel. But afterward, his widow, Bobbie, refused to let his bandmates tour under the Five Pennies name, and Nichols' fame faded.
"It's too bad he never got his due," Hester says by phone from his home in suburban Detroit. "A lot of the guys he played with became more famous than him."
Why? Historian Elwood "Woody" Backensto, a close friend, believes the East Coast-dominated media forgot about Nichols after he moved to California. Backensto, who lives in New Jersey, also thinks Nichols' shyness and emphasis on musicianship over self-promotion worked against him. Nichols influenced many other musicians but never got credit for it, Backensto says.
Backensto and Hester heard Nichols play in person many times. Both men, along with Santoro in Salt Lake City, hope to make Nichols' name and music known to future generations of jazz lovers.
If Louis Armstrong were still alive, he would no doubt be glad to help.
"Let's not forget that man, Daddy," Armstrong once said of Nichols. "What a tone, what a tone. And he was blowin' it at a time the rest of us cats was tryin' to find our way out of the woods."
Happy birthday, Red
A 100th birthday party concert for Red Nichols will be Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Union Station theatre, 2501 Wall Ave., Ogden. The evening will include Dixieland jazz sets by the Dixie Devils from Evanston, Wyo., and the East Street Band of Salt Lake City.
Birthday cake will be served to everyone. Tickets are $15, available at the Union Station gift shop, the Eccles Community Art Center in Ogden or at the door. For more information, call C.J. Santoro in Salt Lake City at 801-466-3161.