Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957 by Robert Dietsche

Abstract

Culver road near Juniper Butte, we were pulled over by threepolice cars and about six police officers. Uncle Henry was thedriverandUncle Alvin, who was holding one ofhis infantchildren, was told to get out of thevehicle.One of thepolice officersjerked thechild fromhis arms and prac ticallythrewhim intoGrandma s lap,while the other officersbegan interrogatingthe brothers as tohow theygot thewhiskey. With one of the police officer's frustration came an upper-cut blow tothestomach,andUncle Alvin crumbled to thehard pavement.This was followedby several brutalwhacks with a nightstickon his back_ The uncles were taken to the cold concrete 10-by 12-footJefferson County jail,where they remained for some time. To get home toWarm Springs, Idrove the1938FordTudor car about 25 miles in second gear. Itwas my first experience driving a vehicle_ Aguilar admits that his first-hand knowl edge of Indian customs and religious beliefs ? such as those of the W?ashat or seven drums? is limited because of the great loss of traditional knowledge suffered since Indi ans were removed to reservations. For these topics, he relies heavily on a rather select few sources, including Leslie Spier and Edward Sapir's 1930 Wishram Ethnography (University of Washington Publications inAnthropology 3:151-300; absent fromhis "Selected Bibliogra phy"), Robert Boyd's People ofthe Dalles (which is based on themissionary Henry Perkins's papers), Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown's several volumes on Northwest Indians, and thePlateau volume of theHandbook of North American Indians. He makes excellent use of several unpublished and largely unknown sources, such as the papers of H.C. Coe, who settled atHood River in 1854.Coe's papers are preserved at theColumbia Gorge Discovery Center atThe Dalles, Oregon. Aguilar's insider account offersa uniquely valuable Native perspective on our region's history. It should be noted, however, that it is a particular Indian perspective. Although Aguilar's ties are about equally apportioned between the two dominant mid-Columbia Indian linguistic traditions, theKiksht/Wasco Chinookan and the Sahaptin, and he is actu ally somewhat more likely to cite a Sahaptin name than a Chinookan one for a particular plant, animal, place, or activity,his allegiance seems to lean toward the Wasco rather than the Sahaptin. Aguilar paints a ratherunpleas ant picture, based on his early experience, of theSahaptin traditional religion, the W?ashat, which perhaps reflects his particular position in Warm Springs Indian society. Helen Schuster's studyof the W?ashat atYakama paints a rather differentpicture ("Yakima Indian Traditional ism," Ph.D. diss., University ofWashington, 1975). This isnot meant to criticizeAguilar's finework, but simply to note that there can be no purely objective account of anyone's history. Eugene S. Hunn University of Washington, Seattle JUMPTOWN: THEGOLDEN YEARS OF PORTLANDJAZZ, 1942-1957 byRobert Dietsche Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2005. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 242 pages. $24.95 paper. This lively historyof the jazz scene inPortland's "LittleHarlem" onWilliams Avenue is not a model of fastidious scholarship,but itisa color ful read, chock-a-block with vital information one otherwise might never have discovered, and awelcome addition to the literatureof regional history.Dietsche is a deejay who used to own Django Records, a popular used record store. Organized in nineteen chapters, one for each nightclub (orothervenue), Jumptown includes a handy referencemap and "Who's Who" of the Williams Avenue neighborhood, dozens of richvintage photographs, a bibliography, a dis cography, endnotes, and a useful afterwordby Portland jazzwriter LynnDarroch, who swiftly carries the story into the present. 302 OHQ vol. 107, no. 2 Drawn largely from oral histories with musicians and characters on the scene (un fortunatelynot itemized in thebibliography), Jumptown has a more socially grounded feel thanmost jazz histories,which tend to con centrate on musical style and personality. In itspages, readerswill meet Kenny Hing, who spenthis hours away fromTigard High School combing through thebins at Madrona Records, thenwent on toplaywith Count Basie; Tommy Todd, the retiringpianist who wrote forArtie Shaw and was so confident about his own tal ents that"hewouldn't walk across the streetto meet thePresident of theUnited States"; and George Lawson, "the greatmight have been" alto saxophonistwho "was intobop before any one" but "lost out due tohis livinghabits" (p. 91).Readers will also get...