Krupa heats up the night
Snowstorm no match for jazz legend at club
Even among jazz musicians, Gene Krupa was a singular individual.
One of the first superstar drummers, Krupa’s full-throttle style of musicianship made him a celebrated figure in the big band era and after. His thunderous playing on Benny Goodman’s 1936 classic “Sing Sing Sing” is one of the epic moments of the period.
(When Rolling Stone magazine ranked the top 100 drummers of all time, Krupa was No. 7 on its rock-centric list, right behind funk master Clyde Stubblefield, who died in Madison last month at age 73.)
Born in Chicago in 1909, Krupa began playing with bands when he was a teenager, including during summers while working at a resort in Wisconsin. He joined Goodman’s band in 1934; his flamboyant playing and solid musicianship made him famous. He struck out on his own in 1938, leading bands for the next 30 years.
Krupa was a regular visitor to Milwaukee; in 1937, playing with Goodman’s band at the Modernistic Starlight Terrace (”the world’s largest ballroom”) at State Fair Park, Krupa was acclaimed by Milwaukee Journal radio columnist Edgar A. Thompson as “the best, fastest and craziest drummer in captivity. … After three
hours of hard labor back of the cymbals, even his necktie was soaked through with perspiration. But what results!”
After years playing major venues on his own and with other bands, Krupa by the 1950s was, like many other jazz artists, playing smaller clubs. On March 25, 1957, Krupa and his quartet began a sevenday run at the Brass Rail, a jazz-centric nightspot at 744 N. 3rd St.
Krupa and company could have picked a better night for it: The gig, opening on a Monday night, coincided with one of those March snowstorms, which began just before rush hour and dumped more than 3 inches of snow on Milwaukee in a matter of hours.
But the seasonal distractions didn’t deter Krupa, nor his fans — or so The Journal’s reviewer, future “Slightly Kloss-Eyed” columnist Gerald Kloss, wrote in a story published March 26, 1957.
“It was a Monday night in Lent and the weather was disgusting — the kind of night that makes a nightclub operator think things over carefully and then jump off the Wells St. bridge,” Kloss wrote. “Unless, of course, he has Gene Krupa, the practically peerless drummer, as his big attraction. … To put it briefly, the joint was packed and jumping.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, The Journal’s news sections had scant room for photographs, so the afternoon paper often set aside one complete page for photos of the day. On March 26, 1957, that grab bag of pictures included shots of a a quintet selected as queen and court for the upcoming Junior Chamber of Commerce convention, renderings of a new hotel proposed for N. 6th and W. Wisconsin avenues — and three photos of Krupa’s show by Journal photographer Donald N. Emmerich.
Emmerich captured Krupa in his element, including what Kloss described as one of the night’s highlights, when the drummer “used his sticks on the string bass in one bit that had the spectators flipping.”
The “knockout of the evening,” Kloss wrote, was Krupa’s charging through “Sing Sing Sing.” “It went on for something like 20 minutes, and as far as the folks in the audience were concerned, it could have kept going all night.”