Flamekeeper of traditional jazz dies

Jim Cullum, who was 77, was mainstay of public radio program

Jim Cullum, a jazz cornetist, bandleader and educator who became a flamekeeper of traditional jazz, and whose San Antonio-based ensemble became a mainstay of public radio on the weekly program “Riverwalk Jazz,” died Aug. 11 at his home in San Antonio. He was 77.

The cause was an apparent heart attack, said his booking agent, Steve Frumkin.

Even as a teenager growing up in Texas in the 1950s, when his peers did themselves up greasy, ducktail hairdos and twisted their hips to Elvis, Cullum was drawn to his father’s collection of 78s featuring Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and other Jazz Age luminaries. At 14, he saved up $7 to buy his first cornet — a beat-up 1920 model he spotted in the window of a pawnshop — and didn’t look back, except in his musical repertoire.

As an enterprising youth, he formed a quartet that played outside a Dairy Queen. “We got four lines of credit,” he once recalled, “and got paid in ice cream cones, milkshakes and hamburgers.” Most prominently through the San Antoniobased Jim Cullum Jazz Band, he devoted his career to resurrecting music popularized by the likes of Beiderbecke, Armstrong, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet.

Cullum threw a musical life jacket to a genre nearly submerged by later jazz styles, including big band, bebop and jazz-rock fusion, not to mention rock, rap and generations of pop.

Jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern said Cullum, whom he called a top-flight musician, was not alone in seeking to preserve traditional jazz, but that his prominence on public radio put him in the pantheon of “trad-jazz” bandleaders.

Cullum, who had long operated the Landing jazz club on San Antonio’s River Walk promenade, attracted an allstar lineup of musicians including clarinetist Allan Vaché and pianist John Sheridan, as well as guest players such as pianist Dick Hyman and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.