Calvin Celebuski
The year was 1923. Jazz was still young and so was Jo Jones. With no prior experience, he walked into a rehearsal of the Al Allen Big Band and said to them “If you don’t fire your drummer and hire me I will kill each and every last one of you.”
“We all thought he was bluffing,” Allen said later in an interview with Jazz Monthly “but we didn’t want to take that risk.” Allen motioned for then drummer Ry Ryan to get up and sit in an empty chair near the horns. “I have no idea why the chair was there, but it was and it’s a damn good thing,” Allen continued. “Otherwise Ry would have had to sit on the floor and Ry hated floors. He used to stomp on them and scream with rage.” Jones took his seat and they began to play. “And man he was already swingin’,” Allen said alone in his home when he thought no one was listening.
Then the incident occurred that would turn Jo Jones from a novice, possibly homicidal drummer into a legend and earned him the nickname Papa Jo Jones. About halfway through the first song, Jones began breathing heavily and fell backwards onto the floor. “Ry hated that,” Allen said in an interview with Jazz News Times, “because a floor was involved.” Jones ripped a hole in his pants and it started. “We all thought he was peeing at first, then we realized his water broke,” Ja Jackson, who asked not to be named, said in a personal interview. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen someone give birth through a penis before,” Jackson said, “but it’s disgusting. And the babies just kept coming. And they all knew how to drum.”
“That’s when we knew we had to have him in the band. Hitting things with sticks is one thing, but giving birth through a penis is another” Allen said in the Jazz Monthly interview.
When asked what to name the newborns, Jo Jones said simply “Joe, with an ‘e’ at the end.”
“We all thought he was crazy,” Ry Ryan laughed later in an interview with JazzJazzJazzJazzJazz. “Why would you put ‘e’ at the end of Jo? It made no sense to us … I guess that’s why he’s the legend and I’m nothing and no one. But at least I don’t have a floor. Fucking floors. I hate them. I HATE THEM.”
“Giving birth is completely painless,” Jones said in an interview with Ksxx Qwwjkt in 1985. “I have no idea why mothers whine about it all the time.”
No one seems to recall the exact number of babies that emerged from Jones’s penis, but there was a count. “There were as many babies as there were cities in America so you could probably find out,” Allen says. The band members formed a committee to decide what to do with the newborns. A decision was made to ship each baby to a different American city, and, when the time came, they would all fight to the death until there was only one survivor and that survivor would become the house drummer at Café Society in New York City. One particularly notable battle was between Albuquerque Joe Jones and Phoenix Joe Jones in a barn in California. Both were considered frontrunners as both had had great success hunting down and killing other Joe Joneses. At one point, three days into the battle, Phoenix Joe Jones was on the ground, dead. It looked like the fight was over, but, staying true to his city’s namesake, he spontaneously combusted and the fire spread to and killed Albuquerque Jo Jones. Unlike his city’s namesake, he did not come back to life afterwards. In the end, Philadelphia or “Philly” Joe Jones was the last Joe Jones standing and thus a legend was born.
CALVIN CELEBUSKI is a Sarah Lawrence College graduate with few accomplishments and fewer things going on in his life at the moment. He has some pets and a webpage at calvincelebuski.tumblr.com, which he has removed most of his better stories from in the hope of getting them published elsewhere. He drums and doesn’t know how to use Tumblr.