{"id":7940,"date":"2018-07-05T23:38:35","date_gmt":"2018-07-06T05:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=7940"},"modified":"2018-07-05T23:38:35","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T05:38:35","slug":"a-legend-is-born","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=7940","title":{"rendered":"A Legend Is Born"},"content":{"rendered":"

Calvin Celebuski<\/strong><\/p>\n

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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 \u201cIf you don\u2019t fire your drummer and hire me I will kill each and every last one of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all thought he was bluffing,\u201d Allen said later in an interview with Jazz Monthly \u201cbut we didn\u2019t want to take that risk.\u201d Allen motioned for then drummer Ry Ryan to get up and sit in an empty chair near the horns. \u201cI have no idea why the chair was there, but it was and it\u2019s a damn good thing,\u201d Allen continued. \u201cOtherwise Ry would have had to sit on the floor and Ry hated floors. He used to stomp on them and scream with rage.\u201d Jones took his seat and they began to play. \u201cAnd man he was already swingin\u2019,\u201d Allen said alone in his home when he thought no one was listening.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cRy hated that,\u201d Allen said in an interview with Jazz News Times, \u201cbecause a floor was involved.\u201d Jones ripped a hole in his pants and it started. \u201cWe all thought he was peeing at first, then we realized his water broke,\u201d Ja Jackson, who asked not to be named, said in a personal interview. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever seen someone give birth through a penis before,\u201d Jackson said, \u201cbut it\u2019s disgusting. And the babies just kept coming. And they all knew how to drum.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s 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\u201d Allen said in the Jazz Monthly interview.<\/p>\n

When asked what to name the newborns, Jo Jones said simply \u201cJoe, with an \u2018e\u2019 at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all thought he was crazy,\u201d Ry Ryan laughed later in an interview with JazzJazzJazzJazzJazz. \u201cWhy would you put \u2018e\u2019 at the end of Jo? It made no sense to us \u2026 I guess that\u2019s why he\u2019s the legend and I\u2019m nothing and no one. But at least I don\u2019t have a floor. Fucking floors. I hate them. I HATE THEM.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGiving birth is completely painless,\u201d Jones said in an interview with Ksxx Qwwjkt in 1985. \u201cI have no idea why mothers whine about it all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one seems to recall the exact number of babies that emerged from Jones\u2019s penis, but there was a count. \u201cThere were as many babies as there were cities in America so you could probably find out,\u201d 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 Caf\u00e9 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\u2019s namesake, he spontaneously combusted and the fire spread to and killed Albuquerque Jo Jones. Unlike his city\u2019s namesake, he did not come back to life afterwards. In the end, Philadelphia or \u201cPhilly\u201d Joe Jones was the last Joe Jones standing and thus a legend was born.<\/p>\n

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CALVIN CELEBUSKI<\/strong> 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<\/a>, which he has removed most of his better stories from in the hope of getting them published elsewhere. He drums and doesn\u2019t know how to use Tumblr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cIf you don\u2019t fire … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":7939,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7940","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-244","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7948,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7940\/revisions\/7948"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}