Giving a Great Jazz Storyteller His Due

Danny Barker, a jazz guitarist and banjoist who was born in 1909 in the French Quarter in New Orleans, always had a curious mind. Once, as a boy, while delivering groceries to a house in the city’s red-light district, he spotted, through a Venetian-style door, a woman dancing naked for a coterie of guests. He could see a lot of her, but not nearly enough of the room’s piano player. He leaned in. Even after the hostess poured a chamber pot over his head, he didn’t stop wondering who was playing her piano so well. He was on to something: it was Joe Robichaux, who later led the New Orleans Rhythm Boys on some of the hottest jazz records of the nineteen-thirties.