Seven Swinging Surgeons

Jazz blew into Winthrop House with a bang last Sunday night, and departed, a little scarred but still very much alive, some two hours later.

It was Dixieland, strictly speaking, which anyone today will tell is not jazz. Anyone, that is, who didn't participate in the 20-year orgy from 1919 to 1940. There are those, of course, who maintain that there haven't been any musicians since Jelly Roll Morton, but such antediluvians are obsolete, anyway.

Nonetheless, le jazz hot made its invasion, in the custody of the "Chamber Music Society of Weston, Mass." It installed itself in the Common Room and toyed with the acoustics for a while, with occasional sojourns to the beer table for lubrication. There were nine, as I recall: Dr. John C. Wells, Jr., coronet; Dr. John Merrill, clarinet; Dr. Charles Palioca (a dentist), trombone; Dr. Thomas Peebles, drums; Richard Wigginton, bass; Raymond Boshco, piano; Guy Garland, banjo; and Bob Johnson and Doug Hayward, guitars. It was like outside the Metropole, only a little warmer.

The event was billed at Winthrop under the somewhat misleading title of "Doc Wells and Seven Swinging Surgeons." Actually, as noted, the group consisted of three doctors, a dentist, and five businessmen and professionals--all from Weston. They play mostly for themselves ("Our wives don't lot us away too much"), but appear in public on select occasions ("There has to be a little booze"). Since Condon's moved to the East Side and went respectable--they don't serve you under eighteen any more--this was your reviewer's first encounter with hot jazz. And it was refreshing.

Dr. Wells, whom all Harvard and Radcliffe hypochondriacs know from their trips to the University Health Service, was the nominal leader of the group; it was his affiliation with Winthrop House that started the whole thing. (He'll deny it, but there was actually a stethoscope dangling from his pocket for half the evening.) He filled us in on some of the details of amateur jazz on the East Coast, and then proceeded to introduce the group. Apparently it started just for fun in 1953, and it's been strictly Dixieland for four years or so. It was the combo's first appearance at Harvard.

The highlight of the evening, without doubt, was Dr. Wells' spluttering tenor, which was heard now and then from behind the coronet. The entire ensemble vocalized The Sheik of Araby once, but there was no request for more of that.