Jack Butler

Trumpeter and vocalist Jack Butler was a good choice for the cast of the film Paris Blues in 1961, since he spent most of his career in Europe and one 15-year stretch at a Parisian club called La Cigale. Associated with the band of Willie Lewis, a major influence on the expatriate jazz movement in the '30s, Butler also toured extensively in Scandinavia and in the late '40s was briefly based out of Toronto, Canada. He did indeed have several periods of action in the United States itself, beginning with his earliest professional association with Cliff Jackson in New York City in the late '20s. Once World War II started, he spent a good chunk of the decade back home working with leaders such as smiling clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow and inventive pianist Art Hodes. Butler was originally intent on being a dentist. He studied the jawbreaking art at Howard University, where dentistry was treated more like a philosophy, not just a matter of a cavity. At 17 Butler began playing trumpet, maybe because he realized his studies had given him an edge on other hornmen who inevitably develop dental problems due to their instrument. Four years later, he was playing well enough to have established a new base in the Big Apple and landed a job with bandleader Horace Henderson. Through the mid-'30s, Butler also fronted his own band, which he took on tour nationally. In 1936 he went overseas and teamed up with Lewis, staying mainly with this leader through the end of the decade. He was still in Norway when the war broke out, but got back to the United States prior to the Nazi stomp up the broad boulevards of Oslo. In addition to the previously mentioned leaders, his time in the U.S.A. led to work with Bingie Madison and, later, bassist Cass Carr. In 1948 he began working in Toronto, but the...