Stacy, Jess Alexandria

(b. 11 August 1904 in Bird’s Point, Missouri; d. 1 January 1995 in Los Angeles, California), jazz pianist prominent in big bands and combos of the Swing Era.

Originally named Jesse Alexander by his parents, Frederick Lee Stacy, a railroad engineer, and Sara (“Vada”) Alexander, a seamstress, Stacy grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River, which later washed away the town of his birth. Because the family lived in poverty in a railroad boxcar, he had to work at odd jobs during his school years at Maiden and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Largely self-taught to play the drums at age eleven and the piano at age twelve, he did receive some piano instruction in Cape Girardeau while he worked accompanying silent movies on the piano at a local theater. Stacy played both instruments in community and high school bands, at the same time discovering the jazz music of bands playing on visiting Streckfus Line river excursion boats. Especially instructive were the cornetist Louis Armstrong and the bandleader-pianist Fate Marable. In the summer of 1921, the year before he graduated from high school, Stacy played piano and the calliope on the steamer Majestic. Employed by local dance bands afloat and ashore, especially the band of Tony Catalano, he relished their jazz-inflected melodies and was especially inspired on one occasion when Bix Beiderbecke sat in on cornet and piano.

In 1924 Stacy moved to Chicago, then the focus of jazz music. But he had to be content over the next decade playing mostly with non-jazz dance orchestras. Such employment was necessary due to his marriage to Helen Robinson about 1926 and the birth of a son soon after. His major gigs were with the bands of Joe Kayser (1924–1926, 1928–1930), Floyd Town (1926–1928, 1933), Louis Panico (1929), and Paul Mares (1934–1935). His first recorded solo was with the Danny Altier band in 1928. He led his own quartet, Stacy’s Aces, at dance marathons during 1930–1931, using the innovative jazz clarinetist Frank Teschemacher. Stacy became identified with such other white musicians of the “Chicago” style of hot swinging jazz as guitarist Eddie Condon, cornetist Muggsy Spanier, and drummer George Wettling, though Stacy was not a member of the inner circle of the so-called Austin High Gang players (white teenage boys from Austin and other Chicago high schools who went on to popularize the Chicago style). Freed from his marital obligations by divorce in 1934, Stacy was heard that year by the jazz promoter John Hammond while playing with the Frank Snyder orchestra at Chicago’s Subway Cafe. The next year Hammond recommended him to the budding swing-band leader Benny Goodman.

Goodman hired Stacy in mid-July 1935, just one month before the band burst onto the national scene to inaugurate the Swing Era. In spite of the orchestra’s often thunderous up-tempo arrangements and searing horn solos, Stacy fit in perfectly with a much more subdued but expert style of accompaniment and understated, lyrical piano solos that buoyed the band and dancers alike. Though capable of rollicking “barrelhouse” type solos, Stacy used rippling right-hand tremolos—inspired by Earl Hines—that were likened to sparkling bells to complement the reed or brass sections and female vocalists. The latter often resented his brilliant obligatos in fear of being overshadowed. Stacy’s immense role in Goodman’s success was crowned by a delicate and introspective two-minute, five-chorus solo that “stole the show” (Goodman’s words) during the otherwise driving “Sing, Sing, Sing” finale number of the band’s epic 16 January 1938 concert at New York’s famed Carnegie Hall. The very next day Jess participated in the first hot jazz recordings of the new Commodore Record Company. When pianist Teddy Wilson left the Goodman Trio and Quartet early in 1939, Stacy replaced him (and played in the new Quintet) while continuing to accompany the full orchestra. Differences with Goodman, however, led Stacy to move to the Bob Crosby orchestra that summer.

Stacy was heard to even greater advantage in the Crosby band’s arrangements and on many small group and piano solo records, often playing such compositions of his own as “Ec-stacy” and “Complainin”. “When the Crosby orchestra broke up in late 1942, Stacy rejoined Goodman until March 1944, when he moved to the Horace Heidt orchestra. Meanwhile, in 1943 he married the song stylist Lee Wiley, who persuaded him to form his own big band and make her its featured singer. From 1944 to 1946 the orchestra struggled along, lacking any jazz content, making no recordings, and plagued by the stormy marital relationship between the volatile Wiley and mild-mannered Stacy. Of the few small band recordings they made together the most memorable was “Down to Steamboat Tennessee” (1940). They also made appearances on several Eddie Condon radio broadcasts (1944–1945). They had no children and were divorced in 1948. Stacy made many small jazz group recordings in the Chicago style during the 1940s, played for the Goodman band again in 1946–1947, and settled in Los Angeles in 1948. He married Patricia Peck in 1950 (they had no children) and performed mostly in West Coast nightclubs until 1963, when he quit the music business in disgust after having lost any real audience for his piano style.

A major figure during the golden age of jazz music, Stacy created piano masterpieces in spite of a modest, self-effacing personality. Although he worked as a mail clerk for a cosmetics company from 1963 to 1969, he played at jazz concerts starting in 1966, cut solo albums for the Chiaroscuro label in 1974 and 1977, and in 1981 made his final recorded appearance, on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz public radio program. He died of congestive heart failure and was cremated, his ashes buried in Los Angeles.

The authoritative biography and discography (including a CD of 1951 and 1953 sessions) is Derek Coller, Jess Stacy: The Quiet Man of Jazz (1997), based partly on Keith Keller, Oh Jess! A Jazz Life (1989). Whitney Balliett, American Musicians (1986) devotes a chapter to Stacy, who is also prominently discussed in Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915–1945 (1999). Stacy’s famous “Sing, Sing, Sing” solo is on Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall (Columbia Records), and his 1938–1944 small group and solo sessions are on The Complete Commodore Jazz Recordings (Mosaic). The Eddie Condon radio programs were issued on the Jazum label. Among several film appearances, Stacy is seen and heard to best advantage with Goodman in Sweet and Lowdown (1944) and with Wingy Manone in Sarge Goes to College (1947). An obituary is in the New York Times (4 Jan. 1995).

Clark G. Reynolds