No program notes were issued at the brief concert of November 9, 1927, but if you've heard a McKenzie-Condon record you know it was jazz, and the boys didn't give a damn who found out. It was direct and to the point--strictly six men ganging up on a flock of instruments in a fight to the finish.

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After 16 years the decision is still in doubt.

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However, for jazz with the stops out, this crowd gets my vote every time, except maybe when you spin a 1923 King Oliver or a 1925 Armstrong plater on your turntable. Which is as good a way as any to alienate your landlord, unless he, too, longs for the days when the New Orleans-in-Chicago Soicety of Upper State Street held regular meetings with the Cook County Choral Conclave and Jubilee Singers, better known as the Chicago Rhythm Kings.

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No one denies that there was a distinctly psychopathic strain in the old Austin High School crowd, which included Jimmy and Rich MacUartland, Bud Freeman, Floyd O'Brien, Frank Teschemacher, and allied members such as Dave Hough, Jess Stacy, Gene Krupa, Joe Sullivan, Muggsy Spanier, and Mezz Mezzrow. For instance, Tesch married a gal who used to pour nothing but straight gin on her corn flakes.

Every morning.

But Jacobson and Frank Billings bought a $500 7-passenger Packard sedan with 16 cylinders one day and decided next morning that they should have gotten a convertible instead. So they sawed off the top.

But it rained that afternoon, so they left it parked on Michigan Avenue and bought a $5000, 7-passenger Packard sedan.

With 16 cylinders.

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Pee Wee Russell, whose friends have been giving him up for dead on a day by day basis for at least nine years, used to hang out with the Chicago crowd during his undergraduate days at the University of St. Louis. He'd skip out of classes every week and start back Tuesday so he'd be back Wednesday in time for his first Monday class. One week he was in St. Louis just long enough to buy another ticket to Chicago. He forgot to get a round trip; so he never went back.

You couldn't call Pee Wee absent minded, but he's the only man I know who consistently pays a nickel to get out of the Broadway & Seventh Avenue Subway.

Among the fringier gents of the "give it hell" school of Chicago jazz is Boyco Brown, the alto saxophonist, who not only studies metaphysics but applies them to his musicianship and even his everyday existence. When he tangled with spiritual Tut Soper (who also plays phenomenal piano) the lid was off and it was strictly a case for the man with the net.

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Boyce and Tut decided they could play better if they confined their relationship to music and nothing else. So for two weeks they didn't speak to one another and didn't even look at each other. Folks used to travel all the way from Milwaukee just to see Boyce and Tut backing up to the bandstand from opposite sides at the beginning of each set, mouths grimly clamped as they groped their way.

The manager finally fired them. They couldn't complain because the other guy would have heard the other guy's voice.