Rex Stewart’s Boy Meets Horn is a Jazz Classic Worth Reading

The great cornet player Rex Stewart, best known for his work with Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, was also a prolific writer. He contributed to Downbeat, Playboy, and Jazz Journal and a number of his pieces were collected and published as the well-respected Jazz Masters of the Thirties. Boy Meets Horn, Stewart’s autobiography, was compiled in the 1960s by editor Claire P. Gordon from his writings-some complete, some mere scraps of paper. In Boy Meets Horn, Stewart shows himself to be a keen observer of the jazz scene, but he himself remains a somewhat elusive protagonist. We’ll take a look at early 1920s-late 1940s jazz history through Stewart’s eyes, and try to read between the lines to get a better understanding of Rex Stewart—a complicated man. Stewart was raised in Washington, D.C. and it was surprising to me how extensive the early jazz scene was in D.C.; this, despite the fact that I lived in D.C. four years and taught at the Duke Ellington High School for the Performing Arts. The cast of local characters includes Doc Perry, Ed (later Duke) Ellington, Elmer Snowden, Cliff Jackson, the Eglin Brothers, Art Whetsol (later with Ellington), Marie Lucas, and the trombonist in her band, Juan Tizol. This somewhat hidden history feeds into a trope that Stewart returns to several times in the book. Namely, that the primacy of New Orleans in jazz history is overstated. He