His name was Martin Abraham. The music world called him Chink Martin, an unfortunate use of an ethnic slur. But what could he do about it, or who would have wanted to, during the years before the general public began to frown on the use of such nicknames? If you’d used his correct name, nobody would have known who you were talking about.
He was born on June 10, 1886, and he spent a continuous, uninterrupted career as a jazz musician for seventy years. He was the first jazzman I ever knew personally. I was four years old, and he worked in the pit orchestra of my grandfather’s Dauphine theater. He was, even then, the most exciting and proficient jazz tuba player in the history of the idiom. The issue of a German father and a Filipino mother, he had neither discernible Oriental coloring nor features, though he was no more than five feet tall, if that. He can be heard playing string bass or tuba on some of the recordings of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, many of the recordings of Sharkey’s Kings of Dixieland, and lots of Southland records of the 1950s. His involvement in the music literally goes back to the very beginnings of jazz.
“Man, we were terrible!” he recalled during supper at the Pont-chartrain Hotel while we were making a British ITV series entitled “All You Need Is Love.” “It’s a good thing those first bands didn’t record. Nobody today would want to hear that music we called ‘ragtime.’ I’d be ashamed to listen to a record from that time if I was on it.”
My wife and Terry Waldo, the ragtime virtuoso and scholar, had been speculating about the actual musical content of those bands of the pre-1910 era and had virtually forgotten that Chink was present. After he’d listened for a while to the discussion, he decided to put aside his veal cutlet and remind them. “I was there! I played in them bands. They wasn’t no good at all!”
One day in the early fifties I met Chink as we were both going into Joe Mares’s warehouse on St. Louis Street. Chink mentioned that Joe had asked him to be sure and drop in that day. When we saw Joe, he explained that he had stopped by and picked up government forms to make it possible for Chink to make his application for social security. Chink said he didn’t want any and I, out of curiosity, asked him why not. It turned out that he had no idea what social security was, but was merely afraid of forms and suspicious of anything that had to do with the government. I explained that he had this money coming to him, that he had been paying a percentage of his income since the thirties in order to provide himself with an income after he had reached the age of sixty-five.
He shook his head. “I ain’t never paid them people nothin’,” he asserted. “They ain’t never asked me and I ain’t never paid.”
“But,” I pursued, “I, myself, took money out for social security on every job I ever hired you for—and I’m sure anybody else you worked for did the same thing. Joe, too.”
Chink looked at Joe, hurt and suspicious. “You mean,” he asked, with a “say-it-ain’t-so” plea in his voice, “You mean you guys been holdin’ out on my money all these years?”
“Of course!” I told him. “That’s the law. We have to make the deductions.”
He brightened. “The dee-ducts!” he said with relief. “You mean the dee-ducts! Why didn’t you say so?”
Further discussion elicited the fact that Chink had always thought the people who hired him were able to deduct a certain amount of his pay as a sort of commission for finding him or supplying him with any job. My attempt to explain what this money was for, I could see, was falling on uncomprehending ears. I went on further, to point out to him that on the first of the month, after his papers cleared, he’d receive a check for a couple of hundred dollars from Uncle Sam.
“What I gotta do for it?” he demanded.
I told him he didn’t have to do anything, that it was his own money. He looked extremely skeptical. Only his close relationship and past history with Joe and me reassured him.
“If that’s for true, what you tellin’ me, I’m gonna buy you a box of cigars,” he promised. As he spoke further of his forthcoming windfall, I realized that I had neglected a detail in my explanation to him. He didn’t yet realize that this wasn’t a one-time payment, that he’d receive a check every month for the rest of his life. He was speechless and unbelieving. Many months had to go by, and many checks come in, before he realized that he really didn’t have to work anymore. Not that that stopped him. He continued to work in Preservation Hall until his death in 1980 at the age of ninety-four.
And just to put in perspective the extent of his career in jazz, I must report this brief excerpt from an interview I did with him while preparing the publicity handout that would accompany him to Disneyland for Frank Bull’s Jazz Jubilee. I asked him when was the very first time he had recorded. This was his reply.
“Well, you know, Al, them first records we did, they wasn’t jazz, see. There wasn’t even no such word then. It was 1905, just Ropollo and me. We made them cylinders, banjo and guitar.”
“How were they?” I asked. “Did they ever come out?”
“Oh, yes,” he assured me. “They come out. Mr. Edison didn’t like ’em at first, but….”