The tuxedoed, five-piece Cuauhtemoc Marimba Band made its first appearance at the plush Central Café just a few months after Pancho Villa’s last attack on Juarez in 1919. Severo Gonzalez’ jazz band played mostly ragtime era tunes there until the late 20’s when he brought in swing trumpeter Frankie Quatrell to modernize his band’s sound. Quatrell claimed to have given Benny Goodman one of his first big band jobs while working in the Hull House Boys Band in Chicago in 1924.(85) Goodman’s sound was “20 years ahead of its time” and when his boss asked Quatrell to fire Benny Goodman, Quatrell chose to quit instead. He would later record “Memphis Blues” and “Waiting for Katy Dear” with both Goodman and Glenn Miller on Victor Records. In the mid-20’s Severo Gonzalez heard Frankie Quatarell while playing with a swing band in a wealthy resort hotel near the Kentucky Derby and invited the trumpeter to lead his Central Café band.(86)
Herbert Berger, the former director of the St. Louis Hotel Coronado band, played at El Tivoli, just a few yards down from the Central Café. In addition to being a bar and casino, El Tivoli had also been a movie theater during the revolution. Berger brought many of his jazz musicians, including Pee Wee Russell, from the United States to join him in Juarez. The celebrated clarinetist probably acquired his drinking problem—for years he’d drink nothing but liquor malts for breakfast---in Juarez while playing at the Big Kid’s Palace in the early 20’s.
“Berger sent me a telegram asking me to join him in Juarez,” Russell told The New Yorker many years later:

That was around the time my father gave me a saxophone. I was a punk kid, but my parents---can you imagine?---said, Go ahead, good riddance. When I got to Juarez, Berger told me, to my surprise, I wouldn’t be working with him but across the street with piano and drums in the Big Kid’s Palace, which had a bar about a block long. There weren’t any microphones and you had to blow. I must have used a board for a reed. Three days later there were union troubles and I got fired and joined Berger. This wasn’t long after Pancho Villa, and all the Mexicans wore guns. There’d be shooting in the streets day and night, but nobody paid any attention. You’d just duck into a saloon and wait till it was over.

The day Berger hired me, he gave me a ten dollar advance. That was a lot of money and I went crazy on it. It was the custom in Juarez to hire a kind of cop at night for a collar, and if you got into a scrape he’d clop the other guy with his billy. So I hired one and got drunk and we went to see a bulldog-badger fight, which is the most vicious thing you can imagine. I kept on drinking and finally told the cop to beat it, that I knew the way back to the hotel in El Paso, across the river. Or I thought I did, because I got lost and had an argument over a tab and the next thing I was in jail. What a place, Mister! A big room with bars all the way around and bars for a ceiling and a floor like a cesspool, and full of the worst cutthroats you ever saw. I was there three days on bread and water before Berger found me and paid ten dollars to get me out.(87)

Many El Pasoans found the whole situation on the border intolerable. The Women’s Club in El Paso, which had been a leading force in the battle for Prohibition, blamed jazz itself for a great deal of the problem. On December 12, 1921, Mrs. S. J. Fennell, president of the El Paso City Federation of Clubs, announced an anti-jazz campaign. “It shall be a sort of social ostracism built up in feeling against the jazz rhythm,” the El Paso Times reported. “It is known that jazz is not music. The clubwomen say so. They bring all good musicians to support them in ousting jazz from claiming fellowship or masquerading under the name of music.” As part of their campaign to clean up music in the area, the high society ladies created a fine arts division which consisted of three “bureaus”---art, music and literature. “The music bureau will handle the anti-jazz work,” Mrs. Fennel explained. “We expect to build up a public sentiment that will kill jazz of its own force. We believe that if the mothers and fathers knew the evil power of jazz over the children that they would have less of it in their homes. Jazz means the dejoining of brains of our young people.(88)

Several El Paso musicians expressed similar sentiments. The director of the Fifth Cavalry Band at Fort Bliss, Lieutenant Edgar J. Bush, found the African American social origins of jazz particularly offensive. “The origin of this style reverts back to the early syncopated tempos expressed in communities of the sensual revelers (read the “negroes),” Bush explained. “In my humble opinion jazz is prostitution of music, pure and simple. Since this despicable form of playing music has come into vogue, I have never allowed my men to practice this abominable style or to “jazz” either collectively or individually. I would sooner be a shoemaker with all due respect to this esteemed mechanic, than a musician who has to “jazz.”(89)
P. J. Gustat, an El Paso musician with the Crawford Theatre orchestra, agreed. “Strictly speaking, jazz music originated in the underworld,” he asserted. It is not good music. It is nothing but a lot of noise, and appeals particularly to the younger element.”(90).
But even the most outspoken opponents of jazz such as Lieutenant Bush, admitted that the demand for it was high. “Let us hope that the public will come to its senses and rid itself of this fad; the sooner the better,” the Fort Bliss band director stated. “Jazz ruins every musician who caters to it, most of whom do it through sheer force of necessity, or who would otherwise lose their income.”(91) But despite Prohibition, jazz was popular even in El Paso, where musicians could find gigs in places like the Rainbow Room on Texas Street across from the old Popular, at the Red Mill at the entrance of Washington Park where there was a 10 cent cover for the dance room and the Modern Café in the basement of the Mills Building, where the Waterhouse Jazz Band played. Of course, jazz and illegal “happy water” often went hand-in-hand in these joints.

In 1921, the same year the El Paso Woman’s Club was fighting jazz, the local Ku Klux Klan organization was waging an anti-vice campaign of its own. El Paso residents received letters with the official seal of the Frontier Klan No. 100 warning them to discontinue their trips to Juarez.(92) In March, 1922, more than 1,000 members of the Frontier Klan No. 100---dressed in their white robes---held an initiation meeting near Kern Place. That same year the Klan burned crosses on the side of the Franklin Mountains and held a parade in downtown El Paso. At their peak, they controlled many of the city’s institutions including the American Legion, the Masonic Lodge, the National Guard, the El Paso public schools and the El Paso Herald (11 out of the 12 members of their editorial staff belonged to the KKK).(93) When the organization was later unmasked, it was discovered that many of the local leaders of the organization were Protestant ministers. The Reverend P. R. Knickerbocker of Trinity Church, during a sermon entitled, “How El Paso Girls and Boys Go Wrong with the Aid of Juarez,” suggested that a battery of artillery guns aimed at Juarez should be placed “on Mount Franklin and blow the whole business to hell.”(94) Southern Baptist Bob Jones brought loud cheers from the congregation during one of his tent revivals when he announced that the “local klansmen would be special guests” at the next church meeting. The meeting would call on the El Paso mayor and city hall to close down the international bridge early to stop Americans from crossing over to Mexico to drink and engage in interracial debauchery.(95)
But ultimately, even the Ku Klux Klan at its peak couldn’t change the border. Musicians and sin---with all its interracial underworld implications---would continue to be part of the Juarez nightlife for a very long time.

(83) E .Dominique et al, “Prohibition Stimulated El Paso, Juarez Economies,” Borderlands (Spring) 2000-2001, Vol. 19:16.
(84) El Paso Herald, March 7, 1921.
(85) Frankie Quatrell, interviewed by Daisy Grunau, March 15, 1977, Institute of Oral History, Special Collections, UT El Paso.
(86) The Central Café later moved to El Paso and became the Café Central on Oregon and Texas.
(87) Whitney Balliett, “Even His Feet Look Sad,” reprinted in Reading Jazz (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), p. 381.
(88) El Paso Times, December 12, 1921.
(89) El Paso Herald, February 13, 1919.
(90) El Paso Herald, January 25-26, 1919.
(91) El Paso Times, February 13, 1919.
(92) Shawn Lay, War, Revolution and the Ku Klux Klan, p. 105.
(93) Lay, War and the KKK, p. 111
(94) “Lynching of Automobile Thieves and Bombardment of Juarez Urged by Pastor,” El Paso Times, December 12, 1921.
(95) Lay, War and the KKK, p. 127