Eddie Condon

Jazz musician, born in Goodland, Indiana, USA. He was a wit and a raconteur, a nightclub proprietor, a guitarist, and a member of Chicago's fabled ‘Austin High Gang’ of the 1920s.

Albert Edwin Condon, better known as Eddie Condon, (16 November 1905–4 August 1973) was a jazz banjoist, guitarist, and bandleader.

Condon was born in Goodland, Indiana.

In 1928 Condon moved to New York City. He frequently arranged jazz sessions for various record labels, sometimes playing with the artists he brought to the recording studios, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller.

From the late 1930s on he was a regular at the Manhattan jazz club Nick's.

Condon also did a series of jazz radio broadcasts from New York's Town Hall during 1944-45 which were nationally popular.

From 1945 through 1967 he ran his own New York jazz club, Eddie Condon's. In the 1950s Condon recorded a sequence of classic albums for Columbia Records. The musicians involved in these albums - and at Condon's club - included Wild Bill Davison (cornet), Billy Butterfield (trumpet), Edmond Hall, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Cutty Cutshall, Lou McGarity (trombone), Bud Freeman (tenor sax), Gene Schroeder, Dick Carey, Ralph Sutton (piano), Bob Casey, Walter Page, Jack Lesberg, Al Hall (bass), George Wettling, Buzzy Drootin, Cliff Leeman (drums).

Condon toured Britain in 1957 with a band including Wild Bill Davison, Cutty Cutshall, Gene Schroeder and George Wettling. Condon's men, on that tour, were a roll-call of top mainstream jazz musicians: Buck Clayton (trumpet), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Bud Freeman (tenor sax), Dick Carey (piano and alto horn), Jack Lesberg (bass), Cliff Leeman (drums), Jimmy Rushing (vocals). A nice touch was that Billy Banks, a vocalist who had recorded with Condon and Pee Wee Russell in 1932, and had lived in obscurity in Japan for many years, turned up at one of the 1964 concerts: Pee Wee asked him "have you got any more gigs?". Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (1956) was a collection of articles by various writers co-edited by Condon and Richard Gehman.

A latter-day collaborator, clarinetist Kenny Davern, described a Condon gig: "It was always a thrill to get a call from Eddie and with a gig involved even more so.

Eddie Condon toured and appeared at jazz festivals through to 1971.