Albert Edwin Condon was born on November 16, 1905 in Goodland, Indiana, United States. He was the ninth and last child of John Condon and Margaret McGrath. His father was a saloon keeper and then a policeman. The family later moved to Chicago Heights, Ill. Music was an important part of family life. Condon's father played the violin, and seven brothers and sisters also played musical instruments. Condon was picking out melodies on the piano when he was nine years old.
When he was in the seventh grade he began playing ukulele. By his first year at Bloom Township High School he was playing tenor banjo.
In the spring of 1922, at the age of sixteen, Condon went on the road with Hollis Peavey's Jazz Bandits. In the fall Condon left the band to work with the legendary cornet player Bix Beiderbecke at the Alhambra Ballroom in Syracuse. In January 1923 Condon, billed as "the world's youngest banjo player, " rejoined Peavey's Jazz Bandits. But by the end of the year he moved to Chicago. Condon, a handsome, well-dressed, quickwitted, sharp-tongued young man aptly nicknamed "Slick, " began associating with young Chicago musicians, many of whom were to become famous jazz players: Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Dave Tough, Benny Goodman, Muggsy Spanier, George Wettling, Joe Sullivan, and Frank Teschemacher. At night, after their own musical jobs were over, Condon and friends would go to speakeasies on the South Side and hear the music of such African-American masters as King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith. Bandleader Red McKenzie was so impressed after hearing Condon and six of his friends (including McPartland, Freeman, Sullivan, and Gene Krupa) that he set up a recording session with Okeh Records (1927). The band was called the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans. The recording was successful, and a second one quickly followed. These sessions introduced and defined a new kind of jazz, called "Chicago style, " defined by the rich contrapuntal textures of New Orleans and Dixieland jazz with an emphasis on individual improvised solos. McKenzie persuaded Condon to go to the capital of the jazz world, New York City. He arrived in May 1928 and in a few days thought that he had found a job for himself and his friends. He encouraged Krupa, Sullivan, and Teschemacher to quit their bands and join him, but the job never materialized. Condon talked his way into another recording session at Okeh. The $150 he and his friends made was only enough to pay an overdue hotel bill, with enough left over to buy a round of hamburgers so small and thin that Condon called them "transparent. " He found little work for the rest of the year. On February 8, 1929, Condon organized the first interracial recording session on a national label, Victor. The band was called Eddie's Hot Shots. Later that year he participated in other interracial recordings with Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong. In November he joined the Mound City Blue Blowers. Red McKenzie played comb and tissue paper and sang. The rest of the novel instrumentation was suitcase with whisk broom and two lutes (Condon played one). He played with this band until 1933. In that year he began playing the four-string guitar, which he tuned like a banjo. In 1937 Condon began an eight-year engagement at Nick's, a Greenwich Village nightclub owned by Nick Rongetti. But Condon was repeatedly fired from his job because he would engage in conversations with the customers--often important journalists, critics, and media people--and take them out to talk and drink in another club down the street. Frequently he did not return in time to play the next set. In 1942, with the help of advertising executive Ernest Anderson, Condon began a series of jazz concerts, first at Carnegie Hall and then at Town Hall, which continued until 1946. In the same year he presented one of the first jazz programs on television, again with a racially mixed group. At the end of the year he took first place as best guitarist in Downbeat magazine's readers' poll. He won the poll again in 1943. In 1945 Condon opened a nightclub in Greenwich Village at 47 West Third Street that featured his own brand of Chicago style jazz. In 1958 the club moved to the Sutton Hotel on East Fifty-sixth Street; it finally closed in 1967. In 1948 and 1949 he again brought jazz to television. The program was called "The Eddie Condon Floor Show. " In the early 1950's he wrote a record review column, often very humorous, for the New York-based newspaper the Journal-American. In 1957 he toured Great Britain and in 1964 went to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. His last public appearance was on July 5, 1973, at Carnegie Hall as part of the Newport in New York Jazz Festival. Because he never took solos, being content to function only as a rhythm player, he was often overlooked by critics. But his playing was purposefully subtle in volume, harmonically inventive, and rhythmically driving. He died in New York City.
Condon married Phyllis Smith on November 16, 1942. They had two children.
