Jazz for Dabblers: Pee Wee Marquette, jazz's mean little MC

This series, Jazz for Dabblers, is all about helping you amaze and astound your pals with your jazz knowledge. It's a roundup of some of the fun and/or oddball little stories behind the great music of jazz. In this instalment, we tell you about Pee Wee Marquette, the extortionist MC.

The story of Pee Wee Marquette is a colourful one. Marquette was the master of ceremonies at one of the most famous jazz clubs in New York City: the infamous Birdland, named after Charlie "Bird" Parker.

Marquette was short and mean. Standing at a slight three feet nine inches, his job was to introduce the constant stream of legendary jazz artists that came through Birdland in the 1950s.

Marquette had a scam, where he would hold the musician introductions for ransom until they paid him a healthy "tip." How he did it was ingenious, yet diabolical. Marquette wouldn't say the performer's name correctly until he got his tip. So he'd crank out names like "Hor-ass-Silber" to the audience instead of "Horace Silver" – until Silver gave him that tip. It was name extortion, that little SOB.

Pronouncing your name incorrectly wasn't Marquette's only punishment. If you didn't give him a tip, he'd find other ways to make your life miserable, like constantly tell you to pack up and leave. According to many reports, he was not a nice man.

You might know Marquette's voice from a hit 1993 song by Us3. The group sampled the MC's voice as the intro to their song "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)."