"I used to take my horn into the woods at Lost Lake and practice long tones. Now Tesch was always very competitive, and one day he heard me and ran into the dining room where the guys were finishing dinner and said, ‘I’ve got to get my clarinet! I just heard Bud. He’s got a beautiful tone.’"
— Bud Freeman, as recounted in his autobiography Crazeology.
“Teschemacher wanted a sharp, rough-and-ready enthusiasm that drove everything before it. His dynamic and rhythmic inventions—such as the diminuendo chorus, a whispered holding-back, before the final tumultuous ride-out, in which he himself invariably played the clarinet’s high notes flat—were all aimed toward this objective. Being in tune didn’t matter, relatively speaking; loud and raucous did. And these were the primary elements of most Chicago jazz from that time until it ended.”
— Hayden Carruth, Suicides and Jazzers
"Tesch had returned to Chicago, hating New York. ‘Too nerve-wracking!’ he had said. A feather bed could be nerve-wracking to Tesch if things weren’t going pleasantly, so in all fairness to the Big City, I allowed for Tesch’s temperament, but I was damned happy to have him back."
— Jess Stacy, quoted in the book Chicago Jazz and Then Some by Jean Porter Dmytryk
"So Frank Teschemacher died, and in one way it was a terrible thing. But in another way, it wasn’t. For he died before jazz had a chance to become swing and before the age of the latterday saints of the clarinet (who shall go unmentioned here). He never had a chance to be pursued by the autograph hounds, and he never had a chance to be terrific on West 52nd Street. I realize that he played with some very sad bands, but I realize too that when he played hot he wasn’t doing so because he was conforming to a vogue. He was doing so because he wanted to. I think you should remember that when you come to play the record."
— Liner notes on the Tesch: Chicago Style Clarinetist record by George Frazier
"The full Chicago style, only starting to emerge in the world of Beiderbecke, reached the most poignant expression of its unrest and agony in the wildly reckless, almost self-flagellating playing of the clarinetist Frank Teschemacher. Indifferent to the vulgarity of the new style’s origins in blatant commercialism, Teschemacher probed it boldly and searchingly. Out of the Tin Pan Alley musical banality he elaborated an odd discourse. The Chicago style with which his name is identified contributed neither shoddy novelty nor extravagant sensation; it was a true innovation which preserved the integrity of the jazz emotion. The innovation was creative, superior to the existing forms which it replaced. In this medium, Teschemacher was an inspired musician."
— “The Duality of Bygone Jazz” by Max Margulis, found in Black & White in American Culture: An Anthology from The Massachusetts Review.
"[Frank Teschemacher] played what looked like a clarinet but sounded like something he had invented: What issued from it were spiky, scratchy, piercing, surrealistic notes that on ordinary clarinets did not seem to exist. His style was as distinctive as his sound, a headlong, hell-for-leather outpouring, full of fluffs, undeniably brilliant. He was one of the most exciting soloists jazz has ever produced. There is no way to explain, on the evidence, how a 21-year old ex-violinist who had been listening ardently to New Orleans clarinetists’ fluid sound could, on his first recording date, play in a style so raw and edgy and pyrotechnic that nobody then playing could match it."
— Marty Grosz, in the liner notes of the Time-Life Frank Teschemacher box set
“You knock yourself out making a great new music for people, and they treat you like some kind of plague or blight, like you were offering them leprosy instead of art.”
— Frank Teschemacher, pictured here in a 1926 Midway Gardens Orchestra photo.
“There was a visitor who appeared quite regularly and sat behind a post and just studied Frank Teschemacher. He wasn’t there to fraternize. Benny Goodman was all business.”
— Jess Stacy, close friend of Frank Teschemacher’s and eventual pianist in Benny Goodman’s big band.
