Streets of Gold (33 page)

The buttons are different, you know, she said. On a girl’s blouse. They’re the reverse. I mean, from a boy’s. Lots of boys have trouble unbuttoning a girl’s blouse because the buttons are turned around. I remember once, will you promise not to tell this to anyone, I was fifteen, I guess, and I’d gone to a party at a girl’s house up the street, she can see and everything, she’s not blind, and they had a keg of beer there, I think it was a party for some boy who was going in the Army, I’m not sure, it was right after Pearl Harbor. And I drank a lot of beer, and I got very, well, not drunk, but sort of tipsy, you know, and when I came home my brother was lying here on my bed, reading, my mother was out someplace, he took one look at me and said, Oh-oh. I couldn’t even unbutton my own
blouse
, would you believe it, he had to unbutton it for me. And even though he’d had lots of practice dressing me when I was small, he still had trouble getting my blouse off that night, I guess because I was weaving all over the room, oh, God, it was so silly. I finally passed out cold and didn’t remember a thing the next morning, my clothes were on the chair there, Iggie, you’re getting me very hot.

I am now going to attempt something that might frighten even the likes of Oscar Peterson. I am going to demonstrate what it is like to play a jazz solo, and I am going to do so in terms of what happened with Susan Koenig in her bedroom that day after we got through the basics of taking off her blouse and her bra and her skirt and her half-slip and finally her cotton panties (but not her dark glasses), and after she unbuttoned my fly and helped me off with my undershorts and fell upon me with blind expertise and unbridled passion. I am going to prove to you not only what a great piano player I am, but also what a unique and marvelous writer I
could
be (if only I had the time), and I am going to do so by demonstrating what jazz would
look
like if you were reading it in the English language instead of hearing it in a smoky nightclub. An impossible feat, you say? Stick around, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To keep this simple (look, he’s already copping out!), I’m going to use a twelve-bar blues chart with only twenty-one chords in it, as opposed to a more complex thirty-two-bar chart with as many as sixty-four chords in it. If I were playing a
real
blues chorus, the chords I’d use most frequently in the key of A flat, let’s say, would be A-flat seven, D-flat seven, and E-flat seven. But we’re not concerning ourselves with chords in what follows; we’re substituting
words
for chords.

This, then, would be the chord chart for “Jazzing in A Flat,” as it is known in England (a pun, Mom), or, as it is known to American blues buffs, simply “Up in Susan’s Womb.” (Another one; sorry, Mom.)

            BAR    1:    SUSAN

            BAR    2:    ME

            BAR    3:    SUSAN

            BAR    4:    BED

            BAR    5:    ME

            BAR    6:    ME

            BAR    7:    DECEMBER and AFTERNOON

            BAR    8:    HOT and COLD

            BAR    9:    AFTERNOON and EVENING

            BAR   10:    AFTERNOON and EVENING

            BAR   11:    SUSAN and BEDDED and I and MYSELF

            BAR   12:    LIMP and DUSK and BED

There are four beats in each bar, but the last two bars combined have only seven beats in them and are called, traditionally and unimaginatively, “a seven-beater,” the last beat understood but not played. If you count all the capitalized words in all the bars above, you’ll discover there are exactly twenty-one of them, just as promised. Their selection was determined by the actual incidence of a conventional set of chords in a typical blues chorus, with which I’ve taken no liberties. For example, the word “bed” in the chart represents an A-flat dominant chord, whereas the word “bedded” represents an A-flat dominant inversion — “bed,” therefore, becomes “bedded,” a different but similar chord.

The first chorus of the tune will consist of these chords being played in the left hand and the composer’s melody being played in the right hand almost exactly as he wrote it. I’ll add a swing to it that did not exist in the original sheet music, but for the most part I’ll play it almost straight, in order to identify it (solely as a courtesy) for my audience. The choruses following the head chorus will be improvised, invented on the spot, and will bear no resemblance to the original tune, unless I choose to refer back to it occasionally, again solely as a courtesy. I am interested only in the chord chart. And the chart consists of those twenty-one words listed above. The rest is all melody —
my
melody, not the composer’s. In fact, the melodies I improvise in each succeeding chorus may have nothing whatever to do with sex per se, except as sex defines the overall “mood” of the tune. In short, the blowing line I invent to go with the chord progression doesn’t
need
to make an emotional or philosophic commitment to the composer’s melody. I can use all sorts of musical punctuation in my running line — eighth notes, eighth-note triplets, thirty-second notes, sixty-fourth notes, runs — the way I would use commas, semicolons, periods, or exclamation points. I can repeat sequential figures, augmenting or diminishing licks as I see fit, or I ran utilize silences if I choose. (A jazzman listening to J. J. Johnson once said, “I sure like those notes he’s playing,” and another cat replied, “
I
like the ones he
isn’t
playing.”) I can do whatever I want with whatever melody I invent. I am entirely free to create.

But I cannot deviate from the chart. Once the chart is set in motion, it is inviolable, it is inexorable, it is inevitable. I am locked into it tonally and rhythmically, I cannot change SUSAN to ALICE, nor can I hold that chord for longer than the four beats prescribed in Bar 1, though I can of course repeat it four times in that measure, if I like. At the end of those four beats, me must come in for another four beats; the chart so dictates. When it comes time for me to play AFTERNOON for two beats in Bar 7, I’d better not be lingering on DECEMBER. I can use substitute chords, or passing chords, or what are known as appoggiatura chords — SHOT to HOT or BLIMP to LIMP — but only to get me
where
I have to be when I have to be there. Jazz is a moving, volatile, energetic force that is constantly
going
someplace. Each chord exists only because it is in motion
toward
the next chord and
from
the chord preceding it. It’s pure Marxist music, in a sense, utilizing the dialectic process throughout. I can take the chord EVENING and break it into an arpeggio if I choose, transforming it into a linear EVE, EN, ING, or I can play it diatonically E,V,E, N,I,N,G, as a mode, or I can play it as a shell, EVNG, but I
have
to play it; it is part of the chart, and the chart is the track upon which the express train of my improvisation runs.

So-in the first twelve bars, I’ll play “Jazzing in A Flat” as the composer wrote it, mingling and mixing right-hand melody with left-hand harmony because we’re doing prose here and not musical notation, and anyway, that’s exactly as you’d hear it. In the next twelve bars, I’ll improvise a jazz solo with a blowing line unrelated to the original melody except where brief reference may be made to it, the entire improvisation based on those twenty-one chords in the relentless chord chart. Then, utilizing whatever bag of tricks I possess, I’ll take us into the final twelve bars, where I’ll play the head again almost as straight as I did at the top, and then go home (“head and out,” as it’s called). All of this will be enormously abbreviated, you understand. A jazz solo, especially on a blues chart, can go on and on all night.
This
solo will consist of only three choruses.

Ready?

Ah-
one
twothreefour...

SUSAN spent six hours with/ME, who soon learned that/SUSAN was not a virgin, that her/BED had been shared with her brother, who, like/ME, had desired her, but, unlike/ME, had been humping her for years./DECEMBER was
my
turn, that AFTERNOON apartment/... HOT radiators clanging, COLD wind rattling the windows,/AFTERNOON waning, EVENING on the way. Oh, that/AFTERNOON! Coming four times and, in the EVENING, once again in/SUSAN’s mouth, BEDDED still, she asked that I let MYSELF out, lying there/LIMP, still wearing dark glasses, as dusk shadowed the rumpled BED.

SUSiphANy SU SU whispering/ME, and oh, andering, MEandering, black-eyed/SUSAN
flat
-boy-ant, optimum/BED! a dead hollow vesper, a con-spir-a-see/ME-eyed poinciana, eyed,/
o sole
ME-eyed poin-/DEE-CEM-BER, all white, and A-F-T-ERNOON all all all un-ending./HOT musky HOT mustard, COLD stinking COLD thurible,/AFTER-sun and NOON sinking, E,V,E,NING fuck and tongue, an/AFTER-taste, but NOON gone, AFTER-NOON screaming, screening EVEN-ING/SUSAN, SUSANitary seas, BEDAZZled by moonlight and I... I... coconut-fronded, MYcamel-SELFconsciousness slinkily slumbering/LiMPingly stuttering, DUSKily darkening, deepening daisies and violets in BEDS.

SUSAN six hours with/ME all astonished, for/SUSAN’s no virgin, her/BED was her brother’s!/ME she fucked royally,/ME she taught brotherwise, all through/DECEMBER, or all AFTERNOON at least./HOT dizzy licks, COLD chops but warm cockles,/AFTERNOON heat begat cool EVENINg’s expertise./AFTERNOON practice for EVENINg’s fel-ay-she oh/SUSAN! oh Christ! how she BEDDED and wedded and urged that I be MYSELF,/LiMPly suggested she’d best be alone now, DUSK softly shrugging and hugging her naked and leaving her lying in shades on her BED.

The bar was on Fordham Road, just off Jerome Avenue.

“It’s full of niggers,” my Uncle Luke said. “Let’s get out of here.”

This was February of 1944, and you could hardly walk through any street in New York without stumbling upon a place offering live jazz. I had asked Luke to take me to this particular bar because Biff Anderson was playing here this weekend. There were eight Biff Anderson records in my brother’s collection, two of them with him backing the blues singers Viola McCoy and Clara Smith, four of them made when he’d been playing with Lionel Howard’s Musical Aces, the remaining two featuring him on solo piano. His early style seemed to be premised on those of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. Waller, I had already learned, was the man who had most influenced Tatum. And Tatum was where I wanted to be.

I was not surprised that the place was full of black people. I had begun subscribing to
Down Beat
and
Metronome
, which my father read aloud to me, and I knew what color most of the musicians were; not because they were identified by race, but only because there were pictures of them in those jazz journals. My father would say, “This Tatum is a nigger, did you know that?” (He also told me Tatum was blind, which was of far greater interest to me, and which confirmed my belief that I could one day play like him.) Or “Look at this Jimmie Lunceford,” he would say. “I
hate
nigger bands. They repeat themselves all the time.” I knew Biff Anderson was black, and I expected him to have a large black audience. But my Uncle Luke must have been shaken by it; he immediately asked the bartender for a double gin on the rocks.

“How about your friend here?” the bartender asked. He was white.

“I’ll have a beer,” I said.

“Let me see your draft card,” he said, and then realized I was blind, and silently considered whether or not blind people were supposed to register for the draft, and then decided to skip the whole baffling question, and simply repeated. “Double gin on the rocks, one beer.” We had to register for the draft the same as anyone else, of course, and — at least according to a joke then current — even blind people were being called up, so long as their Seeing Eye dogs had twenty-twenty vision. I didn’t have a draft card because I wasn’t yet eighteen. I’d have skipped the beer if the bartender had raised the slightest fuss; I was there to hear Biff Anderson play, and that was all.

The bar was a toilet. I’ve played many of them. It did not occur to me at the time that if someone of Biff’s stature was playing a toilet in the Bronx, he must have fallen upon hard times. Nor did I even recognize the place as a toilet. I had never been inside a bar before, and the sounds and the smells were creating the surroundings for me. Biff must have been taking a break when we came in. The jukebox was on, and Bing Crosby was singing “Sunday, Monday, or Always.” Behind the bar, the grain of which was raised and then worn smooth again, I could hear the clink of ice and glasses, whiskey being poured, the faint hiss of draft beer being drawn. There was a lot of echoing laughter in the room, mingled with the sound of voices I’d heard for years on “Amos ’n’ Andy.” The smells were beer and booze and perfume, the occasional whiff of someone who’d forgotten to bathe that month, the overpowering stench of urine from the men’s room near the far end of the bar — though that was not what identified this particular dump as a toilet. To jazz musicians, a toilet is a place you play when you’re coming up or heading’ down. I played a lot of them coming up, and I played a few of them on the way down, too. That’s America. Easy come, easy go.

“Lots of dinges here tonight,” the bartender whispered as he put down our glasses. “What’re
you
guys doin’ here?”

“My nephew’s a piano player,” Luke said. “He wants to hear this guy.”

“
He’s
a dinge, too,” the bartender said. “That’s why we got so many of them here tonight. I never seen so many dinges in my life. I used to tenn bar in a dump on Lenox Avenue, and even
there
I never seen so many dinges. You hole a spot check right this minute, you gonna find six hundred switchblades here. Don’t look crooked at nobody’s girl, you lend up with a slit throat. Not you, kid,” he said to me. “You’re blind, you got nothin’ to worry about. You play the piano, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So whattya wanna lissen to
this
guy for? He stinks, you ask my opinion. I requested him last night for ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas,’ he tells me he don’t know the song. ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas,’ huh?
Anybody
knows that song.”