Streets of Gold (38 page)

I did not know what to do. I had given up classical piano in favor of jazz, and had hardly registered as an alien before my adopted country exploded in revolution. I now had the choice of sticking with the Tatum style and perfecting it (eating cake, so to speak, while the rabble was clamoring at the palace gates), or learning to play a music I did not like or even understand. I could either go it alone, play solo piano if I chose — solo piano
already
had its head on the chopping block, and George Shearing would lop it off forever in 1947 — or I could learn to play with other musicians in small ensembles where the piano player was a part of the rhythm section and, except when taking a chorus, was expected to feed chords to horn players. I had no idea that running down a chart for a horn player could be excitingly heady stuff when the horn players were inventive geniuses like Parker or Gillespie. I did not realize that the bass line of the thirties had indeed been a prison, or that Powell and Wallington and many, many others were freeing the right hand from those cop-out pentatonic runs, more suited to the playing of bagpipes than the playing of piano. In bop, the concentration on the right-hand blowing line — the truly creative line, the invented melody line — was intense. The very system of using hollow shells in the bass demanded that the right hand be innovatively restless at all times, free to express ideas and feelings. And the left hand was no longer rigidly playing the rhythm, but was playing
against
the rhythm — and that was freedom, too. I didn’t realize this when I first told Biff I’d made up my mind. I only knew that I could either go it alone, or I could learn to play music with other men in... well, a family. If it happened that the family was black, and perhaps angry, that was something I would have to cope with. This was America.

I made the American choice.

Rebecca.

I suppose we have to get to Rebecca sooner or later.

The last time I saw her was when I went back to the Talmadge house to pick up the personal belongings I’d left behind, all of which had been clearly detailed in our separation agreement. When I wrote Rebecca trying to set a time and a date, she wrote back saying she didn’t know why I felt I still needed all that “small assorted junk.” The small assorted junk included two pieces of sculpture we’d bought in Venice, and a complete set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Rebecca would not let me take the
Britannica
. She said I’d given it to the family as a gift, and she intended to keep it. I did not argue the point. When I left the house in Connecticut for the last time, I took with me the sculpture and the outdoor furniture and my own extensive record collection, including the jazz I’d first listened to in my brother’s room — small assorted junk. I also took with me a Braille edition of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, which Rebecca had bought for me in London and given to me as a birthday present years ago.

That was the last time I saw Rebecca.

The first time I saw her was in July of 1945. Franklin Roosevelt was dead, and the war in Europe was over, but everyone was saying that the end was still nowhere in sight. An invasion of Japan was expected, and we all knew it would be bloody and costly, but by God we would finish the job in the Pacific the way we had in Europe, all of us out there doing our part — the tobacco-spitting kid from the Ozarks alongside the wisecracking kid from the Bronx and the snooty rich kid from Boston and the divinity student from Duluth and even the handsome sun-bronzed kid who’d tried to dodge the draft because he was making it with four blond starlets in a Malibu beach house, but who’d ended up realizing the fight was
his
, too, he was part of the family, and the family was out there struggling for survival. For me, the war had ended the day they killed Tony. I still believed in the myth, of course; I
had
to if I was to make any sense at all of my brother’s death. But victory was a foregone conclusion; America always emerged triumphantly. Even when Roosevelt died, I knew we would pull ourselves together and get on with this distasteful job that needed finishing. In those days, Americans were good workers, possibly because we’d come through the Depression years
longing
for work, and were now grateful for any job that came our way, even if it happened to be war. Today... don’t ask. If I played piano the way the man who installed our Talmadge kitchen cabinets did his job, people would throw rotten eggs and tomatoes at me. Rebecca later said that the man who’d installed our cabinets was to blame for the divorce, since his shabby work caused a connubial fight that lasted for a week. Rebecca dear, men who install kitchen cabinets, however, shoddily, are not responsible for divorce actions.

Biff had been busy teaching me every chart he knew, which he said I had to learn — “That’s the nexus, man, the nexus.” His method of teaching was... well... not quite the same as Passaro’s. Very often, Biff would give me the chart for a tune, and I would discover that some of the chords were different from the ones on the sheet music. He would tell me to never mind the sheet music,
this
is the right chord. And when I complained that it
couldn’t
be the right chord, he would say, “This’s the chord we
play
, man. This’s the chord that
sounds
right.”

A great many jazz musicians are very superstitious people, and Biff was one of them. Erroll Garner, for example, refuses to learn to read music because he thinks it’ll fuck up the way he’s playing. (Mary Lou Williams told me he
can
read, but Erroll insists he can’t and won’t learn, besides.) I once got into a discussion with George Shearing about his sound, and the “locked hands” or “block chord” architecture of it, which had as its forerunner the Glenn Miller saxophone section — a clarinet on top of the four saxophones normally found in a big band. I was telling George this meant that the melody could be played in two separate voices an octave apart, and I was about to go into a further technical exploration of it, when I detected (we’re both blind, and such detection wasn’t easy) that he was becoming a bit agitated, and finally slightly angry, or maybe just frightened. He didn’t want to know about it. His block system had only been one of the major shaping forces in the history of jazz piano, emulated by every young piano player in the country (including
me
at one time), but he didn’t want his style dissected. He was an articulate man, and he didn’t quite put it in these words, but what he was saying was, “Man, don’t bug me. I just blow, that’s all.”

Biff just blew, that was all. He had his own Rube Goldberg system of working with harmony and rhythm, and he explained chords to me the way he’d learned them. “Play me a C-diminished ninth,” he’d say, and I’d play it, and he’d say, “That ain’t no C-diminished ninth, I don’t know
what
that is, man.” I’d
played
a C-diminished ninth, all right, but what Biff had
wanted
me to play was a C-dominant chord with a flatted ninth. (Similarly, in Biff’s argot, a half-diminished became “a minor flat five.”) He taught me all the things he knew, hundreds of charts and tricks, milking the minor, moving voices; he gave me gratuitous advice: “Don’t play in B for no horn players, that’s a bum key for them, five sharps in it”; he told me stories about jazz men: “There was this one night with Philly Joe Jones, he turned the whole band around with his drumming. Did it as a joke. Got them so fucked up, they lost the meter”; he laid down the law: “Don’t you
never
lose the meter, man. You play them chords in their proper order, and you hold them for how long you’re supposed to, and that’s
it
, man”; issued warnings and proclamations: “Don’t you never mess with dope, you hear me? Lots of cats, they go listen to Bird, they go home and try to play like him, and they can’t do it, and they figure they got to go shoot dope the way he does. That ain’t the answer, dope ain’t what makes Bird play like he does. I don’t mind drinkin’, that goes together, booze and piano does. But you ever shoot a needle in your arm, I’ll personally come bust your ass, Iggie, you hear me? Blind or not, I’ll kick your ass all over the block I ever hear you’re messin’ with dope.”

The week before I met Rebecca, Biff had taken me up to Harlem with him. He didn’t live in Harlem anymore, but he went up there for a haircut every Wednesday. I don’t want to get into a dissection of that. All I know is that Biff lived on Canal Street, in a big loft that used to be a hat factory, and there were hundreds of barbershops in the area, including some barber colleges on the Bowery, but Biff went uptown to Harlem for his haircut every Wednesday. I was with him that Wednesday because he wanted me to meet a drummer who was putting together a trio and looking for a piano player. Biff figured I was about ready to get out there on my own; the only way I’d ever
really
learn to play ensemble piano was to start playing with a band. The guy he introduced me to must have been under a hot towel when we came into the barbershop. Biff told him I was a good man, told him I’d been getting down all the bop shit, knew hundreds of charts, and if he hadn’t yet hired a piano man for the
gig
on Staten Island, I was the man Biff was recommending for the job. The guy’s name was Herbie Cooper. He kept mumbling all the while Biff talked. Finally Biff said, “So what do you say, man?”

“This’s a union club,” Herbie mumbled. “You union?”

“No,” I said. “But I can join.”

“Costs more’n a bill to join,” Herbie said. The barber must’ve taken off the towel; I could suddenly understand him. “Gig don’t pay but seventy-five a week.”

“How long you booked for?” Biff asked.

“Just a week. Hardly be worth the kid makin’ that kind of investment.”

“He got to join the union sooner or later,” Biff said. “Might’s well be now.”

“How old’re you?” Herbie asked.

“I’ll be nineteen in October.”

“Your folks goan fuss ’bout you playin’ a club way out on Staten Island?”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said.

“How you goan
git
there, man?” Cooper said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How’re
you
gonna get there?”

“I got a car,” Herbie said. “Where you live, man?”

“In the Bronx.”

“I ain’t goan way to the Bronx to pick up no piano player. I can git me a piano man lives right aroun’ the corner here, an’ he damn good, too, used to play with Lunceford.”

“If he used to play with Lunceford,” Biff said, “he ain’t goan take no fuckin’ job in a Staten Island toilet for seventy-five a week. How much
you
gettin’ as leader, Herb?”

“I don’t see as that’s rightly your business,” Herbie said.

“Give the kid a break,” Biff said. “You got my word he’s a good man. What the hell more you need?”

“
You
goan pick him up in the Bronx, man? I need a blind piano player like I need a fuckin’ hole in the head.”

“I’ll come to Harlem,” I said. “If you’ll give me a ride from here, that’ll be fine.”

“Gig starts this Saturday. You goan be able to join the union an’ all by then?”

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” I said.

“We all colored in this band,” Herbie said as his final defense.

“I’m blind,” I said, as mine.

“Well, you go join the fuckin’ union, an’ git back to me by Friday. I ain’t heard from you by then, I git me another piano man.”

“I’ll call you soon as everything’s set,” I told him.

“Fuckin’ kid better be good,” Herbie said to Biff.

Which is how I happened to be playing piano in a bar on Staten Island on the night of July 18, 1945, when a girl standing near the piano said, “That’s a nice Erroll Garner imitation.”

This was my first paying job. I had started on Saturday night, and this was Wednesday, and whereas no bedazzled teenager had yet come up to the bandstand and requested a plaster cast of my cock, I was nonetheless learning that simply being up there, and visible, and making music was somehow attractive to certain types of girls. There are, I’m sure, countless theories to explain why some girls will go to bed with musicians after no more formal an introduction than a single chorus of “Stardust.” (“Stardust,” by the way, is a joke tune to jazz musicians. Whenever anyone says, “Let’s play ‘Stardust,’ ” the whole band breaks up. It has a good melody, but a totally dumb white chart.) I have never been able to understand the groupie phenomenon. I have never been able to understand the telephone, either, but that hasn’t prevented me from using it over the years. After I hit it big in 1955, it was not uncommon for girls to come to the piano, and, without preamble, whisper, “Let’s ball, Ike.”

This girl standing at the piano was Jewish. I knew that voice. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I refer you to the
other
Barbra Streisand. There are
two
Barbra Streisands. One of them sings. The other one talks. The singer enunciates each and every word clearly and meticulously; you cannot find a vocalist anywhere in the world who has more respect for lyrics. The talker is a Jewish girl from the Bronx (or Brooklyn — the difference is slight). I am not for one moment suggesting that Barbra Streisand goes to bed with blind jazz musicians; I have certainly never had the pleasure myself. (Please don’t call me, Barbra, I’ve got enough problems right now.) But you don’t grow up in Harlem and later an Italian section of the Bronx without learning that
all
Jewish girls put out. The girl at the piano was Jewish, and she had just delivered a perfectly acceptable opening line — “That’s a nice Erroll Garner imitation” — and just as my grandfather had entertained high hopes of
‘na bella chiavata
the night he and Pino dated those two “American” girls back in 1901, I now assumed I was on the verge of terminating the celibacy imposed by the return of Susan Koenig’s brother. I waited till we finished the set. The girl was still standing there. I turned to her and smiled.

“How do you know
he
isn’t imitating
me?
” I said.