Streets of Gold (48 page)

The chart was the very one I had tried to explain to Susan Koenig on the day she introduced me to the mysteries and delights of blind passion, with that selfsame overworked, I, VI, II, V in the first two bars.

“Terrific, ain’t it?” Mark Aronowitz said to me as we ran down the chords.

“Bound to be a smash,” I said.

We spent close to forty minutes rehearsing the tune, and we were ready to record the first take when Gerri announced that she had to go to the ladies’, and swept out of the studio followed by her tittering hairdresser, The boys and I sat waiting for her to come back. Rudy Hirsch was pacing nervously. Five minutes went by. Ten minutes. Rudy said, “Mark, will you for Christ’s sake go find her?” Mark went out of the studio, and Orry began blowing a twelve-bar blues, and we all picked up on him and jammed for the next ten minutes, and still no Gerri, and now no Mark either.

“Shut up, you guys,” Rudy said. “Where are they?” he asked Uncle Stanislaw, who replied,
“Kto wie?”

“Go find them,” Rudy said to the chauffeur from San Diego, and the chauffeur said “Groovy” and went out of the studio. We were ten minutes into the third and final hour already, and we still hadn’t cut a take, nor had we yet rehearsed the tune that was to be the flip side of the record.

Mark came back into the studio and said, “The lady’s gone home.”

“What?” Rudy said. “What do you mean, she’s gone home?
Home?
Where is she?”

“I told you. She went home.”

“Why?”

“Female complaint.”

“What?”

“She’s menstruating,” Mark said. “She has cramps.”

“What?”

“Rudy,” Mark said, “I can’t believe you’re as hard of hearing as you pretend to be.”

“What?” Rudy said. He was about to have a fit. I have heard many men on the edge of throwing a tantrum, and Rudy was right there, an inch away. “Are you telling me that dumb cunt walked out of here because she...”

“Have
you
ever tried singing when you’re menstruating?” Mark said.

“I have never,” Rudy said, “in my entire experience in the music business had some dumb cunt walk out of a recording session because she got her period. I have had a dumb cunt blow every member of the band, including the drummer, and I have had a dumb cunt threaten to slit her wrists if we didn’t fire the trombonist, but never, and this goes back thirty years in this fucking business, never have I had a cunt tell me she couldn’t sing because she got her period. What the fuck has anybody’s
period
got to do with the music business?”

“We’ll try it again tomorrow,” Mark said.

“The
fuck
we will!” Rudy exploded. “You think
I’m
going back to Harry and tell him we spent all this money for nothing? He’ll throw me out the window.”

“
I’ll
talk to Harry,” Mark said.

“I want the five bills back,” Rudy said abruptly. “I want that money back. And you tell that cunt singe of yours if I ever lay eyes on her again, I’ll give her such a period she’ll never forget it in her life. I’ll give her such cramps...”

“Rudy, please relax,” Mark said calmly. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

“We’ll try again
never
!” Rudy shouted. “I paid for today, not tomorrow. We got forty-five minutes left I already paid for, who’s going to absorb that? You? You’ll be lucky if Harry doesn’t sue you! You wouldn’t pull this if we were Columbia, I can tell you that. You think because we’re small...”

“Rudy, please, you’ll have a heart attack.”

“That’s better than getting thrown out the window,” Rudy shouted, and then he must have pressed the button connecting him to the control booth because he suddenly asked in a much calmer voice, “How much time do we have exactly, Ned?”

“Forty-one seven,” a voice said over the loudspeaker.

“I’m getting two sides out of this session,” Rudy said. “I
paid
for two sides, and I’m going
back
with two sides. What can these shlocks play?”

I realized he was referring to the Dwight Jamison Quintet.

“How about ‘Stardust’?” I said.

“Very funny,” Rudy said. “Ned,” he said, “take your level, and get ready to roll.”

“Right,” Ned said over the loudspeaker.

“I want a jump and a ballad,” Rudy said to me. “How’s the time, Ned?”

“Thirty-nine twenty,” Ned answered.

Rudy was standing close to the piano now; his voice was almost confidential. “Start playing,” he said. “Ned’ll let us know when he’s got his level, and then it’s for real. If we’re lucky, we’ll get two takes on each side.”

“Just a second here,” Mark said.

“What now? If we run into overtime...”

“These men were hired to back a vocalist,” Mark said. “I accepted scale because...”

“And you’re
taking
scale, too,” Rudy said, “or I’ll go to AFTRA and your cunt singer’ll never open her mouth again in New York. Ned, you ready?”

“Ready.”

“How about you, maestro?”

“Give us a minute to run down the tunes, will you?”

“We ain’t
got
a minute,” Rudy said. “Ned, where are we?”

“Thirty-seven twelve.”

“Play,” Rudy said. “Play good.”

The jump tune was chose was “A Night in Tunisia,” which by 1955 had already become a bop standard. We had no opportunity to rehearse it or time it. We did six bars, and then Ned cut in to say he had his level, and I counted off the beat again, and we took it from the top. Rudy stopped us before we got to the bridge, telling us we were playing too fast. Peter Dodds, my drummer, muttered something under his breath. He had cut his chops playing almost
everything
at breakneck speed, and here was a halfassed A&R man telling us we were playing too fast when maybe we were ambling along at 250 on the metronome. I counted off again, slower this time, and we got through the second take without any interruptions from Rudy. He listened to the playback, checked the time with Ned again, and said he wanted another take, this time with an added unison chorus of flute and piano. (Rudy was later to take credit for the “distinctive sound” of the Dwight Jamison Quintet.) We did the third take, and Rudy said it was “satisfactory.” (You was adequate, man.) I hadn’t much liked the sound of it at all. Orry and I had not rehearsed any of the riffs we played together, and it seemed to me they were extraordinarily sloppy. For the flip side, we had decided on “The Man I Love.” Rudy checked the time again, and Ned informed him we had five minutes and twenty-two seconds left before our studio time ended. By union edict, each side of a single could run no longer than three and a half minutes. This meant we had to get the ballad right on the first take. Either that, or Rudy would have to go back to his boss with only one side of a record, and Harry would throw him out of the window.

“All right, let’s go, let’s go,” he said. “You. You got a mute?”

“Me?” Hank said.

“No, the flute player, who the fuck you think I mean?”

“Sure, I’ve got a mute,” Hank said.

“Put it in your horn. And
you
, I want brushes on the ride cymbal, and no klook-a-mop shit. I want everybody cooling it but the piano and the flute, that’s what I want to hear mostly. Open it with piano and flute in unison, then give me two choruses on piano, one on flute, back to the head again and out You got me? The rest of you guys play anything louder than a whisper, I’ll cut off your balls. Ned, what’ve we got?”

“Four and twenty,” Ned said, and he was not referring to blackbirds baked in a pie.

“Let’s go, here’s your beat,” Rudy said. “One... two...”

“I’ll set the tempo,” I said.

“You played too fast on...”

“It’s
my
band.
I’ll
set the tempo,” I said.

Rudy might have argued the point further, but time was running out, time was tick-tocking along, and success was waiting in the wings to gather us into his powerful arms, and press us to his barrel chest, and belch into our faces. The contretemps lasted no more than ten seconds.

“Just, for Christ’s sake, start
playing!
” Rudy said.

I have listened to that unrehearsed, totally improvised version of “The Man I Love” countless times since 1955, in an attempt to understand why disk jockeys all over the country, including those on the rock stations, suddenly began playing the record incessantly. Payola did not account for it. Rudy’s company was small and virtually without funds; we might, in fact, have sold many more copies than we actually did if distribution and promotion had been even slightly better. I am firmly convinced, and Rudy swears to it, that nobody got anything under the table. The record simply took off, and I’ll be damned if I know why. In my estimation, it is simply not a very good record. All it did was define a sound, and even the sound was an accident.

I still believe we achieved that smoothly rehearsed ensemble effect only because we were trying to prove to Rudy that a group of highly trained musicians did not have to be told how to blow or at what speed. I think Hank and Peter were angry all through the three minutes and forty-four seconds it took us to cut the side. If you listen closely to the record, you can hear a heated understatement from the trumpet and drums, as though they are trying to push through the imposed restraints — the straight mute in the horn, the brushes on the top cymbals. Listening, you can hear rage seething in the background, vibrating beneath the diamond-hard (also somewhat angry) piano, and the silvery-cool tones of the flute. (Mark was later to take credit for the flute; it had been
his
inspiration, he said.)

But in addition to the anger, and perhaps as a result of it, the sound also has that quality of reckless freedom one usually associates with a jam session. We were all of us quite relaxed, despite Rudy’s hysteria. Frankly, none of us gave a good goddamn about his problems, nor did we for a moment believe the record would ever be released. We figured Rudy was simply protecting his job. He must have felt fairly certain that Mark would return the five-hundred-dollar advance paid to Gerri Pryce, the unknown disappearing singing star. But he had agreed to pay us for three hours at scale, and we were still there, we had not walked out, we had not had our periods, we had in fact already done three takes on an undistinguished “Night in Tunisia,” and he would have to pay us in full whether we cut the second side of the record or not. The way we figured it, the two sides were Rudy’s insurance policy. He could not go back to his boss with nothing to show for the company’s cash outlay. If his boss didn’t like the sides, well, there was no accounting for taste, right? Into the ashcan, and better luck next time; Rudy had done his job, he had delivered a viable record. Meanwhile, all we were getting was scale, and for scale you do not bust your ass. For scale, you relax — especially when the session is going to be over and done with in less than four minutes. We were all very relaxed.

My piano playing on “Man” is almost a put-on, in fact, a combination of clumpy Dave Brubeck, bluesy-funky Horace Silver, and pyrotechnic Oscar Peterson. Orry, too, is more frivolous on this side than on the “Tunisia” cut, perhaps because he was sensing my own devil-may-care, what-the-hell attitude. Our head chorus, possibly the only display of real musicianship on the record, is a small miracle of precision, considering we’d never rehearsed any of the figures we played spontaneously and in unison. (They may have been bop figures we’d both heard before, I’m sure I don’t know; they sound fresh and improvisational to me, even now.) The lead-in Orry gives to my piano solo is a corny, overworked bop riff, a series of eighth-note triplets, which he restates at the end of my two choruses and uses as a springboard for his own thoroughly uninspired solo. Eight bars into Orry’s solo, Peter and Hank suddenly stop playing, and Stu Holman begins walking the chart on bass, with me tossing right-hand sprinkles haphazardly into the mix (it sounds a little like a stout man walking ponderously on glass, which shatters with each footfall) until we go into the head and home with the full ensemble. Hank takes out the straight mute before we wrap it up, and Peter drops a bass-drum bomb that comes like an unexpected belch, Orry and I repeating the same figures we played at the top, this time more knowledgeably. That last single-string strum on the bass is because Stu Holman somehow thought we were going into another chorus. It promises something that never comes because that’s where the record ends. When I later asked Peter and Hank why they’d stopped playing eight bars into Orry’s flute solo, they told me he was boring them out of their minds, and they just quit.

That was the record that ensured almost ten years of popularity.

The quintet has probably played “The Man I Love” twenty thousand times since 1955. The musicians come and go, they are replaced, they leave to form groups of their own (as did Orry), they become hopeless addicts (as did Peter), or they simply quit the music business (as did Hank D’Allessio, who is now a real estate agent in Santa Monica). The only one of the original quintet who is still with me when we play infrequent club dates is Stu Holman. But wherever and whenever we play, “The Man I Love” is always requested, and if we deviate by so much as a thirty-second note from the way we played it on that ancient disk, the crowd begins to grumble. We are supposed to reproduce the record note by note, without variation, a demand anathema to jazz musicians. (I knew exactly how Bobby Darin felt, may God rest his soul, when I caught him in Vegas years after his initial success, and he was singing up a storm, better than he’d ever sung in his life, and all the audience wanted to hear was “Mack the Knife.”) I’m a better musician now than I was in 1955. I know for certain that any one of my quintets, on occasions too numerous to recall, has played “The Man I Love” better than the original quintet did on that September Thursday in 1955. In fact, when the original quintet (minus Peter, who was in Lexington) opened at Birdland the next year, we jammed on “Man” for a full twenty minutes, and Christ, we were beautiful that night, we put to shame the record that had launched us into the big time.