Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (5 page)

I started going to jazz c
lubs in New York when I was twelve or thirteen, first with my older cousins Mike and Jack, and then later on my own. I remember seeing the mighty Count Basie band at a matinee at Birdland, with the great Sonny Payne on drums. When the whole band pumped out one of those thirteenth chords, you could feel the breeze on your face.

O
nce upon a time, the jazz club was a mythic place that signified urban romance, free-loving hipsterism and the Dionysian rites of the Exotic Black Man: in short, the dread possibility of ecstasy. As a survivor of many nights in actual jazz clubs, I can testify that the image was only partly correct.

Like most of the finer things in life, jazz is an acquired taste. As a suburban youth, I would often ride the bus up the New Jersey Turnpike through the industrial wasteland that must be crossed before the island of Manhattan is won. The combined sum of several weeks' allowance would be burning a hole in my pocket. After docking at the dependably sinister Port Authority terminal, I'd take the AA train to Waverly Place in the West Village, which by then had pretty much completed its transformation from bohemia into Bohemia Land. Tourists nursed espressos at the Cafe Wha? and the Cafe Bizarre. At
Figaro's coffee shop on Bleecker and MacDougal, I'd order a burger and listen to my heart pound as I watched the exquisite, joyless waitresses slink around the room in black leotards. An epigraph on the menu read “Where the Beat meet the Elite.”

By the early sixties, jazz, having already been displaced as America's dance music of choice by rock and roll, was facing another crisis. College kids, after a brief flirtation with bop and cool jazz, had chosen “folk” music as their official enthusiasm. Unlike gnarly post-Parker jazz, guitar-based roots music was totally accessible and irony free, and almost anyone could play it in some form. Moreover, the leftist anthems of the Depression were easily adapted to become the official music of the early civil rights movement. New clubs featuring Dylan, The Tarriers, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, and the like were pulling in a huge share of the business. Nevertheless, the Village was still the best place to hear jazz in its last glorious incarnation.

At the Village Vanguard, my distress at being the youngest person in the audience would dissolve as soon as the music started. In the early sixties, gods stood on that tiny stage. A lot of them drank J&B and smoked Luckies, but they were gods just the same. Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were still youngish, fearless and working at the summit of their creativity. The proprietor, Max Gordon, once he got to know my face, used to seat me at the banquet next to the drum kit and give me a flat bar Coke. The cover charge was, like, seven bucks.

One of my favorites was bassist/composer Charles Mingus, who'd always bring along his demonic drummer, Dannie Richmond. Every time Richmond started banging out that triple time, the vibration of his sizzle cymbal would move my glass toward
the edge of the table and I'd have to push it back to the center. I remember Mingus halting a tune in midgallop to lecture us on race, politics, cheating record companies and hypocrisy, both black and white. Watching this tempestuous artist at work, I found the extramusical events just as exciting as the music. I have to admit cringing, though, when Mingus, on one of his rougher nights, started screaming “Uncle Tom!” at old Coleman Hawkins, who was sitting at the bar. Hawk just gave him a world-weary smile and took another swig. Once, when I complimented pianist Jaki Byard after a set, he actually sat down at my table and graciously answered some questions about the music.

As the premier club in New York at that time, the Vanguard attracted a crowd that was a mix of serious fans and tourists. Of course there would always be the young preppie in a blazer sitting with his date, attractive in a little black dress. Imagine a split-screen: On the left, the kid's eyes are wide, his face is flushed; he's transfixed. He can't believe he's finally in a real jazz club twelve feet away from the great John Coltrane, who's blowing up a hurricane.

His date, on the right side of the screen, is in hell. Although she's heard her boyfriend talk about jazz, this is her first real exposure. She's been in this tiny, smoky, smelly room for almost an hour now, nursing screwdrivers and being forced to listen to four Negroes create a din that sounds like nothing imagined on God's earth. She's got her head in her hands down on the table because it hurts, a real pounder behind the eyes. Most humiliating is the fact that her boyfriend has forsaken her for a black man who seems to be using his silver horn as a satanic instrument of masturbation. The two sides of the screen merge when
she finally pulls on her date's arm and demands to be escorted out. In the clubs, this classic scene can still be glimpsed today, always interesting, always poignant.

Two of the most mind-blowing musicians I got to see at the Vanguard were both patriarchs of early jazz who were still active in the sixties. Earl “Fatha” Hines had been a member of Armstrong's original Hot Five and, during the thirties, had been the main attraction at Al Capone's Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago. As if that weren't enough, the band he'd led in the forties, the one that included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Gene Ammons and Wardell Gray, was the first big band to feature bebop players and arrangements. Hines's gold lamé jacket, legendary smile and many-ringed fingers had the same effect on me as I'm sure they had on the crowd at the Grand Terrace. And then he began to play. I pretty much knew what to expect: he still played clean and swinging. I suppose it was my romantic imagination, but the music seemed to be enhanced by a sonic glow, an aura earned on its journey across an ocean of time.

The same could be said of the music of Willie “The Lion” Smith. In the twenties and thirties, Willie had been one of the mighty virtuosos who developed Harlem “stride” piano. In the sixties, Willie was still sharp and strong, a past master who seemed to have walked straight from a Depression rent party into the present, complete with cocked derby, milk bottle glasses and clenched cigar. He'd worked up his act into a seminar in jazz history, alternating pieces from his repertoire with stories about the musical life of Harlem, the cutting contests, the gangsters and the nuances that defined the styles of his contemporaries James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Luckey Roberts and
Eubie Blake. He had a special affection for his protégé Duke Ellington, whose works he generously performed.

Claiming that his father was a Jewish gambler, Willie peppered his tales with Yiddishisms and made a point of wearing a Jewish star. Though the jive was fascinating, the real fun began when he commenced his abuse of the Steinway, his phenomenal left hand pumping like a locomotive as the right filigreed the melody. After knocking out his version of “Carolina Shout,” Willie's comment was “Now that's what you call . . .
real good
.” But he could be lyrical too, as he was on his own “Echoes of Spring.”

One more thing about the tough, road-hardened African American entertainers from the twenties who had to be heard without the benefit of microphones, men like Willie, Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, Ellington's band: they could play
REALLY LOUD
!

Bill Evans at the Vanguard was always a gas. Those familiar only with his studio recordings don't realize what a spry, funky hard-charger he could be on “up” material in a live setting. When he played quirky tunes like “Little Lulu,” he could be funny, too. Of course, even then, he rarely shifted out of that posture you see in photos, doubled over at the waist, head inside the piano as if trying to locate a rattly string. By the late seventies, I noticed that this quintessential modernist had developed an odd, loping shuffle in his right-hand lines, as if he was regressing to an antiquated rhythmic style dating back to Willie Smith's day. What was up with that?

Real fans and serious hipsters remember Slug's Bar on Third Street between avenues B and C. The neighborhood was dicey
but the sounds were happening. Some nights, the audience would be just me, eyes darting around nervously, and maybe two heavily medicated patrons nodding at their tables. Cedar Walton, Jackie McLean, Art Farmer and Jimmy Cobb were among the regular performers. In 1972, trumpet star Lee Morgan's girl shot and killed him out front.

Around 1965, the folk/rock club Cafe au Go Go started a Monday night jazz policy. These were jam sessions featuring top players who happened to be in town. The one I attended was one of the best all-around nights of jazz I ever saw. The rhythm section alone—Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Willie Bobo on drums—began the set. The other players—Hank Mobley on tenor, Dave Pike on vibes and Curtis Fuller, I think, on bone—fell by as the night went on. Jamming on standards and blues for over two hours without a break, Mobley and Kelly were monstrous: hard-swinging and composing in the moment. It was the shit and I knew I was lucky to be there.

When the civil rights movement became more militant in the mid-sixties, the music followed suit. In those years, a lot of jazz was motivated by righteous political fury, or directed toward a spiritual catharsis. The clubs, overwhelmed for the moment by the rock revolution, began to close. The Five Spot, the Half Note and, finally, Slug's, all gradually vanished. The Village Gate managed to survive only by switching to rock and Latin sounds.

In the eighties, the jazz scene returned, “healthier” than ever. You'd go to hear acts in nifty, wholesome “club environments” and “art spaces.” No smoking, of course, no nodding junkies, no heavy boozing—in fact, no vice of any kind except, perhaps, the criminally high cover and drink charges. The clubs that presented the
top mainstream acts all had a suitably mainstream look and were very strict about reservations. One night in the eighties, I took some friends to Michael's Pub, then home to Woody Allen's Monday night gigs, to see a piano trio. The atmosphere was tense and the maitre d' was rude—there was no romance at all.

We split before the set started. Bring back Slug's!

As I remember, Mort Fega's radio show
Jazz Unlimited
came on at midnight and ended at five or six a.m. In order to escape my parents' wrath, I had to pull the radio under the covers. I'd usually drift off before the closing theme.

T
he Nightfly character from my first solo album wasn't supposed to be a stand-in for any particular jazz DJ. But there were a few actual radio personalities of the time that went into the mix. In the early sixties, a number of Manhattan's powerful stations were blasting hard bop throughout the metropolitan area. If you knew where to find it, you could hear great jazz around the clock.

After school, I'd rush home to hear Riverside Radio's fabulously erudite Ed Beach. Ed's show,
Just Jazz
, would use its full two hours to focus on just one player, or even one aspect of a player's career. After playing a favorite cut culled from his fabulous record collection, he'd tell you details about the recording session and make witty asides, drawing you in with his classical actor's voice and diction. I remember a program devoted exclusively to Johnny Hodges's work with small groups in the forties and fifties. There was another that covered trumpeter
Blue Mitchell's work as a sideman. Ed was talking to fellow fanatics only: dabblers, keep out.

Jazz critics Dan Morgenstern and Martin Williams both had excellent jazz shows back then, and I remember a droll dude named R. D. Harlan on WNCN. After midnight, I could always tune in to WADO and hear King Pleasure sing DJ “Symphony Sid” Torin's wiggy theme song:

Play anything cool for me and my baby

We don't want to think we're listenin' to lazy

It's got to be Prez, Bird, Shearing or the Basie

The dial is set right close to eighty—

Let 'er roll . . .

On Friday nights, Sid was still doing remote broadcasts from Birdland (“The Jazz Corner of the World”!). I'd close the door to my room and blast live music by Basie and Mingus out of that little Zenith table radio. Unhappily, Sid, an important advocate of modern jazz since the early days of bop, was, by the mid-sixties, pegged the “jazz traitor” for switching to a mostly Latin and Afro-Cuban playlist.

My main man was WEVD's all-night DJ Mort Fega. Unlike Symphony Sid, whose growling hepcat routine seemed out of sync with the Kennedy era (“No, dahling, I'm not goin'a play Etta Jones tonight”), Mort had no jive persona to sell. He was laid-back, knowledgeable and forthright, the cool uncle you always wished you'd had. I looked forward to Mort's between-track commentary as much as to the music itself. With Red Garland's
“Mort's Report” playing softly in the background, Mort, with the grace and enthusiasm that reveals itself only in the most bona fide jazz lover, would carefully list every soloist and sideman.

In those days, giants, as jazz fans like to say, walked the earth. They also recorded quite frequently for labels like Prestige, Blue Note, Columbia and Impulse, and Mort played them all—Miles, Monk, Rollins, Mingus, Coltrane, Bill Evans and so on. But he also had his own, somewhat lesser known, personal favorites. One was Oliver Nelson, whose exquisite
Blues and the Abstract Truth
album he helped to popularize. I recall frequent playings of Kenny Dorham's “Sao Paulo” with Joe Henderson on tenor. And it was on Mort's show that I first heard the exhilarating jive tales of His Royal Hipness, Lord Buckley. Many of his over-the-top routines, recorded in the mid-fifties, still resonated with the times. In Buckley's Mahatma Gandhi bit, “The Hip Gan,” Mr. Rabadee, the band contractor, asks Gandhi to tell him which one of the instruments he digs the most. The Hip Gan tells him that “the instrument, you ain't got here.”

Mister Rabadee said, “Man, what are you sayin'? I got the doong-doong players, and the bang-bang players, and the lebedee players, and the reed heads, and the lute heads, and every head that I could dig up that swing out of the jungle here and you tell me that the one you dig the most I ain't got here?”

Said, “Dat's right.”

He said, “Well, sweet double hipness, great beloved nonstop beauty, straighten me—‘cause I'm ready.”

And The Hip Gan say, “That's right, that's right. Well,
here's the lick.” He said, “Baby, the instrument of all India which I dig the music the most of, that swings my soul up in that great cathedral-head of beauty is the music of the . . .”

(scats) He said, “. . . the spinnin' wheel, baby.”

(scats) . . . knock a little patch on the cat's pants . . .

(scats) . . . swing a coat on Grandma . . .

(scats) . . . get a little juice on the table . . .

(scats) . . . swang up, get a little circus money . . .

(scats) . . . He said, “The spinnin' wheel, baby. I hope I didn't . . . bring you down.”

Mort also had his salty side. My partner, Walter Becker, also a huge fan, told me that he once heard Mort express his disdain for avant-gardist Albert Ayler by playing a minute of a cut and then halting it with needle-scraping finality. If Ayler's saxophonic rage seemed more justifiable to my eighteen-year-old self in 1966, I can also recall the urge to scrape something across my college roommate's face when he cranked up Ayler's “Ghosts” at one o'clock in the morning.

Shortly before Mort died in 2005, Walter and I had a gig in Palm Beach, Florida. Mort and his wife, Muriel, had been living there since 1986. To our astonishment, he came to the gig and gave us a nice write-up in his
Palm Beach Post
column. Afterwards, we hooked up. He was just as cool and steady as he'd sounded all those years earlier when he rode WEVD's signal through the swirling, bitter Northeastern night. Using the hoary but handy language of jazz, a stew of Pops, Prez, Bird, Diz, Yiddish and British, he said that if we had “eyes to get together,” we should just “give him a schrei.”