In War Times (6 page)

“Yo!” repeated Wink. “I said, do you like jazz?”

“Who doesn’t?” It was the music of the day. The only people who didn’t like jazz, as far as Sam could tell, were the Nazis. “Once I heard Lunceford’s ‘White Heat,’ I never looked back.”

“You speak truth. Listen, Dance, what say we find out what kind of trouble we can get into? We’ve got all night. I hear Ellington’s in Baltimore this week. If we play it right we might be able to get to the Block and back before roll call.”

They did, just barely. Hanging on the stage at a theater in the entertainment district of Baltimore, listening to Ellington and owl-faced Strayhorn exchange ideas, they missed the three o’clock train and had to hitchhike. During the evening, they discovered that they both played several instruments—Sam, the piano and sax; Wink, the violin and trumpet. Wink, an ex-premed student, had switched to chemistry, which angered his father—that, and the fact that he had blown up a portion of his dad’s glass factory while performing an experiment.

Their lift dropped them off several miles from the front gate. As they walked briskly through the cold, many-starred night, thin, brilliant lines of fire streaked out over Chesapeake Bay.

“What now?” asked Wink.

“Tracers for the shells. I think they’re developing firing tables.”

“Round the clock.”

“The Army never sleeps. Besides, you can’t photograph the flight path in the daytime.”

“Well, I certainly intend to sleep.” Wink found that their room was perfectly situated to answer roll call from the window behind his cot, and claimed it was proof he was blessed.

On Saturday morning they were marched to the pistol range for sidearm practice, where they shot at paper targets, but they were really at Aberdeen to study a range of technical information, beginning with basic electricity and moving on to not-quite-explained heights of ordnance and advanced weaponry, according to their first quick lecture, delivered with no frills by their commanding officer.

Saturday noon, they were set free until Monday reveille. “This is how the better half lives,” exalted Wink, as he rummaged in his footlocker, from which organization had ebbed within minutes after inspection.

Sam pulled a worn black case from beneath his bed and opened it. “Plenty of reeds.” Music was the one constant in his life, the place where it seemed that, at least for fleeting moments, things could be set right, where a perfect world truly existed. “D.C.?”

“New York. I know the territory. I grew up on Long Island. A baby sax? That’s pretty cute.”

“Easier to carry than my alto.”

“You any good?”

Sam shrugged. “I’ve had a few paying gigs. You know any places in New York where we can sit in?”

“A couple. After hours.” Wink removed a violin case from his footlocker and set it on the floor.

“Machine gun?”

Wink grinned. “The world is not yet ready for my jazz violin. I have proof of that.”

“That first time Artie Shaw used strings—”

“Agh, we all puked when we heard that. My violin is not shy background stuff. But I play this too.” He pulled a cornet from a cloth bag, eyed it critically, spit on the bell and polished it with the bag, and slid the horn back into the bag. “I saw Beiderbecke when I was thirteen.”

“No kidding!”

“I used all my earnings that summer to buy this cornet. My old man was fit to be tied. I was working in his factory and after that he wouldn’t give me my own goddamned money. Put it in a bank account. He said.”

“You got it yet?”

“Hell, no. Still lazy and undeserving, apt to waste it on the same kind of nonsense. But, as you see, I’m no longer working for him.”

They got the last available room at the YMCA, grabbed a beer and a bite to eat, then headed to 52nd Street. The marquees were blacked out, but there was still enough light from cars and windows to read sandwich boards arrayed down the street, heralding one jazz luminary after another. Sam felt the rush of liberation and excitement that a city always gave him, a sense of intense, profligate possibilities.

Wink whistled. “Let us pray; this must be heaven. Teagarden, Hawkins, Eckstine.”

Over the next few hours they kept up a frantic pace, moving from one tiny club to the next, buying as few of the exorbitantly-priced drinks as possible. When Red Norvo took a break they dashed across 52nd Street to catch Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins in a cutting contest, Hawkins deep and moody with perfect unexpected pauses; Young with a lighter, more facile approach, a virtuoso of freeing a melody exactly when it needed to be liberated into a present of wild notes strung together with the barest of connections.

The audiences were exclusively white, as was usual in upscale venues. Sam was no stranger to racism—no one in America was. His parents were strangely free of it, but all towns and cities had their black and white side of the tracks. In North Carolina, at Camp Sutton, he had seen it head-on in their forays to town. Black and white drinking fountains were labeled, and when he’d tried to talk to the band members at one of the jazz tours that came through town, he was confronted afterward in the parking lot by a band of local vigilantes with sticks, who warned him not to “fratenize” with niggers again, and to tell his soldier friends the same. He didn’t have to; most of the other soldiers in Company C shared this attitude.

By that time he’d already spent the past six years on the other side of the tracks, listening, and was more used to the obverse—the foray into black territory to the after-hours joint on the other side of the tracks. He’d never been physically threatened in those instances, though, as he had been in North Carolina.

But even here, in New York City, it seemed that blacks were discouraged from mixing with white audiences—although he thrilled to spot Coleman Hawkins, whom they had seen onstage earlier, at a club across the street an hour later, sipping a beer and listening with deep concentration to a subtle, witty saxophone duel, couched within a big-band setting.

At the early hour of one
A.M.
they found themselves out on the street, pleasantly buzzed. “So where’s your sit-in place?” asked Sam.

“Minton’s. It’s in a hotel in Harlem. West a Hundred-and-eighteenth around Seventh. You don’t need a union card there.”

“Why not?”

“Minton’s got some kind of pull, I guess. All the musicians jam there. I was there a few months ago and saw Cab Calloway and a pretty damned good singer. Young girl. Sarah Vaughan. Didn’t dare try to play, but we might get up there for a minute or two before we get kicked off.”

“Which train?” asked Sam, with a grin.

“The quickest way, of course,” replied Wink, deadpan. “Take the ‘A’ Train,” written by Billy Strayhorn, had recently been a big hit for Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. The words were ostensibly based on Ellington’s directions to Strayhorn on how to get to Harlem.

Although they were the only whites on the street in Harlem, they drew no looks, which gave Sam a strange feeling of liberation after spending years as the lone, barely tolerated white guy on dark streets and in juke joints. The revolutionary music he’d heard in the poorer parts of towns and cities had been commandeered by white promoters and white musicians, and smoothed to Glenn Miller dance-band precision, where the surprises so important to Sam were few and far between.

Sleet slicked the sidewalk. Music issued temptingly from the briefly opened door of the Black Cat as someone ducked inside. Sam wanted to go in, and a minute later wanted to try the next club they passed, but Wink was resolute. “We’re going to the headwaters. You’ll thank me. There it is—Minton’s Playhouse. On the next corner.” Ahead was a marquee that read Minton’s Playhouse, which they entered through the Cecil Hotel.

Minton’s was tiny, and many of the handkerchief-sized tables were taken. Everyone in the audience seemed, like them, to be lugging instrument cases around with them. Battered cases of various shapes and sizes sat on the floor next to men leaning forward avidly, accompanied by beautifully dressed women. Sam and Wink found seats right next to the stage and ordered a beer apiece. The place smelled of long-vanished fried chicken and cigarette smoke.

The piano player assayed halting, entire chords, violently augmented or flatted, linked by the trumpet’s fleeting expressionistic runs. The drummer intrigued Sam. He used all four limbs independently to produce near-melodic lines with his various percussives. The bass player wore an expression of deep concentration, plucking notes from within what seemed an entirely different timeline from the other musicians. The fractured music formed a fascinating entirety.

“Who’s playing?” Wink asked the waiter in a loud whisper, breaking the strange, complete quiet of the listeners. Several people turned and frowned at him. The waiter leaned close.

“Guy named Thelonious Monk. Oh, sorry—Thelonious
Sphere
Monk. Pettiford on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet.” Another musician pushed his way past their table, holding his music case overhead.

“Sax,” said Sam approvingly, as the man stepped onstage, opened his case, and slipped the strap over his head.

“That’s Bird.”

The Bird guy wore a soiled T-shirt, a fancy black overcoat with a fur collar, and sunglasses. The wrinkles in his pants were accentuated by the single brilliant spotlight illuminating the small, dingy stage, where the grand piano and drums took up so much room that the rest of the players barely had room to stand. The band swung into a number so fast it was indeed dizzying, accompanied by shouts from the audience: “Play it, man!” “That’s it! Blow!” Apparently silence did not reign during fast numbers.

“Strange,” remarked Sam.

Wink’s eyes were closed. After a moment he said, “Flatted fifths.”

“Start and stop just anywhere.”

“Playing with rhythm.”

The spoken phrase “Salt
pea
-nuts,
pea
-nuts,” was repeated several times, separated by a beat that kept Sam strangely unbalanced along with the octave jump between “salt” and “pea.”

When the “Salt Peanuts” piece was over, another trumpeter climbed onto the stage. Dizzy looked at him and smiled in a predatory way. “All right, then. ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’ A-flat seventh,” he said, and counted out the beat.

Sam and Wink looked at each other, sharing the knowledge that A-flat seventh was not an easy key.

The new trumpeter frowned for a few bars, not even blowing. Finally he kicked in with a few notes, but they were in the wrong key. Shamefaced, he climbed down. Dizzy stopped blowing for a moment to smile once again—this time, Sam saw satisfaction in that smile. The strange key, the challenge, was a way of testing aspiring players.

But, as the numbers passed through his being, each unique—“I Got Rhythm” in B-natural played at breakneck speed; something called “Epistrophy” which Sam had never heard of before—Sam realized that this music was more than just a challenge. It was a new way of thinking about music, about notes, about keys, about rhythm. When they played “Anything Goes,” anything did. Quick triplets. Forays that skipped across the face of a melody like a stone across water, veering in and out of keys. Octave bounces as in “Salt Peanuts.”

Pettiford and Monk left around three, but Bird and Diz seemed oblivious to their absence. Bird, eyes closed, face glistening with sweat, leaned back and let loose with something entirely new in the world, a long wild phrase that Diz promptly echoed without a mistake. In what seemed the middle of a lightning-fast unison run, they stopped abruptly.

Parker squinted against the glare of the spotlight. “Are those instruments I see there, boys?”

“You bet,” Wink said.

“Come on up and play.”
If you can
, was the unspoken dare—almost a jeer—familiar to Sam and apparently to Wink as well.

Though completely out of their league in this new land of utterly unique music, they hurriedly unpacked their instruments. Sam counted it a point in Wink’s favor that he was quite as eager as Sam to make a fool of himself. Bird swung into something he said was “Body and Soul, D,” but which, after the first introductory bar, bore only a passing resemblance to the original, which Hawkins had already revolutionized.

Sam followed Bird’s lead, almost holding his own. Wink blatted out a few notes. Bird looked oblivious to the world but was actually exquisitely attuned to his backup men of the moment for about three minutes, while Diz, still playing, cast him annoyed sidelong looks.

Parker suddenly put down his horn, ambled into a dark corner, shrugged off his coat, whipped off his tie, and tied it around his arm.

“Hell,” Diz grumbled. He stopped playing as well, dropped onto the piano bench, and wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief.

Sam and Wink began a dialogue. It was the first time they had ever played together.

Sam lost himself in the naked lineaments of pure, timeless tone. Wink played himself into what seemed like dead ends and then drew Sam with him over a chasm of skipped chords which, though unplayed, somehow resonated. Dizzy suddenly regained interest, and then Bird, his equilibrium restored, returned and joined Diz in a rapid, luminescent flight, leaving the two soldiers in the dust.

Afterward, Sam decided he had stepped into one of Hadntz’s perfect worlds and lived a couple of lifetimes there. He and Wink soon brought their conversation to a good stopping point and climbed down from the stage, conceding defeat concurrently. While the audience, now swelled by a new party that had just wandered in, offered ragged applause—probably because he and Wink had given up—Dizzy and Parker swung into something that sounded like “Cherokee,” except that it was about ten times faster and was like a roller coaster, the most impressive display of instrumental virtuosity Sam had ever heard. “‘Koko’,” said Parker, just for them, when they had finished—evidently the title.

A light glared abruptly and descended stageward on a rope, illuminating the dapper man turning the crank. “Closing time.”

“That’s Minton,” said Wink.

Parker picked up the tip jar and stuffed the entire take into his coat pocket. Dizzy blew out his mouthpiece and looked the other way.