Jordan County (6 page)

“Look here now,” Pearly said, spreading a sheet of music. “It’s easy as Baby Ray. All those squiggles and dots and dashes, theyre not there to mix you up, they are there to help
you. Look what I mean. Here’s this fellow with a round white face — he goes slow. Give him a leg, like this one here, and he goes twice as fast. Then black his face and he goes twice as fast again, like Jesse Owens outrunning all those white men. Put him a tail on the end of his leg and he doubles speed, eight times as swift as the round-face white one. Another tail, that makes it a flipper; he goes doubling up again. All the time doubling, however many. Comprehend?”

“Two tails and he goes sixteen times as fast?”

“Co-rect. You catching on.”

“That does seem mighty swift.”

“Well, you got to remember — that white-face fellow, he goes awful slow. We’ll get to sixty-fourths before we’re done. And look at this. Where he sits on the ladder, high or low, shows how he sounds, how shrill or rumbly. F, A, C, E, between the rungs: spells face. The higher he goes, the higher you go with him. Here. Play me this line by the notes, and take it easy. All I’m trying to do is teach you something on paper that you already know in your mind.”

Duff had the flannel trousers now and the coat of many colors, but he could not wear the two-tone shoes because they were only lent for the duration of the job. Like the jacket and trousers they belonged to the boat, and the owner would not allow him to slit them for his corns. But that was all right; he had other compensations. In Memphis, on the trip back downriver, he bought a new cornet, a golden horn with easy valves and a glitter like new money. He wrapped the old one carefully in burlap and mailed it back to the warden.
Here and thanks
, he wrote in a note he inclosed.
Give it to some other boy to learn on. I am fine
.

Jefferson played piano. After the second trip he persuaded Duff to join him on a job in a New Orleans riverfront dancehall near the Quarter. With four other musicians, drums, trombone, clarinet, guitar, they formed a combination known as Pearly Jefferson’s Basin Six. As a group — though they made no recordings by which to prove or disprove it at this
late date, or even to argue or rave over — the Basin Six were probably not as good as the cultists nowadays declare. They were late in the tradition, too late for the “carving” contests held on street corners in the days when rival bands played to attract the public to their dancehalls and cafés, too late also for the days when a band advertised its music by driving around town in a mule-drawn wagon, the musicians hunched in the bed between the pianist, who faced forward against the driver’s seat, and the trombone man, who faced rear and moved his slide out over the tailgate. There was none of that left by the time Duff Conway reached New Orleans. But late or early, he was in the tradition. He played the same songs for people who had heard them in the early days and he got to know musicians who had grown old in the trade, who had sat on the same rostrum with Buddy Dubray and Cleaver Williams and were willing to talk about it: as for instance, how Buddy would lean out of a window, pointing the bell of his cornet toward the city, and “call his children home,” meaning that he would signal the customers to come on out, the dance was getting started; he hadnt needed to go downtown to advertise. Duff’s four years in New Orleans were not the years of his greatest music, but they did more than any other years to develop his final tone and style. Backed by the example of Blind Bailey — who had never presumed to “teach” him anything — they were the years that made him what he was when, later, musicians who were supposed to know called him the best horn man of his time.

In March of 1935 he accepted a job with Rex Ingersoll in New York. Tall, handsome, light-skinned, with sideburns and a hairline mustache, Ingersoll was billed as “the crown prince of swing” in billboard and newspaper advertisements for the motion pictures and radio programs which featured him. In New Orleans two weeks before, he had heard Duff play and had talked with him for half an hour. He was interested in the Basin Six treatment of Maple Leaf Rag and had paid Pearly a hundred dollars for what he called the “arrangement.” Pearly
spent ten dollars of it on a wreath for Cleaver Williams’ grave (Williams had played the Rag that way, twenty years ago), gave another twenty to beggars on the street (that was the way Williams had wound up, begging on the street after he lost a hand in a shooting scrape) and blew the rest on a beer bust for the band. From New York Ingersoll telegraphed Duff an offer of eighty dollars a week. Duff packed a cardboard suitcase and caught the first train north.

Ingersoll was waiting for him at Pennsylvania Station. From there he took Duff straight to a tailor who measured him for half a dozen orchestra suits. “We’ll get that out of the way first,” he said. Then he took him to rehearsal. Afterwards he told him, “Duff, you really blow that thing. It’s great, kid, really great. But it’s a little different up here. On those passages that belong to you, go right on and ride it out; it’s great. But other times you have to hold back on it, sort of melt in with the others. See what I mean?”

“Play it soft?”

“Yes, kid, background it. Tacet.”

“All right, Rex.”

He tried to do as he was told, but two days later Ingersoll spoke to him again about it. “We’ve got to take out some of the blare,” he said. “Not that it’s not great. It’s really great. But you know, kid, we got to keep the icks happy, not go breaking their eardrums.”

Duff tried this time, too. He kept on trying, right up to the day when he couldnt even try any longer; he had to give it up. Later he explained it this way:

“He told me to hold back on it, and I tried. But I couldnt. So Rex put a mute in the horn and hung a derby over the bell. That was all right, then — Rex said it was fine.” Duff wagged his head. “Maybe it was, to listen to, but my wind backed up on me. What was suppose to be coming out the other end got choked back down my throat. I like to bust. Rex said it was great, kid, great, but it got me so wrought-up I couldnt sleep. I’d sit up mornings, trying to woodshed it out of me,
but that didnt help any whole lot. So finally one night I stayed home.

“Next afternoon when Rex come round I told him how it was. ‘I cant,’ I told him. But he said I was wrong. He said music wasnt only for the ones that played it; it was for the ones that listened to it, too. He said it was up to us to give it to them the way they wanted it, and let the longhairs take care of the other and go hungry.” Duff nodded gravely. “That sounded reasonable, you know. I figured he was right, being top man in the big time and all that. I figured he wasnt clearing any hundred thousand a year without knowing what he was talking about. And Lord knows I wanted to stay. All that money and high living, fine clothes and good food and smooth women — I like it well as the next man, all of it. But I couldnt; I couldnt even go back and try any more. I would have if I could have but I couldnt.”

The following day a drummer he had worked with in New Orleans came to see him. The drummer said, “I heard you took off from Rex. What you planning now?”

“I dont know. Go back home, I reckon.”

“Aint no sense to that, man; you just got here. Look. This friend of mine is opening a place right here in Harlem — a gin mill affair, nothing special; youd be playing for cakes at first. But come on in with us and we’ll make us some music the way it ought to be made.”

“I dont know, Juny. Seems like my horn dont suit this town. Rex ought to know.”

“Itll suit this place. Come on.”

There were no tin derbies at the Black Cat, no mutes, no music stands spelling R E X in blinking neon; there were no music stands at all, in fact. Opening night, the following Saturday, everything that had been pent up inside him for the past ten days came out loud and clear. From that first night it got better. Six months later he hit his stride.

“I dont know how it happened,” he told Harry Van afterward,
looking back. “It seem like the horn kind of opened up and everything I ever learnt come sailing out.”

Harry Van had never heard jazz before, to listen to. It was something he accepted much as a person might accept Joyce or Brancusi, admitting there might be something there and even admitting it was probably sincere, but never caring to study it or give it any real attention. Van was twenty-seven, only beginning to compose the things he had always worked toward, music that was intellectual in concept and highly organized, with a good deal more stress on form than content. There were plenty of interesting ways to put notes together, and this way was the safest — meaning that it was the one least likely to lead to disappointment; the less you ventured, emotionally, the less you stood to lose. He was aware of the shortcomings of this approach but he excused them on the grounds that what he had done so far was student work, preparation; he was learning his craft, one of the most difficult in the world, and when the time came for what he called the breakthrough (he was anti-romantic, but he was romantic enough to believe in this) he believed he would find his material proceeding naturally from his studies; that is, he would find ‘himself,’ as so many others had done before him. After all, he told himself, there were plenty of interesting ways to put notes together if ‘themes’ were what you were after. Nothing had interrupted or even disturbed this belief until the night his harmony instructor took him to a Harlem nightclub.

Over the doorway there was an arched cat with green electric eyes and a bristling tail. The instructor rapped and a panel opened inward upon a face so black that the eyeballs glistened unbelievably white. The Negro showed an even row of gold teeth when he recognized the harmony instructor. “Evening, professor,” he said, and the door swung open, revealing a dingy anteroom and another door. From beyond it came a pulse of music, like something under pressure in a bell jar. When this second door was opened they were struck by
a violent wave of sound, the ride-out finish of China Boy, followed by one thump of the drum and an abrupt cessation, a silence so empty that, in its turn, it too seemed to strike them across their faces like an open palm, a slap.

On a low dais in the opposite corner there was a five-man group — drums, piano, cornet, trombone, clarinet — seen dimly through smoke that hung like cotton batting, acrid and motionless except when it divided to let waiters through and closed again immediately behind them as they moved among the small round tables where people sat drinking from undersized glasses. Van looked for other instruments, unable to believe that all that sound had come from five musicians. As he and the instructor were being seated the drum set a new beat, pulsing unvaried; the clarinet began to squeal, trilling arpeggios with the frantic hysteria of a just-castrated pig; the trombone growled; the cornet uttered tentative notes; the piano brought out
One Hour
for sixteen bars (Van knew it as
If I Could Be With You
, from college dances) and subsided into a general rhythm of sustained chords. Then it happened.

The cornet man, whose skin had the reddish tint of cocoa, took a chorus alone. Wearing a pale blue polo shirt, highwaisted light tan trousers, and shoes with the fronts hewn out to expose white cotton socks, he sat with his legs crossed, the snub horn bunched against his face. His eyes were closed and he held his head so determinedly down that through the early measures he appeared to be blowing the notes deliberately into the floor, driving them there like so many silver nails, a lick to each. His playing was restrained; it sounded almost effortless; but, seeing him, Van got an impression that the cornetist was generating a tremendous pressure only to release a small part of it. Apparently this was the case, for near the end of the chorus, as if the pressure had reached that point he was building toward, the player lifted his head, the cornet rising above his face, and the leashed energy seemed to turn loose all at once, riding powerfully over what had gone before. It approached the limit at which hearing would renege, that farthest boundary of the realm of sound, soaring proud and
unvanquishable beyond the restraint of all the music Van had ever known. “No! No!” and “Hey!” people cried from adjoining tables. Van just sat there looking, knowing that his life had reached a turning.

The harmony instructor left soon after midnight but Van was there when dawn began to pale the hanging smoke. He left when the musicians did. He went home, ate breakfast, walked the early morning streets for an hour, and went to class. Afterwards, looking back, it seemed to him that this day had the unreal quality of a dream not quite remembered, partly no doubt because of the lack of sleep (he had always followed a healthy regimen) but mostly because of his state of mind, his reaction to what he had heard. He was confused. Something had happened beyond his will, and he could not call it back or comprehend. It was not until three hours after dark, after a restless four-hour sleep, when he passed through the tandem doors of the Black Cat for the second time, that the dream state ended and he returned to the actual living world.

Knowing nothing of the schedule, he was early. The tables were empty and last night’s smoke had dispersed. Four of the musicians were there, two of them with their instrument cases, cornet and trombone, on the floor beside their chairs. The crowd began to arrive. Presently, when the room was about one-third filled, the pianist mounted the dais and took his seat. Again it was like no music Van had ever heard; again it was without melody or, seemingly, even tempo — a vague tinkling in which the black keys seemed to predominate, a strumming such as might have been done by a performing animal, ape or seal, except that there was a certain intelligence to the touch, a tonal sentience beyond Van’s comprehension. Then the clarinetist arrived. White, about forty, with a neat pale tonsure exposed when he removed his Homburg, he resembled a successful dentist or a haberdasher’s clerk. As he crossed the room, the air already beginning to thicken with smoke, he took the instrument from the flat, booksized case beneath his arm and began assembling its five sections. He stepped onto the rostrum without breaking his stride, halted
at the far end of the piano — an upright with its front removed to show the busy hammers capped with felt — and began to play the shrill, sliding runs of the night before. The other three members came forward together, as if this were some sort of muster signal, and during the trombone break Van recognized the melody and realized that he had been hearing it all along. It was
I Never Knew
, which had been popular at dances in his Yale undergraduate days.