Streets of Gold (35 page)

“Any blind piano player I
know’s
a F-sharp piano player,” the other man insisted.

“
Tatum’s
blind,” Biff said, “and he can cut your ass thu Sunday.”

“He only
half
blind,” Sam said.

“I can play in any key on the board,” I said.

“There now, you see? Sit down with Iggie here, an’ work out a nice set, huh? And lemme go see ’bout my social life. Play nice, Iggie. Maybe you can cover up all they
mis
takes.”

“
Sheeee
-it,” Sam said, and then laughed.

I listened as the drummer set up his equipment and the trumpet player started running up and down chromatics, warming up. Sam asked me to tune him up, and when I asked him what notes he wanted me to hit, he said, “Jus’ an A, man,” sounding very surprised. I gave Jerry a B flat when he asked for it, and he tuned his horn, and meanwhile Dickie was warming up on his cymbals, playing fast little brush rolls, and pretty soon we were ready to start the set. I’d never played with a band before, and I wasn’t particularly scared. I’d listened to enough jazz records to know what the format was. The piano player or the horn man usually started with the head chorus (I didn’t yet know it was called the head), and then the band took solos in turn, and then everybody went into the final chorus and ended the tune. I figured all I had to do was play the way I’d been playing for the past seven months, play all those tunes I’d either lifted from my brother’s record collection or figured out on my own. Biff, after all, was a well-known and respected jazz musician, and he had told me that what I’d played wasn’t half bad, which I figured meant at
least
half good. Besides,
he
was the one who’d asked me to sit in.

“You
sure
you ain’t a F-sharp piano player?” Sam asked behind me.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“ ’Cause, man, I don’t dig them wild stretches in F sharp,” he said. “You got some other keys in your head, cool. Otherwise, it’s been graaaand knowin’ you,”

“Well,
start
it, man,” Jerry said to me. He was standing to my right. The drummer was diagonally behind me, sitting beside Sam. I took a four-bar intro, and we began playing “Fools Rush In,” a nice Johnny Mercer-Rube Bloom ballad, which I’d never heard Tatum do, but which I played in the Tatum style, or what I considered to be the Tatum style. We were moving into the bridge when Sam said, “Chop it off, kid.” I didn’t know what he meant. I assumed he wanted me to play a bit more staccato, so I began chopping the chords, so to speak, giving a good crisp, clean touch to those full tenths as I walked them with my left hand or used them in a swing bass, pounding out that steady four/four rhythm, and hearing the satisfying (to me) echo of Sam behind me walking the identical chords in arpeggios on his bass fiddle. As I went into the second chorus, I heard Jerry come in behind me on the horn, and I did what I’d heard the piano players doing on the records, I started feeding him chords, keeping that full left hand going in time with what Sam and the drummer were laying down, though to tell the truth I couldn’t quite understand
what
the drummer was doing, and wasn’t even sure he was actually keeping the beat. It was the drummer who said, “Take it home,” and I said, “What?” and he said, “Last eight,” and the horn man came out of the bridge and into the final eight bars, and we ended the tune. Everybody was quiet.

“Well, you ain’t a F-sharp piano player, that’s for sure,” Sam said. “But you know what you can do with that left hand of yours, don’t you?”

“You can chop it off and shove it clean up your ass,” the trumpet player said. “Let’s get Biff.”

They were moving off the bandstand. In a moment, and without another word to me, they were gone. I sat at the piano alone, baffled.

“What’s going on here?” a voice asked. “Who the hell are you? Who’s that band? Where’s my piano player?”

The voice belonged to a fat man. I could tell. I could also tell he was Jewish. I know it’s un-American to identify ethnic groups by vocal inflection or intonation, but I can tell if a man’s black, Italian, Irish, Jewish, or what
ever
simply by hearing his voice. And so can you. And if you tell me otherwise, I’ll call you a liar. (And besides, what the hell’s so un-American about it?) I was stunned. Some black bastard horn player had just told me to shove my precious left hand up my ass, and I didn’t know why.

“You!” the fat man said. “Get away from that piano. Where’s Biff?”

“Cool it, Mr. Gottlieb,” Biff’s voice said. “I’m right here; the boy’s a friend of mine.”

“Do you know ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’?” Gottlieb said. “The bartender wants ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas.’ ”

“Beyond my ken,” Biff said, in what sounded like an English accent.

“What?” Gottlieb said, startled.

“The tune. Unknown to me,” Biff said.

“What?”

“Advise your barkeep to compile a more serious list of requests,” Biff said in the same stuffy English cadences, and then immediately and surprisingly fell into an aggravated black dialect, dripping watermelon, pone, and chitlings. “You jes’ ast you man to keep de booze comin’, an’ let
me
— an’ mah frens who was kine enough to come see me heah — worry ’bout de music, huh? Kid, you want to git off dat stool so’s we kin lay some jazz on dese mothahs?”

“What?” Gottlieb said.

“I’ll talk to
you
later,” Biff said as I climbed off the stool and off the bandstand.

My uncle Luke had drunk too much. His head was on the table, touching my elbow, and I could hear him snoring loudly as Biff talked to me. On my right, the girl with the five-and-dime perfume sat silent and motionless, her presence detectable only by her scent and the sound of her breathing. The trumpet player had left around midnight. The bass player and the drummer had followed him at about one. We were alone in the place now, except for the bartender, who was washing glasses and lining them up on the shelves, and Gottlieb, who had tallied his register and was putting chairs up on tables, preparatory to sweeping out the joint. As he passed our table, he said, “This ain’t a hotel, Mr. Jazz,” and then moved on, muttering.

“Cheap sheenie bastard,” Biff said. “He’s got his bartender watering my drinks. You okay, Poots?” he asked the girl. The girl did not answer. She must have nodded assent, though, the motion of her head and neck unleashing a fresh wave of scent. Biff said, “Fine, that’s fine, you jus’ stick aroun’ a short while longer. Now, you,” he said. “You want to know what’s wrong with how you play piano?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re lucky Dickie’s a gentle soul. Dickie. The drummer. Otherwise he’da done what Jo Jones done to Bird in Kansas City when he got the band all turned around. He throwed his cymbal on the floor, and that was that, man, end of the whole fuckin’ set. ’Scuse me, Poots.”

“Well,
they
ended the set, too,” I said. I still didn’t know that Bird was someone’s name. This was the second time Biff had used it tonight, and each time I’d thought he meant bird with a lower-case
b
; the reference was mystifying. For that matter, I didn’t know who Jo Jones was, either. But I figured if he’d thrown a cymbal on the floor, he had to be a drummer, whereas all I could think about the use of the word “bird” was that it was a black jazz expression. (Come to think of it, it
was
.) “And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Anderson, your bass player pissed me off right from the start. Excuse me, miss. Making cracks about F-sharp piano players.”

“Well, le’s say he ain’ ’zackly de mos’ tac’ful of souls,” Biff said in his watermelon accent, and then immediately added in his normal speaking voice, “But he’s a damn fine musician, and he knows where jazz
is
today, and
that’s
what he was trying to convey to you.”

“I’m no damn F-sharp piano player,” I said.

“He didn’t know that. Anyway, that ain’t what got him or the other boys riled.”

“Then what?”

“Your left hand.”

“I’ve got a good left hand,” I said.

“Sure,” Biff said. “If you want to play alone, you’ve got a good left hand, and I’m speakin’ comparative. You still need lots of work, even if all you want to play is solo piano.”

“That’s what I want to play.”

“Then don’t go sittin’ in with no groups. Because if you play that way with a group, you’re lucky they don’t throw the
piano
at you, no less the cymbals.”

“Mr. Anderson,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about that bass,” he said.

“That’s a Tatum bass,” I said. “That’s what you your
self
played. That was Tatum right down the line.”

“Correct,” Biff said.

“So?”

“Maybe you didn’t notice, but I was playin’
alone
. Kid, a rhythm section won’t tolerate that bass nowadays. Not after Bird.”

“What do you mean,
bird
? What’s that?”

“Parker. Charlie Parker. Bird.”

“Is he a piano player?”

“He plays alto saxophone.”

“Well... what
about
him?” I said. “What’s
he
got to do with playing piano?”

“He’s got everything to do with everything,” Biff said. “You tell me you want to play Tatum piano, I tell you Tatum’s on the way out, if not already dead and gone. You tell me you want to learn all those Tatum runs, I tell you there’s no room for that kind of bullshit in bop. You know why Sam...”

“In
what
, did you say?”

“Bop, that’s the stuff Parker’s laying down. And Fats Navarro. And Bud Powell. Now
there’s
the piano player you ought to be listening to, Powell; he’s the one you ought to be pickin’ up on,
not
Art Tatum. You want to know why the boys shot you down, it’s ’cause you put them in prison, man, you put them in that old-style bass prison, and they can’t play that way no more. These guys’re cuttin’ their chops on bop. Even
I’m
too old-fashioned for them, but we’re good friends, and they allow me to get by with open tenths and some shells. Sam wants to walk the bass line himself, he don’t want to be trapped by no rhythm the
piano
player’s layin’ down, he don’t even want to be trapped by the
drummer
no more. Didn’t you hear what Dickie was doing behind you? You didn’t hear no four/four on the bass drum, did you? That was on the cymbals; he saved the big drum for klook-mop, dropping them bombs every now and then, but none of that heavy one, two, three, four, no,
man
. Which is why they told you to stick your left hand up your ass, ’scuse me, Poots, to
lose
it, man. They wanted you to play shells in the left hand, that’s all, and not, that pounding Tatum rhythm, uh-uh. You dig what I’m saying?”

“What’s a shell? What do you mean, they wanted me to play shells?”

“Shells, man. You know what a C-minor chord is?”

“C, E flat, G, and B flat,” I said.

“Right. But when Powell plays a C-minor, all he hits are the C and the B flat. With his pinkie and his thumb, you dig? He leaves out the insides, he just gives you the shell. He feeds those shells to the horn players, and they blow pure and fast and hard, without that fuckin’ pounding rhythm and those ornate chords and runs going on behind them all the time, and lockin’ them in, ’scuse me, Poots. Piano players just can’t
play
that way no more.”

“
Tatum
does,” I said. “And so does Wilson.”

“A dying breed,” Biff said in his English accent, “virtually obsolete.
Look
, man, I was with Marian McPartland the first time she heard Bud play, and she said to me, ‘Man, that is
some
spooky right hand there,’ and she wasn’t shittin’. That right hand
is
spooky, the things he does with that right hand. He plays those fuckin’ shells with his left — the root and seventh, or the root and third — because he’s got tiny hands, you see, he couldn’t reach those Tatum tenths if he stood on his fuckin’ head, ’scuse me, Poots. Some of the time he augments the shell by pickin’ up a ninth with the right hand, but mostly the right is playin’ a
horn
solo, you dig? He’s doin’ Charlie Parker on the piano. There are three voices dig? Two notes in the shell, and the running line in the right hand, and that’s it. Tatum runs? Forget ’em, man! They’re what a piano player does when he can’t think of nothin’ new, he just throws in all those rehearsed runs that’re already in his fingers. That ain’t jazz, man. That’s I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t jazz no more.”

“You people going to pay rent on that table?” Gottlieb said.

“What’re you thinking, kid?” Biff asked. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking behind them shades.”

“I just don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“You don’t, huh? Well, here it is in a nutshell, kid. The rhythm ain’t in the left hand no more — it’s passed over to the right. The left hand is almost standin’ still these days. And if you want to keep on playin’ all that frantic shit, then you better play it all by yourself, ’cause there ain’t no band gonna tolerate it. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“I still want to play like Tatum,” I said.

“You’ll be followin’ a coffin up Bourbon Street,” Biff said. “Look, what the hell do I care
what
you play? I’m just tryin’ to tell you if you’re startin’
now
, for Christ’s sake, don’t start with somethin’, already
dead
. Go to the Street, man, Fifty-second Street, dig what the cats are doin’. If you don’t like it, then, man, that’s up to you. But I’m tellin’ you, sure as this sweet li’l thing is sittin’ here beside me, Tatum and Wilson are dead and the Bird is king, and jazz ain’t never gonna be the same again.” He suddenly burst out laughing. “Man, the cats goan drum me clear out of the tribe. They got strong hostility, them boppers.”

“I want to hear them play,” I said.

“Get your uncle to take you down the Street. Diz an’ Oscar — Pettiford, Oscar Pettiford — got a fine group at the Onyx, George Wallington on piano. Go listen to them.”