Streets of Gold (47 page)

Which brings us to what my mother thinks about piano players.

It was along about this same time, just before the move to the Grand Concourse, while my mother was still ranting and raving about all that junk on the sun porch, that she made a remark I consider classic. We were lingering over coffee (as they say in novels) at the dinner table in the new house Rebecca and I had built in Talmadge. My mother, in her characteristically compromising fashion, said, “If you don’t get somebody to take that stuff away, Jimmy, I’m going to throw it in the garbage.”

“Aw, come on, Stella,” he said.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “That’s his hobby.”

“That’s right, Stella, it’s my hobby.”

“Your hobby?” my mother said. “If you need a hobby, why don’t you get one that doesn’t clutter up the whole house?”

“Like what?” my father asked.

(Are you ready?)

“Like your son’s,” my mother answered. “Playing piano.”

I had earned close to four hundred thousand dollars playing piano that year, what with record albums and sheet music and personal appearances and the lot. I owned a department store in Dallas (for the depreciation value) and interests in oil wells (one of which had actually come in), and my tax lawyer had told me I would become a millionaire within the next three years, provided things continued to go well for me. But to good old Stella, piano playing was a hobby, and my success was a freak.

She was right. It was.

Here’s what happened.

In 1955, I changed everybody’s name. Rebecca Baumgarten Di Palermo became Rebecca Jamison, and I became Dwight Jamison, and my three sons became, respectively and respectfully, Andrew, Michael, and David Jamison. Actually, when we named the boys, who were separately born in 1949, 1951, and 1953, we were trying to find names that sounded good with Di Palermo. Andrew, Michael, and David sounded fine to us — and American besides. We changed the Di Palermo, finally, because we got tired of people asking us how we were going to raise the children. (That was the
good
reason; I still don’t know what the
real
reason was.) When you change your name, the Department of Health will send you, at your request, a pink birth certificate with the new name on it. There is no indication on this certificate that your name once was Merton Luftfenster. It merely states that Lance Wasp was born in the city of New York on such and such a date. It looks exactly like the birth certificate that might have been issued way back then when you first drew breath. Not a soul can tell the difference, and it saves you the trouble of producing your court order every time you apply for a passport or a driver’s license or an insurance policy or anything requiring proof of age and birthplace. New York City is very accommodating in this respect. But that is only natural since New York perhaps best represents the spirit of constant change that is America.

Marian McPartland once said to me, “Drummers are always disappearing, Ike, have you ever noticed that? I wonder where they
go
all the time.”

Marian . ..
people
are always disappearing.

Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo disappeared in 1955, when my lawyer went before a judge to petition for the name change. He said it was for professional reasons, a blatant lie since by then I was known as Blind Ike, and was in fact playing under that name at a club on the East Side. The judge signed a court order, and told my lawyer that the order had to be published in a newspaper of the court’s choice within twenty days, just in case anyone had any objections whatever to my becoming more American than I already was. No one objected, and we all became Jamisons. It only remained to send two bucks to the Board of Health for each of those brand-new pink certificates. How simple it is to disappear from the face of the earth, unless (like me) you are plagued by memories.

Everybody (except my grandfather) continued calling me Ike, of course — they had, after all, been calling me that for almost a decade. But I was now Dwight Jamison. As a boy at the Blind School, I had learned to write my own name in longhand, using a sheet of raised letters, and a board with sunken letters, and writing paper embossed with guidelines a half inch apart. I would feel the raised letters with my fingertips, touching each until I thought I knew each curlicue, tail, and dot. Then I would fit my pencil into the sunken letters on the board, learning how to manually recreate each letter by tracing it over and over again, the pencil tip caught in the grooves. And finally, I would practice my signature on the paper, feeling the raised lines and knowing the upper and lower limits of the defining space. I did not know what my handwriting looked like. My mother said I wrote like a Chink. She should only have known how long and how hard I practiced my signature.

I had to practice another signature when I became Dwight Jamison.

I changed my name just in the nick, as it turned out, because I was on the verge of becoming a big success, ma’am, and think of what might have happened to Kirk Douglas if he’d still been Issur Danielovitch Demsky when he made
Champion
. Talent notwithstanding, my success was pure unadulterated chance, the result of a series of accidents, cause and effect mating to produce an inescapable conclusion. My quintet consisted of five musicians (what else? eight?). Cappy Kaplan, from the original Auntie’s trio, had been killed in the Korean War, but Stu Holman was still with me on bass. As drummer, I was using another black man, a kid named Peter Dodds, who succumbed to drugs before we opened at Birdland the following year; he sent us a congratulatory telegram from Lexington, Kentucky, where he was trying to kick the habit. On trumpet, I had a white man named Hank D’Allessio (who had not changed his name for professional reasons) and on vibes another white man named Larry Kimberly. The quintet was what is known in the trade as a “salt and pepper band.” But tell me, does the instrumentation strike a familiar note, ring a reminiscent bell? Here’s your clue: the vibraphone. In 1955, before I became a big success by accident, I was mostly being “influenced” by George Shearing, who had begun winning all those %
Down Beat
polls back in 1949, and who had single-handedly buried solo piano in a grave so deep that resurrection was impossible. There are some piano players who instantly generate excitement among other piano players, and Shearing was one of them. I had first heard him on a record he had cut for Savoy, and later caught him at the Three Deuces, where he was busting the joint wide open with what was then a trio. By 1950, every piano player in the country was trying to copy him, and I was no exception. The same thing had happened in the thirties, incidentally, when a then-current musician’s accolade — “Tatum, no one can overrate ’im” — was coupled with the warning: “Tatum, no one can imitate ’im.” I was unabashedly imitating George Shearing in 1955, right down to the incidental blindness and the almost identical instrumentation — I was using a trumpet in place of the guitar George had in his quintet.

When I accidentally tripped over the hairy unwashed body of success, the quintet (mine, not George’s) was playing at a fairly decent club on the East Side, pulling down respectable loot (twelve bills a week) and enjoying some sort of recognition in a profession not noted for its charity. On a Thursday night, Larry Kimberly, my vibes player, got sick. (He
said
he was sick; I think he was on a bender. No matter.) I called Mark Aronowitz, who had begun managing me six months earlier, and who had in fact come up with the East Side gig, and told him I needed a vibes player to fill in for the weekend. Mark said he’d get right to work on it; he called me back late Friday afternoon.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a flute player for you.”

“A
what
?” I said.

“A flute player.”

“What the hell am I going to do with a flute player?”

“This is a very fine flute player. He played with the Boston Symphony.”

“Mark,” I said, “I need a vibes player.”

“No vibes players,” he said.

“What do you mean, no vibes players?”

“None. Noplace. I called 802, I called every agent and manager I know, I even called Benny up in Connecticut, and asked him for Hamp’s number on the off chance
he
might know somebody. But Hamp’s out of town, and there is not a single fucking vibes player in the entire city of New York this weekend, and that is that.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “There must be
thousands
of vibes players looking for work.”

“Yeah?” Mark said. “Where are they?”

“I don’t want a flute player,” I said.

“What do you want? A tenor sax? A trombone? Name it. The only thing I can’t get is a vibes player. I thought a flute sounded a lot like a vibraphone.”

“Mark, it doesn’t sound
anything
like a vibraphone.”

“Silvery, you know? This guy is a fine musician, Ike. Take him, try him out. Just for the weekend. I’m not asking you to marry him.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

His name was Orion (I swear to God) Burke, and he was the first link in the chain of events that led to the success of the Dwight Jamison Quintet. The second link was a singer named Gerri Pryce. You’ve never heard of her; she didn’t grow up to be Petula Clark or anybody. She was a girl of nineteen who was also on Mark’s list of “artists,” as he chose to call us. He had been grooming her (and probably fucking her) since she was seventeen, and he had miraculously arranged a recording date for her on the Thursday following the night Orion Burke joined the band. I did not like the way the band sounded with a flute substituting for the vibes — which shows how much I know. But Orry was indeed a fine musician (who insisted on calling himself a “flautist,” by the way, pish-posh) and he got on to what we were laying down after a quick Friday rehearsal, and the weekend went by without incident or fanfare. That is to say, nobody came up to the stand to tell us they missed the vibes, but neither did anyone tell us how extraordinary we sounded with a flute in there. Monday was our night off, and on Tuesday Mark called to say he wanted us to back Gerri Pryce on her record date.

“Who’s Gerri Pryce?” I asked.

“Nobody you know yet,” he said. “She’s going to be a big star.”

“How much is the gig paying?” I asked.

“Minimum,” he said. “This is a very small record company, an independent, but when Gerri hits it big with this single, I’ll be able to go back to them and remind them who was on the gig with her.”

“Why do I always end up with all the shit gigs?” I asked Mark.

“Oh?” he said. “Oh? Is the gig you’re playing now a shit gig? I didn’t realize twelve bills a week was shit. You’re taking home more than three hundred for yourself each and every week, Ike, and that puts a lot of meat and potatoes on the table, and that is not
shit
, Ike, that is good hard American currency on my block. Now perhaps you consider it an imposition to be asked by your manager to play for somebody who’s going to be a singing sensation as soon as this single is released, and who is giving you his sacred word of honor...”

“All right, Mark.”

“. . . that once this record takes off, I’ll go back to the company and be in a position to negotiate a contract for the quintet, on terms more acceptable...”

“All right, already.”

“Three o’clock Thursday, Nola Studios,” Mark said, and hung up.

In 1955, it cost thirty dollars an hour to rent space at Nola Studios, and the company cutting Gerri Pryce’s first Big Hit Single (or so Mark hoped) had reserved the facilities for three hours of rehearsal and recording time. In addition, they had paid Gerri a five-hundred-dollar advance against royalties, and they were paying the quintet scale, which came to $41.25 for each sideman and double that for the leader. According to union regulations, this permitted them to utilize our talents for a maximum of three hours, in which time they were entitled to cut four ten-inch masters, each side running no longer than three and a half minutes. The A&R man and the sound technician were the company’s own, and on salary. Still, the session was going to cost $837.50, which was a considerable amount for a small independent to be shelling out. There was an air of confidence in the studio when we assembled at 3 P.M. Since we were there to rehearse and record only two sides, the three hours should have been more than enough time to ensure a professional job.

But Gerri Pryce, at the age of nineteen, already considered herself a star, even though she had never cut a record, and even though her singing engagements to date had been exclusively limited to a series of toilets on Long Island’s Sunrise Highway. She walked into the studio an hour and twenty minutes late, by which time the A&R man — whose name was Rudy Hirsch — was ready to climb the walls. She was accompanied by an entourage consisting of a weight lifter from San Diego, whom she introduced as her chauffeur (his motorcycle was probably parked illegally downstairs), and who grunted “Groovy” when he shook my hand; a fluttery old woman named Mabel, who knocked over Hank D’Allessio’s music stand and tittered endlessly while precious seconds were frittering away (she was Gerri’s hairdresser, though Christ alone knew why a hairdresser was necessary on a recording date); and Gerri’s uncle, a dyspeptic forty-two-year-old Pole (Gerri had changed her name from Przybora) who was there to make sure his niece’s innocence remained unsullied; he had heard a lot about musicians, old Uncle Stanislaw. I later heard from Mark (but this may be gossip) that young Gerri had taken on the entire marching band of a high school in Secaucus when she was but a fourteen-year-old cheerleader. But there she was at nineteen, chauffeured, coiffed, cloistered, and an hour and twenty minutes late. She nonetheless insisted, rightfully, that we rehearse the two tunes she was about to record. She had written one of these tunes herself, and this was to be the Big Hit side of the record. The tune was called “Mooning,” and the lyric, if I recall it correctly, went something like this: