One Train Later: A Memoir (6 page)

The sessions with guitars and records become almost a sacred state, the dark whirling records like mandalas-the repeated solos, mantras running through my head like a distant train. I become reclusive and private about my practice session and add to the isolation by creating a barrier around my record player out of a couch, an armchair, and a reangling of my bed. My room looks strange, as if the furniture's been arranged by a madman, but I climb across my bed and down into my magic circle and sit for several hours with guitar and LPs, lost in surrender to this world.

Most of what I learn about jazz comes from my own rabid curiosity and whatever I can pick up by ear. But a friend tells me about a hard-to-find record shop in the center of town that sells American jazz imports, and I go looking for it that weekend. I find it buried at the end of an alley between Woolworth's back entrance and the British Home Stores. I stand outside and gaze at the window, which displays sleeves with pictures of men as they raise saxophones, hunch over a double bass, or lean back from a snare drum with whirling hands. This is real jazz. It seems beyond reach; what hope would I have of ever getting to understand this world? I don't recognize any of the names, and it hits me like a scary alien planet.

I take a deep breath and push open the door, which makes a loud chiming sound and blows my invisibility, making me even more nervous. Stepping down into the shop-which has the dank atmosphere of an old wine cellar I get a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. This cave is filled from floor to ceiling with racks of American records: Blue Note, Riverside, Columbia, Contemporary Jazz Masters. There is no one in the shop except a small darkhaired man with olive skin who stands behind the counter, smoking a cigarette and exuding power. I look over at him and he appears enormous. He looks up, grunts, and then looks back down at an album he is holding.

This dingy hole is filled with everything I aspire to. Feeling like a thief, I start thumbing through the racks quietly, taking in the names, the faces, the song titles. Another man comes into the shop and goes over to the counter. I overhear their conversation as they smoke and talk with small world-weary laughs and references that I don't get. But I get the owner's name-Lennyand begin returning to the shop every weekend. I don't have the money to buy anything, but I read the sleeves and try to take in the ambience. He sells only jazz albums, and it's as if he is giving up something from his personal collection when with an attitude of "are you worthy?" he lets someone walk out with an LP.

He seems remote, cynical, and I think he doesn't like me; I buy nothing and I know nothing. I feel anxious about Lenny, hoping that maybe he will become friendly, tell me something, share a joke with me. I finger my way through the racks of Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis albums and furtively stare across the shop to where he stands like a priest at the altar, engaged in a sardonic conversation with one of his friends, who all seem to supplicate in front of him. As an expert on the subject of my desire, he wields an emotional power over me even though we have never exchanged a word. But one afternoon I approach the cash register and he leans across the counter, takes a long drag on his cigarette, blows a smoke ring toward the first rack, looks out through the window and says, "So, you like jazz."

I start talking with Lenny and nervously tell him what I know-not muchbut that I really love it, and how can I learn? I explain that I am a guitarist, or would like to he one anyway. He nods and pulls a few records from the racks. Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Raney, Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow. Then he holds up a Blue Note LP and taps it, saying, "This one is great-just got it." It's Kenny Burrell's On View at the Five Spot Cafe, with Art Blakey on drums.

I leave that afternoon, my heart pounding with a strange mixture of relief and commitment, as if I've just been allowed into the priesthood. I can't wait to play the album, and when I get home and finally get it onto the turntable, it puts me in a trance and I play it over and over. I love Burrell's dark wine-stained sound and the atmosphere of this album, with its sound of low murmuring voices, clinking glasses, and laughter somehow conveying the impression of the jazz life, the living reality. I feel as if it is me right there on the stage, guitar in hand, moodily playing to the darkness of a small club in lower Manhattan. No doubt I romanticize it heavily, but the ambience of the club and the liquid voice of the guitar represent some kind of nirvana to me.

I decide to learn Kenny's solo on "Lover Man"-one of the best jazz guitar solos ever recorded--but he plays it in g minor, which takes me a while to understand. But eventually-as I work from a tattered piece of red-colored sheet music with a picture of Billie Holiday on the cover-I am able to transpose it from d minor and note by note learn to play it like a song on its own.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I play a few more chords. My left hand drifts into a c# minor chord that I play with open E and B strings. I have been playing this configuration constantly over the past few weeks, making a new composition out of it as I hear a top line of a pretty descending chromatic melody. This c# mirror area manages to sound both minor and major at the same time as it relates to E major and A major, both big guitarfriendly keys. I stop for a second and move to the fifth fret and the central position on the guitar neck. D minor and another set of feelings and constellations appear. This key is darker and brings to mind Django, the sound of a clarinet, rain forming deep puddles under my window, and my dad cursing as the roses get beaten into the dirt.

Lenny and I become more friendly and he begins to broaden my listening beyond the guitar. He gives me a heavily discounted price on albums, and after a while I have a collection of Monk, Coltrane, Miles, Sonny Rollins, and Ornette Coleman. I listen intently in an effort to have a view of jazz beyond the guitar. Lenny pushes my appreciation further when he gives me an album called The Thelonius Monk Orchestra at the Town Hall, a live recording of Thelonius Monk with a big band. As I listen to this LP, Monk's compositions and asymmetrical magic hit me like a revelation. I report back to Lenny, who is pleased that I "got" it and then tells me that Monk is coming to England in a few months.

Pop isn't rock yet, and like the nineteenth century turning into the twentieth, music hasn't reached the creative self-conscious stage where it will have edge, artiness, and expression with lyrics rooted in poetry and the hallucinatory ramblings of Bob Dylan. And as I struggle with the guitar in the first two or three years of playing, it is not pop that calls to me but the darker precipice of American music, with its blue underworld, edgy solos, loose drums, and dark-throated bass. I want to play the real outsider music-jazz. British pop and British culture at this stage are about as much fun as a Mcvi- ties biscuit. We have Helen Shapiro, Alma Cogan, and the Beverley Sisters. They have Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Link Wray, Lonnie Mack, Ray Charles, James Brown, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Miles, Coltrane, and Monk. The words rock and star haven't cojoined yet, and you don't aspire to rock (because it doesn't exist), but you do effect a lip-curling insouciance, imagine blowing a smoke ring, calling girls "chicks," whistling a Miles solo. Rock music, guitars, and youth culure will eventually infiltrate everything, even the sacred ground of such luminaries as Miles Davis, and will shape the course that jazz takes in the late sixties and seventies.

Under Lenny's guidance, I continue to expand and add horn players and pianists to my listening: Bill Evans, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Hank Mobley. I begin reading Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Louis Armstrong's autobiography. I begin to feel more immersed in this jazz thing and I stare into my bedroom mirror, seeing the guy on the record sleeve, the cat in a dark suit, the man. Sometimes this vision fades and all I see is a boy with tousled hair, freckles, and a red-and-yellow school tie, and then I'm overcome with panic as my self-confidence hits the floor. But slowly my courage grows and I form opinions. Although I still like Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Kind of Blue and "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" make "We're All Going on a Summer Holiday" seem like a piece of fluff.

Lying on a towel in the hot sand of Bournemouth Beach, with the highsummer melange of ice cream, candy floss, sunburned skin, and the petroleum fumes of Nivea cream crowding in, I see another world, a place where things are broken, bittersweet-the lipstick smudge on the rim of the cup, the woman gone, a smoky blue drift in a cheap room, the croon of a tenor sax. I get up from the sand, vaguely thinking I want a Cornish mivvi, and begin picking my way through the thicket of red sunburned legs toward the water's edge. As I kick through the feeble waves that fall on the hot grit between my toes, my head is filled with the sad and beautiful vision of this other life: its drift from the brothels of New Orleans to the streets of New York, its high priests-Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Miles, and Coltrane-the words I don't understand, reefer, horse junk, ofay, Jim Crow, hoochie coochie.

And then I notice a girl lying in the sand with two friends. Her name is Jenna; she goes to my school and she's in a tight blue bathing costume that's glistening and wet from a dip in the sea. I stare at her breasts swelling over the top of her costume. She looks like a woman, a flame bursts to life inside me, and my head feels hot. With my pulse thudding like an African drum, I go over to her. "Hi," I say. She turns away from her friends for a second and squints up at me. "Oh, hi," she says. I notice that there's a fly on her nose but that she doesn't flick it away. I wonder if the fly knows how lucky he is. I offer a small penguinlike wave and limp off.

"Moose the Mooche," "Sippin' at Bells," "Klact-Oveeseds-Tene," Jenna's breasts, mouths, legs, junkies, powder, horn solos, and zoot suits, Birdland, Manhattan, the stink of seaweed, the din of screaming gulls, and an aching lust pour into me like cider. I laugh like a parrot at the rusting girders of the pier as if sharing a joke with them and then, confused and sighing with desire for jazz and Jenna, I struggle past the Punch-and-Judy show, through the thicket of deck chairs, the screaming babies, and the snoring dads with handkerchiefs on their heads and buy a Lyons Maid choc ice and a can of Tango.

At home, after practicing, I lie on the eiderdown, my old Spanish guitar lying across my chest, and mentally project a movie onto the plastered ceiling. There it is--flickering like a black-and-white Sennett film. A shadowy figure with the guitar that sings a phrase like the low moan of midnight and a thousand cigarettes out into the cinder blue ambience of the Five Spot. Jenna is sitting there, waiting, dressed in a sexy low-cut dress, her mouth like a scarlet flower-she exudes the scent of roses. After the second set I take her out. We go downtown to a little Italian restaurant-they know me here-we sit in the corner, drink red wine, touch under the table, the night ahead swollen with desire....

I still have to do my homework but I pick up Really the Blues and my eyes flicker along the passage about Mezzrow's jail sentence and how he, a white Jew, passes himself off as black-the words are getting fuzzy ... my eyes are ruined.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

Ten-thirty A.M. Finding it hard to sleep, I reach over the side of the bed into my travel bag for my cassette player and think, Well, yeah, didn't work out quite like that, but still ... I am looking for a tape of the great Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfa, thinking that I'll relax and listen to some music. In the jumble of my traveling bag, with its tapes, headphones, cassette player, paperbacks, notebooks, and a half-chewed apple, I can't find it, so I lean back and, half asleep, play through a solo version of "Manha de Carnaval," a song I first heard at sixteen in the underbelly of the Continental cinema.

The Continental is a place where, in an atmosphere reeking of stale cigarettes, ice cream, and sperm, you can vicariously experience the world out there. The specialty of this cinema is the double and triple Xers, films such as And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot, which would have us all sitting in the front row, gazing upward with lust at her tiny waist and swelling breasts as she writhes through yet another sultry melodrama. Or, as if correcting a moral imbalance, films about the perils of venereal disease or smoking marijuana, providing us with an educational double message. It's as if the programs at the Continental place a fabulous cake on the table with a small warning that it contains strychnine. But one film that transcends all this and knocks me for six is Black Orpheus.

Set in Rio de Janeiro, the film is a reworking of the Orpheus myth with an all-black cast and fantastic music by Luiz Bonfa. The haunting melody of "Manha de Carnaval," the exotic sun-drenched vistas of Rio, and the sheer physicality of it all fill me with a wave of desire, a sun-, sex-, and music-filled world that comes at me like a Brazilian Shangri-la. Naturally, I miss the irony: the poor black folks from the favelas who are able to forget the grinding poverty and violence of their lives with a song. But in the dark of the Continental, with its Chinese lanterns and odor of seedy loneliness, I am transported. Bonfd's exquisite melodic line and harmonies cut like a knife through my teenage emotions and shower sunlight like a beam of truth across the rows of grubby seats. Years later I will manifest this dream by playing many concerts in Brazil and finally performing this song on the beach in Copacabana one night to a large crowd of swaying brasileiros.

Although I love there and they have the effect of reinforcing or shaping any idea of the world, films do not threaten my pact with the guitar. When my hands are on the strings and the flow begins to happen, all is well and I intuit that this is how I will make my way. I start sending away for guitar catalogs and breathlessly wait for their arrival, when I greedily rip open the envelopes and lie on my bed for hours, drooling over the black-and-white photographs of Hofner Senator, Committee, and President guitars. New terms enter my head: lustrous sunbrust finishes, resonating tailpieces, ivoroid tuners, spruce soundboards, and split backs. I lay in bed at night with visions of these desirable instruments drifting through my fevered imagination. The concept of a rock star isn't on the map yet. There is no rock scene, no MTV, no possibility of being able to retire world-famous at twenty-five or have your face on a T-shirt; the only thing you have is trying to get good on your guitar. That is the target. There are Cliff Richards and other hipshaking rebels, but if you can learn to play, maybe you will get in the band at the local Locarno-and this lowly idea is enough to sustain the endless hours of practice.