New York in the '50s (48 page)

The new sounds of Miles, Charlie Mingus, Lester Young, and Ornette Coleman were coming out of the New York jazz clubs, and then there was the incredible ultimate cool synthesis of classical music with fugue-like jazz, the Modern Jazz Quartet, who liked to perform in concert halls rather than in clubs. “The quartet does much better … in places where people can listen attentively,” the piano player and musical director of the group, John Lewis, explained to Nat Hentoff. Lewis said on another occasion that he was proud of being an American Negro and wanted to “enhance the dignity of that position.”

I played the MJQ's LPs like litanies, especially the album John Lewis wrote as the musical score for a movie,
No Sun in Venice
, which combined our generation's dream of Europe with the native American medium of jazz, or, as it was put more elegantly by Lewis in the liner notes, speaking of his composition “Cortege”: “This is
my
Venice.… I know Venice's history, the music it has produced, I love its
commedia dell'arte
and in my
Fontessa
gave it musical expression. In seeing a colorful funeral procession on the Grand Canal, however, I can't help but think of funerals in New Orleans, which are happy as well as sad, and that double image in my mind is undoubtedly reflected in my music.” The MJQ's music reflected a mood of our time by one of the most successful groups of the fifties.

Because he knew John Lewis was one of my idols, Leslie Katz arranged for me to meet him (Leslie's brother Dick Katz is a jazz piano player and a friend of Lewis's), and Leslie, Jane Mayhall, John Lewis, and I had lunch one day at the Russian Tea Room. It was one thing to meet a literary idol; at least then I would have a few comments to make that I knew didn't sound too dumb. But with a musician I felt completely inadequate and tongue-tied. My technical experience is limited to three years as last-chair clarinet in the School #80 orchestra, so my mumbles of tribute must have sounded like Thelonious Monk speaking to the press. Lewis was quiet, gracious, and dignified, and if nothing else I had the pleasure of saying I had once lunched with the man, like a Giants fan having downed a beer with Sal Maglie or Willie Mays.

Murray Kempton, the most knowledgeable jazz buff I know, tells
me that Margot Hentoff (Nat's wife, and herself a fine writer) claimed that “the MJQ
was
the fifties.” She was right, as she usually is—they were listenable, and they were also extraordinarily good.

“One of the great changes in pop culture occurred in the fifties,” Kempton explains, “in jazz, art, everything else. It was the same thing Henry James describes, how the Venetian painters are ultimately unsatisfying because the light there is too good—it's what he called ‘the demoralizing effect of lavish opportunity.' The LP gave jazz musicians the opportunity of stretching out, and it was demoralizing. If you listen to an old Ellington recording of ‘I'm Beginning to See the Light'—what he does in eight bars is unbelievable. It was compression, you had to get on and off. But the Modern Jazz Quartet was very compact. Of course, there are exceptions to Henry James's rule—Michelangelo had a huge ceiling and it didn't ruin him.”

There were cool new saints marching in, and innovative sounds in the air, which seemed to express the confusion, heartache, and excitement of a more complex time, so it was harder to get worked up over another rendition of “Muskrat Ramble.” Kempton had told me in 1955 about an old friend of his from college who had looked him up in New York and wanted to go hear some Dixieland. Murray shook his head, raised his eyebrows behind his horn-rims and said, “I wanted to tell him, ‘He don't live here anymore.'”

Back in his Dixieland days, Kempton recalls, “We all used to go downtown and listen to Bunk Johnson at the Stuyvesant Casino.” Johnson, a New Orleans trumpet player, was discovered working in a rice field near New Iberia, Louisiana, and brought to New York in 1945 with his own band. He was promoted as the last of the “pure” or “true” jazz players, delivering the music as it was done a generation before. “I used to go to Minton's and listen to Charlie Parker too,” Murray says. “I thought he was just terrible. I didn't like him till after he was dead.”

I am certain Murray is the only New York intellectual courageous enough to make that confession, but he also can state, “I was the only reporter at Charlie Parker's funeral.” (When I mentioned that to Nat Hentoff he said, “There were
two
. I was even asked to say a few words about the deceased.”)

It was Murray who in the mid-fifties told me, “Nat Hentoff is the
only one writing about jazz”—meaning the only one who was worth reading on the subject. Soon Nat was not only writing about jazz in
Down Beat
and reviewing books about jazz in
The Nation
and other magazines, he was also writing a column on civil rights, education, and whatever injustice caught his attention, in the
Village Voice
. I got to know this gentle bearded man with a pipe perpetually stuck in his mouth as a neighbor and fellow writer in the Village, which meant I had the pleasure of drinking with him at the White Horse. Though he accomplished his aim of breaking out of the pigeonhole of jazz by writing on every subject under the sun, not only in the
Voice
but later in
The New Yorker
, Nat remains the premier jazz interpreter and critic of our time.

Nat still lives in the Village, where I met him recently in Bradley's bar. “The fifties was a continuously stirring time in New York,” he says. “Every night there was exciting music somewhere. Coleman Hawkins used to say, ‘You ain't nothing till you come to New York.' He used to say that when he met some trumpet player in Topeka who was supposed to be the best. And they all came.”

One who came in the fifties was David Amram, a jazz musician, composer, and, as Nat Hentoff describes him, “a ubiquitous deliverer of good cheer.” He knew more painters than writers, and he acted as “a link between different groups—music, art, and writing.”

“At my first Town Hall concert there were sculptors, artists, writers,” Amram says proudly. “There was a cohesiveness in the arts, an attempt to make the connections seem natural. We did the first jazz poetry reading at the Gallery, and I have a poster of one we did at the Circle in the Square with Howard Hart, Philip Lamantia, and Jack Kerouac. I was backup, I played piano—those guys would go out drinking between shows and not come back for an hour or two and I had to entertain. This was in '57. Jack played bongos, he was a great improviser of words, and he loved music. After listening to a jazz piece I played, he said, ‘That's what I'd like to do with words but I can't quite do that.'”

Amram plays French horn, piano, guitar, plus the flutes, whistles, drums, and other assorted folk instruments of twenty-five countries. In the fifties he played in the hot Village clubs like Café Bohemia and the Five Spot with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Cecil
Taylor, Charles Mingus, and many other jazz greats of the era, went on to become the first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic, and wrote musical scores for movies, including
The Manchurian Candidate
and
Splendor in the Grass
. Now he conducts and performs as a soloist with symphony orchestras from Kansas City to Toronto, and is called by the
Boston Globe
“the Renaissance man of American music.” Amram, at sixty, lives on a farm in New York State with his wife and children, cows and chickens, and still keeps his old loft apartment in the Village, whose door is decorated with stickers proclaiming “Dizzy Gillespie for President” and “Shalom, Y'all.”

In the apartment, Amram stretches out on a cot below the skylight, tucks his hands behind his head, and speaks from memory. “I first went to New York to hear music when I was a kid in college in D.C. It was a big thing for musicians to go to the Big Apple—they started calling it that in the forties. We'd drive to New York and sleep in my car. I had a '32 Plymouth—it couldn't go over forty-two miles an hour, so the trip took eight hours. We'd go and listen to the big bands.

“I came back from Paris in '55 and went to the Manhattan School of Music to study composition. The first night back, I went to Café Bohemia to hear the alto sax man Jackie McLean, and five weeks later I was playing there with Charles Mingus. Going to hear Mingus play was one of the great experiences of the fifties. His audience wasn't just intellectuals—it was pimps, pushers, pickpockets—but they all had a bond of appreciation. They all knew something really valuable was going on.

“Jackie McLean was one of Charlie Parker's protégés. Jackie felt that jazz as it came to be in our time was a quintessential New York expression, because from all parts of the country the best musicians came here.”

Jazz was
the
music of New York in the fifties, at least of literary and artistic New York (as well as those “pimps, pushers, and pickpockets”), and many of us later pretended, or imagined, that we dug the more advanced sounds, like those of Charlie Parker, all along. Pretending sometimes led to pretentiousness about jazz, as Bruce Jay Friedman testifies: “Jazz lovers are the most arrogant people. I never dared venture an opinion around real jazz buffs. If
I said I liked the way a guy blew horn, they would always know a guy named Pee Wee or Junior who wiped my guy away. I didn't like the church feeling while a guy was doing a riff—I was scared to tinkle a glass, I was scared out of my wits. I wasn't a jazz guy.”

Friedman did become friends with a jazz musician whose music he liked, who in turn was an admirer of Friedman's fiction. Paul Desmond, the most literary of jazz men, played in the Dave Brubeck Quartet. “Paul loved a story of mine in a collection called
When You're Excused, You're Excused,
” Friedman says. “It's about a Jew on Yom Kippur who keeps doing darker and darker things. Paul was the only one who mentioned the story. Of course, our friendship didn't qualify me as a true jazz buff—liking Paul Desmond was about the same as liking Rick Barry in the NBA.”

Desmond used to say, “I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was,” and “I'm not hostile enough to be currently acceptable.” He said being white made him part of “the real underground.”

Despite his unfashionableness with the critics—he was very melodic, and his music was easy to follow—Desmond won the
Down Beat
readers' poll as best saxophone player eleven times (only once did he win the critics' poll). Joe Goldberg wrote that the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with its popularity on college campuses, was “the most maligned, and possibly the most affluent” small group in jazz in the fifties. Brubeck made the cover of
Time
in 1954, but by the early sixties, Desmond said, “most jazz fans wouldn't be caught dead listening to us anymore.” Still, the group has “picked up a whole new audience. Just people.”

He meant people like Bruce Jay Friedman who made no claim to being jazz buffs. Desmond had many literary fans and friends, for he had once thought of being a writer, studied writing at San Francisco State, and was an avid reader who kept up with everything and everyone in contemporary literature. I met him at a party at Bill Cole's in 1959. He was standing in a group where a chic woman was holding forth on “Goodbye, Columbus” when she noticed Desmond, no doubt knew he was a saxophone player, and unnecessarily explained, “It's a story by a young writer named Philip Roth.” Desmond nodded politely, not bothering to mention he had read everything Roth had written.

Desmond was genuinely unassuming, shy, and good-natured,
and I was delighted to spend an evening with him in New York a decade after I'd moved up to Boston. I'd come down to promote my novel
Starting Over
, which was just published, and Abbey Hirsch, the ultimate publicist, was working on the tour for me. She had a dinner date with Desmond and asked me to join them, I think as consolation for having survived a horrendous radio call-in show she had booked me on, and we went to the French Shack, and after dinner we went to Desmond's apartment, which was close by, at 55th and Sixth. We drank brandy and Paul entertained us, talking of the autobiography he was writing,
How Many of You Are There in the Quartet?
(He swore it was the question most commonly asked him.) He wondered if we knew it was possible to play music by pressing the buttons of a telephone; each button made a different note, he explained. Paul picked up his Touch-Tone phone and, nodding his head to the rhythm, played “My Funny Valentine” on the buttons. Full of brandy and a good meal, listening to Paul Desmond play the telephone, I knew I was back in New York, and I loved it.

Even my friends who made no claim to being real buffs had some acquaintance with jazz, some favorite place they went to hear it, and sometimes the style they liked naturally reflected their inclinations in politics and literature.

“I've always loved jazz,” Bill Buckley says, “and I went to Nick's now and then to hear Dixieland—I wasn't interested in innovative jazz, I wasn't able to catch up with them. I used to go to Hanratty's bar to hear a graduate of Columbia named Dick Wellstood. He became a leading jazz piano player, in the opinion of Nat Hentoff.”

Sometimes proximity or style of music determined a person's jazz hangout, and Gay Talese found both to his taste at the Hickory House, on 52nd Street, when he worked at the
Times
. “I used to go sit at the oval bar to hear Marian McPartland, or to impress a date I sat at a table and ordered drinks,” Talese says. “When I worked at night, I left the paper at eight or nine, or at one or two if I was on rewrite, and I'd go to hear jazz. I loved McPartland, George Shearing and Don Shirley. They were wonderful stylists.”

A stylist himself in journalism, Talese admired stylists of jazz.

My own progression in amateur jazz appreciation, and that of
many of my friends, is expressed by the journey Richard Lingeman describes: “I started on 52nd Street to hear Dixieland, went down to Eddie Condon's, then graduated to the Five Spot.” In my own pilgrimage, I stopped along the way at Birdland, the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, and the Half Note, but I knew the Five Spot was special, and marked one's graduation to the new jazz of the era.