The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (18 page)

They would play “Harlem Nocturne” and “Flamingo,” stock band arrangements of anything danceable, Ellington, Basie, “Caledonia.” Jackie
Bland was probably the most advanced. He had them playing “Ooopapadow” of Diz, and Wallington's “Lemon Drop.” Herman's takes of Diz were popular. They wasn't prejudiced, they even ended the sets with Kenton's “Intermission Riff.” But mostly it was rhythm and rhythm and blues and blues ballads. Wayne Shorter played with Jackie and Nat, and Grachan Moncur III played with Nat as well as Knobby who's now with Herbie Mann plus some great young players like Ed Lightsey on bass, Nat's brother Billy on reeds (the whole Phipps family played — Nat a pianist). And hip musicians liked Hugh Brodie, Allen Shorter, Herbie Morgan went through the bands. Hank Mobley was blowing with Billy Ford and his thunderbirds at the Howard Bar and James Moody lived on Monmouth Street up the street from my girlfriend D.

Jackie had the most strange presence and he would conduct the band (really like Diz) with head, arms, legs, butt, even his eyes shooting in all directions. These bands played the whole spectrum of the music, our whole history, from old blues to new jazz, and we danced to all of it. “Hucklebuck,” “Honey Dripper,” “Four Brothers,” and the band members were great heroes to us.

Nat and his brother Billy and a couple other members of that band (like Pretty Boy F., who turned out to be a four-hundred-pound cop) went to Barringer and I knew them, but they were older and in higher grades. Nat and I even ran track together one year and got to be pretty good friends.

All that music was at the Masonic. Some I was very familiar with and some new stuff I heard and began to dig. It was all part of the same cultural matrix to us — black from every which a way and brown plus even yellow and white translated by our main men stomping on the stage.

K. and R. and I also did some other steppin'. We might go to Lloyd's Manor, which had a different crowd plus some of the same folks who was at the canteen. I met Little Esther at Lloyd's one night. She had a big hit (and she was about my age, fourteen or fifteen or so) “Double Crossin' Blues” with Johnny Otis. Between sets I came up to her and she was foolin' around with the bandleader's trumpet. I wanted to say something. She had really big pretty lips, bright red, and her hair cut short and straightened. She was smiling and talking to one of the musicians. I just looked and thought, Hey, I got close to Little Esther. She and Mel Walker and Johnny Otis would sing (and I would too in those bright blue Saturdays of my teenagedom.)

We also went to mambo sets which were coming in about that time too. Once at Lloyd's there were so many people mamboing you couldn't move. We were stuck fixed in the crowd, breathing everybody's passion. (It was also the first time I ever remember seeing what I later found out was a Puerto Rican. Two young girls near my own age, one with a blond streak in dark reddish brown hair at the corner of Belmont and Springfield, going somewhere. I didn't even know what they were.)

This was also around the same period my cousin George lent me (forever) some of his bebop records. I had listened to a couple in his house on Wallace Street. Then he brought some over to my house on Belmont.

They were Guilds, Manors, Savoys (a Newark company), with groups like Charlie Parker's Reboppers, Max Roach and the BeBop Boys, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie's “Ooopapadow,” “Hot House,” “Ornithology,” “The Lady in Red,” and waboppadapaDam! my world had changed!!

I listened to bebop after school, over and over. At first it was strange and the strangeness itself was strangely alluring. Bebop! I listened and listened. And began learning the names of musicians and times and places and events. Bird, Diz, Max, Klook, Monk, Miles, Getz, and eventually secondary jive like
Downbeat, Metronome
, Feather, Ulanov, began to be part of my world and words.

I want to explain how much bebop changed me. Not in the superficial movie way that said, look, yesterday the hero wore glasses and had a limp, today he's whole and looks more like Ronald Colman than he did with that funny disguise. Maybe there were some changes on the top some people could peep. But mostly it was interior. I heard this different music and different ideas, different images came to me. I thought about different things.

I was still in the Central Ward, up over the oil heater Polish couple, and could look down on Belmont Avenue weekends and see slick folks strut
and drunks stagger into the Chinese restaurant for some chow mein. I was still going to the canteen on Sundays, and the National, and hanging out most times with the Hillsides, but mostly K. and R. But now some other kinds of yearnings turned me around. I wanted to go to some other kinds of places, and usually by myself. Not because I suddenly felt “estranged” from people or whatnot. But because bebop, “The Music,” had got into me and was growing in me and making me hear things and see things. I began to want things. I didn't even know what.

And I wasn't even sure what the music was. Bebop. A new language a new tongue and vision for a generally more advanced group in our generation. (Though that could always be turned around by the rich and the powerful and this will be the case until the oppressed have control over their own lives!) Bebop was a staging area for a new sensibility growing to maturity. And the Beboppers themselves were blowing the sound to attract the growing, the developing, the about-to-see. Sometimes even the players was carrying out the end of another epoch as they understood it. Though they knew they was making change, opening a door, cutting underbrush and heavy vines away to make a path. And where would that path lead? That was the real question. It is the real question of each generation. Where will the path you've shown us lead? And who will take it?

The sound itself. The staccato rhythm and jagged lines. The breakneck speed and “outside” quality. Joe Carroll sang “In the Land of Oobladee.” “Outside.” Strange. Weird. Weird. That word I read and heard. Weird. Thelonious. That's a weird name. What did it mean? Why were they sounding like this? They even looked weird.

My first hero was Diz, Dizzy Gillespie. That's because he was the wildest. For the same reason the media picked up on Diz. I looked in
Esquire
(which my father used to subscribe to) and there was an article on Diz. “The High Priest of Bebop” (later I got to understand that that was Monk). The title of the article hit me. “To Be or Not to Bop.” The Shakespearean overtones, the picture magazine hype, turned me on. Diz in windowless hornrims. Also the shades and beautiful beret. I had never really looked at a beret before. We called them “tams.” And there were dudes and women who wore them. But Diz (and the magazine) provided a pique I'd never checked before. A guy down the street from me who went to Barringer named G. and I began to hang out. He was a bass player. He played with the school band and also made some of the gigs with the various teenage bands around town. He hung with with a trumpet player named Pinball
who I thought was one of the hippest dudes in the world. He even had a sound like Miles.

I had gone from piano lessons to drawing lessons to drum lessons and now I was at trumpet lessons. My mother kept throwing yellow W. in my face as someone who would stick to piano lessons. (He had an uncle who played piano occasionally for the church. He, the young uncle, was yellow with a slanted high side part, the epitome of yellow mischief as far as I was concerned. Glasses. A sort of Hollywood character actor type. Had a name like Percy, dig?)

Bebop had brought a wind of other connections, interconnections in all directions. Like wires strung up and looping out of the Third Ward, yet that, for me, was its center, where you had to be to pick up all the communications coming in. I had a skate box, without skates as I remember, because I couldn't really skate. Though I went to the rink a few times. But that was a social thing. Thursdays was Colored Night in those days, even in Newark. The joint was called Dreamland and other nights you'd get turned away. Those were for white kids and the joint was really in the next town, Elizabeth, and there was always talk that if you showed up the other nights not only would you be turned away but you'd get into a rumble with the white kids.

Usually, I'd just show up down at the White Castle hamburger place on Elizabeth Avenue and check out the cars until I saw people I knew and we'd rap. I'd check the beauties and maybe see a couple of my familiar fantasies. Sometimes I'd get a ride back to Belmont, other times I had to hoof it. But it was a regular stop. The only thing I ever did pertaining to skating was paint the skate box, which was made of plain wood. I had some red sticky paint and painted Dizzy's picture, with the bebop glasses and bebop tam and around the hopeless painting I scrawled “To Be” on top of the picture and “Or Not to Bop” underneath. I don't even know if I took that skate box out of the house. I might have taken it to Dreamland a couple of times, I'm not sure, cause once I got into Dreamland, I'd just stand around and watch. Even when I put on skates. But that was it, I never even had skates. When I went down there I had to rent skates. So it woulda been stupid to carry the box. However, I mighta carried it.

But I did show the picture a couple times in some context. I began to buy records now to try to add to my core collection which was really my cousin George's. George had also given/loaned me some “Jazz at the Philharmonic” (JATP) records. The Norman Granz production of everybody in those mostly blowing sessions that traveled around the country. Bird,
Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Flip Phillips. He asked me if I had any records, bop records, and up until that time I would only occasionally buy an R&B or quartet record. Like Orioles, Ravens, Honey Dripper, or Hucklebuck. I showed him my parents' album (those four-record 78 collections) of Nat King Cole's trio. And they was pretty hip but that was all I had.

Everything was still 78 and very fragile. One of the first records of the new music I bought was Charlie Parker's
Repetition
. I hadn't heard it, but something I read in one of the magazines turned me on. I pored through those magazines and the mystique and the fact that they were mentioning landmark sides which I didn't know anything about and dropping names and showing flicks and I knew nothing at all about them — except the little bit of knowledge I got from George's present — made it seem that I was being let in, now, on something very heavy that had been going on all around me without me knowing anything.

I had just started trying to play the trumpet and still didn't know how to read music very well. The band I started was embarrassing in that regard, cause I had to have them play the heads over and over till I could read it, I was so slow. We wanted to play Shearing's “September in the Rain” and a tune we'd heard Sarah Vaughan sing, “Tenderly.” That's when we discovered that those were really the same tune.

The alto and drums were the only really consistent members of the “band.” The bass player, G., was too advanced for us. (And of that band the bass player is a street vendor, the drummer an architect, and the altoist a commercial artist, the trumpet player does write something about the music, but he sure can't play!) The band was a brown enterprise connected in its strongest tone to black and blue. But my mother let us play in her living room on her sacred hardwood floors. She “didn't mind,” in fact I'm sure she was happy we was there rather than snakin' through the streets which was pure black and blues.

And then I was going through some other changes as I was about to leave high school. In school my grasp on the day-to-day academics had slipped altogether. Though I still got passing marks in most stuff, I had just waved my hands at stuff like algebra and just sat up in the class listening to the white boys crack jokes. The teacher we had, Mr. H., was no teacher at all but just the brunt of cruel high school First Ward jokes. The kids would sometimes curse him out in Italian or call him names consistently like “Baccala” (fish) which invariably cracked everybody up. I laughed because the others did. But I could ask V. sometimes what the Italian words meant
and he would tell me. Where before I'd been much more serious and concerned about my grades and school behavior now I cared less and less.

In fact around my junior year I'd begun to take off (play hooky) from time to time. Mostly, when there was something happening downtown at the Adams, when they had live shows. Like the whole of the Newark school system turned out for Nat King Cole. But why would they have an 11:00 A.M. show? Once they had a guy come on stage and get a rah rah session going where he said, “Everybody from Barringer,” and they'd cheer. “Everybody from Central,” and they'd cheer. “Everybody from South Side,” and they'd cheer. And so forth. And then they busted all those that raised their hands and any others they could see and made 'em go back to school.

The bass player and I used to cut together. We lived near each other, on the same street, way cross town. But still went to Barringer. How we got over there I'll never know. He was older than I was and was actually driving a truck. I think it was his father's fish truck, (though I could never understand how his father could use it to sell fish if G. had it daytimes cattin' around with us).

But that was superhip for its time, that fish truck. A few of the selected would meet near the school and take off. Or else we'd be in school and after letting them mark us present in their homerooms we'd break, meet outside, and take off. Just the idea of riding around in that fish truck while school was going on thrilled us. We felt real big time. Though we had deep paranoia about the truant officers and our parents. Much more probably than is possible today when the truant officers are so secondary in the present “philosophy” of education that they have been fired in Newark because of budget cuts. So your child could be absent any number of days these days and you wouldn't know it. In those days you couldn't do that. They would be onto your case in a minute.