The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (49 page)

In one sense our showing up on Cooper Square was right in tune with the whole movement of people east, away from the West Village with its high rents and older bohemians. Cooper Square was sort of the borderline; when you crossed it, you were really on the Lower East Side, no shit. The Music itself, rapid motion during this period. Trane's leaving Miles and his graduate classes with T. Sphere Monk put him into a music so expressive and thrilling people all over tuned in to him. Miles' group was classic because it summed up what went before it as well as indicated what was to come. Miles' “perfection” was the interrelationship between the hard bop and the cool and in Miles, sassy and sly. So that on the one side the quiet little gurgles that we get as
fusion
also come out of Miles (all the leading fusionaires from “Cannonball” on are Miles' alumni) as well as the new blast of life that Coltrane carried, thus giving us the Pharaoh Sanderses and Albert Aylers and the reaching searching cry for freedom and life that not only took the music in a certain direction, but that direction was a reflection of where people themselves, particularly the African American people, were going. It is no coincidence that people always assciate John Coltrane and Malcolm X, they are harbingers and reflectors of the same life development.

And so I, we, followed Trane. We watched him even as he stood staring from the Club Bohemia listening to Miles and going through some personal hells. We heard him blow then, long and strong, trying to find something, as Miles stood at the back of the stage and tugged at his ear, trying to figure out what the fuck Trane was doing. We could feel what he was doing. Amus Mor, the poet, in his long poem on Trane says Miles was cool, in the slick cocktail party of life, but Trane would come in “wrong,” snatchin' the sammiches off the plate.

The Five Spot gig with Monk was Trane coming into his own. After Monk, he'd play sometimes chorus after chorus, taking the music apart before our ears, splintering the chords and sounding each note, resounding it, playing it backwards and upside down, trying to get to something
else. And we heard our own search and travails, our own reaching for new definition. Trane was our flag.

Trane was leaping away from “the given,” and the troops of the mainstream were both shocked and sometimes scandalized, but Trane, because he had come up through the ranks, had paid all the dues, from slicksteppin' on the bars of South Philly, honking rhythm and blues, through big Maybelle and Diz on up to Miles and then Monk, could not be waved aside by anybody. Though some tried and for this they were confirming their ignorance.

But there were some other, younger, forces coming in at the time and this added still other elements to the music and spoke of still other elements that existed among the African American people. Ornette Coleman had come in, countrified, yet newer than new. He showed at the Five Spot, first, with a yellow plastic alto saxophone, with his band dressed in red Eisenhower jackets, talking about “Free.” It was “a beboppier bebop,” an atomic age bebop, but cut loose from the prison house of regular chord changes. Rhythmically fresh, going past the church revivals and heavy African rhythm restoration that Sonny Rollins, Max Roach and the Messengers, Horace Silver had come out with attempting to get us past the deadly cool of '50s “West Coast” jazz. Ornette went back to bop for his roots, his hip jagged rhythms, and said, “Hey, forget the popular song, let's go for ourselves.” And you talking about being scandalized, some folks got downright violent. Cecil Taylor was on the scene first and his aerodynamic, million-fingered pianistics, which seemed connected to the European concert hall, made people gloss over the heavy line of blue syncopation that Cecil came with, and the percussiveness of his piano was as traditional for black “ticklers” as you could get. But that was new too and sassy, even arrogant (like Cecil himself), as if he had gone to the academy (he had) copped what they had, and still brought it back
home
.

Plus, all of Ornette's band could play, they'd start and stop like it was
in medias res
, it seemed there was no beginning or formal ending, yet they were always “together” — Don Cherry, like a brass pointillist, with his funny little pocket trumpets; Charlie Haden, the white bass player who got down on his instrument, strumming and picking it like a guitar, showing that he had heard Monk's great bassist, Wilbur Ware, and knew which way that ax was going, but at the same time original and singing. And Billy Higgins, of the perpetual smile, cooking like you spose to, carrying the finally funky business forward. They all could play, and the cry of “Freedom” was not only musical but reflected what was going on in the marches and confrontations,
on the streets and in the restaurants and department stores of the South.

The '60s had opened with the black movement stepping past the earlier civil rights phase in many ways. One key addition and change was that now the black students had come into the movement wholesale. So that from 1954 (when
Brown v. Board of Ed
. showed that the people had forced an “all deliberate speed” out of the rulers instead of the traditional “separate but equal”), through 1960, Martin Luther King and SCLC, mostly black, southern, big-city ministers, leading that struggle for democracy, were at center stage. But in 1960, the student sit-ins began, and, on February 1, black students at Greensboro began a movement that brought literally hundreds of thousands of black students, and soon students of all nationalities, into the struggle for democracy as well. So that soon we would hear the term SNCC, who, at first, were still hooked up with the middleclass ministers and their line of nonviolence, but that would change. But now, the cries of “Freedom” had been augmented with “Freedom Now!”

So it was in the air, it was in the minds of the people, masses of people going up against the apartheid South. It was also coming out of people's horns, laid out in their music. People like Max Roach spoke eloquently for an older, hip generation. He said “Freedom Now,” and Sonny Rollins had his “Freedom Suite.” And nutty Charlie Mingus was hollering his hilarious “Fables of Faubus.” I even got into a hassle with a bald-headed German clerk in a record store on 8th Street. I'd come in and asked for Jackie McLean's terrible side “Let Freedom Ring,” and the clerk wanted to give me a lecture about how “you people shouldn't confuse your sociology with music.” (It was mostly a European concert music-selling store). I told him to kiss my ass, right now. Yeh, kiss my ass … that was also getting into it.

So there was a newness and a defiance, a demand for freedom, politically and creatively, it was all connected. I wrote an article that year, “The Jazz Avant-Garde,” mentioning people like Cecil, Ornette, and the others, plus Trane and the young wizard Eric Dolphy, the brilliant arranger and reed player, Oliver Nelson, Earl Griffith, onetime Cecil Taylor vibist, and my neighbor Archie Shepp, who had come on the scene, also shaking it up.

I also wrote a piece for
Kulchur
called “Milneburg Joys, or Against Hipness as Such,” taking on members of our various circles, the hippies (old usage) of the period who thought merely by initialing ideas which had currency in the circles, talking the prevailing talk, or walking the prevailing walk,
that that was all there was to it. I was also reaching and searching, life had to be more than a mere camaraderie of smugness and elitist hedonism.

Ornette Coleman's “Free Jazz,” the completely “free” improvisational record, with the cream of the new players, had set the tone. It was as if the music was leading us. And older players like Trane and Rollins took up that challenge. Trane played chordal music, but he got frantically chordal. The critics called it “sheets of sound,” many at a loss for words, like they'd been when Bird had first appeared.
Downbeat
and
Metronome
had to re-review all those old records, because they had put them all down as fakery and they were classics of African American music, so they tried to clean up.

What was being generated by the new blacker circle I mostly hung with was quite different in effect than the earlier circles. Our overall large circle was, of course, well integrated. But now, I'd be sitting and talking to Marion or White or both, or three, add Bob Thompson. Or we'd be at Bob's loft, checking his wild paintings, all kinds of different-colored women with scenes taken from the Italian renaissance classic painters and reinterpreted through Bob's way-out mind. White was painting wry symbolic abstractions, where instead of the pure motion-paint of the “action paintings,” White relied on more or less “organic”-looking shapes swirling and dancing on his canvases. I still wonder what White's work would have been like today had he lived. Or Bob's, had he lived. Overstreet, at the time, was doing brilliant but highly sexy drawings. And usually we'd be getting high, about to get high, or talking about getting high.

We had some bigger, wilder parties at Cooper Square, in Archie's loft, with some of the hippest music of the time. And Archie and I used to do some mean tipping around those streets, or when he played we'd go cheer him on. Sometimes with Bob and White and Marion and me, Tom might be walking with us, or hanging with us, and sometimes Elvin Jones or Hank Mobley. Dudes be sitting around heads about to wear they chest out and Elvin would look like he wasn't even high, smiling his lit-up smile like a neon sign. But Hank eventually got into bad times.

One time I was sitting with Marion and White and somebody else up in my study at Cooper Square and we were shooting cocaine. Somebody also had given us a vial of liquid procaine, which was like fake cocaine. I get the bright idea to melt the real cocaine in the liquid procaine and shoot it up. I had got the needle out of my arm and I feel the rise coming but this time it's sweeping up through my body to my head like it won't stop. I was sitting in the big overstuffed desk chair for my rolltop and this hot surge
seems to sweep up past my eyes shooting out the top of my skull. I rose up, almost paralleling, I guess, the rise of the drug. I said, “Whooo-ooo,” and then wheeled around in the middle of the room and fell over backwards like I'd been shot. And then, on the floor, semiconscious, it seems to me like some big blue thing is trying to hit me between the eyes. They say I was thrashing around on the floor, turning my head frantically from one side to the other. I thought I was trying to keep the blue thing from hitting me between the eyes. I didn't know nobody could OD off “coke,” but that felt mighty close to something bad, and it scared the shit out of me. But it didn't stop me or our drug activities.

We were in the old Half Note on Hudson Street watching Trane slay all pests. Between sets, Bob (who was a great friend of Elvin's), White and I go up the street, fetch a bag of whatnot, then Bob wants us to stop by this painter's house he knew, a pretty hip white dude who lived down there. We all high, but Bob wants to go up and talk to the dude. His wife comes to the door in her gown and lets us in. It was a very sheer gown and you could just about see through it. there's some music playing so after Elvin is introduced, he starts dancing with this dude's wife, grinding like he's trying to start a fire. I'd always thought the shit made you unsexual, but it didn't affect Elvin that way at all. We'd be nodding and he'd go back and play the drums like mad.

There were now a few lofts scattered around where you could hear the music as well as European avant-garde music. I especially liked Morton Feldman's music, Cage's audacity and some of the other things. But we were mostly into the new black music. Coffee shops like Take 2, the White Whale, also had the young musicians in when they couldn't work in the larger clubs. In one of those coffee shops one night a really wild episode went down. It told me something about downtown and myself and some of my friends. Archie Shepp had been playing in this place on 10th Street, the White Whale, the decor even had a big anchor on the wall with huge chains hanging down. It was early and people were sitting around talking and, at a couple of tables, playing chess. There's one guy sitting there, they called him Big Brown. He was big, about six feet three inches, and much darker than brown. He was slender like he was in shape. Plus, he had this slow, bent-knee hop he walked with that was more peculiar than hip. Brown made his mark downtown by first standing around various places like Washington Square Village profiling. He had muscles, so he liked to preen and twist, stand like a body builder in a show. He was a proto Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Brown's whole demeanor used to turn me off. But even worse was the fact that not only would he always be in his exaggerated strut, but during the summer months he'd walk the streets in a loincloth, like an Indian fakir or something. And sometimes he'd come into the Cedar when we'd be sitting there and he would come walking down the aisle rubbing his crotch, like he was showing off his wares to the various females. One night he even came up to a booth where one couple was sitting and stood rubbing his crotch just a few inches from this woman's face! Her companion said something and Brown talked in rhymes putting the dude down. Brown loved to recite singsong versions of Shakespeare or the
Rubaiyat
or his own rhyming doggerel. A couple of times, I saw him get in some woman's face who was sitting with some man and I vowed inside my head that that motherfucker better not ever do that to any woman I was with. In fact, when he'd walk down the aisle I'd loudly ridicule him, and one time he cut his eyes over my way, scowled, made some remark, and kept swaggering on up.

But as he was playing chess, the dude he was playing checkmated him, calling “Check!” I laughed, as it happened just as I was passing close to the table where he was sitting.

I said, “Wrong again!” and broke up. Some of my friends, notably A.B., Marion, and Joe, were in there and this cracked them up and some others nearby. Brown always pulled his shit off in the spirit and demeanor of “Bogarting” people. He would run his silent or rhymed gorilla act on people and they were supposed to be intimidated. But I didn't dig him.