The Jazz Kid (9 page)

Then we stopped. He stood up. “I gotta go. She's probably already sore at me.”

“Can I come back, Tommy?” I wasn't sure if I was supposed to call him by his first name, but I wanted to.

“Sure,” he said. “I don't mind.”

I
T CAME OUT
the way I figured. Pa never said anything more about taking lessons from Tommy Hurd. I don't know if it was his idea, or Ma's; probably both of them, for different reasons. I figured he just threw Tommy's card away and let the whole thing slip from his mind. I wasn't going to bring it up: if I didn't ask they couldn't say no.

I knew I shouldn't make a nuisance out of myself to Tommy. I figured if I went out once or twice a week—every five or six days, maybe—didn't stay more than an hour or so, and brought him his pie and coffee, he might put up with me for a while. I
had
to learn how to put that floating feeling into the music. So that's what I did—hike myself over there every once in a while.

To be honest, I admired Tommy more than anybody. I admired people before. I admired Ray Grimes on the Cubs, I admired Tom Mix and some of those other cowboys in the movies, who raced their horses through rivers and over gullies to catch the bad guys. But I never admired anybody the way I admired Tommy It wasn't just because he could play jazz, either; it was the kind of guy he was, too. The only thing that mattered to him was jazz. He hardly thought about anything else. Sure, he had some girlfriend he usually went to see before he went to work, and he liked to shoot pool—he had an uncle who ran a pool hall, and when he was a kid he used to hang around there a lot running errands and sweeping up. But I noticed that when he was showing me something about jazz, he'd forget what time it was, and suddenly have to rush out so his girlfriend wouldn't get salty with him.

You take me. I was used to having a nice home, clean clothes, lampshades with fringes on them, a carpet on the living room floor. Pa said he could afford to have a nice home and was resolved to have it. But Tommy, he didn't care about anything like that. He didn't even notice that there was no shade on the lightbulb hanging from his ceiling, that there weren't any pictures on the walls. It didn't make any difference to him whether there was a lampshade or pictures, because he wasn't there anyway—he was somewheres
off
in jazz land. To him a place was a nice home if it had a phonograph and some jazz records; if it didn't, it wasn't.

I guess that's one reason why he didn't mind me coming around. He could talk jazz to me as much as he wanted and I sat there and soaked it up. He'd play me records he figured I ought to know about— the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which got a lot of people started on jazz, Bailey's Lucky Seven, the Original Memphis Five and of course the Rhythm Kings—he had all their records, every one of them. He'd teach me tunes, he'd show different ways of fingering certain phrases. We'd play things together, and he began to give me some idea of what improvising was all about. That was another time when those old piano lessons came in useful, for I knew what he was talking about when he explained how you put a melody against the chords.

A lot of times we just sat around and talked. He told me about the gigs he was on—what they were like and who was on them. He told me about going to the South Side, around State Street and Thirty-fifth where there were a whole lot of jazz clubs. “You got to get over there sometime, kid, and hear for yourself. Get yourself a pair of long pants, they'd probably let you in. The Nest, the DeLuxe Cafe, Dreamland, Lincoln Gardens. Places like that. That's where all those New Orleans guys play.”

That brought up a question that had been bothering me for some while, for the Black Belt was on the South Side. “Tommy, why do they call it nigger music?”

“That's to set people against it. A lot of white people, you tell ‘em jazz is nigger music, they don't want nothing to do with it.”

“Well, is it or isn't it?”

“That's a hard one, kid. I don't rightly know. It started down there in New Orleans, and from what you hear it was the colored guys who came up with the idea. But the first we heard of it up here in Chi was these white bands—the Original Dixieland, Tom Brown's Band from Dixieland and such. The colored guys began to come up a year or two later— Duhé, Keppard, Oliver, this here Bechet they all talk about. Nick LaRocca and them white guys from the Dixieland, they always claimed they started it, but Steve Brown—that's Tom Brown's brother, he's the bass player with the Rhythm Kings, a
white
guy— Steve says LaRocca's full of it, he stole all his stuff off Ray Lopez. Steve told me in New Orleans they got it off the colored. Out there in these country towns down there the colored had these little bands—Steve thinks it started out there. When you get a chance to hear some of these colored fellas play, you figure that might be right. But I don't know. I wasn't there myself.”

“So it is nigger music.”

He kind of looked at me sideways. “So what if it is?”

So what if it was? That was kind of hard to answer. “Well, a lot of people figure nig—colored people are kind of low down.”

Tommy nodded. “Some of ‘em are. Some of ‘em ain't. You take Calvin Wilson, he's as good a fella as any white man I ever met.”

“The piano player you were jamming with at Herbie's club?”

“Yeah. I'd trust him with my wallet and the keys to my place.”

It was a hard one. I'd been raised all my life to think of the colored people as low down, and it wasn't easy to change. But I didn't want to disagree with Tommy, and I resolved I'd do like he did, and say colored instead of nigger. “Okay, is it colored music? Or is it white people's music, too?”

“Well, I reckon it belongs to anybody who's willing to take good care of it,” he said. “The Rhythm Kings are white and the Oliver bunch is colored and I don't see as there's much difference between ‘em. Both from New Orleans of course.” He stopped to think about it. “I don't know, maybe you got to give the edge to Oliver. He does stuff with mutes that beats everything. He's got this number “Dipper-mouth Blues,” where he works the plunger so nice you think it was a baby crying for its ma.”

“What's a plunger?”

Tommy laughed. “Why you ought to know, of all people, kid. It's the rubber part of a plumber's friend.”

That sure surprised me. “What you use for unstopping toilets?”

“That's it. He works it over the bell. It's just uncanny.” He picked up his cornet, and began to play real soft, at the same time closing and opening the bell with his hand. It
was
uncanny, too, for he could get all kinds of effects with it—laughing, crying, people talking.

He put the cornet down. “Of course I was using my hand. It ain't nothing to what Joe Oliver can do with a plunger. Or a bottle, ashtray, anything.”

Naturally I was all fired up to try it, and I resolved I would, the minute I got home, for Pa had two or three plungers laying around. “So in the end you would say the colored guys are best.”

“Well, yes and no. You can learn something from those colored guys, all right. They got something to teach you. A lot of guys get out to State Street whenever they can to listen to them. But in the end you got to run it into something of your own. You take Calvin Wilson. He ain't from New Orleans. Memphis. He didn't grow up with jazz like the New Orleans guys. He learned to play the blues on the guitar from hanging around the colored stevedores on the waterfront. When ragtime got big he switched over to piano—taught himself, all the keys, not just D-flat like those blues players. He played in all those colored saloons down there—Memphis, St. Louis, Sedalia, which was a big ragtime town. When jazz come along he came up to Chi and took it up. He's an all-around entertainer, really. Sings, gets up from the piano and dances while he's playing, writes his own songs. I heard him first in one of Dan Jackson's gambling joints. Tough place.”

“Who's Dan Jackson?”

“Colored gangster. Politician, gangster, I don't know what you call him. Runs half the Black Belt. Calvin was in with him, and played his clubs. I started sitting in with him. He didn't mind—give him a rest. That's how we got to be buddies. He ain't a real great jazz musician—still got a lot of ragtime in him. So you can't say every colored guy is a natural-born jazz musician. But I learned a lot from Calvin.”

“How come he never plays in your band?”

“Are you nuts, kid? You can't put a colored guy in a white band. White guy in a colored band, neither. Oh, a white can sit in with a colored band and nobody'd say nothing about it. But not as a regular part of the band. The cops would close you down if
you
tried it. And worse if a colored guy went to sit in with a white band. It just wouldn't happen.” He shook his head. “But I can sit in with Calvin. Maybe some time you can get your folks to let you out at night, I'll take you out there. Go to Lincoln Gardens and hear King Oliver. Seeing as I don't start till midnight we could go over there for a couple hours first. You got to get hold of long pants, though.”

Oh, it took my breath away to think of going out to Lincoln Gardens to hear Oliver, but I knew there wasn't any hope of it, either. Not until I was older and on my own, anyway. “How come they never made any records?”

“I heard they just went down to Richmond, Indiana, to cut some sides for Gennett, but I ain't seen any in the stores yet.”

Gennett was the same label the Rhythm Kings made their records for. “Do you think King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band is better than the Rhythm Kings?” I hated to think that, for I'd gotten loyal to the Rhythm Kings.

Tommy thought about it. “Don't know. All them New Orleans fellas are pretty damn good. A couple of years ago this fella Lawrence Duhé had a mighty fine band at the DeLuxe. Freddie Keppard was in that. Keppard was all the rage until Oliver came along. Freddie got to drinking, that was his problem. I ain't against a man taking a drink, but Freddie took it to where he couldn't play right. Then there was this clarinet with Duhé named Bechet who had everybody talking. I didn't hear him myself. He ain't around no more. I don't know what happened to him.”

“These are all colored guys?”

“Colored, all from New Orleans. But I'm not saying as you can take it away from the white guys, either. I don't reckon there's any better bass player around than Steve Brown. And Rop—I'd put him up there with the colored clarinets.”

For a minute he sat there thinking. “You know, kid, it's kind of mixed up, when you get down to it.

See, a lot of these guys ain't exactly colored. They're Creoles. Frenchmen, they call them down in New Orleans. You and I might take them for colored, but they'll tell you they're different. Pretty light-skinned, some of ‘em. Take this here piano player Jelly
Roll
Morton—he's as light as you or me. Great player. Speaks good, too. Speaks better than me, when you get down to it. When you look at it that way, you might say these here Creoles are the key to it. Keppard, Bechet, Duhé, Jelly Roll—all Creoles. I guess Oliver's part Creole, too, although he don't look it. I mean they call the band the Creole Jazz Band, don't they?”

The whole thing confused me a lot. It was the way Tommy talked about the colored that struck me funny. When somebody I knew mentioned the colored, you could tell just from the way they talked that they took them to be low down. They didn't have to
say
it straight out—it was just there in the way they put things. If you just called them niggers, that'd do it. But there wasn't any of that in the way Tommy talked about them. For one, he never said nigger. He talked about them like they weren't any different from anybody else. They had their own ways, maybe; I guess Tommy would say that. All people had their own ways, when you got down to it—Italians, Irish, Jews, whatever. A lot of times you could tell who somebody was just by the way they talked, or from their clothes. I could see that just by looking around my own neighborhood. The colored had their ways, too. But leaving that aside, from the way Tommy talked about this musician or that musician, it didn't seem to matter very much where they came from. It was how they
played
that mattered. I could see the justice in that. But it was new to me, and I wasn't used to it.

I never paid Tommy anything and he never asked me to. Of course he wasn't giving me real lessons like Mr. Sylvester. You know, sit there playing exercises over and over until I got them right. But I was wasting a lot of Tommy's time, a couple of hours a week. For a long time I was afraid to bring it up. If he decided he wanted to get paid, there was no way for me to get hold of the money. But not paying him made me feel guilty. Pa had drilled it into us that a man paid his own way. I didn't feel good about getting free lessons from Tommy, and finally I brought it up.