My senior year, I had an epiphany. That year was important for me, not least because I was graduating at the end of it and would then have to decide what I wanted to do with my life and find a job (though not necessarily in that order). I’d be leaving an environment that had probably become too comfortable for me. And to complicate matters, the summer before I had realized the summer that I didn’t much like my majors (poly sci and Spanish) and had no interest in pursuing any of the careers I’d been preparing myself for since starting at Hiram. I didn’t want to be a city manager or work in the State Department (my sole reason for majoring in Spanish) or in any other government office. I’d never wanted to be a lawyer, so that hadn’t changed, and while I found politics interesting, the thought of becoming a politician made me puke.
But I only had three credits left to go in my major and because I’d delayed fulfilling the college science and math requirements (six credits each) for three years in a row, I had to complete them that year, so my senior year was going to be constrained by taking all the courses I didn’t want to take but had to in order to graduate.
Another complication, though not a major one, was that I ‘d successfully avoided taking –well, passing— gym courses for three years. I signed up for seventeen P.E. courses during that time but only passed four. I had to pass ten in order to graduate. The only way you could flunk a gym course was by missing class more than two times. (They met twice a week for seven weeks.) I flunked some courses the second week –English Country Dancing was one. P.E. grades didn’t count toward your cumulative grade point average or I’d never have blown them off, but I still had to pass them before I graduated and at the start of my senior year, I had six left to go. There were thirty-five weeks of class in the school year and .P.E. courses lasted seven weeks, with two sessions a week. So I had thirty-five weeks to finish forty-two weeks of gym. Go figure!
My senior year was mostly a matter of me taking courses I didn’t want to take, alleviated by the two art courses I substituted for my final course in Spanish. (I dumped the major.. After all, if I wasn’t going into the Foreign Service, why take more Spanish?)
It was a good year outside the classroom, but not in.
(Since I have nowhere else to add this, let me add this tidbit here: I dyed my hair orange that year too.)
***
In 1957, women had to be back in the dorm by a designated time (10 pm on weekdays). Afterwards, we men either went out the road –Hiram was a dry campus and out the road was where the bars were– or we headed back to our dorms to hang out. After hours, we’d congregate in someone’s room, stack up records on the turntable and chew the fat until we ran out of steam. ( It took a while. We were young.) It was a great year for me socially. I was in my second year of rooming with Jim “Goody” Goodsell. Across the hall and one door down from us were Dick Reimel and Howie Ludlum and directly across Joe LaCamera and Dave Cody. We lost track of each other after graduation but that year, we were tight, and when we played music, which we did all the time when we were together, we played jazz. We all liked jazz and Reim and I were fanatic about it.
Here’s my epiphany.
Reim had joined the Columbia Record Club. As a new member, he received nine free records. Columbia’s jazz catalogue wasn’t the best –there were many more lows than highs in it– but they recorded Ellington and had just signed Dave Brubeck and hired Teo Macero as their A&R man and he was already turning their jazz operation around.
I came back from work at Freddie’s one night and Reim called me over to his room. He wanted to play me one of his new records. He played a cut and asked, “Keym, what do you think of that?” It was a quintet: trumpet, tenor sax, piano, bass, drums, definitely boppish. I didn’t like it. Not a bit. “The trumpet’s too thin,” I said. “He’s playing melody a lot and just doodles around on his solo. The tenor is way too harsh. He’s angular and his solo doesn’t go anywhere. The piano player plays cocktail piano –tinkle, tinkle– and the drummer is way too loud.”
Thus, on first hearing, I dismissed the first great Miles Davis quintet –Miles, trumpet; John Coltrane, sax; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Philly Joe Jones, drums. The song was “All of You.”
Then three weeks later, I went over to Garrettsville to buy some records and returned with one album, Sonny Rollins, vol. 2, on Blue Note Records. I heard it in the listening booth and knew I had to have it right away. The music was electric . Rollins (tenor sax) seldom tried to sound pretty but on this album, he outdid himself: his playing was more strident than on any album of his I’ve heard since. The other horn was trombonist JJ Johnson, a player who had bridged the gap between tailgate trombone and the fast moving, sinuous, harmonically adventuresome music of bop, playing Parker on his unwieldy big horn. That album was also my exposure to the piano playing of Thelonious Monk, who played bop like no other musician I knew. I’m ashamed to say I ‘d never heard him before or if I had, I hadn’t paid attention. It was like bop piled on top of old school stride. He struck the keys differently than his confreres: with a harder, more percussive sound and longer intervals between notes and thus fewer notes played over all, a ringing sound to it.
Monk played on two tunes on the album, both written by him: “”Reflections” and his masterpiece “Misterioso,” whose rocking-back-and-forth melody line almost doesn’t sound like melody until you hear it played. (It’s the one Monk tune I learned how to play on my own, built completely off ascending intervals: you move up the keyboard, note one to note two, then back again and start a half note higher, using the white keys instead of the black, and go through the same routine again …. It’s brilliant!)
“Misterioso” started with a press drumroll by Art Blakey, the drummer who quickly became my favorite, usurping the laid-back ‘cool’ drummers I’d heard with West Coast bands. Monk and Rollins seesawed up the melody -dum, dat, dum, dat (pause) dum, dat, dum day …. Rollins soloed backed by Monk and Monk soloed himself. Monk finished and handed over the keyboard to bop-funk pianist Horace Silver, who comped behind Johnson on trombone and then soloed on his own. Monk came back for the reprise. Throughout, Paul Chambers’s bass seesawed back and forth and Blakey laid down a rock hard beat. Silver was the pianist on the four other cuts, closer to mainstream bop and hard. The playing throughout was formidable, torrents of notes, brilliant solos, and an ensemble to die for.
Paul Chambers had just joined Miles Davis: his walking bass line on the torrentially up tempo “Wail March” amounted to a solo in itself. Blakey was known for his power but more than that, he knew how to push a player into a solo: he would signal its coming with a clack clack clack of sticks on the side of his snare or a slow press roll that grew louder and louder as it went on until boom, the soloist was plunged into solo, at which point Blakey would pull back, playing a heart on his snares and cymbals, dropping an occasional depth charge on the bass drum and using his sticks on the rim of the drum to make off-beat clack clacks.
Blakey is still my favorite among jazz drummers. He wasn’t the most technically proficient drummer –that was probably Elvin Jones– but he best moved along the players he played with. He brought out the best in the horns he backed.
***
Three weeks before, I’d criticized how harsh Coltrane’s sound was and how intrusive a drummer Philly Joe was. Now I’d come back to the dorm with an album that blew the other out of the water in volume, energy and harshness. I played the Rollins record for Reimel and he laughed. “The tenor on my record is too harsh?” he said. “Keym, it doesn’t hold a candle to this one.” He was right. It didn’t change my feelings about the Rollins record, though. I still loved it.
What did change was that I listened again to Miles and within a month or two, I’d bought my own copy of the same album.
***
A point about Rollins. He is the absolute master at improvising. His solos are witty and logical, often self-referential. (He loves to quote other songs in the song he’s playing.) He can play longer and with greater focus than any player I know on any instrument. That too came though on that album. The lines Rollins blew told stories. I could tell on first listening that I was listening to a great.
***
A few weeks later, I owned Miles’s Round About Midnight, the first of many albums by him I would eventually acquire, I purchased the first of my many Coltrane albums, Blue Train, and by the end of the year had purchased albums by Silver, composer-arranger George Russell, the great bassist/composer/combo leader Charles Mingus (Mingus Ah Um, Mingus Dynasty, The Clown). I even owned albums by Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, though I didn’t know yet quite what to make of them.
My jazz world had expanding exponentially because once I had opened that one crack in the door, I kept noticing other directions to explore.
So far it was only expanding forward and outward, though. Not backward into the history of jazz. I still wore blinders to pre-1930s jazz, which meant I didn’t appreciate how startlingly original and moving the early recordings of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton were. I didn’t dig Fats Waller (“too popular”), Jack Teagarden (“old hat”), and god forbid I should listen to the great white jazz –Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Tnschemacher and Beiderbecke, Bud Freeman, Teagarden, Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Adrian Rollini that came out of Chicago in the ’20s.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
MUSIC & ME 