The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  I was so nervous on that first real gig with Bird that I used to ask if I could quit every night. I had sat in with him, but this was my first real paying gig with him. I would ask, “What do you need me for?” because that motherfucker was playing so much shit. When Bird played a melody I would just play under him and let him lead the fucking note, let him sing the melody and take the lead on everything. Because what would it look like, me trying to lead the leader of all the music? Me playing lead for Bird—are you kidding? Man, I was scared to death that I was going to fuck up. Sometimes I would act like I was quitting, because I thought he might fire me. So I was going to quit before he did, but he would always encourage me to stay by saying that he needed me and that he loved the way I played. I hung in there and learned. I knew everything Dizzy was playing. I think that’s why Bird hired me—also because he wanted a different kind of trumpet sound. Some things Dizzy played I could play, and other things he played, I couldn’t. So, I just didn’t play those licks that I knew I couldn’t play, because I realized early on that I had to have my own voice—whatever that voice was—on the instrument.

  That first two weeks with Bird was a motherfucker, but it helped me grow up real fast. I was nineteen years old and playing with the baddest alto saxophone player in the history of music. This made me feel real good inside. I might have been scared as a motherfucker, but I was getting more confident too, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

  But Bird didn’t teach me much as far as music goes. I loved playing with him, but you couldn’t copy the shit he did because it was so original. Everything I learned about jazz back then I learned from Dizzy and Monk, maybe a little from Bean, but not from Bird. See, Bird was a soloist. He had his own thing. He was, like, isolated. And there was nothing you could learn from him unless you copied him. Only saxophone players could copy him, but even they didn’t. All they could do was try to get Bird’s approach, his concept. But you couldn’t play that shit he played on saxophone with the same feeling on trumpet. You could learn the notes but it won’t sound the same. Even great saxophonists couldn’t copy him. Sonny Stitt tried, and Lou Donaldson a little later, and Jackie McLean a little later than both of them. But Sonny had more of Lester Young’s style. And Bud Freeman used to play a lot like Sonny Stitt played. I guess Jackie and Lou came the closest to Bird, but only in their sound, not in what they played. Nobody could play like Bird, then or now.

  BUT AS good as my relationship with Bird was getting in music, our private relationship was getting worse. Like I said, Bird lived with me for a minute, but it wasn’t as long as a lot of writers say it was. I mean, I got him a room in the same apartment building where me and my family lived. But he would be down to our apartment all the time, borrowing money and shit, eating Irene’s cooking, passing out drunk on the couch or the floor. Plus, when he would come by, he was constantly bringing all kinds of women and hustlers, dope dealers and all kinds of dope-fiend musicians.

  One of the things I never understood about Bird was why he did all the destructive shit he used to do. Man, Bird knew better. He was an intellectual. He used to read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that. And he could hold a conversation with almost anybody on all kinds of things. So the motherfucker wasn’t dumb or ignorant or illiterate or anything like that. He was real sensitive. But he had this destructive streak in him that was something else. He was a genius and most geniuses are greedy. But he used to talk a lot about political shit and he loved to put a motherfucker on, play dumb to what was happening and then zap the sucker. He used to especially like to do this to white people. And then he would laugh at them when they found out they had been had. He was something—a very complex person.

  But the worst thing that Bird did back then was to take advantage of my love and respect for him as a great musician. He would tell dope dealers that I was going to be paying the money he owed them. So them dudes would be coming by looking like they wanted to kill me sometimes. That shit was dangerous. Finally I just told him and all the rest of them motherfuckers not to come by my house no more. That shit got so bad that Irene went back to East St. Louis, but she came back to New York as soon as Bird stopped coming around so much. Bird met Doris Sydnor about this time and he moved into her apartment, somewhere on Manhattan Avenue. But when Bird moved out of my place and before Irene came back from East St. Louis, Freddie Webster moved in and we would talk all night. He was a whole lot better to get along with than Bird was.

  EARLY IN the spring of 1946, I think it might have been March, Ross Russell set up a recording session with Dial Records for Bird. Ross made sure that Bird was sober, and hired me and Lucky Thompson on tenor, a guy named Arv Garrison on guitar, Vic McMillan on bass, Roy Porter on drums, and Dodo Marmarosa on piano.

  At this time, Bird was drinking cheap wine and shooting heroin. People on the West Coast weren’t into bebop like people in New York were and they thought some of the shit we were playing and doing was weird. Especially with Bird. He didn’t have no money, was looking bad and raggedy, and everybody knew who he was, knew he was a bad motherfucker who didn’t care. But the rest of the people who were being told that Bird was a star could only see this broke, drunken dude playing this weird shit up on stage. A lot of them didn’t buy all that shit about Bird being this genius, they just ignored him, and I think this hurt his confidence in himself and what he was doing. When Bird left New York he was a king, but out in Los Angeles he was just another broke, weird, drunken nigger playing some strange music. Los Angeles is a city built on celebrating stars and Bird didn’t look like no star.

  But at this recording session that Ross set up for Dial, Bird pulled himself together and played his ass off. I remember we rehearsed at the Finale Club the night before we recorded. We argued half the night about what we were going to play and who was going to play what. There had been no rehearsal for the recording date, and the musicians were pissed because they were going to be playing tunes they were unfamiliar with. Bird was never organized about telling people what he wanted them to do. He just got who he thought could play the shit he wanted and left it at that. Nothing was written down, maybe a sketch of a melody. All he wanted to do was play, get paid, and go out and buy himself some heroin.

  Bird would play the melody he wanted. The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct. He didn’t conform to Western ways of musical group interplay by organizing everything. Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was “fuck what’s written down.” Play what you know and play that well and everything will come together—just the opposite of the Western concept of notated music.

  I loved the way Bird did that. I learned a lot from him that way. It would later help me with my own music concepts. When that shit works, man, it’s a motherfucker. But if you get a group of guys who don’t understand what’s happening, or they can’t handle all that freedom you’re laying on them, and they play what they want, then it’s no good. Bird would get guys in who couldn’t handle the concept. He did it in the recording studio and when they were playing a live performance. That’s what a lot of that argument was about at the Finale the night before we recorded.

  MEANWHILE, BIRD was forming a new band and asked me to come with him, and I did. The two records Bird had recorded for Dial out in Los Angeles had been released. I was on one and Howard McGhee was on the other, I think. They had been released in late 1946 and were now big jazz hits. So, with 52nd Street open again and Bird back in town, the club owners wanted Bird. Everybody was after him. They wanted small bands again and they felt that Bird would pack them in. They offered him $800 a week for four weeks at the Three Deuces. He hired me, Max Roach, Tommy Potter, and Duke Jordan on piano. He paid me and Max $135 a week and Tommy and Duke $125. Bird made the most he had ever made in his life, $280 a week. It didn’t matter to me that I was making $65 a week less than what I had made in B’s band; all I wanted to
do was play with Bird and Max and make some good music.

  I felt good about it, and Bird was clear-eyed, not like the crazed look he had in California. He was slimmer and seemed happy with Doris. She had gone out to California to get him when he got out of Camarillo, and accompanied him east on the train. Man, Doris loved her Charlie Parker. She would do anything for him. Bird seemed happy and ready to go. We opened in April 1947, opposite Lennie Tristano’s trio.

  I was really happy to be playing with Bird again, because playing with him brought out the best in me at the time. He could play so many different styles and never repeat the same musical idea. His creativity and musical ideas were endless. He used to turn the rhythm section around every night. Say we would be playing a blues. Bird would start on the eleventh bar. As the rhythm section stayed where they were, then Bird would play in such a way that it made the rhythm section sound like it was on 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4. Nobody could keep up with Bird back in those days except maybe Dizzy. Every time he would do this, Max would scream at Duke not to try to follow Bird. He wanted Duke to stay where he was, because he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with Bird and he would have fucked up the rhythm. Duke did this a lot when he didn’t listen. See, when Bird went off like that on one of his incredible solos all the rhythm section had to do was to stay where they were and play some straight shit. Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time. It was like he had planned it in his mind. The only thing about this is that he couldn’t explain it to nobody. You just had to ride the music out. Because anything might happen musically when you were playing with Bird. So I learned to play what I knew and extend it upwards—a little above what I knew. You had to be ready for anything.

  A week or so before opening night, Bird called for rehearsals at a studio called Nola. A lot of musicians rehearsed there during those days. When he called the rehearsals, nobody believed him. He never had done this in the past. On the first day of rehearsal, everybody showed up but Bird. We waited for a couple of hours and I ended up rehearsing the band.

  Now, opening night, the Three Deuces is packed. We ain’t seen Bird in a week, but we’d been rehearsing our asses off. So here this nigger comes in smiling and shit, asking is everybody ready to play in that fake British accent of his. When it’s time for the band to hit he asks, “What are we playing?” I tell him. He nods, counts off the beat and plays every motherfucking tune in the exact key we had rehearsed it in. He played like a motherfucker. Didn’t miss one beat, one note, didn’t play out of key all night. It was something. We were fucking amazed. And every time he’d look at us looking at him all shocked and shit, he’d just smile that “Did you ever doubt this?” kind of smile.

  After we got through with that first set, Bird came up and said—again in that fake British accent—“You boys played pretty good tonight, except in a couple of places where you fell off the rhythm and missed a couple of notes.” We just looked at the motherfucker and laughed. That’s the kind of amazing shit that Bird did on the bandstand. You came to expect it. And if he didn’t do something incredible, that’s when you were surprised.

  Bird often used to play in short, hard bursts of breath. Hard as a mad man. Later on Coltrane would play like that. Anyway, so then, sometimes Max Roach would find himself in between the beat. And I wouldn’t know what the fuck Bird was doing because I wouldn’t have never heard it before. Poor Duke Jordan and Tommy Potter, they’d just be there lost as motherfuckers—like everybody else, only more lost. When Bird played like that, it was like hearing music for the first time. I’d never heard anybody play like that. Later, Sonny Rollins and I would try to do things like that, and me and Trane, playing those short, hard bursts of musical phrases. But when Bird played like that, he was outrageous. I hate to use a word like “outrageous,” but that’s what he was. He was notorious in the way he played combinations of notes and musical phrases. The average musician would try to develop something more logically, but not Bird. Everything he played—when he was on and really playing—was terrifying, and I was there every night! And so we couldn’t just keep saying, “What? Did you hear that!” all night long. Because then we couldn’t play nothing. So we got to the point where, when he played something that was just so outrageous, we blinked our eyes. They would just get wider than they were, and they already were real wide. But after a while it was just another day at the office playing with this bad motherfucker. It was unreal.

  I was the one who rehearsed the band and kept it tight. Running that band made me understand what you had to do to have a great band. People said it was the best bebop band around. So I was proud of being the band’s musical director. I wasn’t twenty-one years old yet in 1947, and I was learning real quick about what music was all about.

  Bird never talked about music, except one time I heard him arguing with a classical musician friend of mine. He told the cat that you can do anything with chords. I disagreed, told him that you couldn’t play D natural in the fifth bar of a B flat blues. He said you could. One night later on at Birdland, I heard Lester Young do it, but he bent the note. Bird was there when it happened and he just looked over at me with that “I told you so” look that he would lay on you when he had proved you wrong. But that’s all he ever said about it. He knew you could do it because he had done it before. But he didn’t get up and show nobody how to do it or nothing. He just let you pick it up for yourself, and if you didn’t, then you just didn’t.

  I learned a lot from Bird in this way, picking up from the way he played or didn’t play a musical phrase or idea. But like I said, I never did talk to Bird much, never talked to him over fifteen minutes at a time, unless we were arguing about money. I’d tell him right up front, “Bird, don’t fuck with me about money.” But he always did.

  Miles: The Autobiography (with Quincy Troupe), 1989

  Henry Miller

  (1891–1980)

  Henry Miller was the archetypal drop-out before there were drop-outs, quitting family, job, and the U.S. to lead a bohemian existence in Paris while writing books—Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring—whose sexual frankness made them unpublishable for decades in his native land. Returning to America in the 1940s, he found himself still at odds with the mainstream culture, as evidenced by the following account of a drunken Hollywood dinner party. Settling at Big Sur, Miller was a liberating father figure to succeeding generations of writers and artists.

  Soirée in Hollywood

  MY FIRST evening in Hollywood. It was so typical that I almost thought it had been arranged for me. It was by sheer chance, however, that I found myself rolling up to the home of a millionaire in a handsome black Packard. I had been invited to dinner by a perfect stranger. I didn’t even know my host’s name. Nor do I know it now.

  The first thing which struck me, on being introduced all around, was that I was in the presence of wealthy people, people who were bored to death and who were all, including the octogenarians, already three sheets to the wind. The host and hostess seemed to take pleasure in acting as bartenders. It was hard to follow the conversation because everybody was talking at cross purposes. The important thing was to get an edge on before sitting down to the table. One old geezer who had recently recovered from a horrible automobile accident was having his fifth old-fashioned—he was proud of the fact, proud that he could swill it like a youngster even though he was still partially crippled. Every one thought he was a marvel.

  There wasn’t an attractive woman about, except the one who had brought me to the place. The men looked like business men, except for one or two who looked like aged strike-breakers. There was one fairly young couple, in their thirties, I should say. The husband was a typical go-getter, one of those ex-football players who go in for publicity or insurance or the stock market, some clean all-American pursuit in which you run no risk of soiling your hands. He was a graduate of some Eastern University and had the intelligence of a high-grade chimpanzee.

  That was the set-up. When every one had
been properly soused dinner was announced. We seated ourselves at a long table, elegantly decorated, with three or four glasses beside each plate. The ice was abundant, of course. The service began, a dozen flunkeys buzzing at your elbow like horse flies. There was a surfeit of everything; a poor man would have had sufficient with the hors-d’oeuvre alone. As they ate, they became more discursive, more argumentative. An elderly thug in a tuxedo who had the complexion of a boiled lobster was railing against labor agitators. He had a religious strain, much to my amazement, but it was more like Torquemada’s than Christ’s. President Roosevelt’s name almost gave him an apoplectic fit. Roosevelt, Bridges, Stalin, Hitler—they were all in the same class to him. That is to say, they were anathema. He had an extraordinary appetite which served, it seemed, to stimulate his adrenal glands. By the time he had reached the meat course he was talking about hanging being too good for some people. The hostess, meanwhile, who was seated at his elbow, was carrying on one of those delightful inconsequential conversations with the person opposite her. She had left some beautiful dachshunds in Biarritz, or was it Sierra Leone, and to believe her, she was greatly worried about them. In times like these, she was saying, people forget about animals. People can be so cruel, especially in time of war. Why, in Peking the servants had run away and left her with forty trunks to pack—it was outrageous. It was so good to be back in California. God’s own country, she called it. She hoped the war wouldn’t spread to America. Dear me, where was one to go now? You couldn’t feel safe anywhere, except in the desert perhaps.

  The ex-football player was talking to some one at the far end of the table in a loud voice. It happened to be an Englishwoman and he was insulting her roundly and openly for daring to arouse sympathy for the English in this country. “Why don’t you go back to England?” he shouted at the top of his voice. “What are you doing here? You’re a menace. We’re not fighting to hold the British Empire together. You’re a menace. You ought to be expelled from the country.”