Mona Bates was clearly relieved she had an unblemished record for her students but on the way back to her studio in the streetcar she said, ‘Jack, I can’t help feeling you’ve lost some of your enthusiasm. I know you had to work hard on your final school exams and perhaps that’s it. I hope to continue being your teacher after you enter the conservatory, but you’ll have to buck up, my boy. From now on, if you want a concert career, then you’re going to have to learn what real application and dedication mean.’
Normally I would have continued on in the streetcar after she got off at Jarvis Street, but I asked if I could come back with her to the studio.
She looked surprised. ‘Isn’t this a rare day off for you, Jack? You’ve passed your entrance exam. I don’t expect to see you back until your Monday lesson.’
‘It shouldn’t take long, Miss Bates,’ I replied. I wasn’t a timid small boy any more, but I can tell you I wasn’t looking forward to the next half hour. Mona Bates wasn’t an easy person to confront and I knew she regarded me as one of her star students.
Fortunately the studio wasn’t far from the streetcar stop, and for three weeks there had been guys with jackhammers digging up the road, much to the annoyance of Miss Bates, who complained, ‘While the government invents needless work for the shiftless and the lazy, they’re driving those of us who work for a living to utter distraction.’ She’d called to complain twice and was unimpressed with the response she received, telling them in no uncertain terms that she was Miss Mona Bates and that they hadn’t heard the last of the matter. As she knew everyone of importance in Canada, including the prime minister, Mr Mackenzie King, it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d called him personally to complain. Now I was glad of the jackhammering, because the noise meant we didn’t have to talk until we were in the privacy of her studio.
‘Well, Jack, what is it?’ She pointed to the lobby couch. ‘Shall we sit?’ It was more a command than a suggestion. She walked ahead of me and sat down. ‘Out with it.’
‘Miss Bates, I don’t want to go to the conservatory,’ I blurted out.
‘Oh?’ I waited for her to say something more but she remained silent.
‘I want to be a jazz musician.’ Then I added, ‘I don’t want to be a classical pianist.’
To my surprise she didn’t explode but remained silent. Finally, she said, ‘That’s why you deliberately messed up the Beethoven, wasn’t it?’
‘No! Not at all, I promise!’ I protested, appalled at her accusation.
‘Well then, you know what you’ve done, don’t you, Jack?’
I’d expected her to be furious and yell at me, so this quiet, even voice she was affecting was disconcerting. ‘No, Miss Bates.’
‘You’ve elected to be a nobody when you might have been a somebody.’
‘I . . . I don’t see it like that, Miss Bates.’
‘Oh, of course you don’t, you’re still wet behind the ears.’
‘But, Miss Bates —’
‘Don’t be impertinent, Jack! You’re giving up years of study, and for what? To play in some smoke-filled basement with third-rate musicians when perhaps you could have played in the great concert halls of the world – Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, New York . . .’
‘You gave up your concert career, Miss Bates.’ I knew I was being provocative, in fact, clearly overstepping the mark.
Then the explosion came. ‘How dare you! You think it was easy . . . a woman alone, lonely, often exhausted, in a hotel room by myself or with some jumped-up impresario trying to get me into bed? I always put my art first. I was dedicated, diligent and I didn’t complain about the pokey changing rooms, bad organisation, arrogant European concert organisers, pedantic and stupid conductors, ignorant audiences!’
I could have said touché, but instead I said, ‘But then you wisely decided to quit. Miss Bates, I don’t want all that. I don’t want to be a concert pianist,’ I pleaded. ‘I want to play jazz piano and what I’ve learned from you will be the best possible training anyone could have.’
‘Balderdash! Don’t patronise me, Jack!’
‘I’ll be eighteen next year and I’ll have to join up. I’d have to leave the conservatory after only one year anyhow.’ It was a futile attempt at amelioration.
‘Oh? That’s your excuse for not continuing, is it?’
‘No, that would be a lie. It’s just that I want to play jazz. I want to make it my future. I’m truly sorry, Miss Bates. I just can’t . . . I just can’t do it.’
‘What about your poor mother?’
‘She’s disappointed, I admit. But she understands that I’ve made up my mind.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose someone from her background would know any better,’ Miss Bates said, her tone acerbic, lips pursed. She’d been so kind to my mom and this is what she truly thought of her?
‘My mother thinks very highly of you, Miss Bates. She is enormously grateful for what you did for her, letting her sit with you at concerts and the dresses and shoes. She thinks it’s one of the most generous and kind things that has ever happened to her.’ It wasn’t very often anyone got the better of Miss Bates. ‘She just wants the best for me,’ I added, immediately feeling guilty and trying to soften the smart-ass comeback somewhat.
‘Doesn’t everyone! All those years I’ve put in so you’d have the best chance possible to dig yourself out of poverty! I am appalled and humiliated! You’ve let me down, and as far as I’m concerned you are a disgrace and I have wasted my time and my gifts trying to teach you!’
‘I’m truly sorry. I hope some day to make you proud of me, Miss Bates.’
‘Proud? I’ve given you the benefit of the best teaching in Canada and you turn on me like a rabid, snarling wolf. I had high hopes for you, Jack. Playing jazz is like spitting at my feet! Proud? Of what? Your return to the gutter? I don’t think so, boy!’
‘You’ve taught me wonderfully, Miss Bates. I will always be grateful to you.’
‘Well, I must say, you have a very strange way of demonstrating your gratitude, Jack Spayd. We, Floss Byatt and I, pulled you out of a stinking social sewer and now you’re diving straight back into it! How dare you insult us both like this!’
‘I have already spoken to Miss Byatt. She has accepted my decision.’ I didn’t tell Mona Bates this had taken place almost a year previously.
‘Spoken to her? You’ve spoken to her before you spoke to me?’ Her cheeks had blown out and her eyes were so furious they were practically spitting sparks. She was nearly apoplectic. It was the worst possible thing I could have said and now she completely lost control. She jumped to her feet and leaned over me, her lips spit-flecked. ‘I am your teacher and you . . . Oh! I knew I should never have trusted Floss Byatt! She disgraced her family and became a soldiers’ slut! Everyone in Toronto knows that place she calls a jazz club is just a brothel in disguise! And as for that disgusting old black man in his pale blue satin suit and their gauche and sickly sentimental piano duo, it’s horrible, cheap and thoroughly nasty!’ She pointed to the front door. ‘Go to Jezebel’s arms, boy!’
I hesitated, wanting to defend Miss Frostbite, but at that moment she screamed, ‘Go! I never wish to see your face again! Damn you, Jack Spayd. I hope you have a truly rotten life!’
As I closed the front door to leave Jarvis Street forever, I was glad I didn’t say what I had in mind because that would have made me as nasty to her as she’d been to me, and I had no cause to do that. Leaving Jarvis Street forever was terribly sad. I’d seen it in summer heat and when the maple leaves changed colour to the rose red and pure gold of fall. Mona Bates had taught me everything I knew about music. She’d taken a small boy and turned him into a good musician. The rest was now up to me.
Could I make it to the top in jazz? It was a momentous and perhaps a foolish decision for a boy to make and her curse, ‘Damn you, Jack Spayd. I hope you have a truly rotten life!’, was to haunt me for the rest of my days.
CHAPTER FIVE
SO THERE I
WAS, tossing away the best opportunity I’d ever had, or was ever likely to have. Brilliant decision! But I just couldn’t see myself under the bright lights playing classical piano.
Over the years Miss Bates had mentioned the life she’d led as a concert pianist and why she’d finally given it up. The stories came in dribs and drabs, often as casual asides, and I knew she wasn’t saying all this to discourage me, but simply to toughen me up – a grown-up reminding a kid that life is never easy and success is a long, hard road.
From memory, it went something like this: ‘Now, Jack, if you’re going to be among the one per cent who get to the very top in this profession, you’re going to have to give it everything you’ve got, every waking minute of your life. You’re going to have to do your apprenticeship in the larger towns and smaller cities, in halls with bad acoustics and in front of audiences who are less interested in the quality of your playing than they are in being seen by others.
‘You’ll have to become accustomed to fat sanguineous old men in evening suits whose wives have dragged them, bellowing, to your concert and who, after half an hour, are fast asleep and snoring. At the conclusion of your performance they’ll be wakened with a sharp dig in the ribs and then, taking their cue from their wives, they’ll jump to their feet clapping and yelling “Bravo!”
‘You’ll live in cheap hotels, eat bad food and be invited after the performance to endlessly boring dinners with the local mayor, his wife, and those members of the community he’s hoping to impress with his sophistication.
‘The local newspaper critic, who probably failed grade three, will comment on the inaccurate way you played a Beethoven sonata – too soft, too loud, at the wrong tempo and most certainly not the way Beethoven intended it to be played.
‘It’s all a part of your training and there’s no guarantee you’ll move further up the ranks. You may never become a member of the elite, play at Carnegie Hall, travel the world and receive the applause from the cognoscenti, people who come to hear you because they love the way you play. But I believe you have the talent; the rest is persistence and dedication and a ruthless will to succeed. You must show me you have these qualities as well,’ she would say.
Of course, she had no idea that I still loved jazz and assumed that classical music had taken possession of my soul and was all I lived for. But I craved participation, rather than the solitary glory of the soloist; I loved improvising and the spontaneous response of people who hear the beat and the bump and the grind in their heart and soul.
That’s not to say for one moment that I didn’t enjoy, even at times love, playing classical music, because I did and knew I always would. Music is its own reward but I would carry in my heart forever my mom’s pride as she clutched to her chest the blooms I’d won and smiled her shiny new smile.
But in the end I was the son of a garbage collector and a cleaning woman, an Anglo-Celtic gentile Canadian boy from the slums of Cabbagetown, and I wasn’t heir to generations of European culture and musical tradition. I needed different rhythms to make my blood race and my heart beat faster.
Boys of seventeen can be difficult and stubborn and convinced they know everything, and I guess I was no different. There would be times when I would regret the impetuosity of my youth, but now ambivalence had no part in my life, and every decision needed to be unequivocal. I saw the dream clear and clean as if in a polished crystal ball – Jack Spayd, earning respect at the jazz piano.
The boy who thought all his Christmases had come at once when his mother managed to buy a soup bone from the cut-price butcher, who dipped his spoon into the delicious broth and sipped it slowly to make it last, was one day going to show the world how to play jazz piano so that everyone sat up and took notice. What I could imagine myself achieving in jazz piano I never imagined with classical piano. I knew myself capable of tremendous concentration, perhaps to the point of addiction, but I couldn’t reach the pinnacle in both classical and jazz at the same time, so one of them had to take precedence over the other.
But what could I have possibly known? I was barely seventeen, and young for my age, that is, if you compared my experience of life with that of your average slum kid, who by seventeen belonged to a street gang trained in petty crime and had already received his first tongue-lashing from an exasperated magistrate. While I was practising endless scales, the local kids were becoming experts at stripping factories of copper wire, lead piping, faucets and other brass fittings – any stuff you could take apart quickly and quietly while the guard slept in his hut. They sold it to a junk dealer on the Don, who paid them cash and whose yard seemed shut and padlocked during the day but remained open all night to take deliveries.
If piano lessons and hours of practice weren’t sufficiently isolating from the normal routine of other young guys in Cabbagetown, I was also a scholarship kid at a private school, where I was clearly a misfit. Clever, bookish, isolated by serious music and unfamiliar with the life and privileges of a well-to-do family, I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. If I’d attended tech or a local high school, I might have at least stayed in touch with the world of my childhood. All I had was my mom and my music. Not surprisingly, I was as confused as any boy might be living in a slum while learning to reach for the stars.
I hadn’t neglected the harmonica and played jazz as often as possible. I also played jazz piano whenever Joe could fit me in for a lesson. ‘You’re good, Jazzboy. Just gonna take time and practice. Ain’t nothing gonna happen ’less you practise,’ he’d say, and I’d long since realised that nothing happens in life without practice. I’d often spend an extra half hour in Miss Frostbite’s piano room fooling around with the jazz numbers the band played, but there had been no real opportunity to practise jazz while I was studying classical piano with Miss Bates.
Had I possessed a crystal ball to see the full disaster we euphemistically term life, I could well have changed my mind and returned to the safe and secure world of classical music where, even if you don’t hit the big time, you can always find a role as teacher, academic, repetiteur, accompanist or, as a last resort, a regular musical hack.
But life doesn’t work that way and we don’t have the ability to see the future. When you squander opportunities you inevitably pay for your lack of judgment. But then, in my experience, some (certainly not all) of your more costly mistakes turn out to be the parts of your life where you were the most alive and where the human capital you spent turned out to be a worthwhile investment.
Mistakes seem to me to be the force that changes the status quo and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most humans hate change. We love to sit clutching our knees within a well-worn, familiar and comfortable groove. We are trained young in the hope of acquiring a set of skills that will grow steadily until we grow old and the final bell tolls. Here lies Jack, who played piano.
The thousands of hours of practice for frenetic travel, polite applause and a bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane didn’t add up to the exciting life my febrile imagination had conjured up. I’d read too many books about here, there and everywhere and firmly believed there were adventures to be had. The harmonica and not the piano seemed the perfect metaphor for where I saw myself going. It was light, bright, versatile and instant and could earn a man a welcome, a meal and a bed wherever he went.
It was not that I wanted to return to the harmonica – my ardent desire was to be a truly good jazz piano player – it was just that, as a Canadian boy who’d emerged bruised from the Depression, my head was full of visions of a vast new land of snow, endless prairie and space, where men were rough and women stoic, where a Mountie always got his man and where cattlemen and lumberjacks rubbed shoulders with adventurers and rogues. Childish, I know, but we are the sum of our own myths and the sons and daughters of our larger environment. I was Canadian and not Russian or Polish or Austrian, and this, I told myself, accounted for my different mindset.
Of course, these imaginings assume I could have made it as a concert pian
ist in the first place. There was no such certainty. Five or even ten more years at a conservatory were no guarantee that I’d make it onto the hallowed concert stages of Europe and North America. Had I failed, the choices left to me did not fill me with wild excitement. Every kid hopes to grow up and be famous for something; with me it was jazz, not classical piano.
Although, just for the hell of it, I’d sometimes reflect on what might have been. For instance, whenever I see a soloist receiving a sheaf of flowers at the conclusion of a recital, I imagine that I am him. Then moments later I will be going backstage, my black tie ripped free and my sweat-stained collar unbuttoned the moment I’m alone. On the way I’ll meet the cleaning woman (ugly term) waiting for me to leave so she can tidy up the mess I’ve made and then sweep the corridor and the stage before going home. In my mind’s eye she’s the same age as my mom at around the time she got her new teeth and, like her, she gets home late and exhausted. I’d smile and hand her the flowers and say, ‘Here, my dear, brighten up the parlour a bit.’
But the glorious, heart-stopping moment I’d experienced the first time I heard jazz had never left me. Even today, when I hear the grand masters of my idiom, men such as Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk and, topmost, foremost and every possible most, the incomparable Art Tatum, I want to urgently repent my sins and die a good man simply because I’ve had a taste of heaven and want more of the same in the afterlife. Great jazz makes my heart race like a furiously beaten set of bongo drums.
Alas, the Cabbagetown boy in me never felt the same way about playing the Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor by ‘Big Hands’ Sergei Rachmaninoff, who, by the way, having once heard Art Tatum play at the Onyx Club later told a reporter, ‘If this man ever decides to play serious music, we’re all in trouble.’
Jack of Diamonds Page 14
