Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  Yes, there’s a music network that has patterned itself on MTV and has played some progressive black music, but its producers are a cliquey bunch, and if they don’t like you, you never make rotation. Yes, there’s the Caribana parade in Toronto with its waves of tourists from all over, but it’s a once-a-year gig. I am talking about our own artists getting on CBC shows, getting radio airplay, selling out the SkyDome.

  A year after she hit it big, they promptly awarded Erica a Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy with nowhere near the prestige. The Junos were publicly ignored long before that time when the Brit Awards became a joke over in the UK. But the media tried to appear miffed that Erica didn’t bother to fly home to accept hers. In fact, she showed no interest in even having it sent along to her. I have the clip of her interview where our national television network, the CBC, caught up to her at a concert in Boston, the clip that was shown and quoted all over the place.

  “Don’t give me that (bleep) that I’m dissing my fans—I’m dissing you. I’m dissing a music industry that wants reflected glory off things I did that they had no part of.” She laughed in contempt and added, “You want me to show up and smile for your ceremony? Then you forget that fool hood ornament you give out and pass on some actual money to No Big Thang and Jamie Cross and Chantal Fox and play them on CFNY in Toronto. Then we’ll talk.”

  You could almost hear the scramble of music journalists as they hunted on Google and Lexis to find out who these artists were that she was referring to. She boosted careers overnight with her diatribe. Because she knew herself what they were going through. She had sent her demo tapes in, she had applied for a Factor grant—that great government financial angel of struggling Canadian musicians—and she had gone to sit-down “chats” with the label executives. She wasn’t what they had heard before, and they were not going to take a chance.

  So she came to New York because it was New York. And because she couldn’t do what she wanted so badly to do in Toronto. “Oh, Michelle, this is not where the music starts,” she said as we made our goodbyes outside Union Station, “this is where the music ends up getting heard.”

  I already told you how she met Easy. Her short apprenticeship as backup singer, jingle vocalist, waitress in a Third Avenue diner has all been well documented. What the books and Rolling Stone never got right, never heard of at all, was how Erica met Morgan and how he became an influence in her career.

  Morgan. His voice always sounding like a bass drum dropped at the bottom of a well. His one nervous habit was to tug on the salt-and-pepper curls of his modest beard as he sat on his piano bench, and he would look at the keys as if he had been waiting to recite a great truth for a long time. Morgan never told me how old he was exactly, but he always looked middle-aged and yet ageless. His freckled caramel skin was etched with character lines, and you knew that wasn’t just a name for them with Morgan, that they really were folds and crevices of his maturing character. He didn’t have a potbelly or that hard look older men get. In fact, his body seemed to be always straining the cloth of his shirts, and I kidded him once or twice about it to learn if he worked out. This, too, he never told me.

  Like everything else, there is Erica’s version of their first meeting and Morgan’s that you can check from old magazines or articles posted on the Internet. Whoever you believe, the locale and minor details don’t change. He lived on the whole top floor of a block above 125th near Fifth Avenue zoned as “artist space” but what really meant cheap apartments with stand-up showers and communal toilets down the hallway. I think Morgan was probably the only tenant who had his own washroom, though he said he took the place because it had a freight elevator that could take his upright piano. On the wall was “A Chart of Basic Jazz Scales,” which had columns and rows with headings like C, Db, D, Eb, F, Gb, G matched with “Enigmatic, Chromatic, Augmented, Whole Tone” and so on. Since I’ve practically forgotten all of my music theory from high school, it looked to me like a musician’s Periodic Table. He says the chart was a gift. Morgan would say that many of his possessions were gifts from friends, like the framed poster for the movie Paris Blues, the one where you’re supposed to believe Paul Newman could ever jam on a horn with Louis Armstrong, and of all things, the black lacquer bust of Beethoven on its kitschy pillar next to the Sears couch and coffee table.

  The freight lift was also the way you got into Morgan’s place, and one day, Erica lifted the wooden slats of the guard door and stepped into his living room.

  “She walks into my place like she’s coming in to buy a paper or something, as if I expect her,” Morgan told me, “and she sits down at my piano and says, ‘I’m Duane Jones’s kid, so that’s how I found you, but it’s not why you should let me stay.’ And she rips into ‘A Train’ and plays the improvisation off a Stan Getz album I know Duane must have. And for three quarters of an hour, she’s showing off. The only guy I know who can mimic other pianists that well is Oscar Peterson, who I used to work with. I mean, she did Ahmad Jamal, and if you listen to him, he’s all about space between the notes. She did that tinkling Basie, she did Ellington. She cracked me up because she did Erroll Garner, complete with his stride playing and groaning. It was a hell of a performance.”

  Erica remembers it differently. She claims she never burst in on Morgan and “took over” his piano, but she does admit he’s quoted her accurately. And she did play for him.

  When she was done strutting her stuff, Morgan took a long pull of his cigarette and said, “Okay, I believe you.”

  “Believe what?” she asked.

  “I believe you’re Duane Jones’s kid,” said Morgan.

  Erica’s father and Morgan had played together when they were young. They were bandmates and used to collaborate on song efforts. Morgan would expect his old friend’s little girl to grow up hearing jazz legends, and in one line, he let her know that playing them back note for note didn’t impress him.

  “So what did you come to me for?” he asked, still slumped on the couch with his abandoned book on, of all things, Australia. Morgan had eclectic tastes. His bookshelf had a lot of history, but you could find him reading Agatha Christie novels, a book on the behaviour of bees, a history of the Napoleonic wars.

  “My Dad told me I should come to you.”

  “That’s not an answer,” replied Morgan. “That’s a course of action. I asked about the motive.”

  “I want to record,” said Erica, feeling embarrassed because a big dream like this always sounds ridiculous when you have to blurt it out. “I write songs, but I think I can write them better.”

  “Ohhhhhh, you want to be a star!” said Morgan. “Duane lives in Toronto, right? That’s where you’re from? Canada? Go home to Toronto, Anna—”

  “Erica.”

  “Gimme a break, kid. I haven’t had so much as a postcard from your Dad in five years. Fuck me if I have to remember the name of his kids. I am not in the lottery business. I do session recordings. I play with small combos for shit on Wednesdays. I do arrangements. Now and again—very, very rarely—I get asked to compose a little instrumental background music for TV shows filmed here. That’s like your wannabe novelist buying his groceries by writing greeting cards. ’Kay?”

  Erica didn’t move.

  Morgan grew irritable. “What do you think I can teach you? I do jazz. Jazz is precise. Jazz is clean. You can be sloppy all you want with pop music, A-B rhymes, three goddamn chords if you want, and we won’t get into the bullshit of rapping—”

  “You do music,” Erica cut in. “I hear it in my head, new things, scraps of melodies, and I need to tap into it better, use it better.”

  Morgan nodded with a sigh and told her, “You know, I think it was Elton John or somebody who said he tripped on the formula for making popular songs by using the structure of a hymn. So there you are. All the Zen I can give you. Bye now.”

  “How about this,” said Erica. “You’re the only person I know in New York.”

  “Starbucks. Sixth Avenue, Midtown. Guy
s will want to pick you up in no time.”

  She was getting nowhere. So she turned on her heel and stomped back into the freight elevator.

  I’ve heard there is an old Japanese tradition with teaching, and since Morgan read so much, maybe he happened upon it and decided to adopt it. Or maybe in truth, he couldn’t be bothered with her that day. The tradition is that the master always says no the first time, the second time, the third, until the student makes such a pest of himself or hangs around so pitifully for so long that the master sees that the student is actually sincere.

  Erica haunted a jazz club where Morgan played, a basement joint in Morningside Heights so it could pick up the college crowd, and when he was on a break, she crept over and put one of her compositions over his sheet music. To her surprise, he sat down and started to play her song as an instrumental, then ignored her bridge completely and improvised something completely different, shaking it up, showing her new paths to consider. But when she turned up on his doorstep the very next day, he told her he was busy.

  “You’re not busy, you’re just reading.”

  “Exactly. I’m busy reading.”

  “That’s busy for you?”

  “It is at the moment. I’m also drinking.”

  “You got a real heavy load there,” she said.

  “I’m drinking Scotch, neat.”

  She stopped by his jazz club again. She fed him another composition. He used it the same way. Again, she was refused at his door. When she gave him her first try at “Late Night Promises” out of desperation, he called her at her studio apartment and, without a hello, asked, “I see you’ve decided to do some work. Get your ass over here.”

  He was not only her new music teacher. Erica calls Morgan her Professor of Coping. He told her where she could buy sheet music for less, where to go for the best fruit down in Chinatown, where to find meat for curried mutton. He took her on a tour of Harlem music spots like Minton’s Playhouse and Smalls’ Paradise. He was her guide to New Yorkers’ quirky social behaviour. When she asked why everyone instantly apologised after bumping into you on the subway or on the street, he explained, “Paranoia as inspiration for good manners. No one knows what anyone’s gonna do anymore. You might get shot. And the goddamn crazy thing is—it works!”

  People who knew Morgan say he loosened up around Erica. Even they wondered if something wasn’t sparking between the two, despite the difference in age. He liked to go downtown and play chess at the outdoor tables near Washington Square so they could take in the street performers. As he covered his eyes, knowing people could be heartless in their reactions, Erica sang “Late Night Promises” a capella and got five bucks in coins in Morgan’s borrowed cap. She was more delighted with the applause than the spare change. She tagged along when he spent hours at the sprawling, endless Strand bookshop. They talked. They talked music. And they mostly talked about what kind of career Erica would have, because Morgan was beginning to believe. He did, however, have his reservations.

  “Pop music by definition is ephemeral, disposable,” he argued. “Listen: what is this?” And he began to hum a few bars of something.

  “ ‘Round Midnight,’ ” she said promptly. “So what?”

  “So that lasts. It’s delicately constructed, and it’ll stand the test of time. And it’s good music.” To reinforce his point, he started humming Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

  “I can’t believe you cop an attitude like this!” she laughed. “They’re still melodic, they’re still popular. And there are classics that were pop tunes first! When you got started in music and heard ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,’ did you think people would still love it later?”

  “Hey, watch it,” he growled. “Yes, I was around, but I am not that old. And I’m not saying one kind of music’s superior to another. I listen to all kinds of shit. Look, Erica…” He stopped in the park, and she recognised he was being serious. “It’s just that I don’t think they’re going to let you be the kind of artist you want to be,” he said gently.

  “Oh, come on—”

  “No, you come on,” he said, and he dug into his coat pocket and pulled out her scribbled lyrics to “And You Think That Makes It All Right?,” her blistering attack on proposed compensation for descendants of slaves. She had wanted his opinion. “You think you can say the stuff you want to say?”

  “You know my Dad didn’t only listen to Duke Ellington and Miles Davis,” said Erica. “We also played Bob Marley in the house.”

  “I like Bob Marley, too—”

  “They got artists doing political songs all the time,” said Erica.

  “No, artists say a few things that can almost be called political,” he corrected her. “They’re forgotten ’cause they go into newspapers or magazines. Tossed out the next day or in a week. People hang on to CDs. And their songs are the tamest shit compared to what real people think—”

  “That’s not always true, Mor—”

  “Show me the hard stuff, and I’ll show a guy that’s been slapped down. Or grown tired and faded away. Nobody is saying things in their music as strongly as you want to say them, not in the commercial mainstream in between the Madonna and Snoop and Red Hot Chili Peppers shit. You want to say this stuff, and you want the music to last? To become classics? I don’t think they’ll let you. I am telling you—you want to be provocative while you climb the charts? Shake your ass, don’t speak your mind.”

  “Morgan, that’s a horrible sexist thing to say!”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. I’m not saying that’s my opinion. Get a grip. At the end of the day you want to be a musician. A composer. You want to say things? Say it through the notes, the chords. Make music that’s provocative. Forget the words. Any fool can rhyme or paint a placard.”

  Erica stared at him, refusing to budge from her spot on the pavement.

  “Don’t give me the hurt puppy dog expression,” he said brutally. “You forfeited the right not to listen when you called yourself an artist! You’ll get people who won’t love everything you do. You’ll get asshole reviewers. Suck it up, young lady. The roller coaster hasn’t even started. Go prove me wrong.”

  “Christ, you do sound like my Dad sometimes,” she told him, taking his arm.

  “Your father was smart,” said Morgan. “He got out.”

  “Then why’d you stay in?”

  “For the same reason he sent you to me.”

  Erica thought she understood. Her father wanted Morgan to teach her how to love the craft beyond the glory. It was a rather bittersweet compliment to his talents, since that kind of lesson is best learned from the one who has failed, the one who stays behind to keep watch, to hold the sacred ground. This was the “Just in case” that her father communicated to me, that if Erica didn’t make it, she could keep the music. If she did succeed, then Morgan’s training would prove immeasurably beneficial. She walked with her arm linked through his, humbled by the knowledge, both of them saying nothing for a couple of minutes.

  “Why don’t you have a girl?” she asked.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Noooo, you’re being nosy,” he growled. “And don’t think I’ve never noticed the wheels grinding with you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I want to go play chess,” said Morgan, and the subject was dropped.

  She admitted to me that she did creep into his apartment late one evening after that walk in the park. The freight elevator didn’t tip him off to her arrival because he was in the shower. Morgan stepped out of the bathroom, he told me later, to walk around and get out of the cloud of steaming vapour, towelling himself off as he paced around his apartment with only one lamp on near the television. And there was Erica standing in front of him.

  “Hi, Morgan,” she purred.

  He towelled the nape of his neck, not bothering to cover himself up. Erica told me he was “an impressive hunk of man standing like that.” Yes,
he was old enough to be her father—he was her father’s contemporary, after all—but his body had chunks of compact muscle, his broad chest with a sprinkling of silver grey hairs, his wide smooth thighs the most youthful part of him. His cock was for the most part in shadow, his ball sack visible and hanging down like a tiny velvet pouch.

  “What is this?” he said, sounding more disappointed than outraged. “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  She knelt in front of him, but he didn’t move. He looked at her as you would a child acting out.

  “Erica…”

  She reached her hands around and felt his buttocks, surprisingly firm to her touch, her caress working the circumference of his waist until her spread fingers rested delicately on his hips. His penis sprang to life, and he was thin but long. Erica let out a slow, steady warm breath, and his cock stirred, hardening until he was a hot brown pillar, and she saw him grit his teeth but still show no embarrassment or modesty. Or affection.

  “This is not,” he said firmly, “the way I want or need to be compensated.”

  She grabbed him—literally grabbed him—at the base of his cock, and while the motion surprised him, tugging him off his heels and forward a step, she didn’t hurt him. “That’s a shitty thing to say! Take it back.”

  Amazingly, he said, “No.”

  Her fingers softened on his flesh, and she began to stroke him, keeping him hard, her other hand feeling the strength in his chest, lightly dancing over the silvery hairs.

  “You don’t think I feel something for you?” she asked indignantly.

  “You want to bring me down just like you’ve done with other fools,” said Morgan. “I know your type. Yeah, sure, hon, it’s an enormous compliment that you thought of me for your recreational amusement, but I told you, I can see the wheels turning. It just sticks in your craw that you’re getting all these lessons, and I haven’t tried to feel you up. Doesn’t it?”