Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  Oh no. Oh no no no. I get it.

  Da da daaa. Da da da-daaa. Da da daaa, da-da.

  Performed at about 80 BPM, a super-slowed down ‘Smoke on the Water’, the song that synth-pop-rock group played in a jazz style just so this guy Jamie could hear my swing first hand. The Dirtybeat boys didn’t ask him for this – he asked them. It’s his little memento for me.

  Jamie’s breath, lips and fingers are ready to join in. His heart says, Dunno what it’ll sound like, Max, but here’s one for you. It’s just for fun so if you want to laugh, go ahead.

  The rhythm and melody is a little sluggish. My rock boys really don’t have the first clue about how to swing at all.

  But oh man, I am laughing. ‘Smoke on the Water’, bad-jazz style, yet with a trenchantly melodic alto saxophone soaring above it. Jamie, this has made my day.

  IX

  Was I surprised to hear from you after so long, Max? Well, yeah, you sat on that one a long time, that’s for sure. But I guess I’ve learned that old musicians never give up and musicianship never goes away.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ was what I asked you the first time I tried to get you interested, and Max, that’s what I asked you this time. You weren’t so angry any more. Not sarcastic like back then. Instead you sounded shy. You answered, ‘Play some real jazz. Really swing.’

  Music to my ears.

  I used to think – still do – today’s drummers just don’t have it in them. To swing’s uncool, too laid back, but good jazz is all about cool even when expressing love, hate or the most misunderstood qualities of our type of music: grief and bewilderment. You’ve got to have lived a lot and be old inside yourself to get those emotions right. Anyone can crash and thump, as Pete Towns-hend once said, but the things I was looking for were in you all right. Just listen to Dirtybeat here beside me. Energetic kids, but let me give you another quote, this one courtesy of Satchmo and his manager Irving Mills: It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing, right? Even Graham Parker had to use that line, because he knew too, and what these poor lads are doing today doesn’t mean anything at all.

  Sorry to subject you and everyone else to this, Max. Bad idea.

  The pity of it is that if you could rise up out of that box and play right now, you’d really be something. You’d be best and fairest and most improved too. You’ve lived and died and that’s what every good musician wants to do if their going to make memorable music.

  Unfair, huh?

  My mind shouldn’t wander so, but maybe you prefer my thoughts to this trite little musical tribute I put together for you? No wonder I can’t focus. Right now I’d rather be talking to you than playing. You used to agree that too many skin-men want to be the main man – they want their drumming to cut through all the other instruments and be the instrument. They’re all about me, me, me. What do you end up with? A fight, and that ain’t music. Unless you’re Keith Moon or someone absolutely unique. Then it works, otherwise it don’t. You never wanted to be centre stage, spotlight on you. You wanted, Max, to set the stage for the rest of us. The true Backroom Boiler. That’s what made you so hot. Then, the fact that you could intuit what was inside the players you worked with, well, that’s just what made you hotter.

  Funny thing. Playing harmony, lead, now some syncopated sliding scales in this ditty about a gambling house burning down in Montreux, Switzerland, something’s happening. What is it? Let me end my piece with a little flourish, then pass on to Greg the Dirtybeat guitarist so that he can give us a clever four bars of acoustic lead. Nice, nice.

  Now I can think about it. Hmmm. Thing is, it’s like I’m standing here playing but what I hear is your voice giving me my old question back: Dr Jamie Lazaroff, specialist in triage and associate professor of surgery: What do you want to do?

  Isn’t there just a world of terror in a question like that? What does a man like me want to do as opposed to what should he do?

  I’ve got a brand new leg and one quarter hearing. My young wife Dharka is pregnant with our first baby and I’m struggling to get through a song as simple as this. I’ve saved lives, but I could have saved more. I already run a discipline at university and still look for extra time to operate a private medical practice. Every year I donate six to eight weeks to MSF somewhere in the world. Often they’re the best weeks out of any year, but I took a wrong step in a place I was warned about and I didn’t die – but I’ve got a life that needs saving anyway, mine. I mean, look at you, Max. But for a whisker of luck I nearly beat you to the Pearly Gates.

  What do I want to do or what do I need to do?

  Old friends are the ones you can be honest with. Best estimate is I’m three-quarters deaf and rising. Well, while I’ve got time I need to teach myself something and it’s something I used to know. If this kid in Dharka’s belly is ever gonna have a real father, and not a nut-case progenitor good for nothing but professional achievement and longer and longer hours away from home, I’ve got to turn back the clock. Play some real jazz again, really swing. That’s the sum of what I want. What I need. No more do-goodery.

  There, I’ve said it. But I couldn’t have said it before because I never even knew the shape of the question. Why’d I have to get up here to realise the truth?

  What’s that, old friend – this is all music to your ears?

  Well, I don’t think you mean this song Dirtybeat and me just murdered.

  X

  I told Jamie that like everyone else in his collective I didn’t want attachment, only a good gig from time to time. His group of available musicians had settled into a core set of twelve and a wider, looser collection of about another fifteen. They were into jazz without labels, eschewing the names given to all the sub-genres. Big Band, Swing, Fusion, Bop, West Coast Cool, Continental Jazz, Progressive, Orchestral – not for Jamie and his friends. Our jams were free and fluid, a musical transition that felt natural to me, as if Concetto San Filippo had prepared me for this since the day he gave me my first lesson. What I didn’t like was that my playing wasn’t anywhere as clean as it used to be when I practised with him. So many years of rock drumming had narrowed my technique. Jamie asked for more colour and variation, more method and style – more grace, even. Sometimes as I set the groove I’d see Jamie watching me, a smile in the corner of his mouth. He was encouraging me, and seemed to be saying, Find it again, Max. It’s not all gone.

  Hey, it wasn’t.

  And Conny’s old voice guided me as if he was right there. What was even better was that the click in my head in a thousand variations was still there too. The old metronome that becomes a part of your psyche: nothing would ever lose me that, not after Conny taught me so correctly. Whenever Jamie’s musicians started off too fast or too slow I knew how to guide them back to the right click, no matter the tempo of the tune. I’d glance at our twenty-one-year-old leader and Jamie would be looking at me, the only one completely aware of what I’d done. His half-smile said he was watching a rebirth; the kid was right.

  Then, one day, he said something that turned me upside-down. ‘Your stepfather told my grandfather that you were one of the best drummers he’d seen. But you were going to have to follow a lot of side-roads before you got onto the right one. He knew you pretty well, huh?’

  That night, for the first time in a long time, I walked around my house drinking too much. I missed him, wished we’d had more time together; I even wished he was my real father and had been my guide since the day I was born. Settling into the couch, I slept in exactly the place he’d fallen asleep so many times, the television’s rippling hues bathing over him.

  In a dream, we were walking down the local streets under a fat moon, and we were hand in hand. I looked at his olive-skinned face as he watched the stars; he was full of wonder. Then I was at his funeral. The look and feel of that day was exactly as it had been. Summer heat; scent of jasmine; sweat falling in droplets off my forehead. I hadn’t had to do any of the organising. Friends I’d never even known he had did it all on my behalf.
I was eighteen and I think already quite self-assured, but in the shock of his loss I could barely organise tying my shoe laces.

  The thing was, before the funeral people started calling the house to speak to me. It wasn’t just the old guys in the wedding band, but men I’d never heard of. They knew all about me, however, and would refer to me as ‘Conny’s son’. A small deputation finally came to visit, saying that if I’d allow them they would do everything needed for a decent funeral and wake. They were all Mediterranean like Conny and post-middle age. It soon dawned on me what was going on.

  I quizzed Francesco, a large, sixty-five-year-old Neapolitan, about my stepfather’s life and their connection. With the others drinking wine and watching us, Francesco explained that Conny had come to this country after he’d discovered the truth about his sexuality. Almost too late; he’d married young but at least had no children. In his country he’d trained as a master builder, and had liked women well enough, but the first time there was a man was not the last time. His wife found out and raised an unholy Hell. Conny escaped to this country for peace, quiet and a life he could lead without approbation. He found this circle of friends; some were musicians, some had trades, and by the time of the funeral most were retired. Not all of these men had lived completely open lives, but neither did those who were married hide very much from their families. I’d never imagined a world like this – or that it had existed inside my own home.

  ‘You aunt Emma, she did know. She was not so happy for this,’ Francesco spoke in his throaty accent, and I remembered what I’d sometimes heard and seen between Emma and Conny: affection, need, and once: ‘Don’t lie to me, you’ve gone back to it, haven’t you?’ or was it, ‘Don’t lie to me, you’ve gone back for more, haven’t you?’

  Francesco made sense. Seeing the surprise in my face, he said like a priest, ‘Everyone they do have to find their way to live, right for them but no one else. Figlio, what man is made like a stone?’

  Not you, Concetto. At his funeral his compatriots sat with me. We were a group. In the vividness of my dream, as I slept in that couch, I could feel their arms again. Or was it Conny holding me? In the week following the funeral I drank myself into my own sort of oblivion, smashed my way into stores at midnight and stole more booze and ridiculous things I didn’t need. I was never sober, but I kept wondering how I could have lived so close to this man and never bothered to know him. What effort did I make to understand why he would build me my own practice studio, buy me my drums and so tirelessly teach me how to be ‘musician the finest’? What thanks did I ever offer him, what did I ever do for him? In that last bottle shop I drank their tequila and laid down on the floor, wanting to die. He’d had a big heart and mine was stone. It was almost a relief to end up in a prison farm, where others could do the thinking for me, and I could switch off, force myself to think nothing at all.

  XI

  Jamie’s musicians had no illusions of hitting it big or making millions. They were well on the way to becoming doctors, lawyers, dentists and engineers. When we played we usually performed under different group names, things like Big Blue Jays, Smokey Leroy, The City Heat Quintet and the Three Horn Trio. Times were good. Bookings turned up at hotels, reception halls, bars, jazz clubs, restaurants, outdoor cafés and even street busking if the mood hit enough of them. I was one of four potential drummers. It remained unspoken, but I could tell I was the favourite.

  Our equation worked to a canon Jamie Lazaroff had worked out for all of us. It was ‘Be Cool’. We tried to be. If the telephone rang and I wanted to play somewhere for a night or two’s pocket money and free drinks, then fine. If I didn’t, no one pushed it. Under this arrangement I enjoyed playing more than I ever had, and in trying new styles alien to rock music, I moved from the musical plateau I’d been stuck on for decades into something a whole lot better.

  Do people notice themselves growing older? I barely did, and I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that my bank account was fattening month by month. The gardening business was a licence to print money, and, because I enjoyed the playing, I found myself saying yes to more and more gigs. I had untold energy; unless it was the height of summer, working outside all day hardly seemed to tire me at all. Running that on into late-night shows was natural enough. Nothing better to do anyway. I told myself that as soon as any of this felt like work, I would cut back, but it didn’t happen. Gardens were full of sunlight and my flowers relished every new day. That could have been good enough, but playing with Jamie and his guys lifted me up even further.

  Exhausted but happy one night in my living room, I told Conny, ‘Thanks for teaching me the right way.’ I fell into bed feeling light inside. At least I’d said something. My life was good; I’d been saved, but guess what, it was only a couple of whiskies, three shots of vodka and the blink of an eye before Jamie’s musicians were graduates getting jobs, and turning those jobs into careers, and marrying and procreating too, eventually to fall into the endless loops and traps of young families.

  Musicians dropped off the radar and Jamie Lazaroff was now a doctor specialising in accident and trauma care. The end of the Eighties came and he barely had time to scratch himself. At a practice session he gathered we leftovers and broke the news: he’d joined Médecins Sans Frontières and had signed up for a one year tour of duty in the Ivory Coast. Where? There was a new light in his eyes. Not yet thirty, but something told me Jamie had found his real road. He said, ‘This’ll be it, guys,’ and it was. No farewell show to tug at the heartstrings, the look in his eyes and the determination in the set of his jaw said he was going now.

  What a loss. I missed his skinny frame, his stoop, the almost spiritual air that he played his saxes with. There were many times I thought he was connected to something a lot bigger and darker than the sum of either himself or the musicians around him. Maybe it was what the Spanish call the Duende; if there really was such a thing, the person who reached into it was Jamie. His sets were exercises in the exploration of his spirit, and, with it, the spirits of others. No wonder audiences loved him. When I watched the way he played it made me realise how much Debbie Canova had been like this too: born with a magic unlearned and unlearnable.

  The remnants of Jamie’s collective got together and faced the reality of the coming decade. Our sort of music was largely out of fashion. The few of us that remained from the collective formed a permanent band because it was either give in to that or never find a way to play again, there was just so little work. We called our septet DoctorJay in honour of our absent leader, but there was even a bitter taste to that idea.

  With me there was Stefan Ola on trumpet, Randal Ferguson on saxophone, Bobby Mitchell on rhythm guitar, Rodney Brand on lead guitar, Sam Wyvel on piano and Raf Santos on basses. Each of these guys was now married and had a good- or high-paying job, three already had kids. They’d arrive to gigs in their BMWs and Saabs while I parked Conny’s Premier or my gardening ute between them.

  Things never really worked out. Venues continued to close down and what new ones did open always failed in their first months. The wedding and twenty-first birthday circuit was terminal. Performing stopped being fun, but I didn’t follow my vow to throw it in. Still, after trudging on for year after year with diminishing returns, DoctorJay was ready to call it quits. Well, that would be it then. Maybe I’d fall into line with what Conny had done; just keep my kit under the house and indulge in my own practice sessions, no one else around. Become a teacher maybe.

  Or just stop.

  Before we came to the point of making the final decision, one night I received a phone call. It was toward the end of 1994 and DoctorJay had managed three gigs the entire year. There was a venue in town called Club Marrakesh and it was one of the last of the jazz clubs to survive in this city. Funny thing was, we’d never played there, the owners keeping themselves going by always booking big. That meant they only imported name bands or artists from down south and overseas. Now things had changed. The Scottish-Italian brothers who own
ed the place, Joseph and Roland Sparks – Conny would have called them Giuseppe and Rolando – had been in a legal battle with the local council which was preparing to tear down the luxury hotel the club was in, not to mention the entire business precinct.

  The caller was Joseph Sparks. Parkland near his club was to be redeveloped, and everything in the way would have to go. The Sparks brothers had joined a consortium in opposing the development and the rezoning that would close down their businesses, but it had been a losing battle and sort of half-hearted too. It’s hard to say no to new greenery and open spaces, even when you’re the one who has to take the fall. They soon threw in the towel.

  ‘We might think about a pizzeria or something, somewhere we can’t get fucked over again.’ Joseph and Roland wanted to go out with a bang, really say thank you and farewell to their patrons. ‘It’s gonna be a big night. We’re gonna get Misty Blue up from Sydney. Know them?’

  I did, the quintet was one of the most in-demand jazz bands in the country.

  ‘Well, I hear you guys can be pretty hot, too. Sorry we never had you, but we want to do a play-off, you against them. Alternating on stage, twenty- or thirty-minute brackets each until your fingers fall off or everyone goes home. But I’m thinking, a big finale, everyone together, the stage can handle it. The longest jam you can muster. What do you think?’

  I thought it was pretty good. ‘Most cool,’ Jamie might have said.

  ‘Consider yourself booked. October 31st, okay?’

  ‘What are you going to call the show?’