The Magic Keys

by Albert Murray

  So there you go, statemate, he said, as if using the cymbals to bring you to the solo microphone. And then as if adding a light roll as segue, he said, And speaking of the Bam, give all of our best to them fine people you went and got yourself all married up with. And tell her we also hope that she can also make it by to give us another little peek. Tell her I know how busy she is with both of you all taking classes, but tell I say all she got to do is just pop by the recording studio for a couple of takes and I guarantee that our permanent acknowledgment will be right there on everything else we do for the rest of the session. But now you, he said then, you get to me fast and I know I don’t have to tell you that the Bossman ain’t shucking about something like this.

  The first rehearsal session was from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. that Tuesday. When I came into the studio he was all set up, adjusted and tuned, and so was everybody else. But there was time to make the rounds to each section and greet everybody one by one because the Bossman and Old Pro were still at the copy table deciding on the sequence of what they were going to run through.

  Then shortly after I made it back to Joe States, I saw Old Pro begin to gather up the scores, and I moved on over to the copy table and said what I said to the Bossman first, and he waited while Old Pro and I said what we said to each other and I promised to call and find out about his free time.

  Then I followed the Bossman on over to the piano, and as Scratchy McFatrick and I were slap-snatching palms again, the Bossman had already started playing around with a series of runs even before he sat down and adjusted his seat to the keyboard. Then as I came on over to him he moved over so that I could sit on the seat beside him and went on vamping what he was vamping at the same time that he was saying what he was saying about letting me know when he would be free so that I could meet him somewhere for an update while the band was in town this time.

  Not that we need to lose any sleep over the likes of you, he said, still running variations on the notion he had either made up or picked up. Sometimes it might begin as any old sound at all, just something he heard and decided to turn into music, or sometimes it would be a phrase he heard somebody using as a part of a warm-up exercise and when he decided which way he wanted it to go, he would say, Hey, Bloop, or Hey, Jomo, or Hey, Mobe, how about this, and perhaps more often than not whoever he had picked it up from would not recognize it. But from time to time somebody might also say, Yeah, that’s a little run I picked up from old so-and-so back when I first started going to rehearsals trying to get in the high school dance band from the marching band. Or sometimes whoever it was would say, I still got the record that was on and I still remember all of it note for note, but that was the part I had to work on the hardest, so every now and then I use it to check up on myself.

  Now you, he said, still doodling and noodling; I just don’t want you to forget that my best wishes are just the same old conventional down-home ones handed down from generation to generation, beginning as far back as the time of the abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. All that is a part of it, too, as I’m sure you know, but what I want you to keep in mind is that with me it is also personal. Which means that I’m all for touching base in person from time to time, however briefly.

  He went on noodling and doodling on the keyboard, pausing from time to time to make another notation on the fresh copy sheets on the top of the piano. The fact that he could say what he wanted to say to me while going on with what he was doodling on the piano (and with his pencil) was something I had become aware of the very first time I went to hear the band in person that night out at the Dolomite. I cut classes to go out there that day to watch and listen to them rehearse some new material for an upcoming recording session when they hit New York a few weeks later. So when I went back out to the dance that they were in town to play that night, I was already in a state of fairyland euphoria.

  But not to such a degree that I would miss what happened when the band came back onstage for the second set. Hortense Hightower came up to say something to him from the dance floor, and he had her come on up to the bandstand and sit beside him. And since they were playing a dance and not a concert, he didn’t announce the selections, he just vamped the signal for each number, sometimes bringing sections of the whole ensemble in on the first chorus as written or in any case as I remembered it from the recording; but at times he might segue to another chorus, even the out chorus as if it were the first chorus. And if you were out on the dance floor you would be so involved with what the music was stimulating you to do that you probably wouldn’t have time to notice very closely what any individual musician’s posture and gestures were as he played what you were responding to.

  What you had to get out there and do from time to time, because how could you resist that part of being right there with them playing “live and in person”? But at the beginning of the second set that night out at the Dolomite I was as close to the bandstand as you could get, and that was where I was when I saw what I saw and realized that the Bossman could carry on what was obviously a serious, extended conversation while not only leading the band from the keyboard, but also keeping track of what everybody in each section was doing at the same time.

  They were playing a number that was one of my favorite recordings, and I was keeping an eye on the trumpet section because I knew that there was a chorus coming up in which I wanted to see how the three horn men looked doing what they were about to do. So I was watching them and I saw old Osceola Menefee making signifying head gestures to Jomo Wilkins and Scully Pittman about how preoccupied the Bossman was with the conversation he had going with Hortense Hightower.

  Then when they came to the part I was waiting for, the three of them stood up to hit one sharply percussive note in unison. But when they raised their sparkling silver horns to do so, old Osceola Menefee didn’t put his mouthpiece to his lips, and the instant the rim shot–like note went spat!, the Bossman’s head jerked up and he wagged his finger at Osceola Menefee, who grinned as if to say, Just checking, maestro, just checking, and saluted as the three of them sat back down.

  And now, he said as we took the first sip of our wine after giving our waiter our short order that afternoon on which I had been able to make it up to the recording studio at Sixth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street in time to spend his snack break recess with him as I had promised through Milo the Navigator on the phone the night before.

  The two-hour break for the rest of the band amounted to about an hour and a half for him. So he had taken me to a cozy little place two and a half blocks up Sixth Avenue where there was a table waiting for him. And when he gave the waiter his order I said I’d have the same, which is also what I had done when they brought him a glass of the wine that they already knew he wanted.

  So now, he said as we put our glasses back on the table before taking a second sip, let’s get personal. How are things going for my fine young all-purpose timekeeper? And I said, Still trying to keep it swinging, maestro. Still trying to keep as much of it together as I can, still trying to find out how much else I should be trying to get together. And he said, They get into some pretty tricky stuff in outfits like the one you’re hooked up to these days, but of course you already knew all about that part of it before you made your move. I’m satisfied on that score. So I’m not asking because I have any doubts. I’m just keeping in touch.

  And that was when he went on to tell me what he told me about what Hortense Hightower had told him about why she had given me the bass fiddle. She told me that it was the one basic instrument that even as a beginner you could play almost the same way you just naturally did whatever you just naturally did when you were just listening and responding to whatever you were hearing when you were listening and responding with nobody else around. Just think how different it would be if you were playing the same notes on a tuba.

  That, he said, was a pet notion of hers, and I said it made a lot of sense to me, because it did. But when I called to tell her that I was thinking about sending for you as the
stopgap replacement for Shag Phillips, she was all for it, but she still immediately reminded me of what she had told me about not mistaking your all too obvious love for music and close identification with musicians with any personal desire on your part to become a professional musician as such. Not as your life’s work. Even though you hadn’t yet settled on what you wanted to try to make of yourself.

  Which I could also understand, he said, and I promised her, and I kept my word as you well know I did. And by the way in case you haven’t already figured out why I picked an inexperienced youngster like yourself to fill in for Shag Phillips, what impressed me was how natural your sense of time seemed to be. Because what it all added up to was pulse, which is not just metronomic precision but a matter of personal feeling, gut feeling. Technique is fine, but it doesn’t always add up to music, not the kind of music I’m always trying to play. Not that you or anybody else were born with it, for Christ sake but you were conditioned to it early on.

  We were well into our snack by that time and he looked at his watch and said, I don’t pick my musicians like anybody else anyway. With me it’s not their expertise but their potential. So what happened with you was the way you locked in with old Joe and Otis and me was not just surprising, it was downright incredible. And so far as I was concerned it had to do with a lot more than execution. It had to do with feeling. Look, we could always improve your execution with practice. That’s what the hell rehearsal is always about, but feeling is something else, and the texture of my music is always all tangled up with the blues.

  Which I could have said was essentially a matter of idiomatic sensibility. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to sound that much like a graduate school academic. So what I actually said was that I knew exactly what he meant. And even as I said it I was remembering those old long-ago summer twilight times on the steps of the swing porch, with the antimosquito smoke wafting and curling across the chinaberry yard, when old Luzana Cholly used to come sporty limping up along Dodge Mill Road from the L & N Railroad bottom, strumming his twelve- string guitar on his way to whichever honky-tonk or jook joint he was going to play in that night.

  Not that it wasn’t as if church music was also always there. But church music was about church service, which was about heaven and hell. Whereas the blues was about everyday good times as well as holiday good times. I don’t really know which I heard first, but I do remember that Luzana Cholly with his guitar and sporty limp walk was there quite a while before old patent-leather-tipping, flashy-fingered-piano-playing Stagolee Dupas fils first came to town.

  So I said what I said because suddenly all of that had come to mind. But what he was saying then was that as far as he was concerned, musicians should never become so preoccupied with what they were doing technically or theoretically—and certainly not with how their technique is impressing other musicians— that they forget that the truth of the matter is that the people in the real audience respond to what you make them feel.

  So, he said, when we returned to that part of the conversation as we finished our dessert and stood up to leave, so what good is impressing other musicians with your virtuosity if nobody out there in the ballroom, the auditorium, and the record store is responding? Which sometimes people do in spite of themselves. In other words, describing and explaining how the sounds are made is elementary for musicians themselves, but all of that is only a matter of craft. But when my band plays something, I want the craft to add up to what good music is supposed to do for people who come to hear it and dance to it. Not because they understand it but because they feel it.

  Then as we came on back along Sixth Avenue toward the studio, he said what he said about Hortense Hightower and that was when I said what I said about Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas fils. That was when he went on to say what he said about what great but undefined expectations Hortense Hightower had told him she had for me. And I said what I said then because that was when he had gone on to say, As you already know I’m with her. And so is everybody in the band. And that was when he smiled his very pleased Bossman Himself smile and then raised one eyebrow and said, But I still can’t help being curious about what you yourself think about how you happened to come by such an intimate identification and involvement with music without becoming a musician.

  So that was when I said what I said about that and I don’t remember having ever said it or even thought about like that before. I said that there never was a time when I wanted to become a musician per se. I said as much as I always wanted to do things like Luzana Cholly, who was my very first legendary hero in the flesh, I don’t remember ever wanting to become a guitar player, not to mention a twelve-string guitar player. I said old Luzana Cholly’s sporty limp walk was in itself a downright epical statement but whenever I did it, the imaginary object that I would be pretending to be holding so expertly would not be a make-believe guitar but old Gator Gus’s baseball pitching glove. I said, even when little Buddy Marshall and I tried to skip city by hopping a northbound freight train to follow him that time and he himself caught us and brought us back to Three-Mile Creek bridge, neither one of us had thought of ourselves as hitting the troubadour trail as an itinerant guitar player.

  And the same was true of old Stagolee Dupas fils, the flashy-fingered jook joint and honky-tonk piano player from down in New Orleans, the Creole and voodoo and steamboat city beyond the Gulf Coast Mississippi canebrakes and bayous where the L & N Railroad made its junction with the California-bound Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe. I used to spend hours just listening to him practicing, sometimes on the piano at home and sometimes all by himself some mornings in old Sodawater’s empty honky-tonk, just practicing and playing for himself or making up new numbers or new twists to use on old numbers. But I didn’t ever really want to become a piano player either. I just wanted to do whatever I decided to try to do like he did what he did playing the way he played the piano.

  I said, With old Luzana Cholly what I heard was blue steel routes and destinations and what they required was rawhide-tough flexibility. I said, With old Stagolee Dupas fils and his custom-tailored big-city clothes and jewelry, it was the sights and sounds along patent-leather avenue canyons. I said, I told you that time about Papa Gladstone’s band. But I must say, maestro, as many of those rehearsals as I used to go to and as many of his dance dates as I began listening to from outside the dance halls even before I was old enough to buy a ticket even if I had been able to afford one, I don’t remember ever having any urge to play any instrument for him someday, even though I memorized and could hum and whistle just about every part of most of the numbers in his book and could spot any phrase that any newcomer didn’t get right.

  And that was when he said what he said about having not only the knowledge but also the feeling about how it all goes together and if the feeling comes first, so much the better. He said, Our friend Hortense knew exactly what she was doing when she gave you that bass. She knew good and well that a special scholarship college sharpie like you could and would pick up on the basic technical facilities in no time at all and that whatever skill you were capable of just naturally followed.

  We came on across Forty-fourth Street and into the building where the studio was, and as the elevator started upward he said, So with that kind of background you actually came into our band knowing why I sometimes kept the fluffed notes in. And I said, Because if you like how it sounds, it becomes the right note. And that was when he said what he said about sheet music versus ear music. So far as his band was concerned, sheet music was there to remind you of ear music.

  When we came on back into the studio where Old Pro was waiting for him at the piano, he gave me the old mock French military one for each cheek farewell for now routine and said, And incidentally for whatever it’s worth, I also want you to know how pleased I am that you’re still touching base with old Daddy Royal. Ain’t but the one. As I’m sure you already know, and as I’m also sure you already know what it means to have somebody like that expecting something
special from you, even before you yourself have settled on what you would really like to do with yourself.

  When I went back to the studio at the end of the week for my this-time-around get-together with Joe States, the very first thing he said as we came on out onto the sidewalk en route to Sam’s Musical Supply Shop on Forty-ninth Street between Sixth Avenue and Times Square was also about something that Royal Highness had said about me.

  Well now, just let me say this, my man. Old Daddy Royal has got your number. So if the impression you’re making on them profs down there at that university is anything like your hitting it off with him, you got this grad school gig off and popping like these old thugs in this outfit hitting when the Bossman sics them on with one of our old surefire getaway jump tunes. Man, talking about a bunch of jackrabbits! Man, when the Bossman sics them splibs in that outfit on a Broadway audience they hit like they got the lowdown on the mainstem of every metropolis there ever was.

  XII

  When I finally told Taft Edison about the time I had spent on the road with the band, I said, Man, it began as an incredible summer transition job that I needed because I had to get enough cash from somewhere to supplement the graduate school fellowship grant that I had been awarded along with my B.A. degree at commencement that spring. I said, Man, nothing like that had ever crossed my mind before. I said, Man, when I left home for college my main musical involvement beyond listening and dancing to it was humming and whistling it.

  That was my second visit to the writers’ work space on Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street that he was still using five days a week, Monday through Friday, because the owner was still away on a biographical research project in France and Italy. He was sitting at the long heavy oak conference table that he used as a writing desk, and I was sitting across from him in a chair near the window through which I could look north beyond St. Patrick’s Cathedral toward Fifty-seventh Street and Central Park South, and from that many floors up, the sound of the traffic was all a part of the midtown Manhattan hum and buzz as I already remembered it from movie sound tracks when I heard it on my other visit.