The Jazz Kid

by James Lincoln Collier

  I found the address. It was a beat-up wooden rooming house on Twenty-fourth Street, three stories high, with a rickety porch across the front. I went up the steps to the porch. One of Tommy’s cards was stuck to the doorjamb with a thumbtack. Penciled on it was SECOND FLOOR, ROOM 4. I pushed the door open. Ahead of me was a flight of stairs. The carpet on them was worn right through to the wood in places. I went up. There wasn’t much light up there, but there was enough to see the yellow stains on the wallpaper and the layer of dirt on the window down at the end of the hall. I found Tommy’s door and stood in front of it, feeling nervous. Suppose he got sore at me for coming over there? Maybe he didn’t really want some kid bothering him.

  I knocked, kind of soft. Nothing happened. Maybe he wasn’t at home. I gave him a little time and knocked again, this time louder. After a minute there came a scratchy voice. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Paulie Horvath.”

  “Who?”

  “Paulie Horvath. You gave Pa your card for me. The plumber.”

  For a moment there wasn’t any sound. Then he said, “Oh, yeah. Come on in.”

  I pushed the door open and looked in. Tommy was in bed with the blanket up to his chin. His room was a worse mess than mine. His clothes were flopped over a chair, not even hung there, but just heaved there. A phonograph sat on the floor, with a lot of records scattered around it in little stacks. On the bureau was another stack of records, his beat-up wallet, a couple of crumpled dollar bills and a half-empty glass of whiskey with a cigarette butt floating in it. A cornet case stood on one end by the bureau, and next to it another cornet case, open, with a cornet lying across it, cup mute in the bell. There were no pictures on the wall, no calendar, nothing.

  “What the hell time is it?”

  “It must be around four,” I said. I wanted in the worst way to get a look at those records. They had to be jazz.

  He grunted, like he wasn’t used to the idea of it being four. Then he said, “You got any dough?”

  “No,” I said. “I never have any dough.” I wondered if I could get him to play some of those records for me.

  “Take a buck off the bureau and get me some coffee and a piece of custard pie. There’s a greasy spoon around the corner on Twenty-third Street. Meanwhile I’ll see if I can get some blood moving in my head.”

  The way he talked to me gave me a good feeling. It was like we were the same age and were doing something together. I went around the corner to the greasy spoon, got the pie and coffee, and came back to his room. By now he’d got pants and a shirt on, and was sitting on the bed yawning and putting on his socks. His yellow hair stuck up all around like hay. “Put the stuff on the chair,” he said. There was room there now, for he’d taken his clothes off it.

  “Do you always eat custard pie for breakfast?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes peach pie. But I had a liking for custard pie since I was a kid. This here stuff ain’t nothing like my sis used to make, but I can choke it down.”

  “Did your sis always cook at your house?”

  “My old lady died when I was nine. Sis had to take over for her, even though she wasn’t but twelve herself.” He took a swallow of coffee, picked up the pie with both hands and bit off the point. “You always got to eat the end of a piece of pie first.”

  “Why? I never heard of that.”

  “Bad luck if you don’t.” He took another swallow of coffee and another bite of pie. “That’s more like it,” he said. “We didn’t get off work till eight this morning and then Phil wanted to go eat some Chink food. I didn’t get to bed till ten.”

  “I shouldn’t have woke you up so early.”

  “Naw, it’s okay. I got things to do anyway.” He took another bite of pie and washed it down with coffee. “What kind of a horn you got there? Lemme see it.”

  I opened the case, and handed him the cornet. He looked at the engraving on the bell. “Hmmm,” he said. “Stratton. That baby’s been around awhile. Where’d you get it?”

  “From Hull House. I rent it.” It made me feel kind of proud to be talking about horns with him.

  He worked the valves. “Hand me my mouthpiece.”

  I didn’t dare take the mouthpiece out of his horn myself, for fear I’d break something, so I brought the whole horn over to him. He put his mouthpiece in my Stratton and blew a few notes. It amazed me how easy the notes spilled out, like he hardly put any effort into it at all. “Hmmm,” he said again. “You cleaned it out recent?”

  It never occurred to me you ought to clean your horn. How come Mr. Sylvester never said anything about it? “Not for a while.”

  “You got to clean out a horn regular.”

  “I heard of different ways of cleaning your horn,” I said. “What’s your way?”

  “I never heard of any but one way, soap and warm water. You got a little brush for the crooks?”

  “Maybe I can get one.” I didn’t see how I could unless I stole it.

  “Just make sure you wipe the water off good afterwards or it’ll leave spots. Although in the case of this horn I don’t know as it matters too much.” He shook his head. “You oughtta put new corks in the valves to cut down on the leaks. Of course it ain’t your horn.” He finished off the pie and coffee and sat there licking his fingers to get the last taste of custard. Then he said, “How come you got interested in jazz?”

  “From hearing you that time we were fixing the pipes down there in the cellar of that joint. I got so excited by it I could hardly sleep that night.”

  “Naw,” he said, “I ain’t that good. You ought to hear those New Orleans guys, like King Oliver out at Lincoln Gardens or Paul Mares with the Rhythm Kings. I ain’t nothing compared to them.”

  “The New Orleans Rhythm Kings? I got one of their records. Is that who the cornet player is?” It kind of gave me a thrill that he was called Paul, too.

  “Yeah. Paul Mares. He’s one of those New Orleans guys. They’re the best. You can’t beat ‘em. Which record you got?”

  “‘Oriental’ and ‘Farewell Blues.’ I’ve been trying to copy it off the record.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. He handed me my horn. “Go ahead. Play it. Let’s hear what you sound like.”

  I took the horn, feeling as nervous as could be. It was one thing to sit there in Hull House with a cup mute in and bang away. It was another to play it for a real musician. The trouble was that I couldn’t really get the feeling into it that Mares got—or Tommy got. That bounce, that sparkly feeling. I could play the notes right, most of them anyway, but not the feeling. But I was determined to try. I blew a couple of scales to warm up, and then I started off. About two bars in I hit a clam. I flashed hot. That made me hit another clam, and I stopped, feeling embarrassed and sore at myself.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t take it so fast. Just play it nice and easy.”

  It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to play it as fast as the Rhythm Kings did. “You mean play it slower?”

  “Take it where it’s comfortable for you. You ain’t Paul Mares yet.”

  So I started off a little slower, and by the time I got through the first few bars I knew I could do it if I didn’t lose my concentration. So I banged away at it, right on through to the end of the second chorus. I quit playing and looked at him, waggling the valves and feeling mighty nervous.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “I’ll be go to hell.” He gave me a look. “How old did you say you was?”

  Well, now I was glad as could be that Mr. Sylvester had put me through the mill the way he did. “Thirteen,” I said.

  “Thirteen? Jesus.” He picked up his horn. “Gimme a B-flat.” I hit the note and he tuned to it. Then he said, “You’re banging the beat right on the head too much. It ain’t no march. You don’t want to hit the beat right on the head. Listen.” He lifted up the cornet and played the first eight bars of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ “Now that’s the way Sousa plays it—hits the beats right on the head. To play j
azz you got to hit the notes off the beat. Like this.”

  He started playing it again with the jazz in it. Now the music had that lightness to it, like it was dancing, leaping up and down. There was glory in it.

  He stopped. “See what I mean? You got to get over hitting the beat right on the head.”

  I didn’t really get it. I could hear the difference all right, it was plain as day to me. But I couldn’t hear what he was doing that made the difference. “How do you know where the beat is if you don’t play on it?”

  “That’s what you got a rhythm section for. Tap your foot, whatever. Listen,” He tapped a slow tempo with his foot, and played along. Once again there was the floating feeling to it. He stopped. “See, it’s more in between the beats”

  “Like syncopation?”

  “That’s what a lot of them writers say in the magazines, but it ain’t. Them writers don’t know nothing about it. Who the hell told them they could explain jazz to everybody when most of ‘em don’t know the difference between a tuning fork and a basketball? It ain’t just syncopation. You got to take the beats by surprise—get in there a little quicker than they expect or wait until it’s just about too late and then jump in.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t see how you can figure all that out when the notes are flying by you so fast.”

  He laughed. “Hell, kid, you can’t think about it. You got to feel it. You got to let it happen of its own accord.”

  “What if you can’t feel it?”

  “You will. You stick to it and one day it’ll come to you and you won’t ever have to think about it again.” He opened the spit valve and shook a little water out. “All right, come on, we’ll try ‘Farewell Blues’ once and then I got to go see my girl so she don’t get salty with me. You take the lead. Just play it like you did before.” He stomped four beats and off we went. Well, I tell you, I never felt anything like that in my life. I played it the way I’d learned it, and he played along with me, circling around me, weaving through my line, up and down and around. I couldn’t believe it was me; I couldn’t believe it was me playing jazz.

  Then we stopped. He stood up. “I gotta go. She’s probably already sore at me.”

  “Can I come back, Tommy?” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to call him by his first name, but I wanted to.

  “Sure,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

  IT CAME OUT the way I figured. Pa never said anything more about taking lessons from Tommy Hurd. I don’t know if it was his idea, or Ma’s; probably both of them, for different reasons. I figured he just threw Tommy’s card away and let the whole thing slip from his mind. I wasn’t going to bring it up: if I didn’t ask they couldn’t say no.

  I knew I shouldn’t make a nuisance out of myself to Tommy. I figured if I went out once or twice a week—every five or six days, maybe—didn’t stay more than an hour or so, and brought him his pie and coffee, he might put up with me for a while. I had to learn how to put that floating feeling into the music. So that’s what I did—hike myself over there every once in a while.

  To be honest, I admired Tommy more than anybody. I admired people before. I admired Ray Grimes on the Cubs, I admired Tom Mix and some of those other cowboys in the movies, who raced their horses through rivers and over gullies to catch the bad guys. But I never admired anybody the way I admired Tommy It wasn’t just because he could play jazz, either; it was the kind of guy he was, too. The only thing that mattered to him was jazz. He hardly thought about anything else. Sure, he had some girlfriend he usually went to see before he went to work, and he liked to shoot pool—he had an uncle who ran a pool hall, and when he was a kid he used to hang around there a lot running errands and sweeping up. But I noticed that when he was showing me something about jazz, he’d forget what time it was, and suddenly have to rush out so his girlfriend wouldn’t get salty with him.

  You take me. I was used to having a nice home, clean clothes, lampshades with fringes on them, a carpet on the living room floor. Pa said he could afford to have a nice home and was resolved to have it. But Tommy, he didn’t care about anything like that. He didn’t even notice that there was no shade on the lightbulb hanging from his ceiling, that there weren’t any pictures on the walls. It didn’t make any difference to him whether there was a lampshade or pictures, because he wasn’t there anyway—he was somewheres off in jazz land. To him a place was a nice home if it had a phonograph and some jazz records; if it didn’t, it wasn’t.

  I guess that’s one reason why he didn’t mind me coming around. He could talk jazz to me as much as he wanted and I sat there and soaked it up. He’d play me records he figured I ought to know about— the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which got a lot of people started on jazz, Bailey’s Lucky Seven, the Original Memphis Five and of course the Rhythm Kings—he had all their records, every one of them. He’d teach me tunes, he’d show different ways of fingering certain phrases. We’d play things together, and he began to give me some idea of what improvising was all about. That was another time when those old piano lessons came in useful, for I knew what he was talking about when he explained how you put a melody against the chords.

  A lot of times we just sat around and talked. He told me about the gigs he was on—what they were like and who was on them. He told me about going to the South Side, around State Street and Thirty-fifth where there were a whole lot of jazz clubs. “You got to get over there sometime, kid, and hear for yourself. Get yourself a pair of long pants, they’d probably let you in. The Nest, the DeLuxe Cafe, Dreamland, Lincoln Gardens. Places like that. That’s where all those New Orleans guys play.”

  That brought up a question that had been bothering me for some while, for the Black Belt was on the South Side. “Tommy, why do they call it nigger music?”

  “That’s to set people against it. A lot of white people, you tell ‘em jazz is nigger music, they don’t want nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, is it or isn’t it?”

  “That’s a hard one, kid. I don’t rightly know. It started down there in New Orleans, and from what you hear it was the colored guys who came up with the idea. But the first we heard of it up here in Chi was these white bands—the Original Dixieland, Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland and such. The colored guys began to come up a year or two later— Duhé, Keppard, Oliver, this here Bechet they all talk about. Nick LaRocca and them white guys from the Dixieland, they always claimed they started it, but Steve Brown—that’s Tom Brown’s brother, he’s the bass player with the Rhythm Kings, a white guy— Steve says LaRocca’s full of it, he stole all his stuff off Ray Lopez. Steve told me in New Orleans they got it off the colored. Out there in these country towns down there the colored had these little bands—Steve thinks it started out there. When you get a chance to hear some of these colored fellas play, you figure that might be right. But I don’t know. I wasn’t there myself.”

  “So it is nigger music.”

  He kind of looked at me sideways. “So what if it is?”

  So what if it was? That was kind of hard to answer. “Well, a lot of people figure nig—colored people are kind of low down.”

  Tommy nodded. “Some of ‘em are. Some of ‘em ain’t. You take Calvin Wilson, he’s as good a fella as any white man I ever met.”

  “The piano player you were jamming with at Herbie’s club?”

  “Yeah. I’d trust him with my wallet and the keys to my place.”

  It was a hard one. I’d been raised all my life to think of the colored people as low down, and it wasn’t easy to change. But I didn’t want to disagree with Tommy, and I resolved I’d do like he did, and say colored instead of nigger. “Okay, is it colored music? Or is it white people’s music, too?”

  “Well, I reckon it belongs to anybody who’s willing to take good care of it,” he said. “The Rhythm Kings are white and the Oliver bunch is colored and I don’t see as there’s much difference between ‘em. Both from New Orleans of course.” He stopped to think about it. “I don’t know, maybe you g
ot to give the edge to Oliver. He does stuff with mutes that beats everything. He’s got this number “Dipper-mouth Blues,” where he works the plunger so nice you think it was a baby crying for its ma.”

  “What’s a plunger?”

  Tommy laughed. “Why you ought to know, of all people, kid. It’s the rubber part of a plumber’s friend.”

  That sure surprised me. “What you use for unstopping toilets?”

  “That’s it. He works it over the bell. It’s just uncanny.” He picked up his cornet, and began to play real soft, at the same time closing and opening the bell with his hand. It was uncanny, too, for he could get all kinds of effects with it—laughing, crying, people talking.

  He put the cornet down. “Of course I was using my hand. It ain’t nothing to what Joe Oliver can do with a plunger. Or a bottle, ashtray, anything.”

  Naturally I was all fired up to try it, and I resolved I would, the minute I got home, for Pa had two or three plungers laying around. “So in the end you would say the colored guys are best.”

  “Well, yes and no. You can learn something from those colored guys, all right. They got something to teach you. A lot of guys get out to State Street whenever they can to listen to them. But in the end you got to run it into something of your own. You take Calvin Wilson. He ain’t from New Orleans. Memphis. He didn’t grow up with jazz like the New Orleans guys. He learned to play the blues on the guitar from hanging around the colored stevedores on the waterfront. When ragtime got big he switched over to piano—taught himself, all the keys, not just D-flat like those blues players. He played in all those colored saloons down there—Memphis, St. Louis, Sedalia, which was a big ragtime town. When jazz come along he came up to Chi and took it up. He’s an all-around entertainer, really. Sings, gets up from the piano and dances while he’s playing, writes his own songs. I heard him first in one of Dan Jackson’s gambling joints. Tough place.”

  “Who’s Dan Jackson?”