by Rafi Zabor
It was true there could be troubles on the tour. In their early days together they were discreet about the Bear's real nature, and had confined the news to a small circle of friends. Even so, inquiries came, poHte and academic at first, mild solicitous souls in ill-fitting clothes and fashionless spectacles: a couple of days at the lab, such a privilege, if you'd be so kind. And it might have ended there if the Bear hadn't been so adamantine in his refusals. Subsequent bids had been more forceful, eventually even threatening: of course we could take matters into our own hands, sir, but we won't if you volunteer, and a week is all we want of your animal I promise. Nuts to you had been Jones' reply. The research theme reached it ripest development with two men in narrow-cut suits, short hair and steel-frame shades who offered Jones a "book contract"—tw^o books would appear under his name and royalty checks would be paid him on a regular basis—for the "use" of the Bear: in our facilities we can look after him better than you can, and he'll have a good and, nudge-nudge, fiill Hfe with us. Even after Jones and the Bear changed addresses twice there had been doorw^ay figures in the street at night, new neighbors in the next apartment, an irritating echo on the telephone and a suspicious fire in the building. After years of extreme discretion, in which they had narrowed their social life to a drtual circle of two, Jones and the Bear had achieved anonymity^ again, they hoped. In any event no strange nose had poked through the curtains in awhile, but now that they were stirring the waters who could tell?
"I don't want to get anyone into trouble they don't know about," said the Bear.
"That's big of you, but maybe then you shouldn't tour. Some tour. A couple of unadvertised gigs in New York and a quick ramble up to Boston. We're
The Bear Comes Home 39
lucky to get anyone at all. But," Jones recited, "Julius talked to Tim Berne and Marty Ehrlich, and although they couldn't spare their own bands they did know these other guys ..."
"The Bear and These Other Guys. Terrific billing. I had hopes, I really had hopes, that between Julius and McCall and the guys in the Art Ensemble we could manage to find some real cats willing to come out with us."
"You sat in with McCall and Lester and it's spoiled you. You haven't earned guys like that for a working band."
"So I got nowhere to go but down. Traffic jam." The Bear pointed at the cars bunching up at the light.
"I can handle it," said Jones, braking, lurching. "Fucking suspension."
"Fucking suspense," said the Bear. "Please don't crash." But he wasn't really worried about a traffic accident: how good would These Other Guys be, and if they actually did the tour would he survive it?
The one-night stint with the Art Ensemble had come off well, but that was down to Lester Bowie, who had done everything to ease the Bear's way and make sure the joint was secure: the loading doors at the back of the Bottom Line swinging open just as Jones and the Bear pulled up in the van, Bowie hustling them inside and introducing the Bear to the rest of the Art Ensemble in the backstage dressing room.
"We're overdoing the costume shit tonight. You'll be lucky if anyone even notices you," Bowie said, and he might have been right: bassist Malachi Favors had painted his face white and wore tribal-style robes of silver lame; Joseph Jarman had topped off his cloaks and warpaint with a pair of fluffy pink bunny ears; drummer Don Moye was wearing approximately Dogon regaha; Roscoe Mitchell, in streetclothes and black cotton watchcap, merely nodded hi. The Bear wore what seemed to be his regulation music costume of raincoat, baggy pants and widebrim hat.
"And dig this," Bowie said, showing him the gun, a small black automatic lying on the palm of his hand. "The piece of resistance. Ought to scare off intruders, right? Sometimes I like to shoot it off at the end of a trumpet solo, blanks of course, but it also takes flare cartridges and tear gas. Brought them along in case of trouble. When I bought the thing I wanted to see what the flares were like and I damn near set fire to the house."
Malachi Favors finished applying bright red lipstick and smiled out of the mirror at the Bear. "Em interested to hear how you play," he said. "Em sure, from what Lester tells me, that I will be delighted."
Roscoe Mitchell nodded again and again said, "Hi."
In the event, the music had been interesting.
After standing with the band in silence facing east—a nice moment
40 Rafi Zabor
actually, an effective tune-up—things had begun in a rumor of gongs and birdcalls, and the Bear had stayed out of it, a few stray notes excepted. Standing at his bass, Malachi Favors began muttering into a bullhorn, Lester was breathing hoarsely in and out of his horn, and something in these gathering strands of music caught on his fur and before he knew it he was involved in a converse of whispers with Roscoe Mitchell on the other alto while Joseph Jarman roamed the gong-world behind him, occasionally punctuating the groundswell with a bicycle horn. Now, the Bear had never considered himself a flat-out free atonal player—he hoped he sounded like himself, though it was pretty obvious he came out of Bird, Ornette and Jackie McLean—but as he and Roscoe tangled further and drums and bass came up under them like some thickening storm and Jarman raised a rattle of bells and chimes before the rising wind, in a matter of minutes the Bear was involved in successive tumults of freeblow with Roscoe's pretty much atonal alto, and the band's whole sound rose up in a wave. When the crescendo subsided, the rest of the night was blown clear of obstruction, and the Bear went into it happily and without much worry. The audience, which applauded pretty much on schedule after each of the music's episodes, didn't bother him either.
There was a long sort-of blues, the rhythm section sohd, Malachi Favors' bass huge and warm without, the Bear noticed in some surprise, the benefit of amplification. The Bear had some fun with Bowie, trading choruses, then drifting into some less marked-out call and response. There was a long percussion jam in which he crossed the stage, grabbed a mallet and whomped away at a big bass drum, and then someone called Jarman's impossibly uptempo Coltrane tribute, "Ohnedaruth," and all the horn players blew their brains out in succession. Bowie played last, pulled out his pistol at the end of his outing and emptied his clip of blanks into the lights.
So far so good, thought the Bear as he squeezed tight on the reed and blew out a skirl of multiphonics, but then Bowie, looking as if he'd gone mad, for all the scientific sobriety of his labcoat, reached into his pocket, loaded another clip into the automatic and fired another brace of blanks into the avid, crowded tables of the nightclub yelling, "Bang bang bang motherfuckers," and a busload of tourists at a row of tables near the front—some tour director must have sent them to see the Art Ensemble by mistake or for laughs—who had been only mildly alarmed at the first shots and the presence of what seemed to be an actual bear onstage now went into blind panic, flinging chairs aside and bolting through the tightly packed crowd for the exit. Their panic spread through the club, no one sure what had happened or what had not, and it pretty much cleared the house. The band retired backstage
The Bear Comes Home 41
laughing, Jarman threatening to kill Lester Bowie twice, and the Bear stood there onstage looking through pistol smoke.
He heard Jones calling from the club's front door, but he also saw a lone figure seated at a table, and the Bear's jaw dropped in deference: it was Ornette Coleman: the master: he made me.
The Bear stepped down from the stage through the remaining gunsmoke and walked to Ornette's table. Ornette was wearing a black silk suit and he seemed untroubled by the gunshots and the emptying of the club. He smiled up at the Bear. "That was interesting," Ornette said in a faraway, gentle voice, "but what I wonder, even though you play a thousand times better than I ever could, was how come you pi .y so much like a human person. What I would like to know is do you transpose from bear to human and if so why you do it, because if I played with you what I'd like is for you to play bear without transposing and I could play like me even if I don't know if that says man and then we could see what the total added up to if no one did
the adding. You know?"
Even though he felt the hemispheres of his brain crossing, the Bear was sure Ornette was right. Why did he transpose? Why was he so weak as to want to assimilate? "You're right," he told Ornette redundantly.
"You see," Ornette told him, "I think you play quadripedally, so what would a quadripedal tone be if you didn't transpose it to two-footed music. That would be the really interesting thing. By the way," he said, "I wouldn't worry about the audience leaving. They used to walk out on me all the time."
"Bear," he heard Jones calling, "there's a mob out on the street and I think I hear a siren."
"Let's play sometime," Ornette suggested.
"Maybe we could leave together," said the Bear.
"No that's all right," Ornette told him. "I'd like to hear the rest of the set." He gestured up at the empty stage.
Jones came up, grabbed the Bear by the arm, and they made it to the back door and the van just as a noise of entrance began swelling through the front.
It had taken the Bear a couple of days to get his alto case back, but the Bear considered his evening with the Art Ensemble a qualified success, not least because there came an unexpected check from Lester Bowie in the mail, and for no minuscule amount either. He would have played the gig for nothing. Of course you would, Bowie told the Bear when he phoned to say thank you, but we couldn't let that happen, could we.
The check had paid for today's rent-a-van, and some of it remained to finance the makings of a tour.
Which would be like what, exactly?
42 Rafi Zabor
The van negotiated a tangle of intersections between the municipal court buildings, then found its way along a commercial slot of street and pulled up to a parking meter in front of Tim Berne's place—the Bear knew Tim from when they were both studying with Julius. They trundled through the door and up the stairs past a hair salon one flight up, then through the open door into Tim's apartment, said their hellos and entered the music room, where a rhythm section was waiting.
Piano, bass and drums, and when the Bear came in, the three guys behind the instruments exchanged quick looks with each other and smirked out loud.
The Bear turned to Jones. "I don't think I like the look of this," he said.
By the time the actual tour got under way the worst of the summer heat was gone, and that first night autumn blew in on a black wind down Fifth Avenue, where the Bear and his band unpacked their gear from a dark green van, menaced by flying newspaper and bits of wind-driven ash. Eager to be off the street as quickly as possible, the Bear picked up both halves of the Fender Rhodes piano like two vaHses and hurried them into Beefsteak Chadie's, dropped them onstage, then disappeared into a dark, highbacked booth while Jones and the rhythm section rigged up a curtain to cover the show window at the front of the club. The Bear felt ready to deal with an audience but he did not want to be observed from the street. Everyone was teUing him to relax, but he was still worried about the police.
Finished with the curtain, Jones joined him in the booth while the rhythm section set up their axes. A waitress came by and Jones ordered two cognacs.
"Naw," said the Bear to the waitress, "make mine a draft beer. You have Guinness on tap? Even better. I'll have a pint of that."
"Sure," said the waitress, smiling at him and trying to get a better look under his hat.
Making an effort to be sociable, the Bear took it off, ruffled the far on top of his head and smiled up at her. "Hi," he said. "You've heard about me all week and you wanted to see if it was true, right?"
"Right," she said.
"It's true," he said, "and I've changed my mind, I'll take the cognac alongside the stout. But I need a very big snifter." Making another effort, he patted his snout and smiled again. "Cold nose, warm heart," he added, looking her up and down.
"Jesus, Jones," said the Bear when she had gone, "how many people am I gonna have to deal with tonight? I'm not used to this."
"That's what I like about you," Jones told him, "you're not too tough to be sensitive, even sometimes a little shy."
The Bear Comes Home 43
The Bear curled a black-and-purple lip at him, disclosing sharp canines and incisors. "And where did they get all this turn-of-the-century crap?" he complained, gesturing at the ornamental woodwork, fake studded leather cushions, wrought-iron frosted-glass imitation gaslamps and dim period paintings on the walls. "What am I supposed to do, play cakewalks to match? Did we come to the right place?"
"Restaurant consciousness is heavily into reproductions these days, I can't help that," said Jones. "I'm glad you're in such a good mood." He craned his head momentarily out of the booth. "Cummins just came in."
"Thank God for that," the Bear said.
Bob Cummins slid into the booth alongside Jones. "Hi fellas," he said.
"Hiya Bob," said the Bear. He liked Cummins, and much to his surprise had trusted the man immediately upon meeting him the week before. Cummins was a gentle-featured man around forty, face framed in curly brown hair going grey and a ditto beard. He owned India Navigation, for which small, almost infinitesimal record company the Bear was supposed to record toward the end of the tour,
"How's it going?" Cummins asked.
"Oh great," said the Bear. "I feel Hke bolting out of my seat and ditching my axe in a sewer but otherwise everything's just peachy. Cummins," he said more seriously, "are you sure that's the best rhythm section we could get? I mean, I'm glad for your help, but they've been busting my ass in rehearsal, they hardly talked to me on the way over here, plus they don't really play that good. What's going on here?"
"They're young and nervous," Cummins lied.
"And I'm big and hairy. So?"
Cummins considered for a moment, then went on, "First of all the Musicians Union's heard about you and they don't like it. They've yelled at a few people, asked a lot of questions and filed suit against Circus Performers International, who haven't got the slightest idea what they're talking about."
"And," the Bear prompted, sensing Cummins' unwillingness to go on.
"And there's some flack around town among musicians about you being a novelty act and a ripoff. There are a few people I called that don't want to work with you."
"Oh," said the Bear. "That's swell. That's great. Makes me feel really good to be here. I enjoy feeling guilty. What would I do all day without guilt, I don't like what they have on TV. So I'm taking bread out of people's mouths, is that it?"
"You've got to understand," Cummins explained, "that, aside from not
44 Rafi Zabor
knowing you or having heard you play, most of these musicians lead a very marginal kind of existence and make a very marginal living."
"I know about marginal living, Bob," said the Bear in a surly voice. "What about our friends?"
"They're all on tour with their regular bands and we can't afford Dave Holland and Jack Dejohnette."
"Are you still my buddy?" the Bear wondered. "Do you still want to record me?"
"I'll be happy to have you in the catalogue, Bear. I like your work and you might just sell enough records to get me out of my law practice and into the record business full-time."
"Us novelty acts tries real hard," the Bear assured him.
"And we might be able to improve the band as the tour gathers steam."
"Steam?" the Bear wondered. "Why steam? What has steam got to do with it?"
"You know, somebody from Warner Brothers called me the other day and wanted to know if you were for real. If you wanted to make some money you could probably work something out with them. If you're interested, I could return the call and represent you as your lawyer."
The Bear looked across the table at Cummins. "I want to be a musician, not some famous freak of nature. That's why I'm deahng with you. Besides, this is about as much world as I can deal with just now."
"I didn't mean to offend," Cummins said.
The waitress brought the drinks, and the Bear raised his big dark glass of stout. "On t
he other hand, Bugs Bunny's always been a hero of mine and do you think they'd let me record with Yosemite Sam?"
The first set, as the Bear would later maintain, was an irremediable disaster, however much Cummins and Jones would assure him that he had turned it around. It had begun with the Bear standing in fi*ont of the quarter-full house (votive candles in colored glass columns meshed with plastic fishnet on every table), stomping off "Straight No Chaser" and the band coming in behind him at a markedly slower tempo. They were out to test his mettle, ran the charitable interpretation; more likely they just wanted to fuck him up. Then, because he had no experience of playing lounges, he ran into the acoustic double bind of all stageless rooms: he could hear either the rhythm section or himself, but never both at once. To top it off, once the tempo got settled—he giving way to theirs—his employees were acting up on him again. The drummer, a hotshot kid with Turkish cymbals hung so high he could hardly reach them, started cracking out loud, irrelevant breaks behind the Bear, interrupt-
The Bear Comes Home 45
ing his Hne virtually every time he tried to get something more than just another phrase off the ground, and punctuating the choruses as if they were eight bars long instead of twelve. The pianist kicked in a Httle later with some intrusive and inappropriate chording and opened three consecutive choruses with fake modulations that made it look as if the Bear had landed himself in the wrong key. The bassist behaved, but there wasn't that much damage you could do from the bass, although he did break up his walk whenever the Bear began to swing despite the odds and opposition. The Bear looked back and snarled over his shoulder at the three of them; the drummer paled and dropped a couple of beats, the pianist laid out and looked away, and the bassist had his eyes closed. Thanks a lot, thought the Bear. I need you guys like I need another fur coat.
