The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  It looked to me like the whole continent was being drowned in a bath of blood, from coast to coast. The nation was committing mass suicide—it was like a slimy snake blowing its top, writhing and wriggling with the fits, beginning to chew up its own tail. Sure, I was surrounded by a race of gangsters running amuck, a hundred million blowtops, born with icecubes for hearts and the appetites of a cannibal. “They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.” Nietzsche said that. “See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.” They were sure clambering some in the U.S. of A. Nobody was safe in this funky jungle. It was all one great big underworld, and they’d put their dirty grabbers on the one good thing left on earth, our music, and sucked it down into the mud with them.

  I found I was getting so sensitive to odors, any strong smell was a torture. Almost any kind of heavy odor would make me dizzy and send me reeling down the street, my stomach quaking in shuffle rhythm. The worst ordeal of all, one I really dreaded, was to take the Seventh Avenue subway uptown, to get to where I was living with my family just then, on Park Avenue just below Fordham Road. There’s a long stretch from 96th Street to 110th, where the train passes under Central Park, heading into Harlem, and I used to go out of my mind there because of the extra strong odor of scorched steel. It reminded me of the burnt-rags stench of the ether they doused me with back in The Band House when they took my appendix out, and I couldn’t stand it. I used to sit huddled up on my seat, shrinking into a corner, my head shoved down between my knees and my arms wrapped tight around it, to keep from screaming.

  One day, just as the train pulled into 110th Street, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder, and when I worked up enough courage to raise my head, there was a nice-looking old colored man with a thick crop of snow-white hair, looking down at me with the kindest, most sympathetic expression I ever saw. “Son,” he said to me real soft, “if you can’t make money, make friends,” and with that he stepped out on the platform and drifted away. He saved my life that day. Of course, it wasn’t money I was worrying about, it was that metallic odor that reminded me of jail and burnt powder and all the scowling evil in the gangster world I knew. But that old man had the answer anyway: fall in with some regular guys and you’re saved. I had such a tender feeling for that man that when I was on a record date a little later I remembered his words, and that’s how we got the title for those blues Jack Teagarden sang, Makin’ Friends.

  “Ten times must thou laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise thy stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee in the night.” That’s what the wise man said to Zarathustra. I thought about those lines a lot—I sure had forgotten how to laugh, and my stomach was on the blink too, and maybe there was some connection. Well, the doctors couldn’t give me any prescription for breaking out in smiles, but they at least might be able to set my stomach straight.

  Tommy Dorsey sent me around to see his physician, Dr. Irving Grad, and he wanted to pump my stomach, but I couldn’t see that at all. “Well,” he told me, “you’ve got to get your system cleaned out somehow, so if you don’t want to use a pump why don’t you take an ocean trip? In your condition you’re bound to get seasick, and Nature will do the job for you.” I couldn’t think of anywhere to go, that was the trouble. I didn’t feel like taking one of them ocean jaunts; I just wanted to dig a hole in the ground and crawl way down into it and pull it in after me. I told him I would think it over.

  The doc told me to take long walks and get as much fresh air as I could, so every day I would totter over to the Bronx Zoo, which was a little ways down Fordham Road from where I lived. Once I stopped by the seal pond and stood there for a long time, watching a big black glistening seal go jack-knifing through his tricks. It got me in a trance. All of a sudden it hit me that this high-spirited animal, that was so graceful it made me want to cry, really had the secret, and nobody suspected it. “And to me also, who appreciate life,” said Nietzsche, “the butterflies, and soapbubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.” With those moustaches and that bright, clear-eyed look of his, this seal struck me as being a gentle and wise old man, digging the whole world and at peace with it. He belonged to the world of butterflies and soapbubbles. While all us two-legged ounce-brains jittered around real frantic outside his bars, cutting our throats and bumping each other off, he just kept diving and leapfrogging through the water with that heartbreaking ease and sureness, one tight beautiful unit from head to tail—sunning himself, knowing his natural strength and ability to use it, taking a gang of delight in his sleek supple body, just coasting along without tension or nerve-knotting worry. That fine animal never suffered from nervous indigestion a day in his life; thy stomach, the father of affliction, never broke up his solid sleep. He laughed ten times a day every day at us strutting simps. It became very important to me to study every flick and ripple of his body, to try and dig his marvelous control, the secret of his ease.

  Goddamn if that animal wasn’t so anxious to help me out, he started romping around just for my benefit. He would dive and then go through his wriggles slow-motion, right at the surface of the pond so I could follow him. Then he would climb right up in front of me and look straight in my eyes and I knew he was saying to me, Well brother, you see how it’s done, watch close now—all you got to do is relax and take it easy and use yourself the way Nature intended you to, and then you’ll be happy just like all us seals, you’ll live forever and you’ll never need a Seidlitz powder. He was pointing his wise old snout straight at the millennium, and wanted me to follow him there. We understood each other so perfectly, I got self-conscious. Pretty soon I hurried away because other people were drifting near and I didn’t want any square outsiders standing around while that seal and I spoke to each other. They wouldn’t have understood.

  WELL, ON January 23rd, 1929, I got a cablegram from Dave Tough in Paris saying, HAVE GOOD JOB COME AT ONCE BRING RECORDS AND MUSIC WIRE IMMEDIATELY. Right away I thought of Doc Grad’s advice about a sea voyage. Here was the answer, dropped right in my lap.

  Now all I had to do was raise money for my passage. As luck would have it, Gil Rodin, who was playing with Ben Pollack’s band just then at the Park Central Grille, was going to have his tonsils out and asked would I take his place for a couple of weeks. So I played there, alongside Benny Goodman and his brother Harry, Jimmy MacPartland, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden and Ray Bauduc. Even though we played all show tunes and dreamy dance music, things sometimes began to happen when Jack Teagarden, taking his trombone apart and playing with just the slide and a water glass like the colored boys sometimes did, would start off the blues in a major key, then change to the minor, same as he does on Makin’ Friends. Jack could really get in the jazz idiom, and he did a lot to make this job bearable to me.

  During this period I sat in on a recording date with the Pollack band, just a couple hours after I’d had a gang of teeth yanked, because my biters were going bad along with all my other parts. It turned out that the piano player had had a tooth pulled that morning too, so we sat with a spittoon between us and took turns spitting blood between choruses. Then there was another date, under the title of “Eddie Condon And His Foot Warmers,” where a band made up mostly of Chicagoans recorded Makin’ Friends and I’m Sorry I Made You Cry for Okeh. Then we got together for Victor, under the title of “Eddie Condon’s Hot Shots,” and made two more sides, I’m Gonna Stomp Mr. Henry Lee and That’s a Mighty Serious Thing. (On this date we had one of the first mixed groups that ever recorded—besides three colored boys from Harlem, there were Teagarden, Sullivan, Condon, and me.) Jimmy Dorsey asked me to substitute for him for a couple of weeks in the pit orchestra at the “Rain and Shine” show. Finally I had enough loot for the trip.

  I wrote home for a birth certificate, which I needed to get my passport, and my dad sent it to me along with a note. “Go anywhere you wish son,” he wrote, “but always remember, sei a mensch.” That�
�s the Yiddish for “be a human being.” Then I booked passage for a second-class stateroom on the Île de France. Nobody knew I was leaving except my wife. Close to midnight on March the 2nd, 1929, I drove down to Pier 54, Bonnie coming along with me because I was so hopped-up she didn’t dare let me go alone. All the taxis honking and the porters yelling drove me near crazy; I had to chew on my tongue to keep from screaming. Until the whistle tooted its last phlegmy good-bye and the boat started to creep down the Hudson I was in steady fear. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  Weaving from side to side like a lushhead, I groped my way to my stateroom. My stomach was churning worse than a volcano. I felt like I wouldn’t live through the night. I crawled into my cubby and found I had a roommate, no butterfly or soapbubble exactly, but a suave and oily continental guy, who was counting a tremendous roll of hundred-dollar bills. He informed me cheerfully that he had strangled one man in Europe for raping his sister, stabbed another to death in a gambling fracas, and was now beating it from the States because of a third murder rap.

  Really the Blues, 1946

  Miles Davis

  (1926–1991)

  Bop was the font of postwar hipness and Charles “Yardbird” Parker was its prophet. Miles Davis began playing with Bird around 1945 when he was nineteen, and from there he went on to transform jazz with genre-making innovations, transitioning from bop to the cool school he founded, from modality to fusion (its best exemplar). Miles’s style extended to everything he did—from his clothes to his paintings to his speech. When poet Quincy Troupe collaborated with Miles on his life story they set it down the way Miles told it—in language as close to the bone as his horn. Here’s Miles on Bird, close-up and personal.

  from Miles: The Autobiography

  I KEPT LOOKING for Bird. One night I found myself just sort of standing around in the doorway at the Three Deuces when the owner came up and asked me what I was doing there. I guess I looked young and innocent; I couldn’t even grow a moustache back then. Anyway, I told him I was looking for Bird and he told me he wasn’t there and that I had to be eighteen to come in the club. I told him I was eighteen and all I wanted to do was to find Bird. Then the dude start telling me what a fucked-up motherfucker Bird was, about him being a dope addict and all that kind of shit. He asked me where I was from and when I told him, he come telling me that I ought to go on back home. Then he called me “son,” a name I never liked, especially from some white motherfucker who I didn’t know. So I told him to go fuck himself and turned around and left. I already knew Bird had a bad heroin habit; he wasn’t telling me nothing new.

  After I left the Three Deuces, I walked up the street to the Onyx Club and caught Coleman Hawkins. Man, the Onyx was jam-packed with people there to see Hawk, who played there regularly. So, because I still didn’t know anybody I just hung around the doorway like I had done at the Three Deuces, looking for a face I might recognize, you know, maybe somebody from B’s band. But I didn’t see anyone.

  When Bean—that’s what we called Coleman Hawkins—took a break, he came over to where I was, and until this day I don’t know why he did this. I guess it was a lucky break. Anyway, I knew who he was and so I spoke to him and introduced myself and told him that I had played with B’s band back in St. Louis and that I was in New York going to Juilliard but really trying to find Bird. I told him that I wanted to play with Bird and that he had told me when I got to New York to look him up. Bean kind of laughed and told me that I was too young to get mixed up with somebody like Bird. Man, he was making me mad with all this shit. This was the second time I had heard this that night. I didn’t want to hear it no more, even if it came from somebody that I loved and respected as much as Coleman Hawkins. I got a real bad temper, so the next thing I know I’m saying to Coleman Hawkins something like, “Well, you know where he is or not?”

  Man, I think Hawk was shocked by a young little black motherfucker like me talking to him like that. He just looked at me and shook his head and told me the best place to find Bird was up in Harlem, at Minton’s or Small’s Paradise. Bean said, “Bird loves to jam in those places.” He turned to walk away, then added, “My best advice to you is just finish your studies at Juilliard and forget Bird.”

  Man, those first weeks in New York were a motherfucker—looking for Bird, and trying to keep up with my studies. Then somebody told me that Bird had friends in Greenwich Village. I went down there to see if I could find him. I went to coffeehouses on Bleecker Street. Met artists, writers, and all these long-haired, bearded beatnik poets. I had never met no people like them in all my life. Going to the Village was an education for me.

  I began to meet people like Jimmy Cobb and Dexter Gordon as I moved around Harlem, the Village, and 52nd Street. Dexter called me “Sweetcakes” because I was drinking malted milks and eating cakes, pies, and jelly beans all the time. I was even getting friendly with Coleman Hawkins. He took a liking to me, watched out for me, and helped me all he could to find Bird. By now Bean thought I was really serious about the music and he respected that. But, still no Bird. And not even Diz knew where he was at.

  One day I saw in the paper where Bird was scheduled to play in a jam session at a club called the Heatwave, on 145 th Street in Harlem. I remember asking Bean if he thought Bird would show up there, and Bean just kind of smiled that slick, sly smile of his and said, “I’ll bet Bird doesn’t even know if he’ll really be there or not.”

  That night I went up to the Heatwave, a funky little club in a funky neighborhood. I had brought my horn just in case I did run into Bird—if he remembered me, he might let me sit in with him. Bird wasn’t there, but I met some other musicians, like Allen Eager, a white tenor player; Joe Guy, who played a great trumpet; and Tommy Potter, a bass player. I wasn’t looking for them so I didn’t pay them hardly no attention. I just found a seat and kept my eye fixed on the door, watching out for Bird. Man, I had been there almost all night waiting for Bird and he hadn’t shown up. So I decided to go outside and catch a breath of fresh air. I was standing outside the club on the corner when I heard this voice from behind me say, “Hey, Miles! I heard you been looking for me!”

  I turned around and there was Bird, looking badder than a motherfucker. He was dressed in these baggy clothes that looked like he had been sleeping in them for days. His face was all puffed up and his eyes were swollen and red. But he was cool, with that hipness he could have about him even when he was drunk or fucked up. Plus, he had that confidence that all people have when they know their shit is bad. But no matter how he looked, bad or near death, he still looked good to me that night after spending all that time trying to find him; I was just glad to see him standing there. And when he remembered where he had met me, I was the happiest motherfucker on earth.

  I told him how hard it had been to find him and he just smiled and said that he moved around a lot. He took me into the Heatwave, where everybody greeted him like he was the king, which he was. And since I was with him and he had his arm around my shoulder, they treated me with a lot of respect, too. I didn’t play that first night. I just listened. And, man, I was amazed at how Bird changed the minute he put his horn in his mouth. Shit, he went from looking real down and out to having all this power and beauty just bursting out of him. It was amazing the transformation that took place once he started playing. He was twenty-four at the time, but when he wasn’t playing he looked older, especially off stage. But his whole appearance changed as soon as he put that horn in his mouth. He could play like a motherfucker even when he was almost falling-down drunk and nodding off behind heroin. Bird was something else.

  Anyway, after I hooked up with him that night, I was around Bird all the time for the next several years. He and Dizzy became my main influences and teachers. Bird even moved in with me for a while, until Irene came. She came to New York in December 1944. All of a sudden, there she was, knocking on my motherfucking door; my mother had told her to come. So I found Bird a room in the same rooming house, up on 147th and Broadway.

&n
bsp; But I couldn’t handle Bird’s lifestyle then—all the drinking and eating and using dope. I had to go to school in the daytime and he’d be laying up there fucked up. But he was teaching me a lot about music—chords and shit—that I would go and play on the piano when I got to school.

  WHEN DIZZY left their band at the Three Deuces, I thought Bird was going to take a band uptown, but he didn’t, at least not right away. A lot of club owners on 52nd began asking Bird who his trumpet player was going to be since Dizzy quit. I remember being with Bird one time in a club when the owner asked that, and Bird turned to me and said, “Here’s my trumpet player right here, Miles Davis.” I used to kid Bird by saying, “If I hadn’t joined your band, you wouldn’t even have a job, man.” He would just smile, because Bird enjoyed a good joke and one-upmanship. Sometimes it didn’t work—me being in the band—because the owners liked Bird and Dizzy together. But the owner of the Three Deuces hired us in October of 1945. The group had Bird, Al Haig on piano, Curly Russell on bass, Max Roach and Stan Levey on drums, and me. It was the same rhythm section that Bird and Dizzy had right before Dizzy quit. I remember the gig at the Three Deuces being for about two weeks. Baby Laurence, the tap dancer, was the floor show. He took four and eights with the band and was a motherfucker. Baby was the greatest tap dancer that I have ever seen, or heard, because his tap dancing sounded just like a jazz drummer. He was something else.