by Claude Brown
It sounded like someone just playing the piano. He told me it was a record playing, just a disc-jockey program. I said, “Okay, I’m going to keep talking, and when the program goes off, I want you to get the name of that record, because I want to get it.” When it went off, he told me that it was Bud Powell playing “A Memorial to Charlie Parker.”
I liked a few jazz cats then, and I was living right down the street from a place called the Five Spot. I used to go in there and listen to musicians like Thelonious Monk, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Don Schumacher, and those cats, that Village circuit of musicians. I hadn’t become too involved in it then. But when I heard this record, it sounded like the most beautiful piano solo I’d ever heard in my life. I decided that I wanted to get a piano. I wanted to play.
It might have sounded like a crazy thing. Here I was, nineteen years old and I was going to start playing the piano. But this was the way I felt about it. I told a lot of people, “Man, I got to get me a piano.”
Tony said, “Yeah, man, that’s just the thing, because you bound to be good at it.” This was Tony. He would say something like that.
A lot of other people said, “Man, you kinda old for piano lessons, aren’t you?”
I said, “I don’t care, man. I got to have me a piano.”
I didn’t tell people why I wanted it. I wouldn’t say, “Yeah, I heard this cat Bud Powell playing over the telephone, and I have to get me a piano because I want to play like that.” But this was how I first got the bug to blow a piano.
I had started getting out. I had stopped going up to Harlem every weekend. Sometimes I’d stay away three or four weeks at a time. I’d stay downtown. I was still in the talking stage in this piano thing. I knew I wanted a piano, but I didn’t know too much about just how I was going to get it or when or anything like that.
I never heard anybody else who I thought was as good as Bud Powell, but every time I heard somebody good, I got this big urge to play the piano all over again. It would last for a couple of days, but I wouldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t get the piano right away.
I stayed downtown, and there were a lot of crazy things happening right there in the house. I remember once I had come in, and it was cold. It was a private house, and I had left the front door open but didn’t know it. I had a little kerosene stove to heat up my room. After I finished lighting the stove, I sat down on my bed and started to eat a sandwich, a kielbasy sandwich. This was something I had found out about when I moved. I used to eat a lot of those sandwiches.
I heard a voice in the hall. Somebody said, “Hey, come out here. Open that door and come out of there or I’ll shoot.”
I didn’t pay any attention to it. I thought it was one of the cats who lived in the house, just clowning. I said, “Yeah, well, go ahead and shoot.”
I heard something like Blam! The door flew open. Something hit the door, and I knew somebody had shot. I just froze; I was about to take a bite, then everything just stopped.
Then somebody said, “Are you comin’ out?”
I said, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! What you shootin’ for?
He said, “Come out of there with your hands up.”
I put my hands up and walked out. There was this dumb rookie cop standing out there with a gun in his hand and shining a flashlight. I was standing there trembling like a leaf in the wind. “Don’t shoot, man. What you gon shoot me for?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
By that time, the cat who owned the house, an artist named Pops, who lived downstairs, had turned on all the lights and was running upstairs. Since he was a white cat, the cop figured right away he owns the house.
He started searching me with the gun still in his hand. Pops jumped back. He probably figured that if the cop turned on him with the gun, he was going to shoot.
The cop said, “Hey, does this guy live here?”
Pops said, “Yeah, he lives here. What’s wrong? What’s he done?”
The cop said, “He went and opened the door.” This sounded stupid to all of us. I was still standing there shaking, because this guy was crazy. I felt he shouldn’t be running around loose with a gun and coming in people’s houses shooting just because they had opened a door. This was what had happened.
Afterward, he just went on downstairs. But this was only the beginning.
The next incident took place a few days later, maybe about a week later. It was early in the morning. Somebody had come in late at night and left the door open. I had gotten up about five o’clock in the morning and was going downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor to shave.
When I opened the bathroom door to go in, a flashlight beam hit the wall on one side of me. Then it moved over into my face. The voice behind it said, “Hold it right there.”
I said, “Yeah, what’s wrong?”
“Do you live here?”
“Yeah, I live here.”
“Is there a light around here anywhere? Turn on the light.”
“Yeah, there’s one right here.” I turned on the light.
Then I saw this cop. He was in his thirties. He was bent over. You could see that he was sloppy drunk; the guy was stinking. He smelled like wine, but I’d never seen anybody get that drunk off wine. He was bobbing and weaving; he had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other hand.
I had a safety razor down in my hand, and I was thinking, Oh, Lord. Here’s this nut. He’s just liable to fall. And he’s just liable to shoot me, the liquor’s just liable to shoot me.
He started squinting, as though he couldn’t see too well. He said, “Hey, what’s that in your hand?”
I was afraid to snatch it up too fast, because the guy might have gotten excited and started shooting. I said, “This is just a razor, you see.” My hand wouldn’t move. I wanted to raise it up and show it to him, but I was too scared to move.
“Do you live here?” Then he said, “No, you don’t live here because there’s a white couple who lives in this house.”
“Yeah, I rent a room from them.”
He said, “I’m gonna wake ’em up.” And he started shouting, “Hello, hello there!”
I got kind of scared. I was hoping that somebody would come out in a hurry. If he didn’t see anybody, I was afraid he might start shooting. After about six loud calls, this guy roused everybody in the house. They all came down. Pops came down and said he was going to write his councilman.
The cops down there were terrible, but we were living right near the Bowery, so we couldn’t expect but so much. They wouldn’t put any good cops down there—if there is such a thing as a good cop.
Sometimes I wanted to run back to Harlem, but I couldn’t find anything up there any more. I didn’t want to get high; I didn’t want to go around to the old places. I didn’t want to be with those people any more, because I didn’t feel I was a part of it.
Cats wouldn’t say certain things around me any more. The truth was that I didn’t want to hear a lot of these things, and I guess a lot of them sensed it. Cats would whisper when they were talking about drugs or about some other kind of business. Everybody started feeling as though I wasn’t a part of the Harlem scene any more. I started feeling like it too.
When I did go back up to Harlem after staying away for about three or four weeks, I met some young cats who were musicians. They’d been in the neighborhood a long time, and I’d seen them around, but we’d never said anything much to one another. I’d sold them some pot a few times, but we’d never really swung together.
Now these cats were blowing their horns, their axes, whatever they had. I remember that Flip was playing saxophone, and he was damn good. David was playing some nice drums. There were a lot of cats around there who were doing things.
I started talking to Flip one night. He asked me to come down to Connie’s on Seventh Avenue, and hear Sonny Rollins blow. I’d heard about Sonny Rollins, but I wasn’t any great jazz enthusiast.
I went there on
e night and sat and listened to these guys blow. Anybody could sit in. After a while, it became a regular thing for me to go to Connie’s and listen to these cats. I liked some of the stuff they were doing. This gave me a stronger urge to blow piano, or blow a box, as they used to say. It still was just something I wanted to do but didn’t know how to go about. I had to find another out, someplace else to go, something to do away from Harlem.
I was passing by a place on Broadway in mid-Manhattan one day. It was a gym where a lot of well-known personalities went. I didn’t know the difference. It just seemed to be a place where people went to lift barbells, and I thought this would be the thing for me.
I had just started seeing other parts of New York. When I took the job with the watch repair firm, I used to deliver watches to parts of New York City I didn’t even know existed, like Flatbush. I’d never been to Flatbush in my life before. I’d never known that there was such a pretty section in New York City. I used to go over there when it was spring and everything was in bloom. I liked being in a place where everything was so clean. It used to make me feel like me. I was lost, the colored folks were lost, because there were no Negroes in this nice clean section of town, nothing but Jewish people.
I wanted to see a lot more of New York. Sometimes on Sundays I’d go way up in the Heights just to see new sections of town.
This day when I was in mid-Manhattan and saw the sign about the gym, I went up to look at it, to see what it was all about. The fellow who owned the gym walked up to me. I had noticed that there were no colored cats in there. I felt a little out of place, but everybody who was working out at the time seemed to be all by himself. This encouraged me. It wasn’t as though it was one big happy family, all white cats, and I’d be the only colored cat there. The cat told me that it was fifteen dollars a month and that you could come up and train as often as you liked. I said, “Okay, I would like to try it.”
I started going every other night. I would knock off from work, go to the gym, and then go to school. I started feeling pretty good. Sometimes I’d be tired when I got off from work. Then I’d go up to the gym and work out for a little while, and I wasn’t tired any more. I’d go home and get a good night’s sleep. I’d be sleepy, but I never felt really tired.
After I was at the gym for a couple of months, I met a guy. He was a sort of funny-looking guy. I’d never paid any attention to him, but I think he’d been up there a couple of times before. He was about twenty-seven, twenty-eight. We were sitting in the locker room getting dressed. He spoke to me. I had a thing about speaking to those gray cats first. I wouldn’t, because I didn’t want my feelings hurt. I was made to feel pretty silly sometimes. You’d say hello and they’d look at you as if you were crazy, so I never spoke to them first. I just didn’t know how to approach them. I used to think that maybe my voice was too low-pitched for them. Most of these cats were nice clean gray boys, and I knew I was kind of crude, right off the streets of Harlem. I didn’t know how to talk to these cats. They were polished. I was pure Harlem.
Somebody had put a trombone under the bench that I was sitting on. This funny-looking gray cat—he wasn’t really funny looking; he just wore glasses and looked real serious—said, “Is that your trombone?”
I said, “No.”
“Somebody blows trombone in here?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Then I said, “I’d like to play piano myself.”
The cat said, “Well, why don’t you play piano? What’s stopping you?”
“Oh, man, I’m kind of old.”
He started telling me about somebody he knew who had started playing piano at the age of thirty-eight and had gotten quite good at it by the time he was forty-five.
“Yeah, well, he must have been a pretty determined fellow.”
“Yeah, he was. You could do it if you wanted to.”
“Yeah,” and I had the feeling that this guy wasn’t playing.
“If you want me to, I can give you the name of a guy who’ll rent you a piano and give you a good deal if you want to buy it.”
“Yeah, thanks a lot.”
“If you have any trouble finding a teacher, I can recommend some good teachers to you.” The guy was very serious, and I knew he wasn’t playing.
I said, “Yeah, I’d appreciate it.”
He wrote this down and gave it to me. Then he introduced himself to me, so I told him my name. His name was James Finley. He was a musician. He was also a composer who had written a couple of hit tunes. He’d written a couple of scores for Hollywood films, this sort of thing. He was a young man who had been out on his own for a long time, and he was doing a lot of things for himself. He believed in getting things done.
He showed me how to get a piano and a music teacher, a lot of things. He was a quack psychologist, apart from being a good musician. He was a Freudian. He introduced me to psychoanalysis, a lot of things, a whole new world. I was fascinated by the guy because he had accomplished so much while he was young. He had started at Juilliard when he was about fifteen.
The teacher he recommended was top-notch. When I was ready to change, he recommended other top-notch teachers. After a while, I’d just find my own. This was all right too. After I really got started in music, I didn’t need anybody to recommend them. I knew where I was going.
I became more engrossed in the piano than in anything else I’d ever been involved with in all my life. I was grateful to Jay, because he had started me. Before, it was just a talking thing. I might have talked and talked about it for years and never have gotten a piano and started taking music lessons.
When I started taking the music lessons, I was studying with white music teachers. After I’d been at it six months or a year, I’d go uptown and play with the cats. These guys didn’t have any formal teaching. They’d been around joints where the cats were jamming all the time, and they’d pick up a little bit here and a little bit there. They were getting good by just being around people who were always playing.
We would talk a lot. Many of the guys said that the reason Bird blew so well was that he stayed high, that it was drugs that made him blow so well; so if somebody wanted to really blow, he had to use drugs. A lot of them believed it. They would point out that just about all the good jazz musicians used drugs. Everybody had this big thing about colored cats and all the soul they had. They would say, “None-a them gray boys can blow any real jazz.”
I had trouble with rhythm. I just couldn’t seem to get into it with these cats; they were way ahead of me. They had all these eighth notes and sixteenth notes going, up-tempos. Every time I tried to speed up things or do something fancy, I’d get lost. These cats would be saying, “Sonny, you got to stay away from them gray boys and them gray teachers, because, like, they stealin’ your soul, man. You got to get you a colored teacher if you really gon learn how to blow some good jazz.”
I started looking around for a colored teacher, and I found one. I went to the Professor. The Professor wasn’t a professor, but he was a good music teacher, damn good. That’s why everybody called him the Professor. The first time I went to him, he made me feel that maybe there was some truth to all the stuff those cats were saying, because the first thing he said when I told him I was having trouble with rhythm was, “Boy, you havin’ trouble with rhythm ? You must not be as colored as you look, huh?”
I thought, Well, damn, this cat’s a real musician and knows something about it, so I guess there is something to that color thing in music. After I got this teacher, I figured I was all set to get into this soul thing.
I had started hanging out with a new group. I found a new groove in the Harlem thing. I was with the young jazz musicians now. I was still living down in the Village, but now I had a companion in my room with me. It was a piano, something that I had needed for a long time. I played the piano from four to eight hours a day, and I liked it. I really liked it. I felt that I was into something. Every time I learned a new tune, I would struggle and struggle with it, but I could see the progress. Fo
r the first time in ages, I felt as though I was really doing things, learning new things. I felt that now I was going places and doing something. I was ready. I had everything back in its right perspective. I had Harlem in its place. I had the job in its place. I had school and everything. I felt whole. I was ready to take on the Harlem scene again.
9
ONE NIGHT in the fall of 1956, I was walking down Lenox Avenue, and I saw somebody coming toward me. The face looked familiar, but the way he was walking … there was something about him that just didn’t resemble anybody I knew. As he got closer, he started smiling, and I recognized him. It was Billy Dobbs.
Billy walked up to me and said, “Peace, brother.”
I thought, Oh, shit, here’s another one of those cats on this Muslim Kick. I said, “Hey, man, how you doin’?”
He said, “Oh, I’m doin’ fine, Sonny. I’m doin’ better than I’ve ever been doin’ in my life.”
“That’s good, Billy. I’m glad to hear it.” I was all prepared for a sermon or a long spiel about the Muslim thing, Allah, and Elijah Muhammad, all that bullshit. I didn’t want to hear it. I had heard enough of that. It just didn’t get to me. Those cats were crazy, the way I saw it.
Billy started talking, and I was surprised. I had never thought that Billy could get into that thing. The last time I’d seen him, Billy was strung out. He had at least a forty-dollar-a-day habit. He was far away from any kind of religion then, unless it was drugism. Billy said he’d found a whole lot of peace.
“Yeah, man, everybody’s finding some peace.”
“Have you found any, Sonny?”
I said, “Yeah, man. I just had a nice piece last night, a fine bitch, man,” and I went on. I was doing this because I didn’t want to hear any of that nonsense about peace. I was just being nasty to avoid all that.