by Paula Guran
I stayed for all three sets, and after my seminar the next day, I went down to Sam Goody’s and bought five of Hat’s records, all I could afford. That night, I went back to the club and took a table right in front of the bandstand. For the next two weeks, I occupied the same table every night I could persuade myself that I did not have to study—eight or nine, out of the twelve nights Hat worked. Every night was like the first: the same things, in the same order, happened. Halfway through the first set, Hat turned up and collapsed into the nearest chair. Unobtrusively, a waiter put a drink beside him. Off went the pork pie and the long coat, and out from its case came the horn. The waiter carried the case, pork pie, and coat into a back room while Hat drifted toward the bandstand, often still fitting the pieces of his saxophone together. He stood straighter, seemed almost to grow taller, as he got on the stand. A nod to his audience, an inaudible word to John Hawes. And then that sense of passing over the border between very good, even excellent music and majestic, mysterious art. Between songs, Hat sipped from a glass placed beside his left foot. Three forty-five minute sets. Two half-hour breaks, during which Hat disappeared through a door behind the bandstand. The same twenty or so songs, recycled again and again. Ecstasy, as if I were hearing Mozart play Mozart.
One afternoon toward the end of the second week, I stood up from a library book I was trying to stuff whole into my brain—Modern Approaches to Milton—and walked out of my carrel to find whatever I could that had been written about Hat. I’d been hearing the sound of Hat’s tenor in my head ever since I’d gotten out of bed. And in those days, I was a sort of apprentice scholar: I thought that real answers in the form of interpretations could be found in the pages of scholarly journals. If there were at least a thousand, maybe two thousand, articles concerning John Milton in Low Library, shouldn’t there be at least a hundred about Hat? And out of the hundred shouldn’t a dozen or so at least begin to explain what happened to me when I heard him play? I was looking for close readings of his solos, for analyses that would explain Hat’s effects in terms of subdivided rhythms, alternate chords, and note choices, in the way that poetry critics parsed diction levels, inversions of meter, and permutations of imagery.
Of course I did not find a dozen articles that applied a musicological version of the New Criticism to Hat’s recorded solos. I found six old concert write-ups in the New York Times, maybe as many record reviews in jazz magazines, and a couple of chapters in jazz histories. Hat had been born in Mississippi, played in his family band, left after a mysterious disagreement at the time they were becoming a successful “territory” band, then joined a famous jazz band in its infancy and quit, again mysteriously, just after its breakthrough into nationwide success. After that, he went out on his own. It seemed that if you wanted to know about him, you had to go straight to the music: there was virtually nowhere else to go.
I wandered back from the catalogues to my carrel, closed the door on the outer world, and went back to stuffing Modern Approaches to Milton into my brain. Around six o’clock, I opened the carrel door and realized that I could write about Hat. Given the paucity of criticism of his work—given the virtual absence of information about the man himself—I virtually had to write something. The only drawback to this inspiration was that I knew nothing about music. I could not write the sort of article I had wished to read. What I could do, however, would be to interview the man. Potentially, an interview would be more valuable than analysis. I could fill in the dark places, answer the unanswered questions—why had he left both bands just as they began to do well? I wondered if he’d had problems with his father, and then transferred these problems to his next bandleader. There had to be some kind of story. Any band within smelling distance of its first success would be more than reluctant to lose its star soloist—wouldn’t they beg him, bribe him, to stay? I could think of other questions no one had ever asked: who had influenced him? What did he think of all those tenor players whom he had influenced? Was he friendly with any of his artistic children? Did they come to his house and talk about music?
Above all, I was curious about the texture of his life—I wondered what his life, the life of a genius, tasted like. If I could have put my half-formed fantasies into words, I would have described my naive, uninformed conceptions of Leonard Bernstein’s surroundings. Mentally, I equipped Hat with a big apartment, handsome furniture, advanced stereo equipment, a good but not flashy car, paintings . . . the surroundings of a famous American artist, at least by the standards of John Jay Hall and Evanston, Illinois. The difference between Bernstein and Hat was that the conductor probably lived on Fifth Avenue, and the tenor player in the Village.
I walked out of the library humming “Love Walked In.”
4
The dictionary-sized Manhattan telephone directory chained to the shelf beneath the pay telephone on the ground floor of John Jay Hall failed to provide Hat’s number. Moments later, I met similar failure back in the library after having consulted the equally impressive directories for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, as well as the much smaller volume for Staten Island. But of course Hat lived in New York: where else would he live? Like other celebrities, he avoided the unwelcome intrusions of strangers by going unlisted. I could not explain his absence from the city’s five telephone books in any other way. Of course Hat lived in the Village—that was what the Village was for.
Yet even then, remembering the unhealthy-looking man who each night entered the club to drop into the nearest chair, I experienced a wobble of doubt. Maybe the great man’s life was nothing like my imaginings. Hat wore decent clothes, but did not seem rich—he seemed to exist at the same oblique angle to worldly success that his nightly variations on “Too Marvelous For Words” bore to the original melody. For a moment, I pictured my genius in a slum apartment where roaches scuttled across a bare floor and water dripped from a rip in the ceiling. I had no idea of how jazz musicians actually lived. Hollywood, unafraid of cliche, surrounded them with squalor. On the rare moments when literature stooped to consider jazz people, it, too, served up an ambiance of broken bedsprings and peeling walls. And literature’s bohemians—Rimbaud, Jack London, Kerouac, Hart Crane, William Burroughs—had often inhabited mean, unhappy rooms. It was possible that the great man was not listed in the city’s directories because he could not afford a telephone.
This notion was unacceptable. There was another explanation—Hat could not live in a tenement room without a telephone. The man still possessed the elegance of his generation of jazz musicians, the generation that wore good suits and highly polished shoes, played in big bands, and lived on buses and in hotel rooms.
And there, I thought, was my answer. It was a comedown from the apartment in the Village with which I had supplied him, but a room in some “artistic” hotel like the Chelsea would suit him just as well, and probably cost a lot less in rent. Feeling inspired, I looked up the Chelsea’s number on the spot, dialed, and asked for Hat’s room. The clerk told me that he wasn’t registered in the hotel. “But you know who he is,” I said. “Sure,” said the clerk. “Guitar, right? I know he was in one of those San Francisco bands, but I can’t remember which one.”
I hung up without replying, realizing that the only way I was going to discover Hat’s telephone number, short of calling every hotel in New York, was by asking him for it.
5
This was on a Monday, and the jazz clubs were closed. On Tuesday, Professor Marcus told us to read all of Vanity Fair by Friday; on Wednesday, after I’d spent a nearly sleepless night with Thackeray, my seminar leader asked me to prepare a paper on James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” for the Friday class. Wednesday and Thursday nights I spent in the library. On Friday I listened to Professor Marcus being brilliant about Vanity Fair and read my laborious and dimwitted Joyce paper, on each of the five pages of which the word “epiphany” appeared at least twice, to my fellow-scholars. The seminar leader smiled and nodded throughout my performance and when I sat down metaphorically picked up my littl
e paper between thumb and forefinger and slit its throat. “Some of you students are so certain about things,” he said. The rest of his remarks disappeared into a vast, horrifying sense of shame. I returned to my room, intending to lie down for an hour or two, and woke up ravenous ten hours later, when even the West End bar, even the local Chock Full O’ Nuts, were shut for the night.
On Saturday night, I took my usual table in front of the bandstand and sat expectantly through the piano trio’s usual three numbers. In the middle of “Love Walked In” I looked around with an insider’s foreknowledge to enjoy Hat’s dramatic entrance, but he did not appear, and the number ended without him. John Hawes and the other two musicians seemed untroubled by this break in the routine, and went on to play “Too Marvelous For Words” without their leader. During the next three songs, I kept turning around to look for Hat, but the set ended without him. Hawes announced a short break, and the musicians stood up and moved toward the bar. I fidgeted at my table, nursing my second beer of the night and anxiously checking the door. The minutes trudged by. I feared he would never show up. He had passed out in his room. He’d been hit by a cab, he’d had a stroke, he was already lying dead in a hospital room—just when I was going to write the article that would finally do him justice!
Half an hour later, still without their leader, John Hawes and other sidemen went back on the stand. No one but me seemed to have noticed that Hat was not present. The other customers talked and smoked—this was in the days when people still smoked—and gave the music the intermittent and sometimes ostentatious attention they allowed it even when Hat was on the stand. By now, Hat was an hour and a half late, and I could see the gangsterish man behind the bar, the owner of the club, scowling as he checked his wristwatch. Hawes played two originals I particularly liked, favorites of mine from his Contemporary records, but in my mingled anxiety and irritation I scarcely heard them.
Toward the end of the second of these songs, Hat entered the club and fell into his customary seat a little more heavily than usual. The owner motioned away the waiter, who had begun moving toward him with the customary shot glass. Hat dropped the porkpie on the table and struggled with his coat buttons. When he heard what Hawes was playing, he sat listening with his hands still on a coat button, and I listened, too—the music had a tighter, harder, more modern feel, like Hawes’ records. Hat nodded to himself, got his coat off, and struggled with the snaps on his saxophone case. The audience gave Hawes unusually appreciative applause. It took Hat longer than usual to fit the horn together, and by the time he was up on his feet, Hawes and the other two musicians had turned around to watch his progress as if they feared he would not make it all the way to the bandstand. Hat wound through the tables with his head tilted back, smiling to himself. When he got close to the stand, I saw that he was walking on his toes like a small child. The owner crossed his arms over his chest and glared. Hat seemed almost to float onto the stand. He licked his reed. Then he lowered his horn and, with his mouth open, stared out at us for a moment. “Ladies, ladies,” he said in a soft, high voice. These were the first words I had ever heard him speak. “Thank you for your appreciation of our pianist, Mr. Hawes. And now I must explain my absence during the first set. My son passed away this afternoon, and I have been . . . busy . . . with details. Thank you.”
With that, he spoke a single word to Hawes, put his horn back in his mouth, and began to play a blues called “Hat Jumped Up,” one of his twenty songs. The audience sat motionless with shock. Hawes, the bassist, and the drummer played on as if nothing unusual had happened—they must have known about his son, I thought. Or maybe they knew that he had no son, and had invented a grotesque excuse for turning up ninety minutes late. The club owner bit his lower lip and looked unusually introspective. Hat played one familiar, uncomplicated figure after another, his tone rough, almost coarse. At the end of his solo, he repeated one note for an entire chorus, fingering the key while staring out toward the back of the club, Maybe he was watching the customers leave—three couples and a couple of single people walked out while he was playing. But I don’t think he saw anything at all. When the song was over, Hat leaned over to whisper to Hawes, and the piano player announced a short break. The second set was over.
Hat put his tenor on top of the piano and stepped down off the bandstand, pursing his mouth with concentration. The owner had come out from behind the bar and moved up in front of him as Hat tip-toed around the stand. The owner spoke a few quiet words. Hat answered. From behind, he looked slumped and tired, and his hair curled far over the back of his collar. Whatever he had said only partially satisfied the owner, who spoke again before leaving him. Hat stood in place for a moment, perhaps not noticing that the owner had gone, and resumed his tip-toe glide toward the door. Looking at his back, I think I took in for the first time how genuinely strange he was. Floating through the door in his gray flannel suit, hair dangling in ringlet-like strands past his collar, leaving in the air behind him the announcement about a dead son, he seemed absolutely separate from the rest of humankind, a species of one.
I turned as if for guidance to the musicians at the bar. Talking, smiling, greeting a few fans and friends, they behaved just as they did on every other night. Could Hat really have lost a son earlier today? Maybe this was the jazz way of facing grief—to come back to work, to carry on. Still it seemed the worst of all times to approach Hat with my offer. His playing was a drunken parody of itself. He would forget anything he said to me; I was wasting MY time.
On that thought, I stood up and walked past the bandstand and opened the door—if I was wasting my time, it didn’t matter what I did.
He was leaning against a brick wall about ten feet up the alleyway from the club’s back door. The door clicked shut behind me, but Hat did not open his eyes. His face tilted up, and a sweetness that might have been sleep lay over his features. He looked exhausted and insubstantial, too frail to move. I would have gone back inside the club if he had not produced a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, lit it with a match, and then flicked the match away, all without opening his eyes. At least he was awake. I stepped toward him, and his eyes opened. He glanced at me and blew out white smoke. “Taste?” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. “Can I talk to you for a minute, sir?” I asked.
He put his hand into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a half-pint bottle. “Have a taste.” Hat broke the seal on the cap, tilted it into his mouth, and drank. Then he held the bottle out toward me.
I took it. “I’ve been coming here as often as I can.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Go on, do it.”
I took a sip from the bottle—gin. “I’m sorry about your son.”
“Son?” He looked upward, as if trying to work out my meaning. “I got a son—out on Long Island. With his momma.” He drank again and checked the level of the bottle.
“He’s not dead, then.”
He spoke the next words slowly, almost wonderingly. “Nobody-told-me-if-he-is.” He shook his head and drank another mouthful of gin. “Damn. Wouldn’t that be something, boy dies and nobody tells me? I’d have to think about that, you know, have to really think about that one.”
“I’m just talking about what you said on stage.”
He cocked his head and seemed to examine an empty place in the dark air about three feet from his face. “Uh huh. That’s right. I did say that. Son of mine passed.”
It was like dealing with a sphinx. All I could do was plunge in. “Well, sir, actually there’s a reason I came out here,” I said. “I’d like to interview you. Do you think that might be possible? You’re a great artist, and there’s very little about you in print. Do you think we could set up a time when I could talk to you?”
He looked at me with his bleary, colorless eyes, and I wondered if he could see me at all. And then I felt that, despite his drunkenness, he saw everything—that he saw things about me that I couldn’t see.
“You a jazz writer?” he asked.
“No, I’m a graduate student. I’d just like to do it. I think it would be important.”
“Important.” He took another swallow from the half pint and slid the bottle back into his pocket. “Be nice, doing an important interview.”
He stood leaning against the wall, moving further into outer space with every word. Only because I had started, I pressed on: I was already losing faith in this project. The reason Hat had never been interviewed was that ordinary American English was a foreign language to him. “Could we do the interview after you finish up at this club? I could meet you anywhere you like.” Even as I said these words, I despaired. Hat was in no shape to know what he had to do after this engagement finished. I was surprised he could make it back to Long Island every night.
Hat rubbed his face, sighed, and restored my faith in him. “It’ll have to wait a little while. Night after I finish here, I go to Toronto for two nights. Then I got something in Hartford on the thirtieth. You come see me after that.”
“On the thirty-first?” I asked.
“Around nine, ten, something like that. Be nice if you brought some refreshments.”
“Fine, great,” I said, wondering if I would be able to take a late train back from wherever he lived. “But where on Long Island should I go?”
His eyes widened in mock-horror. “Don’t go nowhere on Long Island. You come see me. In the Albert Hotel, Forty-Ninth and Eighth. Room 821.”
I smiled at him—I had guessed right about one thing, anyhow.
Hat did not live in the Village, but he did live in a Manhattan hotel. I asked him for his phone number, and wrote it down, along with the other information, on a napkin from the club. After I folded the napkin into my jacket pocket, I thanked him and turned toward the door.
“Important as a motherfucker,” he said in his high, soft, slurry voice.