Mona stepped forward and they stood before the painting. He put an arm around her shoulders.
I never imagined a snake coming at the guy before, Latif said.
I wondered about that. I figured if you're blowing demons out your horn, you're the first person they see. They might come for you.
Latif lay on the couch. He didn't feel like crying anymore, for Mona or himself. That's true, he agreed. They might.
COOKING LESSONS | COMP | VAN HORN'S
Albert's living room was where the sessions happened. There was a Steinway baby grand piano and a full wall bookshelf, ten feet high and all biography. Van Horn read other people's lives. Nero, William Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thomas Jefferson, Cleopatra, Desiderius Erasmus, Shaka Zulu, Moses Wellfleet Walker, Confucius: an anachronistic dinner party of history's largest personalities. Pots of food rested over low flames in the kitchen, next to a stack of plastic plates. Marisol woke up early on Sundays and went to her niece's house; Van Horn woke up early to cook downhome recipes reconfigured by the exotic touches of a worldwide palate. Cats grabbed helpings of red beans and a curried rice, mustard greens with pickled lotus root, beef stew over mashed cassava, whenever they got hungry.
The smells drifted into the living room and seasoned the music, but the kitchen was where Albert did his talking. He hung back and didn't play much at these sessions, didn't say much either. What he did say was often couched in culinary wisdom. Ask him about cooking, Sonny had advised. And when Latif rang the doorbell at one, exactly on time, Albert steered him right into the kitchen. Latif was dismayed to find the living room already lively with musicians. He'd expected serenity, somehow: for Albert's front door to open onto a Buddhist rock garden replete with slow trickling fountains, for Albert to bless him and hand him a prayer shawl Let the initiation rituals begin. Instead, empty plates covered the coffeetable and cats sat smoking and chatting, their legs crossed at rakish angles. On time, apparently, was late. Latif exchanged nods and how you doin, bruh with the cats he passed as Van Horn ushered him through the living room and fixed him a plate.
As a species, Albert said, talking as he moved from pot to pot we barely know a tenth of a percentage about anything. We can barely travel, we don't know bullhockey about medicine or science, and our communication skills are somewhere just past rudimentary. The only thing we've really mastered on this planet, snatching the lid off a soup tureen with a magician's flair and lowering his nose into the aromatic steam that streamed forth, filling the kitchen is eating. He shot Latif an infectious smile and spooned basmati rice onto the plate.
The key to cooking, Van Horn confided as he ladled turkey chili over the rice, looking like somebody's hip grandfather in a white terrycloth suit and beige house shoes is knowing what flavors complement each other. Cats try to get fancy and throw in every spice in the cupboard, and the taste just gets muddled. What you've got to do is bring out the flavor that's already there. Like putting lemon on fish. Collard greens?
Latif nodded. There was a warmth to Van Horn's home. It radiated from him and melted the jittery, competitive energy of the other musicians. Latif had expected to be nervous, but what he felt instead was mostly hollow, drained but not purged by yesterday's sadness. He'd left Mona's with the painting wrapped in brown paper, gone home and sat in his room feeling so fragile that nearly anything—a poor irretrievable spoon lost behind the sink, a lone shirt swaying arms-up on a neighbor's clothesline—seemed suddenly eloquent with horror and tore into his heart. Picking up his horn had been out of the question; so was looking at the painting. He'd backed away from that dangerous ledge now, and Latif had no idea where the distance would place him when it was his turn to play; the feeling might return to paralyze him or remain absent and leave him numb.
Albert handed him a heaping plate and said they'd be starting in a few minutes but not to rush: eat, listen, relax. The brothers would be here for hours. Latif wolfed down his food, watching the others tuning and cleaning and tightening their instruments. It was delicious, and Latif had to fight back his dismay at this delight, at the unattainable honesty which burst forth even from Albert's cooking.
There were only three horn players there besides Van Horn: Latif, another tenor, and an alto doubling on flute. He checked the others out as each found his own corner like a boxer and warmed up, and was relieved to realize that he was the youngest of the reedmen; only the bass player and pianist looked younger than midtwenties. Manhattan School cats, probably, those two; Albert taught occasional master classes there and these kids had that smug bohemian proud-to-be-in-New York student look. Mismatched artifacts of hipness dangled from their lanky frames: porkpie hats, Malcolm X glasses, dashikis. Latif looked down at his own attire: a cream-colored V-neck sweater, sleeves pushed to his elbows, and pressed Italian slacks from Sonny's homeboy's warehouse. At least he looked the part. Last of the well-dressed jazzmen.
Latif stepped up there with the rest of the musicians and the benchwarmer rhythm section cats relaxed to peep game and the drummer counted off the tune and dug in. He was skinny and his playing thin and effete, and Latif clenched his jaw at what the kid was missing, prepared himself to quarterback with insufficient blocking. He looked around, but there was no dissatisfaction to be gleaned from other faces and so Latif forced himself to listen harder, to find what he'd missed. It wasn't that the cat couldn't play, just that his style was so different from what Latif wanted to hear that he had to force himself to recognize the ideas behind it. He wondered why Albert had invited this brother; his sound was as far from Murray Higgins' massive cannonblast drumming as could be. Maybe Albert's neighbors were complainers, Latif thought with a smile.
He carried the smile into his solo, fluttering his sound in laughter as the other tenor player stepped back and away to give him room. He could still taste the beef stew in his mouth, and Latif felt it knotting in his throat as he batted about the first sounds kittenlike. Playfulness soon dissolved and the chuckle metamorphosized into a different kind of laugh. It was absurd, sinister, despairing, the laugh that erupts from a man as he stands watching his house burn, and Latif didn't control it, didn't know where it was taking him. He grappled for command, able to distinguish this not knowing from the kind which was inspired, which swept you up in exploration and pursuit, the kind to which any intuitive musician bowed immediately.
This not knowing threatened hysteria, and Latif hot-potato juggled the note of sadness he had found and listened to it, tried to match it to the surging feelings he had had in Central Park and in his room, and realized it was lacking, a pale weak sliver, nothing like real life. There was no gravity, no dignity, no nuance to it, only a mounting compensatory aggression. Without wanting to, Latif grew loud, insensible, and nihilistic; the phrases moaning from his horn were infants pushed prematurely from the belly, unready to meet the world. Latif sounded to himself like the worst of what he heard booming from hip hop car systems, anger and bass distorted into frenzied rants that drowned out their own meaning. He squeezed his eyes shut and blew harder, overblew, trying to get to something raw, something he knew was there somewhere, but he was miles away from it and panicking, and he gave up—receded into short low sobbing tone bursts, knowing they sounded hip, and backed out of the solo hot and shamefaced as soon as he could.
He looked around, expecting to see shock on the faces of the others, but there was only standard bandstand body language, nods and small hipswaying, and his frustration grew. Latif wanted his failure acknowledged, gaped at, wanted it to stop the show. But these cats had no idea what a rough and twisted insignificant approximation of life had just blurted from his horn; to them it was probably just another forgettable and mercifully short solo.
The question it raised slapped Latif senseless: what the hell was he doing here with this unsightly metalwork contraption bulging in his hands? Being a musician? He wanted to throw it to the ground and stomp it, fall on his instrument like a grenade and beat it with his fists until he bled. And
in the home of his idol, as he stood and tapped his foot to the pianist's nonswinging collage of better musicians' ideas, and then to another tenor solo as uninspired as his own, Latif realized that being a musician wasn't shit. You had to be a musician and a father, a musician and a rooftop cop sniper, a musician and something. He twitched himself free of the thought, chased it away, but for the rest of the afternoon his horn felt foreign in his hands and bitter in his mouth, like an old lover he had forgotten how to kiss.
HEADCUTTING | ROAD SONGS |
REMEMBER THAT
You sounded like what you were, that's all, said Albert, crossing his legs at the knee and smoothing the slategray of his slacks. Somebody who's been pushed up on an unfamiliar bandstand with a bunch of strangers, everybody too preoccupied to listen. He and Latif sat at his kitchen table with ceramic mugs in hand, sipping Vanilla Almond tea at ten o'clock next Sunday morning as pots percolated on the stove. The crumbs of cranberry muffins Latif had brought speckled the small glass plates in front of them. Every now and then Van Horn would rise and lift a lid, peer at a broth or give something a stir, tap a bit of sage into his cupped palm and then brush half of that into a pot.
It's a shame money and fashion killed the big band, because a three-month tour of duty would be the perfect remedy for you—melt away that what-is-music handwringing with a sturdy shot of life experience. I'm talking about spending every hour next to some of the killingest musicians in the world, not to mention some of the smartest and sweetest cats you'd ever want to know. I used to just sit and listen, which is often better than sitting and asking questions, to whatever any two bodies in that band might be jawing about.
I'll tell you, Albert said, raising his eyebrows earnestly, those old Asian philosophers and architects who envisioned and designed the special meditative sanctums and classrooms, the places designed for tranquil thought and serious discussion, they understood something. And a tour bus humming peacefully through the countryside at dusk or even four A.M. has been my American equivalent.
Albert paused. You've got a touch of that tourbus mentality, he said, tapping Latif on the wrist and refilling their mugs from the teapot in the center of the table, forearm tendons rippling mighty even with the slight effort of lifting and pouring, the way you thought to come here and talk life not music. Most young cats want to pick my brain about playing, which ain but so useful because I can't explain it any better than Joe Saxophone might do it for me. It all breaks down to dots and lines, or whimsy and hallucinations. You can kill it with too much intellect or too much romance.
My girl is always telling me I'm too much in my head, Latif said.
Van Horn smiled. The mouth is halfway between the brain and the heart. The trick is to use one to find the other.
Latif looked at him quizzically and Albert leaned forward, elbows on the table, unsurprised the youngster didn't understand. It's like this: Just from the way you carry yourself, I can tell you have a strong sense of justice, of the way things ought to be. Right? Latif nodded. That's a headsmarts thing. So is anger. You can get to sadness from there; maybe you're starting to. Maybe that's why you haven't played all week.
Part of Latif felt he should sit and contemplate Albert's words before plowing on. But he didn't have forever with Van Horn. How did you do it? he pressed.
Well, I sidestepped that particular crisis with the simple gambit of not being nearly so smart as you. Latif smiled impatiently at the obvious untruth, but Albert was serious.
I came from a religious family, he elaborated. Grew up looking at music as my testimonial, my joy rather than High Art. The only time I ever felt comfortable, expressive, was when I was playing. By the time I got heady about it, I was much older than you and the healing power of music had already become very clear to me.
I didn't know you came up in the church, Latif said. He'd watched Albert brush away the esoteric questions of young musicians after shows, queries about some forgotten solo or the dynamics of a twenty-year-old recording date, by smiling, You got to remember, music is all about love, getting a laugh and leaving it at that. But Latif had never associated the spirituality of Albert's music with any particular religion.
In it but not of it, Van Horn said, standing and flicking the front burner from low to warm. He glanced over at Latif. Is your family musical? he asked.
My mother sings in church, and she got me started on horn lessons. But not really.
Van Horn nodded. It always astounds me how many of the cats I've met throughout the years come from musical families, with a mother who teaches piano back wherever they're from or a father who played cornet in marching bands or blues guitar in pickup combos and so forth. Not to mention enough siblings and uncles and cousins all on different instruments to make any family gathering an all-out jamboree. I've always envied that, because I grew up having to practice on the sly, if you can imagine such a thing. My father was a minister, the Reverend Telford H. Van Horn, and he soon cursed the day he bought me my first instrument, a schoolboy clarinet.
Uh-oh, said Latif, leaning back into his chair as Albert's voice went storyteller. He had a style of speech so natural and easy that listening was effortless and yet you felt as much a part of the story as he was. It wasn't that The Rev disapproved of music as such, Van Horn explained. Quite the contrary, his congregation sang as loud and long as any in the city, and he even encouraged me to practice for the first few years. It was when I started getting serious about playing, around the age of fourteen, that he and I began to clash, and it was not so much an issue of music as of spirituality.
Now, I make no distinction whatsoever between the two, and that was precisely the problem. To me the act of making music is a tribute, an approach to God. Even an attempt to follow in those footsteps by creating something. And it's a collaborative effort; I feel the hands of something greater on me when I'm playing at my best, and that's the way musicians the world over feel about their craft, Hindus to Jews. Teef nodded slow, a wordless amen corner.
It's a damn lucky thing I wasn't yet thinking along those kinds of lines when I lived beneath my father's roof, however. We had plenty to argue about just within my contestation that music was the form which my relationship with The Divine was meant to take, without me mounting what he would have no doubt perceived as a challenge to the fundamental sanctity of Christianity Itself on top.
The upshot of it all was that The Rev forbid me to play what by then was no longer a clarinet but a tenor sax, saying that I would not blow another note until I learned to put things in their proper perspective and understand that the Good Lord had put me on this earth to do His Work and that His House was the Church and not the concert hall or nightclub, that He had taught us how to worship Him and it was not with any fool saxophone but through Good Works and Prayer and adherence to the Word of Holy Scripture, and didn't I know what would happen to my Soul should I ignore the Teachings of the Lord and not Repent my Earthly Sins?
I know, I said, but what I thought was, I know that you can't show a different page to a man whose book is closed. And I set about earning the money to buy myself a horn. I scraped together enough to put a payment on a tenor, and I went down to Ms. Jacqueline McKinney's Music Shop with my friend and high school bandleader, Mr. Terrence Taylor, and he explained to her that I was a talented and trustworthy schoolboy for whose character he would gladly vouch, and she looked me over hard and finally agreed to let me hold the tenor while I made my weekly payments.
I had to be very careful never to let The Rev see my new horn. He had the old one locked away somewhere, right next to my old slingshot no doubt, and as far as he was concerned the matter had been dealt with and was closed. I never mentioned music again and he assumed I had forgotten all about it—something I'm sure he did only against his better knowing, for even a fool knows that such things are not so easily forgotten, and my father is no fool. But I let him go on thinking it had only been a phase and practiced before and after school and often during, having arranged with Mr. Tayl
or to store my instrument in a locked closet in his room, to which he kindly gave me a copy of the key.
To The Rev I was suddenly and for the first time No Trouble At All: careful, quiet, and an obedient churchgoer. Really, I was a million miles away from him at all times; I'd learned the trick of going through the necessary motions without having to think of anything I didn't want to. I absented my mind from my physical circumstances, as I've since read that torture victims also learn to do, and sent it hurtling toward whatever music I was working on or working out. The Rev never guessed how far he had pushed me from both himself and his religion by positioning them in opposition to my need to play. It was years before I was even able to think his God and mine could be the same.
How did you get out to play? Latif asked.
That was trickier, smiled Albert, a sneaky kid's grin covering his face. For a moment Latif could see him back then, peachfuzzed and a little pudgy, dodging his pops like any kid with a forbidden hobby. I had to finish my homework before I could go out after supper, and I was subject to a ten-thirty curfew even then, so what I did was catch part of the first set, go home, and sneak back out around midnight to hear the closing number and find out where the jam session would be. On Fridays I was allowed to sleep at a friend's house, and I usually got someone to cover for me and stayed out listening all night. A few of the local musicians knew my father, and I had to beg them not to tell him that they'd seen me, which they were happy to do once I explained my situation. Most of them came from musical families, as I've said, and thus they saw me as an orphan and adopted me.
Winston Rodney, Albert said fondly, aiming a closed-lipped smile at the ceiling and tapping his hand against his knee. Bass player and an old high school buddy of my dad's. He's the one who not only began taking me with him to afterhours jam sessions, but also found it in his heart to drive me home at four or five A.M., talking all the way cross town about the finer points of what we'd heard or he'd played and leaving me with the admonition to hurry up and catch some Zs before you got to get back up and go to school, cuz you know if you don't bring home A's your daddy gonna whip your butt.
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