Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  ‘Anybody in this town but you and me and the painter?’ Rick asked. The sun was warm and the air was salty and everything was fine, but what becomes of a dance band if nobody comes to dance?

  The man behind the counter said maybe not this week, but come back next week if he wanted to see a mob. All a matter of school getting out. One week nobody and the next week college kids till hell wouldn’t have them. He talked man to man with Rick without making the mistake of assuming that he might be a college boy himself. You wouldn’t have made that mistake about Rick at twenty. He dressed like a college boy, his hands were clean, and there was nothing much wrong with the way he talked, but there was something in his face that marked him as no college boy. It was the tight, nervous face of a man who knows something, the kind of face that goes with passion of whatever sort. You see it in revolutionaries, maniacs, artists—in anyone who knows he will love one thing, for good or ill, until he dies.

  ‘They’re fixing up the dance floor in there now,’ the man behind the counter said. ‘Last summer, or I guess it must have started summer before last, the college crowd started to come down here, and it boomed the town, in one way. Some big real-estate man from Los bought this place. He’s changing the name and making the hall bigger, and I understand he’s getting a different orchestra, fixing up for a heavy season.’

  Rick had finished his drink and was blowing ice neatly out of his mouth and making it bounce into the gutter across the sidewalk. He was so full of the good feeling of leisure that comes just before an auspicious starting to work that he didn’t even ask the man about a place to live. He just sat there and blew pieces of ice out of his mouth and watched them bounce, and didn’t care whether he walked up the street to the beach or down the street to the bay, or stayed where he was. And before he got around to deciding, four men, one of them Jack Stuart, turned the corner, and the leisure was gone.

  Jack Stuart had an extra-curricular collegiate look to him, no doubt about that; he was wearing white linen knickers—plus sixes or possibly plus eights—and a white shirt open at the neck, and, pinned to the front of it, an outsize fraternity pin with more pearls than you’d care to count. He had black curly hair and a genial, man-of-the-world manner. He stuck out his hand to Rick, gave him a handclasp so firm that it hurt, and said, ‘Glad to see you, fella; meet some of the rest of the crowd.’ Rick met them, and at the end he knew precisely which was which: in the order of their presentation they were drums, saxophone, and trombone.

  ‘Have you got it with you?’ Stuart said at the end of all the handclasping, and Rick said, ‘Yes,’ and pointed to his trumpet case on the stool beside him. ‘When do we start?’

  Stuart laughed and said: ‘Take it easy. We don’t start until Saturday night. Let’s go in and look things over.’

  The five of them walked up the steep incline to the double doors and went inside. It was a very long and narrow hall, and at the far end there were three men down on their hands and knees sanding and scraping the floor. There was a grand piano on the stand and a lot of chairs. Jack Stuart said, ‘It looks as if they’ve already got this front part waxed.’ He took a short run and slid twenty feet or so down the floor. Rick jumped up on the stand, put his trumpet case on the piano bench, and started setting chairs together the way they should go, in threes: reed section, brass section, rhythm section, and the extras one on top of another in a corner. Sliding on a floor wasn’t his line. He pushed the trumpet case over, sat down on the bench, and began to hit chords to see how the piano was, and after that it wasn’t long until he was playing, and not much longer until he was playing the hard way, really trying things. It brought the collegians right up to him, hanging on the piano, looking the new man over. He was supposed to be a trumpet player.

  When Rick stopped playing, Jack said, ‘You certainly play whorehouse piano, fella, and nigger whorehouse at that,’ leaving it up in the air whether or not he meant it to be a compliment. And when Rick blushed in the unmistakable way he did, Jack laughed loud and long and said he guessed he’d sized things up better than he thought, by the color of Martin’s face. He pushed in beside Rick on the bench, saying, ‘Forgive me, brother; let’s play four hands.’ Rick had the bass end; he gave out some chords in A flat and Jack played ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.’

  He didn’t have Rick’s ability to strike into the deep levels of a piano’s subconscious, but he was all right. He played about the way most American boys do when they have behind them a natural feeling for music and on top of that a history of an hour-a-day’s practice firmly supervised by some disciplinarian in the family. It usually happens with this kind of boy that at the age of sixteen when he’s interested in dancing and popular music and general social accomplishment he suddenly finds out that he can play, that the years of practicing an hour a day have brought him to the place where he can read sheet music or even work up popular tunes by ear. So he gets a revival of interest in playing the piano, and sometimes he keeps it up and, like Jack Stuart, makes a business of it. Jack was, you could tell from one chorus of ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,’ a competent pianist.

  Rick moved off the bench, set his trumpet on a chair, and let Jack take over the whole piano. And while Jack played, Rick looked the trombone man over with speculative eye, trying to find some outward indication of what he might be worth. He seemed not so slick as the other three; he missed being a fat boy by about twelve pounds, and he had a round, candid face that might indicate stupidity or earnestness or some of each. He was standing a little bit away from the piano, so Rick went up to him and began his ground-clearing. No harm in finding out what the brass in this band was going to amount to.

  ‘Who do you think is the best trombone player in the country?’ Rick asked him, straight out, like a kid saying to another one, ‘Where’s your old man work?’

  It was as good a way as another to approach this boy. He thought a moment and said, ‘Playing now? I think Jack Teagarden.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Rick solemnly. It was one of the right answers, but it didn’t reveal a prying mind. It left him feeling that the thing had been resolved too easily—as if you asked someone who’s his favorite writer. ‘Living now?’ he asks. ‘No,’ you say, ‘any time.’ And quick as a flash he gives his answer: Shakespeare. It’s an answer you couldn’t quarrel with, but it might have seemed more satisfactory, since he had at his disposal all the writers of all time, if he’d spent more time looking the ground over. If he’d said, for instance, that La Fontaine, across the channel, or Racine weren’t to be overlooked, or that there’s something to be said for Milton, and then had gone ahead and chosen Shakespeare, it would have meant more.

  ‘Have you heard this boy Snowden that plays trombone for Jeff Williams?’ Rick asked him.

  ‘Oh,’ the boy said, ‘niggers. I was thinking about white bands. Niggers are in a class by themselves.’

  Now they were getting somewhere. Rick looked at the boy and said: ‘That’s a funny thing. You’d think any white man could learn to play as well as a negro.’ He paused and thought it over, and then went on in a voice of a peculiarly different quality: ‘Well, I think a white man could do it, all right, if he’d only try hard enough to. But these negroes don’t even seem to have to try; they’re just born that way. You say you’d heard this boy Snowden?’

  ‘Just records,’ the boy said. ‘You hear a lot about Williams’s band, but they never seem to be playing anywhere where you can hear them.’

  ‘They’ve been mostly in Chicago and New York the last three years,’ Rick said, ‘but I’ve got every record they ever made. First one was “Dead Man Blues” with one of Williams’s own pieces, “Black Scramble,” on the other side. Didn’t you ever notice Snowden’s chorus on “Black Scramble”?’

  ‘I can’t say I have,’ the boy said; ‘it must have been a pretty long time ago.’

  ‘If you’d ever heard it, you’d know,’ Rick said. ‘It’s the—oh, I don’t know, it’s not like anything you ever heard tell of. It doesn’t ev
en sound like a trombone much, the way Snowden plays that chorus. The way he plays it, it sounds more like a trumpet, everything sharp and not gliding. He doesn’t play a valve trombone either, just a regular slip-horn. You don’t see how he does it.’

  ‘What are you fellas saying about me?’ Jack said, looking up from the piano keys, very well pleased with things.

  ‘Nothing. This guy,’ the trombonist said, pointing a thumb at Rick, ‘says he’s got every record Jeff Williams’s band ever made.’

  ‘That so?’ Jack said. He stopped playing. ‘Why didn’t you bring them along?’

  ‘I did,’ Rick said. ‘They’re right here in my suitcase, all fourteen. I’ve got them here but I haven’t got a phonograph. You can usually find a phonograph, though.’

  ‘Bob Jones the second trumpet’s got a portable with him. Up at the house. We’ve been taking it down to the beach in the afternoons.’

  ‘I don’t want to bust any of these records,’ Rick said. ‘A lot of them you can’t get hold of any more since Williams got popular.’

  He spoke in the tone of a connoisseur, a trusted keeper of the seal, and the collegians seemed disinclined to take exception to his stand.

  ‘You must think Williams is pretty good,’ was all that Stuart said.

  ‘Yes,’ Rick said, ‘I think he’s the best.’

  They took that, too, from him. Something about the way he said it gave it an edge, made it incontrovertible, and more than that, convincing.

  They stood around the piano, quiet, all of them looking at Rick, and finally Jack Stuart got up from the piano and said, ‘Let’s go; I’d like to finish my tan this week without burning all the hide off of me.’

  ‘Get some of that E.Z. Tan dope,’ the drummer said. ‘I got a peachie tan last summer with that.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Jack said. ‘I’m the kind of a man that can’t stand any greasy stuff on me. The only way to get a tan is to go out about an hour a day the first week and keep zinc ointment on your nose.’

  The first week went that way. They had a house together on the bay front, five bedrooms for the ten of them and a living-room, dining-room, and sun porch. They took their meals at the restaurant across from the Rendez-Vous and used their own kitchen as a workshop in which they worked all possible combinations of bootleg gin and mixers, orange juice, lemon juice, grapefruit juice, grape juice, ginger ale, lime rickey, coca cola, and on one occasion root beer.

  They got up late, all the way from eleven until one; they lay around on the beach all afternoon, interpolating periods of athleticism when they put on shoes and kicked a football up and down the beach, or played Sink the Ship, or rode breakers. All ten of them got fierce sunburns. Rick’s was so bad that he was delirious all one night and got blisters that he could roll very carefully from his elbows to his shoulders just by raising and lowering his arms. Very bad blisters. It was a rotten start. It was impossible to get all ten of them in a mood to rehearse at the same time. If the leader had been tougher, he might have kept them in some kind of order and got them down to work, but Jack Stuart was first of all a collegian, and with him the going was always easy. And that first week was more like a fraternity house-party, stag and unfettered, than anything else.

  The round-faced trombonist, Eddie Phelps, shared a room with Rick. He was more tractable and less volatile than the others, and Rick fed him Snowden choruses, one after the other, until he built up his taste for them. It was Phelps’s first good job, and he meant business; he was willing to be taught anything, and Rick was willing to do the teaching. The two of them left the beach and went back to the house every day at about three and tried things out, sitting in the sun porch in their bathing suits. When the rest of the crowd came in around six, there they’d be, glistening with sunburn salve, sitting on the edges of a couple of wicker chairs and blowing out good brass duets one after another. It put the rest of them in a mood to play, as a rule, and all ten of them would play around for a half hour or so, fighting for solos and finally breaking off one by one to go mix a drink and get dressed for dinner.

  Two nights before the opening they had a systematic rehearsal at the Rendez-Vous. They took the instruments, lights, and stands and a gallon of gin down to the hall before dinner and left them there all ready to go. They were all serious and intent during dinner, and when they went back to the hall and began tuning and shoving chairs around, there had developed a real excitement, something like the spirit that gets into a football squad after the first string has been picked and they’re in the gymnasium ready and waiting for a pep talk from the coach before serious practice begins. It’s a good sort of hysteria, and too bad it always gets put to wrong uses like athletics and militarism. It was working fine on this crowd; after a full week of the most unregenerate playing around and downright slothfulness, here they were, Jack Stuart’s ten collegians, all primed to become overnight the greatest band in the world. Ready and willing.

  Jack had arrangements of eight new tunes still in the publisher’s box unopened. He ripped the box open with a pen knife and started calling them off: trombone, first trumpet, second trumpet, piano (that’s me), bass, first sax, second sax, third sax, guitar—over and over until all the music was given out.

  ‘Now keep these straight,’ Jack said; ‘I’m not responsible for any guy losing his music. These are damned good arrangements, too, at least they ought to be for what they cost me.’

  He stood up. He was handsome in a way that didn’t mean anything. He had the empty, regular face that you can find ten to a row in college courses called Economics 10B or Political Science 101, or the sort of face you see on young leading men in the second feature of moving-picture double bills. He was the showman of the band, and he would be even better at it when his tan got established and his cheeks and forehead stopped peeling and flaking off. Right now the face was clouded with authority. Straw boss over ten musicians.

  ‘First of all,’ he said, and he cleared his throat to give weight to his words, ‘first of all I want you to remember that we’re a dance orchestra and our first job is to play a tempo that they can dance to. And it must be smooth. And another thing, this is a high-class place, all-college crowd. They aren’t going to allow any gobs on the floor at all. So you see what that means?’

  The straw boss was liking this, warming right up to it. Who was the brains of this outfit; who knew how to figure this kind of thing out? Jack Stuart, that’s who.

  ‘What it means is that we’re playing to our own kind of a crowd, and we won’t be playing one-steps for a bunch of snaky Jews and department-store girls. It will be mostly frat men and sorority girls down here, and the main thing we want to do is introduce the Charleston and put it over. It’s the rage now in the East, and if we can be the first to get it started on this coast, we’re made. The manager has got a guy from Hollywood that’s going to be here all summer giving lessons in the afternoon. That ought to get things going.’

  The boys were all in their places listening to it, nodding their heads at the big-business phrases. Rick listened as respectfully as any of them, but he kept an eye on his stack of music and kept shifting it around until he’d got a look at most of the first trumpet solos. He got a look at the notes and heard them in his head the way he’d play them, and he was doubtful. His face took on the sceptical look with which wary young ones will look at a glass of milk or a portion of cauliflower: simple distrust with a germ of rebellion.

  As soon as Jack stopped talking Rick said, ‘Are these eight tunes all we’re going to play?’ And Jack said no, he had some more coming, but what did he want for a nickel anyway? Eight tunes, all of them brand new, just off the press, ought to hold any band for one rehearsal. Hardly anyone had heard these pieces at all. That one called ‘Ah Ha!’ for instance was going to make the best novelty number anybody ever heard. Room for a lot of clowning in that one. Nothing in the world will set a band up like a lot of good novelty stuff.

  Rick listened, and then he said, ‘Are we supposed to play these a
s written all the way through, every time the same way?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jack said. ‘What’s wrong with them? They’re the best arrangements money will buy. What do you want, anyhow?’

  Rick looked sad. ‘Maybe they’re all right,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll sound better than they look, but look at this number six.’

  Jack went over to Rick’s stand and looked. Rick pointed to the page and said, ‘See how it goes?’ He sang it off, and then took up his trumpet and played it. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘in a way; but you wouldn’t be able to play that that way every time. That’s why I asked; do we get to play our own solos or do we just play the written ones? This is so sort of—oh, I don’t know—it’s not—it’s sort of what you’d expect.’

  Jack was sore. He looked down his nose at the score and said in as cold a voice as he could manage: ‘All right, you’re such a ball of fire, improve on it, if you’re so good. But get this straight; this isn’t any coon band like this Williams’s you’re always yapping about, and I don’t want it to sound like one. We’re playing for a refined crowd.’

  He walked off and Rick said to his back, ‘I just wanted to know.’ And Jack, looking straight ahead of him, said, ‘Now you do, I hope.’

  And so, during the rehearsal Rick gave the arrangements their chance. He played exactly as written, and he played so well, took his solos with such restraint and such beautiful phrasing and feeling that before ten o’clock Jack was out of it and looking on him with definite approval. Rick was easily the best musician in the band; Jack could see it, anybody could have seen it.

  When they knocked off at ten to have a drink after having gone through number six three times for the benefit of the reed section, which was having a time with the problem of solidarity, Jack walked up to Rick, touched lily cups with him and said: ‘Here’s to a big season, fella. It looks good from here.’ And Rick repeated ‘Big season’ and drank it down.

  They were apart from the others and Jack said, ‘What do you think of Jones?’—the second trumpet. ‘I think he’ll be all right,’ Rick said. ‘He’s just a little anxious or something, and I think he’s playing with the beginning of a roll.’