“You told her about playing cornet and all?” I wished she hadn’t: it was my business, not theirs.
“Of course I did. I didn’t want her to think you were a lamebrain. I wanted her to understand why you weren’t studying. She said she was glad I told her, for now she could make sense of it. She said you could still pass for the year if you worked at it. She said if you stayed after school she’d help you catch up. But she said you have to show a willingness to work, otherwise she’d just be wasting her time.”
But if I stayed after school I wouldn’t have much time left to go over to Hull House and practice. “Ma, I—”
She put her hands on my shoulders, crouched down in front of me, and stared into my face. “Paulie, Pa was all set to throw your cornet in the Chicago River.”
I didn’t say I already knew that. “Ma, he couldn’t do that. It belongs to Hull House.”
“I told him that. It doesn’t matter, Paulie. If you don’t pass, that’s the end of music for you. Pa was going to take your cornet back to Hull House.”
“I would have run away.”
She went on looking me in the face. “No, you wouldn’t have, Paulie.”
“Yes, I would have.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do that to me.”
I didn’t know if I would. I might or I might not. I decided not to say anything.
“Now you listen to me, Paulie. I talked him out of it. I said if he let you keep on with your music, I’d see to it that you passed. I put myself on the line for you, Paulie. I want you to promise me you’ll do it.”
I looked down at the floor. Even before I got interested in music it was a struggle to get myself to do my homework. “I don’t know if I can, Ma.”
“Paulie, look at me.” I looked up. “You can pass. Miss Hassler said you could, and she’s willing to help you. But you have to put in the time, even if it means skipping music practice for a while.”
I felt just awful. She’d gone to bat for me, and now I didn’t know if I could get myself to study. “I’ll try, Ma. I promise I’ll try.”
She shook her head. “That’s not good enough, Paulie. You’ve got to promise me you’ll do what’s necessary to pass. You’ve got to promise me you’ll stick with it as long as you have to, to get it right. Otherwise I’m going to take that cornet back to Hull House myself.”
How could I promise when I didn’t know if I could make myself do it? But I had to. I took a deep breath. “I promise.”
WHAT WITH NOT daring to practice around home in the evening when I was supposed to be doing my homework, I wasn’t getting along as fast as before. Still, I was making progress. By this time I’d got beyond copying what Paul Mares played and was trying to improvise something new for myself. I wasn’t too good at it. Tommy Hurd had showed me how to work off chord changes, but it was one thing to know the idea of it, and another to sit down and do it. A lot of times nothing would pop into my head and I’d fall back on the melody. Tommy said there was nothing wrong with playing melody, you could make the melody swing, too. But still, I wanted to improvise; wasn’t that what jazz was all about?
At night I studied. Or to be honest about it, tried to study. It was an awful struggle. I had to fight myself every step of the way. I’d sit down at the table in our room with my civics book and start memorizing the natural resources: coal and iron ore for this one, timber and rubber for that one. The next thing I knew I’d be leaning back looking at the ceiling, to see if the cracks in the plaster made some kind of picture. Or I’d set out to write a report on the solar system explaining why the planets didn’t crash into each other when they went around the sun. And about fifteen minutes later I’d realize I was staring out the window to the apartment across the street where Mrs. Winterhalter was waggling her big rear end while she washed the dishes.
But in the end, by forcing myself hard, I generally managed to get some homework done. At least I’d have something to hand in, so Miss Hassler would know I was making an effort. And I didn’t do too bad in my classwork. I was a pretty good guesser, and a lot of time I came up with the right answer to some question. But tests were a problem. The truth was, no matter how much homework I did, nothing seemed to stick beyond a day or two. I’d get something learned, like the natural resources of someplace nobody ever heard of, and the next day I could usually haul up enough of it to answer a couple of questions. But by the end of the week, when we had a test on it, I couldn’t even remember the names of the places we had studied, much less their natural resources. I never once got better than a C, and about half the time I flunked—fifty-seven, sixty-three, something like that. It was touch and go. Each night I’d tell myself to grit my teeth and bear down hard; but no matter what I told myself, there I’d be once again staring out at Mrs. Winterhalter’s fanny.
Every once in a while Ma’d go to see Miss Hassler. She’d say, “Miss Hassler says you’re doing a lot better than last term. She says she can see you’re trying. But she says you’ve got to do a little better.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can, Ma.”
“You’ve got to try harder.”
Once I asked Tommy how he did in school. “Oh, I got by,” he said. “I wasn’t no great shakes in English. My people didn’t speak too good. But I had a knack for math and science and I got by, until I had to quit.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“My old man worked in the stockyards. He got his leg busted by a steer one day. Sis was working in a sweatshop sewing pockets on shirts, but her boyfriend always took half her dough. Of course with Ma dead that left me. I used to deliver newspapers before school—got up at five every morning. After the old man got hurt they took me on full time. Big twelve dollars a week, but it saved us. We ate mostly potatoes and fried fatback all that winter. But Pa’s leg didn’t heal right, and by the time he got to working again I’d been at it for a year and wasn’t of much mind to go back to school.”
“How old were you then?”
“Thirteen. I wouldn’t have gone beyond fourteen, anyway. By that time I was playing around a little bit. Kids’ tea dances, social club picnics. I saw pretty quick I could make a helluva lot more dough playing music than I could delivering papers, and by the time I was fifteen I was in the union.”
It was funny: Tommy’d had it mighty hard, what with his ma dying, his pa getting hurt, and eating fried potatoes and fatback all the time. But the truth was, I envied him. When he was my age he was free to do what he wanted. Of course he had to work. But he was already building himself up in the music business, and I was stuck.
“Tommy, how long do you think it’ll be before I’m ready to play a dance job?”
“You play good enough already, but you got to know more tunes. You go out there on a dance job, they want to hear all the latest stuff. The kids want the new hot tunes, the old folks want waltzes, somebody always asks for a polka. You got to be ready to play them.”
“How am I going to learn them?”
“Get hold of the sheet music. Or learn ‘em off records.”
“I haven’t got enough money for that.”
He shrugged. “Go to dances, get around to the clubs. Carry your cornet with you, they’ll think you’re in the band and let you waltz in.”
“Do you think I’d be able to get in to hear Oliver or the Rhythm Kings?”
“I thought your old lady wouldn’t let you out that late,” he said.
“But if she did.”
He thought about it for a minute. “I tell you what, kid, maybe one afternoon we go out to the Stroll and look up Calvin. Calvin’s a big man out there. He could get you in anywhere.”
“What’s the Stroll, Tommy?”
“That’s what the colored musicians call the area around Thirty-fifth and State. There’s nothing official about it. They stroll around there and catch up on the news—who’s working where, if some big name is coming to town.”
“I would love to go there sometime.”
“We’ll do it som
etime, kid.”
I struggled on through April and May, getting a sixty-five here, a seventy-three there, right on the edge the whole time. June came and that made it even harder, for all the while I sat there in our room trying to get natural resources to stick in my head, I could hear through the open window everybody out on the street in the last daylight having a grand time—kids shouting, grown-ups sitting on the stoops arguing among themselves, cars honking, horses clip-clopping along towing the ice wagon or the fruit and vegetable carts.
Finally the last day came. I could hardly sit still in class. The day wore along, minute by minute. Then there we were, lined up to get our report cards. When Miss Hassler came to me she said, “Paulie, wait a minute, I want to talk to you.”
I stepped out of line, my heart beating fast and waited until all the other kids were outside on the street whooping it up. Miss Hassler stood there with one last report card in her hand.
“Did I pass?”
She looked at me for a minute. “No, Paulie. Not really. But I squeezed you through. Your mother’s such a nice lady I didn’t have the heart to do it to her.”
I was saved. But I knew there wasn’t any hope I’d be able to put myself through that kind of torture for another whole year. There wasn’t a chance of it.
THAT SUMMER I got it. It came all in a rush, almost in five minutes. One minute I was trying to figure out what jazz was, and the next minute it was coming out of the bell of my cornet. Why it happened when it did I’ll never know. It was one of those times they were using the room at Hull House for a dancing class and I was over at Rory’s. Of course Pa wasn’t going to let me lay around the house all summer playing the cornet, and took me out on jobs whenever he figured I could make myself useful. But a lot of days he couldn’t use me and let me stay home. I was getting in a lot of practice.
By this time Rory had got used to jazz. He’d heard the Rhythm Kings’ record of “Farewell Blues” so many times he didn’t have any choice but get used to it. I had six or seven records by then. Tommy had given me a couple that were pretty near worn out, and every once in a while at some kid’s house I’d come across a good jazz record mixed in with pop stuff like the Aaronson’s Commanders or the Benson Orchestra of Chicago, and I’d beg it off him. I had two King Olivers, another Rhythm Kings, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues,” which made them famous, a Louisiana Five, and a couple more. I had to keep them at Rory’s and take a chance on Mrs. Flynn breaking one when she got to drinking beer and crying. She didn’t care much for that kind of music anyway, she said. “Danny Boy” by John McCormack was more her speed.
Jazz was getting to be all the rage that summer of 1923. Every time you turned around somebody was raving over a swell new record, a swell new musician, a swell new band. It seemed like every week King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton or the Rhythm Kings had a new record out. Tommy was talking about a new cornet player named Bix something, who was with a band called the Wolverines. Of course the blues had been hot for a couple of years, and Bessie Smith was getting to be big. I couldn’t hear most of these people, because naturally Ma wouldn’t let me stay out that late. It made me feel left out of things, like when everybody else is going to a picnic and you can’t go because you’re sick in bed.
Anyway, jazz was getting to be a big number. Rory wanted to be in on it, so he was game to let me practice over at his house. We’d take the phonograph out on his porch. Rory would practice spitting through the clotheslines down onto the kids in the yard, and I’d play along with records.
I was playing along with Oliver’s “Snake Rag,” when all of a sudden jazz began to come out of the bell of my cornet. I was so surprised I stopped dead. “Did you hear that, Rory?”
“Hear what?”
“What I was playing.” I was all nervous and excited, for I didn’t know if I could get the same thing again.
“I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Well this time listen.” I put the needle back to the beginning of the record, picked up the cornet, and plunged in. Here came the jazz again. I could hardly believe it—I couldn’t believe that it was me playing the stuff coming out of the horn. I didn’t want to ever stop; I wanted to keep on going and going. But of course the record ended, and I put the horn down.
What made the difference? I wasn’t even sure I knew—something to do with not hammering down on the beat all the time to make it go, like Tommy said, but letting the beat take care of itself so I could prance around on top of it. Some idea like that. It was hard to explain, but I could see now why they were always saying that you couldn’t learn how to play jazz— couldn’t just take lessons in it, the way you could learn how to play a march just by following the rules. With jazz, you had to have a certain attitude. You couldn’t wrestle it to the ground, you had to let it happen to you. Something like that, anyway.
I put the needle back on the record and played along with it again, trying to figure out exactly what I was doing. I couldn’t, and I started to play it a third time, but Rory put a stop to it. He was all for jazz, he said, but there could be too much of a good thing.
I could hardly wait to get down to Tommy’s and show him what I could do. Maybe Rory wouldn’t know the difference, but Tommy would. The problem was that just then Pa ran into a job he could use me on every day. I think he had a hunch that I wasn’t long for school, anyway, and he wanted to start training me for the plumbing business. It wasn’t anything you could even argue with him about. He had it all planned out.
On top of it, Ma was leaning on me hard to get a head start on my schoolwork for the next year. Of course, she didn’t know that Miss Hassler squeezed me through, but she could see by my grades that it had been mighty close. She went down to the library, got out a speller and a math book, and drilled me whenever she could catch hold of me. Poor Ma, she was going to hate it when I turned out to be a jazz musician living in a room with a bare lightbulb and records scattered on the floor. But maybe after a while I’d do real good at music, have a fancy apartment and ride around in a swell new car. That would be more cheerful for her.
Anyway, Ma didn’t catch up to me with the speller too often, for Grampa wasn’t doing any better, and she was over there a lot, tending to him.
Between one thing and another it was a week before I got down to Tommy. In the end I was disappointed. I played for him in my new way, but he wasn’t as impressed as I figured he would be. All he said was, “Yeah, sounds good, kid. You been making a lot of progress this summer.”
“It was the first time it sounded like jazz to me,” I said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t of said that.” He took a sip of coffee. “Listen, can you get away tomorrow afternoon? I’m subbing for a fella at a tea dance over on Halsted up near you somewhere. If you brought your horn around maybe you could sit in.”
He said it so casual, like he could have done it anytime, but it was a shock to me. I’d never actually heard a jazz band live, except that time at the Society Cafe, and here he was asking me to play with one. My mouth fell open. “Do you think they’d let me?”
He shrugged. “You know how it is. Some fellas don’t mind about sitting in, some do. There’s no harm in asking. I don’t know about these here fellas—they got a pretty good opinion of themselves. They call themselves the Austin High Gang, and they like to think jazz is their private secret.”
“Who’s in it?”
“I don’t reckon you know their names. They’re mostly around my age—a little bit younger, maybe. Saxophone player named Freeman. Dave Tough on drums. The star’s the clarinet—Teschemacher. I don’t know any of ‘em except to say hello to.”
“How come you’re subbing?”
He shrugged. “Search me. Freeman got hold of me and said their cornet, McPartland, couldn’t make it. It’s only a tea dance, but what the hell, it’s five bucks.”
Well, I was so nervous I could hardly eat supper, hardly go to sleep that night. There were about sixteen things that could go wr
ong, and one of them was bound to. Pa could decide he wanted me on a job, Ma could decide to drill me on spelling. What about my clothes? I’d have to dress up as good as I could, and if Ma saw me combing my hair, much less cleaning my fingernails without being told, she’d know something was up.
What I did was get up bright and early and take the garbage down. Then I sat under the stoop as long as I dared, hoping Pa would go to work. Finally he did. I went back upstairs. “Where’ve you been all this time?” Ma said. “Pa was looking for you.”
“I took the garbage down. You’re always complaining if I don’t do it, and now you’re complaining when I did it.”
“It doesn’t take a half an hour to take the garbage down. I suppose you were sitting on the stoop, daydreaming.”
I decided she might as well think that. “It wasn’t a half an hour,” I said.
I spent the morning staying out of sight in our room, pretending I was studying my speller. Around noon Ma sent me out to fetch some stuff from the store. She fixed fried-egg sandwiches for lunch. I was too excited to eat, but I forced myself, so she wouldn’t get suspicious. After lunch I hid out in our room for another hour. Then I took a clean shirt and a necktie out of the bureau and stuffed them into my cornet case. I told Ma I was going over to Hull House to practice, and lit out for Rory’s. I told Rory what was up. He was all excited, and wanted to go along, too. I said I didn’t know if he could get in or not, and he said it didn’t matter, he’d walk me over anyway. So I put on the clean shirt, and then I picked up the tie. The only time I ever wore a tie was to church on Christmas and Easter, and once when Ma took me and John to the photographer to get a picture to send to the relatives. I didn’t have much of an idea how to tie one, and Rory had even less of an idea, for Mrs. Flynn wasn’t a big one for dressing up, and Rory didn’t have a tie.
But he was bound to give advice. “That isn’t right, Paulie,” he said. “You got to wrap it around the other way.”
The Jazz Kid Page 8