The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The Bear joined him in the laugh without thinking twice. Our first duet.

  Suddenly Haden was a trifle anxious: "I didn't mean that in an offensive way."

  "No, it's cool," the Bear told him. "I got it. I knew what you meant."

  "I was afraid, hm, of having made what might be thought of as a humanist statement."

  The Bear had to chuckle. "That's the first time I've heard the word used in that sense," he said.

  "Well it shouldn't the last." Haden nodded yes with a certain meditative seriousness.

  "Stick 'em up," said a voice from behind the Bear, and something like a gun barrel poked him in the back.

  "Billy," said the Bear, "if I didn't recognize your voice I might've spun around and taken your head off. You got to be careful around me just now. I'm in no mood for another arrest. What's that in my back, the butt end of a drumstick?"

  "Yeah," said Billy, coming around front to say hello. "I wasn't thinking. Sorry, Bear. How you feeling today?"

  "Some days you eat the bear," the Bear told him, "and some days the bear eats you."

  Billy shook his head. "I could think about that all week and not know what you could possibly mean by that."

  "I'm a little wired. Where's Bobby Hatwell?"

  "Here."

  The Bear had to blink at the piano player. First he had not been there, then he was. Where had he come from? "First there is no Hatwell, then there is," he said. "Nice trick. How you feeling?"

  "I'm a httle wired," the piano player said, like an echo-delay effect. Rahim Bobby Hatwell was a small medium-dark-brown guy in his twenties with a bullet head, small ears tucked tight to his temples, a delicate mouth, an articulated Ethiopian nose with arched nostrils, and dark Persian-almond eyes that looked right at the Bear the way most people's eyes did not. He was well

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  muscled, highly articulated forearms coming out from under the pushed-up sleeves of his charcoal-grey cotton sweater. At the ends of these forearms, just the other side of a pair of delicate wrists, hung two enormous hands, veined and sculpted with extraordinary attention to detail. "You're looking at my hands," Hatwell said.

  "Uh, yeah."

  "I'd, ah, rather you didn't. I know I'm physically eccentric, but I'd rather you didn't stare."

  "I think I can relate. I thought you were a litde tense about playing with me because I'm, well, a bear."

  Hatwell took a breath before speaking. "Actually I kind of dig the concept, and this isn't the weirdest gig I've ever played, if you want to know. One time I toured America with Tiny Tim, John Carradine, Pinky Lee and Zippy the Chimp. We did, like, Hadawank New Jersey, Fuckaduck P.A., Assa-watchie OH, East Potato and St. Bump—the whole circuit. The tour was booked by this mobbed-up guy so of course what we played was a transcontinental series of, you should pardon the expression, Policemen's Balls. Air. Tim headlined, but John Carradine did these sweeping versions of 'The Raven,' 'Now is the winter of my discotheque,' and 'To be or not to be.' Then, in his biggest hambone voice, he'd introduce the Lovely Karina and Her Young Charge. Karina'd come out to 'Saber Dance' in a spangly red costume swinging Zippy in a circle in the air on the end of a rope the monkey had in his teeth. It was a buffalo show. After Zippy did his shtick we'd get Pinky Lee in his check suit and derby hat singing 'Hi ho, hi hee, my name is Pinky Lee,' and then Mr. Tim would make his entrance, showing all his strange-looking teeth and strumming on his ukelele, which was tuned like to R-sharp minor, telling us, 'In the Key of G, gentiemen.' And it would almost never fail: the wife of some cop or other would come flying across the room to put a flying liplock on Tim and we'd have to keep the cop husband from pulhng out his rod and packing up his troubles right there. After that we'd go out to a Chinese restaurant and Zippy'd get up on a table, pull down his pants and moon the house before putting down a whole baked fish and a couple of noodle dishes. At the end of the tour they found the mobbed-up guy who booked it in the trunk of his Buick Riviera with a longnose .22 in the base of his skull. I also did an episode of The Love Boat on a ship off Italy in the Mediterranean and dropped my whole paycheck playing cards with, of all people, Polly Bergen. This woman is a lethal weapon when she got a deck of cards in her hands, just in case you ever happen to run into her. Last week I did five gigs in two days and lost money. I'm a working musician. Bear. You can't show me nothing new."

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  The Bear turned to Billy. "You didn't tell me he did vocals."

  "Yeah, well."

  "How do you like the piano?" the Bear asked the pianist.

  "This Hamburg Steinway Krieger got flown in by albatross, none of your New York shit, you kidding me? Look at that mirror-black finish. Listen to the way it sounds. When we're done with the record I want to be buried in it. One more thing," Hatwell said. "I'd rather you called me Rahim than Bobby, if that's okay with you."

  "Rahim," said the Bear. "The Compassionate. Are you a particularly compassionate man?"

  "Sometimes you're given a name because you already have the quaHty," Hatwell told him, "and sometimes because you need it. You speak Arabic?"

  "Just a few of the Divine Names is all."

  Hatwell looked both ways at Billy Hart and Charlie Haden. "He's unusual," Hatwell said.

  "For a bear," Billy Hart allowed.

  "So what you guys do after I split the rehearsal the other day?" the Bear asked his rhythm section generally, as a change of pace.

  "We talked to Sigbjorn a lot," Charlie Haden said.

  "We took his temperature," said Billy. "We tried to cool him down."

  "Then the three of us played for a couple of hours," said Hatwell. "We really worked through your shit, you know? got your pieces down. We figure if Krieger comes in and cuts you out we're ready, the three of us, to record an album called Ha Ha Ha Plays Bear."

  "Ha Ha Ha?" the Bear inquired.

  "Haden Hart and Hatwell."

  The Bear slapped himself on the head as stoopidly as he could manage. "I didn't realize. Thanks for working the material through."

  Another party cleared his throat. It was James, the recording engineer, being polite on the outskirts of their grouping, accompanied by Jones, who, casting furtive eyes at the band, seemed painfully outcast from life's feast. The Bear had to admit it, it was still pretty cool to be a musician.

  "Jones," said CharUe Haden. "It's good to see you again, man." Haden turned upon Jones the same interested attention he had directed at the Bear, and Jones responded like a morning glory that had sensed the sun.

  "What is it," the Bear asked the engineer.

  "I just wanted to show you," the man said. "We have Rahim and CharUe playing on opposite sides of the main room here. We'll close the door on Billy's drums in the booth, and we're putting you in this room over here." He indicated a glassed-in chamber on the other side of the studio.

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  "I'm playing in a condo?" the Bear asked him. "I'm looking out at the band through a window?"

  "Sigbjorn gets his sound by isolating the instruments," said James. "Everyone does it. It's standard."

  "We have a problem," said the Bear.

  "Then we have a problem," said James. "What's up?"

  "James, I don't have a clue how to play in a situation like this. I'm used to being with the band. I've got to be in close personal touch. Isolated like this," he gestured at the walled-in instruments, "how am I supposed to play? I know people do it all the time, but . . . Also, I'd have to use headphones to hear the band. One, they don't fit my head—"

  "We could customize a pair for you."

  "—and two, they hurt my inner ear intensely."

  "You understand I'm not producing the date," James told him, "only engineering the sound. If it was just a matter of not wanting to separate the instruments you wouldn't have a chance, but the headphone problem gives you an in. You're not lying to me, are you?"

  "Only a little," the Bear confessed.

  "What I suggest is that you
take it up with Sigbjorn when he comes in, and when he goes berserk I'll step in and suggest a way of recording the band in the main room. Meanwhile I'll get my gear set up so I can make the switch. Cool?"

  "Bless you," said the Bear. "I'm still panicked but it's cool."

  Sigbjorn Krieger swept in about fifteen minutes later, followed by his aide-de-camp. Krieger wore a dark overcoat over his shoulders like a cloak and then flung himself, as the Bear observed through the control-room window, into the leather sofa in front of the glass and dropped his face into his hands. When told to expect a Dansker, the Bear had anticipated some sort of blond or at least honey-colored individual, but Victory-Bear Warrior—the Bear's still unconfirmed translation of his name—was dark and sallow and hollow-cheeked and looked more like a suffering artist than any artist the Bear had ever met. He watched Jones bend solicitously over the melancholy Dane, and after awhile Krieger nodded yes, shed the overcoat, and rose, displaying dutiful fatigue. Nice dark turtleneck sweater, observed the Bear, lush corduroy slacks in subdued, almost indeterminate colors. Artist's clothes. The way I'd dress myself if I could manage the effect. Krieger acknowledged the Bear through the window and waved a weary hand hello, then headed for the control-room door, right. The Bear stood his ground, the alto hanging from his neck, and let the producer come to him.

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  "I understand we have a problem, the Bear," Krieger told him, then looked down at the floor. "Something about headphones?"

  "My ears are positioned funny compared to humans'. See? They're up top of my head."

  "We can modify the armature on the cans," Krieger said, although he looked pained at the prospect.

  "Well yeah," said the Bear, "but they hurt my ears a lot. There's pain in there, damage being done. I can't do a Beethoven scene in my old age. You ever see a deaf bear? Pathetic."

  The Bear was sure Krieger was within an ace of cancelling the session. "I don't know if we have time to reorganize the studio for you," he said.

  At this point James materialized on cue. "I think I may have a solution," he said.

  "How," Krieger asked James.

  Then the Bear listened to James lay it out for Krieger: "I can isolate piano, bass and horn with panels in the main room, bring Billy forward, and baffle him left and right. We'll put three ambient mikes high up to pick up the harmonics. Promise you, Sigbjom, we'll get something you'll Hke."

  Krieger pinched the bridge of his nose and the Bear wondered if he really cared whether the date went on or not. On reflection, it turned out he did.

  After Krieger nodded yes and withdrew, it took about twenty-five minutes for James and the guy who had been sorting cables to set the panels up and reconfigure the wilderness of microphones that attended the musicians. Jones walked around the studio through the whole procedure looking obscurely supervisory and generally getting in the way.

  The Bear sidled up to him. "How'm I doing in there," he asked, and jerked his snout toward the control room, where Krieger sat brooding on the sofa.

  "You're just getting away with it," Jones said. "I may have gathered from a conversation with Krieger's assistant, that the reason you haven't been shit-canned for misbehavior is not your ineffable charisma but because Megaton is pressuring Krieger. BFD records haven't been selling the way they used to, and you're expected to move product and help keep the distribution deal in place."

  "You mean I have leverage?"

  "Don't push it, B."

  Preliminary levels took fifteen minutes, with James back in the control room asking individual members of the quartet to play a few notes for him. Then the band did a few desultory choruses of "Au Privave" and James said through the sound system, "I think we're ready for a take."

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  Here goes nothing, thought the Bear, not for the first time in his hfe. "Okay, guys," he said. "I think we should start off with the uptempo blues."

  It was called "Vehicle," only he wanted it pronounced Southern-style, Vee-hickle, and now was thinking of changing its name to "Ha Ha Ha." He had.liked writing it, felt he had come up with a bright idea. The line was nothing special, a wisp-and-fragment thing the regulation twelve bars long, but the first chorus was in the major, and the second a variation in the related minor. Wayne Shorter had done the same thing on an Art Blakey shuffle once, but "Vehicle" was fast and seemingly casual in its architectonics, and the Bear had some ideas about how it could be played.

  "WTiat I'd like to see here," he told the band, "is a sense that the major-minor alternation is there, but it's also kind of optional. I might start off my solo with a chorus of one, a chorus of the other, but then if I feel like playing three minor choruses in a row that's the kind of freedom the tune is written for. You guys have the same freedom, of course. So we'll have to listen to each other to see which way it wants to go. And if we feel like dropping the changes awhile, that's fine too. Charlie, I know you're familiar with this kind of thing. Everybody happy?"

  Haden blew into his hands and said, "Uh-^z//?."

  Hatwell piped up: "So, what you're saying, we feel like it we could play some free jazz."

  "I was thinking pay as you go," said the Bear.

  "One more thing," said Hatwell.

  "What."

  "You can call me Bobby if you want."

  "Actually," said the Bear, "we need all the mercy and compassion we can get."

  Getting the nod from James, the Bear grunted a countoff at an energetic but not intolerable uptempo and the band came in like the pros they were. What uplift, he thought as he launched into the head. I mean, these guys start off as if they're already in the middle of the thing, no touchy-feely probes into what the tune might be about. Immediate arrival. They start off at a level other guys might never reach after weeks with the material. What sophistication. Hope I'm up to it.

  Billy laid some asymmetrical punctuation into the gaps in the tune's head and implied some facets of the architecture the Bear hadn't known he'd written. As the Bear attained the beginning of his solo over the bridge of a cymbal swell firom Hart and a chord pileup from Hatwell, he hoped again he was up to it, and remembering that he wasn't, he resorted to a prior strategy. Because he knew he couldn't play in time present and would have to imitate

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  himself, for the first time in his checkered career he had worked something out in advance. He would do his first choruses in fi-agmentary fashion, playing some piece of thematic variation oddly placed within the barlines, then lay out for little stretches and let the rhythm section fill. This would extend the strategies of the written composition and, who knew, might pass for music among the uninitiated. Then he'd lay in more bits and fragments awhile and try to pull them together with some long lines and runs for the finish so it would look as if he'd really done something with the solo. It was an inauthentic, connect-the-dots way of playing music, but it seemed like something to go out there with for starters. He might just get away with it. It might just sound like something had really happened.

  Accordingly, the Bear put his first bit of phrasing out there and laid back to listen. The band called his bluff with snappish responses from three directions at a deeper level of invention than he had proposed. Then they setded, waiting to hear what he had to say next. Oh shit, the Bear told himself, you can't lie to these motherfuckers. But I'll have to keep trying this stuff out till something better comes along.

  His first four choruses kept to the regular major-minor alternation indicated on the page. Billy was producing rounded swelling waves of rhythm on the drums and cymbals, ocean surges that overspilled the barlines while still kicking the beat at him—just the kind of drumming the Bear liked best, only he didn't feel exactly equal to contending with it now. Haden was digging methodically into the rhythm while opening up, within an increasingly free harmonic field, worlds of implication in which the major and minor blues as given had begun to interpenetrate each other, almost, in a way, to cancel each other out. To make matters wors
e, the Hatwell kid was laying in all this large-scaled architectonic chording that kept upping the ante drama-wise on the Bear every time he proposed a new bit of phrasing or line of thought. In essence they had seen his two preconceived bits and raised him more than he had in his wallet. He either had to fold his hand and forget the whole deal or rise to the occasion somehow. Okay, he thought, let's pretend I can play. Let's pretend I'm comfy and at home. If I were, if I could—soul of Jackie Mac, intercede for me—I might do something, uhh, I might do something like this.

  The Bear successfully doubletimed his way into the next chorus, not an easy thing at this tempo, and thought: not bad, but there was still a lot of Cannonball in that. He didn't know if his bid had succeeded, but everyone responded as if he was good for the amount, and from that moment on he pretty much lost track of the proceedings. Oh, he knew that Billy was bashing it and that Haden had dropped strict timekeeping to wrench explosively

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  placed double-stops out of the bottom of his instrument, the strings protesting bodily against the fingerboard—and once, Haden did that droning, rising pedal-tone thing, like a choir of basses, against what he was playing on the horn, and the Bear took it as a compliment, since Haden usually only ran that stuff behind Ornette. He loved the way Hatwell was working his shit in— nobody out there was playing piano like that, laying out for awhile then hitting the music's uprush with this strong two-handed harmonically intensified blockwork, then giving him a bit of the usual connective chording before entering a repetition cycle that responded to what the Bear was playing and demanded that he think about it some more—but what he was aware of, mostly, was the feeling that he would have to sink or swim and that he was doing a bit of both. He wished Billy would give him a bit more breathing room—he was bashing those tom-toms pretty hard—and then, despite the fact that he knew he couldn't play like this anymore, at last he began to dig into what the band was giving him, grudgingly at first, because he had no alternative and it was probably better than packing up the horn and going home, and so despite himself he lit into the day's offered music, streaked and ran and just generally behaved as if he could still tear things up. He stole a hck or two from Coltrane's long recorded solo on "Impressions." Ah well. If you have to steal, steal from the best. The music was either dead or alive or a bit of both, he figured, and the whole time, compounded of what remained of his talent and his finistration with its inaccessibility and limits, there was a kind of shuttered tumult in him, as if all this equivocal music were being generated by a drama taking place from behind the closed doors of a room somewhere deeper in the house of his nature than he could bodily reach, light gleamed around the edges of the doorway and occasionally he could hear some word of dramatic argument rise articulate in the air; but all he could do here, amid the covered furniture and general gloom, was use what he knew about music and the horn to make some sense and energy out of such echo of real event as reached him. Occasionally he got into something real, but then it would slide away and leave him with whatever lay ready between breath and tongue and paws. He didn't know how long his solo lasted, though he ticked off the major-minor switches when he felt like it and took note when the blues structure fell away entirely, but when he was finished he knew that a bunch of time had passed, that he was sweat all over, and it seemed he had drifted into an out-of-tempo dialogue with Haden, Hatwell laying out and Billy flicking in some cymbal trills and mini-bashes on the outskirts. The bassist played beautifully, sounded notes in the Bear's nature that the Bear himself would have played if he still resonated that deep. It was a kind of call, and the Bear responded to it in his current piecemeal fashion, partly able, due