Young Jazz

Paul Zimmer

Fat Carison and I used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons in 1945. We would meet at the bus stop and ride downtown to the Palace Theatre on Market Street in Canton, Ohio. One weekend the marquee announced that our Abbott and Costello movie was paired with a live matinee performance of the Count Basie Orchestra. We decided to forego our milk shakes to make up the difference in tickets. Both of us were eleven years old. I cannot speak for Fat, but it was a sacrifice that signfficantly changed my life.
    After Abbott and Costello’s knockabout, the theater stayed dark. There was a pause, a rustling and scraping of chairs behind the big screen, then a piano started jiving, and someone on a loudspeaker announced the Basie band. The screen lifted slowly, and the band was revealed, bathed in blue light, saxophones swinging the riffs of Basie’s theme, “One O’Clock Jump.” The trumpets and trombones roared into the tune together, then the trumpets jumped out and hit it hard over the driving saxophones. I was transported, bouncing in my seat, surprised, overwhelmed by sensuous rhythm and sound. They alternated jump tunes and dance numbers, and I could barely contain myself. A tap dancer named Peg Leg Bates came out and stomped around on one leg and a wooden limb, worrying us that he might fall, but he was amazingly deft. A beautiful black woman sang the blues.
    Count Basie was out in front on the piano, smiling his complete smile, moving the band, driving it in and out of numbers through the big, powerful solos and roaring section work. Midway through the show he brought out a line of chorus girls, and they pranced and bumped into each other gorgeously on the stage. I could smell their perfume up in the balcony. The band closed out with an easy “Rock-A-Bye Basie,” then roared back into a chorus of “One O’Clock Jump.”
    When it was over I was tingling. I beat my little hands together until they were pink. I tried to talk Fat into staying for another show, but he said his mom was expecting him home. He seemed a little stunned, but all the way home on the bus, I gabbed about the music.

I think I was born to love jazz. I tuned in as a small child, when my parents allowed me to stay up late on Wednesday nights to listen to Bing Crosby’s radio show. Usually he had show business guest stars like Dinah Shore or Bob Hope, but one evening he featured Louis Armstrong and some musicians. Satchmo and Bing crooned and bantered, but I got most excited when the musicians started cooking—Baby Dodds, Joe Venuti, Trummy Young, and Louis. I had never heard anything so swift and engaging. I was a sickly kid and had been down for a week with the croup, but I hopped around in my sleepers in front of our big Philco like a spring bunny. My parents were impressed and probably a little alarmed, because I had never been so animated before. The next morning I still had jazz in my head, and my lungs were clear. I got up voluntarily, put on my clothes, and went back to school.
    On Sunday afternoons there was a network radio show called Piano Playhouse, and my father tuned in as we ate dinner. Usually the pianists were slick, popular players like Alec Templeton, Carmen Cavallero, and Frankie Carle, but sometimes it was Meade Lux Lewis, Teddy Wilson, or Art Tatum—and that put some snap into the roast chicken and mashed potatoes. Even then I could hear and feel the difference. The iced tea would be jumping in the glasses until my father ordered me to stop kicking the table leg.
    A few years later when my future brother-in-law, Bob, was courting my sister, he would visit us in Ohio during summer vacations from college. One time he brought a Duke Ellington album, and I could not stop listening. I loved the flag-wavers like “Jam with Sam” and “Take the A Train” but also grooved on more mellow pieces like “Mood Indigo” or “In a Sentimental Mood.” We had a console record cabinet in the living room, so I was right in the middle of things. Over and over I would put those platters on. My family had to push me out the door to play baseball with my friends, but as soon as I came back, I would set the needle down on the vinyl again. I could not get enough. In those days there were no earphones, so everyone in the house had to listen. Finally they persuaded me to turn the volume way down and press my ear to the speaker.
    I had heard big, ricky-ticky bands like Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombardo, or Kay Kaiser on the radio, and I had heard Basie’s big, stomping band at the Palace, but never anything with the élan of the Ellington orchestra. Of course, Johnny Hodges knocked me out, but all the great soloists swept me up with their art and sophistication. The ensemble work was a thrill—those marvelous tones coming together creating a full, lush, sexy sound on slow-tempo songs, and when the band cooked on the upbeat tunes, I soared with it. I could not keep my feet still or my shoulders from bobbing. The album notes told how Ellingron and the band traveled the world. Parisians loved their savoir faire. The great music halls of London were SRO. This seemed so remote and exotic to me, as I headed into puberty in the middle of Ohio.
    Realizing how much I enjoyed the Ellington, Bob “accidentally” left it on the console. He almost lost favor with my parents, but it was an act of great generosity. The next time he came to visit, he helped me solder a jack to the white Motorola tabletop in my room, and we wired it so I could plug in a turntable and listen to jazz records through my radio without driving everyone nuts.

What was it about this music that swept me up so completely? Why is it still so important to me? My cherished recollections are as rich as the times of actual listening. I can be miles from a stereo, but memories and echoes help me get through a long day.
    Some people cannot hear jazz. I once spent a bundle taking a girl I very much admired to one of the jazz variety shows that traveled city auditoriums in the 1950s and ’60s. It was to be our big night—Ellingron, Erroll Garner, Sarah Vaughn, Stan Getz. I was vibrating, but she sat on her hands all night, looking bored or threatened. I did not take her out afterward for a snack. I took her home, opened the door, eased her in, and said goodnight. No kisses. No need to waste any more time.
    A good friend once asked me why I liked this “cacophony.” I gave him another chance, telling him to calm down and listen again. He pretended to put his ear to it but could not wait to ask the question again. I have not seen him for years.
    So jazz is important enough to end a love or a friendship and generous enough to cure a sick little kid. What else does it do? I found out early.
    There was another girl I liked a lot when I was in high school. One summer evening I walked to her house and saw her through the window in a clinch with one of my friends. I almost collapsed on the lawn. I staggered home in agony, my heart crushed to pulp. I went to my room, lay down on the bed, and wept. The pain would not go away. I had to do something.
    I had been buying Jazz at the Philharmonic albums with extra money I scratched up from my paper route. I put on Volume 13, Embraceable You—Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Tommy Turk, Flip Phillips, Hank Jones, Buddy Rich, Ray Brown. After a Jones introduction, Eldridge opens with a warm, pristine solo. Then Lester Young comes in with just a short solo, exactly two minutes, followed by Parker, Turk, Parker again, and then Phillips closing, all playing georgeously and with feeling. But it was Pres’s solo that got me through that night of pain so long ago. “Embraceable You” is hardly a blues, but Lester was playing something that nudged my sky-blue funk. I listened and listened again, literally wearing a groove into his part of the platter. I had always been fascinated by his solo, sensing its wisdom and accomplishment, but had not fully understood it. He put his gentle eroticism and sadness right out in front. Phrase after phrase—no secrets, only pure feeling changing and building the tune. That night I understood perfectly.
    Two minutes. With embouchure, warm breath, spittle, a long, graceful curve of brass tubing, magnificent talent, and great heart, Lester Young, a southern black man who had lived a life I could not even imagine, threatened and cheated by racism all his life, was stating my pain and comforting me, a broken-hearted white teenager in the middle of Ohio.
    That is a tender, long-distance connection. It is what makes jazz significant and endearing. When I am in the dumps, I still run that memorized solo through my head. Its meaning has changed for me, but it is still part of my life. So Pres connects even now with a retired sixty-five-year-old geezer living atop a hill in southwest Wisconsin, half a century after he played his solo at Carnegie Hall. This is enduring art, with its ability to quicken, sadden, and yet sustain.

Finding jazz in a smaller Midwestern city in the late 1940s and ’50s took some effort. The downtown news depot in Canton, Ohio, stocked Downbeat for local musicians, and I bought copies when I could afford them. Most of my first records were swing music, but I became fascinated with bebop. When I could not find records in local shops, I special-ordered them from the New York wholesalers who advertised in Downbeat. I became a curiosity at the post office. The packages would not fit into our mailbox, so the mailman would leave a pick-up slip. I had to ask my father to run me downtown to the post office, and he would hassle me loudly all the way to the delivery window about how I was wasting my money. Then the postal clerk would bring me a package from New York City marked Bebop Incorporated or How High the Moon Records and hand it to me with a curious look.
    I did not always know what I was buying. There were no jazz radio shows, so I ordered blind—records by musicians I had read about in Downbeat. Usually, to be certain, I went for titles that had a bop” pun in them: As I Live and Bop, Bop, Look, and Listen, Boptimism, Boplicity, Cubano Bop, Bop Sign. I could only afford so much, but I bought quite a range—from Brew Moore to Bird, Dodo Marmarosa to Thelonious Monk. I loved every one of those slick, black platters that whirled like turbines on my 78-rpm spindle. They came from faraway smoky cities of intrigue and elegant corruption, and the guys who made them were the coolest people I could imagine. When I cracked a disk, it caused me great pain. I would press it flat on the turntable and play it anyway, putting up with the pop, pop, pop to hear the music. Sometimes only a little half-moon chip would break off, but at least I had the larger part of the tune.
    I invited my buddies up to my room to listen, and we bounced around from wall to wall, giggling and happy. “Where are you getting these hot records?” they asked. One time I broke my bed, jumping on it to show off, fracturing the wooden antique legs. “Some chips just flew,” Jim Merryman said. The dancing stopped, and my dad shut down my record-buying for a while.
    My pal Dick Schiavone’s older brother was an alto saxophonist who gigged around town when he was not going to college. Dick had a job as a caddy at a golf course and bought his own duds. He had his pants pegged and wore pink shirts with Mr. B roll collars like his brother.
    I got into a tremendous row with my mother in a clothing store when I told her I wanted to have the cuffs pegged on the new brown pants we had selected.
    “Absolutely not.”
    “How about just a little?”
    I could not persuade her that she was being unreasonable. I needed at least a token. No one would notice if there was just a slight tuck.
    “But it’s the style!”
    “It is not the style.”
    I could not tell her it was the way jazz musicians dressed. That would have made things worse. My mother was the daughter of an immigrant French miner and a Belgian waitress. Only gangsters and low people wore their pants pegged.
    But I was tired of going around looking like Dopey Danny Dee.
    She insisted I must look neat and presentable.
    Hell. Somewhere—I cannot remember where—I found an old pair of discarded chartreuse flannel trousers that were a little long on my legs and large around my waist. I took them with some of my paper route money to the tailor shop around the corner from my father’s shoe store. The Jewish tailor looked at me over the top of his glasses when I told him I wanted them taken in at the waist . . . and pegged. He knew my father, of course.
    “You are certain?”
    Yes, I was certain.
    I wore them once with a bright yellow shirt. It was not right. I did not look cool like Schiavone or Lester Young. I looked like a stock of pale asparagus in bloom. Eventually the pants disappeared from my closet. I suspect my mother confiscated them. I beat the game anyway by tucking the pant legs of my blue jeans at the bottom and rolling them up to look pegged. My parents would not let me get my hair ducktailed either, but I still knew more about jazz than anyone in the neighborhood. I affected a kind of jazz musican shuffle. Lefty Rowles called me “Jazzy Zimbos.”
    I went on listening intensely to the music. I memorized tunes and riffs. My older sister took piano lessons. I learned “Chopsticks” but refused my parents’ offer of lessons. I did not want to mess around plunking those endless cornball repetitions. I wanted to be an instant prodigy like Sugar Child Robinson, but I could only make hash on the keys. So instead of playing an instrument, I played the turntable.
    Jazz excited me and made me feel good. The sexuality of it beguiled me, but I was too young to know what was happening. I just listened and listened and was warmed by the music. I learned to hear nuances and musicianship, expanded my range and became more selective. I found a clerk in a record shop who shared my interest, a very pretty girl—alas, at least five years older than I. Damn it!
    But I passioned when she told me I had good taste. Once she rubbed my shoulder when I said something clever, and I almost passed out. She special-ordered records for me and put me on to new things. She took me to the listening booth and put on George Shearing or Sarah Vaughn. I kept willing her to come into the booth with me so I could smell her perfume, maybe brush her arm and gaze into her brown eyes as she talked about the music. She never did, but I knew that jazz had something to do with my feeling for her. When I played the records at home, I would think about her. My fantasies expanded, and I began to realize that, as much as anything, jazz was about sex.
    But I was a good Catholic boy and well brought up. In our house we had a copy of Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton’s autobiography of his young manhood and entry into Trappist life. Merton, too, loved jazz when he was young but made a solemn and deliberate decision to give it up in order to realize his religious destiny. Was jazz evil? I did not understand why Merton had to do this. I knew I could never be that holy.
    I was aware that jazz musicians drank a lot and took drugs. I had seen drunken people, but never a drug addict that I knew of. Apparently drugs relaxed them and helped them play better. The jazz life was intense and stressful. I knew that Gene Krupa had been arrested and sent to prison for taking drugs. I was aware that other musicians had problems. Schiavone’s brother told me that Charlie Parker was a genius, but also a junkie. Occasionally articles in Downbeat hinted that certain musicians were having trouble.
    I knew that marijuana was prevalent and that heroin was stronger and more dangerous. Someone told me that many of the big stars were on it. I could not visualize this—such an evil connected with this happy, sophisticated music. It was a world so far from my own. I studied their photographs and saw no traces of dissipation. They all looked clear-eyed and focused to me, not like the drunks I had seen slopping around. If drugs and alcohol made jazz musicians happy and helped them play music that I loved—well, then it was a sad business, but I guessed it was cool. I would sneak a mouthful of bourbon sometimes when my parents were Out of the house. It was worse than medicine, but I got it down and could feel the buzz. It helped me understand the problem, and, yes, sometimes it made the jazz sound more interesting.
    Every time I thought about jazz being improvised, it astonished me. I knew that painters painted over their work until they got it right, writers rewrote to perfect their stuff, singers and classical musicians peformed from prepared scores, but jazz musicians put it down right on the spot. It went from their heads right out through the bells of their horns, the strings and skins of their instruments, the keys of the piano. This seemed very brave to me, almost a higher art. I forgave them their small indiscretions. No wonder they needed a little help once in a while. I figured if they died young, they were martyrs for their art.

I recall my amazement the first time I heard someone I respected refer to jazz musicians as “artists.” I thought artists were people who painted, or who were writers, or singers in the Metropolitan Opera productions we listened to on Saturdays. Artists were serious, highly cultured, adult people. My aunt was an artist and made some of her living doing etchings and colored drawings for Catholic prayer books. I admired her a great deal. But my aunt, or Ernest Hemingway, or Rise Stevens, or Jose Iturbe, seemed far removed from the jazz musicians I admired. Still, jazz musicians were artists too, nocturnal artists who played in bars and smoky clubs, not generally appreciated or understood, artists who sometimes altered their consciousness in order to achieve something—but artists nevertheless.

In high school I endured study halls by making lists of musicians for dream jazz bands. I thought if I ever got rich, I would bring these guys together to play. I must have looked studious as I worked on my enormous sections, which included a broad spectrum of boppers and swing players and even a few Dixielanders. I wanted everything. I made up these lists, over and over, and they looked something like this:

Tenor Sax
Lester Young        Ben Webster
Flip Phillips           Illinois Jacquet
Stan Getz             Brew Moore
Coleman Hawkins  Wardell Gray
Chu Berry             Bud Freeman
Georgie Auld         Don Byas

Alto Sax
Charlie Parker       Johnny Hodges
Benny Carter        Sonny Stitt 
Willie Smith          Lee Konitz

Baritone Sax
Harry Carney        Serge Chaloff
Gerry Mulligan      Bob Gioga

Trumpet
Dizzy Gillespie      Harry James
Roy Eldridge         Cootie Williams
Louis Armstrong   Cat Anderson
Buck Clayton        Maynard Ferguson
Sweets Edison      Red Allen
Miles Davis          Howard McGhee

    And so on through the trombonists, clarinetists, bassists, drummers. To pick a piano player, I listed Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Peterson, Al Haig, Art Tatum, George Shearing, and Erroll Garner. I could not decide which player I preferred, so I figured I would just have a bunch of pianos put on the stage and let them all wail. It would be spectacular.
    It was going to be a big band, and it was a contest to see who would be the leader. I considered Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, and Woody Herman. Then I decided to bring them all in and alternate them. Four sets to a concert. It would take all night, but no one would go home. There were a lot of musicians, but I wanted a big, full sound, and I knew that Basie, Ellington, Kenton, and Herman could devise ways to make all these stars play together. I heard the huge band cooking in my mind as I made up my lists. Sometimes the study hail teacher would ask me to stop tapping my foot.
    When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I usually said I wanted to be a doctor. People were generally impressed with this, and it would end the conversation. But I had no clue about my future. I knew I did not have the talent or patience to be a jazz musician, but perhaps I could be some kind of artist. I took art classes in high school. Perhaps I could make a lot of money like Norman Rockwell and then bring my band together. The art teacher, intrusive and more than slightly inept, was Maude Rose. Her teaching technique was “hands-on.” She took your brush Out of your hand when you were working and smeared it around on your painting to show what you should be doing.
    But I got off on the right foot with her. For the first lesson she wanted us to create small sculptures using ordinary objects. I had the idea of using peanuts and pipe cleaners to create jazz musician figures and shaped bits of tin foil into their horns. I made a conga drum Out of a thimble and a little stage out of a shoebox. I rigged up some curtains stripped from a torn shirt and called it Jam Session. It was cool, and everyone admired it.
    The next project was to do a drawing, not from life, but from our imaginations. I drew some musicians having a jam session. It was stilted and sloppy. I erased a lot, but Maude said okay. I was hardly a talented student, but she had to move things along.
    Finally, we were to do a watercolor, and of course, I started to paint a jam session. I worked intensely, trying to get some feeling of improvisation into it. Other students painted flowers or landscapes, but I wanted to make a more personal expression. Maude was touring the room, going from student to student, checking the work. When she came to mine she snorted, grabbed the brush out of my hand, and smeared a big X through my work. I stood up. “What are you doing?”
    “You can’t do any more jazz musicians,” she said. “You’ve got to think of something else.” She kept smearing the brush around, dipping it in the water, obliterating what I had done. I snatched the brush back out of her hand and accidentally bumped her so that she staggered back.
    “Out!” she cried. “Get out!”
    I was an inarticulate teenager, enraged, but helpless to express my anger at her rudeness.
    “Out!” she shrieked again and gave me a push. I thought about pushing back, but, thank God, I kept my hands to myself.
    Oh, but I paid and paid anyway for this episode. Maude Rose gave me a big red F for the class. The principal told me that no one had ever failed art in the history of the school. My parents were undone. I was a dreamy, less than mediocre student anyway, but now to fail art? When they heard my explanation, they cut off my jazz records again. So I was a martyr for jazz and for art.

But no one could stop me from loving it. I took my jazz records with me to college and eventually found a compatible dorm roommate, Butterball Clark, who listened with me. Both of us were big on Stan Kenton, a dominant figure at the time. We would turn up those huge, brassy numbers on his 45 changer and beefed-up speakers, and people would be pounding on our door.
    Not even the 1812 Overture coming from the beleaguered classical lovers in the next room could blow us away.
    College did not interest me; I ignored my classes and was told to leave after a year. I took a series of ridiculous jobs until I was drafted intothe army in 1954. There was not much jazz in Kentucky, where I went through the obligatory misery of basic training at Fort Knox. It was a lonely, difficult, jazz-starved time, but one Saturday we were cleaning our barracks and a radio was playing. An enlightened Louisville disk jockey slipped in the Stan Getz/ Johnny Smith “Moonlight in Vermont” side between some country music numbers. I guess he thought he could get away with it because of the guitar. I stopped and leaned enraptured on my broom. Some guy made a move to change the station, and I hollered at him. He did not much like being shouted at, since it was his radio, so he headed in my direction for a serious chat but was intercepted by a formidable guy from Detroit named Rosenkrantz. Rosenkrantz settled him down, then came over to me. Jazz lovers are sometimes like a secret society.
    “Do you know who that was on the radio?” he asked.
    “Stan Getz and Johnny Smith.”
    “Man,” he said. “I have been looking for you. Let’s go have a beer when this party’s over, and we can talk some sounds. I thought I was going to lose my mind with all these geetars and people singing through their noses.”

A terrible thing happened to me in the army, but also something great and memorable. I was assigned to be one of the “atomic guinea pigs,” the army personnel that “experienced” atomic explosions in the Nevada desert. We did maneuvers and witnessed eight tests in the spring of 1955 from trenches close to ground zero.
    But prior to these appalling experiences, I was sent to Fort Slocum, New York, on an island off New Rochelle, for some special training. After duty hours I taught myself how to travel into Manhattan and make my way to Fifty-second Street and the legendary jazz clubs. I went into the city almost every night, blowing my meager paychecks on cover charges, draught beer, and jazz. It was a dreamlike, glorious time.
    The first time I did this, I was very uncertain on the train and on the streets of New York. I walked up Pennsylvania Avenue from the station with a map of Manhattan in my hand. Above all else, I wanted to find Birdland. I turned on Fifty-second and walked into the District—Basin Street, The Open Door, Three Deuces—and just around the corner and down the street on Broadway there was the Royal Roost, the Band Box, and beside it, the awning and sign of Birdland, “The Jazz Corner of the World.” The billboard in front read in block letters:

BUD POWELL TRIO
SYLVIA SIMS

    When I paid the cover charge, my hand was shaking. I shyly declined a waiter’s offer to take me to a table and was directed to the listener’s gallery along the left side of the bandstand. I was early and got a good seat beside a pillar, right up against the railing beside the stage. A recording of “Salt Peanuts” was blowing on the sound system. I ordered a beer and studied the women in the gathering crowd.
    The lights dimmed, and Peewee Marquette came out Ofl the stage in his tuxedo and made one of his strident announcements. Marquette was a midget, but he was hugely proud of his position as MC at Birdland. He felt it was his serious duty to keep things moving along. To the great irritation of musicians, he would often interject himself at the end of sets before they finished playing. I read later that Lester Young used to call him “half a motherfucker.”
    Peewee cranked the microphone down. “Ladies and gentlemen, Birdland is taking a great deal of pride at this time to present to you the very wonderful Bud Powell and his trio. How about a little welcome for the Bud Powell Trio!” We applauded, Marquette left the stage, and then there was a pause. A long pause.
    Finally, the kitchen door opened at the right side of the stage, breaking the darkness. Three figures emerged. One of them, a huge black man, guided a smaller man across the stage to the piano with firm hands on his shoulders. It was Charlie Mingus leading Bud Powell, who sat down on the bench and slumped over the keys with his eyes half closed. Mingus went to his bass and picked it up. He nodded to the drummer as he watched Powell carefully. The drummer started brushing a medium tempo, then Mingus began plucking his strings. He kept his eyes on Powell. The drummer kept his eyes on Powell. We all kept our eyes on Powell, wondering what would happen. Suddenly, Bud lifted his head and brought his hands down to strike a chord on the keys. Then, amazingly, he was bouncing into “Audrey.” Soon he was sweating and ranting as he played. It was a wonderful set. I remember lovely versions of “My Heart Stood Still” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” the march into the strange “Glass Enclosure,” his Bachian introduction to the beguiling “Sure Thing,” and a breakneck “I Want to Be Happy.”
    The legend was bouncing before my eyes—and the legends continued to roll. I went into the city two or three nights a week, taking the early evening train so I could get a good seat. It was a golden, privileged period of my life. In those clubs I heard a large portion of the galaxy—Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Don Byas, Hank Mobley, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Carmen McCrae, Gerry Mulligan, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Zoot Sims, Milt Jackson, Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, Al Cohn, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, Terry Gibbs, Phineas Newborn, Sonny Stitt, Buddy De Franco, Tony Scott, George Shearing, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Lee Konitz, Charlie Shavers, Howard McGhee, Miles Davis. They even stuffed whole big bands onto those small stages—Basie, Ellington, Kenton, Herman. They literally blew you away in those little clubs.
    One blessed late spring evening, I walked down Fifty-second and turned the corner onto Broadway, reading the billboards as I made my way. It was glorious license to be able to pick your pleasure from those offered riches. I stopped at the entrance to Basin Street when I saw the words:

CHARLIE PARKER
ELLA FITZGERALD

I went to my pocket and got my dough out fast.
    Of course, I was early and got a good seat. I was tremendously excited about hearing Bird, so stirred up I do not remember hearing Ella Fitzgerald. I cannot even recall who played in the rhythm sections, but then Bird came out and joined the other musicians. He was wearing a powder blue serge suit and suede shoes. I knew the legends of his dissipation, but he seemed keen and bright-eyed. He played magnificently, crisp and clean, no fluffing or wavering, but soaring like on my old Verve waxes back in Ohio. I was enraptured. What I did not know is that he was in his last months, a brief period of clarity before the abrupt, final descent. Three months later he attempted suicide. Nine months later he was dead. I am very grateful that I heard him when I did.
    I was at Camp Desert Rock, Nevada, witnessing atomic bombs, when some black soldiers told me Bird had died. I found it hard to believe. When I had listened to him play that night, he had seemed the most adult person in the world. I look now at his photographs, the stages of his life, and the astonishing variety of his appearance. Sometimes he looked like a young pug, sometimes a businessman, a driven artist, a Buddha, a happy clown, and, yes, sometimes a haunted, wide-eyed junkie. Charlie Parker was thirty-four years old when he died. As I write this, I am thirty-one years older than he when he passed, but I will never live to be as old as he was.

An ephemeral, sprightly strain of jazz called “West Coast” became briefly prominent in the mid- and late 1950s. I collected and listened fervently to this jazz, generally produced on bright, transparent 45 records with artsy album covers. It is common to patronize this music, and I must admit that I rarely listen to it now. But in the mid-1950s—the middle of the Eisenhower years—it came like sunlight and warm breezes into those dreary Ohio winters, brightening my uncertain days, making me dream of being warm and free on the California beaches. It was pat, but clever and effervescent, usually swinging hard, the tunes frequently titled with puns like “The Sweetheart of Sigmund Freud,” “Coming through the Rye Bread,” or “Coop de Graas.”
    While I was stationed at Desert Rock, several of us decided to take a pass and drive to Los Angeles for a few days. I was not thinking about jazz. We took a room on Redondo Beach, put on shorts, and started strolling south along the sand—three girl-starved guys walking the beach. There was plenty of sand at Desert Rock, but not this kind of sand, and I had never seen such glorious flesh, so many delectable women.
    When we reached Hermosa Beach, I looked up the street into the town, and there was Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse Café, a mecca of West Coast jazz. I could not believe my eyes. I dragged my pals away from their girl watching and up the sidewalk to check it out. It was Saturday, and an afternoon session was scheduled. I was ecstatic, irresistible in my powers of persuasion. We paid the cover charge and went in, bought a round of beers, and sat at the bar. By the time the musicians came in, I was crocked, but I remember Bob Cooper, Richie Kamuca, Bob Brookmeyer, Shorty Rogers, Rumsey, and Stan Levy.
    My God! These were the guys. When they tuned up and sailed into their first number, I was enraptured, young, happy, and very drunk. Here it was—California jazz life as I had dreamed about it in my bedroom back in Ohio with my 45 changer spinning. “Warm Breeze,” “Surf Ride,” “Didi.”
    By that time in my life, I had decided I wanted to be a poet. Listening to jazz has always made me feel “poetic.” I was tremendously excited. I kept asking the bartender for pencil and paper. I wanted to make notes and sketch a few lines on the spot. He ignored me.
    My buddies were looking at the women, as was I, but I was grooving on the music too. Nobody was feeling the whole thing like I was. Here was the life of the artist, the freedom and decadence. Finally my friends wanted to get back to the beaches. I would not leave, and they left me there. I stayed the rest of the afternoon and finished hearing the set. I had a hamburger and French fries, took a walk and sobered up a little, then hung around for the evening sets and started my debauch all over. By closing time I was a mess, but somehow I found my way back to our room.

When Suzanne Kokluauner and I married in 1959, we went to California to start adulthood, and I hauled my jazz records with us in our 1952 Chevrolet. We settled in San Francisco for a while and got jobs. We were finished with school and enjoying our young lives. In the evenings and on weekends, we roamed the city. We got into the Blackhawk to hear Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, and others. There was a wonderful bar called The Hangover, where we listened to Earl Hines and Muggsy Spanier. In North Beach was a joint called the Jazz Workshop, and we took in Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Witherspoon, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Hampton Hawes, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and others.
    I had been working hard on my poems. In the mid-1960s I started to get acceptances from magazines and gained some confidence. We moved to Los Angeles, where I managed the UCLA bookstore. I noticed a guy who kept coming into the store to check out the poetry section and struck up a conversation with him. He was a Unitarian minister named Jim Daniels, and we fell in together, started taking lunch once a week to talk about poetry and jazz.
    The Watts riots ignited in 1966, and we were all disturbed, feeling guilty and worried about conditions. Jim kept encouraging me to write about it. He wanted to create an arts event dealing with Watts, to raise awareness in the people who attended his lily-white church in the San Fernando Valley. I knew nothing about Watts, but I knew how I felt about racism. I was young and hopeful that I might be able to do some good, so I worked at some poems about slavery, prejudice, and racial anger. They were poems of the moment, immature and overly dramatic, but Daniels showed them to a music teacher in his congregation, and the guy took them to some of his jazz musician friends.
    The next time I had lunch with Daniels, he told me he had arranged to have an event in his church, that some musicians were working up music to go with my poems, and I would be the reader at the performance. The first rehearsal would be the following week. I was excited, but very intimidated; up to that point I had only read poems out loud to my wife and a few friends.
    “Duck soup,” he said. “You will be great.”
    “Who are the musicians?” I asked.
    He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read, “Hampton Hawes on piano, Teddy Edwards tenor, Ralph Peña bass, and Shelly Manne on drums.”
    “Lord, have mercy!” I gasped. I was way in over my head. These were musicians I revered. I owned their albums and looked at their pictures. I had no business being on the same stage with them. I worried and fussed for a week, and Suzanne did her best to buck me up.
    “Those guys are like gods,” I told her. “I’m going to make an ass of myself. I can’t do this.”
    “Then make a very good ass of yourself,” she said. “Onward.”
    The rehearsal was in a big meeting room next to the church. I was tingling and short of breath as I lumbered across the parking lot. The musicians had already arrived and were tuning up. Jim Daniels took me by the sleeve and walked me over to them. They looked up and smiled engagingly, those faces so famous to me. Each of them stood up and shook my hand warmly.
    I was in another dimension—a little boy babbling in front of his heroes. My hands were shaking and my voice was high. The only thing I could think to say was, “I’m proud to be doing this with you guys. I think your work is great.”
    Teddy Edwards put down his horn and gave me a gentle poke on the arm. Hampton Hawes—the Hampton Hawes who had played with Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Art Pepper, Sonny Rollins—grinned handsomely. “Hey, man,” he said, “we really dig your work too.”

Paul Zimmer, known around these parts as “The Legend,” is the author of numerous books of poetry and several essays. He is retired and lives on a farm in southwest Wisconsin with his wife and dog.

“Young Jazz” appears in our Summer 2000 issue.