SHINING HOURS / FORGIVING RHYME
On a Saturday morning when I was eight or nine years old, my dad and I set out in our old Chevrolet to play some music at a friend’s house. Actually, my dad was going to play music, but he let me carry his horn cases, and both of us were decked out in jazz-dude apparel: penny loafers, khakis, and Hawaiian shirts with the tails out. First, though, we had to pick up our new neighbor, Magda, who had only moved to Texas about three months before. We had become friends with her because people left their windows open back then, and we heard each other playing Duke Ellington 78s. Now, Magda and my mother went shopping together and hung out, so I knew her as this nice, relaxed German lady who sat around in the kitchen with Mom, dicing things.
When Dad beeped the horn in front of her house, however, a different Magda came out. She was all gussied up, with her hair in a bun, wearing this black voile dress, a rhinestone pin, and little, rimless spectacles that I associate to this day with “looking European.” She was also carrying an armload of sheet music, and as she approached the car I whispered to my dad that this must be Magda’s first jam session—because nobody looked at sheets at a jam session. Dad said to shut up, dammit, that Magda was a refugee, that she was a Jew who fled the Nazis, first to London and then, after the war, down here to Texas. So cool it! he whispered, and I cooled it. Problems with the Nazis were credentials enough for me. I hopped in the back seat, let her ride up front with Dad.
Then we had to stop and pick up Diego, who worked at the Jiffy Dry Cleaners where we took our clothes. We beeped, and Diego came trotting out with his bongo drums in a paper sack—a really cool-looking guy, I thought, with his thin black mustache and his electric-blue, fitted shirt with bloused sleeves. Usually, Diego played percussion in Latino bands on the North Side, but he loved to sing jazz, so he was fairly bouncing with excitement as he ducked into the back seat beside me. Then all the way out to Ron’s, he flirted so outrageously with Magda that my dad and I kept cracking up.
Magda blushed down into her dress, but she seemed not to mind Diego’s attention. At one point, she turned around and scolded him good-naturedly: “Herr Diego,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You are a stinker!” And that cracked us up too, so we laughed all the way out to South Fort Worth where Ron lived in this redneck subdivision, in a ranch-style house with a post-oak in the lawn. As we pulled up in front, two black guys, Butch and Julius, were advancing warily across the lawn. They were dressed in white dress shirts and high-waisted zoot-suit slacks, carrying instrument cases, and glancing around them at the neighborhood.
Butch and Julius were beboppers, but, like my dad and Ron, they played pick-up gigs with dance bands around town, so I saw them all the time. I waved, and Butch, who was carrying a guitar case, waved back. Julius was lugging his stand-up bass, so he just grinned, and Ron, who stood in the front door holding the screen, waved too. Ronno was my dad’s best friend, and as usual, he was barefoot, wearing a sleeveless Marine Corps T-shirt and camouflage fatigues. “Not many jazz fans in this neighborhood,” Butch remarked when we were all in the living room. Ron allowed there weren’t, but the VA had approved his loan so he took it. Julius just smiled and took his bass out of its case. Then he took a Prince Albert tin out of the string pocket inside it, flopped down in Ron’s easy chair and began rolling a joint.
Magda’s eyes got big at this, but I could tell she wasn’t upset. She was tickled to death. You could almost hear her thinking, "Oh boy! I have made it all the way from Birkenstrasse to this! I am out in the Wild West—at an American Jazz session with Negroes smoking marijuana!" To cover her excitement, she marched over to Ron’s baby grand, set her music on it and began striking octaves and fifths, checking the tuning. Butch gave her an appraising sideways glance. Julius just grinned and lit up his reefer. After he had taken a couple of hits, Ron’s wife Mary stuck her head out of the kitchen, sniffing the air. “Guess y’all are gonna be wantin’ cookies,” she said. “I am!” I said, and everybody laughed.
Ron took a hit from Julius’s reefer and climbed behind his drum kit, clanging his ride cymbal as he did. Butch and Diego took up positions on the couch—Butch with his Gretsch guitar, Diego with his bongos between his thighs. My dad opened his horn cases on the floor. He fiddled with the saxophone, then took out his clarinet, wet the reed and leaned back against the piano with his ankles crossed, examining the instrument, blowing lint off the pads. They all tweaked and twanged for a minute, getting in tune, then Ron counted off Artie Shaw’s “At Sundown.” Magda was really shaky at first, pale with fear, but Diego just kept grinning at her and nodding, and she started to firm up.
Then, Dad swung around, aimed his clarinet at her, and she seemed to wake up. In less than a bar, she found herself and started hitting the note, crisply; and the lady had some chops, you know. She could play jazz music, but it was strange to watch, because here in this smoky, shadowy room full of swaying, agitated beboppers was this nice German-Jewish lady in a black voile dress with her back rigid and her eyes glued to the sheet, her wrists lifted in perfect position, playing in such a way that, if you couldn’t hear the music, you would have guessed Schumann or something like that. But Magda was really rapping it out, and she had such great attack that Diego had to sit up straight to sing the choruses. Mary even came to the kitchen door to listen, which she rarely did.
After that, Magda got into it, even bouncing her bottom on the bench once or twice (much to Butch’s whimsical delight). But she wouldn’t solo. They would give her the space, nod in her direction and say, “Take it, Maggie!” but she would shake her head and vamp through her sixteen bars. Then Butch or Dad would come in and solo. But I was really proud of them. They always gave her the space—in case she changed her mind. And I was proud of Magda too, for getting her confidence up, and letting it build, so the best thing they played all afternoon was the very last thing: “Satin Doll” by Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Johnny Mercer.
By this time, the room was very mellow and autumnal. Ruby light angled through the windows, glowing in the drifting strata of second-hand ganja as Ron counted off the song. He and Julius started alone, insinuating the Duke’s sneaky, cosmopolitan shuffle. Then Magda laid down the rhythm signature, Butch and my dad came in, and they played the song straight, flat out. Then they relaxed the tempo, moved back to the top and let Diego croon his way through the sublime economy of Johnny Mercer’s lyrics—calling up for all of us (even me) the ease and sweet sophistication of the Duke’s utopian Harlem, wherein we all dwelt at that moment:
Cigarette holder,
Which wigs me,
Over her shoulder,
She digs me,
Out cattin’
That satin doll.
As it turned out, that satin doll was that. There were no more jam sessions, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and, within three years, my dad was dead. After that, our life remained improvisational, but it was never as much fun. So I kept that musical afternoon as a talisman of memory. I handled it carefully, so as not to knock the edges off, keeping it as plain and unembellished as I could, so I could test the world against it, because it was the best, concrete emblem I had of America as a successful society and remains so. My dad is a part of it, of course, but I see him differently now—not as my dad, so much, but as this guy who would collect all these incongruous people around him and make sure that everybody got their solos.
So, I have always wanted to tell this story, because it is a true story that I have carefully remembered, but frankly, it is a sentimental story, too—as all stories of successful human society must be—and we don’t cherish that flavor of democracy anymore. Today, we do blood, money, and sex—race, class, and gender. We don’t do communities of desire (people united in loving something as we loved jazz). We do statistical demographics, age groups, and target audiences. We do ritual celebrations of white family values, unctuous celebrations of marginal cultural identity, multiethnic kick-boxer movies, and yuppie sit-coms. With the possible exception of Roseanne, we don’t even do ordinary eccentricity anymore. In an increasingly diffuse and customized post-industrial world, we cling to the last vestige of industrial thinking: the presumption of mass-produced identity