I am in love with music.
I cannot see straight for the love of her. But if music is, as Duke
Ellington put it, my mistress, then we have had a stormy relationship.
I have cheated on her, lied to, neglected and beat her. On the other
hand, she is too demanding. When she nagged I left her and when I
neglected her she left me. I spent my time under too many hats,
between too many stools. It has been a stormy affair.
hipsters slouched through my living room, eyes red, leaning forward
with gig-bags cradled in their arms. They wore Dizzy Gillespie goatees
and berets. Those who were not junkies scratched their noses and spoke
with a rasp to make believe they were. Charlie Parker was a junky and
that was hip enough for them.
"Groovy, man. What a gas!"
they'd say as my father looked over his New York Times in disbelief.
They'd climb the stairs to my attic studio where there was a wire
recorder, an upright piano and pictures of jazz giants on the wall.
Earl Brew burned some piano keys but my mother did not say anything
because Earl was black and she was a Socialist. She thought the burns
were from cigarettes.
When we weren't playing music we were
listening to or talking about it. We did not have to ask each other: "What
do you want to be when you grow up?" We took professional names.
Bob Milner became Bob Mills. Frank Hamburger chose Duke Frank. I was
Mike Wayne. Al Goldstein picked Al Young in honor of Lester Young but
everybody called him Lester Goldstein.
My attic studio
overlooked the Forest Hills Tennis Club. The tennis players complained
because our jamming jammed their concentration. We were the first
Jewish family in Forest Hills Gardens, an exclusive enclave. My father
suspected the tennis players were anti-Semitic. The tennis players
accused him of operating a rehearsal studio in violation of zoning
laws. Lester Goldstein loved to honk out the window during set points
and Lester really knew how to honk.
I cut high school to
catch noon shows at the Paramount, the Capitol, the Strand - Broadway
theatres where my heroes rose hungover from pits for the first of five
daily shows playing "Blues Flame," "Take The A Train,"
and "Let's Dance," my own "Star Spangled Banners."
I was dazzled by the sparkle of spots off brass. I daydreamed of
future hungover noons rising from pits. I knew big-band personnel like
other kids knew big-league baseball lineups.
My parents took
me to a Catskill Mountain hotel for a summer holiday. After breakfast
one morning, walking in the crisp mountain air, we passed the
hotel-band bass-player coming in with a dazzling suntanned brunette on
his arm. We had talked and he knew I wanted to be a musician. "You're
up early," I said. He hesitated: "Yes...early." Later I
realized he had not in fact been to sleep. How I envied grown-ups who
could stay up all night playing music and be with beautiful women. Now
when I think of that hack working in the Jewish Alps for the summer, I
wonder how children survive their fantasies.
In the summer on
1949 I was in New York on vacation from the University of Miami where
I was majoring in sailing. No, actually sixteen of us were on full
scholarship to play for dinner in the streamlined student cafeteria
which was cantilevered over an artificial lake. It was sort of like
sailing at that.
In those days, to mix metaphors, I played my
horn like a kid skiing down a slalom, with more courage than sense.
Falling on my face never occurred to me. One night I climbed up to
Minton's, where bebop was born, in Harlem. A lot of white cats
considered Minton's too steep a slope. I never imagined somebody might
not like me because I was white. I was absolutely fearless. I took out
my trombone and started to play "Walkin'" with Art Blakey,
then known as Abdullah Buhaina, a fearful cat I was later told.
I noticed Miles Davis standing in a dark corner, I tried harder
because Miles was with Bird's band. (Miles loved dark corners). He
came over as I packed up. I slunk into a cool slouch. I practised cool
slouches. We were both wearing shades - no eyes to be seen. "You
got eyes to make a rehearsal tomorrow?" he asked me. "I
guess so." I acted as though I didn't give one shit for his
"Four." Miles made it clear he
couldn't care less if I showed up or not: "Nola Studios."
Driving over the Triborough Bridge to the house by the tennis courts
at five-AM, I felt like a batboy who had been offered a tryout with
The next day at four I found myself with Miles,
Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, Junior Collins,
Bill Barber and Al McKibbon playing arrangements by Mulligan and Gil
Evans. We would come to be called "The Birth Of The Cool."
when I started cheating on my mistress. I went into my father's steel
fabricating business to support my young wife and three young
children. When my father died, I became President. I was the only
President my friends knew. Everybody's Only President had problems
presiding. He had a closet full of neckties, custom shirts and a suit
for every day of the week. By the age of twenty-three his ambition was
to grow old. Responsible people call this attitude "responsible,"
"mature," "serious." Youth was a preparation for
old age, music a tangent and vacations were spent to work more
efficiently when they were over. You might have asked Everybody's Only
President whatever happened to his burning love for music. He asked
himself....Wait a minute. Talk about alienation. What's this third
person shit? That was me!
I quit the business when my first
wife left me, came to Paris to "find myself," practiced my
trombone a lot, went back to New York and joined Maynard Ferguson's
big band. Realizing my ambition, I rose out of pits hungover.
Maynard's band worked opposite Miles and Trane in Birdland for two
weeks. I felt extremely hip walking from my Tenth Avenue apartment
across 57th street to Birdland carrying my horn. A few weekends later,
I drove one of Maynard's cars to Cincinnatti and back through a
snowstorm for a one-nighter. He gave me two checks; $35 for playing
and $102 for driving. And so Everbody's Only President was
reincarnated - "responsible, mature, serious."
was a flash. I had moved to Greenwich Village. My local paper, The
Village Voice, had no jazz critic. I would be it. I became it. It
became me. The idea was to get a name in print so I could work with my
own band, a rationalization for cheating on mistress music. Wearing
still another hat, I stopped practicing and only started again a
decade later, after marrying my French wife when we were both
vegetables for too many seasons in the Vaucluse and I had nothing
better to do.
Which more or less brings us up to date. Oh, I
forgot a few details - I have been writing for the International
Herald Tribune for 21 years, I toured with a French rock band called
Telephone and I had a son...not necessarilly in that order. I am the
only living trombone player ever to have played with Miles Davis and
Telephone. My son, seven at the time, came on tour with us. Kids are
good luck on the road and the members of Telephone, kids themselves,
carried him on their shoulders, played ping pong and video games and
rolled around dressing room floors with him. During concerts, he sat
on-stage right behind drummer Richard Kolinka, who juggled his sticks
and painted his face like a pirate. When the tour was over I asked my
son to keep me company going to the office to get paid.