Editor's note: This is the first of three installments from Bill's memoir-in-progress, "The Inherited Heart."
I doubt that many people are abstemious by choice. I certainly wasn't.
Although I carried on a continuous pursuit, my adolescent years did not provide any overt rewards when it came to "success" with girls (and I'm not talking sex, but a relatively innocent quest for attachment and affection). Consequently, I more or less abandoned Love (with a capital "L") but, fortunately, was able to discover a reasonable small "l" love less riddled with discrepancy between theory (aspiration) and practice (accomplishment). I learned that it was possible to fall in love with something other than a human being — even though it was human beings who had dreamed up and produced that "something else."
I fell in love with an art form: jazz. I started out slowly, then gradually fell head over heels in love. I discovered that you could develop a genuine passion for an art such as jazz and hang on to it for dear life, throughout your entire life — as I have. I learned that this love might prove to be far less fickle, changeable, unpredictable, impossible than others. Jazz music would prove to be true to me at times when I could not remain true to myself.
Much later, I would also realize that there was an intimate and vital connection between the love of jazz and love for women — but from age thirteen (1949) through age sixteen (1952), I was not quite ready for that revelation yet. I was ready for "substitute gratification" (how the music itself may have come about in the first place?), so I became a closet drummer. Maybe "basement" is a better word.
We had a piano in the living room, a console, and I would fool around on it, nibble at its keys from time to time, but I hadn't started taking lessons yet (more about that coming up when it happened) and I was a long long long time away from a mental state in which every piano I would ever sit down at, no matter what shape (in tune or otherwise) it was in, would automatically feel like home. In 1949, at age thirteen, as soon as school was over I would rush back to the home I then had and head for the basement, a place where, because I was without a job and could claim no money aside from a modest allowance, I had assembled a homemade set of drums — an assemblage not likely ever to be found again. They belonged in the Smithsonian Institution.
The author as an aspiring 16-year-old drummer
The snare was made of half a Quaker Oats box with tissue paper taped to the bottom and crossed by lines of thin wire. It worked. One cymbal was the lid from a #10 can of beans; the other, smaller, was from a Campbell's Soup can (Cream of Mushroom, I believe). I made a set of wire brushes out of bristles I plucked from my mother's prized broom. On this crude, strictly homegrown kit, I began to spend hours woodshedding in the basement.
Ironically, oddly enough, the music I played "drums" (such as they were) to was piano music. Before 1949, such a thing as 45 rpm and the 33-1/3 records did not exist. The 78 rpm recording (heavy as hell, and highly breakable) had been king (my mother had recordings by Artie Shaw that were 78s), but in 1949, an innovation called "microgroove" (allowing a smaller groove and stylus and more music per radial inch of record space) prompted Columbia — one of two industry "giants" at the time, the other being RCA — to produce a series of 10-inch "long playing" records. That series was called "Piano Moods."
In those days, you could listen to recently released music in enclosed glass booths in record stores. When I did so, these new recordings replaced Al Jolson, Perry Como (a sentimental favorite of mine — sentimental indeed!), Tony Martin, Doris Day ("Do do do... what you've done, done, done before, Baby"; and "Here in My Arms"), and Joni James ("You're nearer... than my head is to my pillow"; and "Let There Be Love") in my adolescent affections.
Listening for the first time to the "Piano Moods" series occasioned a sort of religious conversion in me. I felt immediate attachment to, affinity with the music of Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner, Earl "Fatha" Hines, and Eddie Heywood — with Art Tatum to follow by way of a Columbia recording of a concert he gave at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1949 (presented by impresario Gene Norman). All of these artists were black, but I was still innocently colorblind; this before I became painfully aware that my Southern father — a first-rate raconteur and soft shoe tap-dancer, a man absolutely charming in so many ways, a man who'd come North to Detroit in 1931 from Arkansas — found it somehow natural to use the "N-word" on occasion in reference to jazz, depending on whether or not the music met his approval at the moment. This long before I would begin to appreciate, in a meaningful and positive way, individual racial or ethnic contributions to "culture" as a whole, or those cultures in and of themselves.
I just didn't think about what I was listening to in terms of race. White artists, such as Joe Bushkin, Jess Stacy and Ralph Sutton were also represented in the "Piano Moods" series — but from the start I was drawn to Wilson, Garner, Hines and Tatum. I instinctively liked them best.
Down in my basement "space," I first played and attempted to accompany (on my crude, strictly homegrown drum kit) Teddy Wilson. I loved his steady, clean, crisp lines and rhythms. I was light years away from being able to, or even interested in, articulating what I had come to admire in any particular performer or style of jazz, but I was learning about that by way of what I heard, and also liner notes on the back of each 10-inch LP (Columbia's trademark term for "long playing"). What was written about Wilson made perfect sense to me: "When a better piano is played, Teddy Wilson is likely to be the man at the keyboard." The notes pointed out his "translucent delicacy, together with a wonderful feel for the beat and the meaning of a song." Just how those two attributes went together was something I was beginning to pick up on.
I would sit alone, behind and above my humble drum kit and just go swish ta-da swish ta-da swish ta-da swish — the standard jazz quarter note, dotted eighth, sixteenth note, quarter note, etc. drum pattern: 1 2-e-an-ah 3 e-an-ah 4 e-an-ah 1 rhythm — with the wire brushes I'd pilfered from my Mom's broom. I did so in time to what I'd read described as Wilson's "fluidity," "swift, racy style," "airy sprint," "richly evocative" and "intricate, splendidly modulated piano." I recently read somewhere that as "an added source of inimitability," these "Piano Moods" recordings were "produced with no pauses between the tracks, giving the side of a record album the feel of having someone performing for you right there in your living room" — and that was true, although in my case it was only a basement.
I was amazed by the skillful manner in which Teddy Wilson strung together "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" (still one of my favorite songs!), "Bess, You Is My Woman," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," and "After You've Gone," moving from tune to tune, tempo to tempo, with grace and grand agility. He did the same on the other side of the recording, where I first heard songs that persist as favorites: "I've Got the World on a String" and "Honeysuckle Rose."
Al McKibben and J.C. Heard were the drummers on each side, but I was listening and digging myself as my new friend Teddy's sideman drummer, not them! Swish ta-da swish ta-da swish ta-da swish: quarter note, dotted eighth, sixteenth note, quarter note...
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