For a kid like me with not much cash in the pocket, the good news about the clubs on West 52nd Street was that the music came free as long as I wasn't fussy about standing on the sidewalk. Especially in warm weather, none of the clubs shut their doors. All I had to do was hang out on the sidewalk and let my ears do the rest of the work. It was a bonus later on when the doormen and the guys selling the admission tickets recognized me as a regular and invited me into their clubs for free, no ticket or cover charge required.
The part of 52nd that really counted lay between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. That was the block with the jazz clubs on both the north and south sides. It was where I went door to door and cocked my ear. I heard Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on the south side and Red Norvo directly across the street at the Onyx. Billie Holiday sang at Kelly's Stable a few doors further west. At different clubs on the street, I heard older swing-based guys like Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge. I heard Thelonious Monk and I heard a great young singer named Sarah Vaughan. I heard the older masters like Lester Young and Art Tatum. And I heard the younger guys like the trumpeter Howard McGhee and the tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson who were just finding their audiences. I heard practically everybody who was on the New York jazz scene.
One club, the Onyx, was historically at a bunch of different addresses on 52nd, always featuring jazz, but the Onyx was at number 57 on the street when I went in one night in 1944 and heard a very early bebop band. Dizzy was in it-when it came to early bop, Diz was involved in everything-plus Don Byas on tenor; Oscar Pettiford playing really powerful bass; and Max Roach on drums. The pianist was an Italian-American guy not much older than me named George Wallington.
A couple of months later, when I was listening to a group led by an older clarinetist named Joe Marsala whose band played regularly at the Hickory House on the south side of 52nd, I couldn't help noticing someone familiar at the piano. It was George Wallington.
George was born Giacinto Figlia in Palermo, Sicily, on October 27, 1924. His parents immigrated to Atlantic City, New Jersey, when George was a little kid. He picked up the piano in roughly the same semi-accidental way I did, though he started much earlier in his life than I did. Before he was out of his teens, he was playing on 52nd Street with people like Dizzy and Bird. He wrote a couple of tunes that became modern jazz classics, Lemon Drop and Godchild. And he changed his name.
Almost immediately in my days and nights hanging out on the street, I connected with George and some other pianists. It was only natural since so many of them reminded me of myself. They were white pianists from the New York area, and they played bebop like it was the great love of their lives. They were just like me. But soon I began to notice that, beboppers though they all were, each guy's approach to his playing and improvising differed from the others.
Wallington was a very elegant guy in his looks, his clothes and his playing. He gave his piano lines a touch of flamboyance, which I thought of as an Italian characteristic. I compare him now with someone from the movies like Vittorio De Sica, a dark, handsome, charming guy who played the way he looked.
Joe Albany wasn't like that, even though he played the same kind of basic bebop piano with the same bands as George played with. Joe came out of the Atlantic City Italian community too, born there as Joe Albani in 1924 a few months before George. By Joe's teen years, he was in New York playing with Bird and Miles. He had a wonderful lyric sense at the piano as if he was reflecting an inner Puccini. I thought the lyricism made him more suited to playing with Lester Young than with Bird. But the sad story was that Joe's career pretty much stalled for years. It was booze and drugs that got to him, as they did to so many bebop musicians. Joe probably never achieved the things he might have been reaching for.
Al Haig was more intellectual than the other bebop pianists. He had a couple of years of seniority on everybody, born in 1922 in Newark, New Jersey. He had passed his twentieth birthday when he started playing with Bird and Diz. The older age gave him a touch of maturity, and he made himself a thinking man's bebop piano player. He liked to put things into boxes, an organized quality that made him appealing to the bebop leaders. For a long time, Al was first call on piano for Bird and Diz (unless, of course, Bud Powell was available, but Bud's own troubles with drugs and mental illness made him more often unavailable than available).
Pretty soon, I was having a coffee with the piano guys, most often with Haig and Wallington. We would walk over to the Nedicks at the corner of 52nd and Sixth. Nedick's was a chain specializing in hot dogs, waffle fries and orange juice. Wallington always ordered a tomato, just one tomato, which he would slice up very precisely before he ate it. The guy loved tomatoes.
I tended to be a gregarious kid, and to me, there wasn't anything unique about me hanging out with friends. But with Al and George, my purpose other than socializing was to learn. I asked questions and listened to their ideas about bebop, about chords and harmonies and tunes. I might have been a little pushy, but I was driven by ambition. I knew there were all kinds of Italian kids my age in Brooklyn who had terrific piano talent. Some might have even been better than me at that stage. A kid named Tony Rubato was a wonderful pianist, but the point was he didn't go anywhere, not in jazz. Maybe he was discouraged by his family who told him music was no place for a young Italian boy to make his living. He needed to get a "real job." Maybe that was what happened to Tony Rubato.
So far, nobody in my own family had warned me away from music. I kept on hanging out on 52nd Street.
Meanwhile, I was still at Fort Hamilton High, and I was playing the piano in every place where there was a piano. I played boogie woogie at school and in the social clubs for teenagers. I played boogie woogie because it brought the girls out to listen. Duke Ellington said there was always a beautiful girl at the end of the piano. In my experience as a kid, Duke didn't have it quite right. There were always beautiful girls at the end of the piano when I played boogie woogie. But when I played bebop, the beautiful girls drifted away.
I was getting a few paying jobs by then, mostly on weekends. The work came in neighbourhood halls and clubs, and it was almost always with a small group, just me, a saxophonist and a bass player. A drummer was added if the people behind the gig were really flush. The occasion was usually a dance, sometimes a small floor show, and the group played stock arrangements of whatever songs happened to be popular. Sometimes the pay was spectacular in terms of what a teenaged kid could expect to take home, as much as forty bucks for a weekend's work. Occasionally I worked a wedding. Musicians, especially guys who played saxophone, loved weddings. It wasn't necessarily the pay, which could be pretty good. It was more the food. When nobody was looking, the saxophone guys would fill their music cases with enough salami sandwiches to cover their lunches for the next week.
Most of the people I played with at these weddings and dances and clubs had very little talent for jazz and zero interest in bebop. They weren't at all like me in their musical ambitions. But I began to hear about people who felt the way I felt, especially about bebop. These were guys from New York's five boroughs and from New Jersey, people like Red Mitchell, the Jersey bass player; Clyde Lombardi from the Bronx, another bassist; Chuck Wayne, the guitarist from Staten Island; Davey Schildkraut, a Brooklyn alto saxophonist. Most of them tended to be two or three years older than me, and further along the path toward making a living in bebop, but the path they were on was the same one I was on. I heard stories about Chuck and Davey and all the other guys, and though I hadn't yet met them, I was certain the day we would get together wasn't far off. I turned out to be right about that.
I was so sure of myself in my teenage years. I didn't have a doubt in my mind about the importance of bebop and the future I'd have in the music. All the confidence was almost certainly the result of the way I'd been spoiled from the time I was a little kid by my parents and my brothers and sisters, by my uncles and by everybody else on my mother's side of the family. A guy who was treated like that could get filled with confidence before he probably deserved it. That was the case with me. I was already a legend in my own fourteen-year-old mind.
Right around the time I passed my fifteenth birthday in May 1943, I decided to get my membership card in the musicians' local union, number 802. With the card, I could work union jobs and earn more money. One day in June of that year, I went to the union offices on 48th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue for a test that would earn me the card. A union official took me into a room just off the office where union members went to pay their dues. The room had a piano. I sat at it, and the official put a piece of sheet music in front of me. It was a song I'd never heard of before.
"Play it, kid," he told me.
I looked the piece over, the piece I was now going to sight-read. It didn't look too difficult. Then, for my first mistake, I didn't bother to check the top left hand corner of the sheet music. That was where the key of the piece was printed. It read "A major." I confidently played the song in A minor.
The union guy didn't seem too bothered by that.
"Very good, kid," he said when I finished. "But you needa work on your reading."
"But did I pass?"
"Pay fifty bucks at the window outside," he said.
I got my union card. It was dated June 17, 1943.
But the guy who tested me had been right. I didn't read fast enough. Instead I depended on my memory. I knew I had to get my reading up to a speed that satisfied me. Even more essential, I had to get up to a speed that would satisfy the musicians I intended to work with.
I started to make trips to the Roseland Ballroom during the day. It was the place where musicians gathered on Tuesday and Friday mornings to pick up jobs. Band leaders, agents and union guys were there, looking for players to work on specific gigs. Maybe it would be a club date or maybe a night with Lester Lanin, the leader of the society orchestra that played long, smooth medleys of standard tunes. The whole deal at the Roseland added up to a sort of slave market for musicians, except this was a slave market where both masters and slaves made jokes and kidded around.
One morning at the Roseland, a Dixieland trombone player named Brad Gowans came up to me. He asked if I was a piano player. I told him yes, full of the usual bravado.
"My piano player, Dick Cary, the army just drafted him," Gowans said. "I need you at Nick's. Eight o'clock tonight."
Gowans wasn't kidding around. He was serious.
Nick's, a bastion of Dixieland, was on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village. I showed up, even though I had no experience whatsoever as a Dixieland player. The first thing that happened as I was arriving, I saw Pee Wee Russell, the legendary clarinet player, staggering across Seventh. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. People from Nick's rushed him inside and pumped coffee down his throat, hoping he'd sober up enough for the first set.
The next thing that dawned on me was that Brad Gowans was nowhere in sight. He had sent Lou McGarity to substitute. I shrugged, and looked over the band's play list for the night. I only knew two tunes, Lady Be Good and Body and Soul. The list was packed with titles like Big Butter and Egg Man. What kind of songs were these? Right then, I knew I might be in serious trouble.
Nick's itself had a strange physical arrangement. In front of the raised bandstand, there was a small space at floor level where some of the customers could sit. Beyond them, there was a slightly lowered pit area with three pianos in it and more space for customers beyond the pit. A guy was sitting at one of the pit's three pianos. He turned out to be a traditional jazz pianist named Cliff Jackson, and during intermissions, he would perform on one of the pianos.
The band I was to play with included Wild Bill Davison on cornet, the more or less sober Pee Wee Russell, Lou McGarity, Bob Casey on bass, and Tony Spargo on drums plus, on guitar, Eddie Condon, who slipped in after we got started. Before that happened, I explained to the others that I didn't know many of their tunes. Bob Casey said I shouldn't worry because he'd call out the changes for the tunes that were new to me.
So we began, and Casey called the chords. But they were the wrong chords. We got to Big Butter and Egg Man. Casey gave me the wrong chords again. It was deliberate, Casey's idea of a joke. He was going to show the kid bebop piano player what real music was. That resulted in me making strange off-key Stravinsky sounds in the middle of a Dixieland band. The other musicians enjoyed Casey's deception until finally the joke wore thin. That was when they kicked me off the bandstand and told me to take a seat at one of the pianos in the space where Cliff Jackson was sitting. Jackson, a nice man, sympathized with my predicament, and I sat through an intermission listening to him play. In the process, I learned some of the subtleties of his kind of traditional piano.
Then I went home.
I never got paid for the gig at Nick's. I figured I was owed six dollars for the half set I played. I wrote a letter of teenage outrage to Brad Gowans, asking for my six bucks. I never got an answer. Gowans probably pocketed the money.
But my Dixieland night wasn't a total waste. It at least brought pats on the back from two of my teachers at Fort Hamilton High. One was, of course, the music teacher, Mr. Ratner, who played in a Dixieland band on weekends, and the other was the history teacher who was a huge Dixieland fan. Both of them were very impressed that I'd played in a band with Pee Wee Russell. I didn't bother mentioning Pee Wee's problem with drinking or my problem with the play list.
Four or five months after the episode at Nick's, after the praise from my two teachers, I said goodbye to the teachers and to Fort Hamilton High. It was the late winter of 1944, and I told my mother I intended to quit school. Her answer went straight to the point.
"If you don't want to do the school work," she said, "get a job."
It wasn't so much a job I had in mind as a career. I was going to make my life playing music. I'm certain my mother understood that, and she didn't object. Neither did my brothers and sisters.
Why did they react differently than other Italian families in our neighbourhood? Why didn't my family say what the other families would say, that I should get "a real job?" The number one reason was that my family knew I was already earning good money on the dance and club gigs I picked up. Some weeks, I brought home more pay than my brothers-in-law (something that put their noses a little out of joint). It was just about guaranteed that I could pay my own way and give my mother enough to cover room and board.
As of that moment in 1944, I became a full-time piano player. Now I had to follow through on my higher ambition-to make myself a full-time jazz piano player. I was going to spend my whole life on the same musical high as I felt playing with Dizzy and Bird on the afternoon at the Spotlite on 52nd Street