Back in New York after a couple of months with Buddy's big band, I did two things on more or less my own initiative. I organized a rehearsal band, and I played solo piano at the Three Deuces. Both gave me steps forward in my playing and writing, though neither was exactly a major money-maker.
The rehearsal band met at my house on Monday nights. Monday was off night for musicians, and everybody who wasn't on the road came to 76th Street in Brooklyn. My mother-and later Patsy-made coffee and served crumb cake from Newman's Bakery. The crumb cake, if you didn't eat it fast, turned into something with the consistency of concrete. With time out only for the coffee and cake breaks, we played music in the basement where I had an upright piano (not my precious Weber, which was on the first floor).
The musicians were almost one hundred percent young New York guys who were into bebop. Warne Marsh and Allen Eager, the tenor saxophonists, often turned up, Jimmy Chapin or Billy Exiner played drums, Tony Fruscella and John Carisi were the trumpet players, Chauncy Welsh was on trombone (he was later the guy playing the beautiful trombone on the Linda Ronstadt recordings with Nelson Riddle), Red Mitchell or Joe Shulman on bass, Danny Bank on different reeds. These guys were regulars, and so were several others. Not the same guys showed up every Monday, but we always had pretty good attendance, and the charts we played were from top guys. John Carisi wrote arrangements for us. So did Johnny Mandel. And so did I. It was a great chance for me to listen to what I otherwise heard only in my own head. It was humbling and thrilling to hear good musicians play my ideas.
My mother found the experience baffling, all these musicians in her basement till the sun came up. She knew the guys talked in jazz slang, and she tried to get a grip on it. She understood that musicians had a name for their instruments, but she didn't have it quite right.
"Oh," she'd say to a guy arriving with his horn under his arm, "I see you brought your saw."
Axe, ma. A musical instrument is an axe.
One time Danny Bank came through the door wearing a gorgeous new topcoat.
My mother complimented him on it.
"Thanks," Danny said. "It is pretty cool, isn't it."
"Oh, I'm surprised at that," my mother said. "It looks very warm"
Sometimes people dropped by just to listen. George Shearing was one of them, the guy who would later borrow the guitar-piano phrasing Chuck Wayne and I developed. Joe Guastafesta came over a couple of times, the bass player who never changed his name. He liked listening to Red Mitchell, and it wasn't long after his visits that he left for New Orleans to begin his great career as a symphonic bassist. Another time, a neighbour walked in, and stood there the whole night just taking in the music. What made his appearance a little odd was the neighbour's occupation. He worked as a narc, a drug cop. Maybe he felt disappointed that none of the guys were smoking dope. Or maybe he was just a music lover, not thinking about drugs at all that night.
The Monday night sessions lasted for four or five years off and on. Sometimes I was out of town or sometimes we all took a holiday with the result in both cases that there were Monday nights when silence reigned at my house. But the sessions were always great occasions, something I remember with tremendous affection. It wasn't just the music; the general camaraderie among all the guys counted for a lot too. Between tunes, we used to talk about which people we'd heard who could really play and which people who couldn't play a lick. We were very opinionated. You might say we could still be snot-nosed little kids at times.
But I still have good memories and images from those nights. I'll always remember the sight of Red Mitchell leaving the house at five-thirty in the morning. Red had developed a little wheel gizmo that he attached to the bottom of the bass enabling him to push his instrument along the sidewalk. As the sun started to come up on my street, I watched from the door while Red wheeled his bass alongside my neighbours who were just leaving for work with lunch pails in their hands.
As for the music from the basement sessions, a little of it survives on a tape we made one night. This session was issued on a Japanese CD decades later. The sound is surprisingly good for such primitive recording conditions; it's so clear that at one point Patsy's voice comes through telling everybody the coffee's ready. What's harder to hear is the sound of Patsy playing a little of Billy Exiner's brushes on one track. Patsy's time was perfect.
The record's personnel varied a little on different tracks, but I was on all the tunes. So was Joe Shulman on bass, and Billy was the drummer on most tracks. Two excellent alto players, Charlie Kennedy and Hal McKusick, took solos. But the number one guy on all nine tracks was Tony Fruscella.
Tony was a beautiful trumpet player with a lovely tone, and he blew like an angel on the recording. But poor Tony led a tortured life. His parents died when he was a little kid and he grew up in an orphanage. He played in bands led by great people-Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan-and he married Morgana King who was an excellent singer and part-time actress (she played Marlon Brando's wife in The Godfather). Still, Tony had his demons. He drank too much, and then he got into heroin.
Tony and Morgana lived in the Radio Center Hotel on 48th Street in Manhattan. Many jazz musicians made the hotel their home, guys like Gerry Mulligan, Red Kelly, Red Mitchell and Jimmy Chapin, the drummer. Some of the musicians in the place turned into terrible junkies, and I saw enough of syringes and of people shooting up to put me off the thought of drugs for my whole life. Guys like Mulligan and Chapin came through the experience of Radio Center perfectly intact. Chapin's father was the famous artist, James Chapin, who did a number of TIME magazine covers; I still have a framed copy of the older Chapin's portrait of the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak hanging in my office. And one of Jimmy's sons was the very successful folk singer, Harry Chapin. Jimmy himself made a lot of money writing two instructional books for modern drummers, books that people like Art Blakey and Max Roach swore by.
So Jimmy and lots of other Radio Center residents were okay, but Tony Fruscella inflicted too much punishment on himself. Tony died of cirrhosis of the liver when he was only forty-two. I'm just glad that he left behind a few records, and that the CD from the basement at my house was one of them.
I recognized that a problem of mine as a kid piano player involved my left hand. I couldn't develop one. The bass players wouldn't let me. This wasn't exclusively my problem. Every bebop piano player had the same dilemma with bass players. The minute I, or any of the other pianists, played something rhythmic with the left hand, the bassist would say, "Hey, you're playing my part, man." The bassist would threaten to walk out if I didn't quit with the rhythm stuff. "Man," he'd say, "I'm gone if you keep doing that." And some bass players literally deserted the bandstand, leaving me alone up there.
In an odd way, that worked to my advantage on one significant occasion. On this night I'm talking about, I was stranded on the bandstand at the Three Deuces all by myself, no bass player to provide the rhythm when the guy I was working with left in a huff. I kept on playing, doing marvelous things with the right hand and carrying the rhythm in at least an adequate way with the left. It happened that the two men who ran the club, Sammy Kay and Irving Alexander, heard me and were impressed. They asked me if I wanted to come in on Monday nights and play solo piano. I knew I'd have to forget about the rehearsal band at my house for the length of time the solo job lasted, but I couldn't turn down the chance at such a valuable experience.
The second or third Monday on the solo job, who walked into the Deuces? None other than the greatest solo pianist of all time, the inimitable Art Tatum. I was playing the piano all by myself, and Tatum brushed past me on his way to the john. Then he came back to the table where he was drinking, and while this was going on, I was having an experience where a light bulb went on in my head. The light bulb was telling me that I had to learn a few things about playing the whole piano the way Art Tatum did.
I was hardly going to turn myself into a replica of Tatum, but I wanted to approach the entire piano the way he did. I had to teach myself how to keep time by myself and how to swing by myself. Playing with a bass and drums, I might sound as if I was swinging like crazy, but playing alone was another story. I sat there that night when Art Tatum was listening to me, and knew I had a lot of learning to do. The Tatum night was a kind of signal to get on with the business of playing good all-round solo piano.
On another night at the Deuces of a completely different sort, Thelonious Monk came by. This happened during a period when I played intermission piano, still solo, for the whole week, performing while the band that was the week's feature attraction took a break. Monk, whose band was the feature that week, got into a conversation with me. I told him I loved a new tune of his. I heard him play it with his group in the club, but I wasn't sure of its title. I hummed a little of it.
"Oh, that tune," Monk said. "I call it Why Do You Evade The Facts?"
"Interesting title," I said. "Great tune."
Next night, Monk was back in the club with a gift for me. It was the sheet music for Why Do You Evade The Facts? He had written it out in his own hand. To me, to any pianist as lucky as I was that night, this was a gift to be valued, and I thanked Monk profoundly.
Some time in the next year or so, the alto player Hal McKusick found out I had the Monk tune in manuscript and asked to borrow it. I obliged. But after a few months had gone by, I wanted Hal to bring it back. He said he was sorry but Joe Albany had dropped into his house, and when Joe left, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Joe must have taken it with him. I knew it was useless to go after Joe. He was in his junkie phase, and there was no trusting a heroin addict with someone else's property.
What really bothered me was my discovery that Monk had made a big hit with the tune I knew as Why Do You Evade The Facts? He'd changed the song's title to Monk's Mood, and recorded it more than once under the new name. Monk's Mood had become a staple in his repertoire. A lot of other musicians recorded it and played it in clubs. It was not just a very nice jazz tune; it was also a very popular jazz tune. And I had let the priceless manuscript of Monk's Mood, done by the composer himself, slip out of my hands!
In the fall of 1993, I got a hint of where the manuscript might have gone. For a couple of days that September, I was a guest on Phil Schapp's jazz radio program on WNYC in New York City. Phil was as knowledgeable about jazz history as anyone I've ever met, and when I told him, on air, the story of my adventure with Monk and Monk's Mood, he pronounced himself certain that the manuscript has fallen into Dean Benedetti's possession. Benedetti was an alto saxophone player who was best known as the guy who obsessively followed Charlie Parker from club to club in the late 1940s, taping his performances every night. He collected other jazz memorabilia too, and Schapp was aware that Benedetti at one time claimed to own a copy of Why Do You Evade The Facts? Benedetti's manuscript may well have been mine. That made sense since Benedetti knew Joe Albany, and both were addicted to heroin. Junkies hung out together. At the time Schapp revealed all of this, it was too late to go after Benedetti because he died of something terrible called myarthenia gravis way back in 1957.
So where did Schapp think the Monk handwritten copy of Why Do You Evade The Facts? had ended up.
"It's in Jimmy Knepper's attic," Phil said on air, his voice ringing with certainty.
Knepper was a terrific trombone player and had been a pal of Benedetti's from the time they were kid musicians in Los Angeles through to Benedetti's early years in New York when he taped Bird so feverishly. It seemed more than possible that Knepper had come into all of Benedetti's possessions including my manuscript without really knowing what he had. Jimmy lived on Staten Island at the time I was talking to Phil Schapp. But I lived hundreds of miles away in Toronto, and I never got around to contacting Jimmy. Then he died in 2003. And I lost that thread in the search for the Monk copy of Why Do You Evade The Facts?
I would love to have the manuscript today, and I regretted losing it. On the other hand I was the knucklehead who let it go to Hal McKusick in the first place. If I learned a lesson, it was that I should never allow a precious masterpiece to slip out of my own mitts.