The Mayor of MacDougal Street (3 page)

My first instrument, aside from those damn piano lessons, was a ukulele. This was the late 1940s, and Arthur Godfrey had tripped off a huge uke and Hawaiian music revival. There were still plenty of flappers and sheiks around, people who had grown up in the twenties and could chord a uke, so picking it up was pretty easy. I think the first thing I learned to play was “Cool Water.” I must have played that thing a hundred times a day just for the pleasure of hearing it come out right. (I suspect the pleasure was all mine.) Pretty soon, I had a whole repertoire of ukulele numbers: “Back in Nagasaki Where the Men Chew Tobacky and the Women Wicky Wacky Woo,” “I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack in Kealakakua, Hawaii,” and all that jive. I never got to be very good at it, because I could not develop a decent roll: you’re supposed to get a very tight series of up and down strokes with your right hand, so it comes out like a roll on the drum, and I could never do that.
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Still, by assiduous application I managed to acquire a reputation as the second-hottest twelve-year-old ukulele player in Richmond Hill.

That summer I also learned my first blues song. A friend of my mother’s whom I called Aunt Esther had moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio, and I was packed off to spend the summer vacation there. It was, without a doubt, the most agonizingly boring summer I have ever spent in my life. Shaker Heights was even worse than Richmond Hill, and I was going totally bonkers. Then one afternoon I was sitting around the living room doing what twelve-year-old boys do best: sulking. In a desultory way, I
was thumbing through a book that my aunt’s upwardly mobile family kept by the piano,
The Fireside Book of Folk Songs
, and my eyes lit on this song that just totally blew me away. It was called “St. James Infirmary.” I had to learn that song. Since my music-reading skills were minimal at best, I put the arm on my upwardly mobile cousin, who was studying piano at the time, and made him plunk his way through the piece, over and over, until I had learned the chords and the melody. That became my project for the summer, and it really saved my bacon. By the time I got back to Queens, I was playing the funkiest ukulele version of “St. James Infirmary” you ever heard.

Shortly, I got together with some of the local kids and we started a quartet. We called ourselves the Harmonotes, and on school-day mornings we would walk together as far as the “el” station, singing all the way. My mother had already taught me to sing harmony, starting me out on “Now Is the Hour,” which had been a hit for Gracie Fields somewhere back in the twelfth century. It was simple harmony, a pretty tune, and a good place to start. Anyway, Tommy McNiff, John Banninger, Bob Linder, and I would get together for rehearsals a few times a week. We had no lack of models: the Four Aces, the Sons of the Pioneers, the Mills Brothers, and of course the Weavers, who were a big phenom right then. I did not think of the Weavers as folk singers especially—they were just another pop group with interesting harmonies. (Incidentally, I do not understand why the Weavers have received so little attention for their abilities as musicians and arrangers. The harmony in “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” is a perfect combination of simplicity and inventiveness, not to mention the part singing in “Tzena, Tzena” and Pete Seeger’s marvelous Zulu yodeling in “Wimoweh.”) Tommy McNiff didn’t like the Weavers, and I didn’t like the Four Aces, so we compromised and sang both, along with the hits of the big radio stars, people like Eddie Fisher and Patti Paige: “’Twas just a garden in the rain . . . ”

We also loved barbershop quartet stuff, and for that we had the Mariners and the Chordettes, both from the Arthur Godfrey radio show. We were singing all kinds of chords and intervals—diminisheds, augmenteds, ninths, thirteenths—without having the foggiest idea what they were, and I picked up a lot of seat-of-the-pants knowledge from that kind of material. For the rest of my life I continued to use those big
fat barbershop chords, especially when I was working out voicings for guitar arrangements.

We only had one gig, a Christmas party at a German fraternal hall in Ridgewood, Brooklyn. Our pay was all the beer we could drink—I suppose they figured, How much beer can a fourteen-year-old kid drink? I do not recall the answer to that, but I am told that they carried me home like a Yule log.

It was around this time that I expanded my instrumental skills to include a guitar. I acquired my first in a schoolyard swap, one of those perfect deals where both parties emerge feeling like successful thieves: in exchange for a pile of
Captain Marvel
comics, Conrad Fehling traded me a battered blond Kay orchestral arch-top. I forthwith removed two strings so I could play it like a ukulele, but the two unused tuning pegs rattled and clanked like Marley’s ghost, so over the next few months I added a fifth and finally the sixth string. Then, with the help of a Mel Bay instruction book, I set out to prove Segovia’s dictum that the guitar is the easiest instrument in the world to play badly.

By then my mother and I had our own apartment, and she would go to work every morning, leaving me to play hookey. I took the instruction book—it was called something like
Five Million Chords for the Guitar
—and made huge copies of the chord charts and tacked them to the ceiling above my bed. Then I would lie in bed all day and practice the changes. Of course, I didn’t know what to
do
with them—there you are, you can barely use three chords, and suddenly you’re playing an F sharp demented thirteenth, and you don’t have the faintest idea where to put it—but it sounded kind of weird and nice. I would lie there and practice going from one chord to another at random, when I was supposed to be in school, and that experience helped kick off a personal philosophy: “If it can’t be done in bed, it’s not worth doing.”

That was coming along fine, though one day a fellow truant came over to hang out and he didn’t notice the guitar lying on the bed, and he flopped down on it, splitting the top from guzzle to zatch. I went calmly insane, picked the guitar up by the neck, and broke the bottom over his head—one of the most satisfying things I have ever done. Then I went out and cadged a beat-up old Harmony from someone. I was a bad kid.

I was also a klutzy kid. I was big for my age and always tripping over my own feet, and to exacerbate the problem, I had been born left-handed, and somewhere along the line a well-meaning “aunt” had decided I should be changed to a rightie. To effect this change, she enforced a form of homemade conditioned reflex therapy, based on the Pavlovian system of rewards and punishments. The punishment consisted of a whack upside the head. The reward was the absence of a whack upside the head.

This was very effective, and as a result manual skills have never come easily to me, which proved to be something of a problem when I decided to be a guitar player. My left hand could handle the chords just fine, but getting my right hand to do what I wanted it to do always required a lot of effort. Years later, my wife Terri was talking to Barry Kornfeld, who is one of the best guitarists I’ve ever known, and she said, “Barry, Dave is such a klutz that he can barely tie his shoes. How is it that he can play the guitar?” Barry made a wise face, stroked his beard, and said, “It is one of the mysteries of the industry.” And indeed it is. I think quickly, musically. When I click into a piece—not when I’m just potchkeying around with it, but when I really get into it and find the groove—I know where everything should be, I understand what the structure should be, measure by measure. But getting my goddamn hands to do it is really a brute, and I had to accept the fact pretty early on that I was never going to be a superchops guitarist.

Even while I was fooling around with barbershop and pop songs, I had never stopped listening to and loving jazz. I wanted to play it, but there was nobody around that I could pick it up from, the way I had the other music. Finally, I realized I would have to bite the bullet and take some guitar lessons. There were not a lot of jazz guitarists teaching in Richmond Hill, so at first I wasted some time studying with a local hamfat who tried to teach me stuff like “Oh Mein Papa” and “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Then I got lucky, and somehow found out about Jack Norton.

Jack, or “the Old Man,” as we used to call him, had played in the Jean Goldkette band and known Bix Beiderbeck and Eddie Lang. He taught most of the band instruments, including some he didn’t even play, but he played guitar, drums, and all the reeds. He even played flute—he would say, “Well, it’s just a question of embouchure; the fingering is the same as saxophone or clarinet.” And he also taught trumpet and trombone quite
effectively. In fact, I wanted to study trumpet with him, but he took one look at my teeth and said that too much air would escape and I would never be able to get a commanding tone.

Jack’s apartment was in Briarwood, Queens, and he used to hold court and teach on Saturday mornings and afternoons. A bunch of us kids would spend every Saturday there. We would sit in the living room playing records, arguing, trading licks, and generally horsing around while we waited for our turn in the studio with the Old Man. We were all jazz nuts, and very opinionated, a sort of Austin High Gang manqué. After the last lesson was given, there would be a big mess of spaghetti and meatballs cooked up by Norton’s friend Arlene. She was a big, blowzy redhead, very hip, and we were all sure she had “a past.”

Jack showed me some of the fingerings I would continue to use for the rest of my life. He was of the old orchestral jazz school, the musicians who played nonamplified rhythm guitar in the big bands: “Six notes to a chord, four chords to the bar, no cheating,” as Freddie Green used to say. And he also would sometimes use wraparound thumb bar chords and things like that, which had dropped out of the jazz world when more classical guitar techniques came in.

Along with the basic instrumental skills, Jack taught us something far more important: how to listen. He saw musical phrases as sentences, with pauses, parentheses, asides, and raised or lowered dynamics for emphasis, and he heard the silences as much as the notes. He would sit his students down, put on a Duke Ellington or a Joe Venuti-Eddie Lang record, and analyze it with us. Or we would play “Name That Musician.” He would play a record without saying who it was and then ask, “Who was that on tenor?” This was not just some kind of parlor game. Though he never put it in those terms, it was ear training. He was making us listen, and after a while, if you really paid attention, you got so you could at least make a pretty good guess as to who was playing every instrument. There are people you can’t fool, people who can tell you, “No, that’s not Ben Webster, that’s Coleman Hawkins,” or “That’s not Pres, that’s Paul Quinichette,” and be right every time, and to do that, you can’t just groove with the music. You have to listen with a focus and an intensity that normal people never use. But we weren’t normal people, we were musicians. To be a musician requires a qualitatively different kind of listening, and that is what he was teaching us.

He used to play tricks on us. I remember one time he put on a Count Basie record, and it was one of those arrangements with a recurring theme, a riff going on and it builds and builds and builds. By about the third chorus it was raising the roof, and Jack said, “Watch what the rhythm section’s doing during that chorus.”

Two or three of us said, “Well, they’ve sped up a little, haven’t they?”

He said, “Let’s set a metronome and see.”

So we backed up a couple of choruses, set the metronome so that it was keeping the same time as the band, and listened to what happened. It turned out that we were right in a way, because the tempo did change. By that chorus the rhythm section had slowed down slightly—just a little, but you could tell from the metronome. So it was just the opposite of what we had thought: the tempo had slowed, and that was creating this fantastic tension.

That was a real education, and I have spent the rest of my life working with what I learned on those Saturday afternoons at Jack’s place. These days, I probably couldn’t tell you which one is Ben Webster and which one is Coleman Hawkins, but I used to could, and it would just take a few months of careful listening before I could do it again. I moved on to other things and did not need that particular skill anymore, so it was no longer important to me. But what has remained important, and what I use all the time, is that I learned how to listen.

Another thing I learned from Jack was that I needed to think like an arranger. I got in the habit of listening to the whole arrangement, not just what the guitarist was playing or what the singer was doing. Without that training and what I learned hanging out with other jazz musicians and would-be jazz musicians, all my other musical experiences would not really mean much. For the rest of my life, I continued to use things I learned from Jelly Roll Morton, from Duke Ellington, and from some of the stride piano players: James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie “the Lion” Smith. That was my foundation, and it prepared me for all the music I would learn later from people like Leadbelly, Josh White, Scrapper Blackwell, and Furry Lewis, all of whom were marvelous arrangers. Jack taught me that less is more. Like Jimmy Yancey. Never use two notes when one will do. Never use one note when silence will do. The essence of music is punctuated silence.

Around this same time, I made another life-changing discovery: I found that just a subway ride away, there was a bigger world than Queens, or even Brooklyn.

Through my musical interests, I had acquired a sort-of girlfriend named Cindy, and she had a friend named Rochelle. Rochelle Weissman was hip. She was cool. She was an older woman (sixteen), and she knew all about something called folk music. Every Sunday afternoon she would haul her beloved Favilla—a flat-top, nylon-string guitar, the farthest thing possible from my big band arch-top—down to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where the folk foregathered to raise their voices in song. “So,” she asked me one afternoon, “would you like to come over with me some Sunday?”