This is a recent post, about a band I helped form and played in when I was in upstate New York in the mid-1980s. the New African Music Collective (NAMC). We opened for Dizzy Gillespie in 1984.
This post is from roughly the same era as the NAMC post, when I was living in upstate New York in Troy. But it’s about very different music, the Sage City Symphony in Bennington, Vermont (just across the border).
It was 1982 or ‘83, perhaps ‘81 or ‘84, I don’t remember exactly. I had gone to Daisey Baker’s, a restaurant in downtown Troy, New York, with Margaret, my best friend’s girlfriend. She knew Don Dworkin, leader of Doc Scanlan Rhythm Boys, a local swing era jazz group. She introduced me to him and he invited me to sit in on a tune, “Sunny Side of the Street.” As I was taking my solo I noticed a group of RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) administrators sitting at a front-row table. I recognized the VP for Student Affairs, whose name I forget, one or three others, and most especially Eddie Knowles, Assistant Dean for Minority Affairs.
Eddie had toured with Gil Scott-Heron for seven years as a percussionist. After my solo I went over to their table and introduced myself. He seemed a bit surprised that I recognized him. It’s not as though having played with Scott-Heron was a secret identity, but I suppose that it’s been awhile since people thought of him in that context. Now he was a university administrator. Anyhow, he introduced me to his fiancé, Druis Beasley; we chatted a bit, and I returned to Margaret, which, BTW, is what she called herself. Not “Peggy.”
Dance Class
Anyhow, as they were leaving, Ade came over to me and said that he was playing drums for a class in African dance that Druis was teaching. Would I like to join him? Yes.
At least that’s how I think it went. But maybe he and Druis made the invitation while I was chatting with them at their table. I don’t really remember. What I actually remember is: me and my trumpet, Margaret, Daisy Baker’s, “Sunny Side of the Street,” Eddie with RPI administrators at a table, introduction, chatting, invite. I’m just trying to turn that into a plausible sequence of events.
A couple of days, a week, later I showed up at the class. There was Druis, in a leotard? a half-dozen to a dozen dancers, and Eddie. He had a conga drum, a djembe, some cowbells, perhaps claves, and perhaps a shekere (a West African instrument made from a large hollowed-out gourd covered with beads in a loosely strung netting). That is to say, that is likely what he had. Congas and djembes for sure, the rest is highly plausible conjecture. I had my trumpet and flugelhorn.
Druis would tell Eddie what she had in mind, he would play a rhythm on either the conga or the djembe, Druis would lead the students in some dance move, and I would play my trumpet or flugelhorn, whichever seemed appropriate for the rhythm. No one told me what to play. They assumed that I’d know what to do. Which I did. Not that I’d ever done this particular thing. I hadn’t, but I’d played a lot of music, and listened to a lot; I was an experienced improvisor. I could handle it.
Surprisingly well, considering. Yes, Ade played African and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and I played jazz, which has African roots. But the rhythm is not the same. The basic pulse, the groove, is different. The patterns you play over it are different. I couldn’t just take my jazz chops and lay them on those African rhythms.
African rhythm is polyrhythmic, based on multiple interlocking rhythmic phrases. Afro-Cuban rhythm is based on a rhythm called the clave, which consists of five beats in a fixed pattern, but they’re not equally spaced. Depending on the particular dance – for these are fundamentally dance rhythms – various other interlocking phrases will be repeated by other percussion (congas, bongos, timbales, bells, whatever) over and with the clave. In contrast, Western rhythm is monometric, based on a single regularly recurring pulse, generally in groups of four (e.g. marches) or three (e.g. the waltz). More complex patterns are created through either adding beats together or dividing them in two or four, and sometimes three. Jazz rhythms reflect a negotiation between the two systems. I was trained in “legit” music and in jazz. Afro-Cuban rhythm was new to me.
But by no means completely new. I had some Latin (e.g. Afro-Cuban, Salsa) records which I listened to and enjoyed a great deal. I’d play along with them. I’m thinking particularly of Eddie Palmieri’s Lacumi, Macumba, Voodoo, with the legendary Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros on trumpet. I hear it now, “Colombia Te Canto,” the drums, Palmieri’s percussive piano figures, and Chocolate floating over the time. I had to be Chocolate with Eddie, Druis, and her students. We worked well together. I particularly remember playing flugelhorn over a samba rhythm. Liquid.
We Form a Band
So we did that a couple, three, four, half-dozen times, I don’t know exactly, and we decide to form a group, Eddie, Druis, and me. We called ourselves the Afro-Eurasian Connection (AEC). Eddie on drums, bells, and other percussion; Druis on vocals, bells, and other percussion; me on trumpet, flugelhorn, occasionally bells and other percussion. We were the core. Druis also took on the all-important function of fronting the group, introducing the tunes, chatting with the audience. Her sister Fonda would come up from New York City on a regular basis and join Druis on vocals, and bells and other percussion. Also Eddie’s old compatriot Kehinde Donaldson on dundun, and other percussion.
From left to right: Fonda Beasley (holding a shekere), me, Eddie Knowles (congas), Druis Beasley (balafon)
We had to create a repertoire. Percussion, vocals, and trumpet is not a standard musical format. There is no standard repertoire for it. We adapted songs: Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue,” Druis sang the lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr.) in a rich, full alto (and I played high harmony on flugelhorn, Eddie on percussion; “Signifying Monkey” (Oscar Brown’s version), with Druis on vocal, me on balafone, and Eddie on Percussion; “Wade in the Water” (traditional), Druis on vocal, Eddie on slit drum, me on muted trumpet. And so forth. And of course we created our own stuff.
We played various local and regional gigs: a cultural fair in downtown Troy, some pep rally at RPI, a student union gig at Alfred University in Western New York. I had to drive the van because the others were worried about being pulled over for DWB (driving while black; it happens). We played a party that RPI put together to showcase local (RPI) talent on the side. As we played one tune the hall went stone cold silent. A local arts center asked us to put on a program. Gave us a month. Eddie was busy at work, so Druis and I had to put it together.
I'm thinking a lot about basics these days. So it's time to bump this to the top of the queue. It's about how I got started improvising.
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I was improvising before I’d learned the word, but I wasn’t systematic about it until years later. I suppose for a time the word had a bit of a mystique about it, as it does for many. After all, the norm in Western musical practice has been to read music that someone else, the composer, had written. The composer is the authority; you are a mere conduit; and improvising, where you (shudder) make it up yourself, that’s VERY mysterious.
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You mean, no notes in front of you. Just make it up?
Yes.
And it comes out OK?
Sometimes, sometimes not. It depends.
Isn’t that very brave and dangerous?
No. Do you speak from a script?
No.
Well then, there you have it. Don't need a script for music either.
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I started taking music lessons when I was ten years old. I was taught to read music, and only to read music. So that’s what I did. But at some point, I forget just when, I decided I wanted to play simple tunes that weren’t in lessons. And so I decided, well, I’ll just have to figure out how to do it. I do remember that, when I was in sixth grade, I was particularly taken with the theme song to a series that played on Walt Disney’s Sunday night TV show. I forget the name of the series, but it was about mountain men and the song had wistful lyrics about living in the mountains.
I decided to figure it out. I had a spiral-bound book of music paper and used that to write out the tune. I didn’t bother with the rhythm, just the pitches. I picked a pitch to start with and wrote it down. And then I figured out each subsequent pitch in the melody. How’d I do that? Trial and error. I’d play what I’d figured out so far and then make a guess at the next note or two or three, whatever. If it sounded OK, I wrote the pitch down. If not, I tried other notes until I found the right one.
I have no specific recollection of the process, nor of how long it took me. Half an hour, and hour? Did I do it in one session, two, three? Don’t recall. All I recall is that I did it and that I remember that tune to this day, almost six decades later.
A couple of years later, after I’d joined the marching band (see Leapin’ Lizards: Three Lessons from Marching Band), I’d make up my own march tunes while practicing. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. I would place march-like melodies that I made up myself. Just how long they were, or how they were structures, I have no recollection. Nor do I know whether or not I would continue one line of musical thought from one practice session to another. Nor, for that matter, do I know how much time I devoted to this activity, as opposed to practicing the assigned lesson material. All I know is that I did it. I was playing music based on what I thought up, on what I heard in my mind’s ear, not based on written notes in front of me.
At the same time I had begun to work on Rafael Mendez trumpet solos. What he played on the recording was sometimes different from what was written in sheet music. So I figured out what I heard on the recording and played that, noting specifically how it differed from what was written down.
The point is simply that I was learning to rely on my ear. Which makes sense, when you think about it, because music is for the ear, no? Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all improvised, didn’t they? So why did improvisation disappear from classical music during the 19th century?
I digress.
When I was in high school I played in the stage band – that’s what they called a big band, just why that name was used, I don’t know. I played the second trumpet part; Jerry Horner played first. One of the tunes in our repertoire was Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme”. There was a trumpet solo in the 2nd trumpet part. I had a choice: 1) I could play the solo that was written into the part or, 2) I could improvise a solo over the chord changes, which were also written into the part. I chose a third alternative: I composed my own solo. Just how I went about that, I do not recall. But I had enough skill on the piano that I could pick out the chord progression. Who knows, maybe I played chords with the left hand, trumpet with the right; and wrote the notes down.
All that’s just detail and it doesn’t matter. I was now making up my own music, if only in small ways. I’m sure I spent time making up my own little tunes and I certainly worked out tunes that I heard and liked. But it would be several years before I got serious about improvisation.
I played in both marching band and concert band in my first year at Johns Hopkins, but then I put the trumpet away for two or three years. Why? Don’t know. I forget whether it was in my senior year or my first year of graduate school (still at Hopkins) that I got the trumpet out, got back in shape, and joined the concert band. Whenever it was, 1969 or 70, one day after rehearsal a couple of guys approached me about playing in a rock-and-roll band they had performed. The band was modeled after Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago (aka Chicago Transit Authority) and they needed a trumpeter.
I have no idea just why they approached me. I certainly didn’t have any kind of reputation that I was aware of. I mean, what kind of reputation could I have possibly had? But sure, why not? They had songs by both BS&T and Chicago in the repertoire; the horn parts had been written out. All I needed to do was play the parts. But I didn’t have any intention of becoming a soloist, like BS&T’s Lew Soloff.
Then, one day in rehearsal, before we’d ever played a gig, we were working on “For What It’s Worth” (as I recall), not a horn-band tune, but one of the guys had likely written some simple horn lines. We’d played through the vocal part and were just riffing at the end, maybe the guitarist was soloing, I don’t recall. I started playing simple trumpet riffs that I intended as back-up figures. The guys liked it and maybe I started going beyond just back-up riffs. And so I’d slipped into playing a trumpet solo. Through the back door as it were. On the sly.
For all I can remember, we decided that, yes, there’d be a trumpet solo at the end of “For What It’s Worth.” And we made room for trumpet solos in other tunes as well. It turns out that I was pretty good. It was a rock and roll band, so of course the guitarist had his solos, as did the keyboard player, and the two other horn players as well, a trombonist and a sax player who doubled on flute. I played with the band, St. Matthew Passion, for about two years before the band broke up, as most of the guys were leaving Hopkins.
It was a great experience. Our first gig was at a party thrown by one of the political science faculty. He had a row house near campus and we played in his basement.
The gig was glorious. I still have vague visual and even kinetic memories of it. But mostly what I remember is how very much fun it was. We had a great time playing and the people had a great time dancing to our music – the two things go together, of course.
You want to know what life’s about? Well life’s about many things and I’m not going to say it’s a party. But a good party, a GREAT party, that’s nothing to sneeze at. It’s something you remember for a long long time. I don’t remember most of the gigs we played, but that one I remember, not in specific detail, just the glorious fun.
I also wrote some arrangements for the band, “A Lighter Shade of Pale” (Procul Harum), “Something” and “Hey Jude” (The Beatles). But mostly I worked on playing kick-ass solos. Since we were a ‘cover band’–that is, we covered music by other bands rather than writing our own–I had records of all the tunes where I had solos. I’d practice soloing along with those tunes. But I’d also play along with anything I liked, and certainly along with jazz records. I believe this is when I bought some Jamey Aeberold play-along-records. The record had rhythm section parts for jazz tunes. You would then play the melody at the beginning and the end and improvise solos to the rest.
But perhaps the single most valuable thing I did was to play wild. I’d become interested in avant-garde jazz, where there were no set melodies, no chord progressions, and often no set pulse either. You just played whatever you felt like playing. No rules.
It’s harder to do than you’d think. You’d think that, with no rules, with anything goes, it would be easy-peasy. In the abstract, yes. Concretely, no. You’ve got to remember that you’re playing the instrument with your body. And the easiest thing to do is to play patterns you’ve already got under your fingers. That tends toward boredom pretty quickly. The fact of the matter is that in order to play wildass shit that sounds weird and perhaps even wonderful, you have to think.
The fact that there are no preset rules doesn’t mean that there are no rules. It’s just that the rules arise in the context of playing. You have to discover them, and go with them.
If you do it right, if you really work at blowing wildass shit, and listen to what comes out of the horn – that’s so important, listen listen listen – what you’ll discover is that this wildass stuff begins to make sense. It no longer sounds so wild. You’re working the territory, discovering the order. As the noise begins to make sense, you have to work outward to the nonsense, thereby expanding your reach. The nonsense will, in time, make sense. Then it’s time for more nonsense.
Perhaps it isn’t quite like that. That makes the process sound a bit too pat. But something like that is definitely true. Go wild, and listen.
At the same time, of course, you’re working on chord progressions and scales and all that standard stuff. But always work at keeping something wild happening. It’s the growing tip.
Anyhow, that’s what I was doing while playing with St. Matthew Passion. Our last gig was particularly memorable. One of the tunes we played was “She’s Not There”, originally recorded by The Zombies, but we likely were more influenced by Vanilla Fudge, a psychedelic band:
We were not even remotely like Vanilla Fudge. But we had our devices. In our arrangement the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out (the wildass shit I was just talking about) and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player. The trombonist couldn't make it. The sax and I started our improv. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. Cosmic consciousness? Who knows, but that’s just words. The experience itself was beyond, words, beyond BEYOND.
It felt good.
I tensed up.
It was over.
After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it — “that was nice” — enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been. Did he know what had happened? Or, if not ‘know’ exactly, did he sense a special magic in the performance? I ask because performers and audience often have a very different ‘sense’ of the same performance. Perhaps the guy was just complimenting us on our ‘freak-out’ chops, not on any magic in the music.
And that was it, St. Matthew Passion’s last gig. Our first gig had been a joy forever and our last, for me it was something else forever. I had glimpsed a truth. A profound truth? Maybe yes, maybe no. Who knows. But a truth.
I was in my middle twenties, still at Johns Hopkins. I was now confident in my ability to improvise, to make up compelling music on the spot. But it wasn’t until I went to SUNY Buffalo (State University of New York at Buffalo) that I really came to terms with jazz improvisation. But that story will have to wait, though I’ve already told much of it in this post about Frank Foster. Frank had played and arranged with Count Basie in the late 1950s and then went on to work with the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Elvin Jones. He was a superb jazz musician, one who’d worked with the acknowledged masters, the prime inventors of the music.
Bumped to the top of the queue in honor of Dylan's 80th birthday.
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I'd originally posted this on April 3, 2011. Last night, April 14, 2018, I attended Howard's jam, again. And we played “Knocking on Heaven's Door", just like we had that time almost 20 years ago that I wrote up in my book. Another good version. Some of the same people were there, I'm sure. And some new ones. A good time was had by all. [Just so we're clear on this, the following video is not from Howard's birthday jam.]
Last night was Howard’s Annual Jam and Birthday Bash. He’s been doing this for twenty-five years, though I’ve only been going for about ten or so. As always, a good time was had by all.
And this year was especially good, perhaps the best I remember – though I don’t remember everything that happened this time, so it may have been even better than I think it was. Here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil, my book about music, that recounts an incident from ten about years ago (pp. 69-70):
A couple I know threw a big party to celebrate their new house and her pregnancy. As he is deep into the Hoboken folk-music scene, about a dozen guitars were there, and some other instruments as well: a flautist, a few pianists, a woman who brought a dozen or so shakers that folks could play, a soprano saxophonist, and me, on flugelhorn and clavé. We played one or two songs as old as dirt, but also lots of Beatles, van Morrison, Bob Dylan—very Sixties.
The front room on the ground floor served as the music room. The music would start and stop, musicians of all levels of ability came and went, and the boundary between players and others was wonderfully fluid. The music was ragged and rambling and occasionally confused and the rhythm would get lost every now and then and all that. From an evolutionary point of view it was just a bunch of apes hanging out and grooming one another while munching on some choice leaves and termites.
But there was at least one moment quite unlike anything exhibited by bands of apes. It was 1:30 or 2 in the morning and we were jamming on Bob Dylan's “Knocking on Heaven's Door.” I took a flugelhorn solo early in this long jam and then, when I was done, went to the bottom register of the horn and started a simple repetitive swelling figure which I played more or less continuously to the end. The soprano sax played harmony to my line, and I to his, and sometimes did a little obbligato, and a guitar solo floated up here, a piano solo there, vocal choruses and refrains happened as needed. At some point I decided to see how much I could drive this train by leaning on my simple line and bearing down. A half minute or so later, four or five or six voices chimed in on the refrain at the same time. A lump came to my throat. There we were, knocking on heaven's door.
This experience has had a profound effect on how I think about music. I used a reworked version to open the second chapter of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. One of my all time favorites.
Introduction: Together on the One
Interpersonal synchrony, moving, precisely, to the same beat as your fellows, is the core of social experience. The thrusts and jerks of an infant’s limbs, the timing of glances and twists of the body, will follow the speech rhythms of someone talking to the infant. Couples casually strolling in the park walk in step. People at a ball game make a “wave” in support of their team. All societies have rituals where people gather together and synchronize their movements, and thereby their hearts and minds, in affirmation of the central values of their culture.
I want to consider an example which is immediately familiar to me. This happened when I was living in upstate New York, which is as familiar to me as Africa was to the original African-Americans. It involves bell playing based on traditional African techniques.
The Craft
However, before getting to the magic, you need to understand a little about the craft. Few physical tasks are easier than getting a sound from a bell by hitting it with a stick. But that doesn’t mean that you can play your bell in a mood of casual somnambulance. No, you must be sensitive to small details, for nuance matters.
Generally you hold the bell in your left hand and the stick in your right—if you are right-handed. When you hit the bell with a stick the stick will bounce back. You need to learn to work with the rebound, not against it. If you hold the stick too firmly your grip will damp out the rebound and you will thereby waste the energy the bell has imparted to the stick. Rather, you want to hold the stick lightly and learn simply to redirect the stick’s energy back to the bell. You want to “cooperate” with the stick and the bell rather than “dominate” them.
Further, you need to attend to just where you hit the bell. The sound of a bell is complex and varies depending on just where you hit it. Thus, by hitting a bell in different places you can get several distinctly different sounds from a single bell. The different sounds you get from the bell will blend with other bell sounds in different ways. You have to be conscious of these blending possibilities when playing your bell.
By hitting the bell with sensitivity to the elastic properties of stick and bell you become one with the bell. By hitting the bell with sensitivity to the way your bell tones blend with other bell tones you become one with the group. While thus “becoming one with” has a mystical aura about it, you need to understand that this mystical aura is grounded in the subtleties of physical technique.
On Wednesday 13 February 2002 I attended a workshop conducted by William Parker. It was held in downtown Manhattan at 228 W. Broadway. The participants included two guitarists (electric), a vocalist, a trumpeter (me) and, of course, Parker himself, playing tuba for this occasion (he’s best known for his work on stand-up bass). Not your standard jazz ensemble.
Free jazz was the idiom. Of course “free jazz” is a big territory, but it doesn’t much matter just where in that territory we were located.
Parker made some general statements about this and that, and had variously wry, witty, and informative comments about the working methods of many of the folks he’s played with – Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Muhal Abrams, and so forth. But mostly we made music. And it really was music that we made. And pretty good music at that. The kind of music where, when it’s over, you don’t want to talk. You just remain silent for a moment, collecting yourself, deploying your parachute so as to slow down your descent into lower Manhattan.
We started with something Parker called “Number 14” — which he concocted on the spot. As he said, it starts with four fours. “What’s that?” you ask. You play four notes at a rapid clip, and do that four times in a row. “What four notes?” you ask. “He didn’t tell us, and none of us asked.” We all picked the notes we wanted when it came time to play the piece. But there’s more to “Number 14” than four fours. After four fours there’s a pause, that’s so, just like that, long. After the pause everyone picks a high note and does a long descending gliss(ando) to some low note. “What high note to what low note?” you ask. “Do you really think there’s a specific answer to that question?” says I. And then we play a long trill. “On notes of your choice,” you remark. “Yes, that’s it.” After that, guitar one plays a simple one two figure and repeats it four times. Then the ensemble does another high to low gliss to trill. That’s the “head” to “Number 14.” After the head, it was up to us and the music to negotiate the flow.
So we went through the head a couple of times and then played it down. It must have gone for twenty or thirty minutes. It started out pretty raggedy, but then things started to settle in—though “settle “ is not a particularly good word to use here. There’s no easy way to describe the music that evolved. Sometimes there was a pulse, sometimes there wasn’t. Even when there was a pulse, there where times when some people didn’t follow it. Sometimes everyone was playing, sometimes only one or two were. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, always shifting. Sometimes full-tilt bozo, sometimes approaching serene.
You need to understand that this is different from, say, your standard mainstream jazz quintet (there were five of us) in various ways. For one thing, the head wasn’t particularly definite; and there were no set chord changes or modes, no set back-up figures or ensemble passages. But, major though that may seem, those differences from the mainstream are, in fact, secondary. More profoundly, the traditional instrumental roles were gone. Traditionally there’s a rhythm section (piano and/or guitar, drums, and bass) and a front line (horns, vocal, guitar). The front line players do the head and then they play solos; meanwhile the rhythm section provides support (and gets a bit of solo action as well, depending on the format). Within the rhythm section, the drums, bass, and piano each has a role to play.
Well, in our music, all that disappeared. There’s no distinction between front line and rhythm section, and no fixed division of rhythm section responsibilities. It’s all up in the air, to be negotiated and reconfigured moment by moment. What this implies is that the old head-solos-head format disappears as well. There are no solos as such. This is collective improvisation, a conversation among equals, true democracy (to put a Ken Burns twist on the proceedings). Now, at this or that moment, one player might be more out front — either because she stepped out there or the others stepped back — but this is not dictated by any plan. It just happens. So we’ve got a floating mélange of quasi-solos, duos, trios and quartets all within the framework of the overall quintet.
How do you cope with a situation like that? I can’t answer the question in general, but I can say a little about how I approached it: With my ears. I’m always aware of what’s going on. Now sometimes I’m focused on what I’m doing and not so much on anyone or everything else. But I’m aware of it nonetheless. And when I’m focused on my own playing I might be doing complex stuff, or I might be repeating a simple three-note riff, or even a long tone. But I also make it a practice to spend some time explicitly focusing on what each other player is doing and to orient myself to those sounds in some way. Perhaps I’ll imitate them, or play an answer to them, or support them, or create a counter line. There are lots of ways to orient yourself to what other people are doing and it’s very important that you do so with each player, one at a time. It’s part of your responsibility as a citizen in this improvisatory democracy.
To return to traditional ways of thinking, what this means for me is that some of the time I’m thinking and playing like a soloist — my instrument’s traditional role in mainstream jazz — but that I spend more time thinking and playing like a bass player (though the trumpet is a soprano instrument, but that’s no reason I can’t provide an anchoring ostinato) or pianist (playing arpeggios) or even like a drummer (playing staccato hits). And when the vocalist would sing long tones, I might support her by playing long tones (more or less) with her.
It’s like going into a theatrical costume shop and trying on all the different costumes. Everyone else is doing the same thing. You meet in various configurations and improvise a little skit that’s consistent with your costumes. Then you change costumes and do it again, and again.
Until it’s over. And that’s the interesting thing. How do you know it’s over? Since there’s no set plan, no check list of things to accomplish (as in the head-solos-head format), you need some other way to end it. You might think that, since William Parker was leading this workshop, that he ‘d end it. But he didn’t. We all ended it, and at the same time.
That was the first time through “Number 14.” We did it a second time. Then we worked on some conceptions from other workshoppers. And then it was over. We didn’t have time for “Number 15.”
For two years, perhaps three, I played trumpet with the Sage City Symphony. Why it is called the “Sage City Symphony” I do not know, as it is located in Bennington, Vermont, and is associated with Bennington College. At the time – the late 1970s and early 1980s – I was living in Troy, New York, where I was on the faculty in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The department administrator, Bernice Cohen, played French horn, as did her husband, Gerry, music director at a local high school. She invited me to play in the orchestra.
That’s how it was. No audition. I just got in the car with Bernice and Gerry and showed up for rehearsal one day. That was that.
It was a community orchestra drawing its members from Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts. Here’s the mission statement:
The mission of the Sage City Symphony is to provide high quality orchestral music to the residents of Bennington County and its surrounding area, to provide an opportunity for musicians of various skill levels to play orchestral music, and to commission new orchestral works which will be performed by the Sage City Symphony.
That’s what it’s about, musicians of various skill levels, and new music.
Of course, we performed the standard repertoire. I specifically remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Schubert’s Unfinished, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and, just a tad off the standard repertoire, the Schuman orchestration of Ives’s Theme and Variations on America. The last was a hoot and a half, in part because there’s a passage near the end where the trumpet has the melody and I could bear down and drive the orchestra like a lead trumpeter driving a big band. The string section didn’t know quite what to make of it, but the director had no problem. What fun. We must have played some Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Bach, and Tchaikovsky too, but I don’t remember specific pieces.
And then there was Carl Ruggles, Sun-Treader. Not the standard repertoire, not at all.
I remember patches of black ink scattered across the page. Somehow we were expected to translate them into things we could do with our instruments. Don’t know how we managed to play it. Some of us could just barely play our instruments.
But not all of us. The cello section, for example, had some first-rank professional players, generally a Finckel or two, and Maxine Neuman. They were on the faculty at Bennington, as were other players here and there. Some Bennington students too. The other trumpeter, who played principal, was a music major at the University of Vermont. The second violin section seemed to be filled out by kids who’d only been playing for a year or three. And every skill level in-between. No one condescended to the kids, no one kowtowed to the pros. It was a nice mix.
It was founded and conducted by Lou Calabro, who was on the faculty at Bennington. He was also a composer and we played some of his compositions. Or, I should say, the Sage City Symphony played some of his compositions, but I only remember one during the years I was there, Triple Concerto for Three Cellos and Orchestra, Opus 50. It was written for George Finckel, a cellist on the faculty at Bennington who also played in the orchestra. As I somewhat vaguely recall there was at least one section where we could go nuts, playing whatever. I was good at that, going nuts. Still am. I think there may have been an Otto Leuning piece on that particular program as well.
All of which is to say, real people playing real music. Sure, there were a lot of monuments on the bill, had to be, nature of the classical beast. But they weren’t treated as monuments. They were treated as living music. And the musicians were of and in the community where we performed. Sure, a couple had careers based in New York City and had to commute in. But, still, members of the community, albeit a geographically dispersed community.
All together one of the healthiest groups I’ve been in. Still don’t know where the “sage” comes from, though.
I started taking trumpet lessons in the fourth grade. These were group lessons, taught at school. As I recall, I was grouped with two clarinetists; I even think they were my good friends, Jackie Barto and Billy Cover, but I’m not sure of that. Why with two clarinetists? Because the clarinet, like the trumpet, is a B-flat instrument. At some point, after weeks, more likely months, I began to get behind. Don’t know why; didn’t practice, most likely.
And then my parents decided I should take private lessons, likely prompted by the teacher at school. So some guy came to house for my lessons. Don’t remember a thing about him except that he was blind. Nor do I recall how long I took lessons with him, but by the time I was in the sixth grade, I believe, I was taking lessons with Dave Dysert.
His principle instrument was the piano, but he was trained in lots of instruments, as was the norm. He gave lessons out of a studio in his basement, Saturday mornings I believe. But it doesn’t matter much.
The lessons lasted a half hour and followed the same format. At the beginning of the lesson I’d play through the material I’d been practicing for the last week. This was usually a page of exercises of one kind or another and some little tune–to make things interesting. Mr. Dysert would comment as appropriate and then he’d select the material I was to practice the following week and I’d play through it. He’d make helpful comments as I hacked my way through the material.
I was supposed to practice half-an-hour a day. And I did so, but reluctantly, very reluctantly. I forget just how my parents got me to do this, but they did. And I did, sorta.
Then one day when I was 13, I believe, Mr. Dysert couldn’t take it anymore and read me the riot act. I was stunned. I’ve long since forgotten just what he said, but not his anger. I was wasting my time and his, he told me. I had talent, more than most of his students. When I read through the material for the next week’s lesson, I played it better than most students did after they’d been practicing for a week. That surprised me–must’ve been a whole lotta’ hacking going on in the studio is all I can say.
It’s back to my early jazz education. For one thing I just got a new pair of speakers for my computer and I want to listen to them. Mind you, these are small desktop speakers, so we’re not talking about “like real” fidelity or a room shaking sound, but still, they’re nice. I like them.
Also, I’d realized I’d forgotten Al Hirt in my second post, which was all trumpet: Maynard, Miles, and Diz. And to fill things out, I’ll add a bit more Maynard. I realize that neither Maynard nor Hirt are as important in jazz history as Miles or Diz, or, for that matter, Thelonius Monk or Dave Brubeck. But these posts aren’t about jazz history. They’re about my personal history with jazz, and Al Hirt and Maynard Ferguson loomed large in my early years. I still listen to them with pleasure.
Here’s Al Hirt playing a tune that was written by a trumpet player, Ziggy Elman, and is associated with him. “And the Angels Sing” was a number one hit for Benny Goodman back in 1939. This is on Hirt’s album, Al Hirt – Swingin’ Dixie! (At Dan’s Pier 600 in New Orleans):
To appreciate how this hit me in my early teens you have to understand that the trumpet is a beast of an instrument. Just getting a sound out of it is difficult. And to get a sound like this, nice clean and round, that’s impressive. And the playing is so relaxed. Where’s the effort?
But what really got me, it starts at about 1:01 with the just the drums, tom-toms, and then Hirt enters otherwise unaccompanied with some really sexy snaky swirly licks. What the heck is that? thought I to myself. The album notes said something about Ziggy Elman and “frailach licks.” Whatever they are, that must be them. And, wham! at 1:41 we’re back to classic swing, but still snaky and sexy. The rest of the ensemble enters at 2:02 and we go to the out chorus.
Well, Ziggy Elman was Jewish, as you might guess from his name. And he knew klezmer quite well. That’s where those frailach licks come from. Here’s the original, with the snaky licks starting at 1:53:
And he breaks into swing at 2:25, just like Al Hirt did. Except that it’s the other way around of course. And if you listen closely to the two you realize that Hirt wasn’t just playing something like Elman did, he was quoting him note for note. So what we’ve got in Hirt’s performance then is a trip from New Orleans to the shtetls of Eastern Europe by way of New York City. Such is the way of jazz, the way of music, the way of the world.
And it doesn’t end there. Lee Morgan, who became an important influence on me in the mid-1970s, recorded a tune, “Soulita” in which he quotes/paraphrases Elman, at 2:01 to 2:20:
Finally, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s I heard a performance by tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin in Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom. Griffin played Morgan’s “Soulita” and he quoted Morgan’s Elman quote in his solo.
I didn’t know any of that back in the early 1960s. The internet net did not exist, dear children, so I couldn’t look any of that up. And just where, in a small city in Western Pennsylvania, would I have been able to find out about a trumpet solo played by a Jewish trumpeter back in the 1930s? Oh, I’m sure there were people who knew, but I didn’t know how to find them nor what books to consult in what library. So Elman and frailach licks were just tantalizing mysteries on my path through jazz.
And then there’s Thelonius Sphere Monk. The album was Thelonious Monk Big Band and Quartet in Concert. I don’t know how I came across that album, but it stunned me, though it took some getting used to. At that point Maynard Ferguson’s early 1960s band was my idea of a big band. Monk’s band, not his usual performance context, wasn’t at all like that. Not that big, nor that brassy. And, of course it was Monk. Here’s the personnel:
Arranger: Hall Overton
Bass: Butch Warren
Alto Saxophone, Clarinet: Phil Woods
Tenor Saxophone: Charlie Rouse
Baritone Saxophone, Bass Clarinet, Clarinet: Gene Allen
Soprano Saxophone: Steve Lacy
Trumpet: Nick Travis
Trombone: Eddie Bert
Cornet: Thad Jones
Let’s listen to “Bye-Ya,” a Monk original:
Notice that the cut is 11:24, longer than anything I’d heard. The length is in the solos. The tune is a standard AABA tune. But, upon closer listening, not so standard. To a first approximation the harmony’s pretty static, with little excursions at the end of each 8 bar phrase. We don’t have a strong sense of tonal center, which makes this pretty advanced for its time.
Which Monk was. Advanced. Monk is generally classed with bebop. He worked with a lot of boppers, and he emerged when bop did. But he was halfway to 1960s modal music and mid-1960s “out” music.
Here's Monk's “Epistrophy” in a quartet version:
It too is AABA. The A section used a simple 2-bar riff repeated four times, with subtle variations. The B section (aka the bridge) has a more developed melody. So, melodically, it’s riffs in the A section against an actual melody in the B.
Harmonically, like “Bye-Ya,” the tonal center is weak. Now, listen closely to the A section, which is two closely related 2-chord vamps. We’ve got D-flat 7 to D7 for four bars, and then E-flat 7 to E7 for four bars. Like so:
So, do whatever makes sense over Db D7 for four bars, and then take it up half a step for the next four. That’s the structure you’ve got work with. It’s either little or nothing, or very subtle, depending on your skill.
Of course, it wasn’t all trumpet music that I listened to, just mostly.
Really, mostly?
Yeah, pretty near.
Somehow I found my way to Herbie Mann. Don’t know exactly how. Perhaps just flipping through the bins. You can see how a young teenaged boy would be attracted to an album with that cover. Plus: four trumpets! And congas.
The album's title tune, “The Common Ground” is an up-tempo burner that opens with percussion. Mann states the melody on flute, doubled with the vibes, and then the trumpets enter on backing figures, a two bars phrases alternating with punctuations. A percussion break at 1:04 sets things up for Mann’s solo (and, again, the trumpets in the background). Exciting stuff.
This is certainly a different sound from what I’d been used to. Flute? There haven’t been too many jazz flautists. Sax players doubling on flute, yes, but with the flute as the main instrument, no. Hubert Laws played flute as his main instrument, and James Newton. Then there’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who was mainly a saxophonist, though that hardly characterizes what he did. He’d frequently play the flute and cut at least one album on flute music–I Talk with the Spirits–and would often hum while playing flute (a trick Ian Anderson took from him).
Just why the flute is not more widely used in jazz, I don’t know. Is it mostly a matter of historical accident, as jazz instrumentation descended from military band instrumentation and flutes aren’t all that prominent there (but then we have the piccolo obbligato in “Stars and Stripes”)? Perhaps it simply wasn’t loud enough to hold its own against brass and sax in the early days (when amplification was poor on non-existent), though the clarinet isn’t that loud either. Maybe it’s just a matter of timbre in the total range. Who knows?
Anyhow, here we have a front line of Herbie Man on flute and Johnny Rae on vibes, an exotic sound in the jazz context (itself exotic in the context of classical strings). I loved it. Talk about exotic, on “Baghdad/Asia Minor” we have another percussion opening – the drums are fundamental, get it? – with Mann on some kind of flute (not the standard transverse flute of European classical tradition) doubled by the arco bass, which is a little different jazz as the double-bass was usually plucked.
In my post about Rafael Mendez I mentioned how he directed my attention to jazz. I loved the material he did with the “Spanish tinge,” as Jelly Roll Morton called, so I went looking for more. What would you think if you saw this record sitting in a bin at the local discount store just waiting your greedy ears?
The man’s wearing a serape and “Si! Si!”, that’s Spanish, no? And he’s obviously a trumpet player, even if he’s surrounded by the “lesser” brass instruments.
So I bought it. The title track (that’s it above) was indeed Spanish tinged, though quite not what I was expecting. But that’s OK. It was very good. And the arrangement, I’d never heard anything like it–dig the close harmonies in the trumpets on the shout chorus. Not to mention Maynard himself.
But then it had this, “Early Hours,” a very different kind of tune, lazy and relaxed:
Notice that Maynard gave his sidemen generous solo time. Check the lead trumpet starting at 2:19, and then 2:52. Dig the shakes, the top notes–not super loud, just what taste dictates. And the closing phrase for the sax.
I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven.
Walt Disney part of the story. Not Uncle Walt himself, but a Dixieland jazz band consisting of personnel from his animation studio, The Firehouse Five Plus Two. They’d show up regularly on “The Mickey Mouse Club” TV program, and I’m sure I heard them there. Here’s a clip where they play “Muskrat Ramble”:
I have no recollection of having seen any particular performance of theirs, but I could well have seen this one. I’d have loved it, both because “Red River Valley” was one of my favorite tunes and because it was jazz.
I have vague memories of discussing the The Firehouse Five with friends. I have a slightly less vague memory of the first time I head Louis Armstrong. I think.
I was down the street visiting my friend David Leffler. Somehow or other his mother asked whether or not I’d heard Louis Armstrong. I’d never heard of him. So she put a record on and I listened. I don’t remember what it was. All I remember is that it sounded a bit thin. But – and here’s the thing – I remembered it.
When my father joined a record club – you know, one of those deals where you could by records and they’d be mailed to you – I was allowed a selection in the first buy. I read through the little pamphlet and picked something called A Rare Batch of Satch. Again, lots of tinny sound. And a lot of what I’d come to see as standard repertoire: “Basin Street Blues,” “High Society,” “St. James Infirmary” (which I loved), “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” (Armstrong’s theme song), and others.
But the standout number is a little gem tucked away in a cut called “Laughin’ Louie.” “Laugin’ Louie” was a silly novelty tune that isn’t worth much. It broke down during recording and Satch decided to treat his band mates to some a capella gold: “…you must listen at this beautiful number, one of those old time good ones.”
The magic starts at about 2:16, just Armstrong’s trumpet, no accompaniment. The rhythmic virtuosity at the end of the first phrase is astounding. The highest note is G above the staff, which was quite high for trumpet playing at the time.
By this time I was earning enough money mowing lawns that I could afford to walk a mile or so to the local discount department store and flip through the record bins looking for trumpet records. Of course I found mostly jazz because classical music didn’t have much of a solo repertoire for trumpet. But trumpet is second only to the saxophone in jazz – at least that's how saxophone players see it. I'm not so sure.
One of the first albums I bought was Louie and the Dukes of Dixieland. Dixieland was popular at the time, the tail end of the so-called Dixieland revival. Dixieland was basically traditional New Orleans jazz played by white folks. The Dukes of Dixieland played it well. Here’s a cut from the traditional repertoire, “Bourbon Street Parade”:
It opens with an Armstrong vocal. Then one of the Dukes does a vocal. I likely wasn’t too enthusiastic about all this singing. We want trumpet! Still, listen to Armstrong’s scat singing behind the second chorus, and the way he joins in on harmony for the last line. We have a clarinet solo then the drummer does a parade roll-off – you know, the riffs played by the drums of a marching band to bring in the band on the beginning of a tune – to introduce the final chorus of collective improvisation. That's the key to the traditional style, collective improv, no one strutting it above and before the others.
The stand-out cut on the album, though, was the closer, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” a tune traditionally played at New Orleans funerals as they walked the guest of honor to his or her grave:
Louis starts it off by playing the tune on his Selmer balanced action trumpet (if you know trumpets you call tell from the picture on the album cover). His playing is stately and dignified over a dirt-simple background of sustained horn harmonies with a simple drum beat. Stunning. Then he sings the tune over the same background with the addition of a simple trumpet obbligato from Frank Assunto. Armstrong returns to the trumpet for a simple statement of the melody to close, with trumpet obbligato and harmonies.
Wipes me out every time I hear it.
At about that time I found a book of Armstrong trumpet transcriptions and started working out on them – which I’ve been doing ever since then. When I looked at the copyright dates on the individual transcriptions it became obvious that they must have been transcribed within weeks or months after they’d first been recorded. These were all from his landmark Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s. My music teacher, Dave Dysert, included these transcriptions in my trumpet lessons, along with my Mendez solos.
Here’s “Gully Low Blues”:
The format was typical: fast opening, slow it down for a clarinet solo followed by Armstrong vocal, then back to clarinet. Armstrong enters at 2:16 with an astonishing solo chorus. As you know, the blues is typically a twelve bar form. Armstrong’s chorus consists of six two-bar phrases, with the first five cut from the same cloth and then a contrasting 2-bar closer. Then it’s collective improv to the end.
Let’s look at Armstrong’s chorus. The first five phrases start exactly the same way, a rip to a half-note B-flat (trumpet key, A-flat concert) which Armstrong colors with a shake – you have no idea how long it took me to get a convincing shake. The first time Armstrong simply does a line of triplet figures descending to a low E-flat. Second time it’s much the same through for the first half of the phrase – shake on a high B-flat, triplets coming down – but he changes the second bar. The triplets are faster and the phrase goes up a bit before coming back down, this time to D-flat, a step lower than the end point of the first phrase. So, the phrase has a slightly larger range and a more complex melodic shape.
How’s Armstrong going to change it up for the third time through? Opening’s the same – by this time we’ve got the point, same old same old with a little spice on the end. He starts down but then, suddenly he leaps up above that opening B-flat to a high C and finishes the phrase on a fourth space E-flat, a full octave above the point where he ended up the first time through. The spread of the phrase is more compressed than the first two versions. The fourth time through, same opening, but he descends much more rapidly and ends up in the basement, a below-the-staff G, on the second half of the first beat. This version spans two octaves and a third, top to bottom, while the first two times it was less than two octaves and the span was less than an octave on the third.
Armstrong is working variations on this one idea with a systematic deftness and economy that would have brought tears to the eyes of Johann Sebastian Bach himself. And it’s still different the fifth time, spanning just over an octave and leading into the final phrase starting in the second half of bar 10. Five times in a row each two-bar phase starts on the first beat of the bar. The last time through, what does he do? He starts the phrase half-bar ahead of time, in bar 10, rather than waiting for the 11th bar. I’m telling you, those Bach boys must have been laughing themselves silly with joy when they heard Pops lay this one on them as he showed up at the pearly gates. What chutzpah to announce himself to St. Peter with the “Gully Low Blues.”
Now we have his performance on King Oliver’s “West End Blues” with Earl Hines on Piano.
This cut is noted for Armstrong’s opening cadenza, a capella of course (remember that gem buried in the middle of “Laughin’ Louie”?). Armstrong played pretty much the same cadenza for years and decades. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
This, like everything Pops does, is worth serious analytical attention. But he wore me out with those “Gully Low Variations,” so you’re going to have to take care of the analysis yourself. I will only note that it starts straight out on an A above the staff. For a trumpet player to start out cold on an exposed high A, that’s danger Will Robinson, danger! When I’m feelin’ feisty I’ll pick my horn up and, without any warm up, see if I can nail that cadenza. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. The thing is, sitting here in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, I figure there must be a 100 or more trumpet players – black white yellow red purple green male female tall short wide thin young old middle-aged all kind of trumpeters – within a 10-mile radius who can play that cadenza sharp as a tack. It’s something we work on.
Let’s end on a lighter note. This is a duet Armstrong cut with Bing Crosby in 1951. No trumpeting, just singing. “Gone Fishin,” was a hit for them:
Listen to Bing scat behind Armstrong. He learned that from Louis, and he got half his style, the relaxed half, from Louis.
Here’s a version that Crosby did with Pearl Bailey in 1977 (Armstrong had died in 1972):
You’ll hear some of the same business that Crosby and Armstrong did in 1951. At one point Bailey breaks into an Armstrong gravel-tone. Listen to the very end. She hits her final note almost a half step flat, holds on to it for a while and, just when you can’t take it any more (Bing’s getting worried), she comes up on pitch.
This story, like many stories, is at the confluence of many streams. The story itself is a simple one, but to appreciate the simplicity you need to know something about the contributing streams. So that’s where I’ll start. Forgive me if it takes awhile for even the hint of drama to show up.
* * * * *
The story takes place in Baltimore, Maryland, during the Summer or Fall of 1972 during the run-up to the Presidential election that year. I was working as an assistant in the Chaplain’s Office at The Johns Hopkins University. One stream is about the chaplain, Chester Wickwire, and his role in the Civil Rights movement. This stream explains how the chaplain happened to be at the event in question.
The event in question was a stop on the campaign trail – another stream. That explains the existence of the freaked out Secret Servicemen: they were accompanying Sargent Shriver, Democratic candidate for Vice President, who had a reputation as fine speaker. He was speaking before Baltimore’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, an organization of black ministers who had been central to the Civil Rights movement in Baltimore. That made them central to getting out the black vote, which is why Shriver was speaking to them.
Wickwire had been deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement as well. In consequence, he was a member of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. That gets him to the meeting.
* * * * *
Now we’ve got to get me hooked up with Wickwire and give me something that would freak out a handful of Secret Serviceman. That’ll take some ‘splainin’.
Oh, the freak-out is easy enough. I stood up and blew a fanfare on my trumpet. It was loud, they weren’t expecting it, and they jerked to full tactical alert. As they should. That’s what you do when you’re a Secret Serviceman on detail, you get ready for action when you hear an unexpected loud noise.
The fact that it was only a fanfare also explains why I’ve lived to tell the story despite the fact that those Secret Servicemen experienced a moment of, shall we say, heightened awareness. As soon as they saw what was going on, they relaxed. Things were cool. The ministers smiled, laughed. Shriver shook my hand, as did Parren Mitchell, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Things were cool. We ate lunch. And then Shriver had his head handed to him by Homer Favor. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
* * * * *
But, I forgot. I was going to tell you how I got hooked up with Wickwire and what the bleep I was doing with a trumpet at a luncheon where Baltimore’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance was being wooed by the man who would later become Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brother-in-law.
OK, me and Wickwire – another stream. He was chaplain at Johns Hopkins. I was a student there, first undergraduate, then graduate. When I drew number 12 in the Selective Service draft lottery it was obvious I was going to be drafted. So I became a conscientious objector. Wickwire helped me with that, first hooking me up with counseling, then calling in favors to get Congressman to write on my behalf (Parren Mitchell and Paul Sarbanes), and then offering a me a job I could perform as my alternative service.
So, I was doing this and that in the Chaplain’s Office. What about that trumpet? Sure, I was a trumpet player, had been one for years, but what was I doing with a trumpet at a meeting where the black ministers were being serenaded along with the founder of the Peace Corps?
And it wasn’t even my trumpet. It belonged to the Chaplain’s Office. But Wickwire bought it on my suggestion. He liked stagecraft as much as the next fellow, and that’s what the trumpet was about.
* * * * *
You need to understand that, while he was Chaplain at Johns Hopkins, he was also somewhat at odds with Hopkins – yet another stream. Hopkins was a top-shelf University and for many on staff that meant that it was had to be above the political fray, and certainly above the Civil Rights movement, which had inspired the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross on the campus in the Spring of 1966. The KKK burned that cross because Wickwire had invited Bayard Rustin to speak on campus. He also ran a tutoring program that brought black students on campus where Hopkins students helped them with their studies.
This was not consistent with a certain vision of the University as a bastion of the search for truth. Mind you, though, at one time Milton Eisenhower, brother to Ike, had been President of the University. That’s hardly above it all.
One day the clock in the Gilman Hall tower went silent. Gilman Hall was the University’s oldest building and was symbolic of the university as a whole. The clock in the tower atop Gilman Hall rang the hours, and perhaps the quarter hours too. I don’t rightly remember. In particular it rang the noon hour.
When the Gilman Hall clock sounded noon, everyone on campus knew about it. When the clock went silent, well, how the bleep did you know where you were in the day when noon wasn’t being sounded?
I took that as an opportunity for a little fun and merriment, a little showmanship, and Wickwire agreed. I went down to Ted’s Music – a wonderful little hole in a basement off Calvert Street that sold use instruments – and purchased a post-horn for the Chaplain’s Office. Post-horns are those long slender trumpets used for trumpeting the start of a horse race.
The idea is that each noon I would go out on a small balcony on the second story of Levering Hall – where the Chaplain’s Office was located and next to Gilman Hall – and sound the noon hour. Thus the Chaplain’s Office was now picking up where the official university had failed. It got us story in the campus newspaper and was, of course, lots of fun.
Now that the Chaplain’s Office had this post-horn we used it on other occasions as well. One of my colleagues in the office made a nice felt banner which we hung from the horn. It was a red peace symbol on a white background with yellow tassels. When Wickwire gave a speech, I’d precede him with the post horn. I blew the post horn at the beginning of Sunday morning services.
And I decided that it would be fun to blow a fanfare to welcome Sargent Shriver to Baltimore. Wickwire loved the idea.
* * * * *
Now the streams are coming together – the one about Wickwire and the Civil Right movement, the one about the 1972 Presidential campaign, the one about me and Johns Hopkins and the chaplain, and I suppose we really ought to have a separate stream about me and trumpets, but we won’t, because this story is getting too damn long.
There we are sitting in the basement of the church – just which one I don’t recall – me in my hippie clothes and long electrostatic hair and with the post horn. Oh, those ministers loved that post horn. They knew what I was going to do.
We got the word that Shriver had entered the building. I stood up, put the post horn to my mouth, and blew a mighty Joshua blast on the trumpet as Shriver’s party entered the room. Those Secret Servicemen jumped a foot into the air and a good time was had by all.
We finished lunch and it was time for the speaking. Shriver, of course, was the headliner. But Homer Favor preceded him on the bill.
Favor taught political science at Morgan State (“Teacher’s College” it was back then, now it’s “University”), a Baltimore HBCU known for its ferocious gospel choir. No more than 10 seconds or a half-minute in and I knew I was in the presence of a master orator. Favor may not have been a preacher, but he spoke like one. His speech had the cadence, the rhythm, the music, and the fire of a speech by Martin Luther King. He was that good.
I forget just what phrase he used as a refrain, but the burden was simple: When you’re in office, what’re you going to do for black people? I haven’t got the foggiest idea what Shriver was thinking during that speech. But I wouldn’t be surprised if sweat was rolling down his legs and pooling in his shoes. He had a reputation as a fine speaker, but as he soon showed, he wasn’t in Favor’s class.
When Favor was done speaking the show was, for all practical purposes, over. I remember nothing of Shriver’s speech. And George McGovern, who headed the Democratic ticker, lost the election.
