YOUNG MAN WITH AND WITHOUT A HORN

I know a Cleveland guitarist who jammed with Hendrix about 40 years ago.

I played with Brubeck.  Chris Brubeck — Dave’s son.   Chris played in the Michigan jazz band, which I was in briefly. I don’t think Chris would remember me.

I was a jazzer.

Most everybody was  into Steppenwolf.  My freshman roommate liked the MC5 too.  I convinced him to move out.  I got a roommate who was into Jefferson Airplane.  That was better, but not much.

Pure jazz — that was my thing.  The blues, too, was kosher.

My final roommate, Dave (not his real name), was an inner-city Chicago kid into nothing.  Dave didn’t know a clarinet from an oboe. We got along great.

I visited Dave at his Chicago house decades later; he still lived in his old neighborhood in a triple in Wrigleyville.  His teenage kid was jamming on tenor sax to jazz play-along records.  Dave was a brakeman on the railroad.  He had entered Michigan as a pre-med, like everybody else, and had come out a brakeman.  Luckily, he had made it through at all; during sophomore year he had chalked “Take Drugs” on the sidewalk at the co-op house, or “Only Fools Stay in School.”

Dave, rolling a cigarette on his Chicago front stoop,  said, “I would like to raise more Cain, but I don’t know if the Revolution is going to come around again.”  He was sweating his monthly urine test.

His house, which he had bought in 1975 for $30,000, was worth about 15 times that now. “I’m a capitalist,” he said. “I have two renters.” And he subscribed to the Socialist Workers Party newspaper.

His kid played “Watermelon Man.”  Every high schooler started on that, thanks to Jamey Aebersold’s jazz play-along series.

This scene was familiar, except for The Militant newspapers. My family had been Newsweek subscribers.

***

At Bill DeArango’s music store in Cleveland, I played through tunes from the book New Sounds in Modern Music, edited by Bugs Bower, 1949.  The book’s blurb read: “The new era has now fully blossomed . . . [This is the] progressive approach to modernism at its very peak.”

Long live John Birks Gillespie!

DeArango, the store owner, had recorded and played guitar with Dizzy on 52nd Street.  DeArango was the man in jazz in Cleveland.  And he couldn’t believe how good I was.  DeArango had randomly picked the New Sounds charts from his store’s sheet-music rack, and I had played cleanly.  Also, DeArango was probably thrilled to see a kid with a horn in 1970; the store was crammed with electric guitars and rock drum kits.  I didn’t tell DeArango I knew the New Sounds tunes because I already owned the book.

I went up to Berklee in Boston.  There was no campus, just one building.  The school’s founder, Lawrence Berk, had named the school for his son, Lee.  Berklee seemed too similar to my dad’s failed drug company, Lesbert Drug Co., named for my sister, Leslie, and me.  Not my bag — family businesses.  I returned to Cleveland, then on to Ann Arbor, my real college.

I was mediocre, at best, at jazz.  I could not mimic sounds quickly.  I bought play-along records.  (Few students in 1970 knew what jazz was. That was to my advantage.)  I went to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, and I bought jazz instructional books.  These books contained hoards of chord patterns and scales, on par in incomprehensibility with Organic Chemistry.

I packed up my alto sax for about two decades.