Now you, he said, still doodling and noodling; I just don’t want you to forget that my best wishes are just the same old conventional down-home ones handed down from generation to generation, beginning as far back as the time of the abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. All that is a part of it, too, as I’m sure you know, but what I want you to keep in mind is that with me it is also personal. Which means that I’m all for touching base in person from time to time, however briefly.
He went on noodling and doodling on the keyboard, pausing from time to time to make another notation on the fresh copy sheets on the top of the piano. The fact that he could say what he wanted to say to me while going on with what he was doodling on the piano (and with his pencil) was something I had become aware of the very first time I went to hear the band in person that night out at the Dolomite. I cut classes to go out there that day to watch and listen to them rehearse some new material for an upcoming recording session when they hit New York a few weeks later. So when I went back out to the dance that they were in town to play that night, I was already in a state of fairyland euphoria.
But not to such a degree that I would miss what happened when the band came back onstage for the second set. Hortense Hightower came up to say something to him from the dance floor, and he had her come on up to the bandstand and sit beside him. And since they were playing a dance and not a concert, he didn’t announce the selections, he just vamped the signal for each number, sometimes bringing sections of the whole ensemble in on the first chorus as written or in any case as I remembered it from the recording; but at times he might segue to another chorus, even the out chorus as if it were the first chorus. And if you were out on the dance floor you would be so involved with what the music was stimulating you to do that you probably wouldn’t have time to notice very closely what any individual musician’s posture and gestures were as he played what you were responding to.
What you had to get out there and do from time to time, because how could you resist that part of being right there with them playing “live and in person”? But at the beginning of the second set that night out at the Dolomite I was as close to the bandstand as you could get, and that was where I was when I saw what I saw and realized that the Bossman could carry on what was obviously a serious, extended conversation while not only leading the band from the keyboard, but also keeping track of what everybody in each section was doing at the same time.
They were playing a number that was one of my favorite recordings, and I was keeping an eye on the trumpet section because I knew that there was a chorus coming up in which I wanted to see how the three horn men looked doing what they were about to do. So I was watching them and I saw old Osceola Menefee making signifying head gestures to Jomo Wilkins and Scully Pittman about how preoccupied the Bossman was with the conversation he had going with Hortense Hightower.
Then when they came to the part I was waiting for, the three of them stood up to hit one sharply percussive note in unison. But when they raised their sparkling silver horns to do so, old Osceola Menefee didn’t put his mouthpiece to his lips, and the instant the rim shot–like note went spat!, the Bossman’s head jerked up and he wagged his finger at Osceola Menefee, who grinned as if to say, Just checking, maestro, just checking, and saluted as the three of them sat back down.
And now, he said as we took the first sip of our wine after giving our waiter our short order that afternoon on which I had been able to make it up to the recording studio at Sixth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street in time to spend his snack break recess with him as I had promised through Milo the Navigator on the phone the night before.
The two-hour break for the rest of the band amounted to about an hour and a half for him. So he had taken me to a cozy little place two and a half blocks up Sixth Avenue where there was a table waiting for him. And when he gave the waiter his order I said I’d have the same, which is also what I had done when they brought him a glass of the wine that they already knew he wanted.
So now, he said as we put our glasses back on the table before taking a second sip, let’s get personal. How are things going for my fine young all-purpose timekeeper? And I said, Still trying to keep it swinging, maestro. Still trying to keep as much of it together as I can, still trying to find out how much else I should be trying to get together. And he said, They get into some pretty tricky stuff in outfits like the one you’re hooked up to these days, but of course you already knew all about that part of it before you made your move.
