Then he said, Man, well do I remember when young trumpet players around my hometown used to find that stuff just about irresistible. But man, some of the strictest musical teachers around my hometown were also the very ones who had been directors and instrumentalists in military bands down in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and in the cavalry on the Mexican border in the teens.
I had never thought of him as having ever had any serious personal professional interest in dance bands as such. As far as I knew, none of the music school courses of study had anything whatsoever to do with becoming bandleaders and arrangers/ composers like the Bossman Himself. There was no school of music as such at Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery, but if you were mainly interested in becoming a dance band musician, that was your best bet so far as college was concerned in those days.
My impression of Taft Edison from the very outset was that his ambition was to create compositions based on down-home sacred and secular music, including workaday chants and hollers, that would be performed in concert halls by concert hall–type instrumental and vocal groups and philharmonic orchestras. Because when I arrived on the campus as a freshman that fall, he was a junior who impressed me more than anybody else in the School of Music because he was the student who conducted the school’s widely popular college marching band when it took its place in the grandstand in Alumni Bowl to play for the cheerleaders during football games, and he also was the one who supervised the tune-up before the faculty bandmaster took over to direct the concerts in the bandstand on the promenade lawn across which the weather-green copper tower of the chime clock faced the rust red dome and the white Doric antebellum columns and eaves of the brick red dining hall, in the basement of which the student social center was located in those days.
I can still remember how special the musical insignia on his nattily tailored ROTC cadet uniform looked compared with the plainness of those worn by most other cadets who were infantry privates without cadet NCO stripes or the Sam Browne belts and rank insignia that cadet officers used to wear. So he was obviously a very outstanding student musician.
But although there were also two student-led dance bands on the campus at that time, I can’t remember having ever seen him playing with either of them. Not that I ever got the impression that he disliked or had no interest in that kind of music, or that his attitude was one of condescension, as was the case of many conservatory-oriented students at the time. Not at all. Because when you saw him at seasonal and fraternity and sorority socials and at benefit dances, he was not only very much in circulation, as we used to say, but was also always up-to-date on all the latest steps. And also when he stopped by the Mainstem Lounge, where you used to listen to the late-night radio broadcasts from such then famous nightspots as the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club in Harlem and the Grand Terrace on the South Side of Chicago in those days, he could identify as many bands and sidemen as instantaneously as any of the dance band musicians, record collectors, and patent-leather avenue sharpies as happened to be there at the time.
So when I told him what I told him about my stopgap gig with the band, I didn’t know what his response would be, but I did so because I had decided that I had better mention it myself rather than running the risk of having him find about it just incidentally somehow and wonder why I hadn’t mentioned it on my own and why I hadn’t yet said anything at all about ever having played any musical instrument, not even in junior high school. Not that I thought that he would think I was trying to impress him; however, I felt I was in an awkward position either way. And also what if he already knew about it?
But as I should have remembered from his completely unsurprised and ever so casual response when I introduced myself to him on Fifth Avenue that day, he didn’t register any surprise at all. Not to avoid any embarrassing questions about my qualifications but because he also seemed to know almost as much about how the Bossman Himself picked musicians as Hortense Hightower did. Anyway, all he said was that he hadn’t heard the band during the period between Shag Phillips and Scratchy McFatrick.
But, he said, I do remember hearing something about some college boy filling in for a while. So that was you! Which just goes to show you. If whoever it was that I heard it from had mentioned the name of the college boy’s school, I probably would have asked you if you happened to know him when we met that day down in the Forties. I must say that must have been something. Man, as definite as I was about moving out of music as a profession by that time, I myself would have had a hard time turning down the chance to hit the trail with that fabulous crew of thugs for a while. Man, I can just imagine it. Man, when I woke up every morning and realized why I was wherever I was I would have had to pinch myself.
I didn’t say anything about me crossing my fingers, because then he changed the subject to what he had been planning to talk about when he called me the night before and invited me to come by that afternoon, and that was when he said what he said about how much talk about political issues, movements, organizations, involvements, and affiliations
