You could always count on that outfit rising to the occasion in response to an enthusiastic audience in a dance hall, in a first-run movie showcase theater or at an outdoor festival or picnic. But there were also times when they sounded extra special not in response to an extra-special reception but to show their supporters that they didn’t take them for granted, indeed that they would come on just as strong for a midweek audience at a one-night stand in some obscure down-home roadside joint as they had been heard doing on records and live coast-to-coast radio broadcasts. But sometimes they would also hit a very special groove just because they were having such a good time listening to themselves. You hear these thugs, Joe States would say to me at such times. Can you believe that this bunch of granny dodgers can really team up and get to you like this? Boy, this so-called Bossman of ours is a goddamn genius. Man, what can I tell you. Man, who else can take a bunch of splibs as mixed up as this crew we got and get them each to enjoy hearing themselves and then turn around and have everybody else do the same thing one by one. Man, my money says very few people have ever seen anything like these splibs this man has making his kind of music.
All of which is to say that I had been to New York as many times as I had been there while I was with the band but never long enough for me to feel that it was home base, as I had thought it would be when I left Alabama to join the tour in Cincinnati. It was not a New York band as the Earl Hines band was a Chicago band and as Benny Moten and Andy Kirk had been Kansas City and Southwest Territory bands along with Troy Floyd and Alphonso Trent, or as King Oliver’s bands would always be remembered as New Orleans bands. It was not a regional band but a cosmopolitan band, and its home base was a city that was cosmopolitan rather than regional. As Paris and Rome and London were cosmopolitan rather than regional. You could feel it as soon as you arrived, just as you had anticipated you would. But before there was time to begin to really get with it, as you had gradually become used to being a college freshman and then sophomore and eventually an upperclassman on the campus down in central Alabama, you were back out on the road again, getting used to not being used to being somewhere else.
Not that I had ever actually decided that I was going to make New York City the place of my permanent and official residence one day. I had thought of being at home there as I had also come to think of the possibility of getting to feel at home in Los Angeles and Hollywood and then perhaps in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur and also in Rome and in London. But that was not at all the same as choosing the place where you would eventually settle down for good, which many, maybe most, people do years before their thirtieth birthday.
As a matter of fact, even as I used to listen and realize that the Philamayork of the blue steel, rawhide, and patent-leather yarns being unspooled once again during fireside and swing porch tell-me-tale-time sessions, I also realized that it was also yet another homespun version for the fairy-tale castles I already knew about from rocking-chair storybook times. And it now seems to me that on some subconscious level of awareness I also knew even then that sometimes a fairy-tale castle was no less a point of departure than a point of arrival. Which is precisely what I had found New York City to be when I was a member of the band, the castle town from which the Bossman and his merrymakers like the dukes of derring-do of yestertimes were forever sallying forth to encounter and contend with the invisible and indestructible dragons of gloom and doom once again and again.
I knew all that very well. And yet getting to feel like a New Yorker among other New Yorkers (a very significant number of whom had as I was also very much aware grown up elsewhere not only across the nation but also around the globe) was the main reason I had decided to come to do my graduate work in New York City and not in New England, the Midwest, or anywhere in the Far West or out on the Pacific coast.
And it was also why I did most of my library research for assignments at the public library rather than on the campus at Washington Square. In fact, I used the excellent university library only when certain references that professors had put on special reserve status were not also available in the public collection at Forty-second Street, which was not very often, the point not being that it was as if the New York Public Library was really a part of NYU but rather that it was not. Not to me, at any rate. To me it was to big-league research technicians and world-class scholars and intellectuals what Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden were to championship-caliber athletes.
There was, as I not only realize and acknowledge now but also as my
