The Cool School (23 page)

Who were your early influences?

I had a decision to make between Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey, you dig, and I wasn’t sure which way I wanted to go. I’d buy me all those records and I’d play one by Jimmy and one by Trumbauer, you dig? I didn’t know nothing about Hawk then, and they were the only ones telling a story I liked to hear. I had both of them made.

Was Bud Freeman an influence?

Bud Freeman??!! We’re nice friends, I saw him just the other day down at the union, but influence, ladedehumptedorebebob . . . s—t! Did you ever hear him (Trumbauer) play “Singing the Blues”? That tricked me right then and that’s where I went.

How about Coleman Hawkins?

As far as I’m concerned, I think Coleman Hawkins was the President first, right? When I first heard him I thought that was some great jazz I was listening to. As far as myself, I think I’m the second one. Not braggadocious, you know I don’t talk like that. There’s only one way to go. If a guy plays tenor, he’s got to sound like Hawk or like Lester.
If he plays alto, he’s got to be Bird or Johnny Hodges. There’s another way, the way I hear all the guys playing in New York, running all over the place.

In Kansas City, when I was with Basie, they told me to go and see Coleman Hawkins, and how great he is; so I wanted to see how great he is, you know. So they shoved me up on the stand, and I grabbed his saxophone, played it, read his clarinet parts, everything! Now I got to run back to my job where there was 13 people and I got to run ten blocks. I don’t think Hawk showed at all. Then I went to Little Rock with Count Basie, and I got this telegram from Fletcher Henderson saying come with me. So I was all excited because this was bigtime, and I showed it around to everyone and asked them what I should do. Count said he couldn’t tell me, so I decided to split and went to Detroit. But it wasn’t for me. The m-f’s were whispering on me, everytime I played. I can’t make that. I couldn’t take that, those m-f’s whispering on me, Jesus! So I went up to Fletcher and asked him would you give me a nice recommendation? I’m going back to Kansas City. He said “Oh, yeah” right quick. That bitch, she was Fletcher’s wife, she took me down to the basement and played one of those old windup record players, and she’d say, Lester, can’t you play like this? Coleman Hawkins records. But I mean, can’t you hear this? Can’t you get with that? You dig? I split! Every morning that bitch would wake me up at nine o’clock to teach me to play like Coleman Hawkins. And she played trumpet herself . . . circus trumpet! I’m gone!

How did you first go with Basie?

I used to hear this tenor player with Basie all the time. You see we’d get off at two in Minneapolis and it would be one in Kansas City, that kind of s—t, you dig. So I sent Basie this telegram telling him I couldn’t stand to hear that m-f, and will you accept me for a job at any time? So he sent me a ticket and I left my madam here and came on.

How did you get along with Herschel?

We were nice friends and things, but some nights when we got on the stand it was like a duel, and other nights it would be nice music. He was a nice person, in fact I was the last to see him die. I even paid
his doctor bills. I don’t blame him; he loved his instrument, and I loved mine . . .

Why did you leave the Basie band?

That’s some deep question you’re asking me now. Skip that one, but I sure could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be sporting. I still have nice eyes. I can’t go around thinking evil and all that. The thing is still cool with me, because I don’t bother about nobody. But you take a person like me, I stay by myself, so how do you know anything about me? Some m-f walked up to me and said, “Prez I thought you were dead!” I’m probably more alive than he is, you dig, from that hearsay.

You’ve known Billie for a long time, haven’t you?

When I first came to New York I lived with Billie. She was teaching me about the city, which way to go, you know? She’s still my Lady Day.

What people do, man, it’s so obvious, you know? If you want to speak like that, what do I care what you do? What he do, what he does, what nobody do, it’s nobody’s business!

Man, they say he’s an old junkie, he’s old and funky, all that s—t, that’s not nice. Whatever they do, let them do that and enjoy themselves, and you get your kicks yourself. All I do is smoke some New Orleans cigarettes, don’t sniff nothing in my nose, nothing. I drink and I smoke and that’s all. But a lot of people think I’m this way and I don’t like that, I resent that. My business is the musical thing, all the way . . .

Do you think you play modern today?

In my mind when I play, I try not to be a repeater pencil, you dig? Always leave some spaces—lay out. You won’t catch me playing like Lester Leaps In and that s—t, but I always go back.

I can play all those reed instruments. I can play bass clarinet. If I brought that out, wouldn’t it upset everything? I know both Coltrane and Rollins. I haven’t heard Coltrane, but I played with Rollins once in Detroit. I just made some records for Norman with clarinet. I haven’t played it for a long time, because one of my friends stole it. That’s the way it goes. I made them in 1958, in the Hollywood Bowl. Oscar Peterson and his group.

I developed my tenor to sound like an alto, to sound like a tenor, to sound like a bass, and I’m not through with it yet. That’s why they get all trapped up, they say ‘Goddam, I never heard Prez play like this’. That’s the way I want them to hear. That’s MODERN, dig? F—k what you played back in ’49—it’s what you play today, dig? A lot of them got lost and walked out.

Do you play the same thing everyday?

Not unless you want to get henpecked.

What kind of group would you like to have?

Give me my little three rhythm and me—happiness . . . the four Mills Brothers, ha, ha. I can relax better, you dig. I don’t like a whole lotta noise no goddamn way. Trumpets and trombones, and all that—f—k it. I’m looking for something soft; I can’t stand that loud noise. Those places, in New York, the trumpets screaming, and the chicks putting their fingers in their ears. It’s got to be sweetness, you dig? Sweetness can be funky, filthy, or anything. What ever you want!

The Blues?
Great Big Eyes. Because if you play with a new band like I have and are just working around, and they don’t know no blues, you can’t play anything! Everybody has to play the blues and everybody has them too . . .

Am I independent?
Very much! I’d have taken off the other night if I had 500 dollars. I just can’t take that b-s, you dig? They want everybody who’s a Negro to be an Uncle Tom, or Uncle Remus, or Uncle Sam, and I can’t make it. It’s the same all over, you fight for your life—until death do you part, and then you got it made . . .

The Jazz Review
, July 1959

It took Norman Mailer to move the hipster—rebranded as “the American existentialist”—to the center of American discourse with this knockout manifesto that weaves in race, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, crime, drugs, and the intellectual legacy of (among others) Karl Marx, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence. He described it afterward as “a trip into the psychic wild.” Mailer was too ambitious to be hip and too hot to be cool—he was running for president of the Great American Novel—but he knew the buzz. He’d been on bennies and quit marijuana, complaining it made him “over-brilliant.” A founding editor of the
Village Voice,
novelist, filmmaker, polemicist, innovator of the New Journalism, eventually a New York mayoral candidate: Mailer could have been hip if he wanted to, but his ambitions lay elsewhere.

Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an
enfant terrible
turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying low . . . You can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, is trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with “squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a freelance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) . . . It is tempting to describe the hipster in
psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times. He does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.

—“Born 1930: The Unlost Generation” by Caroline Bird

Harper’s Bazaar,
Feb. 1957

P
ROBABLY
,
WE
will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by
deux ex machina
in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed by subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no
matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people.

I
T
IS
ON
this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as
l’univers concentrationnaire,
or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey with the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go
until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands, for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knifelike entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that postwar generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the twenties, the depression, and the war. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fit most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his
parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandize), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good.