Two nights before the opening they had a systematic rehearsal at the Rendez-Vous. They took the instruments, lights, and stands and a gallon of gin down to the hall before dinner and left them there all ready to go. They were all serious and intent during dinner, and when they went back to the hall and began tuning and shoving chairs around, there had developed a real excitement, something like the spirit that gets into a football squad after the first string has been picked and they’re in the gymnasium ready and waiting for a pep talk from the coach before serious practice begins. It’s a good sort of hysteria, and too bad it always gets put to wrong uses like athletics and militarism. It was working fine on this crowd; after a full week of the most unregenerate playing around and downright slothfulness, here they were, Jack Stuart’s ten collegians, all primed to become overnight the greatest band in the world. Ready and willing.
Jack had arrangements of eight new tunes still in the publisher’s box unopened. He ripped the box open with a pen knife and started calling them off: trombone, first trumpet, second trumpet, piano (that’s me), bass, first sax, second sax, third sax, guitar—over and over until all the music was given out.
‘Now keep these straight,’ Jack said; ‘I’m not responsible for any guy losing his music. These are damned good arrangements, too, at least they ought to be for what they cost me.’
He stood up. He was handsome in a way that didn’t mean anything. He had the empty, regular face that you can find ten to a row in college courses called Economics 10B or Political Science 101, or the sort of face you see on young leading men in the second feature of moving-picture double bills. He was the showman of the band, and he would be even better at it when his tan got established and his cheeks and forehead stopped peeling and flaking off. Right now the face was clouded with authority. Straw boss over ten musicians.
‘First of all,’ he said, and he cleared his throat to give weight to his words, ‘first of all I want you to remember that we’re a dance orchestra and our first job is to play a tempo that they can dance to. And it must be smooth. And another thing, this is a high-class place, all-college crowd. They aren’t going to allow any gobs on the floor at all. So you see what that means?’
The straw boss was liking this, warming right up to it. Who was the brains of this outfit; who knew how to figure this kind of thing out? Jack Stuart, that’s who.
‘What it means is that we’re playing to our own kind of a crowd, and we won’t be playing one-steps for a bunch of snaky Jews and department-store girls. It will be mostly frat men and sorority girls down here, and the main thing we want to do is introduce the Charleston and put it over. It’s the rage now in the East, and if we can be the first to get it started on this coast, we’re made. The manager has got a guy from Hollywood that’s going to be here all summer giving lessons in the afternoon. That ought to get things going.’
The boys were all in their places listening to it, nodding their heads at the big-business phrases. Rick listened as respectfully as any of them, but he kept an eye on his stack of music and kept shifting it around until he’d got a look at most of the first trumpet solos. He got a look at the notes and heard them in his head the way he’d play them, and he was doubtful. His face took on the sceptical look with which wary young ones will look at a glass of milk or a portion of cauliflower: simple distrust with a germ of rebellion.
As soon as Jack stopped talking Rick said, ‘Are these eight tunes all we’re going to play?’ And Jack said no, he had some more coming, but what did he want for a nickel anyway? Eight tunes, all of them brand new, just off the press, ought to hold any band for one rehearsal. Hardly anyone had heard these pieces at all. That one called ‘Ah Ha!’ for instance was going to make the best novelty number anybody ever heard. Room for a lot of clowning in that one. Nothing in the world will set a band up like a lot of good novelty stuff.
Rick listened, and then he said, ‘Are we supposed to play these as written all the way through, every time the same way?’
‘Sure,’ Jack said. ‘What’s wrong with them? They’re the best arrangements money will buy. What do you want, anyhow?’
Rick looked sad. ‘Maybe they’re all right,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll sound better than they look, but look at this number six.’
Jack went over to Rick’s stand and looked. Rick pointed to the page and said, ‘See how it goes?’ He sang it off, and then took up his trumpet and played it. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘in a way; but you wouldn’t be able to play that that way every time. That’s why I asked; do we get to play our own solos or do we just play the written ones? This is so sort of—oh, I don’t know—it’s not—it’s sort of what you’d expect.’
Jack was sore. He looked down his nose at the score and said in as cold a voice as he could manage: ‘All right, you’re such a ball of fire, improve on it, if you’re so good. But get this straight; this isn’t any coon band like this Williams’s you’re always yapping about, and I don’t want it to sound like one. We’re playing for a refined crowd.’
He walked off and Rick said to his back, ‘I just wanted to know.’ And Jack, looking straight ahead of him, said, ‘Now you do, I hope.’
And so, during the rehearsal Rick gave the arrangements their chance. He played exactly as written, and he played so well, took his solos with such restraint and such beautiful phrasing and feeling that before ten o’clock Jack was out of it and looking on him with definite approval. Rick was easily the best musician in the band; Jack could see it, anybody could have seen it.
When they knocked off at ten to have a drink after having gone through number six three times for the benefit of the reed section, which was having a time with the problem of solidarity, Jack walked up to Rick, touched lily cups with him and said: ‘Here’s to a big season, fella. It looks good from here.’ And Rick repeated ‘Big season’ and drank it down.
They were apart from the others and Jack said, ‘What do you think of Jones?’—the second trumpet. ‘I think he’ll be all right,’ Rick said. ‘He’s just a little anxious or something, and I think he’s playing with the beginning of a roll.’
‘How do you mean roll?’
And Rick with pedagogical thoroughness explained what a roll is. It’s a habit, and a ruinous one. He heard this boy Jones playing a little sharp on high notes, and so he took a look at him and there it was—a roll—not bad yet, but on the way. It comes from dropping the mouthpiece too low on the lower lip, and if you keep on playing that way you get so you can’t bring it up where it belongs; somehow you just can’t do it. It’s the hell on trumpet players, he went on to say in the same tone people use when they talk about incurable diseases.
‘The way a fellow explained it to me,’ he said, ‘was that a rolled lower lip is like a nozzle on a hose. Say your lips are a hose; if you close the nozzle, the water, which is your air, in comparison, see, backs up or swells up in the back of the hose, which is really your throat, see? When you open up the nozzle of a hose the water flows out easy, comes right out, same rate of speed all the time.’ He had his forehead puckered up with lines going in three directions, he was trying so hard to keep the figure straight.
‘It’s like this,’ he went on, though Jack was obviously wanting to get on with his drinking and stop having things explained to him analogically, ‘you get a roll and it closes up your lips and gives you a choked feeling in your throat, and you get tireder than Christ himself after about a half hour of steady playing.
That’s what puts so many brassmen in the nut house, and I mean it. They blow their heads off and get dizzy and if they keep it up they’re dizzy all the time. The only way to play good is to take your horn and your breathing for granted; then you can think about how you want it to be; you just think it and it blows right out the other end of the horn. You know,’ he said to Jack, who by that time was on one foot and then the other so fast it began to look like a dance, ‘you know, when I was first starting in to play trumpet, I was sort of teaching myself, practicing on stuff I’d hear other fellows play, and without knowing anything about it I was beginning to develop a roll. One day I was showing this fellow that gave me lessons once in a while, I was playing something for him to ask his advice about it, and I just barely put the horn up to my mouth, and he let a yell out of him like he’d seen a spook. “God Almighty, boy,” he said, “you’re getting a roll there like a tramp!” I didn’t even know what one was.’
‘Is that so?’ said Jack. ‘Let’s go over and have another drink.’ They went to the jug and Rick kept the narrative going. ‘Well, this fellow told me to quit playing trumpet for a while until I got the idea out of my head, and all that week I just went around holding my mouth the way he said to, with my lower lip tight against my teeth, and no higher or lower; the way Art told me to do it was to figure it was just the same as putting a clarinet reed on a clarinet mouthpiece; you’d put it just exactly even, not any higher or lower.’
‘Art who?’ Jack said.
‘Hazard,’ Rick said.
‘Not Art Hazard, not the real one?’ Jack said, holding the paper cup away from him and looking at Rick with real interest. The rest of them were around the jug too, and it was no longer a private conversation. ‘What about Hazard?’ one of them said.
‘Sure,’ Rick said, ‘that’s the one; there’s only one of them.’
‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘I’ll be damned.’ He turned to the whole group and said to them, ‘This fella learned to play trumpet from Art Hazard, what do you know?’ He turned to Rick. ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything about that before? How’d you happen to get to know him in the first place?’
‘Oh,’ Rick said, embarrassed now because all of them were looking at him, waiting for him to talk, ‘he used to live right near me, used to play at a little place in Vernon.’
‘The hell he did,’ Jack said. ‘I always supposed he was from the East. What band?’
‘Jeff Williams,’ Rick said. ‘It was the same bunch that’s playing with him now, but there were only five of them then. They got a lot of new guys now but the original five are all still with him. Ward, the first drummer he had, died and he got Jordan, but Jordan played drums for him for two years before they went East, so one way you think of it, he’s part of the original band too.’
Jack seemed mixed up. He was beginning to feel the gin. ‘You mean to tell me a white man would play in a coon band? Art Hazard really plays for Jeff Williams?’
‘Hazard isn’t white,’ Rick said.
‘You mean Art Hazard isn’t a white man?’ Jack said, his jaw way down.
‘Heck no,’ Rick said, and Tracy, the drummer, backed him up. ‘He’s black as your hat. Haven’t you ever seen a picture of him? He’s a nigger, all right.’
‘Well, anyhow, he doesn’t play in Williams’s band now,’ Jack said. ‘He gets out his own records: Art Hazard’s Rhythm Band. I’ve got a couple of them myself and I’ll show you.’
‘That’s just to get around a contract,’ Rick said. ‘Williams is under contract to get out two records a month, but he can make as many as he wants under a different name. He’s made a lot under different names. Did you ever hear of Smoke Jordan’s Dixie Blazers? That’s Williams. Or Snowden’s Cotton Pickers? That’s Williams. It’s all the same band. You can tell if you listen to it. Nobody else plays that way.’
‘Maybe so,’ Jack said. ‘So Art Hazard’s a nigger?’ He shook his head. ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me Red Nichols is a nigger.’
‘Oh, no,’ Rick said, ‘Red Nichols isn’t.’
All of them laughed and Jack looked happier. He hated like poison not to be a smart boy all the time. ‘I’m glad I’ve got you here to tell me about Nichols,’ Jack said to enforce his advantage. And when Rick saw that he was taking a boobing he simply said, ‘Oh, I thought maybe you really didn’t know,’ and the thing was turned around again and Jack was glowering.
Everybody began to feel the strain, and nobody wanted to. The result was that each man hit the gin as a kind of insurance against strife in their midst; and the gin, in its turn, hit each man according to his temperament and special aptitudes. The rehearsal had its ups and downs. Rick went carefree, but only to a certain point. He stopped caring what Jack thought about Jeff’s band, he didn’t let Jack’s musical standards bother him, he didn’t let anything bother him. He acquiesced to the leader very simply and kept on playing the arrangements for what there was in them and for what he could get out of them. And because he couldn’t get in any licks and couldn’t improvise, he gave himself to tone. He got a quality into his playing and a tone out of his horn that melted Jack Stuart’s heart, and at the end of another hour and three more gins there he was again in excellent repute, top man in the show from anybody’s point of view. Jack did him honor. He broke down and said: ‘Boy, they told me right about you. You could take a seat in any band in the country.’
At two o’clock there were three of them left, Rick and Eddie Phelps and Tommy Long, the guitar player. The rest of them had gone under one by one; some had just wandered off and hadn’t come back; others had left in a hurry and hadn’t come back either. Jack had taken Jones home. He said he’d come back but he didn’t. And then there were three, all three good and drunk but still able to play. They folded up the music and did a home-made job. They’d start something, play three choruses of it, ease down as if to break it off, and then one of them would take it again, just for a final run, and at the end of that one somebody else would get another idea and pick it up again. Perpetual motion. When they finally got it stopped, they’d just sit there and laugh like mad until they started to play again.
But things like that can’t go on forever. Comes a point where change is bound to occur. Tommy Long’s little finger began to bleed where the guitar strings had cut it through. ‘I gotta quit,’ he said, ‘or I’ll be getting blood all over my new guitar.’
‘I’d just as soon quit,’ Rick said. ‘I can take it or leave it alone.’
Phelps didn’t say anything. His face was tomato red and his shirt was soaked from armpits to belt. Tommy gave him a slap on the stomach and it sounded like a wet towel. ‘You get yourself all warmed up, don’t you?’ he said.