Shorty’s car turned down the boulevard going fast in second until they couldn’t hear it any more and then Davis said, ‘Race you back to the club. The guys probably think I ran out on them, I been gone so long.’ And he started off, landing mostly on his heels and making great clomping noises. Smoke passed him in ten yards and Rick wasn’t having any trouble; he could have passed both of them the way he felt then, but instead he came alongside of Davis and ran easily, step for step, beside him, because he was feeling friendly and not at all competitive.
When they got to the Cotton Club the front lights were out and the place seemed entirely dark. Smoke, galloping on ahead, went around to the side and turned out of sight behind the building. Davis and Rick went the same way, and Rick stumbled over one of the boxes he and Smoke had been sitting on all evening and almost fell flat.
They went in. It was a big place with about forty tables and a fair-sized floor in the middle. The chairs were on top of the tables now, the way they always put chairs on tables, one right-side up supporting another upside down; and there was heavy dust in the air. The walls were befouled from top to bottom with murals that showed signs of having been picked up after somebody’s local Beaux Arts Ball. It was hard to take them in at a glance, but you were left with the general impression that they had something to do with Hell. Devils, or cuckolds, with tridents figured prominently in Underworld scenes, classic upper-case Underworld, not the thing the newspapers talk about. At the rear of the room was the orchestra shell, very shell-like, fluted along the upper edge, and in it sat four negro boys, one of whom yelled, ‘It’s about time’ when he saw Rick and Smoke and Davis come in. The three of them walked up together, and Davis unbuttoned his coat, drew forth from the inside of his belt the fifth, so-called, of gin, and set it at the feet of a fellow holding a horn.
The four in the shell were glad to see Smoke and made a lot of it. They accused him of this, that, and even of the other, trying to find out why he never came around any more; and Smoke put them off by a system of grinning at the right time. And all the time Rick stood there trying to look unobtrusive, but standing out, just by the force of his contrasting color, like a lighthouse.
There was need of more presentation, and this time Davis did it, very pleasantly and easily: ‘Mr. Martin, I’d like you to meet Mr. Hazard… Mr. Snowden… Mr. Ward…and Mr. Williams. Rick smiled at them self-consciously and made his mouth go, but not fast enough to say ‘I’m glad to meet you’ four separate times. He made an impression on them, though; you could see that. I suppose part of it was that he always looked somehow like a rich kid, very clean and with expensive pants on. He was good-looking, too, on his own hook. He had blond, slightly curly hair and sharp brownish eyes. Brownish, not brown. In terms of color, Rick’s eyes were scarcely describable; they had brightness and sharpness more than they had color. They burned like the eyes of the fevered or the fanatical, with a deep, purposeful smoldering that will get out of hand if you don’t check it in time.
Rick looked at them one by one, but he let his glance slide right across Jeff Williams. There he was, and he marked him for later inspection. No need to stare at him like a housewife at a movie actor; not right now, at least, full-face and in the presence of all. Lots of time.
Hazard, the trumpet player, picked up the bottle and said what are we waiting for, and handed it to Rick, who said I just had one, and handed it on to Ward, who stood on the other side of him. Nobody, out of deference, I suppose, to Rick, said anything about the three drinks being gone out of the bottle. They handed it around from one to another and each man drank a big one right out of the bottle straight, and then made his remark, usually an expression of mixed pleasure and pain: ‘God, that’s lousy stuff; I wisht I had a barrel.’ When it had gone around except for Smoke and Davis and Rick, the bottle was better than half done and the talk was less constrained. The one that was Jeff Williams jumped down off the platform and stood in front of Smoke and Rick, and said to Smoke, ‘You might as well live someplace else, Dan, all I see of you any more.’
‘Yeah, I know it,’ said Smoke, whose right name appeared to be Dan. ‘I been down to Gandy’s nights, mostly, and I don’t like to take a chance on waking you up coming in in the daytime. A guy works as hard as you needs a little sleep.’
‘Forget it,’ Jeff said, and looked around uncertainly.
He was, as Smoke had started to say on another occasion, a handsome fellow. He hadn’t said the rest of it, either, that Jeff Williams was a rare type, an aquiline-featured negro. Three shades lighter, he could have passed for a Castilian almost anywhere.
He looked now at his men and said, ‘Let’s be getting at it.’ Then he turned to Rick and said, ‘Where’d you like to sit?’ and Smoke answered for him, ‘Put him up by you; he’s a pianist.’
Jeff jumped back up on the platform, shoved the piano bench down to the left, and motioned to Rick to sit at the end of it, down by the low notes. Rick jumped up after him, very lightly and with a certain show of athleticism, walked around the bench, and sat down. Jeff turned to him and said, ‘I’d just about as soon you weren’t a piano player. The way that slug of gin hit me I couldn’t say right off which is middle C.’
‘Neither could I,’ Rick said, ‘and I’m not a piano player anyhow; Jordan just said that.’ Faced with an actual piano, all Rick’s illusions, so carefully nurtured by constant wish-thinking, left him flat.
Jeff looked at him hard, as if to find out for himself whether Rick was or was not a pianist, and then he said to him, ‘What shall we play?’ And without a second’s thought Rick said, ‘Play “Tin Roof Blues” the way you do it, you know, when you take the second chorus.’
‘It’s good, all right,’ Jeff said. ‘Not everybody likes it, though.’ He clenched his fists tight a couple or three times before he touched the keys. Then he said ‘Tin Roof’ and banged his heel twice on the floor: one, two, and they were off.
So they played ‘Tin Roof Blues,’ and there’s no way of telling how they played it. You can’t say these things; the way to know what happens in music is to hear it, to hear it from the inside out the way Rick heard it that night on the bench beside Jeff Williams.
When it was over, Jeff, still striking chords, said: ‘How’d you know how we do that? How’d you know I take the second chorus? I’ve never seen you in here, that I remember of.’
And Rick said he’d never been inside before, but he always happened to be passing by and he’d got so he knew how they did things.
‘You must remember pretty good to know who comes where. I don’t hardly know myself.’
‘Oh, I don’t remember exactly,’ Rick answered with that dead ring of sincerity. ‘I just get so I can sort of feel when it’s coming; I get a feeling that there’s going to be a place that needs some piano playing in it; I don’t know.’
He broke it off there and gave up trying to say how it was. Jeff turned from the waist and took another look at him. ‘You sure you don’t play piano?’ he said. ‘Something about the way you talk sounds like you do.’ He said it not suspiciously, but deferentially, as if he felt some kind of force in this mild, white kid, something to be taken seriously.
The bottle was going around again. Ward, the drummer, thrust it at Jeff, and Jeff said ‘Go ahead,’ and gave it to Rick. And Rick, who was as intuitive as a woman and spontaneously tactful as few women are, took the bottle and tilted it up briefly in sign that he was drinking with them.
‘Thanks,’ he said to Jeff, and repeated that he really didn’t play the piano, that he’d started to try to teach himself and that he was doing all right, but that he didn’t have a piano any more. Dead stop, no way to go on.
‘Tough,’ said Jeff. ‘Maybe we could fix you up somehow.’
‘Oh, I don’t know much about it,’ Rick said again. ‘I only got started. I wasn’t playing jazz, anyhow. It was some other kind of pieces.’
‘Classical?’ said Jeff. ‘I can’t see classical for dust. I hear them playing it every once in a while, but I don’t know, I just can’t see it. “Wrassle of Spring.” “Perfect Day.” No damn good. The trouble with classical, nobody plays it can keep time. I tried to teach one of those classical fellows how to play jazz once, and I’m telling you he like to drove me crazy. No matter how much I’d tell him he couldn’t hold a note and fill it in. No classical players can do it. You might as well not tell them. Hold it one beat, hold it four, they don’t give a damn if they hold it at all.’
He meant it. He sat there with the bottle in his hand, talking so seriously that he forgot to drink until Hazard, up front, noticed that the bottle was not progressing evenly and he said, ‘Hey, Jeff! What you got in your hand?’ And then Jeff jerked up his head and the bottle, drank quickly, and shoved the bottle away from him for anybody to take. Then he remembered himself and turned back to Rick to say:
‘Don’t get the idea I’m saying you’re like that. I didn’t mean it that way; I just got to thinking.’
‘I wasn’t playing classical,’ Rick said. ‘I was only playing around trying to learn the notes; just practicing by myself. Hell, I wouldn’t play classical; I’d play jazz.’
Somebody said, ‘Well, are we going to play?’ and again Jeff turned to Rick and said ‘What’ll it be?’ and Rick pulled out his second choice: ‘Would you wanta play “Dead Man Blues” all together the way you were doing it Saturday night?’
‘Dead Man,’ said Jeff, and banged his heel down twice, one, two, action suited to word.
Jeff led them to it with four bars in the key, and then the three horns came in together, held lightly to a slim melody by three separate leashes. Then Jeff left the rhythm to the drums, and the piano became the fourth voice, and from then on harmony prevailed in strange coherence, each man improvising wildly on his own and the four of them managing to fit it together and tightly. Feeling ran high, and happy inspiration followed happy inspiration to produce counterpoint that you’d swear somebody had sat down and worked out note by note on nice clean manuscript paper. But nobody had; it came into the heads of four men and out again by way of three horns and one piano.
Rick, at the bass end of the piano, caught the eye of Smoke Jordan, who was squatting on his heels just barely out of the way of George Ward, the drummer. Smoke nodded, a happy nod of confirmation, as one would say, yes, they’re good all right; they always were. But Rick only shook his head slowly from side to side in a gesture of abject wonderment which meant to say, how can anybody be so good? What makes it? Then Smoke’s face was lost to him, cut off by the cymbal that Ward had just knocked swinging, and he turned his eyes back to Jeff’s hands on the black and white keyboard. He played with his wrists high and his fingers curved halfway around, and he pecked at those keys like a chicken going for corn. He flicked each note out clear and fast, and he couldn’t have fallen into an empty cadenza if he’d tried. His hands were built to pick, not to ripple, and they inevitably shaped out a style that was torrid, not florid.
Rick watched the hands the way a kitten watches a jumpy reflection on a carpet. And when ‘Dead Man’ was played out, he pushed his hand across his forehead and said whew, or one of those happy, exhausted sounds. The three instrumentalists up front turned around for approbation from Rick, and got it, not from anything he said, but just from the look on his face. Smoke got up off his heels and then went down again without saying anything. Ward looked at him and said, ‘You want to take the drums awhile, Dan?’
Smoke got up fast and said: ‘Sure, I don’t care. If you want me to, I’d just as soon take them for a while.’ And when Ward got up, Smoke was in his chair like a flash and had his foot on the pedal, and began tapping the snare lightly with his forefinger. He looked into the basket of sticks that hung beside Ward’s chair, picked a couple, and measured them up automatically. Then he looked with raised eyebrows at Jeff and Jeff said, ‘I suppose you want it slow?’ ‘Well,’ Smoke said, ‘If it’s gonna be good, it must be slow.’ And Jeff answered back: ‘You hear some of them say it the other way: “If it’s gonna be good, it must be fast.” Why you like it slow is so you can go into double time any time you feel like it. That’s not slow, that’s fast.’ He turned to Rick and grinned and said: ‘That’s a fact. He wants everybody else to play slow, so he can play fast. Crazy son of a gun, the only thing in this world he wants to do is tear into double time on a slow piece.’ He thought it over and said, ‘He holds it slow good too.’ Then he turned away from Rick and said to Smoke, ‘All right, you stamp it off, yourself, and we’ll play “Ida,” huh?’ And Smoke very willingly beat it out, one, two, with the foot pedal; really slow: one…two…
The rest of them knew whose turn it was, and they settled down to a low, smooth tune and put their minds to breaking up chords in peculiar, unorthodox harmonies. At every whole note they broke off sharp and let Smoke have it to fill in any way he wanted it, the way vaudeville bands used to play it for tap dancers.
Smoke had the thing under control all the way through. He didn’t pay much attention to the snare—he could play a snare any time he wanted to. He played the bass direct with padded sticks and kept it quiet but very clear, a deep washboard rhythm with constantly shifting emphasis. And to vary it further he played the basic beat with the pedal and went into double time on the cymbal, playing one-handed and holding the edge of the cymbal with the other hand to steady it and mute the tone. He was tearing it up so well—and everybody knew it—that the band simply quit for sixteen bars and let him work; and he stayed right there double-timing one-handed on the cymbal and never repeating himself, keeping it sharp and precise and making it break just right for him. He played a drum the way Bill Robinson dances, never at a loss for a new pattern, but always holding it down and keeping it clean.
When it was over, Jeff said, ‘Anyhow you didn’t go soft while you’ve been away.’ Smoke didn’t hear him; he was talking to George Ward, and so Jeff said to Rick, ‘If that horse would get off the dime and get him a decent set of traps there wouldn’t be a better man in the business.’