DRUMMING: CLUB JAMBOREE

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2 and vignettes and Montmartre and Bud)

When I was a drummer, I never knew what the night held in store - where the music would go, who would come to hear it, whom I might go home with afterward. My brief encounters with daylight passed in that mute haze of anticipation every performer knows - a state akin to fear, near to rapture. My colleagues and mentors - expiring virtuosi and rising stars, strange geniuses and hoary legends - imprinted me no more or less than other madmen, criminals, and beauties who peopled my days and nights.

I’d been drumming since I was eleven - half my life - in school bands and orchestras, at dances and weddings, in murky bars and jazz clubs, in strip joints and lounges, in cavernous rehearsal halls and muted recording studios, on outdoor bandstands and overlit concert stages. Drumming had shaped and defined me.

One day when I was twenty-nine I’d leave a recording session, drive to a drum shop, and sell my last set of traps. Choice had little to do with it.

There were two incidents that prefigured the end of my drumming life, though neither explains it. The first took place that Christmas in Barcelona.

In the photo, I’m standing in a plaza in snow. There’s a Gaudi street lamp behind me, and a wrought-iron bench. I wear a threadbare black sports jacket over a dark turtleneck sweater, cheap slacks, and worn, pointed Italian boots. A pair of scuffed drumsticks protrudes from one of my pockets, from the other a small leather notebook. An arch frames a neon sign that says: Club Jamboree.

Beside me in the photo stands a young woman with round cheeks, sloe eyes, and dark bangs. She is grinning and appears to be beating her mittened hands against the cold. The fact that Eva is in the picture means someone else must have taken it: Memphis Slim most likely, or Guitar Murphy.

Turning the creased black-and-white snapshot over, I read: Barcelona December 21st, scrawled in light-blue ink. A week before my twenty-third birthday. The snapshot had floated up from among my mother’s things when she died.

A freak snowfall had hit northeastern Spain that week, I remember. Hawkers sold mittens and scarves along the Ramblas, shovels became sleds, and in the plazas children built their first snowmen. I was working the Club Jamboree, a cave in the Plaza Real off the Ramblas, with the blind jazz phenom Tete Monteliu and blues master Memphis Slim. Six nights a week, four sets a night, I fueled Tete’s sleek, witty jazz investigations of “Stella by Starlight” and Monk’s “Straight, no Chaser,” then laid down a backbeat for Slim’s throaty vocals and rolling piano on “Kansas City” or “Goin’ to Chicago” - a bruising double shift, pitting creative exhilaration against the body’s exhaustion and the spirit’s confusion. Underfed, underslept, overstimulated, I hovered on the edge of collapse. The slightest breeze from any direction would have pushed me over the edge.

This is the gaunt six-foot wraith with the bad haircut, bony face, and unreadable gaze I revisit in the snapshot.

It had been two months since I’d left Copenhagen, hitchhiking and taking trains south with Eva, bearing my letter of introduction to the poet Robert Graves. We’d arrived in Barcelona, bought tickets for the ferry to Mallorca the next morning, then wandered up the Ramblas in search of a hotel room. We found one on the Plaza Real - by chance, across from a jazz club called The Jamboree.

It was a cavernous, subterranean dive with lavalike walls, graffitied columns, and Technicolor lighting. Eva and I stood at the long, dim bar, listening in astonishment to a blind pianist with a cherubic marble face and black wraparound glasses tear through the jazz repertoire, leaving his Swiss bass player and German drummer in the dust. Tete Monteliu, twenty-six then, and still unknown outside of Spain, was about to establish himself as Europe’s great jazz pianist.

After the set, I approached him at the bar and asked if I might sit in. Relying upon the reassuring cache of my recent work in Copenhagen (like all pianists, he idolized Bud Powell), he agreed.

Afterwards he called the club boss over and told him to fire the German drummer and hire me. I protested that I was on my way to Mallorca. “No, man,” Tete insisted in his burry Catalan accent, tugging at my sleeve. “You stay and play with me.”

Suddenly the club startup with Robert Graves that had nudged me south was pitted against the offer of a real job with a thrilling pianist. Eva said she didn’t mind; she was along for the adventure.

The next day the club owner, a local syndicate capo named Carlos, found us a room in the Roma, an old Art Nouveau hotel across the plaza from the club. I was given a small weekly salary, a per-diem for food, and membership in the local musicians’ union. I began working as the drummer for the Tete Monteliu Trio, my letter of introduction to Robert Graves yellowing in my pocket.

*

In early December, the American blues artist Memphis Slim pulled in with his sidekick Matt “Guitar” Murphy and no drummer. From then on I drummed for both Tete and Slim every night from 7:00 to 2:00 - an elating, exhausting regimen.

By mid-month, the Hotel Roma’s pipes had frozen, coal deliveries had stopped, and Eva and I had taken to sleeping in our clothes. As Christmas approached, I felt unmoored emotionally, losing musical focus, coughing and sneezing with pneumonia’s onset.

On Christmas Eve, the Jamboree was packed with revelers. I sat at a table before the first set with Memphis Slim, a scarf around my neck, sipping tea and sneezing. If there’d been another decent drummer around I would have canceled that night. Slim, hearing my hacking cough, said, “Flying low tonight, schoolboy.” He’d caught me scribbling in my notebooks one day and I’d been “schoolboy” ever since. “Sounds like you’re coming down with something evil.”

I liked Slim, and I greatly admired the potent economy of his lyrics. A tall, sophisticated man with an ebony baby face and a stripe of white hair that swept back from his forehead, he’d recently settled in Paris, purveying his deft, shouting blues of ominous irony to appreciative Europeans. Drumming behind him was easy, his rumbling two-fisted piano obviating much in the way of percussion help.

“You know, schoolboy,” Slim said, sipping his Scotch, eyeing me ruminatively, “You’re a good drummer - don’t get me wrong - but lately you’re in it but you ain’t of it.” He drained his drink and stood up.

Slim’s perception smote me like a curse. He wasn’t talking race; great musicians seldom do (though “white drummer,” a cliche disguised as an oxymoron, would later dog me back in the States.) It’s all about what you deliver on the stand. Slim’s comment alluded to matters of heart. To play music is to commit to live it. Some invisible force was leaching me away from the instinctive center to the watchful edges. I was detatching, not being there. Slim knew it, I knew it.

I was becoming thoughtful, earnest. My eyes were open when they should be closed - as in kissing, or sex. I was marking time, not making it; and drumming is nothing if not about time. Memphis Slim had unearthed a spy in our midst, a stranger on the very ground where we stood - and it was me.

Somewhere I’d come across a quote by Tony Williams, Miles Davis’ young drumming prodigy. He said: “If I could tell you what I was thinking about, I wouldn’t have to play the drums.”

The problem was that, increasingly, I could tell you what I was thinking about. Lurking inside the drummer was a second, larval character: the writer, watching the player, my creative abandon now coolly observed by a voyeur with an inexhaustible subject at hand - myself. When the physical and moral extremes of my life as a musician threatened to annihilate me, the writer, rapt witness, would do nothing to save me. This parallel personage, locked in his own creative tumult, complemented and vied for my soul. (Eventually it would capture it, leading me to shed those skins, abandon the world of unpredictable conflagrations for one of small, carefully tended fires, put myself at a safe remove. But this would come later. ) The writer was eating the drummer.

After the first set, I stumbled to the bar in a sweat. Tete was sitting at his usual stool, dressed impeccably in suit and tie and cufflinks, smiling one of the strange smiles of the sightless. He brushed back his jacket sleeve, flipped open the glass casing of his wristwatch, and felt the hands. “You are stoned tonight, Tony?”

Pot or hash, Tete claimed, tended to pinch my attention to a tiny point - a cymbal sound, a drum tap - whereas a drink or two loosened and socialized me. I swung harder, more freely, he’d say. I’d tested his theory and concluded he was right - further reason to distance myself from drugs at that point. The club’s four-free-drinks-a- night policy (one thing Carlos the boss was generous about) helped the process along.

I looked into Tete’s black glasses, which reflected the club’s lurid revolving lights. “No, Tete,” I said. “Not stoned. Just sick.”

For the next five days I lay in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, coughing and shaking, wracked by anxious dreams of guilt and punishment. I awoke long enough to take penicillin and hear news arriving by way of friends and the daily newspapers. Each day the keening voice of the legless beggar in the Plaza Real rose through the window. “Limosnas, por favor.”

I have to get out of this life, I thought. I’m trapped in some toxic bacchanal with no exit. All of this struck me with the force of judgment. The quota of human waste had exceeded the allowable. I wanted desperately to crawl my way back to sunlight, to feed life and be fed by it.

Before I’d gotten sick I’d been reading Jung’s Memories Dreams, Reflections. Now, in a fever dream one night, I was an enlightened doctor/psychiatrist/writer - some saintly combination of Jung, Schweitzer, and Gandhi - ministering to an ill, unfortunate patient who was also me.

At last one morning I awoke to find sunlight pouring through the curtains. Children’s cheery voices drifted up from the plaza. Water ran through the pipes again. My fever was gone.

I sat up in bed and said to Eva, “I’m going to become a doctor.”

By New Year’s I was back drumming at the Club Jamboree. Slim and Guitar Murphy left for Paris the following week. The Tete Monteliu Trio continued playing smart, virtuosic jazz, but the magic was gone. In February, I saw Eva off on the train back to Copenhagen. Through tears we vowed to reunite later in the spring, when the gig was over and the pressure was off. Things would be better then, we told each other.

*

Hunkered against the vibrating hull of the SAS cabin, I pulled the blanket around my shoulders and pressed my forehead to the window as we flew into the setting sun. I was twenty-three years old, coming back to America after two years away.

The plane banked down over a vast, tilting sea of light. From above, L.A’s gridded extent, so tawdry by day, looked like a jeweled carpet. The pilot cut the engines. Descent narrowed the spooling diorama to a tracking shot of streets, parks, houses. Down there - among the flats and canyons, the streaming freeways, the wide table of the ocean, the rickety pier - lay youth and memory. As the wheels hit the tarmac, dread gripped me.

I lurched off the plane, carrying a box of hardening Danish pastry I’d brought as a gift. Emerging from the terminal, I saw my father, his hair grayer, standing at the curb, waving.

(Sections excerpted from the memoir NATIVE STATE (Random House))