Part of the coolth came from taking my fee out in trade at low joints like The Hedonist Union, a down-the-stairs bôite featuring prices too sour and jazz too sweet. But I got it mentioned in the columns from time to time, and once in a while CUE did a restaurant piece mentioning it; I was being paid what I was worth.
Usually, I took my pay out in meals. I bought my own bicarb. Giulio, the chef, was a worse cook than my mother, and she had been only the last in cooking. Burned water.
Giulio was worse. But it was free.
So I took the Tiger down to see Frankie Sullivan, who owned the joint, and in a burst of fantastic dynamiting, sold him on the kid. Sullivan started the Tiger at fifty a week, backing him with three pick-ups from around town who were pretty well known. It wasn’t a smash at first, but that was how Miles and Bird and Cannonball had started, so I waited. I figured he had it, and when he had enough under his belt, he’d start to shine.
I was right. The kid began to make real sounds. By no sheer coincidence Derry Maylor was living with me, and I saw him every morning when I got up to start pounding my rounds, so I’d ask him, “How they swinging down there?” And at first he’d just nod sleepily from the Castro and turn over. But in a few weeks, he started to tell me things:
“We hit a couple good ones last night. Richie was really fine on Monk’s ‘Midnight,’ and I think Tad’ll be a great stick man one of these days …” then he’d realize he’d been exposing himself, and flip over in the sack. But he was coming back up the road, and that swung.
A couple evenings, when The Hedonist Union was closed, we’d make the scene at The Five Spot or Birdland or The Jazz Gallery and the kid would dig. If I knew someone there, I’d have them invite him up for a sit-in, and the kid just glowed. It was like great. Once he even sat in with Mingus at The Showplace. Far-out, but rewarding.
Let me tell you about the Tiger’s music.
It was more than him. It was like his nose; bigger than life. When Derry Maylor slid onto the bench, and hunched down, there was a bomb about to go. He’d crack his knuckles, and let his hands rest on the white keys for an instant, waiting for the nod from whoever was heading up the set. Then he’d dip his head to pick his way through the intro, and start letting it out from under his fingernails.
The sounds were full sounds. No histrionics, no Liberace or Ahmad Jamal stuff, none of that. It was more like a progressive Waller, if you can put a make on that. There was gut in it. He flatted himself constantly, and the riffs were all minors. It was big tone, what he played, and there was the whole fist in it, not just a pinky at a time. It made you hear that piano over everything else, but at the same time the combo was top ride, the Tiger didn’t try to upstage them. Yet he was the horse and they were the riders. Without him, they’d of been walking, it was that simple.
When they turned him loose for a solo, he cut in on the upbeat and struck away like trampling down the vineyards where the grapes of wrath and like that. He was so good it caught you in the stomach and you got all hot and prickly in the palms of your hands because they were beating on the tablecloth.
That was Derry Maylor’s music.
It was all him, and more than him. It took from everyone in the joint at the same time, and sucked it out like some ego-eater, and fed it back richly and many-colored clean. It was a talent you could identify, and there wasn’t any questions is that Monk or is that Evans or do you dig Powell in the left hand. It was all Tiger, none but Tiger, this Tiger and period.
He was coming back. But strong.
One night, I’d cut my rounds early that day and had caught some sack time, I fell in on The Hedonist Union to pick up on some Maylor. He was good that night, really mellow like Jell-O, and when the second set was done, I sent word round to him by a juice-head named Juicehead, and the kid made it to my table.
“Nutty, man,” I greeted him, holding it out. He took my hand, and gave me that self-effacing little beak-nod. “Really great, specially on ‘Hotshoe.’ Whose number is that?”
“A thing Shorty Rogers recorded from a Brando movie a couple years back. Like the changes we got on it?”
I gave him a thumb-and-forefinger okay and he smiled. We sat and had a few on the rocks until he had to make the next set. I dug all evening, and when he was finished, when the night was like a big coal chute, we staggered home to my pad, going oo-shoobie-doo all the way like a pair of wet brains.
But when we fell upstairs, the Tiger couldn’t sleep. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed willing to talk about himself. So I grabbed off a couple vitamin B–complex caps that helped dispel the foggy-foggy-doo settling in on me, and I picked up what the kid was laying down:
I never had much (he said) but the piano. You know how it is, you come from a family with dough, and they’re good to you and everything, send you to a good school, but you just don’t swing. You know, it’s like you’re a round peg not nearly square enough. And they don’t dig, they keep saying make something of yourself, and stop screwing up. So you try, but it’s no go. Then one day you get enough guts to cut out and you hit the big town with five bucks and a couple of hands of piano. That was the way it was with me.
(He got up, then, and went over to my hi-fi and shook out an Australian Jazz Quintet side and laid it on the turntable. Then he took it off before it could play, and got out an Eric Dolphy thing, “Outward Bound,” and laid it on. We sat there for about two minutes, digging the slow, new stuff of Dolphy’s horn and he started in again.)
It was a rough row at first (he wet his thin lips) but after I hit with Con at the Vanguard it all looked cool. I cut one for Bethlehem and Hentoff said it was swinging. They had Feather do the liner notes, and it looked like I was on my way. Then Con found Rose somewhere and she started to sing with the combo.
(I could tell it hurt him to talk about her.)
Man, I want to clue you, this Rose item wasit. She had green eyes, and they looked Oriental, you dig? Her skin was like some kind of china or something, so clear and smooth. And her hair was auburn almost bloody when the spots dug her. I wanted her so bad, you’ll never.
For a while I thought she dug me, too. We made it together pretty often, you know. Like she wasn’t a tease, and she had this great body, man. Then one day, she came up to my pad while I was practicing, and she put the eye on me, and finally got to the pitch which was Derry would you mind letting this friend of mine who’s a pianist try a few sets tonight with Con, so I gave her the nod, and she brought in this kid from Hollywood who had a name out there, and next thing I knew he was sitting on the bench, and I was hoisting ’em from the floor.
Derry Maylor finished his story, and I stared at him, because I knew who he meant. The kid was now voted high in the Down Beat and Playboy polls for ivories, and the chick — Rose, I couldn’t even remember her name, she hadn’t been much good vocally, really — had cut her own throat; she’d built this new kid and he’d tossed her like she’d tossed Derry.
I felt sorry for the Tiger, but it was a dying hurt now. It was going away like the sounds of the blues when it’s fade-out time. I gave him some bonded sauce, and when he conked, padded him for the dark.
I knew he’d be okay. He’d spilled his gut and now it was clear. I liked the kid … don’t asky why, except maybe it was my kid brother Pete who’d gotten it from a semi when he was thirteen. Maybe, but I don’t know.
Trouble wore a sheath, and had a pair of cans like the headlights on a fire engine. She was waiting for me at Brioni’s, a little espresso house I beat the drum for occasionally. She was sitting with Eddie Brioni at one of the chess tables, a cappucino in front of her, and I glommed her immediatest because she had green eyes.