“I didn’t know he went as far east as Kansas City, looking.”
“Lucky for us he did, I’ll tell you that. Hell of a place! Where’d he find you?”
“Seattle,” said Thomas. That made it sound simple; it had been anything but. By the time he made it to that mist-shrouded city, he was broke and starving, and when the Blue Rose on Yesler Way offered him janitorial work, he did everything but fall to his knees in gratitude. The jazz club opened every night in the basement, and he cleaned it daily in exchange for meals and a small room at the back.
In the afternoons, his work done, he returned to the now pristine basement and its baby grand. In those last hours before sunset, when weak light slanted in through the dust motes in the air, his piano playing would make the owner, Big Lewis Richardson, along with anyone else who happened to be in the house, stop what they were doing and drift down the stairs to listen.
He understood that they were not used to hearing this kind of music in the house, read from the page, at this level of difficulty. “It’s a commitment,” his mother used to say, with a hush, as if art stood above all else. But what had this commitment brought him? Two dollars a night if he was a colored man, five if he was not.
She had not minded about him passing, but she was always afraid he would be distracted by the sounds of stride and Dixieland. “You’re not playing that Saturday night music, are you?” she would say. “Put that sound right out your mind.” She didn’t even like it when he embellished his classical pieces with extra ornaments, or a little too much rubato. “Don’t doctor it up,” she would tell him. “You think you know better than Mendelssohn?”
But when it came to jazz, she need not have feared, since he could not play it. He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes-perfect for small and secret spaces. Now that alcohol was legal again, the music was changing, along with the very character of the night itself. Swanky clubs and ballrooms opened, featuring larger, dancehall-type orchestras. With so many more instruments, especially on top in the reeds and the brass, songs had to be tightly arranged, by skilled bandleaders. This meant work, and it was considerably closer to Thomas’s own playing than the exuberant Dixie-style polyphony of the ’twenties had been-but still out of reach.
This was clear to him after he heard the top bandleaders like Henderson and Ellington, who played whole orchestras like instruments. Thomas could play, but they were titans, and there was never a moment when he did not know the difference.
Big Lewis certainly knew. “You play nice,” he said, that first week in Seattle. “But where you going to get work playing like that?”
“That’s the problem,” said Thomas.
“What you need is to learn the standards, with a little swing.” Big Lewis launched into singing “About a Quarter to Nine,” a popular song from the film 42nd Street.“Go on!” He waved toward the keys.
Thomas shrank, humiliated. “I can’t play that way. Reading is all I can do.”
“You serious? That’s it?”
“Yes. If it’s written, I can play it. Let me get the music for that one and look at it.” So Big Lewis advanced him five cents, and Thomas went down to Jackson Street for the sheet music, came back, and read it through. When he did, it was so simple he was embarrassed. In playing it for Big Lewis, he did his best to embellish it so it would sound more presentable.
But the older man was unimpressed. “Swing the rhythm! Let it go!”
Thomas started again.
“No! You turned the beat around again. Where are you, in church?” Big Lewis gave a slam to the nearest tabletop and scuffed off.
Each night Thomas listened closely to the jazz in the basement, especially the piano work of Julian Henson, which was tightly controlled even when he improvised. There was restraint to it, a kind of glassy hardness. If I could play jazz, I would play like this fellow. But when he tried it at the piano the next day, it still eluded him.
Big Lewis heard. “You’re trying too hard. It’s variations on a song. Think of it like that, a song.” He showed Thomas how to use the blues scale to force what he called the worried notes, especially the flatted third and seventh, over a major chord progression. When Thomas could not hear how to layer these up with counter-rhythms, or how to build chords from dissonant intervals, the older man sang him through it and showed him, using his voice, how to dance around his improvisations and get off them as quick as a grace note. By the end of that week Thomas could play at least a few of the popular ballroom numbers, like “Body and Soul” and “I Can’t Get Started,” and his renditions sounded respectable, if not exactly right.
“Will I get by?” he asked Big Lewis.
“No. Not around here-too many good musicians. Now, in a small town, I ’spect your sound could get over. You want that to happen, you got to work, and work hard.”
So Thomas threw himself into practicing dance numbers every afternoon, and though he got better, he knew he was still well shy of the mark when Big Lewis pulled him aside one night at closing time and told him there was an agent in the house, a man from China, who needed a piano player.
“To play in China?”
“Shanghai. I’ve heard tell of it-fellows get recruited.”
Thomas stared. Shanghai! It was alluring, dangerous; there were songs about it. “Is that him?” he said of the tall, rangy fellow who was the only Asian man left in the place now that it had emptied out. He had a narrow face, doorknob cheekbones jutting beneath his long, dark eyes. Thomas noticed his hair was combed straight back and pomaded down, while his suit still showed creases from the steamer trunk. He dressed like a gentleman, which struck Thomas as a promising chord of commonality.
“Go talk to him,” Big Lewis said.
“What if he-”
“Say you’re a pianist, then just play. Don’t say anything else.”
He looked down at his overalls. Maybe it was a good thing, a lucky thing, the way he was dressed. “Play what?” he said nervously.
“The Rhapsody.”
Thomas closed his eyes for a second; yes, genius, Big Lewis was right. Rhapsody in Blue was the one piece he had memorized which was flat-out impressive and also danced at least a little bit close to the music he had to pretend to know. So he crossed the floor, still littered and sticky, and set his mop and bucket down with a neat slosh. “Name’s Thomas Greene,” he said. “My boss tells me you’re looking.”
And now he was in Shanghai, beside Alonzo, coming to the end of the lane, to Rue Lafayette, where they paused before turning. Thomas studied the older man’s face. “You look like you like it here.”
“Best thing ever happened to me. All my life I knew what I deserved, but Shanghai is the only place I ever got it. You’ll see.” With those words, Alonzo raised a casually crooked finger, and a panting coolie ran up with a rickshaw. Alonzo climbed up onto the rattan seat and slid over, making room for Thomas, who stood frozen. The older man had been here a year and knew all the holes and corners, sure, but should they really be pulled along by a poor, unfortunate man in a harness? Even the slaves had not done work like this. But the bare-armed coolie stamped impatiently, slick with sweat in the cold air, his sinews ropy, his legs strong. He wanted to resume running.
Alonzo was looking down with compassion, and Thomas understood that he too must have crossed this particular threshold on arrival. The city was cruel. Maybe all cities were cruel.