Fulbright riffs, 1991 — day 74, Sunday August 11th

Sunday begins as it should, with the papers over breakfast. I catch the bus into Manhattan mid-morning. After ten weeks I’d begun to forget how exhilarating the view of midtown Manhattan is from New Jersey as the bus approaches the Lincoln Tunnel. From the Port Authority bus terminal I take the subway over to the East Village and locate Howard Mandel’s apartment on East 7th Street, which will be my base, on and off, for the next fortnight.

He invites me in and I’m introduced to his wife-to-be, Kitty Brazelton. She is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and mezzo-soprano. They show me around: just inside the front door, on the right, a large kitchen/diner. Along a short corridor, a double room that serves as their music and study room: there’s a piano, sheet music spread around and unquantifiable books, CDs and LPs stacked on every available surface. I wonder if I will ever feel the need to go out again before the flight back to London. To the left of the study, the bedroom with a south-facing window. The apartment is cosy and secure: the front door has an industrial aspect and an array of bolting mechanisms. This is reassuring as the apartment is on the southern edge of Tompkins Square where there have recently been riots following the eviction of homeless people from the Square. Howard and Kitty tell me the area is pretty safe, however, and has much to offer within walking distance — the Strand bookstore, clothes shops, delis, bars and the Knitting Factory.

Howard shows me how to find the post office so I can pick up their parcels while they are away on their honeymoon. There is a large Ukrainian community in this area: after a Ukrainian deli lunch of blintzes and lemonade we browse in the Strand bookstore on Broadway and 12th. I find a book on Hungarian cookery with a chapter on Transylvania, which describes the people as droll and fantastic and their cookery as the best in the region.

We take a look in the local Gap outlet, the new retailer on the block. Great deals on Levi’s 501s at $19 (more than £30 back home).

Ambling down Broadway, we come across the Synergistic Sensor Sonic Shuttle a one-man street performer submerged within a cosmic assortment of instruments, vegetation and clockwork toys, including a clock that reverses time.

The performer occasionally steps out to engage in intergalactic thumb-wrestling with bemused passers by.

Further down, at Bleecker Street, is Louis Sullivan’s only New York building, the Bayard-Condict building (1899). A double-shafted construction, this is where many independent record labels are based and where the Ear Magazine is printed.

We turn right on Bleecker and then left into a quiet stretch of Mercer Street.

From there we cross from NoHo (north of Houston) into SoHo (south of same) and call in at Fanelli’s, 94 Prince Street, one of the oldest bar/restaurants in Manhattan. We talk about baseball and jazz, our conversation overheard by some women from Toronto who came to New York in 1946. They join in, a little drunkenly, with tales of the old clubs.

Howard is from Chicago. He tells me he came to New York because the jazz scene in Chicago felt too constraining. He is now established as one of the country’s pre-eminent jazz writers and educators. Earlier on our walk we’d touched on the jazz repertory orchestras and the changing positions of Stanley Crouch, the latest of New York’s jazz big shots. Howard says that Stanley Crouch has changed allegiance several times in the last decade, starting out as David Murray’s mentor, passing him on to Gary Giddins (who is really not that interested in Murray), then switching to Cecil Taylor, who he then exposed in print as a homosexual, which Taylor did not appreciate. Now he champions the rhetorical but undoubtedly musical Mr. Wynton Marsalis.

After Fanelli’s, Howard leads me to Washington Square (via a fashionable shoe shop that has a sale on) for my evening rendezvous with Sylvia, one of Rowland’s students who I’d met before at his house. Howard says farewell and I wish him and Kitty all the very best with the wedding. Sylvia and I adjourn to a Chinese restaurant for spring chicken and beef with snow peas and fortune cookies. I get changed into evening clothes and put on my just-bought, bargain shoes ($59 down from $140), because we are going dancing!

We return to Washington Square where we meet Sylvia’s friend Ola (Alexandria). Ola, like Sylvia, is an illegal immigrant but has somehow landed a job teaching English as a foreign language to other Polish immigrants and to Hispanics. We make our way to The Cat Club at 76, East 13th Street for 1930s swing dancing to the George Kelly Jazz Sultans [the same George Kelly who used to be in the famous jump band, the Savoy Sultans. According to the Grove Dictionary of Jazz, George is supposed to have died in 1985, but here he is, and will be for another seven years].

We take a seat and wait for Rowland and another student, Derek, to arrive. The dancing is great and so is the band. I’ve yet to learn how to navigate a quick-tempo dance floor without getting bruised. I lose count of the number of times I cannon into other dancers who throw me annoyed looks by return. The dancers are of all ages, colours and nationalities. I dance myself into a jelly, the new shoes a definite miscalculation.

Rowland drives us all back to Maplewood where we arrive at about 1.30 to find that Kyle and his girlfriend have drunk all the chilled wine that Rowland has been going on about all the way home.