Childhood: Jazz
Alfred was short and rheumy-eyed. His eyes darted. He fidgeted. He seemed perpetually uncomfortable and apologetic. His hair lay limp and slightly long. Alfred came to the back door with some regularity, a shy knock. He would ask for my mother and wait impatiently while I ran to get her. He needed a cigarette, having run out of his own. Or perhaps he wanted a break from his music. Alfred and my mother would smoke together at the back door and chat, conspiratorially.
Alfred lived next door with his wife, Miriam, and a grown daughter Susan. Miriam was as warm and comforting as Alfred was reclusive and anxious. Her voice was strident and full and she was always pleased to see us. Sometimes my older brother David and I went over there for no reason other than to relieve our boredom. Once, when I was nine, I ran over in a panic. I was looking after my baby brother Michael and having difficulty fastening his diaper pin. I took my hand off of him, the one thing my parents said I should never do. He rolled off the changing table, landing with a loud thwack stomach-side down on the floor. After a second of silence, Michael wouldn’t stop crying. I wondered if, like a piece of pottery, I had damaged him beyond repair. Miriam was concerned but reassuring. She took Michael in her arms, rocking him and comforting him until my parents came home.
Alfred was often squirreled away in his home studio. There, he was transformed, contented, only half present. Record covers hung on the walls, more records crammed the shelves, there was sheet music in abundance. He played a shiny, complicated, odd-looking instrument. Only now do I know it was an alto saxophone. It sounded dissonant, unlike any music I had ever heard. When he played his records they sounded equally weird. Was this music? It seemed completely unpredictable and I couldn’t discern the tune or hum along, let alone recollect what I’d heard a few notes prior. Miriam left him to his own devices. And Susan.
Susan was thin and boyish. She was grown up, but lived at home. She had glasses and a cap of tight dark curly hair. She seemed sad and distracted and kept to herself. Occasionally she would look up and smile at us wanly. Susan wore open silky kimonos, flowing caftans, wildly colored paisley stretch pants. She waltzed around and swayed when she played her flute. Susan played the same kind of music as Alfred, melodies that seemed to follow no rules at all.
In our house the phonograph was nearly holy, like a religious reliquary. We were instructed to proceed with the utmost care when removing records from their paper sleeves, to keep our fingers off the grooves, to place the record gently, reverently, on the turntable, clean it with the lightest touch, lift the phonograph arm and never ever drop the needle. At night I fell asleep to the sounds of Japanese Shakuhachi flute, Andean pipes, classical European orchestral and chamber music, Indian ragas, Eastern European women’s choruses, and Israeli folksongs. We listened to the Beatles and the Stones. My father would envelope himself in opera, spirited away and smiling, humming along off-key. My mother played Dylan as my brother David and I called out in protest, the appeal incomprehensible. David and I listened to the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits. We played hit singles on our little 45’s with the plastic inserts in the middle so we could put them on the big phonograph. We danced around the living room and sang along. As soon as the single was over, we played it again. I had my own phonograph too; it was contained in a small plastic suitcase. I spent hours in my room, lying on my stomach listening to my records and reading the covers and paper sleeves. I dreamed of being Joan Baez or Judy Collins; I was in love with Cat Stevens.
I learned guitar and earnestly sang the protests, ballads, and folksongs of the sixties and seventies. Occasionally I played onstage at school, my voice tremulous with nerves. I began playing guitar when I was 8, instead of going to Hebrew school. My parents offered my brother and I a choice: spend money on joining a synagogue and attending Hebrew School or pay for music lessons. After several Sundays accompanying my friends to Hebrew school, where chaos reigned and no one learned a lick of the language, I opted for guitar.
My first guitar teacher was reserved, humorless, and unsympathetic. Mr. Someone; I can’t recall his name. The music school was in an old house with cramped rooms and overactive heaters. We learned from an anodyne songbook. My guitar seemed almost as big as me. My fingers were too short to reach around the neck and my fingertips too sensitive to comfortably play the chords. My second guitar teacher, Bob, patiently taught an awkward group of us in a dingy room at the YMCA. He was tall and gangly with large hands. Bob sang and strummed with great gusto, and laughed often. He gave us mimeographed copies of “Oh Sinner Man” on green paper with only two chords, a drone-like tune that I dislike to this day. But I played and enjoyed most of the other songs. I was older and my hands were bigger. My third guitar teacher, Elliot, lived in a cramped railroad flat in Somerville, full of Marxist posters and household belongings spilling into the narrow hallways. His wife was zaftig and bubbly, with snotty-nosed babies on her hip and a perpetual pot of something cooking on the stove. My mother brought them our outgrown clothing and other hand-me-downs and chatted earnestly with Elliot. He told my mother I was a fingerpicking protégé. To accompany his raucous playing and singing, Elliot often stamped out a beat, blew on a kazoo, or twanged on a Jew’s harp. He loved the union songs, and the protest songs, and especially the songs that told long stories about the downtrodden rising up.
Many years later I found Elliot performing to passersby on my college campus, playing some of the same songs he had taught me. Thrilled to have reconnected, I ventured up to reintroduce myself. My name and a description of my mom didn’t ring a bell. He seemed completely disinterested. I asked what had brought him west, and he replied offhandedly “a ’67 Chevy.”
All these years later, I have discovered that Alfred was a famous jazz musician, his jazz trumpeter son (long gone from the house when I was a child) legendary. Susan is an accomplished jazz musician, still playing and teaching. She seems happier now, based on the article I found online. In a cluttered and eccentric living room, with her flute and her father’s saxophone, she looks much the same as when I was a child, sporting an open silky kimono over shorts.
How ironic that the music I found so foreign as a child runs through the veins of both my sons. They understand and revel in jazz, a language I barely comprehend, but have learned to love. When they listen to a fabulous solo their faces contort with pleasure so intense it seems almost painful. One of them plays trumpet, the other sax and flute.
