|
Sam Kapp was a sax player.
He was an Aspie, which means he was afflicted with the mental disability
known as Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. A lot of
people know about it now, but not when Sam was growing up. Nobody could put a
finger on what was really wrong with Sam. Everybody concluded that he was
just basically slow because he didn't try to play touch football or baseball
or even hopscotch and although he hardly talked at all, when he did open his
mouth and respond to teachers or waitresses or secretaries, it was always
something odd. It was odder than odd. It was so off-the-wall weird it often
made people uncomfortable. His parents feared he was retarded but not stupid
enough to be committed so, through third grade, he sat on the bunk bed in his
room looking at pictures in National Geographic and Dr. Seuss; Cat in the
Hat, or naked African virgins.
Sam watched TV. He couldn't actually
work the TV. He avoided the run of cowboy shows and cartoons his brothers
watched evenings and Saturday mornings. Nobody was sure why but sometimes his
mother noticed he was lured into the room by a catchy theme song or final
credit music but then remove himself at the first sound of gunshots, or
explosions. Sam didn't like noise, that was certain. No one knew what Sam did
like until one Saturday when his brothers, Jake and Andy, left the TV on and
went outside. Lawrence Welk came on and was playing the 5:00 dinner music of
the day. Sam drifted into the room. He sat transfixed for an hour without
moving a muscle. Sam's mother took note and the next Saturday and thereafter,
Sam got to watch Lawrence Welk; then Singalong With Mitch; then Roger Miller
followed by Jimmy Dean. Then came the PBS symphony orchestra broadcasts. Sam
listened. Sam watched. His eyes were brighter after every performance.
Sam's parents couldn't decide if he were going to Hell or not. They asked
their minister and he said it was too soon to tell. The age of responsibility
was thirteen. They had five more years to wait and see. Sam's parents loved
him but they didn't like him. Nobody did.
One Sunday
evening Sam and his family were attending a neighbors house for dinner after
church. Sam was nine. Obligatory admiring comments were made about the new
glass light fixtures illuminating the still-unfinished-dry-walled entryway.
After coats and scarves were neatly hung on hooks, and Mr.Neighbor, as Sam
would refer to the host, briefly outlined his plans for finishing the
entryway, Sam was wisked off to the Neighbor's boys' room. Jake and Andy were
already buddies with Jeremy and Abe so they quite naturally paired off in an
enthusiastic round of lego castles and air rifles. Jeremy was the oldest of
the four. He had just having entered junior high that September and everybody
had to take music or shop, and he was tragically, allergic to sawdust, so he
ended up in band by default. Sam would hear him talk about learning and not
learning arpeggios and embouchure and “...a bunch of other French and Italian
stuff...”. This confused Sam because he thought that 'band' was about music.
But he was used to not understanding.
Jeremy had casually cast his new alto saxophone into the corner of his room.
It was out of the case so he could pretend he was going to practice it soon.
It was partially covered up by a pair of muddy denim blue jeans and a
tee-shirt.The glinting edge of it's brass caught Sam's attention. He inched
his way along the hardwood floor toward it very slowly until he was a breath
away from its golden shine.
"Hey you, booger-head, get away from my saxophone.", Jeremy barked.
Sam flinched violently at the attack, and tipped over on his side in a
defensive fetal position. Jeremy snatched up the horn and slung the neck
strap over his head. "Hey guys, look at ME!" And he gave a great
blast into the mouthpiece, screeching horrifically, then threw his head back,
laughing in mock stardom. He tried again to seduce humor out of the horn.
This time by sucking on the mouthpiece, and the results were less satisfying,
and certainly less loud. Then, as Jeremy was doing his Elvis Presley hips
routine causing him to almost crack his new two dollar reed, dinner was
announced. The saxophone was tossed back into its corner, and they all
swarmed out of the room in a tumble;all except Sam.
Solemnly gathered around the long table were Sam's family and the Neighbors.
All heads were bowed in humble thanks to Jesus for this good food amen, and
nobody noticed that the fourth place at the card table was empty. Nobody
noticed the absence of Sam.
A sound came
sweetly floating around the corner from the boys room. It sounded like a bare bones version of Some
Enchanted Evening.
"Jeremy, I think you left your radio on," said Mr. Neighbor.
"I din't leave no radio on!" said Jeremy.
"Jeremiah, you get up this instant and go turn off that-"
"Wait!" interrupted Sam's mother. The room was silently attentive,
as Some Enchanted Evening purred against every table leg at once. In a
single fluid movement they rose together and surged toward the bedroom, Mrs.
Kapp holding Jeremy back with wordless reprimand. Nine pairs of eyes crept
around the corner and peeked through the half-open door.
There sat Sam,
on the edge of the bed, his back to his audience, coaxing liquid, clinging
notes out the beginner saxophone with the almost-cracked reed. He would miss
a note here and there and his fingers had never touched a saxophone before.
He took a moment to penetrate the mystery of accidental sharps and flats. His
mind saw through the logic of the keys, his heart laced together strings of
grace notes that disguised the mistakes like the most accomplished jazz
musicians do as they make expressive virtue out of error. His tone was
wonderful, warm and vibrant, and filled with the sort of harmonic density,
and confidence that usually comes with maturity but came on the instant for
Sam. In Sam's mind he placed himself in all the perfomances he had been
absorbing from a distance. This spoke to Sam's tremendous ability to focus.
Something his family and those around him never noticed; never noticed until
now.
"Hey!!
He's got my saxophone!" whined Jeremy. There was whispering among the
children. The parents said nothing but raised eyebrows from Mr. Neighbor were
answered by shrugs of "Beats me," from Mr. Kapp.
"Has he ever--?" pointing with his eyes.
"No." Head shake, slowly.
"How does he--?" eyebrows again.
"Beats me," shrug again.
Once again heads turn, the wonder of the music turning to suspicion of
Satan's work in the midst.
"Sam, honey," crooned Mrs. Kapp, deflating the burgeoning moment,
"it's time for dinner."
The beautiful,
radiant high note Sam was just then leaning on, shattered in to chards of
shrieks, as he became aware of the crowd behind him. Jeremy glared daggers.
Sam, of course didn't notice.
"Okay,
Mom," he mumbled, and ever-so-gently placed the saxophone on its couch
of denim. He slunk to the edge of the dispersing crowd. His mother touched
his shoulder. Sam joined the group and ate in silence. Dinner conversation
progressed in a subdued, falsely pleasant tonality but nobody commented on
the miracle they had just witnessed, as though, if they ignored it, it would
go away. Dessert was finished, the dishes stacked, and the Kapp clan took
their leave.
On the way home, silence hovered above the hum of the 1956 Studebaker's tires
on the asphalt street. It was a short drive, but the pressure of the miracle
weighed oppressively on the family. Oddly, law-abiding Mr. Kapp was slightly
speeding. Sam knew he had done something wrong. He sat forlornly in the front
seat, between Mom and Dad, worrying and waiting for something bad to happen.
As the Studebaker turned onto the last block before home, Mrs. Kapp leaned
over and and whispered, "Sam,
honey. . . how could you? How did you know how to play that music?
"I seen it," was Sam's whispered reply.
"You saw it?"
"On TV. I seen 'em play."
"You mean Lawrence Welk? You saw them play saxophones on Lawrence
Welk?"
"I seen 'em. 'And now, a medley of your favorite tunes from South
Pacific. Anna wonna anna twowa. . .'"
At that moment the car pulled into the driveway and Sam scrambled over his
mother's lap and out the door in a combination of moves so sudden that the
sight of him blurred with speed and disbelief together. He was running
hysterically toward the house and the safety of his bunk bed, when something
stopped him in his tracks and he lurched to a stop and slowly turned back
toward the car as Jake and Andy raced past him. Sam cautiously approached his
mother as she got out of the car. She looked down at him, over the car door,
as his mouth moved.
"What?" she whispered again, leaning down.
He placed his lips against her ear. "Want one."
"What, honey?"
"Want one. Wanna sassapone."
"You want a saxophone?"
"Anna wonna anna twowa. . ."
The
introduction of the saxophone into Sam's life constituted the awakening that
his parents had so looked forward to, and so dreaded. After that, he became a
trained monkey who periodically performed Abide With Me at funerals,
and O Holy Night at Christmas services. He never learned to read music
but he could play anything he had heard once, in any key. He did eventually
learn to read street signs and bus route maps and he could recognize his name
on the business cards his mother had printed up for him, before she was taken
by breast cancer when he was twenty.
It was thought
that he might become a dazzling prodigy after he performed the Ibert
Concierto da Camera, with a music-minus-one recording of the orchestral
back-up, at the State Solo and Ensemble Competition in Springfield. He played
the 3rd movement of that difficult piece effortlessly and flawlessly, turning
many heads of important members of the state-wide cultural community. After
that brilliant premiere, several distinguished music professors from the
university had tried to take him in hand and develop his talent into
something like that of a professional soloist but all in vain. Sam was a
phenomenon to be sure, but he was unteachable. What he could do, he either
already knew from hearing a piece, or would never know. He was like a human tape
recorder who could hear something once, then play it back with every nuance
and refinement recreated just as he had heard it. He could not read, he could
not count and could not follow the hand motions of a conductor to save his
life. Everything was by ear with him, and although his ear was infallible, it
seemed disconnected.
When he played,
he entered a dream world that hovered just near enough to the material plane
that he could play with other people but not so near that he could adjust to
anything new or unexpected. The recordings in his head could not be modified
on the fly and he performed every piece in his repertoire with perfect but
indelible precision, every time exactly the same. The so-called
"human" element remained hopelessly unaccounted for. Nevertheless,
Sam's performances were such perfect representations of the original, that
one wonders if the human energy of the music's source were not truly made
manifest, after all; perhaps Sam's personal humanity consisted of merging his
with somebody else's.
When he was
only twenty, directly after his mother's death, he got on a bus to Chicago.
His father stuffed three hundred dollars into Sam's pocket and a detailed
sheet of instructions on how to get to Aunt Maxine's house on the north side.
He paid the bus driver an extra $20 to see that Sam got there safely, which
the driver forgot about after the first two miles. Sam wandered out of the
Greyhound station and across the street to the giant Picasso smiling
complexly at the poor lost boy. He sat beneath the sculpture for awhile, then
took out his saxophone and played Someone to Watch Over Me over and
over for about an hour, until a cop came up to him and ordered him to stop.
Eventually, the cop got the idea when Sam stood mute before the confronting
tirade of hostile authority and took out the instructions to Aunt Maxine's
and offered it to the cop.
Sam made it to Aunt Maxine's place on the predominantly Jewish north side,
and then to a near by restaurant Aunt Maxine frequented, where he settled in
a small corner to play unaccompanied broadway standards and an occasional
hora, three hours a night. They tacked up carpeting at right angles in the
corner to keep Sam's sound from vibrating too much with the customers'
spaghetti and meat loaf; it lent a comfortable, unobtrusive background
quality to Sam's sound, that mysteriously made the spaghetti more exotic, and
the meat loaf warmer.
It was now 1985
and Sam was thirty-something. He sat there every night for over ten years,
until Benny Goldstein, Yiddish theatrical agent and music contractor
accidentally discovered him and moved him over to the Hyatt downtown, to
front Morty Friedkin's "Mellow Four." Sam was really a find for the
ailing trio of middle-aged burn-outs, who had just lost their lead player to
a touring band on the Winnebago circuit, and were glumly facing the imminent
prospect of finding day jobs. Sam's note-perfect readings of Charlie Parker
alto solos, in addition to the more nightclub-friendly Coleman Hawkins and
Lester Young tenor solos transposed to the proper key, gave the band a vast
repertoire of standards to choose from, and the Hyatt management was pleased
to see a large and faithful following develop almost immediately. Every
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, the liquor would flow in the growingly
crowded hotel bar and quite often extra chairs had to be set up as Sam's
eager fans spilled over into the adjoining restaurant. Good music meant good
business and the "Mellow Four" kept their gig.
Every once in awhile, a music student or another pro player on his night off,
would come to check out the rumor that there was a jazz genius playing for
peanuts at the Hyatt. Sometimes they would notice that Sam's playing sounded
just like something they had heard before, and sometimes they could even name
the album but Red Taylor, the piano player, always minimized the implied
absence of originality by extolling Sam's respect for tradition and his
penchant for 'occasionally' playing an homage to whatever jazz great he
happened to be copying. And Sam's repertoire was so extensive, that they
could sometimes go weeks without repeating a tune. If Red got a request from
one of the regulars for a favorite tune that Sam had recently played, it was
not a problem to whisper in Sam's ear to play an 'alternate'
version...somebody else's version.
Sam was gigging
three nights a week and living alone at the St. George, not far from
where Aunt Maxine had first put him up
and here was Morty Friedkin, bass player, Red Taylor, piano player, and Joe
"Sticks" Jones, drummer, playing for the past two and a half years
at the Hyatt Moonrise Room to a growing audience. Morty in paticular was
affected by all of this. In his mind, his career as a musician had just about
peaked out, and was suddenly revitalized by an idiot saxophonist who could
play like fucking Charlie Parker...who musically was Charlie Parker and
Lester Young and Kenny-fucking-G if he wanted him to be. Morty got greedy.
Morty started looking around for other venues for the band, specialty venues,
concert venues. There was one slightly more upscale nightclub than the Hyatt
a few blocks away on Michigan Avenue called "Al's Place". Rudy, the manager was interested in trying
out the group on their dinner theater stage and he was even willing to book them
for a Wednesday so the group wouldn't lose their Thursday through Saturday
commitment but he felt that the purely instrumental constitution of the band
would not hold a paying audience for a whole evening's entertainment without
a featured vocalist.
"Work a singer into your act, and we'll talk again," he told Morty,
over the phone.
"But
listen, man, our saxophonist is a motherfucker, man," objected Morty.
"Our guys plays all the--"
"Yeah, I get it. I've heard your demo, and he really wails, but my people
need the words to keep them interested. Also tits. You can feature the sax
player all you want, but you need a singer, to play here. Why don't you call
up Goldstein? He's got a list."
Morty hated Benny Goldstein, even though Benny was directly responsible for
prolonging the professional life of the "Mellow Four" by bringing
them Sam. The paltry 10% he was still taking out of Sam's cut every week was
no skin off Morty's nose, since he wasn't paying anything, but the idea of
beholding to him piss him off and getting into him with another obligation
offended his stingy scruples. But Benny's understanding of the "Sam
Situation" would probably color his suggestions. "Okay, okay,"
he bitches at himself, "call up god-damned, motherfuckin' Benny god-damn
Goldstein."After a half-hour of conflicted indecision, he called up
Benny.
They held
auditions at the Moonrise Room in the afternoon, in half-hour slots, before
the bar opened. Benny sent over a selection of middle-aged 'female
performers' figuring the older generation would relate better to the
middle-aged rhythm section and the predominantly 30's and 40's repertoire.
The women he knew were mostly not regular nightclub singers, they were more
like wedding/bat mitzva singers, occasional performers with day gigs, and
teen-age children. There was a black lady who showed promise, with a sultry
version of Stormy Weather, but it turned out she only knew a few
songs, she couldn't read any better than Sam could. Everything she sang
sounded like the blues. She also made the mistake of trying to give Sam some
direction. She suggested he put in some fills during a few of her long notes
in the chorus before taking his solo. Sam was not used to any kind of
personal interaction with the people he made music with, and her comments not
only didn't compute, they upset him. He got that frozen look on his face,
just like the first time Jeremy shouted, "Hey you, booger-head, get away
from my saxophone." He stood still for minutes with his eyes wide. Red
made some hasty excuse to the singer, and ushered her out.
Benny had taken a chance sending over another young girl, fresh out of the
Roosevelt University Music School. Her name was Susan Wright. Suzy Wright.
Miss Wright. She had soloed with the college jazz band, and had worked with
the opera group for a few semesters. After graduation, she was keeping it
together with a waitressing gig, and tutored a few private students. Benny
didn't hold out much hope for her as a fifth wheel with the "Mellow
Four," but he liked her voice, and would be pleased if he could manage
to help her break into the business.
Red led her to the bandstand and shoved a pile lead sheets onto the music
stand in front of her. He asked her if she wanted to do something prepared,
or could they just jump right into the band's material. Sure, fine. Okay, how
about Lover Man? Great. D minor? Whatever.
The night before, Red had given Sam several recordings to listen to,
including the Rosemary Clooney Lover Man. "Learn the guitar
part," he had said, which was good, because the Joe Pass guitar part
included not only a nice solo in the middle, but a rhythm accompaniment part,
which would give Sam something to do while the girl was singing. They
launched into the intro, Red tickling the ivories in much the same manner as
the truncated opening of the Clooney version.
I doe no why, but I'm feelin' so sad. . ." she was singing now
Suzy got their attention in a hurry. The voice, young still, was leaning into
the lonely, resonant, siren sound of Rosemary Clooney with a depth of
expression you don't usually get at 4:00 in the afternoon. She was
captivating from the first note. She reminded them of Sam in the way. She
disappeared into the music and became the music. But she kept her
self-awareness and anchored in the here and now. In Sam's eyes you could see
nothing until the tune was over and he returned to us here on Earth.
When Sam went finished his solo, Suzy kept on going. She gave him just enough
space to dominate the stage but also took back the spotlight momentarily
while here and there filling between phrases and joining into some of the
passage work with her own improvisations. She was a talented improviser. She
added a complexity and substance to the saxophone solo that not only didn't
interfere with it but, rather brightened its effect. And when she took back
the lead, there was not only a tenderness of character but also an authority, a confidence.
Then something amazing happened. Sam noticed Suzy's background fills. , his
first reaction was to furrow his eyebrows and drop his head down. Morty, Red
and the rest of the guys started to panic. Then slowly, Sam lifted his head
to a beaming grin. Gone was the usual dream-like uality. He was fully present
and joining the reast. He showed emotion in his playing for the first time
anyone had ever heard. He and Suzy were sounding great together; in how the
sounds went together.
At a certain
point in the duet, as it was winding its way to the climax, Sam did something
he had never done before: he changed a note. The counterpoint Suzy was
making up was working really well but as the peak of the phrase approached,
she was into a line which, if taken to its natural conclusion, would have
clashed with the Joe Pass guitar solo. Only Sam knew this because only Sam
knew where the Joe Pass solo was going, and by some miracle intuitively knew where Suzy's counterpoint
was going.
So he changed a note. In fact, he changed a whole phrase to fit with
Suzy's line. He had never done that before. Red noticed right away, because
he had reviewed that recording himself the night before and had the guitar
solo fresh in his memory. It was not an insignificant change; it was
noticeable.
"Listen to
that," Red sighed. They all rallied around the music with renewed
creative attention. Suzy was having too much fun with music to notice that
she had opened a door in Sam that the "Mellow Four" had been hoping
would open for two and a half years. She didn't know that, for the first time
in his life, Sam had fallen deeply in love.
The mistake was
in having the tryouts at the Moonrise Room, because, just as they were
finishing up, and were about to offer Suzy the Wednesday gig, Jim Meyer, the
manager of the Hyatt strode in and, in two words, booked her for his lounge
on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.
"Morty, I love this new band member. She's on for an extra hundred a
night. That okay with you, sweetheart?" A hundred bucks was a little
better than the going rate for a side man in Chicago at that time; it was
good money. He was gone before the chins all round had ceased to nod.
"Well," said Red.
"Well," said Suzy.
"Well," said Morty, "I guess you're hired. You see that
Gershwin set in there? Yeah the second folder. You know any o' them songs?
You feel like doin' them off the cuff tonight?"
"No rehearsal?"
"Nah, you sound great, we been here since noon, gotta be back and play
at 8:00. Okay?"
"Su-sure."
"Okay. Hey Sammy, time for lunch.
"Lunch," said Sam turning to his case.
Sam took his break over at the park near by on Lake Shore Dr. He spent a lot
of time there on afternoons when he arrived at the gig hours early. When he
stayed home he felt restless and pointless and anxious to be close to where
he would be making music pretty soon. He also went there on days when he
wasn't playing at the Hyatt at all. He liked being near his haven of musical
release a haven.
On rainy days, he went inside to the cafeteria, smuggled in his bag of egg
salad sandwiches, bought a coke, and found a table as close to the far corner
as possible. On clear days, he sat outside under the bronze lions. The bite
of Lake Michigan wind never deterred him. If there was time, whether he ate
outside or at table, he wandered into the museum but he often got no further
than the Rodin in the lobby, the Lovers rising on wings of passion out of the
white rock; the first time he attempted to walk past it, he had spent two
hours standing in front of it, sort of blocking the walkway, until a guard
rousted him out. He also spent a lot of time in front of the Jackson Pollock
upstairs. Something about the Picasso's down the corridor always reminded him
of Someone to Watch Over Me, but he didn't know why. All the
guards knew him by now, and let him loiter harmlessly in front of whatever
painting he became transfixed in front of. To them he wasn't any trouble,
just a poor dumb kid. Always carried that case into the museum; quiet kid, no
problem.
This paticular night, Sam was sitting on the steps under the south lion with
egg salad clinging to his lips. His lips were moving in that slow ballet tempo
of his. It was hard to say but he felt as though a thought were forming in
his head and he was trying to grasp it. Words were not hard for him. He knew
a lot of them but thinking, like talking, required the same improvisatory
faculty that would have enabled him to improvise music if he wanted to.
Putting words together in a different order than he had learned them was a
huge task for him and he was unpracticed at it. Still, he remembered the
miracle at the Hyatt. He remembered the exact notes he had changed the guitar
solo to, just as he remembered the exact notes of the guitar solo he didn't
play. In whatever syntax Sam used to think his translucent thoughts in, he
wondered what had changed in him. Then he remembered Suzy. "Name
Suzy," he thought. "Name Suzy," he whispered. "Suzy
singer. Suzy singer?" The lion wasn't telling.
Thursday night
was borderline funky. It had been quite awhile since Suzy had sung that many
songs the Real Book, which is basically held a number of popular compilations
of lead sheets for jazz tunes. The Mellow Four simply referred to it as 'the
folder'. In the dim light of the bar, it was more of a problem to see the
words than to remember the tunes. Sam was shy with her. More than once, he
would drop out for whole sections at a time, leaving a hole for the
instrumental solo that Red had to fill. Red was okay as a rhythm player. He
had good chords and played all the time-honored substitutions and, most
importantly, he had a good formal sense. He could feel when a climax was
coming and could support the soloist dynamically. But he wasn't as a soloist
himself. His solos were always pretty basic, pretty reserved, spared,
understated, even at times somewhat clumsy. Suzy couldn't always harmonize
with them because the melodic logic was so erratic she couldn't get into the
flow. All jazz solos are chains of stylistic cliches strung together in
something like an original order but Red's melodic utterances were so random
it was impossible to anticipate what the next melody would be. It was like
trying to sing along with somebody who keeps switching tunes every two bars.
Fortunately, that only happened a few times, and only in the early sets.
Toward the end of the night, Suzy had been able to review the songs
thoroughly enough during breaks to get free of the page and Sam started
getting used to the new ensemble experience. He mostly adhered to his
prepared solos and Suzy mostly gave professional but fairly conservative
readings of the old standards.
During Someone to Watch Over Me. Red had trained Sam on the popular
Nelson Riddle arrangement of this song recorded by Linda Ronstadt. This was a
solid, no-frills arrangement with some good counter-melodies for Sam to play
during the head (the music before the solos) but it was kind of glitzy; kind of
Las-Vegas-meets-Ethel-Merman and Suzy was going for a more intimate, more
felt-from-within sense of it. The potential clash between these two
interpretive perspectives was softened immediately by the way Sam altered his
tone quality; another miracle. He and Suzy had found some middle ground and
it set off her whispering sighs with a tender tremble in a fluid vibrato. The
two parts merged in pristine perfection like lovers get after they know each
other's personal rhythms; each others inner music. When the solo came, Sam
switched versions and went into an old Lester Young solo he had learned years
before. The little lost lamb peered out from that corner of Chicago, from
behind the striated breast of the Picasso, with a wide-eyed innocence and
longing that made the listener both comfortable and desperately sad at the
same time, It was a self-pitying, nostalgia for that which is invisible not
because it doesn't exist but because it has just turned a down distant side
street, blown by the cruel breath of the windy city's last and final
farewell.
Suzy was tempted to try some of those counterpoints she likes to do but
changed her mind and let Sam have the spotlight. She marveled at the subtle
sophistication of his nuance and felt how perfectly the lead lines matched
the sentiment she had attached to the song during the head. Then, when it
came time for the final reprise, she leaned over and whispered in Sam's ear,
"Take it." He switched over to the main theme without the tiniest
hesitation while she sang the words to the last phrase in a poised and
plaintive manner. The room was hushed as Red's concluding scaling hung in the
smoky air. The quintessence of the moment could be read in the shapes of
dissipating cloud. The silence was the ultimate stab of lonely desire as lamb
lay herself down to weep and sleep. Then the room erupted in an ovation the
like of which had never before rattled the wine glasses of the Hyatt Moonrise
Room. To The Mellow Four, it was Carnegie Hall; the moment, the drama, the
applause...all of it.
The manager, Jim Meyer, was standing at the end of the bar congratulating
himself as he watched his $100 extra overhead turn into an easy $600-700 in
extra revenue. The wine was flowing like a waterfall. He didn't mind that
there was also a river of twenty-dollar bills flowing into the tip cup,
because he knew that his up-scale clientele had plenty of money for both
booze and gratuities. Enthusiasm had a tendency to spill
over into all available corners of the context, and he knew that if they were
stuffing money into the short-stemmed cognac glass, they were also stuffing
money into his pocket.
Yet another miracle was the music
critic for the Chicago Sun Times, Elliott Stokes, walking into the Moonlight
Room at precisely the right moment; just as Suzy and Sam had eased into Someone
to Watch Over Me. Stokes was not on the job. He had heard the Mellow Four
many times and although he had a lukewarm appreciation for Sam, he was
underwhelmed. He was not a jazz man for he reviewed symphony concerts and
Orchestra Hall recitals and the like. He had not come to hear the band. He
was just dropping by for a nightcap before retiring to his apartment nearby.
He pushed his way up to the crowded bar, ordered his drink and then forgot
about it as the music gradually insinuated itself into his consciousness. He
was not struck by the quality of Suzy's voice, nor the tenderness of the
interpretation but he did notice a tonal sonority coming from the two of them
like pastel colors of jazz. He heard how Sam and Suzy radiated an under
current of attraction that grew on him with each successive phrase. He was
captivated by the sound world of the duet. He saw the melodic lines as shapes
in air, intertwining spires of energy emanating from the stage, exerting a
magnetic pull that drew him in, that enraptured and entangled him in its
smoky coils.
He applauded
along with the crowd adding his, "Bravi!" to the shouts of
"Yeah!" and "Smokin'!" When the band began to pack up for
the night, he went over to Morty and got the correct spelling of everybody's
name and luckily, got wind of the future performance scheduled for next
Wednesday at "Al's Place." His rave review of the band appeared as a
short but glittering sidebar in the Friday "Chicago Nightlife"
section of the Sun Times.
Sam didn't know from newspaper reviews. He didn't really understand when Red
showed him the Stokes' column before the Friday night gig:
The sophisticated vocal stylings of Susan Wright, reminiscent in sound
quality of a young Ella Fitzgerald and
in improvisational quality of the best of Sarah Vaughan, merged with the
wonderfully understated undertones of saxophonist Sam Kapp, in moment after
moment of ecstatic epiphanies. They brought a fresh depth and emotional
intensity to old jazz warhorses which made them live again in the Chicago
Hyatt Moonrise Room.
Sam didn't even know what to do with the extr
a $200 Morty stuffed into his
case that night after the gig. He didn't appreciate it as a good thing. Sam
lived down the street toward the North Side at the dilapidated St. George
Hotel. Aunt Maxine was still paying his bills for him and even making his egg
salad sandwiches. He knew about money, (he had to pay the bus driver on his
way back and forth to the Hyatt, and he knew how to buy cokes at the Art
Institute), but he wasn't very good at arithmetic, and reading a calendar, a
week at a time, stretched the limits of his ability to see into the future.
Each week, Sam went to Aunt Maxine's place for Sunday dinner, handed over the
weeks earnings in cash, and she took care of the banking and rent paying.
Over ten years, Sam had accumulated over $30,000 in savings, but he wouldn't
have had any idea what to do with that money if somebody had given him a
list. He was always paid under the table, so he had, so far, never ponied up
any income tax for Uncle Sam. Sitting there under the lions, a passerby could
have just as easily mistaken him for a homeless bum rather than a somewhat
famous local saxophonist with a sizable bank account. To many, Sam seemed
like a village idiot, incapable of
understanding language structure, abstract concepts, or even the simplest of
social interactions. He may appear to be an autistic savant, gifted in one
thing, and debilitatingly handicapped in all other things: and this would not
be quite accurate. Sam had as much mental capacity as any other average man
on the street but the rub came when he was put in a situation where he had to
act like an average man on the street. He basically knew what he was
supposed to say and do in any particular social situation, passing by the
hotel night man, ordering a coke, even reading a bus schedule, but it was
making himself execute these social formulae that was his undoing.
Asperger's Syndrome manifests in various degrees of intensity, distributed on
a continuum, some closer to outright clinical autism, some further away but
all aspies' cognitive functioning is defined by one qualitatively common
psychological weakness. They have to work a lot harder than normal people to
make their personal inner world connect with the outer world. Normal people
think, feel, and decide in a mental environment of psychological
approximations; assumptions about what is true. This invoves a circular
thinking process that allows them to access ideas from a scattered array of
literally conscious and vaguely intuitive impressions. Aspies can't do that.
They have to have all their ducks in a row; each thought leading, with
impeccable logic, from one to the next like stages of an algebraic equation.
If one step in a mental process is even slightly out of order, the whole
construct falls to the ground. Normal people can get from point A to point B
through any number of roundabout routes but aspies can only get there in a
straight line. Stepping outside the straight line can be done, aspies can
learn, especially with patient and understanding help but it is a tremendous
effort and costs the aspie much in terms of the emotional pain that is always
associated with any momentary mental disorientation.
Also, social catch-phrases visual ques, or subtle tone of voice, are totally
invisible, undetectable, and incomprehensible to an aspie. Countless times,
Sam can remember being taken by surprise when some emotional outburst of
frustration or rage was visited on him by his father, his brothers, his
teachers or his classmates over some misunderstanding; the precise nature of
which he never actually became aware of.
The will to learn, the will to reach out, the will to try and make sense of
the bewildering plethora of nonsensical social emanations, had been lost in
him; and he suffered from this lack, but he was also protected by it. He
snuggled in his cozy cocoon, isolated but safe, lonely but safe, disconnected
but safe. If Sam had known there was anything for him in the outer world, he
might have considered coming out of hiding, but he didn't have a clue, and
had learned not to want to from his father.
Sam's tendencies were pounced on by his too-conventional father. He was
ridiculed and berated as unacceptable. Mr. Kapp soon came to attribute Sam's
eccentric mode of expression to a deeply rooted and sinful character flaw.
What kind of soul won't even answer a simple question?
"Good morning, Sam."
Silence.
"How are you this morning?"
Silence. How am I?
"I said, how are you this morning, Sam?"
"The curtains wiggle."
"What?"
"The window. The curtains wiggle."
"What kind of stupid thing is that to say!"
"How am I. The window curtains are wiggling."
"Lord help us. The curtains are wiggling."
It never occurred to anybody that
there was no such thing a s simple question to Sam. The family prayers at
table and bedside never lacked heaps of heartfelt entreaties to Jesus to heal
Sam's willful and stubborn dedication to the devil's work.
At a very early age, this abusive insensitivity drove deep down inside him
Sam's will to respond to anybody in words. To an aspie, reaching out into the
world of men is not a natural process but a calculated act of logic and will
and Sam was slapped down by his own father so many times in his formative
years that he lost the power to rise to the occasion. For years, the words
would percolate in his mind, striving for verbal expression. It hurt his
heart to fill in the blanks of a socially interactive stock formula; the
phoniness, the one-size-fits-all fuzziness of it. It frustrated his
propensity to sequential linear think toward pristine clarity and
honesty. Why suffer the pain of
drawing the false and impersonal response out of himself, just to suffer more
when his father found fault? He was blocked
by his own deep-seated fear of his father's caustic abuse. The
saxophone gave Sam a way to reach out into the world to a place where there
were no wrong answers; no recrimination, and no pain.
It might be
said that Sam loved the saxophone, insofar as love may be defined as a connection between separate entities. But
the emotional parameter of love, the visceral physicality of love, the
pulsing, the human, red-blooded heart of love, was foreign to him. Such feelings as rage, or jealousy, or
sadness or even affections, like attachment, dependence, or sympathy, were
unknown to him. The one emotion that he knew well was fear. It was fear that
kept him incarcerated in his self-made prison of disconnection. It was the
saxophone that offered him momentary flights of freedom from this prison.
With the saxophone he didn't have to give up the safety of his cell in order
to experience sympathetic resonance with the outer world. The saxophone made
sense and it was the sense of the saxophone that became his self-expression.
With the saxophone he could send out little carrier pigeons of sound that
carried the message I am to any who cared to hear. Mostly, it was Sam
himself who heard this message, bouncing back to him off the ceiling of his
cell at the Moonrise Room or out on the street underneath the Picasso. It
didn't matter which. And until Susan Wright, this had been enough.
The gig on Friday night went even better than Thursday, and the bar was
packed to capacity, thanks to Elliot Stokes. On Saturday, it was ridiculous.
There were people lined up out in the lobby, creating a fire hazard, and
spilling booze on the carpets in front of the elevator. Red programmed a tour
of a bunch of the old classics they had been performing with Sam for a couple
of years, and Suzy managed to fit right in as Sam learned to make way for her
lead solos. He was still performing by rote. But he was also learning how to
transpose different learned chunks, taken from various classic versions, into
the form of vocal arrangements improvised on the fly.
Most of the time, right before they started to play, Red would whisper little
hints to Sam about the source possibilities for each tune. Sam would
resurrect musical treasures buried deep in his phenomenal audiographic memory
by giving perfect renderings of melodies quoted alternately from sometimes,
three or four different recordings, taking into account the key and tempo of
the live version they were doing at the moment. But sometimes Red would call
up a tune and before anybody could say anything else, Sam would launch into
it without preparation forcing Suzy to find her way into the mix, crowding
Sam out of the way at the appropriate moment. The mellow three got nervous whenever
Sam did this because they feared that Sam might not make way for Suzy but he
always did. Sam was learning at an amazing rate.
Altogether, including Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, four hours a night,
from 8:00 till midnight they had gone through a long set of more than twenty
Gershwin standards as well as many by Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. In every case, Sam had
found a way to make his part fit with Suzy's and on the rare occasion when he
proved rigid in his Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins version, Suzy would find
a way to complement him.
It was a happy situation musically and financially speaking, the tip cup was
adding an average of $200-$250 per night. Jim Meyer had to put out cognac
glasses in three different locations in the bar because people kept tripping
over each other trying to get up to the bandstand to stuff their
twenty-dollar bills into the pot.
The level of noise would sometimes rise in direct proportion to the intensity
of the music, and that was okay with Suzy because it covered subtle glitches
in the changes. But she was a perfectionist at heart and her understanding
was that this performance at Al's Place was to be more of a concert
situation. She needed to feel prepared for a formal occasion like that. She
wanted to know the complete repertoire list ahead of time. She wanted to
practice. And she wanted time alone with Sam.
Morty was the leader of the band, in name only. He handled all the booking
and money matters, which, considering they hadn't played anywhere but the
Moonrise Room in three years, was a decidedly uncomplicated responsibility.
It was Red who was, what you might call, the music director. It was Red who
had taken Sam in hand when he first joined up with the Mellow Four. It was
Red who had played Sam all those dozens of classic recordings and watched in
awe as Sam had parroted back each tune note-for-note. It was Red who
basically programmed every set and took care of getting copies of the lead
sheets to Morty when they tried out something new. Red had bought the tape
player that lived in Sam's room at the St. George and he had even left one of
his old electronic keyboards up there for when he worked out his chord
changes with Sam. Red was curious as to why Suzy was so insistent about
working with Sam alone but he already recognized that Suzy outclassed him by
a yard and wasn't going to let pride get in the way of keeping the talent
happy.
The reason the tape player and the keyboard lived at the St. George was that
Sam did not do well in unfamiliar surroundings, especially if those
surroundings were cluttered and crowded as they always were at Red's place.
Sam was easily distracted by visual noise, and this problem almost ended his
gig at the Moonrise Room before it really began. When Sam first started
playing there, every time somebody came in or out the door, every time a
waiter passed in front of the bandstand, every time the cash register popped
open, Sam would lurch and hesitate. It almost cost him his job. But his
talent was such that Red committed to working with him on the problem. They
even tried putting Sam in dark glasses for awhile, (the Miles Davis jazz
druggie schtick), but the glasses kept falling down his nose, giving him one
more visual cue to be distracted by, not to mention creating an inappropriately
comical scene. There was nothing like watching Sam play When I Fall in
Love with sunglasses slipping over his face onto his mouthpiece. They
finally figured out that all they had to do was point Sam to the right,
toward Red, and tell him to focus his eyes on the piano.
After that, Sam got used to the other petty distractions that come with
playing music in a public place, and he never faltered again. The bandstand
at the Moonrise Room became his second home and he pulled its borders in
around him like a blanket and snuggled up into its private corners, with his
music, only dimly aware that there were other people in the place, only
marginally aware that he was playing with three other guys. When he played,
he was like an infant in the cradle who can't tell where his body ends and
the world began. He didn't distinguish between himself and the other members
of the band; he drove them, carried them, and discarded them like extensions
of himself, appendages which served his purpose for the one moment then became
non-existent in the next. When he entered his trance zone, he actually
stopped seeing anything but the notes of his saxophone dancing before his
mind's eye, like bubbles out of a soap pipe. But he still didn't like
practicing at Red's place. There were papers and dirty plates all over the
place and the train ran right by the window every fifteen minutes so the
noise and the movement simply did not permit him to concentrate. Red was
happy to rehearse quietly at the St. George in Sam's 15x20-foot room with its
single bed, plain brown dresser, peeling paisley wallpaper and its cracked
window looking out on an alley. The starkness of the place was ominous except
for one ray of personality; sitting on the night table, under an imitation
ivory Chinese lamp, was a photograph of Sam's mother.
Red was happy
to give Susan Wright directions to Sam's place and warned her not to carry
very much money into that neighborhood
and for God's sake don't park your car anywhere near there. Take the
bus. Suzy was coming on Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. Red had come over
and marked it for him and told him Suzy wanted to play with him alone. Now
his calendar was marked, and he knew Suzy singer was coming over and would be
in his room at the St. George without Red, without anybody else; just
him--just Suzy. It would be Monday. Today was Monday. Sam's calendar was
marked. He checked it three times an hour. Monday. Suzy. Three o-clock. 3:00.
Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Monday. 3:00. Suzy. Suzy singer. He checked
the time three times a minute. Suzy singer. He took out his saxophone. He put
it away. He took it out again. He tested his reed. He put it away again. He
took it out again. Suzy singer. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. What will
happen? He blew a note and put it away.
He looked at the play list Red had xeroxed in the Hyatt office. Suzy had a
copy. Sam read the names of the songs. He could read them easy and every
title represented a memory of sounds and fingerings he experienced in their
totality in a flash. He had all the tapes of all the songs. There were an
even dozen. Red was figuring an average of eight minutes per song for a two
hour show. Sam arranged the tapes in the order of the play list, stacking
them one on top of the other. Several of the cassettes didn't have those flat
plastic cases, so the stack fell over. He restacked them. They fell over. He
set them side by side, left to right on top of his dresser, then he took out
several pairs of underpants and stacked the tapes between piles of underwear.
The stack clattered to the floor and Sam picked them up and set them side by
side on top of the dresser. He checked each one to see if they were all
properly cued. They were. And as he listened to each opening, rewound the
tape, played it again, and rewound it again, the entire piece flashed through
his memory again. He looked at the clock. There was underwear all over the
top of the dresser. How did these get here? Put those things away. There.
Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Suzy singer. What will happen?
Like any pro, Suzy was there early. Sam was looking at the second hand of the
clock lurching toward the 12. 2:48:56, 2:48:57, 2:48:58, 2:48:59, 2:49:00.
KNOCK KNOCK. Sam almost screamed. He went to the door. He stepped away from
the door toward his saxophone. He went back to the door and touched the
handle. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. He almost screamed again.
"Sam?" queried a voice on the other side.
"SAM," He said.
"Sam, it's Suzy Wright."
"Sam."
"Sam, are you there?"
"Yeah, okay. Suzy. (Suzy singer)."
He opened the door and retreated to the middle of the room like a shy pony.
Suzy leaned her head forward and quizzically peered into the room through the
door. Satisfied, she breezed in. "Hi Sam."
"Sam."
She went straight to the electric piano, and placed her stack of lead sheets
on the night table; she removed her coat and scarf and laid them on the bed.
She sat down on the metal folding chair and placed the first tune of their
set on the music stand. Sam stood watching these simple activities with the
opaque wonder of a dog watching his master solve a problem in advanced
calculus. She turned and smiled at him. "Wanna play?"
She had been warned that Sam had problems communicating with people and Red
had outlined the way he taught Sam music by rote, listening to tape
recordings but Suzy was not perturbed or intimidated by the possibility of
difficulties. She had her own agenda for this rehearsal and it didn't involve
learning other people's arrangements by rote. She had another idea. Suzy was
a very remarkable musician but she was also possessed of all the
motherly instincts of a born teacher
and she wanted to try something with Sam that might open him up and extend
his range. She knew Sam had some kind of mental disability, that he was
entrenched in a mind set from which he could not reach out and which most
people could not reach into but she had also felt a connection with him on
the bandstand Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; a musical connection that
enthralled her and gave her the confidence that there was something more to
Sam than people were giving him credit for. She felt she understood Sam as
well as she needed to after three nights of performing and she had a strategy
in mind that might enable her to get more music out of him.
She was so
young. Young and fearless and driven by that open-hearted sincerity that
bestows on all innocents; the keys to the kingdom. She felt that she had in
hand the key necessary to unlock the inner kingdom of Sam. She wasn't sure
but she was by God going to find out. She knew she might be rushing onto
ground where angels feared to tread but Sweet Jesus, that was what music was
for. "Wanna play?" she said again.
Without replying, Sam went over to his saxophone case in the corner with
careful steps avoiding certain lines in the carpet like land mines. He opened
the case. He was inept at putting it together. Suddenly a project that he had
performed thousands of times seemed like completely foreign and unpracticed
territory. He fumbled with the mouthpiece, he fumbled with the reed. He got
so tangled in his neck strap, Suzy had to reach out and straighten it for
him. At last he got his reed moistened and he was ready. After blowing a long
arpeggio up and down the range of the horn, he went to the tape recorder and
pushed the button on Benny Goodman's All of Me, the first tune on the
list. Suzy reached out and flipped it off. Sam flinched with surprise, eyes
wide, as though he had been shocked by 120 volts.
"Let's not begin with the tape," she said and, without any more
ado, she touched the keys and played a simple intro. Just then Sam's alarm
clock belted out a deafening high-pitched whistle. Suzy started and Sam
leaped on the clock like a leopard struggling to shut it off. After three
blasts his stumbling fingers managed to silence it. She began again, this
time with the ending tag in a slow tempo. "You took the part that once
was my heart, so why not take all of me?" Then she started into a
moderate swing vampstlye. Sam stared at her in puzzlement. He had been
prepared to play Benny Goodman's famous version but this didn't jive with
what Suzy was doing. He blanked. Ten different jazz solos buzzed through his
head and none of them fit.
"Don't know it," he said. Sam thought about crying but Suzy's smile
stopped him.
“Play the tune Sam," she encouraged. He took a breath and balked again.
"Play a little piece of the tune, come on." Suzy continued to vamp,
arching her eyebrows in anticipation. Sam played, "All of me,"
and stopped. "Good, now do it again, here," changing minors.
"All of
me."
"Good. Now
here," changing minors again.
"All of
me.”
” Good. Now put
it together." Sam had never played a musical fragment so short and he
had never put the pieces together by himself before. He had never chosen
what to play. He had always just played the other guy's tune. "Come on,
Sam, put it together." She vamped.
After a few moments of frozen silence, she leaned toward Sam and
whispered the magic words that had brought forth the miracle of Someone to
Watch Over Me four nights ago: "Take it!"
And suddenly there he was, playing All of Me. Little threads of All
of Me, like tendrils of tune reaching out to her bass line and twisting
themselves into the chords. For a moment, he was playing a sophisticated,
compressed intro for All of Me, tossing around sequentially transposed
versions of the opening. It linked up with Suzy's simple Heart and Soul
type of vamp.
Then something
weird happened: the excitement of the moment triggered something in his mind;
a safety valve shut off. He started rattling off fragments of fifteen
different versions of All of Me in quick succession with no continuity
between them, like a computer searching for a fingerprint match in an FBI
database; four notes of Charlie Parker here, five or six of Coleman Hawkins
there, Louis Armstrong here, Billie Holiday there and the fragments rolled
over on themselves and collided with each other in a hideous hysterical way.
It was magnificent and horrible and desperate. Sam's tempo accelerated to a
furious whirl and it seemed like he was going to careen off a cliff any
second, that his mad flurry of notes were signaling a time bomb about to
explode. Taken aback, Suzy witnessed the scene with the same awe with which
Sam had watched her take off her coat. Then there was a flash of melodic
construction that caught her attention and she screamed, "STOP!"
Sam choked on his reed and took a step back. He was lost and afraid and
insane.
"There! Play that again."
"Suzy?"
"Play that again, right there." She remembered enough of the
fragment to quote it on the piano. "This."
Sam parroted back the melodicle with a question mark in his eyes.
"There. Not Benny Goodman's tune, not Charlie Parker's tune, Sam's
tune."
"Sam's tune?"
"Yes, Sam's tune. Your tune."
"Mine."
Sam used music to make sense out of the random mess of conceptual objects
that cluttered the bomb-shelled, barb-wired no-man's-land of his mind. He
used it to draw into his personal sphere, material from the outer reality
that he could identify with, from which he could derive a sense of order and
safety. But his talent had always been his ability to mimic what he heard.
His identification with the music was always expressed in the second person.
But it was the collective identity of all those artists that became,
momentarily his personal identity.
Sam was never Sam alone but always Sam in others.This was how it was and this
was how it had always been. Never before had anyone asked him to create
something of his own. The idea of ownership had never occurred to him. He
took refuge in his music to escape the cruelty of his father, never to affirm
the existence of himself. His entire strategy for living had been
defensive--until now. Until now, he had never played a wrong note. As he
labored with Suzy over his own version of All of Me, he honked and
squawked false phrase after false phrase and this almost drove him to tears
again until Suzy stopped him and comforted him with the famous Miles Davis
quote, "You're never more than a half-step away from a right note."
With this, Sam dove into his improvisations with renewed vigor. By the end of
their session, Sam was playing with the same energy and authority with which
he had quoted all the great recorded jazz solos of the 20th century. Yes, he
stumbled, and yes, he painted himself into many musical corners and had to
start over again and again, (like every other musician in the world) but he
had the idea now and practiced on after Suzy went home, so much so that the
night man at the St.George had to come up and remind him it was after 11:00,
and people were trying to sleep.
Wednesday night at Al's Place was a triumph. The place was packed and when
the band launched into All of Me, there was a new saxophone player
onstage. After the head, upbeat and perky, (a little Ella Fitzgeraldish), Sam
took his first solo of the evening. He began with an attenuated,
ever-so-slightly decorated version of the tune but as the solo built and
built, through two complete choruses, his virtuosity became more and more
brilliant and commanding until the second time through the bridge, when he
stopped on a high note and held it for three measures modulating the tone
through the changes, bending it up to an ecstatic ultimate note.
It might be said that this note was a love song to Suzy. It might be said
that this was Sam's glorious "I AM!" moment of self-realization. It
might be said that Sam found his humanity in the applause clattering through
the audience at Al's Place, Chicago, Illinois, Planet Earth, 8:35 Post
Meridian, Central Standard Time. Then again, it might have been just a really
good musical idea, imagined and brought forth into the material plane by an
aspie saxophone player.
He looked over at Suzy, handed it back and let her take it out. The crowd
went wild.
Sam smiled at Suzy, maybe for the first time in his life and as he took his
bow, he took her hand and raised it over their heads, together. There was a
moment between them that could never be duplicated and whose tenderness could
never be surpassed. He felt himself congeal into a knot of self-absortion and
sin and he sighed for so much clarity. He felt himself arriving, felt himself
taking something from Suzy that was hers and his together, mostly his. And he
wept. This time she did not hold him back but embraced him onstage. The
audience redoubled their applause, conscious that they had witnessed
something important, something historic, and something plainly,
quintessentially human. When Red prodded them into their next number, Sam
leaned over and whispered, "I'll take it." And he did.
|
