Sidran - Ben Sidran: a life in the music

Ben Sidran: A Life in the Music

(The True Story of Everything I Ever Knew)

Nardis Books

A division of Unlimited Media Ltd,

PO Box 2023, Madison, WI 53701

Copyright 2003 Ben Sidran

All Rights Reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Sidran, Ben

Ben Sidran: a life in the music / Ben Sidran

v.cm

ISBN 9781450753616

1. Sidran, Ben 2. Jazz musicians United States Biography. I Title.

ML419.S43 A3 2003

786.2/165/092 B 21

ALSO BY BEN SIDRAN

Black Talk

Talking Jazz (Vols. 1, 2 & 3)

There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream

For my son, Leo

and my father, Lou

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I'll tell you the true whether I knew or not.

Mel Brooks, The Two Thousand Year Old Man

CONTENTS

Electronic Edition Preface

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Part One:Expand, expand, keep expanding

Chapter One: 1943 1960

Chapter Two: 1961 1967

Chapter Three: 1967 1970

Part Two:Becoming the information

Chapter Four: 1970 1976

Chapter Five: 1977 1979

Chapter Six: 1980 1981

Part Three:On the rim of the well

Chapter Seven: 1982 1988

Chapter Eight: 1989 1993

Chapter Nine : 1994 1999

Epilogue

Electronic Edition Preface:

I can honestly say that I have very few regrets with this book, but there is one: I never liked the title, A Life in the Music. It was so clearly the result of compromise and indecision, the opposite of everything it took to write the thing in the first place, and I still wince when I see it. It is like that infamous horse designed by committee, only in this case, the committee wasnt really interested in going for a ride.

I know one should never ask others for advice about titles. I knew it then, but not as well and certainly not as surely as I know it now; compromise on the title and you lose a little piece of sleep every night. The title should be that great leap of faith, the moment when disbelief is suspended and you allow the fates to sing your song.

My friend, the elegant authoress Lorrie Moore, told me during my period of waffling that she recommends closing your eyes, opening the manuscript to any page, and pointing, and wherever your finger lands, there is the title. I told her thats what I did when I wanted to call the book Raised by Wolves. She saw through the ruse immediately. I dont think your eyes were closed, she said. She was right.

Along the way, the list of alternative titles included both Music, Meaning and the Long Way Home and Love, Loss and Desire at Centurys End. Thankfully, those fevers passed. Then there was Take Me to the Bridge and, for a period, The Rhythm Method. Both winners but ruled out.

I was adrift. Soon I was caught up in the shoals of The Jazz Lesson, Adventures in the Jazz Trade and A Chronicle of the Jazz Years. But there were those who, perhaps rightly, cautioned against using jazz in the title too restrictive, they said for such a wide-ranging effort and I heard them, abandoning even Jazz: the Verb and Jazzed.

As the search continued, Sing Me a Love Song, On Becoming and Im Telling were thrown into the pot, a pot that was ultimately left to stew unattended when, for a period of time, I insisted the book be called How I Learned to Read the Trees. What? I still think its a poetic metaphor for trying to parse ones life. Still, I can see where it might be confusing, perhaps more appropriate for the biography of an arborist. Not unlike A Runners Heart, the title that seemed like the clear winner until my wife pointed out that people would think it was the memoir of a marathoner. Thats right! I said, not entirely convinced myself. Life is a marathon.

What makes this confession particularly painful is that I knew what I wanted to call the book all along. It came flying out of my mouth one afternoon while still working on the text. I was sitting in a coffee shop when a friend casually asked me what I was doing. I told her I was working on a book. Whats it about? she asked. Its the true story of everything I ever knew, I said.

Ben Sidran, November 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Judy and Leo, who encouraged me from the beginning and reassured me that the work was sufficient unto itself. I would also like to thank the many friends who took a look at the work in progress, offered suggestions, and did not tell me to turn back, especially Howard Gelman, Jerilyn Goodman, Jeff Greenfield, Jim and Carolyn Hougan, Tommy LiPuma, Dave and Linda Maraniss, Jackie Mitchard, Lorrie Moore, Susan Pigorsch, Ken Robbins, Matt Salinger, Ralph and Emily Simon, Peter and Susie Straub, Robert and Phyllis Kimbrough and Terry Strauss. And finally, my thanks to Elaine Markson, who informed me when it was finally time to stop.

PROLOGUE

August 6th, 1991

Red Rocks, Colorado

Im standing on stage in front of twelve thousand drunk, screaming teenagers. In the front row, a plastered sixteen-year-old girl is lifting up her T-shirt to flash me. I see her mouth open, shes screaming but I hear nothing. Up in the sky, up behind the churning sea of bodies, a helicopter lifts off, taking another poisoned kid to the neon room. But I hear nothing. In my ears, I have molded monitors that no sound can penetrate. Im supposed to be plugged into the module on my belt, listening to the band, listening to myself. The greatest mix ever. On top of the world. But Im unplugged. I look down at my hands. Im still playing. But behind dark shades, in my cocoon of silence, on this bright hot August afternoon, I hear nothing, I see nothing, I feel nothing. Way in the distance, Steve Miller is singing Big old jet airliner, dont carry me too far away.... But Im already gone. Almost fifty years old. Man, Im almost fifty years old. Were all almost fifty years old. Up on the hill in front of us, theyre all fifteen and sixteen and they are absolutely pissing in their pants. I can only think about that cold November afternoon, some twenty years ago, driving Paul Pena home from the recording studio the day he first recorded Jet Airliner. Him blind and me lost and hes directing me through the streets of Boston, and we get to his house and all his blind friends are there and we all get stoned and start playing music and then it gets dark outside and then there are no light bulbs in the lamps because, of course, theyre blind, and suddenly, I am the one who is blind. And now its twenty years later and Jet Airliner is one of Steves big hits, and Im on stage and Im blind again, and deaf too, Oh Lord, up on this stage in front of a howling party mob....

PART ONE

Expand, expand, keep expanding

CHAPTER ONE

In a world of fugitives

The person taking the opposite direction

Will appear to run away.

-- T.S. Eliot

* * *

1943 - 1955

In the beginning, you fall in love. It starts in your feet and pretty soon its in your chest and then your throat and finally you cant think about anything else. For me it was boogie-woogie, specifically Pine Tops Boogie by pianist Pine Top Smith. My father had the record, and, by nine, I had it memorized. I played it over and over like some kind of personal litany, rocking back and forth, almost in a trance. I had been playing piano since...well, actually, I dont remember not playing the piano. My earliest memories include the piano, sitting at the keys, turning the pages of a comic book with my right hand and watching my left hand trace a boogie pattern. Slowly, unconsciously, I fixed the moves into my motor memory while my mind wandered. So even as a small child, jazz was, for me, the great escape: it spoke to me of something better, a world greater than the world I knew. To this day, I believe that alienation is at the heart of every jazzmans story.