Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel The Magic Keys by Albert Murray (©2005 by Albert L. Murray).

In the passage, the term stopgap gig refers to a temporary position as a member of a band.

When I finally told Taft Edison about the time I had spent on the road with the band, I said, Man, it began as an incredible summer transition job that I needed because I had to get enough cash to supplement the graduate school fellowship grant I had been awarded. I said, Man, nothing like that had ever crossed my mind before. I said, Man, when I left home for college my main musical involvement beyond listening and dancing to it was humming and whistling it.

I said, Man, when Hortense Hightower told me what she told me about suggesting me as a stopgap replacement when the Bossman Himself called and just happened to mention in passing that Shag Phillips had given notice, I couldn’t believe it. But she said, Don’t worry about it because he doesn’t go around looking for superstars. He makes his own. Not because it’s a game or some kind of challenge to prove anything about his ingenuity as some kind of mentor either. She said, He hires his musicians because he has decided that he wants to find out what he can do with something he’s heard them playing. And that is when she also said, Believe me when I tell you that the very fact that he remembered you as soon as I mentioned you is what counts, because that means that you did something that caught his ear—not necessarily something musically technical either, something that goes with something he’s got filed away in that steel-trap mind of his. You’ve heard about those big-time college profs talking about those linguistic experts that can listen to half a sentence and tell you where you come from? Well, that’s him when it comes to music.

I don’t remember ever really touching, let alone trying to fool around with, the bass fiddle before Hortense Hightower gave me one in the spring of my junior year.

I had never thought of Taft Edison as having ever had any serious personal professional interest in dance bands. As far as I knew, none of the music school courses had anything whatsoever to do with becoming bandleaders and arrangers/composers like the Bossman Himself.

My impression of Taft Edison from the very outset was that his ambition was to create compositions based on down-home sacred and secular music, including workaday chants and hollers, that would be performed in concert halls by concert hall-type instrumental and vocal groups and philharmonic orchestras. Because when I arrived on the campus as a freshman, he was a junior who impressed me more than anybody else in the School of Music because he was the student who conducted the school’s widely popular college marching band.

But although there were also two student-led dance bands on the campus at that time, I can’t remember having ever seen him playing with either of them. Not that I ever got the impression that he disliked or had no interest in that kind of music, or that his attitude was one of condescension, as was the case of many conservatory-oriented students at the time. Not at all. Because when you saw him at socials and at benefit dances, he was always up-to-date on all the latest steps. And also when he stopped by the Mainstem Lounge, where you used to listen to the late-night radio broadcasts from such then famous nightspots as the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club in Harlem and the Grand Terrace on the South Side of Chicago in those days, he could identify as many bands and sidemen as instantaneously as any of the dance band musicians, record collectors, and patent-leather avenue sharpies as happened to be there at the time.

So when I told him about my stopgap gig with the band, I didn’t know what his response would be, but I did so because I had decided that I had better mention it myself rather than running the risk of having him find out about it just incidentally somehow and wonder why I hadn’t mentioned it on my own and why I hadn’t yet said anything at all about ever having played any musical instrument.

But as I should have remembered from his completely unsurprised and ever so casual response when I introduced myself to him on Fifth Avenue that day, he didn’t register any surprise at all. Anyway, all he said was that he hadn’t heard the band during the period between Shag Phillips and Scratchy McFatrick.

But, he said, I do remember hearing something about some college boy filling in for a while. So that was you! I myself would have had a hard time turning down the chance to hit the trail with that fabulous crew for a while. Man, I can just imagine it. Man, when I woke up every morning and realized why I was wherever I was I would have had to pinch myself.