Twenty-Seven Choruses

Words by Jonathan Adams

Art by Sandra Eckert

I never liked that tune. A gimmick, two songs tied up with a bit of string and ribbon. But the boss wrote it, and he told me to hold the pieces together, blow hard for a chorus and give the band a breather. I lived in that space between diminuendo and crescendo, and I’d see if I might come up with something new on my way from one to the other. I never did. No regrets; Jeep, Cat, and Sweets could search for new harmonies and unexplored rhythms, grab the crowd by the ears and make them sit up straight. Especially Jeep. I was happy if I could give the people some blues riffs to get their feet tapping, then get back in line.

Except for that once. Everyone told me I saved the boss’s career that night. Maybe. He needed saving. That much I know. Then he tried to save me.

We were in Newport. The boss had laid it all out to be Jeep’s night, his first big gig back with the band. He’d gone on the road with his own group four years ago, even taking our drummer and trombonist with him, but it didn’t work out. Bandleaders and reedmen, that’s two different cats. Nobody was happier to have him back than me; as long as Jeep was around he’d get all the attention. I could just do my thing.

I thought having Jeep back would put the boss at ease, but he was jumpy and smoking even more than usual on our way up from the city. That night we would premiere the boss’s latest composition, a big, sprawling thing he wrote just for the occasion. He and Strays fiddled with it for hours and hadn’t finished when our bus pulled into Newport.

The jazz festival had moved that year from the tennis club to a place called Freebody Park. Sounded like it took the name from some old abolitionist, maybe a place where there’d be just a little less than the usual shit. But not really. A Mrs. Freebody gave the land to the town, so they put her name on it, then built a casino on half, for the white folks. Nothing, nobody, free here.

Jeep pulled me aside as we headed to the little bandstand to run through the new piece. “Hey, Mex, you ready?” Sweets Edison, the trumpeter, gave me that name the day I walked into my first rehearsal. I guess it was my light skin and Latin-sounding name, and the rest of the band picked up on it. I was Mex from then on, even though I didn’t have an ounce of Mexican in me. Of course, everybody else in the band was colored, so as far as the audience in Newport and most everywhere else was concerned, so was I. Fine by me. We were kin, and I wanted to be heard, not seen, anyway.

“Give me a bass and drums and I’m ready, Jeep. You’ve been away. Did you forget?”

I never knew what Jeep had going on in his head. His expression hardly changed from one moment to the next, not even in the middle of a solo hot enough to melt wax. People told me they could tell exactly how I was feeling on every note I played—my face gave it away. Jeep played like he was trying to open a gal’s bedroom door, but you’d never know it. He might as well have been counting the seats in the back row of the auditorium.

Jeep gave me half a grin and went up the stairs to the stage. I looked around; half the trumpet section was missing, along with the clarinetist and the bass player. The boss noticed too; they all had solos in the new piece. He paced around his piano, smoking and scowling. I hadn’t seen them since we got off the bus. They had probably slipped away to Freddy’s, just beyond the fence. A dark, sweaty place, but I ached to be there too, even though I knew that if I had one drink, I’d have seven, then a needle, and they’d toss me in the back of the bus to sleep it off. Some things you can never quit.

Rehearsal went as bad as you would guess, without much of the band and Strays running around changing the charts as we played them. I nearly hit him in the ear with my tenor as he knelt by my chair to scribble and erase a few bars.

A short, round, bald man came charging up the steps as we finished up, spoiling for a fight. Me and Sweets put down our horns, in case the boss needed us to step in.

It was the festival producer. A cheerful, wise-cracking sort most of the time, but not now.

“Duke, you told me this piece would be ready. It’s shit.” Spit flew from his lips and his breath came in short bursts. “If you play some goddamned medley of songs you wrote twenty years ago I swear I’ll turn off the mics and we can all go home.”

“We’ll get it right. Some of the boys are missing, but they’ll be here when it counts.” The boss even managed to sound convincing.

“Missing? How much of the band is missing?”

“A few. Don’t worry about it.”

“How many is a few?”

The boss shrugged and fumbled for a cigarette. The producer looked at me. I inspected my reed for signs of warping. He looked at Sweets, who held up four fingers. The boss’s eyes blazed. He wanted to stuff that trumpet down Sweets’ throat.

“Four men missing from your last rehearsal of a piece that’s not even written yet, and you think it’s all fine? You need this gig to be a hit.” He shook an angry finger in the boss’s face. “You better come in here swinging.” He turned and stomped down the stairs.

The boss slid his left hand into the pocket of his herringbone sport coat and took a long drag. Then he left too, off to find Strays and fix whatever problems he’d heard during rehearsal. That would take some doing.

A few workmen were setting up, swiping the seats and cleaning the railings that separated the VIP boxes down front. Others rearranged long rows of folding chairs in the general admission section or scrubbed the concrete bleachers that ran along the back of the grounds. It was 5:00, high summer on a cloudless day.

Not a bad setting: decent acoustics, room for a big crowd. If our luck held we wouldn’t get rained on. But I never thought much of Newport. Too white, too rich, too bored. I mean, they held the first festival in ’54 on a tennis court next to the casino and got mad when some grass come out bent. “Sacred ground,” they called it. I’m not what you’d call religious, but I know sacred and some grass with a bit of chalk and a net ain’t it.

Our folks could come too, but they had to stand in the back. Newporters wouldn’t dream of keeping them out altogether. But broad-mindedness was near-forgotten habit in Newport. Long-dead ancestors welcomed Quakers and Jews, and good for them, I guess. They just didn’t talk about the ships sailing in from the West Indies, carrying molasses the good townspeople used to make their rum. Nobody asked where those ship captains got the money to buy all that molasses. Newport preferred more subtlety these days; keep the ticket prices high and then only the right people will show up. Most of the white folks came so other white folks could see them and appreciate how hip they were, hip enough to let themselves be entertained by Negroes playing jazz, and hip enough to get it. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway.

They didn’t get it. They came to hear Louis Armstrong but they called him Louie, like he was their houseboy. Easier than accepting the hard fact of his genius. Newporters did the same kind of thing with the boss. They didn’t get him either, but he was smooth and kind and dressed better than they did so they figured he posed no great threat and it made them feel good to put on a show for their neighbors. He was threatening all right, just not in a way Newport ever understood. Maybe I should cut them some slack. Could have been worse. Could have been a whole lot worse.

The producer didn’t invite us to the first festival, or the second. He couldn’t come up with enough money to pay a big band like ours. I’m not sure what kind of a show we would have put on anyway. We had started to feel threadbare. Without Jeep to keep us on our toes we got lazy, and without his relentless swing the old songs sounded feeble, the new ones muddy, like Strays had written them out with a blunt pencil. We could still draw a crowd, but I can’t say those crowds remembered anything they heard the next day. Nobody, certainly not the boss, would say it out loud, but Newport could be our last big chance.

I should have been more sympathetic to the Newport folks. I grew up not far away, but Pawtucket might as well have been on another planet. People of all sorts washed up there—colored and white and in-between. I found myself in-between most of the time. I had my mom’s fair skin and wavy hair; the neighborhood kids called me high yella, but like everyone from Cape Verde I was a mix of a whole bunch of different things—Fulani, Mandyako, Moor, Spaniard, Portuguese, Jew. I was a mutt, and didn’t think that was a bad thing to be. There were a lot of mutts around as far as I could tell, whether they knew it or not.

On the street, by myself, I was white in a white neighborhood, colored in a colored one, Cape Verdean in New Bedford. But I was just passing through. Most people would just as soon kick a mutt as bring it inside.

Our first set started after eight. The audience was still filling the seats. The four missing guys had not shown up, so we borrowed a bassist from another band. We played a few tunes to warm the place up, but we played stiff when we needed supple. The crowd got restless. The boss did his best to light a fire under us, with growl, an emphatic chord, and a happy “Alright, alright, alright, alright, alright!” during a trumpet solo. “Go, go, go!” he shouted, jumping up from his chair.

It wasn’t alright, not even close. Everybody knew it. The producer glared at us from behind his recording equipment as we came offstage. We had one more set.

The wait backstage was agony. A bunch of acts went on, then intermission. I could see people drifting toward the bleachers, where the ‘Gansett flowed from the taps. I didn’t think this well-heeled bunch would turn into a mob of rowdy drunks, but boredom does strange things to people.

Anita O’Day got them on their feet. We aimed to ride that crest, but two more acts still had to go on and it was nearing eleven. The boss looked ready to blow. We knew we could swing better than any of those acts, but we couldn’t get on stage. It was like taking a horse to the starting gate and not letting him run.

The producer found his way backstage, still worried that we would trot out the old numbers since the boss and Strays hadn’t put the finishing touches on the new one.

“What are you going to play?”

The boss gave him an icy look. “I don’t know yet.”

“I stuck my neck out for you,” he said, tugging at his collar. “No one wanted a big band on this bill. No one. They’re dying and you know it, but I told them you would rise to the occasion. Because of who you are, because of who they are.” The band had gathered behind the boss to hear this exchange, quiet and nervous. “Don’t make a liar out of me, or you’ll regret it.”

The boss gave us a glance. Throw us a lifeline or we might sink out of sight.

“What are we? The animal act, the acrobats?” His usual smooth charm and easy grin vanished with. a blink, replaced by a set jaw and hard eyes. He swept the air with his long arms. “We are not going to play exit music.”

The producer shuffled off with mumbled promises about getting us back on as soon as he could. That turned out to be near midnight.

Just before we went onstage the boss gathered us one last time.

“Look, fellas, we have one more shot at getting this right.” This was as subdued as I’d ever seen him. The pressure had finally gotten to him, the one man who never felt pressure, or never admitted it. “We’ll play the new one first.” He still hadn’t given it a name, a sickly newborn he feared would not survive the night. I never met anyone more superstitious. He sensed death around every corner, in every coincidence or bit of bad luck. In that moment he looked like he was about to walk up the thirteen steps.

“Don’t worry about it, just play it straight through. Then we’ll play 'Diminuendo in Blue' and then 'Crescendo in Blue.' Mex will play in the break.” He grabbed me by the shoulder as he said it. He’d never done that before.

“Gee, I don’t think I know that one,” I said. The tension cracked like ice on a pond.

“It’s in B-flat,” Jeep said, expressionless as ever.

“Just play the blues,” Sweets said. “You remember how to do that?”

The boss found his smile again. “You just blow until I tell you to stop.”

When the boss introduced the first section of the new piece, he decided on the spot to call it “Festival Junction.” It went as well as could be expected, with some nice, easy solos. The crowd responded, but they didn’t seem sold on it, or us. The unease deepened with each section, each sporting a brand-new name that didn’t make the damn thing any shinier.

Then the boss decided to play a ballad, and the place got sullen. People down front started to reach for their hats. The singer came on for an old standard, and the boss just sat at the piano, not touching the keys, staring as the bleachers started to empty. Exit music. A life’s work passing before his eyes. The critics backstage started writing our epitaph, hoping they could make it fit the tombstone of every last big band.

The singer got some tepid applause. The boss’s shoulders sagged a bit more. He looked old, worn out. Maybe his day, and ours, had passed. Then he straightened, set his jaw, summoned resolve from I don’t know where. If he had to go, he would not go quietly. He nearly jumped from his chair and took three quick strides to the microphone downstage.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he said, more a command than a request. With his eyes he said: if you go, you’ll regret it. The folks in the boxes sat down as if the preacher had reminded them he had not yet bestowed his final benediction. The bleacher crowd, younger and drunker, stood where they were, not quite leaving, not quite staying.

The boss went back to his piano and dove right into the opening bars of Diminuendo in Blue, hammering the chords but leaving space in between, placing single accents in just the right places. When he was on, the boss could swing those silences better than anyone but Basie. And he was on now, as lively as if he’d stuck his finger in a socket. He invited us to come with him and fill that space. He’d launched the beat. Now we had to carry it.

Our drummer, Sam, drove us from the first sharp crack of his high hat. He felt the fierce urgency of the moment; his future, the boss’s, this band’s and maybe all bands like it, could be riding on what we did over the next few minutes. The crowd hadn’t abandoned us yet, but we’d squandered nearly all their goodwill playing the unfinished and unnamed.

The last bars of Diminuendo faded away with a few riffs from the boss’s piano. Jeep nudged me with his elbow, gave a quick jut of his chin. He wasn’t passing the torch, but he was giving me his blessing.

I stepped up to the front of the stage. Past the footlights, in the well set up for the photographers, stood a musician I recognized, a drummer from one of the earlier acts. He had a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and was slapping it into his palm. Past him the crowd waited for me to redeem us all, to make the whole night worthwhile. These were my people, the New Bedford kitchen dancers, the Cape Verdeans, the mutts. I knew how to bring them home.

Sam and Jimmy, the bass player, laid down a big beat. The drummer down front picked up on it, hooting and slapping his newspaper against the stage. That’s all it took. I played a few bluesy riffs and the crowds near the exits ran back to their seats. I closed my eyes. I had seen all I needed to see.

Of course I remembered how to play the blues, like I remembered that I had fingers and toes. The blues were my sacred music. A chant, raucous and quiet, to lift you up and lay you down. I was flying right from the start. Nothing to hold me back, just the bass and drums and that guy down front. Call and response, urging me on and on and on and on. The boss growled with delight after a few bars, and I could hear the reedmen behind me grinning, even Jeep. Filling me up. The tension flew out of my fingers after a chorus, leaving only joy and energy. No thought, no dreams of sophistication got in my way. Just drive. Sometimes my mind gets ahead of my fingers, sometimes the reverse, and I have to slow down, figure a new way through the changes. Now everything synched. I’d been born to play this way. The changes came and went like breath. The critics backstage, the snobs in the VIP boxes, might not like it. Too simple for them, too much blues and rhythm, too few ideas. I didn’t care. This was for the mutts, and for the boss, holding them close and no one else was there but us and we’re dancing, a perfect flowing groove.

“Work on it. Work on it! Oh yeah! Work on it!” Pure ecstasy from the boss. After four choruses, the place was on fire. A wave built from the back of the house, a low roar that swept toward me and lifted me up off the stage. I opened my eyes and felt I was looking out over the crowd from the top of a hill and I was alone up there like Gabriel with his horn.

The crowd pushed toward the stage, filling the aisles. Down front, the drummer with the rolled-up newspaper started to shout even louder. He gathered the building energy of the crowd and focused it, pushing us closer and closer to the edge. Sam began dropping bombs on his bass drum and riding the high-hat like a demon. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a woman—white, with platinum hair, in a sleeveless, full-skirted brown dress with a plunging v-neckline. At first she just stood by her chair, swaying with the music. But then in a flash she danced down the aisle, kicking her feet high in the air and waving her sinewy arms above her head, beaming.

The rest of the crowd, the boss, the band, faded to a soft blur. Now it was just the two of us. Newporters didn’t dance, not down front and not like this, reckless and dangerous. But the proper white folk in the boxes weren’t shocked or offended by those indecent, well-toned calves. They stood and grinned, even clapped their hands. I heard another shout, and it wasn’t from the boss or the drummer in the well. The crowd had finally joined the service.

Now the dancer cut loose, and as she did all remaining bonds fell from me as well. Our abandon flew out over the crowd and I felt her close, her breath was mine, she was sliding round and round me, her hands snaking toward the sky and the music all caught up in her hair. The blood rushed to my throat and turned to sound, roaring out of my horn and all the way to the back of the bleachers.

On and on we went, the dancer and me. Twenty choruses. Twenty-five. “Don’t stop, don’t stop now!” the boss shouted. I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to. The crowd clapping and whistling and stomping their feet were part of the band now, an army of rhythm about to overrun us all. The dancer threw back her head and spun, a weightless skater on ice.

And then I was done. I picked out a note and held it, soaking up the crowd’s pulsating energy as long as I could. We were all one now, a single living thing, moving to that driving beat. I’d never felt a rhythm own me like that. I never would again.

The boss was the maestro from then on. I’d blown away whatever doubts had snuck into his soul. He told people he was born in Newport, that night in 1956. He called me the savior, but I never played twenty-seven choruses again. Once you climb that mountain, it’s awfully hard to get back. Makes me wonder if any of it really happened.

About the author

Jonathan Adams is a writer and editor living in Rockville, Maryland. He has written five non-fiction books on topics ranging from nature conservation in Africa to the history of antibiotics to public health in Chicago. He is working on a historical novel set amid the Great Terror and the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. This is his first piece of historical short fiction. You can find him on the web at pangolinwords.com.

About the illustrator

Sandra Eckert is a doodler, a dabbler, and a messy and restless individual. An avid naturopath and off-the-road walker, she finds inspiration in the unscenic vistas and hidden places. While her interests currently lie in the world of art, she has been known to tend goats, whitewater kayak, fish for piranha, and teach teenaged humans. She is fascinated by the lessons of the natural world, both seen and unseen. Sandra holds a BFA with certification, and has continued her education both formally and informally, though she is too distracted to gather up her credits. She lives in Allentown with her husband, Peter, and her dogs, Jack and Tobi. Additional works are available here.