And, On Rhythm Guitar . . . .

In my haste to get the last post up on the site, I left out the part I really wanted to talk about. Geez, where is my mind? Anyway, I won my 20 records and made an appointment with Kendra to pick them up at her house. I got there and the records were organized and waiting for me. We chatted a bit and she told me how pleased she was with the auction and some of the top prices she was able to get, especially for the Bill Evans and Kenny Drew records. Casually, I asked if there were any records that hadn’t sold. I tell you I asked casually, but that is a bit of a fib. It was actually not casual. It was carefully prepared. Because on the auction there were two records that had $50 start prices that seemed to get no action. They were (1) the previously mentioned Let’s Have a Session on Ad Lib with Billy Bauer, Tony Aless, Arnold Fishkin and Don Lamond; and (2) Afro Cuban Jazz by Machito on Mercury, which features Charlie Parker.

So my casual inquiry was with an undisclosed purpose: I wanted those two records. I knew, if they were still there, Kendra would have no clear way to sell them since the auction was over and she wasn’t about to go on eBay or open a record store. Perhaps she could have sold them to one of the other auction winners, but I felt we had built a nice rapport. It turns out that the records, indeed, were still sitting there with no bids and no visible interest from any other buyers. So, I said, how about if I give you twenty bucks for the two records? She paused for just a second, looked at the records sitting off by themselves, smiled and replied, sure. So I pulled out a twenty dollar bill and added those two records to my pile.

Now I finally get to the reason I wanted to write about this last piece of the story. It is because Billy Bauer is responsible for perhaps the only true musical accomplishment/accolade of my life. I will set the stage and I will try not to steal the thunder from my best friend Dan, because I am mostly a supporting character in this story and the best parts of it belong to him and he is writing a book telling his own version, and it is an awesome book, which I know because I’ve read it.

So, let me tell it from my side. This is back in the early 1970s. I am still in my teens and have been playing guitar for four to five years with very little distinction and not a great deal of talent. But I loved music and I at least made an effort. Dan, who lived down the block, was a prodigy. We were both into jazz, but only one of us could actually play it. By this time Dan was studying with Billy Bauer, and I was basically smoking a lot of pot, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get laid, playing a lot of poker and going to the racetrack day and night. To put it mildly, I was not in a good place. Jazz became a refuge for me.

Dan and I would hunt records together, pore through my dad’s collection and go to clubs and concerts regularly. We’d also play guitar together. My repertoire was limited to the blues, Summertime and a few other tunes, but we sounded great because Dan was great and could do anything. If I made a mistake or hit a wrong chord, he could adjust on the fly. As his own repertoire expanded, he started teaching me more jazz chords and more songs so that I could do a better job accompanying him. It turns out, I may not have had great ears, but I could swing. I kept good time and I had a feel for jazz, having listened to it all my life.

At one point I must have been pretty pleased with myself because I suggested to Dan that we get a gig somewhere. He was already a professional musician working every weekend and he kind of laughed, thinking I was either joking or totally out of my mind. So, perhaps to humor me, he said, sure, if you get a gig, I’ll do it. So I went out and got a gig. Monday and/or Tuesday nights at a local wine and cheese bar not far from us on Union Turnpike in Bayside, Queens, where we grew up. I’m not sure how I actually got the gig. I probably just walked in, told them I had a band, and, they probably had nothing else going on Mondays, so they said, why not?

Now that we had a gig, though, we had a problem. How were we going to fill an entire evening? My repertoire was still limited and, because I knew nothing about music theory and didn’t have great ears, I couldn’t just follow Dan and figure out which chords to play (not that it would be easy even if I did have good ears). And Dan didn’t want me to have a fake book sitting in front of me because he was a professional and he felt if we were going to do a gig and play in front of people, he wanted us to look and sound like pros.

So, we came up with an idea. Dan would write the chord changes down on little index cards, and I would surreptitiously put the cue cards down on a stool or something so I could see them, and that would solve the repertoire problem. Dan would call out a tune, I would fumble through a little green tin box with the cue cards, find the right song – You Say You Care, Time After Time, If There is Someone Lovelier Than You, Have You Met Miss Jones, With the Wind and the Rain in Your Hair – and, boom, we’d be off. I’d play the chords, Dan would solo, pretty much the whole night, for three hours. I still have the little green tin box and the cue cards right now, sitting on a shelf behind me as I type this. They are important; next time Dan comes up here to The Berkshires, I guarantee we will pull out those cue cards and start playing pretty much exactly as we did nearly 50 years ago.

Which finally brings me to my Billy Bauer moment. As I said, Dan was studying with Billy, who had a very strong teaching practice on Long Island. One evening, before we were getting on stage, Dan turned to me and said that we should try to turn it up a notch because Billy was coming to see us and he was bringing a bunch of his students. Oh, the pressure. This was the night I couldn’t miss any chords, couldn’t lose my place in the middle of All the Things You Are, couldn’t play a C Minor 7 when the tune called for a C Minor 7 Flat 5.

So we got up on the tiny stage at The Rainy Night House on our two stools and we dug in. Dan called out a Tal Farlow-inspired set because he had recently discovered the Tal Farlow Album, 10-inch on Norgran and it changed his life. I was pretty sure I nailed it that night. After the first set, we went over to Billy’s table to say hi and Danny introduced me to Billy and the other guitarists. After Danny got his well-deserved accolades, Billy turned to me and said something on the order of, “And I was just telling my students to carefully watch what you were doing because you were really swinging and providing the perfect accompaniment to Dan, supporting him without getting in his way.”

And that was it for me. A compliment, completely genuine and unforced, from a real jazz guitarist. It has stuck with me all of these years and perhaps I have embellished it or changed some of the details these decades later, but that’s how I will always remember it. So, getting the Billy Bauer album in this stack meant something personal to me; the fact that the Tal Farlow Album was also among these records was icing on the cake because it was the Tal Farlow Album that helped inspire Dan to become a great jazz guitarist and it was Billy Bauer who introduced Dan to Tal, who became his great friend and mentor. But that one truly is Dan’s story and is not for me to tell here.

One last thing: I think I have posted this before, but I can do it again. Here is what we sounded like back in the day playing All the Things You Are (Dan really gets into it around two minutes in so stick with it, with me responsible for the Yeahs in the background and a few words from The Lovely Mrs. JC right before we get started)

and Donna Lee.

These were recorded on a little cassette in my living room a few years later, but it’s a pretty accurate depiction of what we may have sounded like at the Rainy Night House playing for Billy Bauer and company.