Shackling Water Read online

  Fifty years the spot had stood, through bop and free and fusion, staring down police raids and the periodic Death of Jazz. A portrait gallery hung on each of two long walls. One was a hall of fame, the other one a cemetery. When there was only one gallery left, the owner always said as he performed the solemn ritual of moving a portrait—most recently those of Joe Williams, Jackie Byard, Kenny Kirkland, Leon Thomas, Don Pullen, and Milt Jackson—he would close the club.

  Already Dutchman's was a throwback, the only joint in town which still booked longterm gigs. Van Horn was in week two of a six-month run, a prize equivalent to acceptance at an artists' colony and the closest thing to woodshedding in public. For aficionados and audience musicians, too, longterm gigs were precious opportunities. Only by hearing the same band night after night could you really begin to get inside of what was going on up there.

  It wasn't long before everywhere but Dutchman's seemed dead to Latif; the streets of New York, manic with the noise of commerce and industry, furious with crosscurrents of talk, were a windswept desert by comparison. Everything and everybody was inside the club, where time was not linear and rigid but elastic, something one could borrow, bend, return, and tickle. Van Horn's drummer Murray Higgins did it all and every night. He sat high on his drumstool, grimacing and growling like an ocean god and pounding tridents against drums. Latif sat entrenched and entranced at the nearest corner of the bracket-shaped bar, where there was no cover charge and he could jiggle the same drink until it was nothing but melted ice, and tried to follow along. Higgins' conception of time was so advanced that had he so chosen Latif believed the drummer could have been a mathematician or physicist par excellence. Higgins played time without ever bowing to it, without time ever seeming to confine him. He transformed it like a showman's prop: In Murray's nimble overmuscled hands the beat was a vaudevillian's handkerchief, becoming first a veil and then a hat and then a stick-up man's bandanna.

  There was no single focus, no trusty fingersnapping accent on the two and four to keep the audience clued in; instead, Higgins conducted a sometimes smirking, sometimes clenchingly serious flirtation with the beat. He sprinted ahead of it like Jesse Owens, searing ground with speed and power, then turned around annoyed and tapped his foot and waited for the beat to catch up. He followed behind it like a child mimicking a friend, copying its walk in subtle parody with an off-cadence doubletime rhythm on the hi-hat or an aggressive tempo-pushing pattern on the bass drum. Sometimes Murray played the beat where it should be for an instant, like a three-card molly hustler flipping up the money card, and Latif seized upon the moment, tapped a metronome-hand on his leg and compared Murray's forays and reconfigurations to the point of origin. It was at such times, when Latif could lasso a context, that the drummer's genius, the way he pushed the band, was clear.

  Or was Higgins being pushed? Was there a leader, or did the whole room pulse together? Latif left Dutchman's each night wondering a million things, replaying scenes and sounds nonmusical and musical, retrospectively choreographing an elaborate dance. Was it coincidence that a couple at a side table had argued fiercely during Murray's solo, a hotspiced polyrhythmic stew he'd stirred and churned with mallets—mallets whose soft white heads flew up and down against the sock cymbal so fast that they blurred and streaked through the red of the stagelights like bolts of lightning?

  Was it coincidence that when Albert reentered on tenor the couple grew quiet, the man hunching shoulders over elbows and the woman resting her chin on her fist? When Van Horn's trilled opening curlicues engorged and deepened, grew mournful and low, was it coincidence that the couple stopped bickering and stared into each other's eyes? When Sonny Burma layered meditative velvet chords behind the horn and Amir Abdul walked the bass beneath it all like a man ice skating underneath a bridge and a full moon, was it coincidence that the man took the woman's hand, pressed it to his face, and kissed it?

  Music danced lead with life in here, and when it was time to go Latif shimmied up the staircase underneath a slategray predawn sky. Weariness tugged at his muscles but his mind was never tired, and Latif walked to the train each night resolved to devote himself only to breath and sound, tightening his fists against the rush of adrenaline which surged through him whenever he thought about his music and the future. It was liquid impatience and he knew he had to beat it back, control it, this hip hop desire to break through the woodshed door and sprint into the world. He reminded himself that he would only stagger like a mad scientist's creation, alive but half-formed and unviable, if he left the laboratory too early in search of companionship, love, whatever it was that made monsters break out of their masters' labs.

  Latif woke up each morning fiending for nightfall so he could journey back downtown; it was his reward for a day's work. His saxophone looked dull, unglinting, against the morning washout of the room, but Latif closed his eyes and slid the reed between his lips, imagining the horn as an extension of his body just as Wess had told him to. Think of the circle, the circuit, you're creating, Wess had said. Body to mouth to horn to hands to body. It's unbroken. In flashfloods of romantic majesty, Latif sometimes scripted creation fables for his horn, cribbing from mythologies he'd pored over as a kid because the truth—that his mom had bought the tenor for him at Alphonso's Discount Music in Dorchester—seemed unworthy of his axe. Latif preferred to recall divine mandate: the Arthurian Lady of the Lake chucking the horn at him, a staff of lightning flashing on the water as God boomed Swing, o chosen blower, swing. Or some Homeric hero-test Whosoever can draw forth sound from this, Apollo's saxophone, shall have it as his weapon.

  The boardinghouse room also took on epic grandeur, became Latif's woodshed. The shed was both a place and an idea; it could be a downhome Alabama backhouse or a pearl-gray studio with cracked plaster nestled in the ventricles of Harlem. Anyplace you could seal yourself inside, stone or wood or thatch no matter, just so long as your thin stringy sound would bounce back off it pure and let you know how wack you sounded, how far from total tonal fullness you were. The woodshed was where loneliness was never lonely, where solitude was total yet attended by the omnipresent imperative to whittle away deadness, rub off flaking flesh, to chisel life down to just the burning habanero nowstep agitation parts.

  The shed, Wess told Latif is where you hole up til you whole up, sprinting til your horn is within shouting distance of your heart. You crouched in the woodshed-as-sauna, rocksteady over fire, fat cells sliding off your brain, tongue tingling with sweat-as-nourishment. Perhaps inside a spare splitsec you relished the offhand wondering you knew was lazyfloating in the air, mingling with cigarette smoke, in the spots you used to hold down as your turf: Where so and so been at? Dunno, man, haven't seen him for a minute, spoken languid with a hidden tinge of jealousy because whenever a cat cuts out unexpected, motherfuckers know he might be shedding and thus fear a triumphant return-slash-asswhipping. And feel lame for sitting, smoking, and bullshitting while the next man is off invisible somewhere getting his game tight.

  But more than game was being tightened. The shed was a couples' retreat, one of those learn how to listen and become one joints for a musician and the mouthpiece through which he pulled thick sweetness from that big center-of-the-earth guarded-by-a-many-legged-goddess one love honeypot. A cat might stay in there a day or a year: however long it took to formulate what he'd been fumbling with or teach his fingers what his brain was playing. To catch up with himself or the motherfucker that cut his head last time he hit the afterhours session full of pith and vinegar. The shed ain't no quick fix, Wess cautioned. You gotta get your mail in there. Come back from the gig, hatrack your brim, inhale the mildewed necessity of constant struggle and then get the fuck to work.

  There weren't too many woodshed stories to be told. No witnesses and not a lot to say, really. What could you say? I went in there looking for something and I found it. Or I didn't, and here I am drunk at the bar. A cat who did have shed stories to tell was suspect, Wess said; more than likely he was in the deep end of
the pool, treading water with his brethren in the biggest jazz fraternity of all, the Bullshit Motherfucker House. Certain stuff you were supposed to do in private—fast, pray, woodshed—because to have cats know about it might sully the ritual's purity, shade your motivations with self-consciousness. All of a moment you might find yourself looking left then right before helping a blind man across the street, not to check for traffic but in hopes of being seen.

  Alone in the shed, Latif pictured himself as the young Zorro in exile, hand over the smarting sticky wetness of his swordswipe fleshwound, fingers scarlet on his cheek and blade in hand, practicing parry after parry, sidestep combo shuffle stab en garde, brain squeezed tighter than the black spot pirate murder sign and dreaming lucid of revenge. Or as a banished kung-fu student deep in some bamboo sanctuary, slurping rainwater from leaves and mastering his body until every sinew screamed with hardness and a single arched-foot kick was deadly, crumbling the wispy ghosts of as-yet-unfaced foes like faded charcoal.

  He played every day until his shadowed form against the wall grew long and slender and the sun slid underneath his window. Latif's shadow looked the way he felt; pure, solid, undernourished, and flowing perfectly into his horn. He barely ate, had neither the desire nor the money. Enough of each to fill his stomach once a day, and that was plenty. The give and take of man woman and child ascended lazy from the street and Latif paid it no nevermind. He needed nothing but the sharp, crisp, weighty feelings of the woodshed. The ritual of his days pleased him; he gloried in his lack of wasted motion, in the drama of his mind and mouth and fingers banding together like lone gunmen in a Western to face down the enemy. Ideas were floating in the air and packed into his horn and somehow, effortlessly, he was snatching them and pulling them out, picking them apart and rolling them together.

  Sometimes Latif spent all day on one song, running it through an ever-evolving battery of tests to find a way to make it his. He'd play it through slow first, warming up and feeling it out: where were the curves, the dips and tricks, the hotspots? He and the song tradeoff-psychoanalyzed each other: What emotions was the composition made of? How did he respond to that palette? What complementary tinctures or ideas could he funnel back into the song, and how would it receive them? What had others heard in it; what might they? Latif tried to play the song the way Albert Van Horn would—the young Albert full of passion and power and then the older Albert he knew now, the master craftsman of sensibility who grappled with the nuances of intimacy, delicacy, rage, and love on equal terms, for whom passion and power were not totality but tools.

  He put Albert aside, elated if so much as one phrase matched, and tried to play the tune with Sonny Rollins' sense of humor, keen angled phrasing, and dexterity. He swigged some sink water, came back and hit it with as much Thelonious Monk verve as he could, trying to translate that rambunctious piano style onto horn. Latif dug Monk even before he knew what jazz was: That motherfucker bled pure hip hop thirtysomething years before its birth. Monk attacked the keys with percussive b-boy dementia, uncontainable illmatic violent-playful genius, and you could tell from listening to him that he didn't give a damn about no niceties, would no more pause to tune his shit before he started banging than take off his porkpie on command. Or, as Latif's boy Shane had said when Latif hipped him to the Straight, No Chaser album, That's a crazy ghetto nigga if I ever heard one. Soon Shane was bumping Monk back to back with Wu-Tang.

  It couldn't go on forever, or even for another month, but until Latif's savings expired and he had to cop a job he'd savor the asceticism of his days: waking up just shy of noon and falling to the floor for several sets of push-ups, sit-ups, and knee bends, wrapping himself in a towel and jaunting down the hall to shower. Then came breathing exercises, warm-ups, three or four hours of shedding.

  All the while, Latif teased himself by ignoring the hunger twisting his belly. It vanished, chased off by the concentration with which he practiced, and returned vengeful in the late afternoon. Only then, when it weakened him, did Latif take a break and go to the store for something to sate it. Rice and beans, beans and franks, canned soup, mac and cheese, bags of potatoes he would slice and fry in the always-empty communal kitchen, sandwiches. He ate voraciously while looking out onto the street, serene in the separation he felt from the aimlessness with which so many people seemed to walk or loiter on the block. He realized the snobbery of such thoughts, but Latif indulged himself; anything which might increase his sense of the mission was worth cultivating.

  The music settled somewhat during lunch, worked itself out under the supervision of his subconscious. When Latif got back to business, turning his attention to the task of playing the same tune as much like himself as he could, he felt fresh and studied and surprisingly coherent. The exposition and excavation of the morning gave him a buffet of ideas to dismiss, build on, and synthesize. Latif documented his work on a little miked Walkman, and once or twice a week cupped cushy foam headphones to his ears and walked downtown along the westside water, memorizing and wincing as appropriate. Although he'd been archiving himself since fourteen, Latif never went back to any tape more than a month old.

  Around eight-thirty he showered again, dressed, and made his nightly trek downtown. Vine-wise, he couldn't afford to be dipped, but Latif was inventive. Four-button suits were the baddest shit going, so Latif bought two new buttons and some sewing scissors and transformed his only jacket, ironing the lapels until his black church suit was jazz world hip. He spent the downtown trainride itemizing what he planned to focus on that night: Would he hover in the wings, beneath the exit sign, and concentrate on Van Horn's fingering, breathing, and stance, the precise progression of his every solo? Or would he sit at the bar and take in the band holistically, as he did most nights, shifting his attention when he felt like it?

  Perhaps he would allow himself the luxury of room-roaming, people-watching, indulge his growing habit of jazz club voyeurism. Latif was beginning to recognize a cast of regulars, and he found himself wondering about them as he rode the train back up to Harlem every night. The musician-looking brother with the brown sueded fedora who always tapped his straw against his Scotch and soda. The cute young waitresses who bustled through the room during uptempo tunes and glided delicately, lifting their trays above their heads, during the ballads. The chintzy, overdressed women who flashed large glinting teeth at the bartenders on their way to the bathroom and then returned to their husbands or boyfriends and slid their hands together. The cleansuited whiteboys who nodded studiously at back tables in threes and fours, as if afraid to venture closer. The constant human backdrop of middleaged whitefolks and Japanese tourists—so many that Van Horn ended his opening remarks with Nihonjin tomodachi, kitte kurete arigatou and got big applause. The population breakdown brought to mind a joke Wessel had told him:

  Whatchu call a black man in a jazz club?

  A musician.

  Latif exchanged headnods with a handful of familiars, but he never gave them any opening to chat. He didn't want to add anything, even an errant word, to the sauce lidded on his stove, simmering whether he was in or out, awake or asleep, and growing richer every time he took a taste. The most Latif said some days was two sentences: Take it easy, to the supermarket clerk and Lemme get a vodka tonic, thanks, to the bartender at Dutchman's. Latif saved language for his horn, as if there was only so much of it. He allowed himself to sink into superstitious silence, verbal reclusion, with delight. It was a game Latif was playing with himself, and he won every time he picked up his horn and found himself stronger, his fingers pinpointing ideas as fast as his brain generated them, the process of translation smoothing itself almost flat. His courtship of himself engulfed him.

  The thought of ruining it with a job was repugnant, but there was no choice. What could he do? What kind of gig wouldn't throw open the woodshed doors or infringe on his study time at Dutchman's? In his eagerness to play, Latif was only sleeping six hours a night as it was. He was on the verge of answering a help wanted sign posted in t
he window of a diner down the block when a better solution, or what seemed like one, jumped up on the jam session bandstand and called out a blues.

  TAKEOFF SOLO | HOOKS UPS | CORNERMEN

  The middle set concluded with a piece like an unclenching fist, a flower opening. Bookended by bowed bass intros and outros, Amir Abdul's “A-tension” was a study in how hard you could play softness. Amir anchored the tune with a low Early Music drone sound, dragging the bow slow across the strings so that it hummed in a way that was half mournful yet unsentimental. The constancy was life and death at once, slow growth and slow decay. In it was an awareness that the world is made of cycles that are longer than our lifespans, or so it seemed to Latif as the soloists made their statements one by one and faded, leaving only the ageless drone. Even Murray Higgins was displaced from his stewardship of time on this one; Amir's bow slid with hourglass-sand steadiness and Murray worked around it.

  The drone lingered long after Amir had eased off into silence, and Latif reflected that it was a good thing that another set was coming; send folks home on a vibe that deep and there's no telling what they'd do. Van Horn picked up his soprano sax in one hand, cradling the bell of the tenor hanging from his neck in the other. Wess had told Latif that early on Let it dangle from your neck and you're asking for back trouble. Seeing what he'd been taught confirmed, knowing facts beholden only to musicians, made Latif feel locked into apprenticeship. He felt like sending Wess a postcard from the Holy Land.