Вуди Аллен - Apropos of Nothing

I was also shamed in a celebrity vs. all-stars game at Dodger Stadium. I and a group of schlemiel actors—I mean they’re great actors but schlemiel ball players—played against the likes of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Boog Powell, Jimmy Piersall, Roberto Clemente. For some reason, the oddsmakers had them as the favorites. I only had one at bat against Don Drysdale and flied out. I did have the distinction of Willie Mays flying out to me. A year later when I ran into a kid I grew up and played with, he said, “I saw your softball game on TV. I couldn’t believe you didn’t hit Drysdale.” Yes, I should’ve held my feet a tad closer and really gotten the wood on the ball, and God forbid I wake in the middle of the night and the game comes back to me and I become remorseful, drowned in regret, filled with rage, self-loathing, and I should have hit Drysdale. I need another at bat. Next time, I’ll hold my feet closer. I can definitely hit this guy. Soon, I’m hyperoxygenating, and the room is spinning. Christ, the day I can’t hit Drysdale—I need another at bat—I’m eighty-four—is it too late? Where am I? Where were we?

Ah—yes—back to the snow bank. Jerry tells me he has an older brother Sandy who is the real comedian in the family. He emcees college shows and I should meet him. And off we go to meet a very big early influence on me. Sandy Epstein of Avenue J and Dickinson College. When he performed he looked and sounded like a professional stand-up comedian. “Sorry I’m a little late, folks, I just got out of a sick bed. My girlfriend had the measles.” And while this is not Wilde or Shaw, it was pretty much the kind of routines professional comics were doing. He taught me a number of routines and bits and gags, and as public school passed and Midwood High School became my alma mater, the classrooms were the only venues to use this material, which I did to the irritation of the teachers. It wasn’t long before my mother was a frequent visitor, embarrassed as I tried to explain to the dean what I meant by the line, “She had an hourglass figure and all I wanted to do was play in the sand.” Things were very prissy in those days and the Appropriate Police were everywhere. I did some routines at a local Jewish club to great success, and by junior year I was a wannabe comic, wannabe magician, wannabe baseball player, but in the end just a lousy student. I was the wise guy in the movie house who threw in a joke during an intense or romantic moment on the screen and broke up anyone who heard it. I got as many shut-ups as laughs. My friend Jerry bought a tape recorder and proudly demonstrated it for me.

“What is that music?” I asked.

“It’s a jazz concert I recorded,” he said, “off the radio. Ted Husing’s Bandstand .”

“It’s great,” I said, tossing my schoolbooks aside in the direction of the garbage pail.

“A concert in France.”

“Who is that?”

“Sidney Bechet.”

“Who’s that?”

“A New Orleans soprano saxophonist.”

It was the first New Orleans jazz I heard. Why it clicked so deeply I’ll never know. Here I was, a Brooklyn Jew, never out of New York, with kind of cosmopolitan taste, a great appreciation for Gershwin, Porter, Kern, very sophisticated popular composers, and here were these African-Americans in the Deep South, having nothing in common with me and yet they quickly became an obsession, and soon I was a wannabe comic, wannabe magician, wannabe baseball player, and wannabe African-American jazz musician. I bought a soprano sax, I learned to play it; I bought a clarinet and learned to play it. I bought a Victrola. That I could play with no lessons. I bought records, books on the birth of jazz, the life of Louis Armstrong. My three friends, Jack, Jerry, Elliot, and I must have seemed like a strange quartet. While all the other kids were submerged in pop commercial music of the day, Patti Page, Frankie Laine, The Four Aces, we sat at our record players playing jazz music hour after hour, day after day.

We listened to all kinds of jazz, but our favorites were the primitive New Orleans records. Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and of course Sidney Bechet, whom I worshipped and modeled my playing after (and if that doesn’t give you a laugh, nothing will). I sat in my bedroom alone playing along to Bechet and later with George Lewis recordings. He was another idol of mine; with him and Johnny Dodds, yet another clarinet genius, I felt I had finally found myself. The pleasure was so intense I decided I would devote my life to jazz. Little did I realize that Bechet, Armstrong, George Lewis, Johnny Dodds, Jelly Roll Morton, and Jimmie Noone were musical geniuses. Their idiom was primitive, but within the parameters of New Orleans jazz, they had something truly magical inside them that oozed out of every note they blew. I, naïve clod that I was, did not understand that I did not have that genius, that I was destined, for all my enthusiasm and love of the music, to never amount to more than a musical nonentity who would be listened to and tolerated on the basis of a movie career and not for anything worth a damn as far as jazz is concerned.

Practice though, I did, and still do. I practice every day and with such dedication that to make sure I get it in I’ve practiced on freezing beaches, in churches while my film crew lit, in hotel rooms after work, at midnight, getting into bed and pulling the quilts over my head so as not to wake the other guests. Yet listen to the music as I have, read the stimulating tales of the musicians’ lives, and blow, blow, blow with different mouthpieces and reeds, always searching for that combination that will make me sound better, I still stink. I remain like a weekend tennis player among Federer and Nadal. Sorry to say, I just don’t have it: the ear, the tone, the rhythm, the feeling. And yet I’ve played publicly in clubs and on concert stages, in opera houses all over Europe, in packed auditoriums in the U.S. I’ve played in parades in New Orleans and bars there, at the Jazz Heritage festival and at Preservation Hall, and all because I can cash in on my movie career. Years ago, Dotson Rader, a witty man, asked me over dinner, “Have you no shame?”

Between my love for the music and my limits as a player, if I want to play I can’t afford shame. I tried explaining to him I used to play only at home with a few other musicians. It was for fun, like a weekly poker game. Then they suggested we do it at a bar or a restaurant—so there would be some small audience. I had years of nightclub experience and did not crave another audience but they did, so I said OK. It started small and grungy and wound up decades later that we’re regular fixtures at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan and we’ve always sold out concert halls in Europe, with audiences as large as eight thousand people who have stood in the rain to hear us. So here I am, a boy in Brooklyn, smitten with jazz, struggling with a clarinet. I call a great jazz musician, Gene Sedric, the clarinetist with Fats Waller, and say, I am that young guy who sits at the front table every week listening to you play the jazz concerts with the Conrad Janis band. Would you consider helping me with my clarinet? Expecting a rejection, I hear him say I’d have to charge you two dollars. So for a couple of rugs he rides every week from Harlem to Flatbush, and since I can’t read music, he puts his horn together, blows a phrase, and says, “Say this.”

I try and blow it but, having no ear nor any discernable talent, I fail. Patiently, week after week, he works with me and I get better—but always within the limits of “no real flair for it.” We became great friends, and till he died he remained a constant source of encouragement, although if you hear me play you might call him an enabler.

What got me playing with others, because I played only with records for years, was when I was a comic working the Hungry I in San Francisco. Between sets I’d walk around the block to a joint called Earthquake McGoon’s where Turk Murphy, a great jazz trombonist, led a band. I sat outside and listened night after night until one of the guys in the band said, Why don’t you come in and listen? Shy wretch, jazz lover that I saw myself as, I said, That’s okay, I’m happy in the alley pressed against the exit door trying to filch a smidgen of pleasure from the music inside. Turk, however, wouldn’t hear of it. I was the starring comic at the Hungry I, and he insisted I come in and enjoy the band.