Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

The buttons are different, you know, she said. On a girl’s blouse. They’re the reverse. I mean, from a boy’s. Lots of boys have trouble unbuttoning a girl’s blouse because the buttons are turned around. I remember once, will you promise not to tell this to anyone, I was fifteen, I guess, and I’d gone to a party at a girl’s house up the street, she can see and everything, she’s not blind, and they had a keg of beer there, I think it was a party for some boy who was going in the Army, I’m not sure, it was right after Pearl Harbor. And I drank a lot of beer, and I got very, well, not drunk, but sort of tipsy, you know, and when I came home my brother was lying here on my bed, reading, my mother was out someplace, he took one look at me and said, Oh-oh. I couldn’t even unbutton my own blouse , would you believe it, he had to unbutton it for me. And even though he’d had lots of practice dressing me when I was small, he still had trouble getting my blouse off that night, I guess because I was weaving all over the room, oh, God, it was so silly. I finally passed out cold and didn’t remember a thing the next morning, my clothes were on the chair there, Iggie, you’re getting me very hot.

I am now going to attempt something that might frighten even the likes of Oscar Peterson. I am going to demonstrate what it is like to play a jazz solo, and I am going to do so in terms of what happened with Susan Koenig in her bedroom that day after we got through the basics of taking off her blouse and her bra and her skirt and her half-slip and finally her cotton panties (but not her dark glasses), and after she unbuttoned my fly and helped me off with my undershorts and fell upon me with blind expertise and unbridled passion. I am going to prove to you not only what a great piano player I am, but also what a unique and marvelous writer I could be (if only I had the time), and I am going to do so by demonstrating what jazz would look like if you were reading it in the English language instead of hearing it in a smoky nightclub. An impossible feat, you say? Stick around, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To keep this simple (look, he’s already copping out!), I’m going to use a twelve-bar blues chart with only twenty-one chords in it, as opposed to a more complex thirty-two-bar chart with as many as sixty-four chords in it. If I were playing a real blues chorus, the chords I’d use most frequently in the key of A flat, let’s say, would be A-flat seven, D-flat seven, and E-flat seven. But we’re not concerning ourselves with chords in what follows; we’re substituting words for chords.

This, then, would be the chord chart for “Jazzing in A Flat,” as it is known in England (a pun, Mom), or, as it is known to American blues buffs, simply “Up in Susan’s Womb.” (Another one; sorry, Mom.)

            BAR    1:    SUSAN

            BAR    2:    ME

            BAR    3:    SUSAN

            BAR    4:    BED

            BAR    5:    ME

            BAR    6:    ME

            BAR    7:    DECEMBER and AFTERNOON

            BAR    8:    HOT and COLD

            BAR    9:    AFTERNOON and EVENING

            BAR   10:    AFTERNOON and EVENING

            BAR   11:    SUSAN and BEDDED and I and MYSELF

            BAR   12:    LIMP and DUSK and BED

There are four beats in each bar, but the last two bars combined have only seven beats in them and are called, traditionally and unimaginatively, “a seven-beater,” the last beat understood but not played. If you count all the capitalized words in all the bars above, you’ll discover there are exactly twenty-one of them, just as promised. Their selection was determined by the actual incidence of a conventional set of chords in a typical blues chorus, with which I’ve taken no liberties. For example, the word “bed” in the chart represents an A-flat dominant chord, whereas the word “bedded” represents an A-flat dominant inversion — “bed,” therefore, becomes “bedded,” a different but similar chord.

The first chorus of the tune will consist of these chords being played in the left hand and the composer’s melody being played in the right hand almost exactly as he wrote it. I’ll add a swing to it that did not exist in the original sheet music, but for the most part I’ll play it almost straight, in order to identify it (solely as a courtesy) for my audience. The choruses following the head chorus will be improvised, invented on the spot, and will bear no resemblance to the original tune, unless I choose to refer back to it occasionally, again solely as a courtesy. I am interested only in the chord chart. And the chart consists of those twenty-one words listed above. The rest is all melody — my melody, not the composer’s. In fact, the melodies I improvise in each succeeding chorus may have nothing whatever to do with sex per se, except as sex defines the overall “mood” of the tune. In short, the blowing line I invent to go with the chord progression doesn’t need to make an emotional or philosophic commitment to the composer’s melody. I can use all sorts of musical punctuation in my running line — eighth notes, eighth-note triplets, thirty-second notes, sixty-fourth notes, runs — the way I would use commas, semicolons, periods, or exclamation points. I can repeat sequential figures, augmenting or diminishing licks as I see fit, or I ran utilize silences if I choose. (A jazzman listening to J. J. Johnson once said, “I sure like those notes he’s playing,” and another cat replied, “ I like the ones he isn’t playing.”) I can do whatever I want with whatever melody I invent. I am entirely free to create.

But I cannot deviate from the chart. Once the chart is set in motion, it is inviolable, it is inexorable, it is inevitable. I am locked into it tonally and rhythmically, I cannot change SUSAN to ALICE, nor can I hold that chord for longer than the four beats prescribed in Bar 1, though I can of course repeat it four times in that measure, if I like. At the end of those four beats, me must come in for another four beats; the chart so dictates. When it comes time for me to play AFTERNOON for two beats in Bar 7, I’d better not be lingering on DECEMBER. I can use substitute chords, or passing chords, or what are known as appoggiatura chords — SHOT to HOT or BLIMP to LIMP — but only to get me where I have to be when I have to be there. Jazz is a moving, volatile, energetic force that is constantly going someplace. Each chord exists only because it is in motion toward the next chord and from the chord preceding it. It’s pure Marxist music, in a sense, utilizing the dialectic process throughout. I can take the chord EVENING and break it into an arpeggio if I choose, transforming it into a linear EVE, EN, ING, or I can play it diatonically E,V,E, N,I,N,G, as a mode, or I can play it as a shell, EVNG, but I have to play it; it is part of the chart, and the chart is the track upon which the express train of my improvisation runs.

So-in the first twelve bars, I’ll play “Jazzing in A Flat” as the composer wrote it, mingling and mixing right-hand melody with left-hand harmony because we’re doing prose here and not musical notation, and anyway, that’s exactly as you’d hear it. In the next twelve bars, I’ll improvise a jazz solo with a blowing line unrelated to the original melody except where brief reference may be made to it, the entire improvisation based on those twenty-one chords in the relentless chord chart. Then, utilizing whatever bag of tricks I possess, I’ll take us into the final twelve bars, where I’ll play the head again almost as straight as I did at the top, and then go home (“head and out,” as it’s called). All of this will be enormously abbreviated, you understand. A jazz solo, especially on a blues chart, can go on and on all night. This solo will consist of only three choruses.