Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Lenny Bruce played Carnegie Hall, performing my brother’s all-time favorite routine. Jonah bought the record, his first comedy disk, listening to the shtick until the vinyl wore out. He studied the inflections with his perfect ear, cackling at the cadences no matter how many times he listened:

I’m going to give you a choice, your own free will, of marrying a black woman or a white woman, two chicks about the same ages, same economic levels…whatever marriage means to you — kissing, and hugging and sleeping together in a single bed on hot nights…fifteen years…kissing and hugging that black, black woman, or kissing and hugging that white, white woman… Make your choice, because, see, the white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne.

Jonah played it for me, joining in on the punch line. “You dig, jig? The whole thing’s not really about race after all. It’s about ugliness! So let’s go string up all the ugly people, huh?” But Jonah repeated the routine only in private performance. For the better part of thirty years — and the worse part, too — he never recalled the joke for anyone but me.

Down in the Village, music was having quintuplets. From the insidious Seeburg jukebox at Sammy’s, from little trickles of radio on our way to the Met broadcasts, and from wilder dispatches in the streets all around us, we finally heard. Something had been happening, for years. At last, Jonah wanted a listen. We went downtown, sat in on two progressive jazz sets, had the tops of our heads taken off, then headed back home. Jonah waved the whole scene away. Then, a month later, he wanted to go back.

We fell into a semiweekly ritual, sneaking into the hot spots I wasn’t legally old enough to enter. The bouncer saw that hungry musician’s gaze and looked the other way. We’d hit the Village Gate one week, the Vanguard the next. While the jazz giants gathered at the Gate, the folkies took up across the street at the Bitter End: two furious scenes that couldn’t have been further apart in every way except distance. The mind-warping Vanguard sound had rumbled around for years, old inland blues swelling, flowing, coming back east to get cool and urbane. The older club regulars told us we’d already missed the peak. They claimed that the real gods had already passed from the face of the land, and that 1960 was already nothing but an echo. But to Jonah and me, here was the air of a planet newer than Schoenberg, with an atmosphere far more breathable.

I couldn’t hear it then, the re-creation in our recreation. That sound had filled the house once, pouring out of the radio on Sunday mornings. We had never eaten one of Da’s elaborate experimental omelettes except to jazz. It was never really ours, not like the stuff we sang every other day. Never home to us; more like a wild two-week summer rental on the Strip. But our parents had listened. Only Jonah and I had fallen away. We didn’t feel our prowling around the Village as a return. We thought we’d stumbled onto a place we’d never been.

Da didn’t want us staying downtown all night. He’d lost track of us, vanishing into his work, coming up for air only to blunder through parenting. He surfaced long enough to say that he wanted us home by midnight, too early to hear the stuff that the regulars talked about in hushed tones. Those sets never got started until early morning. The heavy players were still going — zipped up and cooking on fuels I’d never heard of — by the time Jonah and I dragged back into the conservatory the next morning. We could have skipped Da’s curfew anytime without his noticing. But for whatever reasons, we obeyed this law, staying out to the last possible minute the clock allowed, Jonah going through a beer or two while helping himself to my seltzers. By the time we headed back uptown, we’d be reeling like the worst of hard-core drunks, Jonah pale with the darkness, the smoke, the wonder of it, as pale as any Semitic fellow traveler. And all anxious explanations.

“They’re stealing the wild stuff from the thirties avant-garde. Paris, you know. Berlin.” It reassured him, somehow. But from what I’d read, the Europeans had stolen their best bits from New Orleans and Chicago. Music, that vampire, floating around for centuries, undead, wasn’t at all picky about whose jugular it sucked. Any old blood line would do, any transfusion that kept it kicking for another year.

I loved how the jazzers prowled around the streets with their horns, looking for the next quick place to unpack, scouting for like-minded cats, with no other long-range program except to sit back and blow. Their engine was pure self-delight, self-invention. Their sound had no motive, no beginning, no end, no goal but the notes, and even those they looked at only in order to look past. All a body really wanted was to play.

We caught Coltrane one night, tearing the roof off what felt like someone’s living room in a street shorter than a Tinkertoy, on a stage the size of a cheese Danish. He’d been standing in a nearby alley, leaning on the end of his tenor case, when the drummer and pianist of that night’s session went to have a smoke. They waylaid ’Trane, or he had nothing better to do. Sources varied. In any case, Jonah and I sat with our ears in that giant upturned bell, hearing the cups clapping his tone holes, listening to a game of Crazed Quotations beyond our ability to follow.

For all my grounding in theory and harmony, I couldn’t hear a third of what that pickup quartet did that night. But here was music as it had been, once, in the beginning, when my family first gave it to me. Music for the sheer making. Music for a while.

I loved to watch Jonah when the best of the Village’s singers adventured onstage. He favored the sets of a southern woman named Simone who’d started out studying piano at Juilliard with Carl Friedburg. Her voice was harsh, but she took it into unknown places. His other goddess was another dark woman, from Mama’s Philly, who could scat wilder than a Paganini pizz. Jonah sat like a spaniel at a rabbit farm, leaning forward, mouth open, body ready to bolt onstage and join the fray. I had to keep a hand on his collar sometimes. Thank God I did, for on the long ride home — the two of us, north of Fifty-ninth, breaking into the obligatory “Take the A Train”—I heard how gelded his whole concert-hall, full-voiced precision would have sounded on any stage south of Fourteenth.

His keepers at Juilliard didn’t know about his after-hours flirtations with the island’s lower regions. After his senior recital, the school prepared to grant my brother their degree. His teachers split over what he should do next. Agnese wanted him to enter the graduate program, attacca, without pausing for breath. Grau, who loved my brother more ruthlessly, wanted him out in the world, getting a taste of the brutal arena of auditions, the quickest way to toughen that voice that still held on to an unnatural innocence.

The Rome-Berlin axis compromised on a trip to Europe. They conveyed their plans to Jonah. If Jonah put up a token sum, they could arrange a scholarship, free accommodation, and a superlative teacher in Milan. Italy was the voice’s home, the hajj every singer made, the dream world with which Kimberly Monera had once fed Jonah’s childish imagination. He’d had four years of the language and could say things like “To love one another eternally — that is the curse coursing through our blood!” and “Even the gods’ indifference will not delay me” with all the ease of a native speaker. There was no question: He would have to make the pilgrimage to vocal music’s promised land. The only question was when.

My brother had gone to Juilliard purely as an alternative to grief. And now he started planning for Milan only as an alternative to hanging around Claremont forever. Da was sure this was the proper next step. “My boy, I wish I were traveling with you.” Ruthie used her baby-sitting money to buy a set of conversational Italian records so she could jabber with him at breakfast in the weeks before his departure. But after a few go-rounds with Jonah correcting her pronunciation, she broke off the attempt and condemned the records to our piles of opera LPs.