Moving to Higher Ground (eBook)

Discovering the Joy of Swinging

Kids were supposed to stay in the back room. But some kind of way I stumbled into the front room of this tiny wood-frame house in Little Farms, Louisiana. I must have been four or five years old at the time, but I remember it was dark in there, lit only by a soft blue light or a red one, and a lot of grown-ups, men and women, were snapping their fingers on two and four and grooving to a rhythm and blues song. Some sang the words, but they were all dancing up a healthy sweat. I didn't know what was going on back then, but I could tell it was something good--so good I wasn't supposed to be around it.

Well, I could be around the music, couldn't miss it, actually. R&B was always on the radio: 'Baby this' and 'Baby that', 'I need you, girl', 'Why'd you leave me? Come back. Ohhh!' That music was a way of life. Everybody knew those songs and everybody loved them: 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine', 'Stop! In the Name of Love', 'Lean on Me', 'Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.'

Now, jazz was different. That's what my father played: modern jazz. No one danced to it, ever. That had something to do with rhythm. The backbeat of R&B was steady and unchanging. The rhythms my daddy and his friends played were ever changing and many, a torrent of ideas that came together and felt good. I later came to know it as swing.

The first jazz gigs I remember going to with my older brother Branford were like recitals. Only a handful of older people turned up. Some gave us candy, and there was always a good opportunity for us to run around. I noticed that very few black people seemed to like this kind of music. As a matter of fact, so few people understood it, I wondered why my father and his friends bothered to play it at all.

Then, when I was about eight or nine, I began to notice something very strange. Even though most of the people in our community would never attend a jazz concert (or anything artistic for that matter), even though they didn't even consider playing music to be a profession, they had a type of respect for my father. I figured it had to have something to do with jazz, because he certainly was not in possession of any material goods indicative of even the slightest financial success.

I began to pay closer attention to all the jazzmen who came to our house or played with my father in clubs around New Orleans. They were an interesting group, if you could get past how different they seemed to be. First, they had their own language, calling each other 'cats,' calling jobs 'gigs' and instruments 'axes,' peppering their conversations with all types of colorful, pungent words and unapologetic truisms.

Even if you were a child, they spoke directly to you and might actually listen to what you had to say.

Of course, they talked about men and women, politics and race and sports. But above all, they loved to talk about jazz music, its present and its past at once, like it was all now: ' 'Trane and them was playin' so much music I couldn't move. And people had been telling me all week they weren't playing nothin'. Man, the music stood me up at the door.'

They could go on and on about what different musicians played or did or said, great men who all seemed to have colorful names: 'Frog,' 'Rabbit,' 'Sweets.' It seemed to me that all of these people knew one another or at least had some type of connection. For all of that hard, profane talk, there was an unusual type of gentleness in the way they treated one another. Always a hug upon greeting and--from even the most venerated musicians--sometimes a kiss on the cheek. A natural ease with those teetering on the edge of sanity. A way of...