THE OVERNIGHT TRAIN TO CHICAGO WAS RUN BY THE OLD B&O RAILROAD, which left every day in the early evening from downtown Baltimore and arrived in the Loop in Chicago early the next morning. That, or a long drive through western Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, was the only way to get from Baltimore to Chicago. In 1952, very few people took planes, although commercial airlines were beginning to offer an alternative.

I was on my way to college with two friends from high school, Sydney Jacobs and Tom Steiner, both of whom I knew quite well. But our going out to the Midwest together was unplanned, sheer chance. They were part of a local, self-made club they called the Phalanx—a group of superbright, geeky teenagers who banded together for mutual company and entertainment. I knew them from the Maryland Chess Club, though, being several years younger, I was tolerated to a degree but had never been a part of their highly introverted and intellectual group. But I liked them all—they and their friends: Irv Zucker, Malcolm Pivar, and Bill Sullivan. Poets, mathematicians, and techno-visionaries of an order very early and remote from anything going on today.

The three of us were on the train together, bonding easily for the first time. I was extremely excited to be on my way and had barely noticed the lectures, warnings, and assurances from Ben and Ida that in the end came down to letting me know I could come home anytime I needed to if things at the University of Chicago didn’t work out.

“We can arrange with your school that if you come back from Chicago before Christmas, you can go back into your grade at the high school,” my mother said. Of course, I knew there was zero chance of that. They considered the three months until Christmas a trial run. For me, though, it was every kid’s dream—the Great Escape.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. Soon after leaving the station, the lights were out. It was just an old passenger train from Dixie to the Midwest, with no amenities of any kind. No lights, no reading, nothing to do but make friends with the sounds of the night train. The wheels on the track made endless patterns, and I was caught up in it almost at once. Years later, studying with Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s great tabla player and music partner, I practiced the endless cycles of 2s and 3s that form the heart of the Indian tal system. From this I learned the tools by which apparent chaos could be heard as an unending array of shifting beats and patterns. But on this memorable night, I was innocent of all that. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until almost fourteen years later, when I was on my first voyage of discovery in India and trains were the only way to travel, that I did some serious train travel again, much as I had as a boy on my many journeys between Baltimore and Chicago. The facts of travel were similar, at times almost identical. But my way of hearing had been radically transformed in those years. One might think that the trains from Einstein on the Beach came from a similar place, but no, that wasn’t so. That train music came from quite a different place altogether, which I’ll get to later. The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music. Night trains can make those things happen. The sounds of daily life were entering me almost unnoticed.

RIGHT AWAY, CHICAGO HAD MUCH MORE of a big-city feel than Baltimore. It had modern architecture—not just Frank Lloyd Wright but the landmark Louis Sullivan buildings that were a bit older. It had a first-class orchestra—the Chicago Symphony conducted by Fritz Reiner; the Art Institute of Chicago, with its collection of Monets; and even art movie theaters. Chicago was a real city that catered to intellectuals and people with serious cultural interests in a way that Baltimore couldn’t. Chicago was also a place where you’d hear jazz that you wouldn’t hear in Baltimore (I didn’t even know where the jazz clubs were in my hometown). If you wanted to go to a good Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, you had to drive to Washington, but in Chicago we had everything.

The university stretched from Fifty-Fifth Street to Sixty-First Street on both sides of the Midway, which had been the center of amusements and sideshows at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Fifty-Seventh Street was built up with restaurants and bars, and the South Side jazz clubs, like the Beehive, were on Fifty-Fifth Street. Of course I was too young to get into some of the places I wanted to go, since I was fifteen and looked fifteen. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I had gotten a little bit bigger, so I was able to go to the Cotton Club, nearby on Cottage Grove, and also the clubs downtown. Eventually, the people at the door got to know me because I would stand there—just listening—looking through the window. Finally, they would say, “Hey, c’mon kid, you come on in.” I couldn’t buy a drink, but they would let me sit by the door and listen to the music.

The first day of freshman orientation, I walked into a room and the first thing I noticed was that there were black students. You have to look at it from the point of view of a kid who had grown up in the Dixie South—because that’s where Baltimore was. There hadn’t been any African-American students in any school I’d ever attended. I had lived in a world where segregation was taken for granted and not even discussed. This was my conversion from being a kid from a border state, a Dixie state, whatever you want to call it, which was segregated top to bottom—its restaurants, movie houses, swimming pools, and golf courses. I think it took me less than a minute to realize that I had lived my whole life in a place that was completely wrong. It was a revelation.

The College of the University of Chicago was quite small in those days—probably fewer than five hundred undergraduates, counting all four years of the usual program. However, it fit into the larger university of professional schools—business, law, medicine—and divisions devoted to science, humanities, social science, theology, and the arts, as well as the Oriental Institute. The relationship of the College to this large university was surprisingly intimate, and quite a number of the university faculty taught in the College. It was thought of then as a kind of European system, though I have no idea whether that was actually true. Classes were small, consisting of twelve or fewer students with one professor—we were never taught by graduate students. We sat together at a round table and talked through our reading lists—a classic seminar format. There were a few lecture classes, but not many, and in addition, there were lab classes for science.

Very often when the seminars were over in the classrooms, the debates that had begun initially with the teachers would be continued among ourselves in the coffee shop on the Quadrangles at the center of the campus. That actually was the idea. The seminar style was something that was easy to reproduce in a coffee shop, because it was practically the same thing.

There were some sports at the school, but at that time we didn’t have a football, basketball, or baseball team. I wanted to do something active so I went to the physical education bulletin board and found out they really needed some people for the wrestling team. I had wrestled in high school, so I volunteered, weighing in at about 116 pounds. I did pretty well with the team until my second or third year of competition with nearby schools. Then some farm boy from Iowa beat me so soundly and quickly that I gave up wrestling for life.

The University of Chicago was renowned for its faculty members. I remember vividly my freshman course in chemistry. The lecturer was Harold C. Urey, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had chosen to teach the first-year chemistry class to seventy or eighty students, and he brought an enthusiasm for his subject that was electrifying. We met at eight a.m., but there were no sleepyheads in that class. Professor Urey looked exactly like Dr. Van Helsing from the Tod Browning 1931 movie Dracula—the doctor who examines one of Dracula’s victims and says, “And on the throat, the same two marks.” Now, when would a freshman or sophomore kid get to even be in the same room with a Nobel Prize winner, let alone being lectured on the periodic table? I think he must have thought, There must be young people out there who are going to become scientists.

Professor Urey lectured like an actor, striding back and forth in front of the big blackboard, making incomprehensible marks on the board (I couldn’t figure out what he was doing—I only knew it had to do with the periodic table). His teaching was like a performance. He was a man passionate about his subject, and he couldn’t wait until we could be there at eight in the morning. Scientists on that level are like artists in a way. They are intensely in love with their subject matter, and Urey was one of them. In fact, I don’t remember anything about chemistry. I just went to see his performances.

In my second year I had a small seminar class in sociology taught by David Riesman who, along with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, was the author of The Lonely Crowd, a very famous book in those days. I suppose it might seem a little quaint today, but in the 1950s it was very new thinking....