Hurley House Fine Books

Goodbye Porkpie Hat

I’m thinking about Lester Young. Waking up in the night with the stereo on, hearing that soft and kind of peppy saxophone with a million tons of emotional weight buried beneath that easy sound, I realize that everything I know about Lester Young, I learned from Geoff Dyer. Here was a great artist whose spirit was almost broken by its ugly contact with authority. And I think about how Dyer’s story about the greatest jazz artists in history is also the story of police brutality. That ugly history isn’t buried in our past, as the residents of #Ferguson, Missouri know today.

And I think how earlier today I went to the store to grab a few things, and on the way in, I saw this tall, African-American guy with huge beautiful dreads and a little bebop goatee. He had a Pixies T-shirt on and trim desert camo trousers. He said, “Hey, how ya doin’?” He greeted me because I was grinning at him like an idiot. I’m glad he recognized my loony smile for a friendly sign; I just kind of liked him. And I wish a lot more people just liked each other, instead of mistrusting one another. (I wanted to say, “I saw the Pixies in 1990 at Foellinger Auditorium in Urbana, Illinois. I was in the front row. Kim Deal dropped cigarette ash on me.” But instead I just smiled shyly and said, “Hey.”) Music brings us together.

The Army doctor who interviewed Young in advance of his court martial wrote in his notes, among other things, “Jazz.” A one-word indictment, a term embodying his fear and ignorance, his suspicion of the black world, alien and ugly to his square-white worldview, but it is a cry in the night, too. Maybe it’s that cry that woke me and made me think about jazz and black and white and how we’re all pretty much as dumb as we ever were. I’m thinking about Lester Young now and how he drowned his spirit in gallons of lovely silver gin. Hey, Pres, you were the best.

I’m glad that Dyer later depicts a cop who treats Bud Powell with respect and care, who approaches him with caution and even reverence and who, according to Dyer’s beautiful account, colors his final days of madness with the gentle tones of humanity, instead of the ugly sounds of bigotry and fear. I lift my little late-night glass and utter a silent prayer for more people like this gentle peace officer and fewer like the evil human shit of a lieutenant who degraded Lester Young, and all the others who react to black skin with fear and anger. Is it really the early days of the 21st century? Let us come to our collective senses, if it’s not too late. Maybe if we all just listened to that almost mischievous-sounding tenor saxophone, we might become a little more human, we might become better people. We could greet strangers with a smile and a sense of shared humanity, instead of a disrespectful sneer. Maybe, given the chance, we could even love each other.