“Did you look up that record I told you about, One Flight Up?”

William was pushing the 842 up Laurel Canyon hard, and the way the bus rattled with the effort, I could barely hear him over the racket.  I had to ask him to repeat himself.

“One Flight Up.  The record I told you about yesterday,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah.  I might try to pick that up this weekend.”

“It’s out of print, isn’t it?”

“No, you can get it on CD.”

“You can?  Well that was one of Dexter Gordon’s most popular records!  You know it only has three tracks on it. ‘Tanya’ takes up the whole first side, then the other side is ‘Coppin’ The Haven’, then a ballad, ‘Darn That Dream’.”

“I know ‘Darn That Dream’.  Not his version, but I know the song.”

“You do?” He asked, then sang at full voice: “Darn that dream...  I dream each night...  You say you love me and hold me tight…”

The way he launched into it so fearlessly and without hesitation while driving a crowded bus up a crooked road at 7:30 in the morning was impressive.

“That’s a standard,” he told me.

“Right,” I said.  “Hey, when you used to play, did you ever use a ‘fake book’?”  Fake books are bootleg sheet music collections that have probably saved more practicing musicians than the Bible.

“Sure, but you know, some of them would have different changes.  You can lose the whole song if you don’t have the right changes.  You don’t have the right changes, you’re lost right from jump street.  You have to know the inside before you can go outside.  Otherwise you go outside and you’re in no-man’s land!  Do you know ‘Polkadots And Moonbeams’?”

“Yup.”

“That was the first song I learned to play.  I took lessons from a guy, ten dollars a lesson once a week.”

“Ten dollars sounds expensive.  For then, I mean.”

“Then it was.  Now…”

“Now, it’s nothing.”

“Now it’s nothing.  But I wanted to go a couple times a week!  He said no, you can’t force it.  He would send me off with enough to work on for the whole week.  I would practice six, eight hours a day.

“I saw him again, years later.  Maybe ’73, ’75.  I was in the drugstore, in line to get a prescription filled, and I recognized him right away.  I said, ‘Do you know me?’  And he looked at me and said, ‘Give me a minute, your face looks familiar.’”  He laughed at the memory.  “He always had a lot of students.  He still teaches piano.”

“He’s still around?”  I asked, surprised.

“Yeah!”  He said defensively.  “He’s only a few years older than I am!” 

“He was the one who told me, ‘Music is not a hobby.  It’s a way of life.’  He was right.  You’d see all these guys and they were good players.  But they were poor.

“I studied with him that way for four years but then I started thinking, I want things.  I want a house, you know?  They saw me coming around in like, a Cadillac and they were saying, ‘You have to give up these material things’!

“But I saw the ramifications of the lifestyle and I said, ‘this is not for me.’  I don’t regret my decision.  I knew that’s not what I wanted – living in a house with a bunch of musicians, none of them having a pot to piss in.”

It was unusual to hear someone talk about a dream they’d left behind without even a twinge of sadness, but it was clear he meant what he said.

“I watched a show on TV last night – America’s Most Talented Teens?  This kid was on playing saxophone.  You know Herbie Hancock’s ‘Cantaloupe Island’?  He played that.  He soloed on it and everything.  He had a alto.  And he could play!  He was up against a tap dancer and two singers.”

“How’d he do?”  I asked.

“Well the judges are kids too; so they don’t really know.  I mean, I feel like anyone can sing as long as they have a good voice to start with.”

“Right.”

“But naw, those judges didn’t give him anything.  The tap dancer won.”

copyright,  © 2006 Wyatt Doyle

for information on Wyatt Doyle's collaboration with Stanley Jason Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, click here.