By Stuart Mitchner

As Black History Month winds down, Sam Cooke’s singing “Don’t know much about history” while the video for “Wonderful World” shows a checkerboard montage of familiar faces, Einstein, Churchill, Castro, Krushchev, the Kennedy brothers, and Martin Luther King. But you can’t dance to history, and right now Sam Cooke’s voice matters more to me than the issues and events suggested by the theme of the month. It was black music, not black history, that energized landlocked high school seniors like myself as we drove through the night listening to WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee. Our texts were by Bo Diddley (“I’m a Man”), Chuck Berry (“Sexy Ways”), the Cadets (“Stranded in the Jungle” of southern Indiana), and Little Walter teaching us how to “mellow down easy.” The other day, a friend who shared those night rides Shazamed me Little Walter’s “I Hate to See You Go,” from a coffee house in Oaxaca. 

These days the Hoosier high school senior has become a Princeton senior senior driving at a decent hour with jazz on the stereo, speakers front and rear filling the car with the sound of ecstatic crowds on wild summer nights on L.A.’s Central Avenue. when the war was over, the soldiers were home, and tenormen Dexter Gordon, born February 27, 1923, and Wardell Gray, born February 13, 1921, were, as always, the last players standing at the end of every all-night session.

Exchanging Heartbeats

My subject this week being a friendship between two black musicians, I was glad to see Charles M. Blow’s Monday column in the New York Times about the friendship between Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, who celebrate their respective 90th birthdays on February 20 and March 1. Before the advent of Elvis and R&B, the song of songs for slow-dancing at sophomore parties and sock hops was Belafonte’s “Unchained Melody” and, need I say, everyone’s favorite politically correct buddy movie was The Defiant Ones with Poitier and Tony Curtis.

We have the real-life bebop buddy movie starring Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to thank for “the other half of my heartbeat,” a musicianly endearment used interchangeably by Bird & Diz to express what happened when they played together. The dynamic has perhaps its most passionately intermingled manifestation in the playing of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray on those Central Avenue nights of friendly midnight-to-dawn combat in which a pair of swirling, weaving, soaring tenor saxes move from solos to trading choruses, 32 bars to 16 to 8 to 4, until they’re finishing one another’s sentences like two poets at the slam of the century. When you get down to 8- and 4-bar exchanges, heartbeats is the word for it. While these epics of non-stop blowing are generally referred to in terms of “duels” and “battles,” the titles of the two best-known recordings say it better, “The Chase” and “The Hunt.” These gladiatorial encounters fueled a friendship, and if one player appeared to top the other on a particular night, the roles would soon be reversed, and as often as not the bout would end in a split decision.

In baseball terminology, an enthusiastic home crowd is an indispensable member of the team, “the tenth player,” they say. The “home team” for those Central Avenue blowing sessions are the folks sweating and stomping right along with the players, standing on the tables, dancing in the aisles at Jack’s Basket Room, Club Alabam, the Hula Hut, and the Elks Auditorium, urging the players on, perhaps less like baseball fans than crowds at the races or the fights. In the boxing ring, it’s easy to imagine Dexter as the hard-hitting Joe Louis, Wardell the float-like-a-butterfly sting-like-a-bee Ali coming out of his corner dancing.

“Marvelous Empathy”

Quoted in Stan Britt’s biography (DaCapo 1989), Gordon recalls, “there would always be about ten horns up on the stand. Various tenors, altos, trumpets, and an occasional trombone. But it seemed that in the wee small hours of the morning … there would be only Wardell and myself. It became a kind of traditional thing. Spontaneous? Yeah! Nothing was really worked out …. We were coming out of the same bags — Lester and Bird …. That’s where I was. That’s where Wardell was.”

Britt also relates how and when and where the two first met — Gordon a native of L.A, his father a successful doctor, Gray, from Oklahoma City, migrated with his family to Detroit during the Depression. Britt refers to the “marvelous empathy” between a pair of “supreme individualists: Gray, with his lighter, more serpentine phrasing, Gordon with his huge sound, hard tone, and more rugged way of phrasing.” In the context of Gray’s untimely drug-related death in 1955, Britt mentions that Gordon’s feelings for “his friend and erstwhile partner … remain deeply warm” Says Gordon, who died in 1990: “He was a beautiful player. Very musical. I learned a lot from him.” Speaking to critic Ira Gitler: “his playing was very fluid, very clean. Although his sound wasn’t overwhelming he always managed to make everything very interesting, very musical. I always enjoyed playing with him. He had a lot of drive and profusion of ideas. He was stimulating to me.”

Kerouac and the Inner Sound

When L.A.-based Dial Records brought out the Dexter-Wardell jams on a series of 78 rpm singles, “The Chase” and “The Hunt” were among the best selling jazz recordings of the post-war period. They were also fervently listened to by Jack Kerouac and his friends. “We’d stay up 24 hours,” Kerouac writes, “drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon … talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets.” In Kerouac’s bop prosody, words like “holy” and “madly” are the literary equivalent of flatted fifths. In The Unknown Kerouac (Library of America $35), “that American music” is “the actual inner sound of a country.”

For Kerouac’s friend John Clellon Holmes in Go, the so-called first Beat novel, “The Hunt” was “the anthem in which we jettisoned the intellectual Dixieland of atheism, rationalism, liberalism — and found our group’s rebel streak at last.” Kerouac himself gets right to the excitement in On the Road, with Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise “bowed and jumping before the big phonograph, listening to a wild bop record” Sal had just bought “called ‘The Hunt,’ with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic frenzied volume.” Another passage has Dean and Sal playing catch to “the wild sounds” of ‘The Hunt’”

Companionable Spirits

Since Kerouac is the poet laureate of the road, who better than he to glorify the Almighty Auto in terms that express how it felt for me on those R&B high school nights: it’s “the deliverance of our freedom, the chariot of our meanings, the justification of our rebellions” and “the expression in shapely steel of our swift thoughts … the machine fruition of our nameless yearnings to fly through lyrical space.”

In my personal chariot of shapely steel, I’m always in the presence of the warriors of Central Avenue. All I have to do is pull down the driver’s-side sun visor and there they are playing full-tilt in a photo clipped off one of the pictorial inner sleeves of the four-sided Dexter Gordon/Wardell Gray LP, The Hunt. While the idea is to cover up Honda’s warning about the risks of taking curves too fast, I’ll take my chances with those two for company. I like knowing I can glance up at any time and see companionable spirits deep in shared jazz ecstasy, bare-headed Wardell in the foreground, cheek to cheek with black-capped Dexter. When the picture was taken, it’s possible they were blowing the brash full-throated fanfare of “The Chase,” creating what session musician and author Mike Zwerin is talking about when he says that “the sound of Wardell” has never left his head: “I will go to my grave with it.” He calls it “the cry … a direct audial objectification of the soul. You know it when you hear it.”

“Because I Know You”

Since this is a column about friendship, it seems a good time to acknowledge the interracial bond between Death Row inmates Daniel Holden and Kerwin Whitman in the Sundance series Rectify, something I should have mentioned in last week’s column about Ray McKinnon’s brilliant show. Formed on either side of a wall, the relationship between Aden Young’s Daniel and Johnny Ray Gill’s Kerwin is fresh, subtle, warm, and true, and never more so as Kerwin stops to say goodbye on his way to be executed. When Kerwin says he knows Daniel is innocent of murder (“I know you didn’t do it, brother”), Daniel asks him how he knows. Kerwin says, “Because I know you … because I know you … because I know you ….” The sound of Kerwin’s voice in this moving farewell, where “know” means “love,” has in it something like the heartache you can hear in Sam Cooke’s singing: “But I do know one and one is two/And if this one could be with you/What a wonderful world this would be.”