Listen. The greatest feeling I ever had in my life-with my clothes on-was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1944.1 was eighteen years old and had just gradu-ated from Lincoln High School. It was just across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis, Illinois.

When I heard Diz and Bird in B's band, I said, "What? What is this!?" Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary. I mean, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, Buddy Anderson, Gene Ammons. Lucky Thompson, and Art Blakey all together in one band and not to mention B: Billy Eckstine himself. It was a motherfucker. Man, that shit was all up in my body. Music all up in my body, and that's what I wanted to hear. The way that band was playing music-that was all I wanted to hear. It was something. And me up there playing with them.

I had already heard about Diz and Bird, was already into their music-especially Dizzy's, with me being a trumpet player and all. But I was also into Bird. See, I had one record of Dizzy's called "Woody 'n You" and a record of Jay McShann's with Bird on it called "Hootie Blues." That's where I first heard Diz and Bird, and I couldn't believe what they were playing. They were so terrible. Besides them I had one record of Coleman Hawkins, one record of Lester Young, and one of Duke Ellington with Jimmy Blanton on bass that was a motherfucker, too. That was it. Those were all the records

I had. Dizzy was my idol then. I used to try to play every solo Diz played on that one album I had by him. But I liked dark Terry, Buck Clayton, Harold Baker, Harry James, Bobby Hackett, and Roy Eldridge a lot, too. Roy was my idol on trumpet later. But in 1944 it was Diz.

Billy Eckstine's band had come to St. Louis to play at a place called the Plantation Club, which was owned by some white gangsters. St. Louis was a big gangster town back then. When they told B that he had to go around to the back door like all the other black folks, he just ignored the motherfuckers and brought the whole band through the front door. Anyway, B didn't take no shit off nobody. He would cuss and knock a motherfucker out at the drop of a hat. That's right. Forget about the playboy look and air he had about himself. B was tough. So was Benny Carter. They both would drop anybody they thought was disrespecting them in a minute. But as tough as Benny was-and he was-B was tougher. So these gangsters right there on the spot fired B and brought in George Hudson, who had dark Terry in his band. Then B took his band across town to Jordan Chambers' Riviera Club, an all-black club in St. Louis, located on Delmar and Taylor-in a black part of St. Louis. Jordan Chambers, who was the most powerful black politician back in them days in St. Louis, just told B to bring the band on over.

So when word got around that they were going to play the Riviera rather than the Plantation, I just picked up my trumpet and went on over to see if I could catch something, maybe sit in with the band. So me and a friend of mine named Bobby Danzig, who was also a trum-pet player, got to the Riviera and went on in to try and catch the rehearsals. See, I already had a reputation around St. Louis for being able to play by that time, so the guards knew me and let me and Bobby on in. The first thing I see when I got inside was this man running up to me, asking if I was a trumpet player. I said, "Yeah, I'm a trumpet player." Then, he asked if I got a union card. I said, "Yeah, I got a union card, too." So the guy said, "Come on, we need a trumpet player. Our trumpet got sick." This guy takes me up on the bandstand and puts the music in front of me. I could read music, but I had trouble reading what he put in front of me because I was listening to what everybody else was playing.

That guy who ran up to me was Dizzy. I didn't recognize him at first. But soon as he started playing, I knew who he was. And like I said, I couldn't even read the music-don't even talk about playing -for listening to Bird and Diz.

But shit, I wasn't alone in listening to them like that, because the whole band would just like have an orgasm every time Diz or Bird played-especially Bird. I mean Bird was unbelievable. Sarah Vaughan was there also, and she's a motherfucker too. Then and now. Sarah sounding like Bird and Diz and them two playing every-thing! I mean they would look at Sarah like she was just another horn. You know what I mean? She'd be singing "You Are My First Love" and Bird would be soloing. Man, I wish everybody could have heard that shit!

Back then Bird would play solos for eight bars. But the things he used to do in them eight bars was something else. He would just leave everybody else in the dust with his playing. Talk about me forgetting to play, I remember sometimes the other musicians would forget to come in on time because they was listening to Bird so much. They'd be standing up there on the stage with their mouths wide open. Goddamn, Bird was playing some shit back then.

When Dizzy would play the same thing would happen. And also when Buddy Anderson would play. He had that thing, that style that was close to the style that I liked. So I heard all that shit back in 1944 all at once. Goddamn, them motherfuckers was terrible. Talk about cooking! And you know how they were playing for them black folks at the Riviera. Because black people in St. Louis love their music, but they want their music right. So you know what they were doing at the Riviera. You know they were getting all the way down.

B's band changed my life. I decided right then and there that I had to leave St. Louis and live in New York City where all these bad musicians were.

As much as I loved Bird back then, if it hadn't been for Dizzy I wouldn't be where I am today. I tell him that all the time and he just laughs. Because when I first came to New York he took me every-where with him. Diz was funny back in those days. He's still funny now. But back then he was something else. Like, he'd be sticking his tongue out at women on the streets and shit-at white women. I mean, I'm from St. Louis and he's doing that to a white person, a white woman. I said to myself, "Diz must be crazy." But he wasn't, you know? Not really. Different, but not crazy.

The first time in my life I went on an elevator was with Diz. He took me up on this elevator on Broadway somewhere in midtown Manhattan. He used to love to ride elevators and make fun at every-one, act crazy, scare white people to death. Man, he was something. I'd go over to his house, and Lorraine, his wife, wouldn't let nobody

stay there too long but me. She would offer me dinner all the time. Sometimes I'd eat and sometimes I wouldn't. I've always been funny about what and where I eat. Anyway, Lorraine used to put up these signs that said, "Don't Sit Here!" And then she'd be saying to Diz, "What you doing with all them motherfuckers in my house? Get them out of here and I mean right now!" So I would get up to leave, too, and she'd say, "Not you, Miles, you can stay, but all the rest of them motherfuckers got to go." I don't know what it was she liked about me, but she did.

It seems people loved Dizzy so much they used to just want to be with him, you know? But no matter who was around, Dizzy always took me every place he went. He would say, "Come on, go with me, Miles." And we'd go down to his booking office, or someplace else, or like I said, maybe ride in elevators, just for the hell of it. He'd do all kinds of funny shit.

Like his favorite thing was to go by where they first started broad-casting the "Today" show, when Dave Garroway was the host. It was in a studio on the street level, so people could watch the show from the sidewalk, looking through this big plate glass window. Dizzy would go up to the window while the show was on the air-they shot it live, you know-and stick out his tongue and make faces at the chimpanzee on the show. Man, he would fuck with that chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs, so much, he would drive him crazy. The chimpanzee would be screaming, jumping up and down and showing his teeth, and everybody on the show would be wondering what the fuck got into him. Every time that chimpanzee laid eyes on Dizzy, he'd go crazy. But Dizzy was also very, very beautiful and I loved him and still do today.

Anyway, I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never quite got there. I've gotten close, but not all the way there. I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day. I still remember when I was just a kid, still wet behind the ears, hanging out with all these great musicians, my idols even until this day. Sucking in everything. Man, it was something.

Chapter 1

The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit. It might have been me playing around with the stove. I don't remember who it was. Anyway, I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it. That's as far back as I can remember; any further back than this is just fog, you know, just mystery. But that stove flame is as clear as music is in my mind. I was three years old.

I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before. To some frontier, the edge, maybe, of everything possible. I don't know;

I never tried to analyze it before. The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started, with that moment. I don't know, but I think it might be true. Who knows? What the fuck did I know about anything back then? In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.

Looking back, I don't remember much of my first years-I never liked to look back much anyway. But one thing I do know is that the

year after I was born a bad tornado hit St. Louis and tore it all up. Seems like I remember something about that-something in the bot-tom of my memory. Maybe that's why I have such a bad temper sometimes; that tornado left some of its violent creativity in me. Maybe it left some of its strong winds. You know, you need strong wind to play trumpet. I do believe in mystery and the supernatural and a tornado sure enough is mysterious and supernatural.

I was born May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, a little river town up on the Mississippi River about twenty-five miles north of East St. Louis. I was named after my father; he was named after his father. That made me Miles Dewey Davis III, but everybody in my family called me Junior. I always hated that nickname.

My father was from Arkansas. He grew up there on a farm that his father, Miles Dewey Davis I, owned. My grandfather was a book-keeper, so good at what he did he did it for white people and made a whole lot of money. He bought five hundred acres of land in Arkan-sas around the turn of the century. When he bought all that land, the white people in the area who had used him to straighten out their financial matters, their money books, turned against him. Ran him off his land. In their minds, a black man wasn't supposed to have all that land and all that money. He wasn't supposed to be smart, smarter than them. It hasn't changed too much; things are like that even today.

For most of my life my grandfather lived under threats from white men. He even used his son, my Uncle Frank, as a bodyguard to protect him from them. The Davises were always ahead of the game, my father and grandfather told me. And I believed them. They told me that people in our family were special people-artists, business-men, professionals, and musicians-who played for the plantation owners back in the old days before slavery was over. These Davises played classical music, according to my grandfather. That's the rea-son my father couldn't play or listen to music after slavery was over, because my grandfather said, "They only let black people play in gin houses and honky-tonks." What he meant was that they-the white people-didn't want to listen to no black folks playing classical music anymore; they only wanted to hear them sing spirituals or the blues. Now, I don't know how true this is, but that's what my father told me.

My father also told me my grandfather told him that whenever he got some money, no matter where or who he got it from, to count it

and see if it was all there. He said you can't trust no one when it comes to money, not even people in your family. One time my grand-father gave my father what he said was $1,000 and sent him to the bank with it. The bank was thirty miles away from where they lived. It was about 100 degrees in the shade-summertime in Arkansas. And he had to walk and ride a horse. When my father got down there to the bank, he counted the money and there was only $950. He counted it again and got the same amount: $950. So he went on back home, so scared he was just about ready to shit in his pants. When he got back he went to my grandfather and said that he lost $50. So Grandpa just stood there and looked at him and said, "Did you count the money before you left? Do you know if it was all there?" My father said, no, he didn't count the money before he left. "That's right," my grandfather told him, "because I didn't give you nothing but $950. You didn't lose anything. But didn't I tell you to count the money, anybody's money, even mine? Here's $50. Count it. And then go ahead on back and put that money in the bank like I told you." Now what you got to keep in mind about all of this is that not only was the bank thirty miles away but it was hotter than a motherfucker. It was cold of my grandfather to do that. But some-times you've got to be cold like that. It was a lesson my father never forgot and he passed it on to his kids. So today I count all my money.

My father, like my mother, Cleota Henry Davis, was born in 1900 in Arkansas. He went to elementary school there. My father and his brothers and sisters didn't go to high school, just skipped right over it and went straight to college. He graduated from Arkansas Baptist College, from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and from North-western University's College of Dentistry, so my father received three degrees and I remember looking at them motherfuckers up on his office wall after I got older and saying, "Goddamn, I hope he won't ask me to do that." I also remember seeing a picture some-where of his graduating class from Northwestern and counting only three black faces there. He was twenty-four when he graduated from Northwestern.

His brother, Ferdinand, went to Harvard and some college in Ber-lin. He was a year or two older than my father, and like my father, he skipped over high school. He went straight into college after pass-ing the entrance exam with high scores. He was a brilliant guy also;

used to talk to me all the time about Caesar and Hannibal, and black history. He traveled all over the world. He was more intellectual than

my father, and a ladies' man and player, editor of a magazine called Color. He was so smart he made me feel almost dumb; he was the only person I knew growing up who made me feel this way. Uncle Ferdinand was something else. I loved being around him, hearing him talk and tell stories about his travels, his women. And he was stylish as a motherfucker, too. I hung around him so much that my mother would get mad.

My father got out of Northwestern and married my mother. She played the violin and the piano. Her mother had been an organ teacher in Arkansas. She never talked much about her father, so I don't know much about her side of the family, never did, never asked either. I don't know why that is. From what I have heard of them, though, and the ones I did meet, they seemed to be middle class and a little uppity in their attitudes.

My mother was a beautiful woman. She had a whole lot of style, with an East Indian, Carmen McRae look, and dark, nut-brown, smooth skin. High cheekbones and Indian-like hair. Big beautiful eyes. Me and my brother Vernon looked like her. She had mink coats, diamonds; she was a very glamorous woman who was into all kinds of hats and things, and all my mother's friends seemed just as glamorous to me as she was. She always dressed to kill. I got my looks from my mother and also my love of clothes and sense of style. I guess you could say I got whatever artistic talent I have from her

also.

But I didn't get along with her too well. Maybe it was because we both had strong, independent personalities. We seemed to argue all the time. I loved my mother; she was something else. She didn't even know how to cook. But, like I said, I loved her even if we weren't close. She had her mind about the way I should be doing things and I had mine. I was this way even when I was young. I guess you could say I was more like my mother than my father. Although I've got some of him in me, too.

My father settled first in Alton, Illinois, where me and my sister Dorothy were born, then moved the family to East St. Louis, on 14th and Broadway, where my father had his dental practice up over Daut's Drugstore. At first we lived upstairs behind his office, in the

back.

Another thing I think about with East St. Louis is that it was there, back in 1917, that those crazy, sick white people killed all those black people in a race riot. See, St. Louis and East St. Louis were-

and still are-big packing-house towns, towns where they slaughter cows and pigs for grocery stores and supermarkets, restaurants and everything else. They ship the cows and pigs up from Texas or from wherever else it is that they come from and then they kill them and pack them up in St. Louis and East St. Louis. That's what the East St. Louis race riot in 1917 was supposed to be about: black workers replacing white workers in the packing houses. So, the white work-ers got mad and went on a rampage killing all them black people. That same year black men were fighting in World War I to help the United States save the world for democracy. They sent us to war to fight and die for them over there; killed us like nothing over here. And it's still like that today. Now, ain't that a bitch. Anyway, maybe some of remembering that is in my personality and comes out in the way I look at most white people. Not all, because there are some great white people. But the way they killed all them black people back then-just shot them down like they were out shooting pigs or stray dogs. Shot them in their houses, shot babies and women. Burned down houses with people in them and hung some black men from lampposts. Anyway, black people there who survived used to talk about it. When I was coming up in East St. Louis, black people I knew never forgot what sick white people had done to them back in 1917.

My brother Vernon was born the year the stock market crashed and all the rich white men started jumping out of them Wall Street windows. It was 1929. We had been living in East St. Louis for about two years. My older sister, Dorothy, was five. There was just three of us, Dorothy, Vernon, and me in the middle. We have always been close all our lives, my sister and my brother, even when we are arguing.

The neighborhood was very nice, with row houses, something like the ones they have in Philadelphia or Baltimore. It was a pretty little city. It's not like that anymore. But I remember it was that way back then. The neighborhood was also integrated, with Jews and Germans and Armenians and Greeks living all around us. Catercomer across the street from the house was Golden Rule's Grocery Store, owned by Jews. On one side was a filling station, with ambulances coming in all the time, sirens blasting, to fill up with gas. Next door was my father's best friend. Dr. John Eubanks, who was a physician. Dr. Eubanks was so light he almost looked white. His wife. Alma, or Josephine, I forget which, was almost white, too. She was a fine lady,

yellow, like Lena Home, with curly black, shiny hair. My mother would send me over to their house to get something and his wife would be sitting there with her legs crossed, looking finer than a motherfucker. She had great legs and she didn't mind showing them either. As a matter of fact she looked good everywhere! Anyway, Uncle Johnny-that's what we called her husband, Dr. Eubanks- gave me my first trumpet.

Next to the drugstore under us, and before you got to Uncle John-ny's house, was a tavern owned by John Hoskins, a black man who everybody called Uncle Johnny Hoskins. He played saxophone in the back of his tavern. All the old-timers in the neighborhood went there to drink, talk, and listen to music. When I got older, I played there once or twice. Then there was a restaurant owned by a black man named Thigpen down the block. He sold good soul food; the place was real nice. His daughter Leticia and my sister, Dorothy, were good friends. Next to the restaurant was a German lady who owned a dry goods store. This was all on Broadway going toward the Missis-sippi River. And there was the Deluxe Theatre, a neighborhood movie theater on 15th going toward Bond Street, away from the river. All along 15th paralleling the river toward Bond were all kinds of stores and places like that owned by blacks, or Jews, or Germans, or Greeks, or Armenians, who had most of the cleaning places.

Over on 16th and Broadway this Greek family owned a fish market and made the best jack salmon sandwiches in East St. Louis. I was friends with the son of the guy who owned it. His name was Leo. Everytime I'd see him, as we got bigger, we'd wrestle. We were about six. But he died when the house he lived in burned down. I remember them bringing him out on a stretcher with his skin all peeling off. He was burnt like a hot dog when you fry it. It was grotesque, horrible-looking shit, man. Later, when somebody asked me about that and whether Leo said anything to me when they brought him out, I remember saying, "He didn't say, 'Hello, Miles, how you doing, let's wrestle,' or nothing like that." Anyway, that was shocking to me because we were both around the same age, though I think he was a little older. He was a nice little cat. I used to have a

lot of fun with him.

The first school I went to was John Robinson. It was located on 15th and Bond. Dorothy, my sister, went one year at a Catholic school, then transferred over to John Robinson, too. I met my first best friend in the first grade there. His name was Millard Curtis, and

for years after we met we went almost everywhere together. We were the same age. I had other good friends in East St. Louis later, as I got more into music-musician friends-because Millard didn't play music. But I knew him the longest and we did so many things together that we were almost like brothers.

I'm pretty sure Millard came to my sixth birthday party. I remem-ber this birthday party because my boys, guys I was hanging out with at the time, said to me, let's go hang out on the runway-the wooden scaffolding that runs across sign boards, them billboards that have them ads all pasted over them. We would go and climb up on them, sit on the scaffolds with our feet dangling down in the air and eat crackers and potted ham. Anyway, my boys told me we might as well go do this because later I was having a birthday party, so wasn't none of them going to school that day. See, it was supposed to be a sur-prise birthday party, but all of them knew it and told me all about what was happening. Anyway, I think I was six; I could have been seven. I remember this cute little girl named Velma Brooks being at the party. Her and a whole lot of other pretty little girls with short dresses, like miniskirts, on. I don't remember any little white girls and boys being there; there might have been some-maybe Leo be-fore he died and his sister, I don't know-but I don't remember any being there.

The real reason I remember that party was because I got my first kiss from a little girl there. I kissed all the little girls, but I remember kissing Velma Brooks the longest. Man, was she cute. But then my sister, Dorothy, tried to ruin everything by running and telling my mother that I was in there kissing all over Velma Brooks. My sister did this to me all my life; she was always telling on me or my brother Vernon about something. After my mother told my father to go in there and stop me from kissing on Velma, he said, "If he was kissing on a boy like Junior Quinn, now that would be something to tell. But kissing on Velma Brooks ain't nothing to tell; that's what the boy supposed to be doing. So as long as it ain't Junior Quinn he's kissing on, then everything's cool."

My sister left in a huff with her mouth stuck out, saying over her shoulder, "Well, he's in there kissing on her and somebody ought to stop him before he give her a baby." Later, my mother told me that I had been a bad boy kissing all over Velma and that I shouldn't do that and if she had it to do all over again that she wouldn't have had no son like me who was so bad. Then she slapped the shit out of me.

I never forgot that day. At that age, I used to remember feeling that nobody liked me, because they always seemed to be whipping on me for something, but they never beat on my brother Vernon. I mean, his feet hardly ever touched the floor. He was like a little black doll for my sister and my mother and everybody else. They spoiled the shit out of him. Every time Dorothy had her friends over, they would bathe him, comb his hair, and dress him up just like he was a little baby girl doll.

Before I was into music I was really into sports-baseball, football, basketball, swimming, and boxing. I was a small, skinny kid, with the skinniest legs anybody ever had-my legs stayed skinny until today. But I loved sports so much I couldn't be intimidated or scared by people bigger than me. I ain't never been the scaredy type, never was. And if I liked someone 1 liked them, no matter what. But if I didn't like you, I didn't like you. I don't know why that is but that's the way I am. That's the way I've always been. For me, it's always been a vibe thing, a spiritual thing, whether I like someone or not. Like people say that I'm arrogant, but I've always been the way I am;

I haven't changed that much.

Anyway, Millard and I would always be looking to find a game of football or baseball to play. We'd play a game called Indian ball, too, which was a kind of baseball game played with three or four guys to a team. If we weren't playing this, we were playing regular baseball on some vacant lot or baseball diamond. I played shortstop and could play my ass off. I could really field the ball and I was a pretty good hitter, though I didn't hit too many home runs because of my small size. But man, I loved baseball, and swimming and football and boxing.

I remember we used to play tackle football on the little plots of grass in between the sidewalk and the curb. This was on 14th Street in front of Tilford Brooks's house, who later got a Ph.D. in music and lives in St. Louis today. Then we'd go over and play in front of Mil-lard's house. Man, we'd be getting tackled and falling on our heads and busting them wide open and bleeding like butchered hogs. Scar-ring up our legs and giving our mothers fits. But it was fun, man, it

was a lot of fun.

I liked to swim, I loved to box. Even today those are the favorite sports I like to do. I would swim every chance I got then, and I swim every chance I get now. But boxing was and is my heart. I just love it. I can't explain why. Man, I would listen to all of Joe Louis's fights

like everybody else. We'd be all crowded around the radio waiting to hear the announcer describe Joe knocking some motherfucker out. And when he did, the whole goddamn black community of East St. Louis would go crazy, celebrate in the streets, drinking and danc-ing and making a lot of noise. But it was joyful noise. And they did the same thing-but not as loud-when Henry Armstrong won, be-cause he was from across the river, from St. Louis, so that made him a black local, a hometown hero. But Joe Louis was the man.

Even though I loved boxing, I didn't get into fights when I was young. We would body punch, you know, hit each other in the chest, but nothing more serious than that. We were just like every other normal bunch of kids, growing up and having fun.

But there were gangs all around East St. Louis, bad gangs like the Termites. And they had some real bad ones over in St. Louis. East St. Louis was a rough place to grow up in, because you had a lot of cats, black and white, who didn't take no shit off nobody. I wasn't into fighting until I got to be a teenager. I wasn't into no gangs when I was growing up because I was into music so much. I even stopped playing sports because of music. Now, don't get me wrong, I used to fight with motherfuckers and shit, especially when they called me Buckwheat, because I was little, skinny and dark. I didn't like that name, so if anybody called me that they had to fight. I didn't like the name Buckwheat because I didn't like what the name meant, what it represented, that stupid Our Gang bullshit image white people had about black people. I knew/wasn't like that, that I came from people who were somebodies and that whenever anybody called me by that name they were trying to make fun of me. I knew even way back then that you've got to fight to protect who you are. So, I'd fight a lot. But I never was in no gangs. And I don't think I'm arrogant, I think I'm confident of myself. Know what I want, always have known what I wanted for as long as I can remember. I can't be intimidated. But back then, when I was growing up, everybody seemed to like me, even though I didn't talk too much; I still don't like to talk too much now.

It was even tough in the schools as well as out in the streets. They had an all-white school up the street from where I lived, Irving School, I think it was called, that was clean as a whistle. But couldn't no black kids go there; we had to go past it to get to our school. We had good teachers, like the Turner sisters at John Robinson where I went. They were the great-granddaughters of Nat Turner and they

were race-conscious just like he was. They taught us to have pride in ourselves. The teachers were good, but the black schools were all fucked up, with running toilets and things like that. They stunk like a motherfucker, man, like open cesspools in Africa where poor peo-ple live. I mean that shit made me not want to eat while I was going to elementary school, made me sick to my stomach then-and now whenever I think about it. They treated us black kids like we was just a bunch of cattle. Some people I went to school with say it wasn't this bad, but that's the way I remember it.

That's why I used to love to go to my grandfather's place in Arkan-sas. Down there out in the fields, man, you could walk with your shoes off and you wouldn't step into no pile of shit and get it all running and sticky and funky all over your feet, like in elementary school.

My mother was always-it seems now-putting me, my brother, and my sister on trains when we were real young to go visit my grandfather. She pinned name tags on us, gave us boxes of chicken, and put us on the train. And man, that chicken was gone soon as the train left the station. Then we'd starve all the way to wherever we were going. We always ate up the chicken too fast. Never did stop doing that. Never did learn to eat that chicken slowly. It was so good we couldn't wait. We'd be crying all the way to my grandfather's house, hungry and mad. Soon as we got to his place, I always wanted to stay. My grandfather gave me my first horse.

He had a fish farm down in Arkansas. We would catch fish all day long, buckets of them, tubs of them. Man, we ate fried fish all day long, and talk about good? Shit, that fish was a motherfucker. So, we'd run around all day. Ride horses. Go to bed early. Get up early. And do the same thing all over again. Man, it was fun being on my grandfather's farm. My grandfather was about six feet tall, brown-skinned with big eyes; looked something like my father, only taller. My grandmother's name was Ivy, and we called her Miss Ivy.

I remember getting into all kinds of things there you couldn't get into back in a town like East St. Louis. One time me and my Uncle Ed, my father's youngest brother, who was a year younger than me, went out one morning busting up nearly all of Grandpa's watermel-ons. We went from one watermelon patch to another and busted up every watermelon we could find. We took the heart, the center, out of them, ate some, but mostly left all the rest behind. I think I was ten and he was nine. Later, back in the house, we laid up laughing

like two motherfuckers. When Grandpa found out, he told me, "You can't ride your horse for a week." That cured me forever of busting up watermelons. Like my father, my grandfather was something else, didn't take no shit off no one.

When I was about nine or ten I got me a paper route and started delivering papers on weekends to make some extra money. Not that I needed it, because my father by now was making a whole lot of money. I just wanted to make my own money and not have to ask my parents for anything. I've always been like that, always been inde-pendent, always wanted to make it on my own. I didn't make much, maybe sixty-five cents a week, but it was mine. I could buy me some candy. I kept a pocketful of candy and a pocketful of marbles. I would trade candy for marbles and marbles for candy, soda, and chewing gum. Somehow I learned back then that you've got to make deals- and I don't really remember who I learned it from, but it could have been from my father. In the middle of the Depression, I remember a lot of people were hungry and poor. But not my family, because my father was taking care of the money side.

I used to deliver papers to the best barbecue man in East St. Louis, old man Piggease. His place was located around 15th and Broadway, where they had all the rest of those businesses. Mr. Piggease had the best barbecue in town because he'd get the fresh meat from them packing houses in St. Louis and East St. Louis. His barbecue sauce was just outta sight. Man, that shit was so good I can taste it now. Nobody made barbecue sauce like Mr. Piggease, nobody, then or now. Nobody knew how he made his sauce, nobody knew what he put in it. He never told nobody. Then, he made this dip for the bread and that was a motherfucker, too! Plus fish sandwiches that were outta sight. His jack salmon sandwiches eventually got as good as my friend Leo's father's.

Mr. Piggease didn't have nothing but a shack that he sold his bar-becue out of. Only about ten people could get in there at any one time. He had his barbecue grill laid with bricks, made it himself. He also built the chimney and you could smell that charcoal smoke all over 15th Street. So everybody got themselves a sandwich or one of those bad small ends of barbecue before the day was out. The stuff was ready about six o'clock; he had it all cooked and done. I'd be there at six on the dot, giving him his paper, the Chicago Defender or the Pittsburgh Courier, both black newspapers. I'd give him both of those papers and he'd give me two pig snouts; pig snouts cost

fifteen cents apiece. But because Mr. Piggease liked me, thought I was smart, he'd let me slide for the dime and sometimes throw in an extra pig snout, or pig ear sandwich-that's where he got his nick-name "Mr. Pig Ears"-or rib tip, whatever he felt like giving me that day. Sometimes he'd throw in a piece of sweet potato pie or candied yams and a drink of milk. So, he put that shit on paper plates, which would absorb all that fucking great flavor, in between slices of that funky, tasty bread he got from the bakery. Then, he'd wrap it all up in newspapers, yesterday's newspapers. Man, that was good. Ten cents for a jack salmon, fifteen cents for a snout. So I'd get my shit' and sit down and talk to him for a while, with him behind the counter, dealing with everybody. I learned a lot from Mr. Piggease, but mainly he taught me-along with my father-to avoid unneces-sary bullshit.

But I learned the most from my father. He was something else. He was a good-looking guy, about my height but a little bit on the plump side. As he got older, he began to lose his hair-which fucked with his head a little bit, in my opinion. He was a well-bred man, liked nice things, clothes and cars, just like my mother.

My father was pro-black, very pro-black. Back in those days some-one like him was called a "race man." He was definitely not an "Uncle Tom." Some of his African classmates at Lincoln University, like Nkrumah of Ghana, became presidents of their countries, or high up in their country's governments. And so my father had these connections over in Africa. He liked Marcus Garvey more than the politics of the NAACP. He felt that Garvey was good for the black race, because he got all those black people together back in the 1920s. My father thought that was important and hated the way people like William Pickens of the NAACP thought and talked about Garvey. Pickens was a relative, an uncle, I think, of my mother's, and sometimes when he was passing through St. Louis he would call her up and come over. At the time I think he was high up in the NAACP, a secretary or something. Anyway, I remember him calling up to come by one time and when my mother told my father, he said, "Fuck William Pickens, because the son of a bitch never did like Marcus Garvey and Marcus Garvey didn't do anything other than get all those black people together to do something for themselves, and that's the most black people have ever been together in this country. And this cocksucker is opposed to him. So fuck the motherfucker, fuck him and all his stupid ideas."

My mother was different; she was all for the uplifting of the black race, but she saw it like somebody in the NAACP would see it. She thought that my father was too radical, especially later when he started getting into politics. If I got my sense of style and clothes from my mother, I think I got most of my attitude, my sense of who I was, my confidence and race pride from my father. Not that my mother wasn't a very proud person, she was. But most of it I picked up from my father, the way I looked at certain things.

My father didn't take no shit off nobody. I remember one time when this white man came by his office for something. He was the one who sold my father gold and stuff. Anyway, my father's office was real crowded when this white man comes in. Now, my father had a sign behind the reception desk that read, "Do Not Disturb," which he used when he was working on somebody's mouth. The sign was up, but the white man, after waiting about a half an hour, says to me-I was about fourteen or fifteen, working the receptionist's desk that day-"I can't wait any longer, I'm going on in." I say to him, "The sign says 'Do Not Disturb,' can't you see what the sign says?" The man just ignores me and goes on in to my father's office where he does the teeth. Now, the office is full of black people who know my father don't tolerate that kind of shit. So, they just kind of smile and lay back, to see what was going to happen. No sooner did the gold man get into my father's office when I hear my father say to him, "What the fuck are you doing in here? Can't you read, mother-fucker? You dumb white motherfucker! Get the fuck on out of here!" The white man came on out of there quick, looking at me like I was crazy or something. So I told the motherfucker as he was going out the door, "I told you not to go in there, stupid." That was the first time I ever cussed a white man who was older than me.

Another time my father went looking for a white man who had chased me and called me a nigger. He went looking for him with a loaded shotgun. He didn't find him, but I hate to think of what would have happened if he had. My father was something. He was a strong motherfucker, but he was weird in the way he looked at things, too. Like he wouldn't cross certain bridges going from East St. Louis to St. Louis because he said he knew who built them, said they were thieves and that they probably didn't build the bridges very strong because they were likely cheating on the money and the building materials. He actually believed that them bridges would fall into the Mississippi one day. And to the day he died he believed this was so

and was always puzzled by the fact that they never did fall. He wasn't perfect. But he was a proud man and was probably way ahead of his time for a black man. Shit, he even liked to play golf way back then. I used to caddy for him over on the golf course in Forest Park in St. Louis.

He was one of the pillars of the black community in East St. Louis, because he was a doctor and got into politics. Him and Dr. Eubanks, his best friend, and a few other prominent black men. My father carried a lot of weight and influence in East St. Louis while I was growing up. So some of his importance was carried over to his kids and that's probably why a lot of people-black people-in East St. Louis treated my brother and sister and me as if we were kind of special. Now, they didn't kiss our asses or nothing like that. But they did treat us most times like we were different. They expected us to make something important of ourselves. I guess this kind of special treatment helped us have a positive attitude about ourselves. This kind of thing is important for black people, especially young black people-who mostly hear all kinds of negative things about them-selves.

My father was a strict man when it came to discipline. He made us all aware that we had to keep our shit together. I think I got my bad temper from him. But he never, ever whipped me. The maddest he ever got with me was once when I was about nine or ten and he had bought me a bike, I think my first bike. So me being mischievous, I used to ride the bike off the stairs. We were still living on 15th and Broadway, and hadn't yet moved to the house at 17th and Kansas. Anyway, I rode my bike down these real high stairs and had a curtain rod in my mouth. I was going so fast that I couldn't stop and ran into the front door of the garage behind our house. The curtain rod jammed back into my mouth and busted it wide open. Well, when he found out what had happened he got so mad I thought he was going to kill me.

Another time that he got very mad with me was when I set fire to the shed, or the garage, and almost burned the house down. He didn't say nothing, but if looks could kill I would have been dead. Then later when I got older and thought I knew how to drive, I backed the car all the way across the street and ran it into a tele-phone pole. Some of my friends had been teaching me how to drive, but my father wouldn't let me practice, because I didn't have a li-cense. And me being like I was-headstrong-I wanted to see if I

could drive. When he found out about my crashing the car, he didn't do nothing but shake his head.

The funniest thing I can remember happening when I did some-thing wrong was when he took me over to St. Louis and bought me all of these clothes. I think I was about eleven or twelve and I was just getting into clothes. Anyway, it's Easter time and my father wants me and my sister and brother to look good in church. So he takes me over to St. Louis and buys me a pleated, gray double-breasted suit; some Thom McAn boots; a yellow, striped shirt; a hip beanie cap; and a leather change purse that he put thirty pennies in. Now I know I'm clean, right?

When we get back home my father goes upstairs to get something from his office. I got these thirty pennies burning a hole in the new change purse he just bought me. Now, you know I've just got to spend this money-hip and clean as I am, right? So I go into Daut's Drug-store and tell Mr. Dominic, the owner, to give me twenty-five cents' worth of them juicy chocolate soldiers-my favorite candy at that time. You could get three chocolate candy soldiers for a penny, so he sells me seventy-five of them. Now I got my big bag of candy, and I'm standing out in front of my father's office, sharp as a tack, and I'm eating the candy soldiers faster than nobody's business. I ate so many of them I got sick and just started spitting them out. My sister, Dor-othy, sees me and thinks I'm spitting up blood, and runs and tells my father. So he comes downstairs and says, "Dewey, what are you doing? This is my place of business. People come to see me here and they'll think that I done killed somebody, think all this chocolate is dried-up blood, so get upstairs."

Another time around Easter, the next year, I think it was, my father bought me an outfit to go to church, a blue suit with short pants and socks. Along the way while me and my sister was going there, I saw some of my boys playing in the old factory house. They asked me to join them and I told my sister that I'd catch up with her. I went on in that factory house and all of a sudden it's so dark in there I can't see. I trip, fall, and I'm crawling around. I fall into this puddle of dirty water with my good new clothes on. And it's Easter. You know how I felt. So, I didn't go to church. I just went back home and my father didn't do anything. But he did tell me that if I so much as "ever stumble again like that, and you're not supposed to stumble, I'm going to kick your motherfucking ass." So that stopped me from doing really silly shit like that again. He said, "That could have been

acid or anything you fell in. You could have been dead, going in a strange dark place like that. So don't you ever do it again." And I didn't.

Because it wasn't so much the clothes he was concerned about. It didn't bother him that I ruined them. It was me he was worried about. I never forgot that, that he was only concerned about me. So we always got along well. He was always behind me 100 percent, whatever I wanted to do, and I believe that his confidence in me made me have confidence in myself.

But my mother would whip the shit out of me at the drop of a hat. She was into whipping so much that one time, when she couldn't do it because she was sick or something, she told my father to do it. He took me into a room, closed the door, and told me to scream like he was beating me. "Make some noise, like you're getting beat," I re-member him saying. And then me screaming at the top of my lungs and him sitting there looking at me all steely-eyed. That was some funny shit, man. But now that I think about it, I would have almost preferred his whipping me to the way he used to look right through me like I was nothing. When he did that he made me feel like I was nothing. That feeling was worse than a whipping could ever have been.

My mother and father never did get along well. They saw most things through different eyes. They had been at each other's throats since I was a little kid. The only thing I ever saw that really connected them up was later when I got my bad heroin habit. When that hap-pened, they seemed to forget their differences and pulled together to try to save me. Other than that time, they always seemed to me to be fighting like cats and dogs.

I remember my mother picking up things and throwing them at my father and saying all kinds of off-the-wall, nasty things to him. Some-times he would get so mad that he'd also pick up something and throw it at her, whatever he could get his hands on-a radio, the dinner bell, anything. And she'd be screaming, "You're trying to kill me, Dewey!" I remember one time after an argument my father had gone outside to cool himself out. When he came back my mother wouldn't open the door and let him back in-he had forgotten his key. He was standing out there screaming for her to open the door, and she wouldn't. It was one of those glass doors that you could see through. He got so mad with her he punched her right in the mouth through the glass. He knocked a couple of teeth right out of her

mouth. They were best apart, but they gave each other grief until they finally got divorced.

I think part of their problem was that they had different tempera-ments. But it wasn't only that. They developed a typical doctor-wife relationship in that he was seldom ever at home. It didn't bother us kids too much because we were always doing something. But I think it bothered her a lot. And then when he got into politics he was there even less. Plus, they always seemed to be arguing about money, even though my father was considered wealthy. At least, he was for a black man.

I remember when he ran for State Representative of Illinois. He was running because he wanted to put a fire department out where he had his farm in Millstadt. Some white people wanted to give him money not to run, but he ran anyway and lost. My mother got on him for not taking the money. She said that they could have used that money to go on a vacation or something. Plus, she was mad at him later for losing most of his fortune gambling; my father lost over a million dollars gambling like he did. And she never did like all that radical political shit my father was into. But after they broke up she told me later that if she had it to do all over again, she would have treated my father differently. But by then, it was way too late.

None of our parents' problems seemed to affect the fun that me, my sister, and my brother were having, although looking back I guess it really did. It had to affect us somehow, although I don't really know how. I just thought it was a drag to watch them fighting all the time. Like I said, my mother and I didn't get along too well and so I guess I blamed her for all the problems. I know my father's sister, Corrine, blamed her; she never did like my mother.

My Aunt Corrine had a lot of money and shit, but everybody thought she was weirder than a motherfucker. I did too. But they were close, my father and his sister. And even though she was against my father marrying my mother, people said that when they got married my aunt said, "Lord, help that poor woman. Because she don't know the trouble she's getting into."

Aunt Corrine was a doctor of metaphysics or something like that. She had her office right next to my father's. There was a sign out in front saying "Dr. Corrine, Reader, Healer," with an open palm facing the viewer. She told people's fortunes. She'd be in her office lighting all them candles and shit and smoking them cigarettes. Man, she'd be up in her office behind all those clouds of smoke, talking weird

shit. People were scared of her; some thought she was a witch, or some kind of voodoo queen. She liked me. But she must have thought that I was weird, because as soon as I walked in her office she started lighting those candles and smoking cigarettes. Ain't that a bitch; she thought I was weird.

All of us kids-my brother and my sister and me-liked artistic things when we were young, especially Vernon and me, but Dorothy, too. When I was growing up-before I really got into music-me and Dorothy and Vernon used to have our own talent shows. We were still living on 15th and Broadway when we started. I think I was about nine or ten. Anyway, I was just beginning to play trumpet, just getting into it. As I said, Uncle Johnny had given it to me. So, I would play trumpet-as much as I could play back then-and Dorothy would play piano. Vernon would dance. We had a lot of fun. Dorothy could play a few church songs. But other than that, she couldn't play. Mostly we would do little skits-funny shit, you know-talent shows with me being the judge. Man, I was hard on them. Vernon could always sing, draw, and dance. So, he'd be singing and Dorothy would be dancing. By this time my mother was sending her to dancing school. Anyway, that's the kind of shit we was doing. But as I got older, I got more serious, especially about my playing music.

The first time I really paid attention to music was when I used to listen to a radio show called "Harlem Rhythms." I was about seven or eight. The show used to come on at fifteen minutes to nine every day, so I was late to school a lot because I was listening to that program. But I had to hear that show, man, had to. Most of the time they played black bands, but sometimes when they had a white band on I would cut it off, unless the musician was Harry James or Bobby Hackett. But that program was really great. It had all them great black bands on there and I remember being fascinated by hearing the records of Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and a whole bunch of other bad motherfuckers on that program. Then when I was nine or ten I started taking some private music lessons.

But before the lessons, I also remember how the music used to sound down there in Arkansas, when I was visiting my grandfather, especially at the Saturday night church. Man, that shit was a moth-erfucker. I guess I was about six or seven. We'd be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that

everybody said ghosts lived in. Anyway, we'd be on the side of the road-whoever I was with, one of my uncles or my cousin James- and I remember somebody would be playing a guitar the way B. B. King plays. And I remember a man and a woman singing and talking about getting down! Shit, that music was something, especially that woman singing. But I think that kind of stuff stayed with me, you know what I mean? That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm. I think it started getting into my blood on them spook-filled Arkansas back-roads after dark when the owls came out hoot-ing. So when I started taking music lessons I might have already had some idea of what I wanted my music to sound like.

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it. Because it's hard to pinpoint where it all began for me. But I think some of it had to have started on that Arkansas road and some on that "Harlem Rhythms" radio show. When I got into music I went all the way into music; I didn't have no time after that for nothing else.

Chapter 2

By the time I was twelve, music had become the most important thing in my life. I probably didn't realize how important it would become, but looking back, I can see just how important it was. I still played baseball and football, still hung out with my friends like Millard Curtis and Darnell Moore. But I was seriously taking trumpet lessons and was really into my horn. I re-member going to Boy Scout camp near Waterloo, Illinois, when I was about twelve or thirteen. It was Camp Vanderventer, and Mr. Mays, the Head Scoutmaster, knew that I played trumpet. He gave me the job of playing taps and reveille. I remember how proud I was for him to ask me, picking me out from everyone. So I guess by then I was starting to play all right.

But I really started to stretch on out as a player after I left Attucks Junior High and went to Lincoln High School. My first great teacher, Elwood Buchanan, was at Lincoln. Lincoln was both a junior and senior high school; I went there for junior high and stayed all the way to graduation. When I started playing in the band I was younger than everybody else. After my father, Mr. Buchanan was the biggest influence on my life up until then. He was definitely the person who took me all the way into music at that time. I knew I wanted to become a musician. That was all I wanted to be.

Mr. Buchanan was one of my father's patients and drinking bud-dies. My father told him how interested I was in music and in playing

trumpet, specifically. So he said he would give me trumpet lessons and that was that. I was going to Attucks when I first started taking lessons from Mr. Buchanan. Later, after I started going to Lincoln High School, he still sort of looked after me to keep me on the right track.

On my thirteenth birthday, my father bought me a new trumpet. My mother wanted me to have a violin, but my father overruled her. This caused a big argument between them, but she soon got over it. But Mr. Buchanan was the reason I got a new trumpet, because he knew how bad I wanted to play.

It was about that time that I first started having serious disagree-ments with my mother. Up until then, it had been over small things. But it just kind of went downhill. I don't really know what her prob-lem was. But I think it had something to do with her not talking real straight to me. She was still trying to treat me like I was a little baby, the way she was treating my brother, Vernon. I think this had some-thing to do with him becoming a homosexual. The women-my mother, my sister, and my grandmother-always treated Vernon like a girl. So, I wasn't having none of that shit from them. It was a matter of talking straight to me or not talking to me at all. My father told my mother to leave me alone when we started having problems. And she did most of the time, but we really got into some bad argu-ments. Despite all that, my mother did buy me two records by Duke Ellington and Art Tatum, though. I used to listen to them all the time and that helped me later in understanding jazz.

Because Mr. Buchanan had already given me trumpet lessons at Attucks before I came to Lincoln, I was advanced on the instrument. I was already playing pretty good. Then in high school I also started studying with a great German trumpet teacher named Gustav who lived over in St. Louis and played first trumpet with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He was a bad motherfucker. He also made great trumpet mouthpieces, and I use one of his design even today.

At Lincoln High, the band under Mr. Buchanan's direction was a motherfucker. We had a hell of a cornet and trumpet section. It was me, Ralaigh McDaniels, Red Bonner, Duck McWaters, and Frank Gully-who played first trumpet and was a bad motherfucker. He was about three years older than I was. Because I was the smallest and youngest person in the band, some of the kids would pick on me. But I was mischievous, too, playing little pranks on people and shit -throwing spitballs and hitting people upside the head when they

weren't looking. You know, little kid, teenage shit, wasn't none of it serious.

Everybody always seemed to like my tone, which I kind of got from the way Mr. Buchanan played at the time. This was on cornet. As a matter of fact, Red and Frank and everybody else who was playing cornet or trumpet in the band used to pass around Mr. Buchanan's instrument; I think I was the only one in the cornet section who had his own instrument. But even though they were all older than me and I had a lot to learn, they all encouraged me, liked the way I sounded, the way I approached playing. They always used to tell me I had a lot of imagination on the instrument.

Mr. Buchanan kept us playing strictly marches and shit like that. Overtures, real good background music, John Philip Sousa marches. He didn't let us play no jazz shit while he was around, but when he would leave the band room for a while we would try to get into some jazz. One of the hippest things Mr. Buchanan taught me was not to play with vibrato in my tone. At first, I used to like to play with vibrato because of the way most of the other trumpet players played the instrument. One day while I was playing in that style, with all this vibrato, Mr. Buchanan stopped the band and told me, "Look here, Miles. Don't come around here with that Harry James stuff, playing with all that vibrato. Stop shaking all those notes and trem-bling them, because you gonna be shaking enough when you get old. Play straight, develop your own style, because you can do it. You got enough talent to be your own trumpet man."

Man, I never forgot that. But at the time, he hurt and embarrassed me. I just loved the way Harry James played. But after that I started to forget James and found out that Mr. Buchanan was right. At least, he was right for me.

By the time I was in high school I started getting really serious about my clothes. I started caring about the way I looked, trying to look hip and everything, because about this time girls started paying attention to me-although at age fourteen I wasn't really into them yet. So I started dressing real hip, taking a lot of time about selecting the clothes I bought and wore to school. Me and a couple of my friends-who were also into clothes-started comparing notes on what was hip and what wasn't. I liked the dress style of Fred Astaire and Gary Grant back then, so I created a kind of hip, quasi-black English look: Brooks Brothers suits, butcher boy shoes, high top pants, shirts with high tab collars that were so stiff with starch that I could hardly move my neck.

One of the most important things that happened for me in high school-besides studying under Mr. Buchanan-was when one time the band went to play in Carbondale, Illinois, and I met dark Terry, the trumpet player. He became my idol on the instrument. He was older than me and was a drinking buddy of Mr. Buchanan. Anyway, we went down there to Carbondale to play and I saw this dude and walked right up to him and asked him if he was a trumpet player. He turned and asked me how I knew he was a trumpet player. I told him I could tell by his embouchure. I had on my school band uniform and dark had on this hip coat and this bad, beautiful scarf around his neck. He was wearing hip butcher boy shoes and a bad hat cocked ace-deuce. I told him I could also tell he was a trumpet player by the hip shit he was wearing.

He kind of smiled at me and said something that I have forgotten. Then, when I asked him some things about playing trumpet, he sort of shined on me by telling me that he didn't want to "talk about no trumpet with all them pretty girls bouncing around out there." dark was really into the girls at that time, and I wasn't. So what he said to me really hurt me. The next time we met it was a different story altogether. But I never forgot that first time me and dark met, how hip he was. I decided then I was going to be that hip, even hipper, when I got my shit together.

I started hanging out with my friend Bobby Danzig. Bobby was about the same age as me and was a hell of a trumpet player. We used to go around listening to music and sitting in wherever we could. We went everywhere together, we were both into clothes, even thought a lot alike. But he was more outspoken than me. He would tell a motherfucker off in a minute. Man, we'd go to a club and listen to a band and if the horn player was standing wrong, or the drummer had his drums set up wrong, Bobby would say, "Let's get out of here, man, because this motherfucker can't play. Look at how the drummer done set up his drums, man; they're wrong. And look at how that trumpet player's standing. His pos-ture's all fucked up. Now you know that motherfucker can't play standing up there on the bandstand like that! So let's get out of here!"

Man, Bobby Danzig was something else. He was a great trumpet player and he was even a greater pickpocket. He'd get on one of them trolleys that was running in St. Louis and by the time it had reached the end of the line, Bobby would have himself $300, or more on a great day. I met Bobby when I was sixteen and I think he was

the same age. We joined the union together and we'd go everywhere together. Bobby was my first musical best friend, my running part-ner. Like I said, it was him who went with me to the Riviera when I went to audition for the Billy Eckstine band, and he could play trum-pet like a motherfucker. I later became good friends with dark Terry, but dark was about six years older than I was and so we were into different head sets. But Bobby was right there in the things we liked to do together. Except I was never into picking pockets like he was. He was the best at it I have ever seen.

Another great trumpet player was Levi Maddison. My teacher Gustav used to rave about him. Levi was his star pupil, and man, he was a motherfucker. Back in those days, around 1940, St. Louis was a great city for trumpet players and Levi was one of the baddest, if not the baddest. But Levi was a crazy motherfucker who went around laughing to himself all the time. And once he started laughing at something he couldn't stop. A lot of people said he was laughing all the time because he was despondent. I don't know what Levi was despondent over, but I know he could sure play the trumpet. I used to love to watch him. His trumpet was an extension of him. But all of the trumpet players from St. Louis at that time played like that- Harold "Shorty" Baker, dark Terry, and myself. We all played like that, had what I used to call "that St. Louis thing."

Levi would always be smiling with that crazy look in his eyes. That distant thing. He was out and he was always being confined in the nuthouse for a few days. He didn't never hurt nobody, he wasn't violent or anything like that. But I guess people back in those days didn't want to take no chances. Later, after I left St. Louis to live in New York, every time I would come back home for a visit I would go and see Levi. Finding him was sometimes difficult. When I found him, though, I would always ask him to put the trumpet to his mouth just because I loved the way he held it. And he would, with a big smile on his face.

Then once when I came back I couldn't find him. They said he started laughing one day and couldn't stop. So they took him to the sanatorium and he never came out again. Or, at least, nobody ever saw him again. But the thing Levi used to do on trumpet was just too bad, man, he was a hell of a musician. When he picked up the horn you would hear all this tone and brilliance, you know? Nobody else had it and I have yet to hear a tone like that. It's almost like mine, but it was rounder-sort of in between Freddie Webster's and mine.

And Levi had that air about him when he picked up his horn that you were going to hear something you'd never heard before in your life. Only a few people had that attitude. Dizzy had it and I think I have it. But Levi was the man. He was a motherfucker. If he hadn't gone crazy and went to the nuthouse, people would have been talking about him today.

Gustav would tell me I was the worst trumpet player in the world. But later, when Dizzy had a hole in his lip that wouldn't heal and so he went to see Gustav about changing mouthpieces, he said Gus told him that I was his best pupil. All I know is that Gus never told me that to my face.

Maybe Gus thought that by telling me I was his worst student that I would play harder. Maybe he thought that was the way to get the best out of me. I don't know. But it didn't bother me. As long as he taught me that half an hour for the $2.50 I paid him, he could say anything he wanted. Gus was a technician. He could run chromatic scales about twelve times in one breath. He was something. But by the time I was going to him for lessons I already had some confidence in my playing. I knew I wanted to be a musician and so everything I did was leaning toward that.

While I was in high school I started hanging out with a piano player named Emmanual St. Claire "Duke" Brooks. (His nephew, Richard Brooks, an all-American football player, is now the principal of Miles Davis Elementary School.) He got his nickname "Duke" because he knew and could play all of Duke Ellington's music. He used to play with the bassist Jimmy Blanton at a place across the street from where I lived then called the Red Inn. Duke Brooks was two or three years older than me, but he had a big influence on me because he was into the new music that was happening at the time.

Duke Brooks was a hell of a piano player. Man, the motherfucker played like Art Tatum. He used to teach me chords and shit. He lived in East St. Louis and had a room by himself in his parents' house, off the porch. I'd go over to his house and listen to him at lunchtime when I was going to Lincoln High School. He lived about two or three blocks from school. He smoked a lot of reefer and I think he was the first person I knew who did that. I never did it with him, though. I never did like reefer too much. But then, at that time, I wasn't doing nothing, not even drinking.

Duke eventually got killed when he was hoboing a ride on a train somewhere in Pennsylvania. He was in one of those cars filled with

around Lincoln stopped and asked me what I was doing. They started looking at me differently after that. Also, me and Duke were beginning to catch jam sessions in Brooklyn, Illinois-just up the road from East St. Louis. One of my father's best friends was the mayor of Brooklyn, so he let me play even though I was too young to be going into clubs. A lot of really fine musicians played those river-boats on the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis. They were always sitting in up in those all-night Brooklyn nightspots. Man, them places was always jumping, especially on weekends.

East St. Louis and St. Louis were country towns full of country people. Both towns are real square, especially the white people from around there-realty country, and racist to the bone. Black people from around East St. Louis and St. Louis were country, too, but kind of hip in their countryness. It was a hip place. A lot of people from that area had a whole lot of style back in those days-still probably do. Black people from that area of the country are kind of different from black people in other places. And I think when I was growing up it was because of the people-especially black musicians-mov-ing back and forth from New Orleans. St. Louis is close to Chicago and Kansas City, as well. So people would bring the different kinds of styles of those places back to East St. Louis.

There was a hipness in the black people then. After St. Louis closed down at night, everybody over there came to Brooklyn to listen to the music and party all night long. People in East St. Louis and St. Louis worked their asses off in them packing and slaughter-houses. So you know they was mad when they took off work. They didn't want to hear no dumb shit off nobody, and would kill a moth-erfucker quick who brought them some stupid shit. That's why they were serious about their partying and listening to music. That's why I loved playing up in Brooklyn. People were really into listening to what you were playing. If you weren't playing anything, the people in Brooklyn would let you know it quick. I've always liked honesty and can't stand people being any other way.

About this time I was starting to make a little money, not much. My teachers at Lincoln knew that I was serious about being a musi-cian. Some of them heard me up in Brooklyn on weekends or at other jam sessions. But I made it a point to do real good in my studies, because if I didn't, I knew my mother and father weren't going to let me play. So I studied harder.

When I was sixteen, I met Irene Birth, who was going to Lincoln

with me. She had real pretty feet. I was always a sucker for pretty little feet. She was about five feet six inches tall and weighed about 103 pounds. A slender woman, but a real nice figure-reminded me of a dancer's body. She was half yellow-looking in color. You know, kind of light-skinned, but half-assed light skin. Outside of her being pretty and hip, with a good body, her feet is what really attracted me. She was a little older than I was-I think she was born May 12, 1923-and a couple of grades ahead of me. But she liked me and I liked her and she was the first real girlfriend that I had.

She lived up on Goose Hill, which is a part of East St. Louis that is over by the packing houses and the pens where they used to keep the cows and pigs after they unloaded them from the trains. The neighborhood was poor and black. There was always a real bad smell in the air, of burnt meat and hair. The smell of manure and cow shit mingled with this smell of death. What a weird, funky smell. Anyway, it was a long distance from where I lived, but I used to walk over there to see her. Sometimes alone and sometimes with my friend Millard Curtis, who was by then a star football and basketball player; I think he was captain of the football team.

I was really into Irene. I got my first orgasm with her. I remember the first time I bust my nuts I thought I had to pee and jumped up and ran to the bathroom. I had had a wet dream before, when I thought I had rolled over on an egg and burst it. But, man, I had never experienced nothing like that first nut.

Irene and I used to take the trolley car across the bridge over the Mississippi River to St. Louis on weekends. We'd go all the way out to Sarah and Finney-which was the richest black neighborhood in St. Louis back then-to the Comet Theatre, the best black movie house in town. The whole trip cost about forty cents for both of us. I used to carry my horn every place we went, because I figured I might get a chance to play. Always wanted to be ready if the opportunity presented itself, and sometimes it did.

Irene used to dance in one of those groups they had around East St. Louis. She could really dance. I never was a good dancer. But I could dance with Irene for some reason; she seemed to be able to pull the shit out of me and not make me stumble all over the place and look like a fool. She actually made me look like I knew what I was doing. But Irene was one of the only girls-besides my sister, Dorothy-I could dance with. I didn't like to dance because I was too shy back then.

Irene grew up with her mother, who was a good woman, strong and fine like Irene. Her father, Fred Birth, was a numbers writer. He was a gambler, a real tall dude. She had a younger half-brother named Freddie Birth who I used to give trumpet lessons to. He was a pretty good player, but I was hard on him, like Mr. Buchanan was hard on me. After I left Lincoln, Freddie played first trumpet in the school band. He is a school principal back in East St. Louis today. Freddie Jr. grew up to be a very nice and hip dude.

Irene also had a little brother named William, about five or six years old, I think, who I liked very much. William was a real cute little boy, with curly hair, but thin and always coughing. He had gotten real sick with pneumonia, or something like that. So anyway, this doctor came over to see William. Because Irene knew that I had thought of being a doctor-following in my father's footsteps, but on the medical, not dental side (something few people knew about me) -she called me to watch what he did. The doctor came and took one look at William and flat out said, without any emotion, that there was nothing he could do. He said that William was going to be dead before morning. Man, that shit made me so fucking mad. You know, for a long time I couldn't understand how he could say something like that and be so cold about it. It just turned my stomach, man. William did die early the next day in his mother's arms at home without the doctor ever taking him to the hospital, and that shit hurt me so bad.

After this happened, I went to my father and asked him how a doctor could come to see William and tell his family that he was going to be dead before morning and not do nothing about it. He's a doctor, ain't he? Is it that they don't have no money, or what? So my father, knowing that I was asking these questions because of my interest in medicine, said, "If you go to some doctors with a broken arm, they will just cut it off instead of setting it because it might be real hard for them to set it. It might take too much effort. So it's easier for them to cut it off. He's one of them kind of doctors. Miles. There are plenty of them in the world. Those kinds of people, Miles, are only in medicine for the prestige and money that it brings them. They don't love it like I do, or like some of my friends do. You don't go see him if you're really sick. The only people that go to see him are poor black people. Those doctors and he don't care nothing about them. That's why he was so cold to William and his family. He don't care nothing about them, do you understand?"

I nodded that I understood. But, man, that shit shocked me, dis-turbed the fuck out of me. Then, I found out later that this doctor had this real big house, that he was rich and had his own airplane. He had all this shit that he made off people-poor black people that he didn't give a fuck about. That shit made me sick. So I thought about William's death and what my father told me about how some doctors were. I just couldn't understand how someone could look at somebody whose heart is still beating and just say that that person's going to die tomorrow morning and not try to do something about it

-at least try to ease the pain. It just seemed to me, at that time, that if someone's heart is still beating then that person's still got a chance to live. I decided that I wanted to be a doctor so that I could try and save the lives of people like William.

But you know how it is. You say you want to be this, you want to be that. And then, finally, something else just comes along and moves it out of your head, especially when you're young. Music just moved medicine out of my head. That is, if it ever really was there in the first place. I had in my head that if I didn't make it as a musician by the time I was twenty-four, I was going to do something else. That something else, in my mind, was medicine.

Anyway, going back to Irene. I think William's dying like he did drought Irene and me closer. We got real tight after that. She used to go everywhere with me. My father never liked Irene, though. My mother did. I really don't know why he didn't like her, but he didn't. Maybe he thought she wasn't good enough for me. Maybe he thought that she was too old and would misuse me. I don't know what it was, but it didn't change the way I felt about her. I was really into her.

Irene was the person who, when I was seventeen, dared me to call up Eddie Randle and ask him for a job in his band. Eddie Handle's Blue Devils band was hot, man; them motherfuckers could play their asses off. I was over to her house when she dared me, so I told her to give me the phone, and I called him up. When he answered the phone, I said, "Mr. Randle, I hear you need a trumpet player; my name is Miles Davis."

He said, "Yeah, I need a trumpet player. Come on over and let me hear you."

So I went over to the Elks Club in downtown St. Louis where the Rhumboogie Club was located. It was on the second floor, up a long, narrow flight of stairs, in a building sitting off by itself. It was in the black community, so the place would be packed with black people

who really were into music. This was where Eddie Randle played. His band was also billed as the Rhumboogie Orchestra. I auditioned with another trumpet player and got the job.

The Blue Devils played hot dance music so good and there were so many good musicians in that band that everybody used to come hear us play, no matter what kind of music they themselves played. Duke Ellington came through and heard Jimmy Blanton, the great bass player, sitting in with us one night and hired him on the spot.

There was an alto saxophone player in the Blue Devils named Clyde Higgins, who was one of the baddest motherfuckers I ever heard. His wife, Mabel, played piano with the Blue Devils. She was a great musician and a great woman. She was fatter than a mother-fucker, though, and Clyde was skinnier than a motherfucker. But she was something else, a beautiful person. I spent a lot of time learning from her. She showed me a lot of shit on piano, which helped me to develop even faster as a musician.

Another dude who played a great alto was Eugene Porter. He was almost as bad. He was younger than Clyde and wasn't in the band, but he sat in a lot. Eddie Randle played a mean trumpet himself. But Clyde Higgins was so bad that when him and Eugene Porter went down to audition for a gig with Jimmie Lunceford's band, Clyde blew them all away. See, Clyde was a tiny, real black man, and he looked like a monkey. Back during those days a lot of bands that played for white people liked to hire light-skinned musicians, and so Clyde was too dark for them. Eugene said when Clyde went for the audition and told Lunceford he was a saxophone player, everybody laughed at him and started calling him "the little monkey." They gave him the toughest music they had in their book to play. Clyde, being the great musician that he was, ran right through it like it wasn't nothing. At least, that's what Eugene said. When Clyde got through playing, all them cats in Lunceford's band had their mouths hanging open. So Lunceford said to them, "Well, how y'all like that?" Nobody said nothing. Clyde didn't get the job, though. Eugene did, because he was better-looking and light-skinned, and a real good alto player. But he wasn't even close to Clyde Higgins. And he told everybody that Clyde should have gotten the job. But that's the way things were back then in those days.

Playing with Eddie Randle had to be one of the most important steps in my career. It was with Eddie Randle's band that I really started opening up with my playing, really got into writing and ar--

ranging music. I became the musical director of the band, because most of the other guys in the band were working regular gigs in the daytime, so they didn't have the time to get the music together. I was in charge of setting up rehearsals and rehearsing the band. They had other acts at the Rhumboogie, like dancers and comedians, singers, shit like that. So sometimes the band accompanied another act and I had to get the band ready for that. We traveled some and played all over the St. Louis and East St. Louis areas. I met many other great musicians when they came through. I learned a lot being in Eddie Randle's band, and I made more money than I had ever made, about $75 or $80 a week.

I stayed with Eddie Randle's band for about a year, from 1943 to 1944, I think. I used to call him "Bossman," because that's what he was to me-the boss-and he ran a tight band. I learned a lot from him about how to run a band. We used to do the musical charts and arrangements of Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and all them bad cats that were playing back then. There were a lot of great bands around St. Louis, like the Jeter-Pillars Band and George Hudson's band. Man, both of them bands was motherfuck-ers, too. But Ernie Wilkins, who was the arranger for the Blue Devils when I was in that band, and Jimmy Forrest came out of Eddie Randle's band, so I guess I would have to say that he-Eddie Randle -was a leader of great musicians. But George Hudson was a mean trumpet player, too. St. Louis, like New Orleans, is a big trumpet player's town, maybe because of all those marching bands in St. Louis. All I know is that some bad motherfuckers on trumpet came out of there and when I was growing up trumpet players from all over the country used to come through to play in those jam sessions. But I hear it's a lot different today.

I remember when I ran into dark Terry again at the Rhumboogie; it was a different story from when I had first met him. Now, here he comes into the Rhumboogie to hear me play. I said to him when he ran up to me telling me how bad I was, "Yeah, motherfucker, you come up to me now saying that shit, when you wouldn't even talk to me when I first met you over in Carbondale; I'm the little dude you shined on over there." So man, we just laughed, and have been great friends ever since. But him telling me I was bad and could really play at that time did a lot of good. I already had confidence, but dark telling me this just gave me more. After dark and I became friends, we hung out all over the St. Louis area, sitting in and going to jam

sessions, and when people heard that dark and I were going to be sitting in on a particular night, the place would fill up quick, be jammed-packed with people, dark Terry was the one who really opened up the St. Louis jazz scene for me, taking me with him when he would go sit in. I learned a lot from listening to him play the trumpet. He introduced me to the fluegelhorn, too, which I played for a while, calling the one I had "my fat girl," because of the way it was shaped.

But I had an impact on dark also, because he used to borrow my fluegelhorn and keep it for a couple of days because I preferred playing the trumpet. That's how he started playing fluegelhorn, and he's still playing it today and is one of the best in the world at playing it, if not the best. All through this period I loved dark Terry-still do to this day-and I think he felt the same way about me. Every time I got a new horn back in those days, I would go looking for dark to fix up my horn, get the valves to working, and he would fix it up like nobody else could. Man, dark had a way of twisting and light-ening the spring action of the pumps of a trumpet, just by adjusting the springs around, that would make your horn sound altogether different. It made your horn sound like magic, man. dark was a magician with that shit. I used to love for dark to fix my valves. And he used to always use those Heim mouthpieces of Gustav's design with his instrument, because they were very thin but very deep, and gave a big, round, warm sound. All the St. Louis trumpet players used them. One time I lost mine and dark got me a new one. After that, every time he would find an extra one he'd get it for me in St. Louis.

While I was with Eddie Handle's band, like I said, a lot of other great musicians used to come and listen to the band-people like Benny Carter and Roy Eldridge, and the trumpet player Kenny Dor-ham, who came all the way from Austin, Texas, to hear me play. He had heard about me all the way down there. Then there was Alonzo Pettiford, who also played trumpet, and who was the bass player Oscar Pettiford's brother. He was from Oklahoma and was one of the baddest trumpet players around back in those days. Man, could that motherfucker play fast-his fingers were a blur. He played that real fast, hip, slick Oklahoma style. Then there was Charlie Young, who played both saxophone and trumpet, and played both of them real good. And then I met "the President," Lester Young, when he would come down from Kansas City to play in St. Louis. He'd have

Shorty McConnell on trumpet in his band, and sometimes I'd come over with my horn to where they were playing and sit in. Man, play-ing with Prez was something. I learned a lot from the way he played the saxophone. As a matter of fact, I tried to transpose some of his saxophone licks over to my trumpet.

Then there was "Fats" Navarro, who came through from Florida or New Orleans. Nobody knew who he was, but that motherfucker could play like I had never heard nobody play before. He was young, like me, but he was already advanced in his concept of how to play the instrument. Fats was in a band of Andy Kirk's and Howard McGhee's, who was also a fantastic trumpet player. One night him and me got into a jam session on trumpet that was a motherfucker, turned the whole place out. I think this was sometime in 1944. After I heard that band, Howard became my idol, replacing dark Terry for a while, until I heard Dizzy.

I also met Sonny Stitt around this time. He was playing in Tiny Bradshaw's band and so in between sets at the club he was playing at he would come over to the Rhumboogie to catch our set. After Sonny Stitt heard the band and my playing, he approached me about going on the road with Tiny Bradshaw's band. Man, talk about ex-cited, I couldn't wait to get home to ask my parents if I could go. i Plus, Sonny had told me I looked like Charlie Parker. All the cats in the band had their hair slicked back, was wearing hip shit-tuxedos and white shirts-and acting and talking like they was the baddest motherfuckers in the world. You know what I mean? They im-pressed the fuck out of me. But when I got home and asked my I parents, they said no, because I hadn't finished high school yet. I would have been making only $60, $25 less than I was making with Eddie Randle's Blue Devils. I think it was the idea of traveling on the road with a big time band that impressed me the most. Plus, they seemed so hip and were wearing such hip shit. At least, it seemed that way to me back then. I got other offers from Illinois Jacquet, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, and A. J. Sullivan to travel on the road playing in their bands. I also had to turn them down until I graduated from high school. Man, I wanted to hurry up and graduate so that I could get on with playing music and living my life. I was still quiet. Still didn't talk much. But I was changing on the inside. And I really was into clothes-I was clean as a motherfucker, or like they used to say back in St. Louis, cleaner than a broke-dick dog.

Things were going great for me musically, but things at home were

not going so good. My parents were getting along worse than ever and were just about to separate. They did separate around 1944, I forget which year it was. My sister, Dorothy, was starting college at Fisk, and by this time people in East St. Louis felt that Vernon was on his way to being a homosexual. Back in them days that was some other kind of shit.

My father had bought a three-hundred-acre farm in Millstadt, Illi-nois, before he and my mother separated. But she didn't like being out there with all the horses, cows, and prize-winning pigs my father was raising. My mother wasn't into the country living like my father was. But he started spending a lot of time out on his farm and this probably caused them to break up quicker than they would have. My mother didn't cook or do housework. So we had a cook and a maid. But that still didn't seem to make her happy. I liked it out in Millstadt -riding horses and all. It was peaceful and beautiful. I've always been into shit like that. In fact, it reminded me of my grandfather's place, only it was bigger. The house was white, with colonial-style columns, and had about twelve or thirteen rooms. It was two stories high and had a guesthouse. It was really a beautiful place, with a lot of grounds and trees and flowers. I used to love to go out there.

After my mother and father separated, things got real bad be-tween my mother and me. I stayed with her after they separated, but we didn't seem to agree on anything, and with my father not there to keep her off me, there were a lot of screaming arguments. I was getting independent, but I think that the real cause of the problem with my mother was my relationship with my girlfriend Irene Birth.

My mother liked Irene, but she was pissed off when Irene got pregnant. She had plans for me going to college and this was going to cause a problem. My father, like I said, didn't like Irene, although he warmed up to her later. So when I first heard about Irene being pregnant, I went and told my father and he said, "So? So what? I'll take care of it for you."

So I said, "No, Dad, it don't go like that. I'll take care of it myself. I helped do it and I got to be man enough to take care of it." So he kind of paused for a minute and then he said, "Listen, Miles, the baby might not even be yours, because I know all them other niggers she's been fucking. So don't be walking around thinking you are the only one. There's others, plenty of others." I knew Irene was messing around with another dude named Wesley, I forgot his last name, who was older than me. And I knew she was going with a drummer

named James-a little bitty guy-who used to play around East St. Louis; I would see her with him from time to time. But then again, Irene was fine and popular with the men. So my father wasn't telling me nothing I didn't already know. But I was convinced that the baby was mine and that I was doing the right thing by owning up to it. My father was really pissed off with Irene for getting pregnant. I think it was one of the things that stood between them ever really getting tight as they could have been. Anyway, I graduated from Lincoln in January 1944, although I didn't get my degree until that June. We had our first child, a daughter, Cheryl, that year.

Meanwhile, I was making about $85 a week playing in Eddie Randie's band and with other people, and I was buying myself some hip Brooks Brothers suits. I had myself a new horn, so I wasn't doing too bad. But the problems with my mother were getting out of hand, and I knew I had to do something about that and also do something about taking care of my family. I never married Irene legally, but we were still like man and wife. But I started to see some other things about how women were with men. I was also starting to think seriously about leaving the St. Louis area to live in New York.

Marghuerite Wendell (later Willie Mays's first wife) used to work the door at the Rhumboogie. Me and her got to be good friends. She was from St. Louis and was one of the hippest women I ever met. Anyway, she used to come up to me and tell me how handsome all the women, her friends, thought I was. But I didn't pay much atten-tion to that kind of shit. That just seemed to make them bitches more serious about getting me in bed with them. You know what I mean? I remember this one woman named Ann Young, who turned out to be Billie Holiday's niece, coming up to me one night telling me she wanted to take me to New York and buy me a new trumpet. I said I got a new trumpet and I don't need nobody to take me to New York because I'm going to get there anyway. Well, the bitch got madder than a motherfucker and told Marghuerite that I was silly. Mar-ghuerite just laughed, because she knew how I was.

Another time when I was in Eddie Randle's band, there was this dancer named Dorothy Cherry, who was finer than ten motherfuck-ers. Man, she was so fine guys used to send her roses every night. Everybody wanted to fuck her. She was an exotic dancer and we used to play behind her act at the Rhumboogie. Anyway, one night I was passing by her dressing room and she said for me to come in. Now, this bitch had a fine, low ass, long legs, hair down her back;

just a pretty, Indian-looking woman. Dark, with a great body and beautiful face. I guess I was about seventeen at the time and she was about twenty-three or twenty-four. Anyway, she tells me she wants me to hold a mirror under her pussy while she shaved her pubic hairs. So I did. I held the mirror while she did it and didn't think nothing of it. The bell rang announcing that intermission was over and it was time for the band to play again. I told the drummer in the band what had happened and he looked at me really funny and said, "So, what did you do?" I told him I just held the mirror for her. And he said, "That's all? That's all you did?"

I said, "Yeah, that's all I did; what else was I supposed to do?" The drummer, who was about twenty-six or twenty-seven, just shook his head and started laughing and then he said, "You mean with all these sex-fiend motherfuckers in this band she lets you hold that goddamn mirror? Aw, man, ain't that a bitch!" Then he started looking for somebody to tell. For a while after that, the guys in the band looked at me kind of funny. I just figured that it was just show business, right, everybody helping each other out.

But after I got to thinking about it later, that fine bitch having me hold that mirror for her and me looking at that sweet pussy-what was on her mind? I never found out. But she would look at me in that sly way women look at men who are sort of innocent. It's like they're wondering how it would be to teach you all they know. But I was stupid about women then-except for Irene-and I didn't know when I was being hit on.

Once I had graduated from high school I was finally free to do what I wanted to do for at least a year or so. I had decided to try to go to the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. But I couldn't get in until September, and I still would have to pass an audition to be accepted. So I decided to get in as much playing and traveling as I could before I went to Juilliard.

In June 1944, I decided to leave Eddie Handle's band to play with a group out of New Orleans called Adam Lambert's Six Brown Cats. They had a kind of modern swing style, and Joe Williams, the great jazz singer-who was unknown at the time-was singing with them. Their trumpet player, Tom Jefferson, had gotten homesick for New Orleans while the band was playing in Springfield, Illinois, and de-cided to go home. I was recommended to take his place and they paid me good money. So I went with them to Chicago-the first time I had been to that city.

After a few weeks with the band, I came back home because I didn't like what they were playing. That's when Billy Eckstine's band came to St. Louis and I got that chance to play with them for two weeks. This really made up my mind for me to go to New York and attend Juilliard. My mother wanted me to go to Fisk, where my sister, Dorothy, was. She was telling me about how good Fisk's music department was and about the Fisk Jubilee Singers. But after I had heard and played with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Anderson (the trumpet player I replaced in the band in St. Louis; he got sick with tuberculosis and went back to Oklahoma and never played again), Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, and Mr. B himself, I knew I had to be in New York, where the action was. But my father had to settle the argument between my mother and me over my choice of school, and even though Juilliard was a world-famous music school, it still didn't make no difference to my mother. She wanted me to go to Fisk, where my sister could keep an eye on me. But I wasn't having none of that.

East St. Louis and St. Louis were getting so depressing to me around this time that I had to go someplace, even if it was wrong. I especially felt like this after dark Terry left and joined the Navy. For a while, I was so down, I thought of joining the Navy myself so I could play with the great Navy band they had up there in the Great Lakes. Man, they had dark, Willie Smith, Robert Russell, Ernie Royal and the Marshall brothers, and a whole lot of other dudes who used to play with Lionel Hampton's band, and Jimmie Lunceford's band. They didn't have to do no drills or duty or nothing; all they had to do was play music. They went to boot camp, but that was it. But finally, you know, I said, fuck it, because Bird and Dizzy weren't there and that's where I wanted to be, around them; that was where it ulti-mately was at and they were in New York, so that's where I took my ass. But I came real close to joining the Navy in 1944 after I got out of high school. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had done that instead of moving to New York.

I left East St. Louis for New York in early fall 1944. I had to pass my audition to get into Juilliard, and I passed with flying colors. The two weeks I had spent with B's band in St. Louis had been good for me, but I had been a little hurt when B didn't take me with them to play in Chicago's Regal Theatre. B had gotten Marion Hazel to re-place me, since Buddy Anderson wasn't coming back. That had hurt my confidence a little. But playing around East St. Louis and St. Louis

Chapter 3

I arrived in New York City in September 1944, not in 1945 like a lot of jive writers who write about me say. It was almost the end of World War II when I got there. A lot of young guys had gone off to fight the Germans and the Japanese and some of them didn't come back. I was lucky; the war was ending. There were a lot of soldiers in their uniforms all around New York. I do remember that.

I was eighteen years old, wet behind the ears about some things, like women and drugs. But I was confident in my ability to play music, to play the trumpet, and I wasn't scared about living in New York. Nonetheless, the city was an eye-opener for me, especially all the tall buildings, the noise, the cars, and all those motherfucking people, who seemed to be everywhere. The pace of New York was faster than anything I had ever seen in my life; I thought St. Louis and Chicago were fast, but they weren't anything like New York City. So that was the first thing I had to get used to, all the people. But getting around by subway was a gas, it was so fast.

The first place I stayed was at the Claremont Hotel, which was on Riverside Drive right across from Grant's Tomb. The Juilliard School got me a room there. Then I found me a room up on 147th Street and Broadway, in a rooming house run by these people named Bell, who were from East St. Louis and knew my parents. They were nice people and the room was big and clean and cost me a dollar a week. My father had paid for my tuition and had given me some pocket money beyond my rent, enough to last me for about a month or two.

I spent my first week in New York looking for Bird and Dizzy. Man, I want everywhere looking for them two cats, spent all my money and didn't find them. I had to call back home and ask my father for some more money, which he sent me. I still was living clean, not smoking or drinking or using dope. I was just into my music and that was a total high for me. When school started at Juilliard, I would take the subway to 66th Street where the school was located. Right off the bat, I didn't like what was happening at Juilliard. The shit they was talking about was too white for me. Plus, I was more inter-ested in what was happening in the jazz scene; that's the real reason I wanted to come to New York in the first place, to get into the jazz music scene that was happening around Minton's Playhouse in Har-lem, and what was going on down on 52nd Street, which everybody in music called "The Street." That's what I was really in New York for, to suck up all I could from those scenes; Juilliard was only a smokescreen, a stopover, a pretense I used to put me close to being around Bird and Diz.

After I got to 52nd Street, I found Freddie Webster, who I had met back in St. Louis when he passed through playing in Jimmie Lunceford's band. Then I went and heard the Savoy Sultans at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem; me and Freddie went to see them. They was badder than a motherfucker. But I was trying to find Bird and Dizzy and, although I was liking what I was seeing, still, it wasn't what I really came to New York to see.

The second thing I looked for was the horse stables. Since my father and grandfather had horses and since I had been riding them most of my life, I loved them as spirits and loved to ride them. I thought they would be in Central Park, so I used to walk up and down the Park, from 110th Street to 59th Street, looking for the horse stables. I never found them. Finally, one day I asked a police-man where I could find them, and he told me they were somewhere on 81st or 82nd Street. I went there and rode me a couple of horses. The attendants looked at me strange, I guess because they weren't used to seeing a black person coming to ride horses. But I just figured that that was their problem.

I went up to Harlem to check out Minton's, on 118th Street be-tween St. Nicholas and Seventh Avenue. Next to Minton's was the Cecil Hotel, where a lot of musicians stayed. It was a hip scene. The first dumb motherfucker I saw on the corner of St. Nicholas and 117th Street was a cat named "Collar." It was in the little park they

called Dewey Square, where all the musicians used to sit and get high. I never knew Collar's real name. He was from St. Louis. He used to be the Dexedrine king there and would supply Bird with Dexedrine and nutmeg and shit when he came through St. Louis. So, anyway, here's Collar up in Harlem, clean as a broke-dick dog, white-on-white shirt, black silk suit, his hair all slicked back and down to his shoulders. He said that he was in New York trying to play saxophone at Minton's. But he couldn't play too tough when he was back in St. Louis. He just wanted to be in the life of a musician. He was a real funny motherfucker on top of all of this. So here he was, trying to sit in at Minton's, the black jazz capital of the world. He never made it. Nobody never paid no attention to Collar up at Minton's.

Minton's and the Cecil Hotel were both first-class places with a lot of style. The people that went there were the cream of the crop of Harlem's black society. That great, middle-class building across the street from Dewey Square was called Graham Court. A lot of society black people lived in those huge, fabulous apartments; you know, doctors and lawyers and head-nigger-in-charge-type blacks. A lot of people from around the neighborhood, from Sugar Hill, came to Minton's and the neighborhood was first-class back in those days before the drugs really came in and destroyed it during the 1960s.

People who came to Minton's wore suits and ties because they were copying the way people like Duke Ellington or Jimmie Lunceford dressed. Man, they was cleaner than a motherfucker. But to get into Minton's didn't cost anything. It cost something like two dollars if you sat at one of the tables, which had white linen tablecloths on them and flowers in little glass vases. It was a nice place-much nicer than the clubs on 52nd Street-and it held about 100 or 125 people. It was mainly a supper club and the food was prepared by a great black woman cook named Adelle.

The Cecil Hotel was also a nice place, where a lot of the black musicians visiting from out of town would stay. The rates were rea-sonable and the rooms were big and clean. Plus, they had a few high-class hustlers and prostitutes who hung around there and so if a cat wanted to get his balls up out of sand he could pay for a fine woman and get himself a room.

Minton's was the ass-kicker back in those days for aspiring jazz musicians, not The Street like they're trying to make out today. It was Minton's where a musician really cut his teeth and then went

downtown to The Street. Fifty-second Street was easy compared to what was happening up at Minton's. You went to 52nd to make money and be seen by the white music critics and white people. But you came uptown to Minton's if you wanted to make a reputation among the musicians. Minton's kicked a lot of motherfuckers' asses, did them in, and they just disappeared-not to be heard from again. But it also taught a whole lot of musicians, made them what they eventually became.

I ran into Fats Navarro again up at Minton's and we used to jam up there all the time. Milt Jackson was there. And Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, the tenor saxophonist, led the house band. He was a mother-fucker. See, the great musicians like Lockjaw and Bird and Dizzy and Monk, who were the kings of Minton, never played no ordinary shit. They did this to eliminate a whole lot of people who couldn't play.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to get embarrassed by people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked. One night this guy who couldn't play worth shit got up to try and do his thing-bullshit- and style himself off to get some bitches, playing anything. A regular street guy who just loved to listen to all the music was in the audience when this dumb motherfucker got up on the stage to play, so the man just got up quietly from his table and snatched this no-playing cat off the stage, dragged him outside and into the alcove between the Cecil Hotel and Minton's, and just kicked this motherfucker's ass. I mean real good. Then he told the dude not to never take his ass up on the bandstand at Minton's again until he could play some-thing worth listening to. That was Minton's. You had to put up or shut up, there was no in between.

A black man named Teddy Hill owned Minton's Playhouse. Bebop started at his club. It was the music laboratory for bebop. After it polished up at Minton's, then it went downtown to 52nd Street-the Three Deuces, the Onyx, and Kelly's Stable-where white people heard it. But what has to be understood in all of this is no matter how good the music sounded down on 52nd Street, it wasn't as hot or as innovative as it was uptown at Minton's. The idea was that you had to calm the innovation down for the white folks downtown be-cause they couldn't handle the real thing. Now, don't get me wrong, there were some good white people who were brave enough to come up to Minton's. But they were few and far between.

I hate how white people always try to take credit for something

after they discover it. Like it wasn't happening before they found out about it-which most times is always late, and they didn't have noth-ing to do with it happening. Then, they try to take a// the credit, try to cut everybody black out. That's what they tried to do with Min-ton's Playhouse and Teddy Hill. After bebop became the rage, white music critics tried to act like they discovered it-and us-down on 52nd Street. That kind of dishonest shit makes me sick to my stom-ach. And when you speak out on it or don't go along with this racist bullshit, then you become a radical, a black troublemaker. Then they try to cut you out of everything. But the musicians and the people who really loved and respected bebop and the truth know that the real thing happened up in Harlem, at Minton's.

Every night after I finished my classes, I would either go down to The Street or up to Minton's. For a couple of weeks I didn't find Bird or Dizzy nowhere. Man, I was going to the 52nd Street clubs like the Spotlite, the Three Deuces, Kelly's Stable, and the Onyx looking for them. I remember when I went down to the Three Deuces for the first time and saw how little that place was; I thought it was going to be bigger. It had such a big reputation in the jazz scene that I thought it would be all plush and shit. The bandstand wasn't nothing but a little tiny space that could hardly hold a piano and didn't seem like it could ever hold a whole group of musicians. The tables for the customers were all jammed together and I remember thinking that it wasn't nothing but a hole in the wall, and that East St. Louis and St. Louis had hipper-looking clubs. I was disappointed in the way the place looked, but not in the music I heard. The first person I heard there was Don Byas, who was a hell of a tenor saxophone player. I remember listening with awe to him playing all that shit on that little bitty stage.

Then I was finally able to get in touch with Dizzy. I got his number and called him up. He remembered me and invited me over to his apartment on Seventh Avenue in Harlem. It was great to see him. But Dizzy hadn't seen Bird, either, and didn't know how or where to get in touch with him.

I kept looking for Bird. One night I found myself just sort of stand-ing around in the doorway at the Three Deuces when the owner came up and asked me what I was doing there. I guess I looked young and innocent; I couldn't even grow a moustache back then. Anyway, I told him I was looking for Bird and he told me he wasn't there and that I had to be eighteen to come in the club. I told him I was

eighteen and all I wanted to do was to find Bird. Then the dude start telling me what a fucked-up motherfucker Bird was, about him being a dope addict and all that kind of shit. He asked me where I was from and when I told him, he come telling me that I ought to go on back home. Then he called me "son," a name I never liked, espe-cially from some white motherfucker who I didn't know. So I told him to go fuck himself and turned around and left. I already knew Bird had a bad heroin habit; he wasn't telling me nothing new.

After I left the Three Deuces, I walked up the street to the Onyx Club and caught Coleman Hawkins. Man, the Onyx was jam-packed with people there to see Hawk, who played there regularly. So, be-cause I still didn't know anybody I just hung around the doorway like I had done at the Three Deuces, looking for a face I might recognize, you know, maybe somebody from B's band. But I didn't see anyone.

When Bean-that's what we called Coleman Hawkins-took a break, he came over to where I was, and until this day I don't know why he did this. I guess it was a lucky break. Anyway, I knew who he was and so I spoke to him and introduced myself and told him that I had played with B's band back in St. Louis and that I was in New York going to Juilliard but really trying to find Bird. I told him that I wanted to play with Bird and that he had told me when I got to New York to look him up. Bean kind of laughed and told me that I was too young to get mixed up with somebody like Bird. Man, he was making me mad with all this shit. This was the second time I had heard this that night. I didn't want to hear it no more, even if it came from somebody that I loved and respected as much as Coleman Hawkins. I got a real bad temper, so the next thing I know I'm saying to Coleman Hawkins something like, "Well, you know where he is or not?"

Man, I think Hawk was shocked by a young little black mother-fucker like me talking to him like that. He just looked at me and shook his head and told me the best place to find Bird was up in Harlem, at Minton's or Small's Paradise. Bean said, "Bird loves to jam in those places." He turned to walk away, then added, "My best advice to you is just finish your studies at Juilliard and forget Bird."

Man, those first weeks in New York were a motherfucker-look-ing for Bird, and trying to keep up with my studies. Then somebody told me that Bird had friends in Greenwich Village. I went down there to see if I could find him. I went to coffeehouses on Bleecker Street. Met artists, writers, and all these long-haired, bearded beat-

nik poets. I had never met no people like them in all my life. Going to the Village was an education for me.

I began to meet people like Jimmy Cobb and Dexter Gordon as I moved around Harlem, the Village, and 52nd Street. Dexter called me "Sweetcakes" because I was drinking malted milks and eating cakes, pies, and jelly beans all the time. I was even getting friendly with Coleman Hawkins. He took a liking to me, watched out for me, and helped me all he could to find Bird. By now Bean thought I was really serious about the music and he respected that. But, still no Bird. And not even Diz knew where he was at. One day I saw in the paper where Bird was scheduled to play in a jam session at a club called the Heatwave, on 145th Street in Harlem. I remember asking Bean if he thought Bird would show up there, and Bean just kind of smiled that slick, sly smile of his and said, "I'll bet Bird doesn't even know if he'll really be there or not."

That night I went up to the Heatwave, a funky little club in a funky neighborhood. I had brought my horn just in case I did run into Bird -if he remembered me, he might let me sit in with him. Bird wasn't there, but I met some other musicians, like Alien Eager, a white tenor player; Joe Guy, who played a great trumpet; and Tommy Potter, a bass player. I wasn't looking for them so I didn't pay them hardly no attention. I just found a seat and kept my eye fixed on the door, watching out for Bird. Man, I had been there almost all night waiting for Bird and he hadn't shown up. So I decided to go outside and catch a breath of fresh air. I was standing outside the club on .the corner when I heard this voice from behind me say, "Hey, Miles! I heard you been looking for me!"

I turned around and there was Bird, looking badder than a motherfucker. He was dressed in these baggy clothes that looked like he had been sleeping in them for days. His face was all puffed up and his eyes were swollen and red. But he was cool, with that hipness he could have about him even when he was drunk or fucked up. Plus, he had that confidence that all people have when they know their shit is bad. But no matter how he looked, bad or near death, he still looked good to me that night after spending all that time trying to find him; I was just glad to see him standing there. And when he remembered where he had met me, I was the happiest motherfucker on earth.

I told him how hard it had been to find him and he just smiled and said that he moved around a lot. He took me into the Heatwave,

where everybody greeted him like he was the king, which he was. And since I was with him and he had his arm around my shoulder, they treated me with a lot of respect, too. I didn't play that first night. I just listened. And, man, I was amazed at how Bird changed the minute he put his horn in his mouth. Shit, he went from looking real down and out to having all this power and beauty just bursting out of him. It was amazing the transformation that took place once he started playing. He was twenty-four at the time, but when he wasn't playing he looked older, especially off stage. But his whole appear-ance changed as soon as he put that horn in his mouth. He could play like a motherfucker even when he was almost falling-down drunk and nodding off behind heroin. Bird was something else.

Anyway, after I hooked up with him that night, I was around Bird all the time for the next several years. He and Dizzy became my main influences and teachers. Bird even moved in with me for a while, until Irene came. She came to New York in December 1944. All of a sudden, there she was, knocking on my motherfucking door; my mother had told her to come. So I found Bird a room in the same rooming house, up on 147th and Broadway.

But I couldn't handle Bird's lifestyle then-all the drinking and eating and using dope. I had to go to school in the daytime and he'd be laying up there fucked up. But he was teaching me a lot about music-chords and shit-that I would go and play on the piano when I got to school.

Almost every night I was going somewhere with Diz or Bird, sitting in, soaking up everything I could. And like I said, I had met Freddie Webster, who was a great trumpet player about the same age as me. We would go down to 52nd Street and listen in amazement at how fast Dizzy could play tempos on the trumpet. Man, I hadn't never heard no shit like they was playing on 52nd Street and up at Minton's. That was so good it was scary. Dizzy started showing me shit on the piano so I could expand my sense of harmony.

And Bird introduced me to Thelonious Monk. His use of space in his solos and his manipulation of funny-sounding chord progressions just knocked me out, fucked me up. I said, "Damn, what is this motherfucker doing?" Monk's use of space had a big influence on the way I played solos after I heard him.

Meanwhile I started really getting pissed off with what they was talking about at Juilliard. It just wasn't happening for me there. Like I said, going to Juilliard was a smokescreen for being around Dizzy

and Bird, but I did want to see what I could learn there. I played in the school symphony orchestra. We played about two notes every ninety bars, and that was that. I wanted and needed more. Plus, I knew that no white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black motherfucker like me, no matter how good I was or how much music I knew.

I was learning more from hanging out, so I just got bored with school after a while. Plus, they were so fucking white-oriented and so racist. Shit, I could learn more in one session at Minton's than it would take me two years to learn at Juilliard. At Juilliard, after it was all over, all I was going to know was a bunch of white styles;

nothing new. And I was just getting mad and embarrassed with their prejudice and shit.

I remember one day being in a music history class and a white woman was the teacher. She was up in front of the class saying that the reason black people played the blues was because they were poor and had to pick cotton. So they were sad and that's where the blues came from, their sadness. My hand went up in a flash and I stood up and said, "I'm from East St. Louis and my father is rich, he's a dentist, and I play the blues. My father didn't never pick no cotton and I didn't wake up this morning sad and start playing the blues. There's more to it than that." Well, the bitch turned green and didn't say nothing after that, Man, she was teaching that shit from out of a book written by someone who didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. That's the kind of shit that was happening at Juilliard and after a while I got tired of it.

The way I was thinking about music was that people like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington were the real geniuses at arranging music in America. This woman didn't even know who these people were, and I didn't have the time to teach her. She was supposed to be teaching me! So, instead of listening to what she and the other teachers said, I was looking up at the clock and thinking about what I would be doing later that night, wondering when Bird and Diz would be going downtown. I was thinking about going home to pick up some clothes to wear over to Bickford's at 145th Street and Broadway, to pick up fifty cents worth of soup so I could have the strength to play later on that night.

On Monday nights at Minton's, Bird and Dizzy would come in to jam, so you'd have a thousand motherfuckers up there trying to get in so they could listen to and play with Bird and Dizzy. But most of

the musicians in the know didn't even think about playing when Bird and Dizzy came to jam. We would just sit out in the audience, to listen and learn. The rhythm section for them might be Kenny Clarke on drums and sometimes Max Roach, who I met up there. Curly Russell would be playing bass and Monk was on the piano some-times. Man, people would be fighting over seats and shit. If you moved you'd lose your seat and have to argue and fight again. It was something. The air was just electric.

The way the shit went down up at Minton's was you brought your horn and hoped that Bird and Dizzy would invite you to play with them up on stage. And when this happened, you'd better not blow it. I didn't. The first time I played there I wasn't great but I was playing my ass off in the style I played, which was different from Dizzy's, although I was influenced by his playing at this time. But people would watch for clues from Bird and Dizzy, and if they smiled when you finished playing, then that meant that your playing was good. They smiled when I finished playing that first time and from then on I was on the inside of what was happening in New York's music scene. So after that I was like an up-and-coming star. I could sit in with the big boys all the time.

That's what I was thinking about in my classes at Juilliard, instead of having my mind on what they was teaching me. That's why I eventually quit Juilliard. They weren't teaching me nothing and didn't know nothing to teach me because they were so prejudiced against all black music. And that's what I wanted to learn.

Anyway, after a while I was sitting in up there at Minton's when-ever I wanted to and people were coming to hear me play. I was getting a reputation. One of the things that surprised me about being in New York was that when I first got there, I thought all the musi-cians would know more about music than they did. So I was shocked to find out that among the older guys, Dizzy, Roy Eldridge, and long-haired Joe Guy were the only ones I could listen to and learn some-thing from. I expected everybody was going to be a motherfucker and was surprised when I knew a lot more about music than most of them.

Another thing I found strange after living and playing in New York for a little while was that a lot of black musicians didn't know any-thing about music theory. Bud Powell was one of the few musicians I knew who could play. write, and read all kinds of music. A lot of the old guvs thought that if you went to school it would make you play

like you were white. Or, if you learned something from theory, then you would lose the feeling in your playing. I couldn't believe that all them guys like Bird, Prez, Bean, all them cats wouldn't go to mu-seums or libraries and borrow those musical scores so they could check out what was happening. I would go to the library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowl-edge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn't believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it. I have never understood why black people didn't take advantage of all the shit that they can. It's like a ghetto mentality telling people that they aren't supposed to do certain things, that those things are only reserved for white people. When I would tell other musicians about all this, they would just kind of shine me on. You know what I mean? So I just went my own way and stopped telling them about it.

I had a good friend named Eugene Hays, who was from St. Louis and studied classical piano at Juilliard with me. He was a genius. If he had been white, he would have been one of the most highly re-garded classical pianists in the world today. But he was black and he was ahead of his time. So they didn't give him anything. He and I took advantage of these music libraries. We would take advantage of everything we could.

Anyway, at the time I was hanging out with musicians like Fats Navarro-who everybody called "Fat Girl"-and Freddie Webster, and I had gotten kind of close with Max Roach and J. J. Johnson, the great trombone player from Indianapolis. We was all trying to get our master's degrees and Ph.D.'s from Minton's University of Bebop under the tutelage of Professors Bird and Diz. Man, they was playing so much incredible shit.

One time after the jam session was over and I had gone home to sleep, there was this knock on my door. I got up and went to the door with sleep in my eyes, madder than a motherfucker. I opened the door and there was J. J. Johnson and Benny Carter standing there with pencils and paper in their hands. I asked them, "What do you motherfuckers want this early in the morning?"

J. J. said, " 'Confirmation.' Miles, do 'Confirmation' for me, hum it."

The motherfucker ain't even said hello, right? That's the first thing out of his mouth. Bird had just written "Confirmation" and all the musicians just loved that tune. So, here's this motherfucker at six in

the morning. We had just finished jamming "Confirmation" earlier, me and J. J., at the jam session. Now he's talking about humming the tune.

So I started humming it through my sleep, in the key of F. That's what it's written in. Then J. J. says to me, "But Miles, you left out a note. Where's the other note, what's that other note in the tune?" So I remember it and tell him.

He said, "Thanks, Miles," wrote something down, and then left. J. J. was a funny motherfucker, man. He used to do that shit to me all the time. He figured I knew what Bird was doing technically be-cause I was going to Juilliard. I'll never forget that first time he did it, and we laugh about it even today. But that's how much everybody was into Bird's and Dizzy's music. We lived and slept it every day.

Me and Fat Girl used to sit in a lot together up at Minton's. He was so big and fat until he lost all that weight right before he died. If he didn't like what some motherfucker was playing up at Minton's, Fat Girl would just block the cat from getting the microphone. He'd just turn sideways and block whoever it was and motion for me to play. Cats used to get mad with Fat Girl, but he didn't care, and whoever he did it to knew they couldn't play. So they'd stay mad for only so long.

But my real main man during those first days in New York was Freddie Webster. I really liked what Freddie was doing on the horn then. He had a style like the players from St. Louis, a big, singing sound, and he didn't play too many notes or play those real fast tempos. He liked medium-tempo pieces and ballads a lot, like I did. I loved the way he played, that he didn't waste notes and had a big, warm, mellow sound. I used to try to play like him, but without the vibrato and "shaking about the notes." He was about nine years older than me, but I used to show him everything they taught me at Juilliard about technique and composition, technical things, which Juilliard was good for. Freddie was from Cleveland and grew up playing with Tadd Dameron. We were as close as real brothers and a lot alike. We were about the same size and used to wear each other's clothes.

Freddie had a lot of bitches. Women were his thing, besides music and heroin. Man, people would be coming by telling me about Fred-die being a violent cat who carried a .45 gun and shit like that. But everybody who knew him well knew this wasn't true. I mean he didn't take no shit, but he didn't go around fucking with nobody. He

even stayed with me for a while after Bird moved out. Freddie spoke his mind and didn't take shit off nobody. He was a complex guy, but we got along real well. We were so close that I paid his rent a lot. Whatever I had was his. My old man was sending me about forty dollars a week, which was a nice amount of money in those days. Whatever I didn't spend on my family I shared with Freddie.

The year 1945 was a turning point in my life. So many things started happening for me and to me. First off, from hanging around with so many musicians and being in so many clubs, I started to drink a little during that year and I started to smoke. And I was playing with more people. Me and Freddie, Fat Girl, J. J., and Max Roach were jamming all over New York and Brooklyn, wherever we could. We'd play downtown on 52nd Street until about twelve or one in the morning. Then, after we finished playing there, we'd go uptown to Minton's, Small's Paradise, or the Heatwave and play until they closed-around four, five, or six in the morning. After we'd be up all night at jam sessions, me and Freddie would sit up even longer talk-ing about music and music theory, about approaches to the trumpet. At Juilliard I'd sleepwalk through them sorry-ass classes, bored to tears, especially in my chorus classes. I'd be sitting there yawning and nodding. Then, after classes, me and Freddie would sit around and talk more music. I hardly slept. And with Irene home, well, I had to be taking care of my husband duties with her sometimes, you know, being with her, shit like that. Then Cheryl would be crying. It was a motherfucker.

During 1945, me and Freddie Webster used to go down almost every night to catch Diz and Bird wherever they were playing. We felt that if we missed hearing them play we were missing something important. Man, the shit they were playing and doing was going down so fast you just had to be there in person to catch it. We really studied what they were doing from a technical point of view. We were like scientists of sound. If a door squeaked we could call out the exact pitch.

There was a white teacher named William Vachiano that I was studying with who helped me. But he was into shit like "Tea for Two" so he'd ask me to play stuff like that for him. We'd have arguments that became legendary among musicians in New York, because he was supposed to be this great teacher of advanced stu-dents, like I was. But me and that motherfucker went around on each other's back a lot of times. I would say, "Hey, man, you're

supposed to be teaching me something, so do it and cut out the bullshit." Well, when I would say something like that, Vachiano would get madder than a motherfucker and turn all red in the face. But I got my point across to him.

It was playing with Bird that really got my shit to going. I could sit and talk, eat and hang out with Dizzy, because he's such a nice guy. But Bird was a greedy motherfucker. We didn't never have too much to say to each other. We liked playing with each other and that was it. Bird didn't never tell you what to play. You learned from him by just watching him, picking up shit that he did. He never did talk about music much when you were alone with him. But we talked a few times about it when he was living with me, and I picked up some things, but mostly I just learned by listening to him play.

Dizzy liked to talk a lot about music, though, and I picked up a lot from him in that way. Bird might have been the spirit of the bebop movement, but Dizzy was its "head and its hands," the one who kept it all together. I mean, he looked out for the younger players, got us jobs and shit, talked to us, and it didn't matter that he was nine or ten years older than I was. He never talked down to me. People used to put Dizzy down because he acted so crazy and shit. But he wasn't really crazy, just funnier than a motherfucker and really into the history of black people. He was playing music from Africa and Cuba a long time before it got popular anywhere else. Dizzy's apartment -at 2040 Seventh Avenue, in Harlem-was the gathering place for many of the musicians in the daytime. There got to be so many of us that his wife, Lorraine, started putting motherfuckers out. I'd be there a lot. Kenny Dorham would be over there, Max Roach, Monk.

It was Dizzy who made me really learn how to play piano. I'd be over there watching Monk doing his weird shit with space and pro-gressive chords. And when Dizzy would practice, man, I would be soaking up all that good shit. But then again, I showed Diz something that I'd learned at Juilliard, the Egyptian minor scales. With the Egyptian scale you just change the flats and sharps where you want the note flatted and where you want it sharp, so you have two flats and one sharp, right? That means you will play E flat and A flat and then the F will be sharp. You put in the note that you want, like in the C scale's minor Egyptian scale. The shit looks funny because you have two flats and a sharp. But it gives you the freedom to work with melodic ideas without changing the basic tonality. So I turned Dizzy on to that: it worked both ways. But I learned way more from him than he did from me.

Bird could be a lot of fun to be around, because he was a real genius about his music, and he could be funnier than a motherfucker, talking in that British accent that he used to use. But he still was hard to be around because he was always trying to con or beat you out of something to support his drug habit. He was always borrowing money from me and using it to buy heroin or whiskey or anything he wanted at the time. Like I said. Bird was a greedy motherfucker, like most geniuses are. He wanted everything. And when he was desper-ate for a fix of heroin, man, Bird would do anything to get it. He would con me and as soon as he left me, he would run around the corner to somebody else with the same sad story about how he needed some money to get his horn out of the pawnshop, and hit them up for some more. He never paid nobody back, so in that way Bird was a motherfucking drag to be around.

One time I left him in my apartment when I went to school and when I got back home the motherfucker had pawned my suitcase and was sitting on the floor nodding after shooting up. Another time, he pawned his suit to get some heroin and borrowed one of mine to wear down to the Three Deuces. But I was smaller than he was so Bird was up there on the bandstand with suit sleeves ending about four inches above his wrist and suit pants ending about four inches above his ankles. That was the only suit I had at the time, so I had to stay in my apartment until he got his suit out of the pawnshop and brought mine back. But man, the motherfucker walked around for a day looking like that, just for some heroin. But they said Bird played that night like he had on a tuxedo. That's why everybody loved Bird and would put up with his bullshit. He was the greatest alto saxo-phone player who ever lived. Anyway, that's the way Bird was; he was a great and a genius musician, man, but he was also one of the slimiest and greediest motherfuckers who ever lived in this world, at least that I ever met. He was something.

I remember one time we was coming down to The Street to play from uptown and Bird had this white bitch in the back of the taxi with us. He done already shot up a lot of heroin and now the moth-erfucker's eating chicken - his favorite food-and drinking whiskey and telling the bitch to get down and suck his dick. Now, I wasn't used to that kind of shit back then - I was hardly even drinking, I think I had just started smoking - and I definitely wasn't into drugs yet because I was only nineteen years old and hadn't seen no shit like that before. Anyway, Bird noticed that I was getting kind of uptight with the woman sucking all over his dick and everything, and

him sucking on her pussy. So he asked if something was wrong with me, and if his doing this was bothering me. When I told him that I felt uncomfortable with them doing what they was doing in front of me, with her licking and slapping her tongue like a dog all over his dick and him making all that moaning noise in between taking bites of chicken, I told him, "Yeah, it's bothering me." So you know what that motherfucker said? He told me that if it was bothering me, then I should turn my head and not pay attention. 1 couldn't believe that shit, that he actually said that to me. The cab was real small and we all three were in the backseat, so where was I supposed to turn my head? What I did was to stick my head outside the taxi window, but I could still hear them motherfuckers getting down and in between, Bird smacking his lips all over that fried chicken. Like I said, he was something, all right.

So I looked up to Bird for being a great musician more than I liked him as a person. But he treated me like his son, and he and Dizzy were like father figures to me. Bird used to always tell me that I could play with anybody. So he would almost push me up on stage sometimes to play with somebody who I didn't think I was ready for, someone like Coleman Hawkins or Benny Carter or Lockjaw Davis. I might have been confident in my playing with most people, but I was still only nineteen and felt that I was too young to play with certain other people-though there weren't many that I felt that way about. But Bird used to build up my confidence by saying he had gone through the same bullshit when he was younger back in Kansas City.

I did my first recording date, in May 1945, with Herbie Fields. Man, I was so nervous about making that date that I couldn't even hardly play. Even in the ensemble playing-I didn't get to play no solos. I remember Leonard Gaskin on bass on that date, and a singer named Rubberlegs Williams. But I tried to put that record out of my mind and I forgot who else was on that date.

I also got my first important nightclub gig at that time. I played with Lockjaw Davis's group for a month at the Spotlite on 52nd Street. I had been sitting in with him a lot up at Minton's, so he knew how I played. Around that time-maybe a little bit before this, 1 don't exactly remember-I started sitting in with Coleman Hawkins's band at the Downbeat Club on 52nd Street. Billie Holiday was the star singer with the group. The reason that I got to sit in a lot was because Joe Guy, Bean's regular trumpet player, had just gotten

married to Billie Holiday. Sometimes, they'd be so high off heroin and be fucking so good that Joe would miss his gig. So would Billie. So, Hawk would use me when Joe didn't show up. I used to check with Hawk down at the Downbeat every night to see if Joe had shown up. If he didn't, then I would play the set.

I loved playing with Coleman Hawkins and behind Billie when I got the chance. They were both great musicians, really creative and shit. But nobody played like Bean. He had such a big, huge sound. Lester Young-Prez-had a light sound and Ben Webster used to be running all kinds of funny-ass chords, you know, like a piano, be-cause he also played piano. And then there was Bird who also had his own thing, his sound. But Hawk started liking me so much that Joe got his act together and stopped missing sets. Then the gig with Lockjaw came around.

After the gig with Lockjaw was over, people started using me a lot on The Street. What was happening was that white people, white critics, were now beginning to understand that bebop was some im-portant shit. They began talking and writing a lot about Bird and Dizzy, but only when they played on The Street. I mean, they wrote and talked about Minton's, but only after they had made The Street the place for white people to come to and spend a lot of money to hear this new music. Around 1945 a lot of the black musicians were playing down on 52nd Street, for the money and the media exposure. It was around this time that the clubs on 52nd-like the Three Deuces, the Onyx, the Downbeat Club, Kelly's Stable, and others- started being more important for musicians than the clubs uptown in Harlem.

A lot of white people, though, didn't like what was going on on 52nd Street. They didn't understand what was happening with the music. They thought that they were being invaded by niggers from Harlem, so there was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. So you know a lot of white people, especially white men, didn't like this new shit.

There were a couple of white music critics, like Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov, who were co-editors of Metronome music maga-zine and who understood what was going on with bebop, who liked it and wrote good things. But the rest of them white motherfucking critics hated what we were doing. They didn't understand the music.

They didn't understand, and hated, the musicians. Still, the people were packing into the clubs to hear the music, and Dizzv's and Bird's group at the Three Deuces was the hottest thing in New York.

Bird himself was almost a god. People followed him around every-where. He had an entourage. All kinds of women were around Bird, and big-time dope dealers, and people giving him all kinds of gifts. Bird thought this was the way it was supposed to be. So he just took and took. He began missing sets and whole gigs. This was fucking with Dizzv's head, because though he might have acted a little crazy, he was always organized and took care of business. Dizzv didn't believe in missing gigs. So he would sit down with Bird, beg him to pull his act together, threaten to quit if he didn't. Bird didn't, so finally Dizzy quit, and that was the end of the first great group in bebop.

Dizzv's quitting the group shocked everybody in the music world, and upset a lot of musicians who loved to hear them play together. Now, everybody realized that it was over and we weren't going to hear all that great shit they did together no more, unless we heard it on record or they got back together. That is what a lot of people hoped would happen, including me, who took Dizzv's place.

When Dizzy left their band at the Three Deuces, I thought Bird was going to take a band uptown, hut he didn't, at least not right away. A lot of club owners on 52nd began asking Bird who his trum-pet player was going to be since Dizzv quit. I remember being with Bird one time in a club when the owner asked that, and Bird turned to me and said, "Here's my trumpet player right here, Miles Davis." I used to kid Bird by saying, "If I hadn't joined your band, vou wouldn't even have a job, man." He would just smile, because Bird enjoyed a good joke and one-upmanship. Sometimes it didn't work -me being in the band-because the owners liked Bird and Dizzv together. But the owner of the Three Deuces hired us in October of 1945. The group had Bird. Al Haig on piano. Curly Bussell on bass. Max Boach and Stan Levey on drums, and me. It was the same rhythm section that Bird and Dizzy had right before Dizzy quit. I remember the gig at the Three Deuces being for about two weeks. Baby Laurence, the tap dancer, w as the floor show. He took four and eights with the band and was a motherfucker. Baby w as the greatest tap dancer that I have ever seen, or heard, because his tap dancing sounded just like a jazz drummer. He was something else.

I was so nervous on that first real gig with Bird that I used to ask if

I could quit every night. I had sat in with him, but this was my first real paying gig with him. I would ask, "What do you need me for?" because that motherfucker was playing so much shit. When Bird played a melody I would just play under him and let him lead the fucking note, let him sing the melody and take the lead on every-thing. Because what would it look like, me trying to lead the leader of all the music? Me playing lead for Bird-are you kidding? Man, I was scared to death 1 was going to fuck up. Sometimes I would act like I was quitting, because I thought he might fire me. So I was going to quit before he did, but he would always encourage me to stay by saying that he needed me and that he loved the way I played. I hung in there and learned. I knew everything Dizzy was playing. I think that's why Bird hired me-also because he wanted a different kind of trumpet sound. Some things Dizzy played I could play, and other things he played, I couldn't. So, I just didn't play those licks that I knew 1 couldn't play, because 1 realized early on that I had to have my own voice-whatever that voice was-on the instrument.

That first two weeks with Bird was a motherfucker, but it helped me grow up real fast. I was nineteen years old and playing with the baddest alto saxophone player in the history of music. This made me feel real good inside. I might have been scared as a motherfucker, but I was getting more confident too, even though I didn't know it at the time.

But Bird didn't teach me much as far as music goes. I loved playing with him, but vou couldn't copy the shit he did because it was so original. Everything I learned about jazz back then I learned from Dizzy and Monk, maybe a little from Bean, but not from Bird. See, Bird was a soloist. He had his own thing. He was, like, isolated. And there was nothing vou could learn from him unless you copied him. Only saxophone players could copy him, but even they didn't. All they could do was try to get Bird's approach, his concept. But you couldn't plav that shit he played on saxophone with the same feeling on trumpet. You could learn the notes but it won't sound the same. Even great saxophonists couldn't copy him. Sonny Stitt tried, and Lou Donaldson a little later, and Jackie McLean a little later than both of them. But Sonny had more of Lester Young's style. And Bud Freeman used to play a lot like Sonny Stitt played. I guess Jackie and Lou came the closest to Bird. but only in their sound, not in what they played. Nobody could play like Bird, then or now.

As for my concept of music, back then my main influences besides

Dizzy and Freddie Webster were dark Terry with his approach to the horn, and Thelonious Monk with his harmonic sense-the way he played chords was something else. But I guess Dizzy was my main influence. One day after I first came to New York, I asked Dizzy about a chord and he said, "Why don't you sit down and play it on piano?" So I did. You know, I was asking him for the chords, but I already knew them in my head, I just wasn't playing them. Because when I first went with Bird's band I knew everything Dizzy was playing on trumpet with Bird. I had studied that shit up and down, backwards and forward. I couldn't play it high, but I knew what he was playing. I just couldn't play it high like Dizzy could because my chops weren't that developed and I didn't hear the music up in that high register. I always heard the music better and clearer coming from me in the middle registers.

I asked Dizzy one day, "Man, why can't I play like you?" He said, "You do play like me, but you play it down an octave lower. You play the chords." Dizzy is self-taught, but he knows everything about music. So when he told me that I heard everything down lower, in the middle register, it just made sense to me, because I didn't hear anything up, you know? Now I can, but not then. And one time a little after this conversation with Dizzy, he came up to me after I had played a solo and said, "Miles, you're stronger now; your chops are better than they were when I first heard you." What he meant was that I was playing higher and stronger than I was before.

In order for me to play a note it has to sound good to me. I've always been that way. And a note has to be in the same register that the chord was in when I played it back, at least then it did. Back in bebop, everybody used to play real fast. But I didn't ever like playing a bunch of scales and shit. I always tried to play the most important notes in the chord, to break it up. I used to hear all them musicians playing all them scales and notes and never nothing you could re-member.

See, music is about style. Like if I were to play with Frank Sinatra, I would play the way he sings, or do something complementary to the way he sings. But I wouldn't go and play with Frank Sinatra at breakneck speed. I learned a lot about phrasing back then listening to the way Frank, Nat "King" Cole, and even Orson Welles phrased. I mean all those people are motherfuckers in the way they shape a musical line or sentence or phrase with their voice. Eddie Randle used to tell me to play a phrase and then breathe, or play the way

you breathed. So, the way you play behind a singer is like the way Harry "Sweets" Edison did with Frank. When Frank stopped sing-ing, then Harry played. A little before and a little afterwards, but not ever over him; you never play over a singer. You play between. And if you play the blues you just have to play a feeling; you have to feel it.

I learned all that back in St. Louis, so I always wanted to play something different than the way most trumpet players played. Still, I wanted to play high and fast like Dizzy just to prove to myself that I could do it. A lot of cats used to be putting me down back in the bebop days because their ears could only pick up what Dizzy was doing. That's what they thought playing the trumpet was all about. And when somebody like me came along, trying something different, he ran the risk of being put down.

But Bird wanted something different after Dizzy quit the band. He wanted a different trumpet approach, another concept and sound. He wanted just the opposite of what Dizzy had done, somebody to complement his sound, to set it off. That's why he chose me. He and Dizzy were a lot alike in their playing, fast as a motherfucker, up and down the scales so fast sometimes you almost couldn't tell one from the other. But when Bird started playing with me there was all this space for him to do his shit in without worrying about Dizzy being all up in there with him. Dizzy didn't give him no space. They were brilliant together, maybe the best ever at what they did together. But I gave Bird space and after Dizzy, that's what he wanted. A little while after we opened up at the Three Deuces, some people still wanted to hear Diz instead of me. I could understand that.

After a while, the group moved down the street to play the Spotlite Club. Bird replaced Al Haig on piano with Sir Charles Thompson and hired Leonard Gaskin on bass instead of Curly Russell. We didn't play there long because the police shut down the Spotlite and some of the other clubs on 52nd for some bullshit about drugs and phony liquor licenses. But the real reason I think they shut it down for a couple of weeks was because they didn't like all them niggers coming downtown. They didn't like all them black men being with all them rich, fine white women.

That part of 52nd Street was nothing but a row of three- or four-storied brownstones in the first place. W''asn't nothing fancy about the motherfucking place. Earlier, rich white people used to live on the block, between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Somebody told me that

ended around Prohibition when the rich people moved out and the buildings were turned into small businesses and clubs that were on the ground floor. The clubs got real popular during the 1940s when the small bands took over from the large bands. Those clubs were too small to hold big bands. The bandstand couldn't hardly hold a five-piece combo, let alone one with ten or twelve people. So this kind of club created a new kind of musician, who was comfortable in a small-band setting. That's the kind of musical atmosphere I came into when I started playing on The Street.

But the small clubs like the Three Deuces, the Famous Door, the Spotlite, the Yacht Club, Kelly's Stable, and the Onyx also attracted hustlers and fast-living pimps with plenty of whores, hipsters, and drug dealers. I mean, these kinds of people-both black and white -were a dime a dozen on The Street. Them motherfuckers were everywhere doing whatever they wanted to do. Everyone knew that they had paid off the police, and this was all right as long as most of the hustlers were white. But when the music came downtown from uptown, the black hustlers around that scene came downtown with it, at least a whole lot of them did. And this didn't set too well with the white cops. The drug and liquor license thing was only a cover, as far as a lot of black musicians were concerned, for the real reason, which was racism. But they wouldn't admit that back then.

But anyway, after they closed down the Spotlite Club, Bird moved the group up to Minton's in Harlem. I started to play a whole lot better up there. I don't know why, maybe it was all those black people who I had played in front of who were in my corner. I can't put my finger on it. All I know is that I had more confidence in myself and in my playing, and although Bird got standing ovations all the time and wild cheers and shit like that, the people seemed to love my playing, too. I even got a few standing ovations. And Bird was smiling when I played and so were the rest of the musicians in the band. I was still struggling with tunes like "Cherokee" or "A Night in Tunisia," which Diz had just burned through because these tunes were made to order for the way he played. But I was good enough to get through them most of the time without most of the audience knowing that. But when Freddie Webster or Diz would show up out in the audience, they knew I was having trouble with these tunes, but they never came down hard on me about it, although they did let me know that they knew.

A lot of people-white people included-followed the band up-town. I think that's one of the reasons 52nd Street didn't stay closed,

because them white owners began to complain about how they was losing all the money to them niggers up in Harlem. Anyway, The Street reopened a short time after Bird went uptown and began drawing all those white people up there. If it's one thing white people are united on it is that they all hate to see black people making the money they think belongs to them. They were beginning to think that they owned these black musicians because they was making money for them. So, the word must have gone out that these new rules was hurting these white club owners' pocketbooks, that they were about to lose the business back to Harlem. But when the clubs reopened, it seemed like the shit had changed; in the space of time that we were gone some magic, some energy, had been lost. I might be wrong, but it seemed to me that when they closed The Street, that that was the beginning of the end for everything down there. It was just a matter of time.

So that's the kind of world I was juggling when I first got to New York, both uptown and downtown. I mean I was juggling it with Juilliard, which was a whole other world from the one bebop played in. And Bird was the king of this whole scene, because he did so much of everything that world was about-like shooting heroin, fucking around with whores, borrowing money to support his heroin habit, all that shit. Bird did more weird shit than anybody I ever met.

When I decided to quit Juilliard in the fall of 1945, Freddie Web-ster was the first person I told. Freddie was a strong, nice dude. He told me that I ought to call up my father and tell him first before I quit. Now, I was just going to quit and tell my father later. But when Freddie said that to me I got to thinking about the whole thing. Then I told Freddie, "I can't call up my old man and say, 'Listen, Dad, I'm working with some cats named Bird and Dizzy, so I'm gonna quit school.' I can't do no shit like that. I got to go back home and tell him in person." Freddie agreed, and that's the way I did it.

I caught a train and went back to East St. Louis, walked in his office, which had out the "Do Not Disturb" sign. Of course, he was shocked to see me, but my father was cool about things like that. He Just said, "Miles, what the fuck you doing back here?"

I said, "Listen, Dad. There is something happening in New York. The music is changing, the styles, and I want to be in it, with Bird and Diz. So I came back to tell you that I'm quitting Juilliard because what they're teaching me is white and I'm not interested in that."

"Okay," he said, "as long as you know what you're doing, every-thing is okay. Just whatever you do, do it good."

Then he told me something I will never forget: "Miles, you hear that bird outside the window? He's a mockingbird. He don't have a sound of his own. He copies everybody's sound, and you don't want to do that. You want to be your own man, have your own sound. That's what it's really about. So, don't be nobody else but yourself. You know what you got to do and I trust your judgment. And don't worry, I'll keep sending you money until you get on your feet."

That was all he said and then he went back to working on his patient. It was something else, man. But I was forever grateful to my father for understanding so well. My mother didn't like it, but she had learned by now not to say anything about something I had al-ready decided to do. As a matter of fact, it seemed like we were getting closer. I mean, one time in a trip home I had found out that my mother could play a mean blues on the piano. Up until then I hadn't even known that she was that kind of musician. So, when I came in on this Christmas trip home from Juilliard and she was playing the blues, I told her I liked what she was playing and that I didn't even know she could play the piano like that. She kind of smiled at me and said, "Well, Miles, there's a lot of things that you don't know about me." We both just laughed and realized for the first time that it was true.

My mother was a beautiful woman, physically, and as she got older, spiritually. She had a beautiful attitude. Her face was an atti-tude. I picked this up from her and the older she got the more beautiful the attitude became and the closer we got to each other. But as much as I'm into music, my parents hardly ever went to nightclubs, not even to see me play.

Before I quit Juilliard, I did take Dizzy's advice to take some piano lessons. I also took some lessons in symphonic trumpet playing that helped me out with my playing. Trumpet players from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra gave the lessons, so I learned some things from them.

When I say that Juilliard didn't help me, what I mean is it didn't help me as far as helping me understand what I really wanted to play. I figured there wasn't nothing left for me to do at that school. I have hardly ever felt regret over anything I've done. I have some-times, not often. But I didn't feel anything when I left Juilliard in the fall of 1945. Anyway, I was playing with the greatest jazz musicians in the world, so what did I have to feel bad about? Nothing. And I didn't. Never looked back.

Chapter 4

About this time, in the fall of 1945, Teddy Reig, who was a producer for Savoy Records, approached Bird about doing a recording date for his Savoy label. Bird agreed to do the record and asked me to be on trumpet; Dizzy was on some tracks playing piano. Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell couldn't or wouldn't make it; Bud never did get along too tough with Bird anyhow. So it was Sadik Hakim on piano on some tracks Dizzy didn't play piano on, Curly Russell on bass, Max Roach on drums, and Bird on alto sax. The name of the record was Charlie Parker's Reboppers. It was a great record, at least a lot of people thought it was, and it definitely made my name in the bebop movement.

But getting that record finished was something else, man. I remem-ber Bird wanting me to play "Ko-Ko," a tune that was based on the changes of "Cherokee." Now Bird knew I was having trouble playing "Cherokee" back then. So when he said that that was the tune he wanted me to play, I just said no, I wasn't going to do it. That's why Dizzy's playing trumpet on "Ko-Ko," "Warmin' up a Riff," and "Meandering" on Charlie Parker's Reboppers, because I wasn't going to get out there and embarrass myself. I didn't really think I was ready to play tunes at the tempo of "Cherokee" and I didn't make no bones about it.

One thing was funny about that recording session. When Dizzy played all them beautiful solos, I was fast asleep on the goddamn

floor and missed all that bad shit he played. Later, after I heard it on record, man, all I could do was shake my head and laugh. That shit Dizzy played on that day was too bad.

But the gig itself was weird, because all these hustlers and dope dealers looking for Bird were coming by. The whole recording ses-sion was done in one day, I think. It was in late November, on a day off from playing, so it probably was on a Monday. Anyway, all these people kept coming by and Bird would disappear into the bathroom with a dope dealer and come out an hour or two later. In the mean-time, everybody was sitting around, waiting on Bird to finish his nap. Then, he would come back all fucked up and shit. But after Bird got high, he just played his ass off.

When the record was released, I remember some of the reviewers put me down, especially the one in Down Beat. I forget his name, but I remember him saying something about how I had copied all the wrong shit from Dizzy, and that in the end it was going to be bad for me. I don't pay any attention to critics, but back then what that cat said kind of hurt me, because I was so young and all, and playing on this record and doing good was very important to me. But Bird and Dizzy told me not to pay that shit critics said no mind, and I didn't; I respected what they-Bird and Dizzy-had to say about how good I played. The dude who wrote that shit in Down Beat probably never played any instrument in his entire life. Maybe that's where my bad feelings for music critics first started, back then when they put me down so cold, when I was so young and had so much to learn. They were cold-blooded on me then, didn't show no mercy. I guess I thought that was wrong to be so hard on someone so young and inexperienced without giving no kind of encouragement.

But as good as my relationship with Bird was getting in music, our private relationship was getting worse. Like I said, Bird lived with me for a minute, but it wasn't as long as a lot of writers say it was. I mean, I got him a room in the same apartment building where me and my family lived. But he would be down to our apartment all the time, borrowing money and shit, eating Irene's cooking, passing out drunk on the couch or the floor. Plus, when he would come by, he was constantly bringing all kinds of women and hustlers, dope dealers and all kinds of dope-fiend musicians.

One of the things I never understood about Bird was why he did all the destructive shit he used to do. Man, Bird knew better. He was an intellectual. He used to read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that.

And he could hold a conversation with almost anybody on all kinds of things. So the motherfucker wasn't dumb or ignorant or illiterate or anything like that. He was real sensitive. But he had this destruc-tive streak in him that was something else. He was a genius and most geniuses are greedy. But he used to talk a lot about political shit and he loved to put a motherfucker on, play dumb to what was happening and then zap the sucker. He used to especially like to do this to white people. And then he would laugh at them when they found out they had been had. He was something-a very complex person.

But the worst thing that Bird did back then was to take advantage of my love and respect for him as a great musician. He would tell dope dealers that I was going to be paying the money he owed them. So them dudes would be coming by looking like they wanted to kill me sometimes. That shit was dangerous. Finally I just told him and all the rest of them motherfuckers not to come by my house no more. That shit got so bad that Irene went back to East St. Louis, but she came back to New York as soon as Bird stopped coming around so much. Bird met Doris Sydnor about this time and he moved into her apartment, somewhere on Manhattan Avenue. But when Bird moved out of my place and before Irene came back from East St. Louis, Freddie Webster moved in and we would talk all night. He was a whole lot better to get along with than Bird was.

In between gigs with Bird, I played some with Coleman Hawkins and Sir Charles Thompson up at Minton's in the fall of 1945. Like I said, I loved playing with Bean, man, because he could play so good and he was just a beautiful person. He always treated me good, almost like his son. Man, Bean could play the hell out of a ballad, especially one like "Body and Soul." He was from Saint Joseph, Missouri, a little town near Kansas City, which is where Bird came from. We-Bird, me, and Bean-were all from the Midwest. I think that had a lot to do with us hitting it off musically, and sometimes- at least with Bird-socially; we kind of thought and saw things alike. Bean was a sweet guy, one of the most beautiful people I've ever met and he taught me a lot about music.

Plus he used to give me clothes. I'd ask him how much he wanted for a coat or a shirt, and he'd give me one for fifty cents or something like that. He bought the clothes from this hip store on Broadway near 52nd Street, then gave them to me for almost nothing. Like Bean would give me one of them hip overcoats he had for about ten dollars. One time down in Philly, I met these guys through Bean

named Nelson Boyd and Charlie Rice (who I think was a drummer, I don't remember). Anyway, Charlie used to make his own suits and he would make some for Bean. Man, them suits was motherfuckers. I said to him, "Goddamn, Charlie, why don't you make me one of them suits?" He said for me just to get the material and he would, free of charge. So I did. And he made me a bad double-breasted suit that I used to wear to death. I think a lot of them pictures that they took of me around 1945 to 1947 I was wearing Charlie Rice's suits. After that, I have always got my suits made when I had the money.

I also got to know Thelonious Monk better when I was working with Bean; he was in the band, too. Denzil Best was playing drums. I really liked Monk's tune, "'Round Midnight," and I wanted to learn how to play it. So I used to ask him every night after I got through playing it, "Monk, how did I play it tonight?" And he'd say, looking all serious, "You didn't play it right." The next night, the same thing and the next and the next and the next. This went on for a while.

"That ain't the way to play it," he would say, sometimes with an evil, exasperated look on his face. Then, one night, I asked him and he said, "Yeah, that's the way you play it."

Man, that made me happier than a motherfucker, happier than a pig in shit. I'd gotten the sound down. It was one of the hardest. " 'Round Midnight" was very difficult because it had a complex mel-ody and you had to hang it together. You had to play it so you could hear the chords and changes and also hear the tops; it was just one of those tunes that you had to hear. It wasn't like a regular eight-bar melody or motif and it stopped, like in a minor key. It's a hard tune to learn and remember. I can still play it, but I don't like to do it too much now, except maybe when I'm practicing, alone. And what made it so hard for me to play was that I had to get all those harmo-nies. I had to hear the song, play it, and improvise so that Monk could hear the melody.

I learned about improvising from Bean, Monk, Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, and Bird. But Bird was such a great and inventive improviser that he would turn songs inside out. If you didn't know music, you didn't know where the fuck Bird was at when he was improvis-ing. See, Bean, Don Byas, Lucky Thompson all had the same style:

They would run their solos and then they would improvise. You could still hear the melody when they improvised. But when Bird played, it was totally another ball game, totally something else, something different every time. Among the masters he was the master.

Let's put it another way: There are painters and then there are painters among great painters. In this century, in my opinion, you had Picasso, Dali. Bird for me was like Dali, my favorite painter. I liked Dali because of his imagination when he painted death. See, I was into that kind of imagery and I liked the surrealism in his paint-ings. The way Dali used surrealism always had a wrinkle in it-at least for me-it was so different; you know, like a man's head in a breast. And Dali's paintings had a slick finish about them. But Pi-casso, besides his cubist work, had that African influence in his paintings, and I already knew what that was all about. So Dali was just more interesting for me, taught me a new way of looking at things. Bird was like that with music.

Bird had about five or six styles, all different. He had one like Lester Young; one like Ben Webster; one Sonny Rollins used to call "pecking," when a horn player uses real short phrases (today, Prince uses that style); and at least two others I can't describe right now. Monk was like that as a composer and as a piano player; not all the way like Bird, but similar.

I think a lot about Monk these days because all the music that he wrote can be put into these new rhythms that are being played today by a lot of young musicians-Prince, my new music, a lot of stuff. He was a great musician, an innovator, especially in his composition and writing.

Monk was also a funny cat, man, because he used to play the beats with his legs and feet moving. I used to love to watch him play piano, because if you watched his feet, you could know whether or not he was up into the music. If his feet moved all the time, then he was in it; if they didn't, then he wasn't. It was like watching and listening to sanctified church music: the beats, you know, the rhythms. A lot of his music reminds me of the West Indian music being played today, that is his accents and rhythms and the way he approached melody. You know, a lot of guys used to say that Monk didn't play piano as well as Bud Powell, because they all thought Bud was better techni-cally because of his speed. That was some wrong shit to say, the wrong way to approach them, because they had different styles. Monk played some real hip shit and so did Bud Powell. But they were different. Bud played more like Art Tatum, and all the bebop piano players were crazy about Art. Monk was more into Duke Ellington, that stride piano thing Duke was into. But you could hear Monk's style up in Bud's playing. They were both bad motherfuckers. They just had two different styles. Like Bird and Bean are different;

like Picasso and Dali. But Monk's shit was very hip, especially his approach to composition. It was very innovative.

Now this might sound strange, but Monk and I were very close, musically speaking. He used to show me all his songs, then he would explain them to me if I didn't understand something. I used to see them all and laugh about them because they were so funny, so quirky. Monk had a great sense of humor, musically speaking. He was a real innovative musician whose music was ahead of his time. You could adapt some of his music to what's going on now in fusion and in some of the more popular veins; maybe not all of them, but the ones that got the pop in the motherfucking head, you could. You know, that black rhythmic thing that James Brown could do so good. Monk had that thing and it's all up in his compositions.

Monk was a serious musician. When I first met him, he used to stay fucked up a lot, high off Dexedrines. At least, that's what I heard. But when I was learning music from him-and I learned a lot from him-he wasn't getting high so much. He was a big, strong motherfucker, about six feet two, and over two hundred pounds. He didn't take no shit off nobody. When I heard stories later saying that me and him was almost about to fight after I had him lay out while I was playing on "Bags' Groove," I was shocked, because Monk and I were, first, very close, and second, he was too big and strong for me to even be thinking about fighting. Shit, man, he could have just squashed me if he wanted to. All I did was tell him to lay out when I was playing. My asking him to lay out had something to do with music, not friendship. He used to tell cats to lay out himself.

But as great a musician as he was, I just didn't like what he played behind me, that is, the way he used to play chords in the rhythm. See, you had to play like Coltrane to play with Monk-all that space and disjointed shit he used to play. But that shit was bad, now. It was some top of the shit music. But it was just different.

Monk was a quiet dude. Sometimes he and Bean used to get into these deep conversations. Bean liked to tease Monk about a lot of shit. And Monk would take it, because he loved Bean and because- as big and strong and menacing as he could look-he was a real soft, calm and gentle person, a beautiful person, almost serene. But if it had been reversed and it was Monk teasing the shit out of Bean, then Bean wouldn't have liked that.

I thought nothing of it before but now that I'm looking back, hardly any of the critics understood Monk's music. Man, Monk taught me

more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street. He showed me everything; play this chord like that, do this, use that, do that. He wouldn't tell me quite like that; he'd just sit down at the piano and show me. But you had to be quick with Monk and be able to read between the lines, because he never did talk too much. He'd be doing what he'd be doing in that funny sort of way that he had. If you weren't serious about what you were doing and what he was showing you-not telling you-then, you'd be saying, "What? What was that? What's he doing?" It was over for your ass if you found yourself in that place. The shit done passed you by. And that was that. It wasn't no coming back. By that time Monk was somewhere 'else. Because Monk was a man who couldn't and wouldn't stand for no bullshit. And so he saw in me somebody who was serious and he gave me all he could, which was a lot. And although I really didn't hang out with Monk in a social type of way-he never did do that kind of thing no way-he also was a musical elder and teacher for me, and I really felt very close to him and him to me. I really don't think he would have done for someone else all that he did for me. I might be wrong, but I don't think so. But despite Monk being a beautiful cat, he could also be strange to people that didn't know him, like I became later for people who didn't know me.

Sir Charles Thompson was also a strange cat, but a strange that was different from Monk's, whose strangeness came mainly from him being quiet. Sir Charles would use me on trumpet with Connie Kay on drums and himself on piano. Up until that time, I had never heard that combination of instruments played together before, but that didn't bother Sir Charles-who had "knighted" himself. He was strange in that way, and he wasn't quiet.

A lot of cats used to come up and sit in with us at Minton's during the short time I played in Sir Charles's band. People like Bird, Milt Jackson, Dizzy, and a white trumpet player named Red Rodney, who was a bad motherfucker. Freddie Webster used to sit in a lot and I remember when Ray Brown first came to Minton's and blew every-body away with his playing. Sir Charles had a lot of good musicians sitting in with his band. He came out of the swing era, out of that kind of music-Buck Clayton, Illinois Jacquet, and Roy Eldridge- those kinds of musicians. He played a Count Basie-type piano. But he could copy some of Bud Powell's licks, too, when he wanted. He liked playing with the hoppers. I know Gil Evans used to like him. I did, too, for a while, but I was moving in another musical direction,

more into the kind of music Bird and Dizzy were playing, at least at that time.

After I started playing with Bird's band, me and Max Roach got real tight. He, J. J. Johnson, and I used to run the streets all night until we crashed in the early morning hours, either at Max's pad in Brooklyn or in Bird's place. Other cats like Milt Jackson, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Tadd Dameron, and Monk, sometimes Dizzy, all thought somewhat alike. We had a lot of give and take among us. And if anybody needed anything, like musical encouragement, or money, we shared what we had. If Max thought I missed something when we started out in Bird's band, he'd pull my coattails to what it was I missed. And I would do the same for him.

But it was the jam sessions, all over Harlem and Brooklyn, where we had a lot of fun just sitting in with other musicians our own age. I had mostly been around guys who had been older than me and who had something to teach me. Now, in New York, I had found a group of guys who were about my age and who I could both learn from and share my shit with. Before, I hadn't run with too many young guys. I was too advanced musically for them and they didn't have anything they could teach me; most of the time it was the other way around. But I'm the kind of person who always likes to learn different, new, innovative things. So with Max and all the other cats I mentioned before, I could sit up all night and play and talk music. That's what I have always been into.

New York was different back in those days, because you could run the streets looking for all kinds of jam sessions to play in. Plus all the great musicians would be there just like everybody else. Unlike today, in those days you didn't get too big to be sitting in at the jam sessions. Also, all the clubs were close to each other; like either on 52nd Street, or up in Harlem-at Lorraine's, or Minton's, or Small's Paradise, all around Seventh Avenue. The clubs were not so spread out like they are today. Our main interest was to be a part of the music scene. I don't think it's the same today.

I have always liked to take chances, musically speaking, and I guess with my own life as I got older. But back in 1945 all my risk taking was in music. Max Roach was like that back then too. He and I were supposed to be the next bad motherfuckers. Everybody was talking about Max being the next Kenny Clarke, who was considered bebop's top drummer during that time; everybody called Kenny Clarke "Klook." And I was supposed to be the next Dizzy Gillespie. Now, whether that was true or not, I didn't know. That's what the

musicians and a lot of the people who came to listen to bebop were saying.

The critics were still putting me down, and I think some of it had to do with my attitude, because I ain't never been no grinner, or someone who went out of his way to kiss somebody's ass, especially a critic. Because who most critics like a lot of times depends on whether the person is nice to them. Plus most of them were white and were used to black musicians being nice to them so that the critics would write good things about them. So a lot of the guys kissed their asses, grinned up on stage and entertained, rather than just played their instruments-which is what they were there for.

As much as I love Dizzy and loved Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, I always hated the way they used to laugh and grin for the audiences. I know why they did it-to make money and because they were entertainers as well as trumpet players. They had families to feed. Plus they both liked acting the clown; it's just the way Dizzy and Satch were. I don't have nothing against them doing it if they want to. But I didn't like it and didn't have to like it. I come from a differ-ent social and class background than both of them, and I'm from the Midwest, while both of them are from the South. So we look at white people a little differently. Also I was younger than them and didn't have to go through the shit they had to go through to get accepted in the music industry. They had already opened up a whole lot of doors for people like me to go through, and I felt that I could be about just playing my horn-the only thing I wanted to do. I didn't look at myself as an entertainer like they both did. I wasn't going to do it just so that some non-playing, racist, white motherfucker could write some nice things about me. Naw, I wasn't going to sell out my prin-ciples for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn't call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that's what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it.

So a lot of critics didn't like me back then-still don't today- because they saw me as an arrogant little nigger. Maybe I was, I don't know, but I do know that I wasn't going to have to write about what I played and if they couldn't or wouldn't do that, then fuck them. Anyway, Max and Monk felt like that, and J. J. and Bud Powell, too. So that's what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music.

We were getting reputations about this time. People were following us around wherever we played-you know, Harlem, downtown On The Street, and sometimes over to Brooklyn. And a lot of women

were coming around to see Max and me. But I was with Irene, and I believed at the time that a man should only have one woman. I believed that shit for a long time until I changed, when I got my heroin habit and had to use women to help support me. But back then I believed one man-one woman. But I did have a thing for a few women back then, like Annie Ross and Billie Holiday.

When The Street stayed closed throughout the last part of 1945, Dizzy and Bird decided to leave New York and go to Los Angeles. Dizzy's agent. Billy Shaw, had convinced a nightclub owner there that bebop would be sensational out on the coast. I think the club owner's name was Billy Berg. Dizzy liked the idea of spreading bebop to California, but he didn't like the idea of having to put up with Bird's shit again. He balked at first, but when they said Bird had to be a part of the deal. Dizzy finally gave in. So the group was Dizzy, Bird, Milt Jackson on vibes and Al Haig on piano, Stan Levey on drums and Ray Brown on bass. They all went to California by train, I think in December of 1945.

Since it was slow in New York, I decided to go back to East St. Louis for a rest. I closed down my apartment up on 147th and Broad-way. Irene and Cheryl were with me, and we really needed a bigger place. I decided to take care of that when I got back to New York. In the meantime, we all arrived back in East St. Louis in time for Christmas.

I was still there in January when Benny Carter came to play at the Riviera over in St. Louis with his big band, so I went over to catch the band, and since I knew Benny, I went backstage. He was glad to see me and asked me to join his band. Benny's band was based in Los Angeles. Since Bird and Dizzy were out there, I called Ross Russell, who was living in New York and handling all of Bird's book-ings, and told him I was going out to L.A. and wanted to look up Bird and Dizzy. He gave me Bird's number, and I called Bird up and told him I was coming to L.A.

What you've got to understand is that I was thinking only about just seeing Bird and listening to what they were playing. I had no other reason for calling Bird than that. But he started talking about me joining the band out there, about me, him, and Dizzy playing together. He said that he was lining up a record deal with Dial Rec-ords and that Ross Russell was setting it up, and wanted me to play on the date. I was flattered listening to him, praising me like that. Who wouldn't be happy if the baddest motherfucker on the scene

was telling you how bad you are and that he wanted you to play with him? But when you talked to Bird there was always a chance of him trying to put something over on you for reasons other than music. And I wasn't thinking no thoughts about taking Dizzy's place. I loved him. I knew that Bird and Dizzy had had problems in the past, but I hoped they were getting along like they used to.

What I didn't know was that Bird and Ross Russell had already talked about using me. Bird wanted a different kind of trumpet player from Dizzy. He wanted someone with a more relaxed style who played in the middle register, like me. I found out after I got to Los Angeles.

When we arrived, Benny Carter had a job at the Orpheum The-atre. After we played that job the band broke up temporarily until the next job. Benny formed a small group from the larger band that had me and Al Grey, the trombonist, and some other people who I've forgotten. I think he had a guy named Bumps Meyers in the group. We started doing small clubs around L.A. and did a radio broadcast. But I didn't like the music Benny's group was playing, though I didn't tell him that right then. Benny was a nice guy and I liked how he played, but I couldn't use the music them other guys were playing. Plus, when I first got to L.A. I was living with Benny. I felt it would have been wrong to just up and walk out on him. So I didn't know what to do for a little while. I didn't like playing in Benny's band because they were playing a lot of old-fashioned num-bers and arrangements. Benny is a hell of a musician, you know. But he wasn't confident in his playing and sometimes he'd ask if he sounded like Bird. I'd say, "No, you sound like Benny Carter." Man, when I would tell him this, he would laugh his ass off.

I was playing with Bird at an after-hours club called the Finale when I was still with Benny Carter's band. The Finale was upstairs, on the second floor, I think. It wasn't a large place, but it was a nice place and I thought it was funky because the music was funky and the musicians were getting down. They used to broadcast live from there over the radio. Bird had persuaded a guy named Foster John-son, a retired vaudevillian hoofer who ran the club, to let him bring in the band. The Finale Club was located in a section of Los Angles called Little Tokyo. There was a black neighborhood right next to this Japanese neighborhood. I think the Finale Club was located on South San Pedro. Anyway, in Bird's band at the Finale, we had my-self on trumpet, Bird on alto, Addison Farmer-the twin brother of

trumpet player Art Farmer-on bass, Joe Albany on piano, and Chuck Thompson on drums. A lot of other good musicians used to sit in at the Finale. Howard McGhee would come around a lot. He ran the club after Foster Johnson managed it. Sonny Criss, an alto player, used to sit in, and Art Farmer, Red Callender, the bassist, and Red's protege, that crazy, beautiful motherfucker, Charlie Mingus.

Charlie Mingus loved Rird, man, almost like I have never seen nobody love. Maybe Max Roach loved Bird that much. But Mingus, shit, he used to come to see and hear Bird almost every night. He couldn't get enough of Bird. He also liked me a lot. But Mingus could play the bass and everybody knew when they heard him that he would become as bad as he became. We also knew he would have to come to New York, which he did.

I got tired of the music Benny's band was playing. It wasn't music. I told my friend Lucky Thompson how sick I was of playing in the band. He told me to quit and come stay with him. Lucky was a hell of a saxophone player that I had met at Minton's. He was from Los Angeles and had come back home. I had let Lucky stay with me a couple of times when he was in New York. He had a house in Los Angeles and I went and stayed with him.

By now it was early 1946 and my girl, Irene, was back in East St. Louis, pregnant with our second child, Gregory. Now I had to think about making money to support my family. Before I quit, Benny asked me if I needed some money. He had heard that I was unhappy. I just told him, "Naw, man, I just want to quit." He was hurt, and I felt bad because he had brought me out to California and was count-ing on me. That was the first time I had quit a band abruptly like that. I was making about $143 a week. But I was in pain playing with Benny's band. No amount of money was going to make me happy playing those bullshit Neil Hefti arrangements Benny's band was playing.

After leaving Benny's band I didn't have no money in my pocket. So I moved in with Lucky for a while, then I started living with Howard McGhee. We got to be big buddies and he wanted to learn what I knew about the trumpet and music theory. Howard lived with this white girl, Dorothy. She was beautiful-looked just like a movie star. I think they were married: I don't know. Anyway, she kept Howard in a new car and with a pocketful of money and brand-new clothes. Howard was something else, man. Anyway, Dorothy had a friend, a blonde, beautiful woman who looked just like Kim Novak, only finer. Her name was Carol. She was one of George Raft's girls.

She'd be over to Howard's house and Howard wanted me to go with her. At this time I had probably made love to only two or three women. I had started smoking a little bit by this time, but I still didn't even know how to curse. So, here was Carol coming by to see me and I ain't paying no attention to her. She was sitting around watch-ing me practice trumpet, which was all I was doing.

When Howard would get home after Carol had left, I would tell him, "Howard, you know Carol came by." "And what?" Howard would say.

"And what?" I'd say, "What do you mean, 'And what?' " "And what did you do, Miles?" "Nothing," I said, "I didn't do nothing."

"Listen, Miles," Howard would say, "that girl is rich. I mean if she comes by, that means she likes you, so do something. You think she coming by here and by Lucky's house blowing the horn of her Cadillac for her health, man? So the next time she come by, do something. You hear what I'm telling you, Miles?"

She came by a little after that and blew the horn of that new Cadillac she had. I let her in and she asked me if I needed something. Cadillac sitting outside with the top down, she finer than a mother-fucker. I hadn't messed with no white girls at that time, so I was probably a little scared of her. Maybe I had kissed one in New York. But I hadn't been to bed with one yet. So I told her I didn't need anything. So she left. When Howard got home I told him Carol had come by and asked me if I needed anything. "And what?" Howard said.

"I told her I didn't need anything. I don't want any money or nothing."

"Are you crazy, motherfucker," Howard said, madder than a motherfucker. "When she comes by again and you tell me that shit and you don't have no money, man, I'm cutting your motherfucking nose off. Here we can't play nowhere. The black union don't want us to play because we're too modern. The white union don't like us because we're black. And here's a white woman, a whore who wants to give you money, and you ain't got none, and you say no? If you do that shit again I'm going to stab you, you jive motherfucker, you hear what I'm saying, you understand? You'd better, because I ain't bullshitting."

I knew Howard was nice and everything, but he didn't like no stupid bullshit. The next time Carol came by and asked me if I needed money, I said, "Yeah." When she offered it to me, I took it.

When I told Howard that, he said, "Good." After that I used to think about what Howard told me, I mean that shit embarrassed me, her giving me money. I hadn't been around no shit like that. But it was the first time I didn't have money, really. After that Carol used to give me sweaters and shit because it got cold in Los Angeles at night. But I never forgot that conversation with Howard. I remember it almost word for word. And that's unusual for me.

After I quit Benny's band, then I finally hooked up with Bird and played with him for a while. Howard McGhee was also taking care of Bird while he was out in Los Angeles. Bird lived with Howard for a while after he got through playing his engagement with Dizzy at Billy Berg's club. The music Diz and Bird had done at Berg's club had gone over big in Los Angeles, but Dizzy wanted to go back to New York. He bought tickets for all of the band-including Bird-to fly back to New York. Everybody went, was glad to go. Except at the last minute, Bird decided to cash in his ticket in order to buy heroin.

Early in the spring of 1946, I think it might have been March, Ross Russell set up a recording session with Dial Records for Bird. Ross made sure that Bird was sober, and hired me and Lucky Thompson on tenor, a guy named Arv Garrison on guitar, Vic McMillan on bass, Roy Porter on drums, and Dodo Marmarosa on piano.

At this time, Bird was drinking cheap wine and shooting heroin. People on the West Coast weren't into bebop like people in New York were and they thought some of the shit we were playing and doing was weird. Especially with Bird. He didn't have no money, was looking bad and raggedy, and everybody who knew who he was, knew he was a bad motherfucker who didn't care. But the rest of the people who were being told that Bird was a star could only see this broke, drunken dude playing this weird shit up on stage. A lot of them didn't buy all that shit about Bird being this genius, they just ignored him, and I think this hurt his confidence in himself and what he was doing. When Bird left New York he was a king, but out in Los Angeles he was just another broke, weird, drunken nigger playing some strange music. Los Angeles is a city built on celebrating stars and Bird didn't look like no star.

But at this recording session that Ross set up for Dial, Bird pulled himself together and played his ass off. I remember we rehearsed at the Finale Club the night before we recorded. We argued half the night about what we were going to play and who was going to play what. There had been no rehearsal for the recording date, and the

musicians were pissed because they were going to be playing tunes they were unfamiliar with. Bird was never organized about telling people what he wanted them to do. He just got who he thought could play the shit he wanted and left it at that. Nothing was written down, maybe a sketch of a melody. All he wanted to do was play, get paid, and go out and buy himself some heroin.

Bird would play the melody he wanted. The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct. He didn't conform to Western ways of musical group interplay by organizing everything. Bird was a great improviser and that's where he thought great music came from and what great mu-sicians were about. His concept was "fuck what's written down." Play what you know and play that well and everything will come together-just the opposite of the Western concept of notated music.

I loved the way Bird did that. I learned a lot from him that way. It would later help me with my own music concepts. When that shit works, man, it's a motherfucker. But if you get a group of guys who don't understand what's happening, or they can't handle all that freedom you're laying on them, and they play what they want, then it's no good. Bird would get guys in who couldn't handle the concept. He did it in the recording studio and when they were playing a live performance. That's what a lot of that argument was about at the Finale the night before we recorded.

The recording session took place in Hollywood at a studio called Radio Recorders. Bird was a motherfucker on that date. We re-corded "A Night in Tunisia," "Yardbird Suite," and "Ornithology." Dial released "Ornithology" and "A Night in Tunisia" on a 78 rpm record in April of that year. I remember Bird recording a tune on that date called "Moose the Mooch" that was named after the cat who used to get Bird's heroin. I think he got something like half of Bird's royalties from that record date for supplying Bird with heroin. (It was probably written into Bird's contract in some kind of way.)

I think everyone played well on this date but me. This was my second recording date with Bird but I don't know why I didn't play as well as I could have. Maybe I was nervous. It's not that I played terrible. It's just that I could have played better. Ross Russell-a jive motherfucker who I never did get along with because he was nothing but a leech, who didn't never do nothing but suck off Bird like he was a vampire-said something about my playing was flawed. Fuck

that jive white boy. He wasn't no musician, so what did he know what Bird liked! I told Ross Russell he could kiss my ass.

I remember playing with a mute on that date so I would sound less like Dizzy. But even with the mute I still sounded like him. I was mad with myself, because I wanted to sound like myself. I still felt that I was close to getting to the place where I would have my own voice on trumpet. I was anxious to be myself even then, and I was only nineteen. I was impatient with myself and most everything else. But I kept it to myself and kept my eyes and ears wide open so that I could keep on learning.

After the recording session, I think it was around that time, maybe in early April, the police closed the Finale, which was then run by Howard and Dorothy McGhee. Howard was constantly being fucked over by the white police because he was married to a white woman. When Bird started living in their garage and drinking, with all them pimps, dope dealers, and hustlers around, the police began to notice and turned up the heat. They really started messing with them even more. They were a tough couple though, so it didn't make them change what they were doing. The police had closed the Finale be-cause they said dope was being dealt from there-and it was. But they didn't never bust nobody. So they closed it down because of suspicion.

There weren't many places for jazz musicians-especially black jazz musicians-to play in the first place. So there was hardly any money to make. After a while I started getting some money from my father, so I wasn't doing too bad. But I wasn't doing real good, either. About this time heroin got hard to get in Los Angeles. This didn't bother me because I wasn't using it, but Bird was all the way into it. He was a real bad junkie by then, so he started going through severe withdrawal. He just disappeared. Nobody knew he was living with Howard, and Howard didn't tell nobody that he was there going cold turkey. But when Bird gave up heroin, he only switched to drinking more heavily. I remember him telling me once that he was trying to kick heroin and that he hadn't had any for a week. But he had two gallons of wine on the table, empty quart whiskey bottles in the trash can, bennies spilled all over the table, and a crowded tray overflow-ing with cigarette butts.

Bird drank a lot before, but nowhere near as much as he did after he kicked heroin. Then he started drinking a fifth of anything he could get his hands on. He liked whiskey, so if he had that it would be gone in no time. Wine he drank even more of. That's what How-

ard later told me Bird survived on when he was going cold turkey, port wine. Then he started taking pills, Benzedrine, really messing his body up.

The Finale was opened up again in May of 1946. Bird used Howard on trumpet instead of me and for some reason the month stayed in my mind. I think Bird had Howard, Red Callender, Dodo Marmarosa, and Roy Porter in that group. Bird was breaking down physi-cally right in front of everyone, but he was playing good, too.

I started hanging out with some of the younger musicians of Los Angeles, like Mingus, Art Farmer, and, of course, Lucky Thompson -my main man during the time I stayed out on the West Coast. I think I played another gig with Bird in April, but I'm not sure. Seems like I played at a place called the Carver Club, on UCLA's campus. I think Mingus, Lucky Thompson, Britt Woodman, and maybe Arv Garrison were on that job. Work was getting hard to find in Los Angeles and by May or June I was tired of living out there. The scene was too slow. I wasn't learning nothing.

I had first met Art Farmer at the black union office, which was located in downtown Los Angeles, in the black community. I think it was Local 767. I was talking to a trumpet player named Sammy Yates, who played in Tiny Bradshaw's band. Some other guys were standing around asking me about what was happening with the new music, bebop, and what was New York like. Questions like that. I was telling them what I could. I remember this real quiet cat stand-ing off to the side who couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen, watching everything I was saying, soaking it all up. I re-membered him when I would see him at some of the jam sessions. That was Art Farmer. And then I played with his twin brother and found out that he played trumpet and fluegelhorn too. So we'd have these short conversations about music. I liked him, because he was a real nice cat and he could really play, for someone as young as he was.

I think I ran into him the most over at the Finale. I knew him better after he moved to New York later on. But I met Art Farmer the first time I went to Los Angeles. A lot of the young musicians in Los Angeles who were serious about playing would come up and ask me questions about what was happening in New York. They knew I had played with a lot of the bad cats and so they wanted to pick my brains.

By the summer of 1946 I was working with Lucky Thompson's band at a place called the Elks Ballroom, farther south on Central

Avenue, where we got the black crowd from Watts. They were some country motherfuckers but they used to like the music we played because they could dance to it. Mingus played bass in that band. Lucky used to rent the place three nights a week and advertise by saying something like, "Lucky Thompson's All Stars, featuring the brilliant young trumpet player Miles Davis, last heard here with Benny Carter." Man, that shit was funny. Lucky Thompson was something else. That gig lasted for about three or four weeks and then Lucky left with Boyd Raeburn's band.

Around this time I was on an album with Mingus, Baron Mingus and His Symphonic Airs. Mingus was a crazy, brilliant person and I never knew what he meant by that title. He tried to explain it to me once, but I don't think even he knew what he meant by it. But Mingus didn't do nothing halfway. If he was going to make a fool out of himself, he was going to do it better than anybody else ever did it. A lot of people didn't like Mingus calling himself Baron, but it didn't bother me. Mingus might have been crazy, but he was also ahead of his time. He was one of the greatest bass players who ever lived.

Charlie Mingus was a motherfucking man who didn't take no shit off nobody. And I admired that in him. A lot of people couldn't take him, but they were scared to tell him to his face. I used to. It didn't scare me that he was so big. He was a gentle, nice cat who wouldn't hurt nobody unless they fucked with him. Then, watch out! We used to argue and scream at each other all the time. But Mingus never threatened to hit me. In 1946, after Lucky Thompson left town, Min-gus became my best friend in Los Angeles. We would rehearse to-gether all the time, talk about music all the time.

Bird was worrying me because he was drinking like a fish and getting fat. He was in such bad physical shape that for the first time since I had known him, his playing was really bad. He was now drinking about a quart of whiskey a day, up from a fifth. See, junkies have routines. First thing they do is satisfy the habit. Then they can operate, play music, sing, whatever. But Bird was out of his routine in California. When you're in a new place and you can't consistently find what you need, you find something else-for Bird it was drink-ing. Bird was a junkie. His body was used to heroin. But his body wasn't used to all the drinking he was doing. He just went crazy. It happened to him in Los Angeles, and later on in Chicago and Detroit.

It really started to show when Ross Russell organized another Dial Records session in July of 1946, but Bird couldn't hardly play. How-

ard McGhee, who played trumpet on that date, organized the band. Bird was pitiful; he couldn't play anything. Being in Los Angeles, and being neglected, and not having any drugs, and drinking all them quarts of whiskey and downing bennies finally had wasted him. He seemed drained and I really thought it was over. I mean I thought he was going to die. Later that night after the set, he went back to the hotel room and got so drunk he fell asleep smoking and he set fire to the bed. When he put the fire out and then wandered into the street naked, the police arrested him. They thought he was crazy and took him to Camarillo State Hospital. He stayed there for seven months. It probably saved his life, though they did some fucked-up shit to him.

When they took Bird away it really shocked everybody on the scene, especially in New York. But what horrified everybody was that they gave Bird shock treatment while he was in Camarillo. One time they gave him so much that he almost bit off his tongue. I couldn't understand why they gave him shock treatments. They said it helped him. But for an artist like Bird the shock treatments just helped to fuck him up more. They did the same thing to Bud Powell when he got sick, and it didn't help him. Bird got in such bad shape, the doctors told him that if he got even a bad cold-or pneumonia, again-he would die.

After Bird went off the scene, I would rehearse with Charlie Min-gus a lot. He wrote tunes that Lucky and him and me would rehearse. Mingus didn't give a fuck what kind of musical ensemble it was; he just wanted to hear his shit played all the time. I used to argue with him about using all those abrupt changes in the chords in his tunes.

"Mingus, you so fucking lazy, man, that you won't modulate. You just, barn! hit the chord, which is nice sometimes, you know, but not all the fucking time."

He would just smile and say, "Miles, just play the shit like I wrote it." And I would. It was some strange-sounding shit back then. But Mingus was like Duke Ellington, ahead of his time.

Mingus was playing really different shit. All of a sudden he started doing this strange-sounding music, almost overnight. Now, nothing in music and sounds is "wrong." You can hit anything, any kind of chord. Like John Cage playing the shit he's playing, making all them strange sounds and noises. Music is wide open for anything. I used to tease him, "Mingus, why you playing like that?" Like, he'd be playing "My Funny Valentine" in a major key and it's supposed to be

played in D minor. But he would just smile that sweet smile of his and keep doing what he was doing. Mingus was something else, man, a pure genius. I loved him.

Anyway, during the summer of 1946-late August I think-Billy Eckstine's band came to Los Angeles. Fats Navarro had been their regular trumpet player, but he had quit the band to stay in New York. So B got in touch with me because Dizzy had told him I was out in L.A., and he asked me if I wanted to play in his band. "Hey, Dick"- B called me Dick-"well, you ready now, motherfucker?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Dick, I'm gonna give you $200 a week, whether we play or not. But don't tell nobody else," he said. "If you do I'll kick your ass."

"Okay," I said, with a big smile on my face.

See, B had asked me to join his band before I left New York. He had wanted me real bad. That's the reason he paid me so much now. But back then I was enjoying myself playing in the little groups, and Freddie Webster had told me, "Miles, you know playing with B is nothing but death for you. If you go with him you're going to die as a creative musician. Because you can't do what_you want to. You can't play what you want to. They're going to South Carolina and you ain't like that. You can't grin. You ain't no Uncle Tom and you're going to do something and them white folks down there are going to shoot you. So don't do it. Tell him you don't want to go with him."

And I did, because Freddie was my main man and he was very wise. When I tried to say that B didn't take shit off nobody, so why wouldn't they shoot him in the South, too, Freddie said, "Miles, B is a star and a big money-maker. You ain't. So don't put yourself in the same league with him, yet." That's the reason B said to me, "Well, Dick. You ready now, motherfucker?" when he asked me to join his band in Los Angeles. He was pulling my leg for not having joined the band back in New York. But he respected me for having turned him down.

B had Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, and Cecil Payne in the saxo-phone section; Linton Garner-Erroll Garner's brother-on piano; Tommy Potter on bass and Art Blakey on drums. Hobart Dotson, Leonard Hawkins, King Kolax, and me were the trumpet section.

By this time B had become one of the most famous singers in the United States, ranking up there with Frank Sinatra, Nat "King" Cole, Bing Crosby, and others. He was a sex object among black women, a star. He was that for white women, too, but they didn't love him or buy his records the way black women did. He was a rough mother-

fucker who didn't take no shit off no one, woman or man. He'd just knock the shit out of the first person to get out of line.

But B thought of himself more as an artist than as a star. He could have made a lot of money for himself if he had dropped the band and gone out on the road as just a singer. That band, like all the others before it, was very tight, very disciplined. They played the shit out of anything B wanted. The band would get down especially after B had done his numbers. He would just stand there with this big grin on his face, loving what everybody was doing. B's band was never recorded correctly. The record label was more interested in B as a singer, so they put the emphasis on him and on popular music. He had to do the pop stuff to keep the band going.

B had, I think, a nineteen-piece orchestra, and around that time all them big bands were breaking up because of money. One day when the band had been off for a week, B brought me all this money. I said, "B, I can't take this money, man, because the rest of the guys ain't getting paid."

B just smiled and put the money back in his pocket and never did that to me again. It wasn't that I couldn't have used the money. I could have used it on my family; Irene was in East St. Louis with the two kids, Cheryl and Gregory. But I just couldn't take it knowing the rest of the guys weren't getting paid.

When we weren't working dances and shit all over Los Angeles, we broke down into small groups and played little clubs, like the Finale. We stayed out in Los Angeles about two or three months before working our way back to New York in late fall 1946, with stops in Chicago.

I had played all over California with B's band, so my reputation there was growing. When I got ready to leave Los Angeles with B's band, Mingus got real mad at me. He thought I was abandoning Bird, who was still up in Camarillo. He asked me how I could go back to New York without Bird. He was madder than a motherfucker. I couldn't say nothing, so I didn't. Then, he said that Bird was like my "papa." I told him that there wasn't anything I could do for Bird. I remember saying, "Listen, Mingus, Bird's in a mental hospital and no one knows when he'll get out. Do you, man? Bird's all fucked up, can't you see that?"

Mingus went on: "Like I said. Miles, Bird is your musical papa. You're an asshole. Miles Davis. That man made you."

Then I said, "Fuck you, Mingus. Ain't no motherfucker made me, nigger, but my real daddy. Bird might have helped me, and he did.

But the motherfucker didn't make me, man. So fuck that shit. I'm tired of this jive-ass Los Angeles. I've got to go back to New York where the shit is really happening. And don't worry about Bird, Mingus. Because Bird will understand even if you don't."

Talking to Mingus like that really hurt me, because I loved him, and I could see that my leaving hurt him real bad. He gave up trying to convince me to stay. But I think that argument really hurt our friendship. We played together after that, but we weren't as close as we had been. We were still friends, though, no matter what some of the people said who wrote about us in their books. Those writers never talked to me. How would they know how I felt about Charlie Mingus? Later on in our lives, Mingus and me just went our separate ways, like a whole lot of other people do. But he was my friend, man, and he knew it. We might have had disagreements, but we always did, even before that Bird argument.

I started snorting cocaine while I was in B's band. Hobart Dotson, the trumpet player who sat right next to me, turned me on. He gave me a pure rock one day. We were in Detroit on our way back to New York. The person who first turned me on to heroin-which I also did while I was in B's band-was Gene Ammons, in the reed section. I remember when I snorted cocaine for the first time. I didn't know what it was, man. All I know is that all of a sudden everything seemed to brighten up and I felt this sudden burst of energy. The first time I used heroin, I just nodded out and didn't know what was happening. Man, that was a weird feeling. But I felt so relaxed. Then the idea was going around that to use heroin might make you play as great as Bird. A lot of musicians did it for that. I guess I might have been just waiting for his genius to hit me. Getting into all that shit, though, was a very bad mistake.

Sarah Vaughan had left the band by this time and a singer named Ann Baker had taken her place. She was a good singer. She was also the first woman to tell me "a hard dick has no conscience." She used to just open up my hotel door and come right in and fuck me. She was something.

We used to travel around by bus and if B caught somebody asleep on the bus with his mouth open, he would drop salt in his mouth and wake him up. Man, everybody would be dying laughing at the poor sucker, coughing and shit, eyes all bugged out. Yeah, man, B was funnier than a motherfucker.

B was so clean and fine back in them days that women were all over his ass. He was so handsome that I used to think he looked like

a girl sometimes. A lot of people thought that because B was so handsome that he was soft. But B was one of the toughest mother-fuckers I ever met. One time we were in Cleveland or Pittsburgh and everybody was waiting on B outside his hotel in the bus, ready to go. We were about an hour late in leaving. Now here comes B out of the hotel with this fine woman. He said to me, "Hey, Dick, this is my woman."

She said something like, "I got a name, Billy, tell him my name."

B turned around and said, "Bitch, shut up!" He slapped the shit out of her right there.

She says to B, "Listen, you motherfucker, if you wasn't so pretty I'd break your motherfucking neck, you jive bastard."

B was just standing there laughing and shit, saying "Aw, shut up, bitch. Wait 'til I get some rest. I'm gonna knock your fucking ass out!" The woman was madder than a motherfucker.

Later on in New York, after the band broke up, me and B used to meet and hang out on The Street. By this time I was snorting coke, so B would be buying all the coke a motherfucker could snort. They used to sell it to you in these little packages. B would be counting the packages, saying "How many packages you got, Dick?"

When I was younger I used to have B's problem of looking almost too pretty in the face. I was so young-looking in 1946, people used to say I had eyes like a girl. If I went into a liquor store to buy myself or someone else some whiskey, they would always ask how old I was. I'd tell them that I had two kids and they'd still ask for I.D. I was small and had this young girl's face. But B was debonair and a ladies' man. I also learned a lot from him about dealing with people you didn't want around. You just tell them to get the fuck out of your face. That's it. Anything else is a waste of time.

On the way back to New York we went through Chicago, Cleve-land, Pittsburgh, and some other places, I forget now. When we got to Chicago, I went home to see my family and my new son for the first time. This was around Christmas, so I spent the holidays with my family. After that, the band stayed together through the first two months of 1947 before we broke up. I had gotten some good news:

Esquire magazine had voted me its New Star award for trumpet, I think because of my playing with Bird and B's band. Dodo Marmarosa won it for piano and Lucky Thompson for tenor saxophone, and we all three had played with Bird. So it was a rough year but it was a good year, too.

Chapter 5

back in New York, The Street was open again. To have experienced 52nd Street between 1945 and 1949 was like reading a textbook to the future of music. You had Coleman Hawkins and Hank Jones at one club. You had Art Tatum, Tiny Grimes, Red Alien, Dizzy, Bird, Bud Powell, Monk, all down there on that one street sometimes on the same night. You could go where you wanted and hear all this great shit. It was unbelievable. I was doing some writing for Sarah Vaughan and Budd Johnson. I mean everybody was there. Nowadays you can't hear people like that all at once. You don't have the opportunity.

But 52nd Street was something else when it was happening. It would be crowded with people, and the clubs were no bigger than apartment living rooms. They were so small and jam-packed. The clubs were right next to each other and across the street from one another. The Three Deuces was across from the Onyx and then across from there was a Dixieland club. Man, going in there was like going to Tupelo, Mississippi. It was full of white racists. The Onyx, Jimmy Ryan's club, could be real racist, too. But on the other side of the street, next to the Three Deuces, was the Downbeat Club and next to that was dark Monroe's Uptown House. So you had all these clubs right next to each other featuring people like Erroll Garner, Sidney Bechet, Oran "Hot Lips" Page, Earl Bostic every night. Then there would be other jazz going on at other clubs. That scene was

powerful. I'm telling you, I don't think we will ever see any shit like that ever again.

Lester Young used to be there, too. I had met Prez when he came through St. Louis and played the Riviera before I moved to New York. He called me Midget. Lester had a sound and an approach like Louis Armstrong, only he had it on tenor sax. Billie Holiday had that same sound and style; so did Budd Johnson and that white dude, Bud Freeman. They all had that running style of playing and singing. That's the style I like, when it's running. It floods the tone. It has a softness in the approach and concept, and places emphasis on one note. I learned to play like that from dark Terry. I used to play like he plays before I was influenced by Dizzy and Freddie, before I got my own style. But I learned about that running style from Lester Young.

Anyway, after laying around for a while, I did a record with Illinois Jacquet in March 1947. We had a hell of a trumpet section, with me, Joe Newman, Fats Navarro, and two others-I think Illinois's brother Russell Jacquet and Marion Hazel. Dickie Wells and Bill Doggett played trombone and Leonard Feather, the critic, played piano. I liked playing with Fats again.

Dizzy was packing them in with his big band, playing bebop. He had Walter Gil Fuller, who used to write for B's band, as his musical director. Gil was a motherfucker and so there was a lot of excitement with what Dizzy's band was doing. Then, in April, Dizzy's manager, Billy Shaw, booked his big band into the McKinley Theatre up in the Bronx. What made this gig so special in my memory is that Gil Fuller hired the best trumpet section that I think has ever been in any one band. He had me, Freddie Webster, Kenny Dorham, Fats Navarro, and Dizzy himself. Max Roach was on drums. Just as we were about to do the gig. Bird came back to New York and joined the band. He had got out of Camarillo in February and hung around Los Angeles long enough to record two albums for Dial and pick up his drug habit again. But those were terrible records that Ross Russell made Bird record. Now, why did Ross do Bird like that? Man, that's the reason I didn't like Ross Russell. He was a slimy motherfucker who used the fuck out of Bird. Anyway, when Bird came back to New York he wasn't as bad off as he had been in Los Angeles, because he wasn't doing too much drinking and he wasn't shooting up as much then as he would later. But he was still using shit.

But, man, the trumpet section-the whole band on the first night

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-was a motherfucker, you hear me? That music was all over the place, up in everyone's body, all up in the air. And it was so good to play with everybody like that. I loved it and was so excited about playing with everybody I didn't know what to do. It was one of the most exciting, spiritual times I have ever had, next to that first time I played with B's band in St. Louis. I remember the crowd on the first night listening and dancing their asses off. There was an excite-ment in the air, a kind of expectation of the music that was going to be played. It's hard to describe. It was electric, magical. I felt so good being in that band. I felt that I had arrived, that I was in a band of musical gods, and that I was one of them. I felt honored and humble. We were all there to do it for the music. And that's a beautiful feeling.

Dizzy wanted to keep the band clean and felt that Bird would be a negative influence. On the night we opened at the McKinley, Bird was up on stage nodding out and playing nothing but his own solos. He wouldn't play behind nobody else. Even the people in the audi-ence were making fun of Bird while he was nodding up there on stage. So Dizzy, who was fed up with Bird anyway, fired him after that first gig. Then Bird talked to Gil Fuller and promised him that he would stay clean, and he wanted Gil to tell this to Diz. Gil went to Dizzy to try to talk him into letting Bird stay. And I went to Diz and told him that it would be good to keep Bird around to write some tunes for a little money; I think it was a hundred dollars a week. But Dizzy refused, saying he didn't have no money to pay him and that we would just have to get along without him.

I think we played the McKinley Theatre for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, Bird was forming a new band and asked me to come with him, and I did. The two records Bird had recorded for Dial out in Los Angeles had been released. I was on one and Howard McGhee was on the other, I think. They had been released in late 1946 and were now big jazz hits. So, with 52nd Street open again and Bird back in town, the club owners wanted Bird. Everybody was after him. They wanted small bands again and they felt that Bird would pack them in. They offered him $800 a week for four weeks at the Three Deuces. He hired me, Max Roach, Tommy Potter, and Duke Jordan on piano. He paid me and Max $135 a week and Tommy and Duke $125. Bird made the most he had ever made in his life, $280 a week. It didn't matter to me that I was making $65 a week less than what I had made in B's band; all I wanted to do was play with Bird and Max and make some good music.

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I felt good about it, and Bird was clear-eyed, not like the crazed look he had in California. He was slimmer and seemed happy with Doris. She had gone out to California to get him when he got out of Camarillo, and accompanied him east on the train. Man, Doris loved her Charlie Parker. She would do anything for him. Bird seemed happy and ready to go. We opened in April 1947, opposite Lennie Tristano's trio.

I was really happy to be playing with Bird again, because playing with him brought out the best in me at the time. He could play so many different styles and never repeat the same musical idea. His creativity and musical ideas were endless. He used to turn the rhythm section around every night. Say we would be playing a blues. Bird would start on the eleventh bar. As the rhythm section stayed where they were, then Bird would play in such a way that it made the rhythm section sound like it was on 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4. Nobody could keep up with Bird back in those days except maybe Dizzy. Every time he would do this, Max would scream at Duke not to try to follow Bird. He wanted Duke to stay where he was, because he wouldn't have been able to keep up with Bird and he would have fucked up the rhythm. Duke did this a lot when he didn't listen. See, when Bird went off like that on one of his incredible solos all the rhythm section had to do was to stay where they were and play some straight shit. Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time. It was like he had planned it in his mind. The only thing about this is that he couldn't explain it to nobody. You just had to ride the music out. Because anything might happen musically when you were playing with Bird. So I learned to play what I knew and extend it upwards-a little above what I knew. You had to be ready for anything.

A week or so before opening night, Bird called for rehearsals at a studio called Nola. A lot of musicians rehearsed there during those days. When he called the rehearsals, nobody believed him. He never had done this in the past. On the first day of rehearsal, everybody showed up but Bird. We waited around for a couple of hours and I ended up rehearsing the band.

Now, opening night, the Three Deuces is packed. We ain't seen Bird in a week, but we'd been rehearsing our asses off. So here this nigger comes in smiling and shit, asking is everybody ready to play, in that fake British accent of his. When it's time for the band to hit, he asks, "What are we playing?" I tell him. He nods, counts off the beat and plays every motherfucking tune in the exact key we had

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rehearsed it in. He played like a motherfucker. Didn't miss one beat, one note, didn't play out of key all night. It was something. We were fucking amazed. And every time he'd look at us looking at him all shocked and shit, he'd just smile that "Did you ever doubt this?" kind of smile.

After we got through with that first set. Bird came up and said- again in that fake British accent-"You boys played pretty good to-night, except in a couple of places where you fell off the rhythm and missed a couple of notes." We just looked at the motherfucker and laughed. That's the kind of amazing shit that Bird did on the band-stand. You came to expect it. And if he didn't do something incredi-ble, that's when you were surprised.

Bird often used to play in short, hard bursts of breath. Hard as a mad man. Later on Coltrane would play like that. Anyway, so then, sometimes Max Roach would find himself in between the beat. And I wouldn't know what the fuck Bird was doing because I wouldn't have never heard it before. Poor Duke Jordan and Tommy Potter, they'd just be there lost as motherfuckers-like everybody else, only more lost. When Bird played like that, it was like hearing music for the first time. I'd never heard anybody play like that. Later, Sonny Rollins and I would try to do things like that, and me and Trane, playing those short, hard bursts of musical phrases. But when Bird played like that, he was outrageous. I hate to use a word like "out-rageous," but that's what he was. He was notorious in the way he played combinations of notes and musical phrases. The average mu-sician would try to develop something more logically, but not Bird. Everything he played-when he was on and really playing-was ter-rifying, and I was there every night! And so we couldn't just keep saying, "What? Did you hear that!' all night long. Because then we couldn't play nothing. So we got to the point where, when he played something that was just so outrageous, we blinked our eyes. They would just get wider than they were, and they already were real wide. But after a while it was just another day at the office playing with this bad motherfucker. It was unreal.

I was the one who rehearsed the band and kept it tight. Running that band made me understand what you had to do to have a great band. People said it was the best bebop band around. So I was proud of being the band's musical director. I wasn't twenty-one years old yet in 1947, and I was learning real quick about what music was all about.

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Bird never talked about music, except one time I heard him argu-ing with a classical musician friend of mine. He told the cat that you can do anything with chords. I disagreed, told him that you couldn't play D natural in the fifth bar of a B flat blues. He said you could. One night later on at Birdland, I heard Lester Young do it, but he bent the note. Bird was there when it happened and he just looked over at me with that "I told you so" look that he would lay on you when he had proved you wrong. But that's all he ever said about it. He knew you could do it because he had done it before. But he didn't get up and show nobody how to do it or nothing. He just let you pick it up for yourself, and if you didn't, then you just didn't.

I learned a lot from Bird in this way, picking up from the way he played or didn't play a musical phrase or idea. But like I said, I never did talk to Bird much, never talked to him over fifteen minutes at a time, unless we were arguing about money. I'd tell him right up front, "Bird, don't fuck with me about money." But he always did.

I never liked the way Duke Jordan played piano and neither did Max, but Bird kept him in the band anyway. Me and Max wanted Bud Powell on piano. Bird couldn't get him though, because Bud and Bird didn't get along. Bird used to go by Monk's house and try to talk to Bud, but Bud would just sit there and not say anything to him. Bud would come to a gig wearing a black hat, white shirt, black suit, black tie, black umbrella, cleaner than a motherfucker and wouldn't speak to nobody but me or Monk, if he was there. Bird would beg him to join the group and Bud would just look at him and drink. He wouldn't even smile at Bird. He'd just sit out in the audience drunk as a motherfucker, high off heroin. Bud got too high and stayed that way, like Bird. But he was a genius piano player-the best there was of all the bebop piano players.

Max used to always want to fight Duke Jordan for fucking up the tempo in the group. Max would get so mad that he wanted to physi-cally beat Duke up. Duke wouldn't listen. He'd just be playing and Bird would do something and Duke would lose time. This would fuck Max up if I wasn't counting the time for him. Then Max would scream at Duke, "Clear the fuck out of the way, motherfucker, you fucking up the time again."

We did replace Duke Jordan with Bud Powell on a record for Savoy around May of 1947. I think the record was called the Charlie Parker All Stars. It had everyone in Bird's regular group on it except Duke. I wrote a tune for the album called "Donna Lee," which was

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the first tune of mine that was ever recorded. But when the record came out it listed Bird as the composer. It wasn't Bird's fault, though. The record company just made a mistake and I didn't lose no money or nothing.

Bird was still under contract to Dial Records when he made this record for Savoy, but that kind of shit didn't ever stop Bird from doing what he wanted to do. Whoever had the money right then was who he went with. Bird recorded four albums that I played on in 1947, I think three on Dial and one on Savoy. He was real active musically that year. Some people think that 1947 was Bird's greatest year. I don't know about that and I don't like to make statements like that. All I know is he played great music then. And he played great music after that, too.

It was through "Donna Lee" that I met Gil Evans. He had heard the tune and went to see Bird about doing something with it. Bird told him that it wasn't his tune but that it was mine. Gil wanted the lead sheet for the tune in order to write an arrangement of it for the Claude Thornhill orchestra. I met Gil Evans for the first time when he approached me about arranging "Donna Lee." I told him he could do it if he got me a copy of Claude Thornhill's arrangement of "Rob-bin's Nest." He got it for me and after talking for a while and testing each other out, we found out that I liked the way Gil wrote music and he liked the way I played. We heard sound in the same way. I didn't really like what Thornhill did with Gil's arrangement of "Donna Lee," though. It was too slow and mannered for my taste. But I could hear the possibilities in Gil's arranging and writing on other things, so what they did on "Donna Lee" bothered me less, but it did bother me.

Anyway, I think that Savoy record with Bird was my best recording up until that time. I was getting more confident in my playing and was developing a style of my own. I was getting away from Dizzy's and Freddie Webster's influences. But it was at the Three Deuces, playing every night there with Bird and Max, that really helped me find my own voice. Musicians were constantly sitting in with the band and so we were always adjusting to different styles. Bird liked this shit a lot and I liked it too, sometimes. But I was more interested in developing the band's sound than I was in sitting in with a bunch of different motherfuckers every night. But Bird had come from that tradition in Kansas City and kept it going up at Minton's and the Heatwave in Harlem, so it was something he always liked to do and

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felt comfortable with. But when somebody who couldn't play the tunes sat in, then that was a drag.

Playing with Bird and being seen and heard every night on 52nd Street helped lead to my first record date as a leader. The record was called Miles Davis All Stars. I cut the record for the Savoy label. Charlie Parker played tenor sax, John Lewis piano, Nelson Boyd bass, and Max Roach drums. We went in the studio in August of 1947. I wrote and arranged four tunes for the album: "Milestones," "Little Willie Leaps," "Half Nelson," and "Sippin' at Bell's," a tune about a bar in Harlem. I also recorded on an album with Coleman Hawkins. So I was busy in 1947.

Irene had come back to New York with our two kids and we found a place out in Queens that was a lot bigger than the place we used to have. I was snorting coke, drinking, and smoking some by now. I didn't smoke pot because I never liked it. But I still wasn't using heroin. As a matter of fact. Bird once told me that if he ever caught me shooting heroin he would kill my ass. What was starting to get me into trouble though was all the women hanging around the band and me. But I still wasn't really into them yet. I was still so much into the music that I was even ignoring Irene.

There was a concert that a lot of cats played in at Lincoln Square, which was a ballroom that was located where Lincoln Center is now. Man, that was a great concert of All Stars. Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Charlie Par-ker, Red Rodney, Fats Navarro, Freddie Webster, and myself. I think it cost something like $1.50 to get in and hear all those great musi-cians. Some people danced and some just listened.

I remember that concert because it was one of the last times Fred-die Webster played in New York. When Freddie died, in 1947, it made me sick. Everybody else, too, especially Diz and Bird. Webs- that's what we called him-died in Chicago of an overdose of heroin that was meant for Sonny Stitt. Sonny had been beating everybody out of their money to support his habit. So he did it in Chicago when he and Freddie were playing there. Whoever he beat arranged to give him some bad shit, probably battery acid or strychnine. I don't know what it was. Anyway, Sonny gave it to Freddie, who shot it and died. I was sick over that for a long time. We were almost brothers, me and Freddie. I think about him, even today.

We went on the road to Detroit in November of 1947. We were supposed to play a club called the El Sino there, but they canceled

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on us after Bird showed up at the club and walked out. When Bird left New York he always had trouble buying heroin. Then he would drink a lot, which is what he did this night, and he couldn't play. After he got into the argument with the manager and walked out, he went back to the hotel and got so mad he threw his saxophone out of the window and smashed it up on the street. Billy Shaw bought him another one, though, a brand-new Selmer.

After coming back to New York and recording another record (which had J. J. Johnson on it), the group came back to Detroit to fulfill the broken contract we had with the El Sino club. This time everything was all right and Bird played his ass off. Betty Carter sat in with the group on this trip. She left right after this, though, to go with Lionel Hampton's band. I think it was in Detroit that Teddy Reig approached Bird to do another album for him on Savoy. Billy Shaw, who had a lot of influence over Bird and was, I think, a co-manager, told Bird that he had to stop recording for small labels like Dial and stick with a big label, like Savoy. See, everybody knew that the American Federation of Musicians was calling for a ban against recording because of a contract dispute. So Bird-who was always needing cash-signed with Reig and Savoy and went immediately into the studio. 1 think it was the Sun-day before Christmas.

After finishing this album-I think it was called Charlie Parker Quintet-and the one we made in Detroit, Bird went out to Califor-nia to join Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic for a concert tour of the Southwest. I went to Chicago to see my sister and her husband, Vincent Wilburn, for Christmas. Then I went back to New-York and joined up with Bird again. He had gone off to Mexico and married Doris, missing a concert to do it and fucking up Norman Granz. Bird got star billing on the tour. He was the main attraction, so when he missed that concert people got mad and took it out on Norman. But Bird didn't care about that kind of shit. He could always talk his way back into a person's good graces.

Bird was full of confidence after the Philharmonic tour. He had just been named best alto saxophonist of the year by Metronome magazine. He seemed happier than I had ever seen him. We played the Three Deuces again and the lines got longer each night. But it seemed to me that every time Bird was just about to get himself together, he always fucked up. It was as if he were afraid of living a normal life; people might think he was square or something. It was

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tragic, because he was such a genius and a nice person, when he wanted to be. But the constant heroin use really started to fuck with him. Drug dealers went everywhere we went. This shit started to get out of hand in 1948.

I remember this time in '48 when we were out in Chicago to play the Argyle Show Bar. The band was there to start the show but Bird hadn't shown up yet. When he did, he was so fucked up on heroin and alcohol he couldn't play. He was half asleep up on stage. Me and Max played four bars apiece trying to wake him up. The tune would be in F, and Bird would start playing a different tune. So Duke Jor-dan, who couldn't play anyway, would start to follow Bird's fucked-up lead. It was so bad, they fired us. Bird left the club and peed in a telephone booth, thinking it was a toilet. The white guy who owned the club told us that we had to pick up our money from the black union office. Now, they got this tough black union local in Chicago, right? And we ain't got no money. But I ain't worried about that because my sister lives in Chicago and I could stay there. They would give me some money. But I was worried about the rest of the band. Anyway, Bird said for us to meet him at the black musicians' local the next day to pick up our money.

Bird walks into Union President Gray's office and tells him that he wants his money. Now, keep in mind none of these guys like the way Bird plays anyway. They see him as an overrated junkie, all fucked up and everything, right? So when Bird says this to President Gray, Gray just reaches into his drawer and pulls out a gun. He tells us to get the fuck out of his office or he's going to shoot us. So we get the fuck out of there real quick. On the way out, Max Roach says to me, "Don't worry. Bird will get the money." Max believed Bird could do anything. Bird wanted to go back and fight the guy, but Duke Jordan stopped him. That black motherfucker Gray would have shot Bird, because he was a mean guy and didn't give a fuck about who Bird was.

But Bird got his revenge on the club owner of the Argyle when we came back there later in the year. While everybody was playing, Bird laid down his saxophone after finishing his solo, walked off the stage, and out into the Argyle lobby. He walked into a telephone booth in the lobby and peed all over the booth, man. I mean a whole lot of pee. It ran all out of the booth and out on the motherfucking carpet. Then, he came out of the booth smiling, zipped up his pants, and walked back up on the bandstand. All these white people were

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watching. Then he started playing again and played his ass off. He wasn't high or nothing that night; he was just telling the owner in so many words-without even saying them-not to fuck with him. And you know what? The owner didn't say shit, acted like he didn't see what Bird did. He paid him. But we never did get that money from Bird.

Around this time 52nd Street started to decline. People kept com-ing to the clubs to hear the music but the police were everywhere. There were a lot of hustlers on the street, so the police put pressure on the owners to clean up their club acts. The police started to arrest some of the musicians and a lot of the hustlers. People were coming to hear Bird's group, but other groups weren't doing so good. Some of the clubs on The Street had stopped featuring jazz and had turned into strip joints. Also, in the past, a lot of the crowd had been good-time-loving-servicemen, but now that the war was over, people were stiffer and not as lenient.

The music scene was hurt by the decline of The Street and the continuing recording ban. The music wasn't being documented. If you didn't hear bebop in the clubs then you forgot it. We were play-ing regularly at a few places, the Onyx and the Three Deuces. But Bird was fucking with everybody's money and that was messing with our heads. I used to look at Bird as if he were a god, but I wasn't looking at him that way no more. I was twenty-two years old, had a family, had just won the 1947 Esquire New Star Award for trumpet, and had tied Dizzy for first place in the critics' Down Beat poll. It wasn't that I had gotten a big head, but I was beginning to know who I was musically. Bird's not paying us was not right. He showed us no respect at all and I wasn't going to take it.

I remember one time the band went from Chicago to Indianapolis to play a gig. Max and I were roommates and went everywhere together. On the way we stopped in some little diner somewhere in Indiana, an integrated place, to get something to eat. We're sitting there eating, minding our own business, when four white guys walk in and sit down across from us. They were drinking beer and getting drunk, laughing and talking louder than anybody else, like drunken hillbillies can do. Being from East St. Louis, I knew what kind of white people they were, but Max, being from Brooklyn, didn't. I knew they were ignorant motherfuckers. And them drinking beer just made it worse, right? Anyway, so one of them leans over and says, "What do you boys do?"

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Now, Max, who is intelligent but who don't know what he's in for, turns to the guy and says with a smile, "We're musicians." See, Max don't understand, this is redneck-cracker shit. Being from Brooklyn, he ain't never been around it. So then the white guy says, "Why don't you play something for us if y'all so good?" When he said that, I knew what was coming next, so I just picked up the whole table-cloth with everything on it and threw it all over the motherfuckers before they could say or do anything. Max was throwing shit and screaming. Those white boys was so shocked they just sat there with their mouths open, not saying nothing. When we left I told Max, "Next time just ignore them; this ain't Brooklyn."

By the time I got to Indianapolis to play that night, I'm madder than a motherfucker. And here comes Bird, after we get through playing, telling us that he ain't got no money and that we'd have to wait until the next time we played to get paid because the owner didn't pay him. Everybody else goes for it, but me and Max go up to Bird's room. His wife, Doris, is there, and when we walk in I see Bird putting a lot of money under his pillow. So then he blurts out, "I ain't got no money. I need this for something else. I'll pay you when I get back to New York."

Max says, "Okay, Bird, anything you say."

I said, "Come on Max, he's taking our money, again. He's bull-shitting."

Max just shrugged his shoulders and didn't say anything. He was always on Bird's side no matter what Bird did, you know. So I said, "I want my fucking money, Bird."

Bird, who used to call me Junior, says, "You will not get one penny, Junior, nothing, no money at all."

Max says, "Yeah, I can dig that Bird, I can wait, yeah I can dig it. I can dig that. Miles, because Bird has been teaching us."

I picked up a beer bottle and broke it and with it poised in my hand said to Bird, "Motherfucker, give me my money or I'm gonna kill you." And I had him by his collar.

He reached under the pillow real fast then and handed me the money and said with a shit-eating grin on his motherfucking face, "See, you got mad, didn't you. Did you see that, Max? Miles got mad at me after all I've done for him."

Max comes down on his side, saving, "Miles, Bird was just testing you to see where you were at. Yeah, he didn't mean nothing."

That's when I seriously started to think about quitting the group.

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Bird high all the time, not paying us, and me working like a dog to keep the band and music together. He was fucking up. Plus, I thought too much of myself to be treated like that. And Doris, his wife, looked just like Olive Oyl to me. I can't stand nobody talking to me if they ain't together. Especially if they hand out shit like white people do when they think they're the boss. That's the way Doris was. She was nice and all and in Bird's corner, but she liked acting like the boss, especially over black people. When we would be going somewhere to play, Bird would send Doris down to the train station with the tickets. Here'd be this bitch looking just like Olive Oyl, standing in the middle of Penn Station lording it over a group of great musicians like she was our mother or something. I didn't like no ugly women acting like they owned me. But Doris loved it, being surrounded by all these fine black men. She was in heaven. And Bird was someplace high, or trying to get high. He was just insensitive.

Since 52nd Street was going down fast, the jazz scene was moving to 47th and Broadway. One place was the Boyal Roost, owned by a guy named Ralph Watkins. It was originally a chicken joint. But in 1948 Monte Kay talked Ralph into letting Symphony Sid produce a concert on an off-night there. Monte Kay was a young white guy who was hanging around the jazz scene. Back then he used to pass himself off as a light-skinned black guy. But when he got some money, he went back to being white. He's made millions producing black musi-cians. Anyway, Sid picked Tuesday night and did a concert with me and Bird, Tadd Dameron, Fats Navarro, and Dexter Gordon. They had a non-drinking section in the club where young people could come and sit and listen to the music for ninety cents. Birdland did that too, later on.

This was the time when I got to know Dexter Gordon. Dexter had come east in 1948 (or somewhere around that time), and he and I and Stan Levey started hanging out. I had first met him in Los Ange-les. Dexter was real hip and could play his ass off, so we used to go around and go to jams. Stan and I had lived together for a while in 1945, so we were good friends. Stan and Dexter were using heroin together but I was still clean. We would go down to 52nd Street to hang out. Dexter used to be super hip and dapper, with those big-shouldered suits everybody was wearing in those days. I was wearing my three-piece Brooks Brothers suits that I thought were super hip, too. You know, that St. Louis style shit. Niggers from St. Louis had the reputation for being sharp as a tack when it came to clothes. So couldn't nobody tell me nothing.

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But Dexter didn't think my dress style was all that hip. So he used to always tell me, "Jim" ("Jim" was an expression a lot of musicians used back then), "you can't hang with us looking and dressing like that. Why don't you wear some other shit, Jim? You gotta get some vines. You gotta go to F & M's," which was a clothing store on Broad-way in midtown.

"Why, Dexter, these some bad suits I'm wearing. I paid a lot of money for this shit."

"Miles, that ain't it, 'cause the shit ain't hip. See, it ain't got noth-ing to do with money; it's got something to do with hipness, Jim, and that shit you got on ain't nowhere near hip. You gotta get some of them big-shouldered suits and Mr. B shirts if you want to be hip, Miles."

So I'd say, all hurt and shit, "But Dex, man, these are nice clothes."

"I know you think they hip, Miles, but they ain't. I can't be seen with nobody wearing no square shit like you be wearing. And you playing in Bird's band? The hippest band in the world? Man, you oughta know better."

I was hurt. I always respected Dexter because I thought he was super hip-one of the hippest and cleanest young cats on the whole music scene back then. Then one day he said, "Man, why don't you grow a moustache? Or a beard?"

"How, Dexter? I ain't even got no hair growing nowhere much except on my head and a little bit under by arms and around my dick! My family got a lot of Indian blood, and niggers and Indians don't grow beards and be hairy on their faces. My chest is smooth as a tomato, Dexter."

"Well, Jim, you gotta do something. You can't be hanging with us looking like you looking, 'cause you'll embarrass me. Why don't you get you some hip vines since you can't grow no hair?"

So I saved up forty-seven dollars and went down to F & M's and bought me a gray, big-shouldered suit that looked like it was too big for me. That's the suit I had on in all them pictures while I was in Bird's band in 1948 and even in my own publicity shot when I had that process in my hair. After I got that suit from F & M's, Dexter came up to me grinning that big grin of his and towering over me, patting me on my back, saying, "Yeah, Jim, now you looking like something, now you hip. You can hang with us." He was something else.

More and more now I was really leading Bird's band because he was never around except to play and pick up his money. I was show-

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ing Duke chords every day, hoping he would pick up shit, but he never did listen. We never got along. Bird wouldn't fire him, and I couldn't because it wasn't my band. I'd ask Bird to fire him all the lime. Me and Max wanted Bud Powell in the band instead of Duke Jordan. But Bird stuck with Duke.

But there was a problem with Bud. What happened was that one night a few years earlier be had gone up to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem dressed in his all-black outfit that he used to like to wear. He had his boys from the Bronx with him, who, he used to brag, "would kick anybody's ass." So he goes up to the Savoy without any money in his pocket, and the bouncer, who knew him, told him he couldn't go in without any money. But tie's saving this to Bud Powell, the greatest young piano player in the world, and Bud knew this. So Bud just walked right past the motherfucker. The bouncer did what he was being paid to do. He broke Bud's head all the way open, cracked him upside his head with a pistol.

After that, Bud started shooting heroin like il was going out of style, and he was the last person who should have been shooting heroin, because it made him crazy. And he never could drink but now he started drinking like it was going out of style. too. Then Bud started acting crazy, throwing fits and going for weeks not speaking to anyone, including his mother and his oldest friends. Finally his mother sent him over to the Bellevue psychiatric ward in New York City; this was in 1946. They started giving him shock treatments. They really thought he was crazy, too.

So that was that. After them shock treatments, Bud wasn't never the same, as a musician and as a person. Before Bud went to Belle-vue, everything he played had a wrinkle in it: there was always some-thing different about the way the music came off. Man, after they bashed his head in and gave him shock treatments, they would have done better cutting off his hands, instead of cutting off his creativity. Sometimes I used to wonder if them white doctors gave him shock treatments on purpose, to cut him off from himself, like they did to Bird. But Bird and Bud were different. Where Bird was ornery, Bud was passive. Bird survived his shock treatments; Bud didn't.

Before all this happened. Bud Powell was a bad motherfucker. He was the missing link that kept our band from really being maybe the greatest bebop group of all time. With Max pushing Bird and Bird pushing Bud, and me floating over all that bad music-man, it's too painful to think about. Al Haig. the piano player Bird had in the

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group in 1948, played good enough. He was all right. And John Lewis, who also played with us, played nice enough, too. But Duke Jordan was just there taking up space. And Tommy Potter used to choke the bass like he was strangling somebody he hated. We'd always be saying to him, "Tommy, let that woman loose!" Although Tommy's time wasn't bad. But if Bud had been there, well, what can you say; it didn't happen, but it could have happened.

For some reason, Bud's mother trusted and liked me. But then, people used to like me a lot, I mean all kinds of people. Sometimes I think it might have had something to do with the fact that I used to be a paper boy back in East St. Louis. Having a paper route, you had to learn to talk to all kinds of people. So Bud's mother liked me because whenever I saw her, I talked to her. After Bud went crazy like he did, she would let him go places with me. She knew I hardly drank or used drugs like a lot of the other people always hanging around Bud.

I would come by and sneak him a bottle of beer-he couldn't take more than that without going off in his head. He would sip on that, sit there, and say nothing. He would sit there in front of the piano in their apartment up on St. Nicholas in Harlem. I would ask him to play "Cherokee," and he would, brilliantly. He was like a thorough-bred horse on the piano, even after he was ill. And he would try to play after he was sick because he never thought he couldn't. But no matter how great he might play "Cherokee" or anything else after he got sick he could never play the way he could before. But not to know how to play, man, Bud didn't know what that was, at least not inside his own head. Bird was the same way. In fact, Bird and Bud are the only two musicians that I've known like that.

Sometimes, when I was living in Harlem, Bud would come over to my apartment up on 147th Street and not say anything. He did this every day for two weeks one time. Didn't say a word to nobody, me or Irene or our two kids. He would just sit there and stare off into space with this sweet smile on his face.

Years later, in 1959, we went on tour, me and Lester Young-it was the same year that Lester died-and Bud. Bud wouldn't say nothing to nobody; he'd just sit there and smile. He used to look at this musician named Charlie Carpenter. One day Bud was sitting there as usual, not saying nothing to nobody, just smiling at Charlie. So Charlie said, "Bud, what are you always smiling about?" Bud, without changing expression, said, "You." Lester Young just fell out

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laughing, because Charlie was a sad motherfucker and that's what Bud was smiling about all the time.

Before that, when Bud got out of the crazy house where they had put him, he came downtown one night to listen to Bird's band, wear-ing his usual black suit, black umbrella, white shirt, black tie, black shoes, black socks, and his black hat. We came outside on break and there he was standing there, real clean and sober. Now, you see, the reason Bird didn't want Bud in the band was not because he didn't like the way he played. He told Max and me that he didn't want Bud in the band because he "got too high." Now can you imagine Bird' saying that somebody got "too high"? As high as he got?

So this time Max and me said, "Bud, stay right here, we'll be right back. Don't go nowhere." He just grinned at us and didn't say any-thing. We ran into the club, did our set, and told Bird, "Bud's outside and he's clean."

Bird said, "Oh, yeah? I don't believe it."

We said, "Come on, Bird, we'll show you." So me and Max took Bird outside and there was Bud standing by the car where we had left him, like a zombie. He looked at Bird and his eyes rolled up in his head. Then he just started sliding right down the side of the motherfucking car, to the ground. "Bud, where you been?" I said. He just mumbled something about how he had been around the corner to the White Rose tavern. He had gotten drunk that quick.

Later, after he got so far gone, he wouldn't even hardly talk to nobody. It was a shame. He was one of the greatest piano players in this century.

Things in the band were bad by now. Bird was hocking his horn all the time. He didn't have one most of the time, so he was borrowing other people's saxophones. It got so bad that the Three Deuces had a guy, I think he was a janitor or something, who would go to the pawnshop every day just to get Bird's horn out of hock and then return it to the pawnshop after Bird got through playing.

By this time, Max and I were confident we could make it by our-selves and we were fed up with Bird's childish', stupid bullshit. All we wanted to do was play great music, and Bird was acting like a fool, some kind of motherfucking clown. He was treating us like we were nothing, like we were one foot high, and we knew different.

One time at the Three Deuces Bird came in late and went in the dressing room, where he opened up sardines and crackers. The owner was trying to get him to hurry up to the bandstand and Bird

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was just casually eating, grinning like a motherfucking fool, you know what I mean? The owner was begging him to play and Bird was offering him crackers. Man, that was a funny scene. I laughed until I almost died. Finally he came on out of the dressing room and played. But by that time he had made fools out of the owners, who never forgot it. After that, Bird moved the group to the Royal Roost and we never played the Three Deuces again.

From, I think, September of 1948 until December of that year, we played the Royal Roost. It was good at the Roost because Symphony Sid was broadcasting from there and so we were heard by a wider audience. I also started playing with other groups besides Bird's and with my own band. The music I played during this time was what I played with Bird and other groups, but also what I was playing of my own music, which was a lot different from the other stuff. I was finding my own voice and that's what I was mainly interested in.

It was right around this time that Bird's group got to record the first time in 1948, I think it was in September. I got Bird to replace Duke Jordan with John Lewis on that record. Duke got real mad with me, but I didn't care what he thought because I was only inter-ested in the music. Curly Russell was on this record, too.

Later, Al Haig came into the group as Duke's permanent replace-ment. This was around December of 1948.1 wasn't crazy about Bird bringing in Al. I didn't have nothing against him personally but thought that John Lewis and Tadd Dameron were better piano play-ers. I think Bird's decision had something to do with showing every-body that he, not me, was in control. Everybody knew who I wanted in the group, so for Bird it might have been about saving face. I don't know really. Bird and I never talked too much, probably fifteen min-utes at the most through all the time I knew him. And in 1948 we were talking less than we had before. After Al Haig was brought in, Bird replaced Tommy Potter with Curly Russell. Then he switched back up and replaced Curly with Tommy.

Right after this I brought a group, a nonet, into the Roost. I had Max Roach, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, Al McKibbon on bass and Kenny Hagood on vocals. I also had Michael Zwerin on trombone, Junior Collins on French horn, and Bill Barber on tuba. I had started working with Gil Evans some time before this and he had done the arrangements.

Gil had stopped arranging for Claude Thornhill's band in the sum-mer of 1948. He had hoped that he could write and arrange for Bird.

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But Bird never had time to listen to what Gil did, because for Bird, Gil only provided him with a convenient place to eat, drink, shit, and be close to 52nd Street, since Gil had an apartment over on 55th Street. When Bird did finally listen to Gil's music, he liked it. But by that time Gil didn't want to work with Bird.

Gil and I had already started doing things together and everything was going real well for us. I was looking for a vehicle where I could solo more in the style that I was hearing. My music was a little slower and not so intense as Bird's. My conversations with Gil about exper-imenting with more subtle voicing and shit were exciting to me. Gerry Mulligan, Gil, and I started talking about forming this group. We thought nine pieces would be the right amount of musicians to be in the band. Gil and Gerry had decided what the instruments in the band would be before I really came into the discussions. But the theory, the musical interpretation and what the band would play, was my idea.

I hired the rehearsal halls, called the rehearsals, and got things done. I was doing this shit with Gil and Gerry on the side from the summer of 1948 until we recorded in January and April of 1949 and then again in March 1950. I got us some jobs and made the contact at Capitol Records to do the recording. But working with Gil really got me into writing compositions. I would play them for Gil on the piano at his apartment.

I remember when we started to get the nonet together that I wanted Sonny Stitt on alto saxophone. Sonny sounded a lot like Bird, so I thought of him right away. But Gerry Mulligan wanted Lee Konitz because he had a light sound rather than a hard bebop sound. He felt that this kind of sound was what was going to make the album and the band different. Gerry felt that with me, Al McKibbon, Max Roach, and John Lewis all in the group and all coming from bebop, it might just be the same old thing all over again, so I took his advice and hired Lee Konitz.

Max was hanging out with Gil and Gerry and me over at Gil's and so was John Lewis, so they knew what we wanted to do. Al Mc-Kibbon too. We also wanted J. J. Johnson, but he was traveling with Illinois Jacquet's band, so I thought about Ted Kelly, who was playing trombone with Dizzy's band. But he was busy and couldn't make it. So we settled on a white guy, Michael Zwerin, who was younger than me. I had met him up at Minton's one night when he was sitting in and asked him if he could rehearse the next day with us at Nola's Studio. He made it and was in the band.

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See, this whole idea started out just as an experiment, a collabo-rative experiment. Then a lot of black musicians came down on my case about their not having work, and here I was hiring white guys in my band. So I just told them that if a guy could play as good as Lee Konitz played-that's who they were mad about most, because there were a lot of black alto players around-I would hire him every time, and I wouldn't give a damn if he was green with red breath. I'm hiring a motherfucker to play, not for what color he is. When I told them that, a lot of them got off my case. But a few of them stayed mad with me.

Anyway, Monte Kay booked us into the Royal Roost for two weeks. When we opened up at the Roost, I had the club put up a sign outside that said, "Miles Davis's Nonet; Arrangements by Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, and John Lewis." I had to fight like hell with Ralph Wat-kins, the owner of the Roost, to get him to do this. He didn't want to do the shit in the first place, because he felt it was too much for him to be paying nine motherfuckers when he could have paid five. But Monte Kay talked him into it. I didn't like Watkins too much, but I respected him for taking the chance that he did. We played the Royal Roost for two weeks in late August and September of 1948, taking second billing to Count Basie's orchestra.

A lot of people thought the shit we were playing was strange. I remember Barry Ulanov of Metronome magazine being a little con-fused about the music we played. Count Basie used to listen every night that we were there opposite him, and he liked it. He told me that it was "slow and strange, but good, real good." A lot of the other musicians who used to come hear the band liked it also, including Bird. But Pete Rugolo of Capitol Records really liked what he heard and he asked me if he could record us for Capitol when the recording ban was over.

Later in September I took another group into the Roost, with Lee Konitz, Al McKibbon, John Lewis, Kenny Hagood, and Max Roach. Symphony Sid broadcast this gig and recorded it, so there was a record of what we played. That group was happening, man. We got down on that one time we played together, you know. Max was playing his ass off.

But around this time, Gil went into a musical writing slump. It Would take him a week to write eight bars. He finally got it together, though, and wrote a tune called "Moon Dreams" and some things for "Boplicity" for Birth of the Cool. The Birth of the Cool album came from some of the sessions we did trying to sound like Claude

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Thornhill's band. We wanted that sound, but the difference was that we wanted it as small as possible. I said it had to be the voicing of a quartet, with soprano, alto, baritone, and bass voices. We had to have tenor, half-alto, and half-bass. I was the soprano voice, Lee Konitz was the alto. We had another voice in a French horn and a baritone voice, which was a bass tuba. We had alto and soprano up top-me and Lee Konitz. We also used the French horn for the alto voicing and the baritone sax for baritone voicing and bass tuba for bass voicing. I looked at the group like it was a choir, a choir that was a quartet. A lot of people put the baritone sax on the bottom, but it's not a bottom instrument, like a tuba is. The tuba is a bass instrument. I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices, and they did.

Gerry Mulligan would double with Lee sometimes and then double with me, and with Bill Barber, who was always on the bottom playing bass tuba. Sometimes he would come up in the register and some-times we'd have him bring the sound up. And it worked.

We had one day in the studio with the nonet-I think it was in January 1949. Kai Winding had replaced Michael Zwerin, who had to go back to college, and Al Haig replaced John Lewis on piano, and Joe Shulman took Al McKibbon's place. At this first session I think we recorded "Jeru," "Move," "Godchild," and "Budo." We didn't use any of Gil's arrangements at that session because Pete Rugolo wanted to record the faster and medium-tempo tunes first. That first session went off almost without a hitch. Everybody played well, and Max was pushing everybody. I liked the way everybody played that day. Capitol Records liked the music so much that they released "Move" and "Budo" as 78s about a month after