Ornette sat in the front row of Grace Cathedral, not much enjoying the priest’s encomiums. It was true that his mother, April Evans, had been one of the great jazz singers. Her many recordings alone would confirm it. But it was her manner on stage and the particular timbre that singing before a crowd gave to her voice that made going to a club, buying the expensive tickets, and enjoying the overpriced drinks worth everything from the moment she stepped onto the stand. Joy was mixed with grief in her singing, depending on the lyrics and, more important, the arrangements she had written for each of the songs. She was a natural musician who had gotten her training in little Upper Grant Avenue dumps when she was first trying to sing professionally, to the stands of important San Francisco clubs like Keystone Korner, where she made her first live recording as a twenty-five year old, and then on to New York, Paris, Tokyo, et. al.
Ornette himself had loved his mother’s voice, even as her travel schedule so often put him in the hands of others for weeks at a time. The filipina Jocelyn until he was seven, and then the mexicanas Porfíria and María Luz through his high school years. He cared for these women; but even more, he cared about his mother’s absences. He missed her. When she was at home, though, she put most of her music aside in order to play with her little boy, escort him to school at Saints Peter and Paul, cook things that he especially liked…eventually touting his beginnings as a journalist at Galileo High School. He wrote mostly about music. Ornette became special to a lot of musicians because his mother had educated him about the music itself. He could read charts and knew about performance and the other struggles that you have to go through to have any kind of authority in front of an audience. Improvisation itself. But also handling the guys in the band, the business of it all, the travel arrangements, the troubles getting paid. Etc.
“Your mother tell you all this, man?” he was once asked by the blues singer Charles Brown just a year before Brown’s death. Ornette, a junior in high school, showed up for the interview at Brown’s home in Oakland, to be asked by the singer, with his famous smile, if Ornette had been born just that week. Brown clapped Ornette on the back as the young man passed through the front door. “Just a kid!” But Brown was a fan of April Evans’s work, so that Ornette had enough of an opening to be tolerated by the great man, and the interview went well. “You can come back whenever you want, child,” Brown said as Ornette made his way down the hallway toward the front door.
One of Ornette’s special memories was that of watching his mother advise the members of the various bands that had backed her. Usually, they were made up of four or five musicians, and April always ran the show. This was entertaining for Ornette because the musicians were usually men, and thus sometimes frustrated that they were backing up a woman — “You kiddin’?” — who also had the balls — “You hear what she said to me?” — to write all the charts. It happened that she was white, which was also a problem for some of her sidemen. These whisperings among the musicians had to remain close to the vest, though, because if April heard them, or heard of them, you were gone. Ornette, sitting on a chair at the empty Great American Music Hall on a random afternoon, a glass of ginger ale before him at the table, his backpack on the floor next to him and a junior high school homework assignment spread out on the barren bar table before him, enjoyed watching the musicians’ occasional miffed silence during rehearsals. Artistically, April was way on the edge. It was clear, always, that she was inventing. Some of these musicians would nonetheless dismiss her because she so knew what she was doing. If April heard about that, you were especially gone. Ornette now and then even informed on those guys who were unhappy. He didn’t care. Musicians who complained were just complainers, and Ornette, who loved his mother, also knew well what she could do.
Few had April Evans’s improvisational chops. Also, for every disgruntled piano player, there were others that she could call on. The only stipulation was that the excellence of each’s playing had to be matched with the good judgment not to cross April musically. There were enough such players to go around, so her ultimate backup guys were terrific, and usually a lot of fun.
But now, April was in her coffin on the altar at Grace Cathedral. It was an open coffin, and he could see the clear line of her profile where it rose from the white satin pillow on which her head rested. Ornette, now forty, held to the cotton handkerchief he had brought from his jacket pocket. The dark brown skin below his eyes shined with the residue of tears that the handkerchief had not been able to catch. His glasses, which reminded people of Dizzy Gillespie’s, had sometimes fogged up, so that Ornette had to remove them a few times during the ceremony. The frames were thick and black and gave to his face the same kind of professorial authority that Dizzy’s had had. Ornette had a more serious personality than the great trumpeter’s, something he felt enhanced his credibility for the musicians about whom he wrote. They were often intimidated by writers, feeling that they had to get pontifical when being interviewed. Ornette’s personal kindness included the ability to put musicians at ease, particularly as it grew clear to them that he too knew what he was doing.
April had died on tour, in Manhattan, a heart attack. Ornette, traveling with her at the time, had had to deal with the police officers and medical people. The coroner guy. The Birdland people. The woman from the New York Times. They were all of them kind. Even the cops were kind, despite the fact that at first they concluded Ornette was just another black man. Their kindness quotient rose once they understood that the deceased was his mother, whom they could not deny was white.
The simple act of answering their questions, which were routine, cluttered Ornette’s heart with resentment. He understood what these people had to do. He did sympathize with the reasons for their questions. But it was not until the airplane trip home that Ornette could begin actually to mourn his mother. It began in the moment he broke the news to his mother’s secretary Marvin, a gay man who had been working for her for many years. Marvin’s need to sit down the moment he got the news from Ornette sounded, over the phone, like a muffled crash, as though several packages had dropped to the floor. Ornette waited, wishing to ask Marvin if he were okay. He remained silent because he heard Marvin’s continued weeping. Marvin attempted apologies but could not make it through them. Ornette listened in silence. He had known Marvin since he was sixteen.
The crowd left Grace Cathedral, many of them pausing on the steps to wait for Ornette. He greeted many, accepting their hugs and sentiments. Most declared that they would be attending the memorial concert at the SFJazz main hall the following week. Ornette had personally invited a number of musicians who were not on tour somewhere. All had gladly accepted. The crowd dispersed from the steps, leaving Ornette to speak with stragglers.
An old man stood to the side of the labyrinth that is imprinted on the upper plaza before the cathedral. The labyrinth itself provides a kind of thoughtful path-seeking to anyone who wishes to walk it, even those who may have few if any Episcopalian sentiments. Around the outside, it forms a circle, and you follow its many pathways inside, sometimes encountering a dead end, other times flowing through a corner that leads to another and then, maybe, sometimes, another. There is contemplative grace in the labyrinth. Even when you walk into a blocked corner, you can take advantage of the moment to question why such a stop may be a good thing. You turn back, pleased with fresh direction.
Thoughtfulness and quiet, back and forth, up and around.
He was a very thin, very black man. A black business suit, white shirt, and neat silk necktie, properly tied and without wrinkles where it lay against the front of the shirt. A folded overcoat over his left arm. His black leather shoes had not one scuff. He even wore a fedora, of the sort you can see in photos of Martin Luther King Jr. as a young man. Ornette imagined that, suddenly, he had been transported into the early Civil Rights movement, and that this man — a playwright, an activist A.M.E. pastor, an historian of black culture — was an acquaintance of James Baldwin (his editor, maybe) or of the recently assassinated Malcolm X.
“Ornette?”
He approached Ornette with an air of shy rectitude, buttoning and unbuttoning his suit coat.
“Yes.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t.”
“So, I hope this isn’t too much of a surprise.”
Ornette extended his hand. “Not a worry. Yes, I’m Ornette Evans.”
“Named after the great saxophonist.”
“Yes, he was a friend of my mother.”
“I know that.”
“You do?” Ornette stood back and surveyed the other man’s eyes. They looked into his. A moment of kindness seemed to overtake the introduction. Finally, the man spoke.
“I’m your father.”
Ornette felt the man’s handshake grow even more firm. A shroud of silence fell across both of them.
“My name is Buddy Briggs.”
Sympathetic to Ornette’s sudden trembling, and now smiling as he released the younger man’s hand, Buddy suggested they get coffee.
A bit unhinged, Ornette made small talk as he escorted Buddy in an Uber to the Caffe Trieste in North Beach. Once a hang-out for the beatnik crowd in the 1950s, it remains one for those few still left alive who totter in all alone. The café remains a haven for young poets and others wishing to emulate the notoriety of those originals, so that it is frequently crowded. Silent, angry writers, already poverty stricken — as were the beatniks themselves — are uniformly armed with ballpoint pens and scuffed notepads. They use the paper for composing hurried complaints in much-considered, much scratched-out and replaced language. Some of the complaints contain arbitrarily shortened lines so that they pretend to verse. There is also a fair amount of bitter intoning in the café’s conversation, usually on political subjects. Republicans are not welcome at The Trieste. But neither are Democrats. It is generally agreed upon that both parties remain in thrall to billionaire corporate crime, and so are not to be trusted. Che Guevara still has high approval here.
Times have changed since the 1950s. The laptop computer, for example, has been added to the tools of poetic inquiry, but has done little to improve the general sullenness of the Trieste’s clientele.
Ornette stood in line with Buddy, who looked through the café, mentioning that it reminded him of a lot of places in The Village in New York. “Funny that the white avant-garde never changes, isn‘t it?” he said as they sat down at one of the tables inside the long window that borders Grant Avenue. He unbuttoned his overcoat. He had ordered a muffin and a latte. Placing his fedora on the bench next to him, he fingered the muffin in silence.
“You live in New York?” Ornette said. He was trying to maintain some sort of calm. It was difficult because his mother had told him so little about his father. “Oh, Ornette, it was a fling,” she had said over dinner on his twenty-first birthday. Ornette, feeling that this was perhaps the most important birthday ever, sought an explanation from April that was more than just the few detail-less thoughts she had expressed about his paternity since he had been little. “The only thing I really knew was that, once I discovered I had you…you know…” She pointed to her tummy. “I wasn’t going to lose you. I just knew that I wanted you. I so wanted you.”
“But what about him?” Ornette said.
April leaned forward, and Ornette recognized the resolve in her wordlessness.
“What about him, Mother?”
“I can’t….” April shrugged, looking away. “I just can’t, Ornette. I’m sorry.”
The conversation between the two men had been tentative at best. Ornette held his breath. He actually was afraid that Buddy would tell him things about April that he did not wish to hear. Who is this guy? What did he do to her?
“Did she ever speak about me?” Buddy asked.
Ornette shook his head. “All she said was that, if I ever were to meet my father, I should ask him.”
Buddy nodded. He too held back.
“Are you a musician?”
“I was.” Buddy sipped from his coffee. “When I met your mother.” He winced with the coffee’s bitterness. “I still am, sometimes. But mostly I’m a teacher.”
“Where?”
“The Harlem School of The Arts.”
“What instrument?”
“The trumpet.”
Ornette smiled. “Yeah, she liked the trumpet.” He now fingered the pastry before him, aware that Buddy was waiting. “Did she like you?”
Buddy winced. Ornette knew the question was nervy. Insulting, even. But he did not wish to simply dance around the questions of who his father was, and how it was that this fellow was his father. He had been dancing around such questions since the day of his birth.
Buddy swallowed. “The day she told me to leave, she also said that she had once thought she couldn’t live without me.”
“How did you meet?”
“She had a gig at Bradley’s, in The Village, and she needed somebody. I went to the club to play for her, and she liked what I was doing.”
“So, she hired you.”
“Yes.” Buddy took up his latte and sipped from it. He replaced the mug on the table. His eyes quivered back and forth across it. “And I fell in love with her.”
Ornette’s fingers caressed the brim of his own mug. It had not occurred to him that Buddy could possibly be deeply saddened by the passing of his…what had his mother called it? His fling? So long ago. But he understood now that Buddy was himself overcome with sorrow. Buddy exhaled, a substitute for a moan.
“I did love her.” He lifted his eyes to Ornette’s. “I did.” He took in another breath. “She never spoke with you about me?”
Ornette shook his head.
“I wouldn’t have expected so. I made a terrible mistake, Ornette.” Buddy sipped again from the coffee. “She was so happy when she learned she had you.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“Oh, she was. It was me, though, Ornette. It was me who was unhappy.”
“Why?”
Buddy reached for the last of the muffin, which had the task of absorbing his sadness. He crumbled it into small shards that fell to its plate.
“I thought then that it was just some kind of game. I thought we’d just been playin’, see?” Buddy pushed the shards together into a small pile. “I’m sure that, for you, that’s an insult, Ornette.”
“It is. But if she couldn’t live without you…that’s more than just playin’.”
“It makes sense that’s how you’d feel.”
“Look, I’m too…too unnerved to know how I feel.”
Buddy sighed. Ornette recognized embarrassment.
“Why are you here now? Why are you telling me this, when you could have shown up—”
“Years ago,” Buddy said.
“Yeah. Years!” Ornette grumbled to himself. Impatience flowed from him. “What was the mistake?”
The pause that resulted brought the conversation to suppression and darkness. Buddy was searching the words. Ornette enjoyed his father’s discomfort.
“Have you done any heroin?” Buddy said.
Ornette had studied the musicians and the times from the 1940s on, and knew well what had taken place. He had memorized a list of several dozen who had suffered from their addictions or, especially so, those who had died from them. He actually smiled with the recollection that he had asked his mother, when he was twelve, why, instead of naming him Ornette, she had not named him Charlie Parker Evans. April had laughed. On occasion she sang like Parker played, which caused Ornette such delight that she wrote a tune named “Bird’s Havin’ Fun.” It was named after Parker and based on a lick of his that she loved, which she dedicated to Ornette and sang whenever Ornette was in the audience.
Charlie Parker. Ornette sighed. “I’ve stayed away from all that.”
“Well, I tried and tried to stay away.” Buddy took the lapels of his overcoat into his hands and pulled them close to each other. He appeared to want to hide himself within them. “But I failed.” He let out a breath. “For years.”
“And she left you.”
“Yes, even though the horse wasn’t enough all on its own.”
Ornette wondered if maybe it was too late for him to punish Buddy. Ornette’s actual anger with his father, whoever he may have been, had been palpable. But he now saw that Buddy Briggs was not some soulless monster, as he had figured this disappeared, forgotten man must be. Disappeared, yes. Cast from memory, for sure, although not without continued angry suspicion. But here, in his overcoat, a music teacher, a fedora and muffin, the Harlem School of The Arts, a man seeking forgiveness….
“Although she did hate the heroin,” Buddy said.
Ornette looked away, into the café. “Of course!”
“Wait, Ornette. Please. Let me tell you.” Buddy straightened his tie. When he looked up, he saw that Ornette’s impatience was turning to exasperation. “There’s more.”
Ornette kept still. After a moment, he spoke. “Look, I’ve had two questions about you, almost since I was born.”
Buddy rested a hand on the table, its fingers clenching and loosening.
“Simple questions.” Ornette was besieged by the irony that, after so many years of sequestering these questions in silence, he actually was now about to liberate them. “’Who was he?’ is one of them.”
“What’s the other?”
“‘Where is he?’”
Buddy removed his overcoat and folded it on the bench to his side. He placed the fedora on top of it. His hair was very close-cut and white. Ornette, wondering from where this excessive neatness had come…in the midst of an addiction, in the lies Ornette assumed Buddy must have told his mother, in his maybe scattered, certainly sudden abandonment of her….
“She wanted me to go solo,” Buddy said. “Maybe you remember she liked all that jazz-funk stuff. You know, the 1970s.”
“I do. John McLaughlin. Wayne Shorter.”
“Especially Miles, of course.”
Ornette grinned. All that music was now long gone, but he remembered sitting with his mother as a ten-year-old and listening to some of those records, which even then were marked by age. The rugged rhythms and accents on them, the guitars, the insistence on the probability that you would get up and dance around the world if only to hear more of it. April had once said to her son, shaking her head, “It’s not for me, Ornette. I couldn’t sing to it. But listen to it anyway. Just listen to it!”
Ornette still had those records.
“She thought there was a place for me in it…you know, as a front man.”
Ornette laughed. “Did she want you to wear those hippy clothes, like Miles did?”
Buddy nodded. He too appeared briefly gleeful. Briefly. “She did. She bought the clothes for me. She told me what to wear.” He looked down at his tie and the front of the shirt, smoothing them. “It’s been a while since I—”
“You don’t still have them?”
“I do. But I’d be kind of embarrassed.” Buddy adjusted the knot of his tie. “I’m, you know, seventy-three.”
“You said there’s more, Buddy.”
“Yes, we argued.”
“About what?”
“I didn’t think at the time that any woman should be telling me what to do on my instrument.”
Ornette took this in with considerable disappointment.
“You know, what kind of music I should play.”
His father was one of those complainers. He imagined Buddy sitting on a wooden stool on the stand, listening to April’s criticisms while fingering his silly Jimmy Hendrix feathers and red felt pants, the flower-power shirt and the Elton John-style sunglasses, fuming at her. What the fuck does this bitch know?
“She had fired me. Often.”
“But she took you back?”
“She did. She—”
“That’s unheard of!”
“I know. I watched her fire many guys. But, Ornette…. She, she—” Buddy looked to the floor.
“She got rid of a ton of musicians.”
“That’s right.” Buddy took in a breath, held it as though considering its worth, and let it out. “The mistake was that I just continued arguing with her. She wouldn’t let it go.”
“No, no, Buddy.”
Buddy held up.
“You wouldn’t let it go.”
Buddy’s eyes fell toward the floor once more.
“And that was your mistake.”
Buddy swallowed, turned to the side, and looked out onto Grant Avenue. The neighborhood here retains the feel of post-earthquake San Francisco, a century before the recent corporate tsunami of tech companies came ashore. Few buildings on this stretch of Grant Avenue have more than two floors, and almost every one of them has a ground-floor storefront, a bar, or a club. Generally, the music issuing from their doors is decades-old blues, soul, or jazz, not very well played serenades to the much-faded paint on the buildings. The occupants of the clubs often look as decrepit as the storefronts themselves.
Looking up the street himself, Ornette recalled the many times he had been sent on an errand to the Liguria Bakery a couple blocks away. April would have given him the Saturday morning task of buying a few slices of its focaccia.
“I was good on that horn, Ornette.”
“I expect you were. April wouldn’t have hired you.”
“And except for those clothes, I was good at that kind of music. You know, I played with Shorter. I played with Keith Jarrett.” Buddy shrugged. “For a short time.”
“On any of their records?”
Buddy appeared stricken, even ill for a moment. “Well…no.”
“The heroin?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t expect she wanted you back either.”
Buddy leaned to the side. His right hand fell to the bench as though he had received some sort of blow. “I tried.”
“What did she say?”
“And there was the night I hit her.”
“You what?”
“I—”
“Nobody hit my mother.”
“Twice,” Buddy said.
Ornette struggled with the quickening, deepened hatred for Buddy that now invaded him. There was much conversation in the café, but Ornette heard none of it.
“She wanted me off the heroin, of course. She saw I had lost my…abilities? They’d been overcome, see?”
“By your habit.”
“Yes, and I preferred the habit.”
“The music didn’t matter?”
“Not then.” Buddy shrugged. “No.”
“And that made her angry.”
“Very.”
“And she wouldn’t shut up.”
“Right. So….” Buddy’s voice quieted to a simple expelled breath.
Ornette’s hands lay open, palms down, on his knees, and he could feel what seemed to be their own articulate wish to smother this guy…this monster sitting across from him.
“It was then that she really threw me out,” Buddy said.
“Good. I don’t blame her.”
“I haven’t either since that day. I haven’t had the right to.” Buddy took up his fedora and fingered its brim. “She was pregnant.” Doing so gave him the appearance of an afflicted elder, addled and searching.
“Did you try to contact her?”
“For years.”
“And she turned you down.”
“Flat.”
“That’s good, too.”
“Ten years ago was the latest,” Buddy said. “In New York.”
“I don’t believe she would entertain such a thing.”
“She knew I loved her, Ornette. I stopped the heroin. It was the most ferocious physical difficulty I ever…ever…. I haven’t done any of it since you were born. I apologized so often, and she never told me not to apologize. She always listened to my apologies.”
“Although she didn’t let you back in.”
“Never.”
Ornette recalled one Saturday morning when he had returned home from the Liguria, the paper-wrapped slices of focaccia tied with a string. He was fifteen. He placed the key into the front door lock of their apartment and ran up the entry stairs.
“Mom!”
The apartment door clattered shut behind him, and he threw his jacket onto a chair, took the package into both hands, and hurried toward the living room. He knew April would want to cut two slices from the bread and eat them right away, a custom mother and son cherished together. He stopped after a few steps, though, intimidated by what he heard.
“I don’t want to talk with you!”
April’s speaking voice had little of the authority with which she sang. Ornette had noticed this among a number of the singers to whom she had introduced him. It was as though they had two voices…one for the routine effort of getting through the day; the other for the expression of such magic as their souls contained. In his mother’s case, it was a trove of magic like few others. But now, on the phone….
April let out a stifled moan. “Please don’t do this!”
Ornette held the package tightly in his fingers.
“I know that. I understand it. But you know how I feel.”
She was silent.
“Of course, he doesn’t know!”
She listened a moment longer, and then hung up the phone. Ornette remained quiet in the hallway. Who was this? He held the bread close. His heart felt like a stone cut into shards. It hurried, and, doing so, it hurt.
“Ornette?”
He took a step toward the living room.
“Ornette?”
He found April sitting on the couch. The light coming in the front windows was brightening with the morning. A few sheets of hand-written charts lay next to her. She wore dark red slacks, a red and black silk blouse, and a Mexican tooled leather belt. As it was on stage, April’s appearance was gloriously neat, with a stylish nod to Paris, where she now bought most of her clothes. Her black hair, which was full with loose curls and quite long, was gathered behind her head in a tortoise-shell barette. She was wearing glasses, an addition to her appearance that April usually apologized for. She felt that glasses interfered with her beauty, which for Ornette was considerable, despite the fact that he knew he had inherited her short-sightedness. “I like your glasses, Ornette,” she had once said. “I just don’t like mine.” He had laughed with the following line from his mother. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal.” He laughed because he knew how personal it indeed was for April herself, who hated her glasses. Her appearance mattered, she reminded him now and then, because it was so featured on her album covers, and she wanted to have her looks on the stand project the same insistence on quietly projected sensuality that the photography emphasized. It was a signature of her singing of ballads. Ornette, respectful of April’s performance standards, supported how she felt.
But that morning, she had responded to Ornette’s demand to know who was it on the phone with the news that it was a business thing, her agent…trouble getting paid…. “You know, Ornette. The usual.”
Now Ornette lowered his head. It wasn’t her agent, he thought. His hands remained on his knees.
“Ornette?”
It was Buddy.
He looked up. Buddy’s eyes rested on his.
“Forgive me, Ornette. Please.”
Had Buddy broken down in this moment and wept…had sorrow drowned him, Ornette would not have responded. That would have been, for him, proof of gross insincerity. Tears were meant to be fresh. Weeping comes from a moment’s unpreparedness. But Ornette realized that Buddy had been thinking about this for forty years, and so he accepted the resigned sadness that made Buddy’s face so immobile. His eyes were like carved obsidian set in place by proven personal guilt.
But Ornette still could not excuse him.
A week later, the concert hall was filling. The loud talk among the audience was filled with congratulatory humor. It felt to Ornette, who was to introduce the musicians and say something about his mother, that these people indeed loved her. Everyone in the hall. The talk and noise, the laughter and the sense that great music was about to erupt filled the room.
The musicians came on stage and took their places. Just their arrival caused raucous noise. There would be a couple of marquee singers…Kitty Margolis and Gregory Porter…plus a few other surprise guests.
Ornette studied his few notes. When he came onstage to applause, the house lights were still on, and Ornette saw Buddy standing, leaning against a side wall at the back. He studied him a moment, until Buddy nodded. Ornette smiled and approached the microphone.
“Good evening, everyone.”
Applause broke from the crowd, which Ornette acknowledged.
“Just a moment, please, if you don’t mind.” He looked up toward Buddy. “Let’s talk more, afterwards.”
Buddy nodded. The audience looked around. His black suit shrouded him with grief, as it had at the Caffe Trieste. The overcoat hung from his arm like a much-considered regret. It was clear that no one recognized him.
“A close acquaintance of mine,” Ornette explained.
Copyright ©2020 Terence Clarke, All rights reserved.
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This story is from my collection San Francisco, available everywhere in print and ebook versions.
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