Many of the greatest jazz artists of the forties, fifties, and sixties came through Lexington. In the dressing rooms off the stage in the auditorium, I found chord changes penciled on the walls. They were sophisticated substitutions, and I wondered who might have written them: Tadd Dameron? Lee Morgan? Gerry Mulligan? Word on the prison grapevine was that the legendary jazz trumpeter Red Rodney was coming to Lexington. Some of the older brothers were hard-core jazz fans, and they were excited he was coming in. I hadn’t heard of Red before, but I got up to speed pretty quick. He had played with Jimmy Dorsey, Georgie Auld, Claude Thornhill, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, and many others. The jazzbos on the yard schooled me that back in the forties, Red replaced Miles Davis in the Charlie Parker Quintet, and was regarded as one of the most formidable trumpeters in jazz.
When he walked into the entry of Nu-Men Unit, he didn’t look like I’d imagined. I expected a tall, ultra-hip black man, but this guy was short, and he sure didn’t look hip. He was slightly portly and he was also very white, almost pink, with a shock of bright red hair. “Danish Jew,” he told me later. I approached him straight away. I told him that I was a musician, and we had a band here and maybe we could do some playing together. He was cool to the suggestion; he gave me a once-over and said, “Maybe. We’ll see.” I resented his attitude because I was being as sincere and respectful as I could be. Yet, it was understandable in the prison environment, where often nobody is who they say they are and trust takes time. Still, I thought he was a snob.
One day, Red showed up at my door with a trumpet under his arm and a jazz fake book in his hands. He asked, “Can you read these chords?”
“I think so,” I said. I was surprised that he came to see me.
“Okay then. Let’s play this one.” Red handed me the book, pointed out the song, and counted off, “One… two… one, two, three, and…”
I struggled to keep up. The changes came fast and furious. At some points in the chart, there were four chords to the bar, and this was not at a relaxed tempo. Red played the melody, and when we finished, he said, “Good. You can play.” It was a trying moment in my musical life, but I passed. Only years later did I realize that getting the stamp of approval from a musician of Red’s caliber was a real accomplishment.
After I passed my audition, Red opened up to me. It was as if I was all right now, and we were on a level playing field. We began walking the yard and talking together a lot. He delighted me with tales of New York and the jazz world in the forties and fifties; being on the road with Charlie Parker and his early professional work with the big bands. He was a walking compendium of American musical and cultural history, and I grew to love him immensely.
At one point, he decided that my music education needed to be upgraded, and I was his willing student. Red had taken a Berklee College of Music correspondence course when he was in Lexington decades before, and he still had the books and coursework. We convinced the warden that this would be a good thing for the inmates. He agreed, gave us a classroom, and let us mimeograph the lessons and distribute them to our classmates. It was my first exposure to the numerical scale system and to harmony, and a lot of homework was involved. I was learning by writing out scales and harmonizing melodies. The classroom theory was applied when we picked up our instruments and played. I forgot I was in prison when we played and studied music.
My relationship with Red blossomed over the many months we were together. We spent long hours telling each other stories of our days in music and other adventures. We talked about our good and bad behavior; how we were similar and how we were different.
Red told me about touring the South with Charlie Parker, playing the Chitlin’ Circuit joints, and how Parker had nicknamed him Chood and forced him to sing a blues song each night. “And I ain’t no singer,” he laughed.
A lot of the stories Red told me came to the big screen in Clint Eastwood’s film Bird. Red worked as a consultant on the movie, and recorded much of the score.
He was exactly the kind of fellow I venerated. He was hipper than hip, cooler than cool. He was smarter than everybody and skilled as hell, and, unfortunately, back in prison again in his fifties. That made me think.
Red always had a great attitude. He was never depressed and, believe me, prison life has a way of getting you down from time to time. A bad letter from home, a setback from the parole board, loss of good behavior credits, or any of a hundred other dramas can throw you in the dumps real quick.
Red would say with a huge smile on his face, “Wayne, I like doing business with established institutions.” He’d wave his hand around like he was the mayor of Lexington, its resident tour guide and host. In Red, I got to see what it really meant to be an opiate-addicted musician over a lifetime. How complicated and troublesome it all was, and how, once hooked, he had no choice but to ride it to the bitter end. I expressed my sincere desire to straighten up, but when he asked if my girl back home was using, and I said yes, he said I didn’t have a chance. “Might work if it was the other way around. But you going out to a dope fiend woman… forget it.”
Once, when I was getting short (nearing a release date) and had gone home on a five-day furlough, he asked me if I’d gotten high while I was home. I said, “Hell, yes.” He said, “I ought to beat the shit out of you.” Here was 53-year-old little Red Rodney looking up at me, with his fist balled up, furious. I loved him for that. He cared enough to get angry at me.
We played in our jazz group at any opportunity that presented itself. We did a regular Sunday concert schedule during the summer months on the small yard. We played special events like Fourth of July, and even produced and filmed a mock TV talk show, written by and starring inmates and staff. On a couple of occasions, we got to join some local musicians on supervised concerts in public parks in the town of Lexington. This was set up by one of the area musicians, a tenor player who worked for the post office. He’d been coming out to the prison to play for years, and had a good relationship with the warden. These were really fun gigs. We played jazz standards, and learning to comp through changes really helped my playing.
One of the park concerts was in the heart of the black community, and everybody was excited about us coming out to perform. They all knew it was Red Rodney on trumpet. The local drummer had asked for me in particular as “the white boy who could play blues like B.B. King.”
We also played as the backing band for Unity, a vocal group from one of the other housing units who paid us for our work in heroin. After a lifetime of shooting up, Red had no veins left. He asked me if I could help him inject his shot. I wasn’t prepared for digging in his arms with a dull, nasty, jailhouse syringe. Instead, we snorted the dope. It wasn’t much to speak of anyway.
Once Red and I became close, he told me of his journey to Lexington this time. He had started his sentence at FCI Sandstone, Minnesota, while he was still on crutches. “Why were you on crutches?” I asked. He dropped his trousers to show me two large round pink scars, one on each thigh: bullet wounds. “Look what they did to me,” he said.
He was sent to Sandstone because the prison is out in the middle of the boonies in Minnesota up near the Canadian border, and he was considered a flight risk. A flight risk… on crutches. The snow is so deep in the winter, you’d die of exposure if you attempted an escape. After a year up there healing from his wounds, he was transferred down to Lexington.
Red was married to a Danish woman who was the well-respected director of the Danish library system. He had lived in Denmark, and played in the Danish National Jazz Orchestra, as well as occasionally touring Europe with Dexter Gordon in their quintet. Red’s habit was maintained through a government methadone prescription that arrived at his house by mail. Life was good.
In the early 1970s, George Wein, the New York jazz pianist and promoter, hired Red and Dexter for a tour of America with his Newport Jazz All Stars.
Red had an old friend who was a jazz fan and high-level mafia drug supplier. He sold Red two kilos of raw morphine base for $800. This was for Red and the other guys in the band who used, so they wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of trying to score on the road, or not find drugs and get sick.
Red was no smuggler, though, and just packed the dope in his suitcase. The dogs discovered it at Kennedy Airport, and the DEA broke down his hotel room door just as he was doing his first shot in New York.
When he got to court, his attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, used Red’s lifelong history as a narcotics-addicted jazz musician to convince the judge that the two kilos were for his personal use, and that he was not a dealer. The judge showed compassion, and sentenced Red to three years in federal prison.
Red had been to prison numerous times before in his life, and was scared of going back again. He fled home to Denmark instead.
Every year for the next few years, the United States would demand that the Danes extradite Red. Since he had dual citizenship, he was legally a Danish citizen, and the Danes refused. In Denmark, narcotics addiction was not a criminal offense, so he was not in violation of their laws.
One afternoon, Red was home alone. His doorbell rang, and two big Americans informed him that they were from the U.S. embassy; that there was a new ruling that would release him from his criminal sentence in the States. All he needed to do was sign this form, and it would be all over. Red told them he would have to get his glasses, and turned back into the house. Smelling a setup, he ran out the back door and was confronted by another American with a 9mm pistol pointed straight at him. He fired twice, hitting Red in both legs. They threw him into a van and drove him to an American Air Force base, where he was put on a military jet with tourniquets on his legs, flown back to New York, and arrested at Kennedy Airport. He waited nine hours before he saw a doctor in the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital. The entire ward was filled with guys who had been shot, beaten, and kidnapped by DEA agents all over the world.
When he went back to court for having fled from custody, the judge gave him an additional six months. Williams informed the court that the U.S. government had shot and kidnapped a Danish citizen—while living in Denmark—in violation of international law. The police in Denmark didn’t even carry guns, and what the United States had done was indefensible. Red sued for ten million dollars.
A year or so later, Red stopped me on the yard to tell me that the warden just offered him an immediate release if he dropped his lawsuit. He asked me what to do. “Call your lawyer,” was my response. He told me later that Williams informed him that his was not a personal injury law firm, they were a political law firm, and Red was going to stay in prison until they settled the suit.
Six months later, I was released on parole, and Red followed me into freedom some months after that.
I would run into him around Manhattan, and we tried to stay in touch. After I hadn’t spoken to him in a year or so, I called him one day to see how he was doing. He was doing pretty well. He’d just bought a boat, a house in Florida, and a house in New Jersey. He told me he’d settled with the government for three million in cash. No more jingle sessions for Chood. From now on, he would only play jazz when and where and with whom he wanted. He and his long-time partner, Ira Sullivan, were playing together, and he was having a ball.
Red died at his home in Boynton Beach, Florida, from lung cancer at age 66 on May 27, 1994. There will be no more like him.
The last year of my bit with Red was a gift. He was my mentor, and a father figure for me. We were both there because of major league bad behavior as adults and, as a result, any life truths that Red passed my way were subtle and hard-won.
But in music, he was unquestionably my true master, and I his humble acolyte. Those particular lines of demarcation were written in stone. Not in his demeanor or how he treated me, but in the clear recognition of his utter mastery of his instrument, and of jazz as the highest achievement in musical art. He was a giant in music, and I was well fed by the crumbs from his table.