Near the end of Bob Hize’s palliative care, in the master bedroom of his apartment overlooking Central Park, it could be exhausting for him to eat, to laugh, to talk for too long a sustained period. Still, he seemed to get some pleasure from the tentative trips he and I took to the past, no matter how much they sometimes drained him. “You’ll come see me again, another afternoon?” he’d asked after our first conversation, with the clock at his bedside reaching 4 p.m. “Afternoons, that’s when I’m best.” Part of me wondered if this was true, or if Bob was, in his subtle way, producing our visits to avoid some conflict. I had yet to formally meet his daughter, Melody Hize Jorgensen, but she had emailed to say she was “concerned but resigned” regarding my interview request and her father’s desire to grant it. Melody, as it happens, also was relieved from one to four each day by a nurse the family had hired.
The nurse, named Alice, was a five-foot-three wonder, originally from Ocho Rios, Jamaica. She had a quiet voice and a sweet round face and was unafraid, it seemed, of anything—the great loom of death, regrets, meddlesome visitors…. She fed Bob thin soups and ice chips, rubbed lotion into his hands and feet, readjusted his skullcap, and forever seemed to be doing laundry. She also told me in no uncertain terms when it was time for me to leave, as she had apparently promised Melody she would do.
As far as I could tell, the only thing Bob ever asked for was music. The rooms in the apartment had been wired for excellent digital sound, with tiny speakers painted the same ecru as the walls and screwed into the corners of the fifteen-foot ceilings—a lavish gift from his children for the retirement that this battle with cancer had forced him to take. Within easy reach on the bedside table lay a sleek remote that controlled the entire wireless system. But in his last months, Bob was craving lo-fi—fussy, fuzzy vinyl. As soon as his prognosis came down, he’d had Melody get back into good working order an ugly old console that had “decorated” the apartment’s foyer for years, thanks to a painfully literal interior designer Bob had hired after his divorce in the 1980s. Now the thing had pride of place in the master bedroom, its many wires snaking out the back toward the same power strip that juiced Bob’s adjustable bed. As a warm, imperfect sound thrummed from the contraption, from the speakers hiding inside its rattan-covered swing-out doors, sometimes Bob would be moved to hum along. Sometimes he’d raise his hand from underneath the bedsheets and move it like a conductor along with the music’s swell. And every time one record played out, either Alice or I, if she was busy doing something else, would rush to put on another. Always we would ask Bob first what he wanted to hear; always, he’d say, “Surprise me.”
One of us would then step out of the bedroom and into a strange and small adjoining space—a walk-in closet transformed into a home for his vinyl collection (pulled out of deep storage at Rivington Records). Inside, this cool little room felt as hushed and reverent as the religious-studies section of a university library, but at the same time, its thrilling options for every proclivity put me in mind of a sex shop’s DVD back room. Among Bob’s collection you could find Beethoven’s sonatas or big-booty bass, Nas or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It took me a minute to crack the code of exactly how it had all been arranged, by an ethnomusicology PhD student at NYU who’d once interned at Rivington, but eventually I got a rough idea of the organizing principles—historical period, genre, subgenre, artist.
For some reason I worried about rushing too abruptly, too aggressively, into the work Bob had done with my father, and so I avoided playing Polychrome until my conversations with him naturally led there. The afternoon I finally pulled that album from the closet, having exhausted the topics of Bob taking a risk on Rivington and an interest in Nev, I dropped the needle on the vinyl with my heart in my throat. There was static and a pop from the console, and then Jimmy Curtis’s driving drumbeat kicked open “Yellow Belly.” In his bed, Bob smiled as if he’d been waiting for this. “And here we are,” he said. “You’ve got the original pressing there?”
“Of course,” I said, and turned down the volume slightly so my recorder could catch whatever Bob would say next. I walked back across the room to the chair set by his side, and held up the cover for him to check.
“My God, what on earth was I thinking?” he chuckled, and shook his head as he ran his fingers over the image of the gumball machine with Opal and Nev’s heads topsy-turvy inside. “I didn’t much know what I was doing back then, when it came to the marketing. The look.”
“Oh, I think the art’s kind of fun. A little bit poppy. Was it Warhol-inspired?”
“You’re much too kind,” Bob said, his eyes sparkling, amused. “When I showed your dad this cover and asked him what he thought, he barely even looked at it. He said, ‘Is my name somewhere on here?’ I said, ‘Of course, Jimmy, yes, you’re credited on every song in the liner notes!’ ‘And you’ve got it spelled right, man?’ ‘I’m positive, yes, that part wasn’t too hard.’ ‘And that check you’re writing me, it’s gonna clear?’ ‘I promise you I made sure of that, if nothing else.’ He just handed it back to me and said, ‘Then I guess it looks pretty good to me.’ ”
Alice, who’d come into the bedroom bearing Bob’s lunch and was setting it up on a rolling tray, laughed along with us.
“We’re just talking now about Ms. Shelton’s father,” Bob said, as Alice pressed a button that sat him up higher. “Remember the brilliant drummer I told you about? I was lucky enough to work with him on this album.”
“Is that right?” Alice said, quite affably, and yet I felt vaguely embarrassed. She rolled the tray so that it stretched across Bob’s lap, then handed him a plastic spoon. “You want to see if you can manage today?”
She tucked a paper napkin into his pajama top and watched over him as he dipped the white spoon into the broth and dredged up a smidge. His hand hovered a moment in midair, promisingly, but then he got distracted. The liquid splatted onto the tray as he shook his new plastic instrument. I’ll never forget it: Bob Hize’s air drums.
“Will you just listen to that?” he said, smiling at me as Jimmy charged toward the song’s climactic end. “Your dad amazed me, how he was able to make the music sound both tight and loose at the same time…. Right on the edge of losing control, but never tipping over. Alice, tell us: Have you heard this record before? Did they ever play Polychrome on the radio in Jamaica?”
“Mmm, I don’t think so,” she said, and gently took the spoon from him. “But something about it sounds familiar.” She held the broth to Bob’s mouth and put her other hand behind his neck. “Calm now, Mr. Hize,” she murmured, and the moment was so tender, so uncomfortably reminiscent of how my mother could be with her own elderly patients, that I had to look away. I opened the album cover atop the bedsheets, underneath which Bob’s legs were thinning to twigs, and as he drew in the broth and coughed softly, I made a game of spotting my father’s name the twelve times I already knew it appeared.
“That familiar quality Alice mentions,” Bob finally said when his coughing quieted, “I’d say it’s mainly because of your dad.”
“Can you tell me more about that?” I said. “What Jimmy was like during the Polychrome sessions?”
Bob closed his eyes as Alice pushed a button that lowered him again. The back of his skullcap raised up as his body slumped down slightly, and she leaned over him a moment to pull it snug again. “Well, you must know he could, and he did, play absolutely everything. Any style, any rhythm, he had a facility with it.”
“I didn’t hear this record until I was fourteen,” I said. “My mother would only play the jazz in the house.”
“But what a universe that was, the jazz. Bossa nova, bebop, Afro-Cuban, gypsy… The jazz is what gave Jimmy a foundation from which he could riff.” Bob closed his eyes as the needle moved on to the next track, “Ginger’s Lament.” “Listen,” he said, and licked his lips. “Wah-PAAAAAH-pah, wah-PAAAAAH-pah… That’s quite jazzy, isn’t it, very swinging—you hear the way he hangs slightly behind the beat? But the song as a whole, with the other instruments and especially Opal’s vocal there, it goes to another place. Arriving somewhere new, but carrying that familiar tinge of something old. That’s the key.”
From the pocket of her pink scrubs, Alice pulled out a ChapStick. “I see I’m getting a musical education today,” she said, rubbing the balm across his lips. “You’ll be okay for a while?” she asked him. “I think it’s time for some nice clean sheets.”
“Oh, yes, I’m fine, thank you,” said Bob—but as Alice was leaving the room, she caught my attention and tapped at her wrist. I glanced at the time. Three forty-seven already.
“I’d love it if you’d share with me another story from the time you knew my father,” I said, once Bob and I were alone again. “I mean, not necessarily as a musician, but as a person. Does anything specific spring to mind?”
Bob was quiet a long while. Was he thinking, feeling, twiddling, remixing? “Has anybody ever told you,” he finally said, “about that funny noise he used to make—that hissing business between the teeth?”
I sighed, disappointed by such trivia. “A lot of people do seem to remember that, yes.”
“We were never really sure if that was him laughing or expressing his approval or disapproval or what, but whatever it was—that ssss-ssss-ssss—it was very contagious, and if the hour was getting late in the studio we—”
“Mr. Hize,” I said, “please don’t worry about being indiscreet. I already know it’s one hundred percent true, what was going on between my father and Opal. And I know their affair must have sparked in the studio. The sessions, then, were very… intense?”
He smiled up at me ruefully. “Have you talked with Opal about this yet?”
“Only so much,” I confessed, “and not at the depth that I’d like to. It’s not as if she denies anything; she’s very matter-of-fact about it. ‘Yes, I understood he was married; no, I didn’t think to end it.’ Detached, unemotional… I’ve gotten more color about their affair so far from Rosemary Salducci.”
“Oh God, Rosemary,” Bob moaned. “Always one for the excruciating detail.”
“But Opal herself… Opal hasn’t even told me that she loved him. She’ll describe the trim on the sleeve of the dress she wore the first time in the studio, but clams up when I ask what she thought of my father when she met him.”
“Well, now. A sleeve doesn’t have much complication to it.”
“Virgil LaFleur would argue otherwise,” I said. “He told me he struggled to piece that particular garment together.”
We laughed a moment, as the record moved into “Red Handed.” The song is arguably Opal’s finest work on the album, her staccato vocal playing hide-and-seek with Jimmy’s beat. I’m not a girl that can be caught / I’m not the girl who can be bought….
“I had been warned that your father was not easily moved by much,” Bob said. “Another rock producer who’d worked with him told me not to take offense over it—told me Jimmy was an excellent drummer but would come in, roll up his sleeves, do his bit just as you’d asked him to do it, and then go. Sphinxlike, stone-faced. I imagine he felt he had to be somewhat guarded among us rock-and-roll types. He was lonely, maybe.”
“You think he felt isolated? Being Black in that world?”
“I imagine that’s so.”
“So when Opal came into the picture…”
“She charged in and changed the atmosphere.”
“You’re saying she opened him up?”
“Not exactly. He wasn’t too much of a chatterbox, even then. And it did take a while for it to happen, for him to recognize that her promise was real. But eventually something about her seemed to ease some pressure valve within him. Something about her made him go ssss-ssss-ssss.”