CHAPTER TWO

The first time I ever met a white kid was in high school. At my elementary school, Forestville, all the students were black (though some of our teachers were white). No white families lived in my neighborhood, and I never really went anywhere else, so I just never met any. In our part of Chicago, the only white people we saw were the ones coming to collect money—the insurance man, or the landlord.

The only thing I knew about white kids came from the stories my dad told me from his childhood. He’d spent his first years in the segregated South, then went to a mixed elementary school after he moved to Chicago, and often had gotten into fights. So when I was about to start my freshman year at Hyde Park High School, where three-quarters of the students were white, I was definitely wary.

I had skipped a grade in elementary school, so I was young for a freshman—just twelve when I first set foot in the halls of Hyde Park. We weren’t really supposed to go to school there, since we didn’t live in Hyde Park’s district, but it was better academically than the high school in our district, so my mother was determined to send us there. We had an aunt and uncle who lived in the right district, so my parents used their address when they enrolled us.

My head was full of the stories my dad had told me, so when I went to school on the first day of freshman year, I fully expected something to go down. I was primed for a fight, but to my surprise, the white kids turned out to be . . . just kids. I went running home after that first day of school, and as I burst through the door to our apartment, I yelled, “Mama! Mama! They’re just like us!” It sounds funny now, but that really was a big surprise to me.

Hyde Park was a liberal school, so we students thought of ourselves as progressive, racially and otherwise. But as progressive as we thought we were, it was the 1950s, so a lot of people frowned on blacks and whites dating each other. Still, I probably experienced more overt racism from members of my own extended family than I did from my high school friends. I had darker skin than most of my relatives, and in black families, that’s an easy target. Sometimes, when I was bad, I’d get called “a black, evil rascal.” But to the best of my recollection, nobody in high school ever called me names based on my color.

Even if they had, I’d have done my best to ignore it, because I made a conscious decision in high school not to focus on race at all if I could help it. Racism existed, of course; in the 1950s casual racism was woven into the fabric of American life. You didn’t have to go searching for it, because it was omnipresent, everything from whites getting preferential treatment for loans, employment, and housing to white people addressing a black man as “boy.” But early on, I realized I had a choice: The easy road was to sit back and expect racist acts to happen—to see injustice and ill intent at every turn, to essentially say, I’m black and will never get a fair shake, and to live life accordingly. I made a choice to do the opposite.

Some black people look for racism, but I made a point of not looking for it, because looking for it feeds a victim mentality, which doesn’t help anyone. That victim mentality was rampant in our neighborhood, but somehow I managed to find my way out of it. This was partly thanks to my parents, who raised all three of us to believe we could achieve anything we put our minds to. But it also had a lot to do with my own curiosity. When I started high school, for the first time in my life I found myself surrounded by many different kinds of people. And rather than feeling like I was an outsider or being judged by them, I wanted to know everything about them.

After growing up exclusively around black people, I suddenly had friends who were Jewish, Italian, Asian—and I didn’t know anything about their cultures. I wanted to hear how they talked, see how they lived, learn about their beliefs. Most ethnic groups stuck together at Hyde Park, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in the black-kids group.

One of my first girlfriends was white, a girl named Barbara Laves, who played violin with the orchestra. She was a petite brunette with amazing light blue eyes, and I used to walk her home after school each day. Barbara and I didn’t stay together all that long, and I dated black girls, too, including my prom date, Peggy Milton. But I never really worried about anybody’s race. If I liked a girl, I asked her out. And if other people had a problem with that, I either didn’t know about it or, more likely, didn’t pay attention to it.

My parents tried for a while to turn us into churchgoers, but it didn’t stick. The first church they took us to was Ebenezer Baptist, one of dozens of Baptist churches sprinkled throughout our South Side neighborhood. The music was fantastic. There was a young people’s gospel choir and an adult gospel choir, and I liked the part of the service when they sang. But the sermons were all fire and brimstone, which didn’t really speak to me, or to my mother. There just didn’t seem to be much to learn from listening to someone talk about hell and damnation all the time.

Next, my parents took us to an African Methodist Episcopal church a few blocks away. Their choirs were good, too, but I didn’t love the hymns, and I still didn’t love the message—I just never responded to the notion of heaven and hell and retribution and punishment. Apparently my parents didn’t, either, because the next church we went to was Unitarian, which didn’t preach any kind of fire and brimstone at all. My mother liked this church, as it was more open and seemed to have an intellectual, rather than emotional, basis. But even so, we didn’t go to this one for very long, either.

None of the churches really spoke to me, yet from the time I was very small, I was always curious about the big questions of existence. At night, after my brother went to sleep, I’d sit on the windowsill of our bedroom looking up at the stars, wondering about life and death and the universe. At some point, I figured out for myself that life never ends, and I came early to the belief that even when we die, we reemerge later as another being. Years later, I would learn that these were core beliefs of Buddhism.

The notion of heaven and hell just never made sense to me. I couldn’t imagine that, when you die, you just pop out and disappear to some unknown place. I didn’t see anything else in the world just disappearing like that; matter and energy transform, but they don’t disappear. A seed becomes a tree, a tree becomes a chair, a chair becomes ash, and the cycle continues. It just wasn’t logical to me that the way we live and die could be so different from that.

This was how my brain worked, by seeking out the logical sequence of things. As a kid, I loved mechanics and science, and I spent hours taking apart clocks and toasters because I had a driving need to know how things worked. I was drawn to the rational order of these systems, enraptured by the way that taking apart an object could lead to a complete understanding of that object.

One day in high school, I decided to apply that same kind of logic to other parts of my life. I’d done something that got me in trouble with my parents, and they decided to punish me by not letting me go to a party I was looking forward to. The punishment didn’t seem fair, and I was really angry. I didn’t get mad often, but this seemed so undeserved that I was furious. It was a barrier I couldn’t get around—I felt helpless, almost victimized, by the injustice of it all. I stewed about it for days.

Sulking in my room on the afternoon of the party, I finally thought, Okay, let me examine rationally what’s going on here. I decided to take apart the situation just as I’d take apart a mechanical object. The party started at ten, and because of my curfew, I would have had to leave at midnight. That was two hours of my life; once those two hours were done, I’d be on to the next thing, whether I went to the party or not. Suddenly everything became clear: All I have to do is get through those two hours, and then life will go on as usual.

So that’s what I did. From ten until midnight, I read books and hung out in my room, and once midnight had passed, that was the end of it. I didn’t feel like a victim anymore; in fact, I was proud of myself. I had taken control of my emotions and figured out a way to get past my anger. From that point on, there was no way I could be punished, because I knew I could choose how to respond to any given situation. I had learned how to keep my emotions under control.

This felt like a great development: I would never again feel victimized by external factors, because I could control how they affected me emotionally. In many ways this was a useful trait, but over time, I carried it to an extreme, desensitizing myself. I had never been a particularly emotional kid, but from high school onward I really kept my emotions in check; I almost never cried, no matter how sad or upset I felt. If something started to upset me, I’d shut myself down rather than feel those negative emotions.

There was one glaring exception, and it happened just as I was starting my senior year in high school: the murder of Emmett Till.

Emmett Till was fourteen, just one year younger than me, and he was also from the South Side of Chicago. In August of 1955, he went to Mississippi to visit relatives. His mother warned him before going that the South was different from the North and he needed to behave accordingly. But when Till and some friends went into a convenience store to buy some candy, one of the other boys dared him to talk to the twenty-one-year-old white woman working at the store, Carolyn Bryant. He apparently wolf-whistled at her, showing off for his friends, and when Bryant told her husband, Roy, about it, he decided to take action.

Several days later Roy Bryant and a number of other men kidnapped Till and pistol-whipped him. They put the bleeding boy in the back of a pickup truck, covered him with a tarp, and drove him to a cotton gin, where they picked up a seventy-pound fan. Then they drove Till to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, and tied the fan around his neck to weigh down his body before throwing it into the river.

Three days after that, kids fishing in the river found Till’s corpse. His grieving mother insisted that his body be put into a pine coffin and sent by train back to Chicago, rather than being buried in Mississippi. The coffin arrived at the A. A. Rayner funeral home in early September, and when Till’s mother looked in and saw her son’s horribly mutilated face, she decided to have an open casket at his funeral, so the whole world could see what those men in Mississippi had done to him.

The day Till’s body arrived back in Chicago, we happened to drive past the Rayner funeral home, which wasn’t far from our apartment on the South Side. I could see people stumbling out the door, weeping, and I watched in shock as one man came out sobbing, uttering gibberish as he waved his hands in the air. I had never seen people unhinged like that, and it scared me.

Jet magazine published a full-page close-up photo of Emmett Till’s swollen, destroyed face, and although my parents tried to shield us from seeing it, curiosity got the better of me. When I picked up the magazine and flipped to the photo, fear and horror shot right through me. No matter how much control I thought I had over my emotions, nothing could have prepared me for seeing the cruelly disfigured face of a boy my age, from my own neighborhood, who’d been brutally murdered for nothing at all. I had nightmares for weeks afterward.

My earliest exposure to jazz was on WGES deejay Al Benson’s radio show. Known as the Godfather of Chicago Black Radio, Benson spun records all day, mostly blues or R&B but with the occasional jazz cut thrown in. The first jazz performance I took notice of was “Moonlight in Vermont,” played by the guitarist Johnny Smith, with Stan Getz on tenor sax. It was a ballad, just a pretty song that I liked, rather than some kind of big epiphany about jazz. At the time it came out, in 1952, I mostly listened to R&B music, like the rest of the kids in my neighborhood.

We used to stand around on street corners and sing, imitating our favorite groups—the Orioles, the Midnighters, the Five Thrills, the Ravens. Later I heard the Four Freshmen, a vocal quartet that gained fame in the mid-’50s with songs like “Mood Indigo” and “Day by Day.”

The Four Freshmen sang harmonies that were beyond the four-part barbershop harmonies that had been popular in the ’30s. They sang more jazzlike harmonies, with major sevenths and even a few ninth chords, which mesmerized me and made me want to learn how to sing them myself. I also loved the Hi-Lo’s, another vocal group, whose piano player, Clare Fischer, arranged many of their songs. Fischer’s arrangements had a tremendous influence on my understanding of harmony.

I loved this type of singing so much that I even put together my own vocal group at Hyde Park. But even though I was interested in R&B and other musical genres, it never really occurred to me that I could play anything other than classical music on the piano.

I used to play for the high school orchestra’s rehearsals, to help guide the violinists and others who were struggling to learn parts. But the orchestra never performed with a piano, so in concerts I played cymbals and percussion instead. Hyde Park did have a dance band, but their piano player was a guy named Don Goldberg, who was in my class, though I hadn’t yet met him. Don was also in a student jazz trio, and when I finally saw them play one afternoon during my sophomore year, he did something that changed my life.

Every semester the senior class at Hyde Park put on a variety show for all grades. Don’s trio—piano, upright bass, and drums—took the stage, and as they started playing, I was of course watching Don. His performance absolutely floored me: He was improvising! I had no idea people our age could do that; I thought it was something only older players did. Mind you, “older” to me at age fourteen meant nineteen or twenty.

I had been playing classical music since I was seven, so I was pretty good at reading music, but Don could do something on my instrument that I couldn’t. He was creating the music himself, in the moment, rather than reading it off a page. My heart started beating like crazy, and as soon as the trio finished their three songs, I hurried backstage and found him. I quickly introduced myself, and then I couldn’t hold back.

“Man, how did you learn to play like that?” I asked him. “I don’t really understand what you did, but I liked it. I want to learn how to do it, too—how to play jazz.”

Don laughed and said, “Well, if you like what I did, the first thing you need to do is get yourself some George Shearing records.” He told me to listen to how Shearing played and then try to imitate the parts I liked. That was how he’d learned, and at age fifteen he was already pretty good at improvising.

As soon as the school bus dropped me off that afternoon, I ran home, burst through the front door, and said, “Mama! We’ve got to get some George Shearing records!” She looked at me like I had three heads. “Herbie,” she said, “you already have some.”

“No, Mama,” I said. “You don’t understand. We need George Shearing records. Not just any records.”

“Herbie,” she said, “do you remember last year when I brought you home some records, and you got mad at me because you wanted some other ones and said I’d gotten the wrong things? Those were George Shearing records. Go look in the cabinet.”

I crossed the living room to the cabinet, which was filled with 78s, and sure enough, there they were: a few albums by George Shearing and his quintet. I had never even listened to them. I’d always thought of jazz as older people’s music, something that had no relevance to me. But now that I’d seen someone my age improvising, making that kind of music exciting, I just wanted to do it myself.

I slid a record out of its sleeve and put it on the turntable. Don’s trio had performed three songs that the George Shearing Quintet played: “Lullaby of Birdland,” “I’ll Remember April,” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” I laid the needle down on “I Remember April,” and as I listened to Shearing play, it sounded like Don! That was it for me—if Don could do it, why couldn’t I? That afternoon I started trying to learn how.

My first attempts were terrible. I sounded exactly like what I was, a classical musician learning how to improvise. But then my love of science and mechanics kicked in, and I decided to approach improvising the same way I approached taking a clock apart: analytically. I’d find a phrase I liked, and then try to pick out the notes by listening to it over and over—even just to find a single-note improvisation on the right hand. I tried to listen past the melody to the improvised parts to figure out the individual notes I needed to play.

Once I found the right notes, I’d try to play along with the record, but in the beginning I couldn’t seem to make it sound the same. So I’d go past that phrase to get to the next one, learning longer and longer phrases until I could play them the way they sounded on the record.

I kept working to find the phrases I liked, and then I’d transcribe them onto music paper. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was also doing ear training—I was sharpening my relative pitch at the same time I was learning the phrases. I did this for hours each day, branching beyond George Shearing into other piano players, like Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.

Because of the way my mind works, I noticed patterns. I’d play a phrase, write it down, and think, Wait a minute—he just used those same notes in another phrase earlier in the song. I didn’t know how jazz was constructed, so I had to figure it out as I went along. To me, improvisation sounded like stream of consciousness. But at the same time I knew it couldn’t be, because it was so organized.

Despite the fact that I could play classical music well, my knowledge of other musical forms was pretty limited. I knew major chords and minor chords, but everything else I had to teach myself. I began to spend a lot of time talking to the few other kids at school who were into jazz, including Don Goldberg and a French horn player named Ted Harley. They were both good musicians; Don went on to become a professional composer and arranger, changing his name to Don James and working on big shows, such as the Ice Capades and Baryshnikov on Broadway. Talking with Don and Ted helped me to figure out more of the theory and structure behind improvisation.

Whenever people ask me how to learn to improvise, I tell them the same thing Don told me: Find a player you like, and then copy what he or she is doing. That analytical, mechanical approach will enable you to learn the basics, but then the trick will be to figure out how not to get stuck in copying. You have to start creating your own lines, to find your own voice.

If you’re playing a particular form—say, on a thirty-two-bar song—you’re playing the melody, the head of the tune, and then you improvise off that form’s particular chord structure. There’s a lot of freedom within that structure—space, rhythm, chords, shadings. Whatever you decide to play, whatever comes out moment to moment, is an expression that’s shaped by a combination of elements, which includes, if you’re in a group, what the other musicians are playing. You have to be fully present, because there’s a lot going on, and it’s happening so rapidly that you can’t get slowed down by thinking about it.

Improvisation—truly being in the moment—means exploring what you don’t know. It means going into that dark room where you don’t recognize things. It means operating on the recall part of your brain, a sort of muscle memory, and allowing your gut to take precedence over your brain. This is something I still work on every day: learning to get out of my own way. It’s not easy, but the times when you can do that are truly magical. Improvising is like opening a wonderful box where everything you take out is always new. You’ll never get bored, because what that box contains is different every single time.

Jazz is not something you can ever completely master, because it is in the moment, and every moment is unique, demanding that you reach inside yourself. Classical music seemed more cerebral, but jazz was both cerebral and intuitive. It pulled me like a magnet, and I couldn’t wait to learn more about it.