CHAPTER THREE

In the fall of 1956, I headed off to Grinnell College. Grinnell was a small liberal-arts school in Iowa, of all places, so it wasn’t the most obvious choice for me. But one of my parents’ closest friends, our South Side neighbor Mrs. Smith, had gone there, so I decided to apply. I won a Pullman scholarship and set out for Iowa at age sixteen, and what I found when I got there was a warm, welcoming campus with students from all over the world. Going to Hyde Park High School had opened my eyes to people from different walks of life, and my time at Grinnell would broaden my horizons even more.

Even before I set foot on campus, I started examining my options analytically. Should I major in music? Or in science? I loved them both, but I wanted to make the smart choice. So I asked myself: What are the chances you can make a living from jazz? Questionable. Now, what are the chances you can make a living from science? Probably really good. As much as I loved jazz, I decided to take the pragmatic path and major in engineering. I even promised my mother, who wanted me to get a degree in something useful, that I wouldn’t major in music.

I didn’t sign up for any music courses my freshman year, but I did take piano lessons and spent hours on my own studying jazz. My grades were just average, because I never buckled down that much to study my engineering classwork. Although there weren’t many other jazz musicians at the school, I did find a couple of guys who were pretty good, so I spent time playing and talking about music with them. There was a drummer from Denmark named Bjarne Nielsen, a bass player named Dave Kelsen, and two trumpet players who could play pretty well—John Scott and Bob Preston. John became a close friend; we even wrote a song together that I would later record for my second album, My Point of View.

Some professional classical musicians practice for eight or so hours a day, but not me. I never actually practiced at the piano for more than about an hour a day—but I spent untold hours studying, learning, and analyzing music. I’d talk endlessly with the other guys about structure, theory, and improvisation, and we’d swap notes until late into the night. I never got tired of it, and the more I learned, the more excited I got.

I continued to be fascinated by improvisation. When I’d listen to Oscar Peterson records, I’d think, How’d he do that? I loved playing and jamming, because it was a blank slate for expressing yourself. You didn’t have to just read the music someone else wrote; you could express yourself by creating your own music in the moment.

In my sophomore year I decided to put together Grinnell’s first jazz concert. How hard could it be, right? I’d just listen to a few big-band recordings, figure out what the other instruments were playing, and transcribe all the arrangements myself. Then I’d just have to find enough musicians who could play the various parts, show them how to phrase and use dynamics, and get them concert-ready. Somehow, in my seventeen-year-old head, this seemed an achievable goal.

Grinnell had only about twelve hundred students total, and it was smack in the middle of Iowa. Where was I going to find enough jazz musicians for a whole concert? I put up notices on bulletin boards all over school, seeking out anyone who had experience playing and especially anyone who’d been in a high school dance band. I knew that the University of Iowa, about sixty miles east of Grinnell, actually had a jazz band, so I borrowed some arrangements from them and from Iowa State. Somehow I managed to cobble together five saxes, three trombones, four trumpets, bass, drums, and a small vocal group.

Then I started figuring out the arrangements from a few Count Basie records, just as I’d worked out those George Shearing songs: by listening to the record, then writing down the various instrumental parts on blank music paper. This was complicated and time consuming, but I learned a lot doing it.

Once the parts were ready, I started section rehearsals for each instrument of the band. What I discovered was that while everybody could play the notes, only two people knew anything about jazz phrasing. I didn’t want to go through all this trouble to put on a mediocre concert, so I personally conducted every section rehearsal—the saxophone players, the trombone players, the trumpet players. And because nobody knew how to solo, I had to write those parts out, too. For the whole semester I spent all my time teaching these players, trying to get them ready for the show. I was so consumed by preparing for the concert that there was no room for anything else in my mind, and I began flunking all my courses.

This was the second semester of my sophomore year, and the concert was scheduled just before finals. As the date drew near I stopped going to classes altogether—there was too much to do! I was working with the musicians day and night, hardly sleeping at all. But when the big day arrived, we were ready. Or as ready as we’d ever be, anyway.

The concert was held in May of 1958 in the Alumni Recitation Hall auditorium. People had never thought they’d get to hear a jazz concert in Grinnell, Iowa, so, given everyone’s low expectations, we sounded fantastic. With every song, the audience was clapping and cheering like crazy. I loved being onstage improvising with a group of jazz musicians, just letting loose in whatever direction I felt like playing. The whole night felt magical.

But then came the nasty wake-up call: I had ignored my classes so completely that, unless I aced my finals, I was in danger of flunking out of school. For the next week, all I did was study. I crammed everything I could into my brain, and when I showed up for the finals, some of my professors—who hadn’t seen me in weeks—seemed surprised. I knew how crushed my parents would be if I failed, so I was desperate to do at least well enough to stay in school.

And somehow I did. I aced all my finals, which enabled me to pass the semester with three Cs and a D. One professor was so shocked that he even thought I had cheated. He called me into his office and demanded to know how I could have been failing all semester, only to come in and do so well on the final exam. He began firing questions at me, trying to see if I really knew the material or not. When I was able to answer all his questions, he had to back down.

After that I went back to my dorm room, completely exhausted, and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, and I looked like hell. “Who are you trying to kid?” I asked the face in the mirror. I’d tried very hard to fit myself into the engineering box, but it was obvious where my passion was. At that point it was no longer even a choice. That day I decided to switch my major to music.

When I started taking music classes my junior year, I was happy to find that I already knew a lot of the material we were covering. I’d spent so much time studying theory and harmony and structure that I was able to skip most of my classes and just show up for tests.

To bring in extra money, I had a job at the restaurant in the student union, taking orders and serving food. But one weekend I got a gig playing piano in Des Moines, and to my shock I got paid more for that one night than I did for a week of working at the union. That realization just turned me upside down: The idea of logging all those hours slinging food in a restaurant when I could make so much more doing something I loved made it impossible for me to keep doing that job. So I quit.

The funny thing was, the Des Moines trip wasn’t actually all that pleasant. The gig was okay—but a strange thing happened afterward.

I was only eighteen or so at the time, but somehow these guys who were playing at a nightclub had heard about me. I had agreed to go to Des Moines to play with them, and then, to save money, I was planning to go right back to Grinnell in the early-morning hours instead of paying for a hotel room. But one of the musicians told me I could just stay at his house with him and his wife. I thought, Cool! An adventure! This guy was a real working musician, and I was going to get to hang with him.

The gig wrapped up at about two in the morning, and as the guy and I walked to his car, he said, “I gotta make a couple of stops before we get to my place.” I said, “I don’t mind!” I didn’t care where we went—I was just happy to be along for the ride.

Another couple of people were waiting at the car, and we all piled in. The guy pulled out of the parking lot, and after driving for a while we ended up outside a house. As soon as we pulled up, all the lights in the house went off. I thought that was a little weird—were they not expecting us?—but someone hopped out and went up to the front door, and then came back to the car with a little paper bag. We then drove to another house and picked up the guy’s wife, and I noticed with bewilderment that even though it was pretty warm out, she was shivering.

We made a few more stops to drop off the other people in the car, and then it was just the musician, his wife, and me. He drove us to their building, and we climbed some back steps to get into their apartment. When he opened the door, my mouth fell open: It was one tiny room, with one bed in it. The guy and his wife lay down on the bed and gestured for me to join them.

“Do you want to get high?” he asked me, and then emptied the contents of the paper bag onto the bed. I looked at the hypodermic needle that had tumbled out, and the baggie of powder, and said, “No, thank you.” I had never gotten high before, on anything, and I had no intention of getting into that stuff. But I was curious, so I said, “Can I watch?” As long as I was there, I wanted to see how it was done.

I observed him as he put the powder in a spoon with a little water, lit the lighter, and heated the bottom. The powder turned into a black liquid, which he then poured into the syringe. He wrapped his arm with a piece of rubber and tapped his vein, just like in the movies, and then he shot up. His wife was shivering because she was coming down from a high, but when he offered her the syringe, she took it, too. I could hardly believe I was sitting here watching them shoot up; watching their faces to see if anything changed, I started feeling nervous. Were they about to get weird? There was only one bed, after all. But evidently they didn’t think much of the heroin, so after complaining for a little bit, the guy said, “We’re just gonna go to sleep.” And I thought, Okay, but where the hell am I supposed to sleep?

I ended up lying on one side of the bed, with the guy in the middle and his wife on the other side, and I was so nervous I don’t think I closed my eyes the entire night. They didn’t seem all that high to me, but I’d never been with people shooting up heroin, so what did I know? I was a complete novice when it came to any kind of drug use, though I had recently started drinking. But this was a completely foreign world to me. I hadn’t been tempted by drugs at all, though that would change.

In 1960 I left Grinnell and returned to Chicago, one credit shy of graduating because I had flunked a course in my junior year. I wanted to get my degree, but I wanted even more to start playing jazz seriously, and Grinnell wasn’t the place to do that.

So I moved back in with my parents and took a job with the post office while I sought out work as a pianist. I delivered mail five days a week, and whenever I had gigs, I’d play music from nine p.m. until four or five in the morning. The hours were just brutal—I had almost no time left over to sleep. And I often had to take the train to and from the gigs, so I’d be slumped over in exhaustion on the “L” as it shuddered down to the South Side in the early-morning hours.

But until I could make enough money playing piano, I needed that post office job, so I was still delivering mail in the fall of 1960 when I got a call to play with Coleman Hawkins. Hawkins was a legendary saxophonist, the man who brought the tenor sax to prominence in jazz. He’d been playing since the early 1920s, when he started with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds, and in the four decades since then he’d played with all the big names: Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, and Oscar Peterson. I mean, I would have been excited just to be in the same room with a player like Coleman Hawkins, much less actually get to play with him.

To keep his costs down, Hawkins usually worked with pickup bands, which meant he hired local musicians—a pianist, drummer, and bass player—in each city he played. For this gig in Chicago, the first-choice pianist, a guy named Jodie Christian, wasn’t available, so Hawkins’s drummer, Louis Taylor, suggested he give me a try. I was pretty green at that point, but I’d played with Taylor a few times, and he thought I deserved a chance.

Coleman hired me to play with him at the Cloisters nightclub for a fourteen-day stand. He was the first internationally known musician I had ever worked with, and his recording of “Body and Soul” was considered the ultimate saxophone solo of that classic song. I felt honored to share the stage with him and excited at the thought of what I might learn, but I was also nervous, hoping I could hold up my end of the bargain. He encouraged me and tried to make me feel comfortable onstage, and I think he was pleased with how I played.

I never got much of a chance to talk to Coleman, because I always had to hurry home after the last set. The hours were crazy—four sets a night, and five on Saturdays, with no days off—so I was playing music into the wee hours every night and then trying to deliver mail all day. By the third day I was a complete wreck. That morning I was standing in front of somebody’s apartment, thumbing through the mail, and I actually fell asleep standing up—which wasn’t good, because the apartment was at the top of a concrete staircase. I was really dragging, and not surprisingly, I got sick, too.

Louis Taylor, the drummer who had gotten me the gig, said, “Herbie, that post office job is interfering with the music. You’ve got to quit.” I knew there was no way for me to keep doing both, but I was scared to quit the post office, since it offered me stability and a steady income.

But on the fourth day, dragging myself home at four a.m. from that night’s gig, I knew I had no choice. That morning I told some of the guys at the post office that I was going to quit. A lot of them were musicians themselves, and they urged me not to do it. More than one guy said, “Man, you’re going to lose your health insurance!” I knew that if I did leave, I’d never get hired back there if music didn’t work out, but that was a chance I had to take. So I walked into my supervisor’s office and told him I was done.

After I finished that two-week gig with Coleman Hawkins, I just waited by the phone, hoping someone would call with another one. It was strange not to have a steady job, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make enough money playing piano. But my parents took care of me, letting me live at home rent-free and feeding me dinner every night. I felt very lucky to have their support as I kept trying to make my dream of being a professional jazz musician come true.

In December of 1960, a couple of months after the Coleman Hawkins gig, I got a call from John Cort, the owner of the Birdhouse, a small club in a second-floor walkup on Dearborn Street, on the North Side. “Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams are playing in Milwaukee this weekend,” he told me. “You want to play with them?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Yeah, I want to play with them!” I couldn’t believe it—I’d just been invited to gig with one of the best jazz trumpeters around. Donald Byrd was a veteran of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and he’d earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. He’d performed with many of the jazz greats over the years, including John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and in 1958 he’d started a quintet with the baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams. That was the group I was being invited to play with.

“Well,” John said, “put on your maroon jacket and get on down here!” I’d played several times before at his club, so he knew my maroon jacket—the only jacket I had for playing gigs. I hurried down to the Birdhouse as quickly as I could get there.

As it turned out, Donald had hired another piano player, but a blizzard was blowing through the Midwest and the pianist had gotten stranded. So they just needed me to fill in for the weekend gig at Curro’s in Milwaukee, and then on Monday they’d have their regular guy back. I met Donald and Pepper and the other guys at the Birdhouse, and we all went downstairs to pile into a car for the drive. But by now the blizzard was howling, and we didn’t get very far before realizing there was no way we could make it to Milwaukee in time for the gig.

I was disappointed, but then Donald said, “Well, are there any jam sessions happening in Chicago tonight? Maybe we could at least hear you play.” I knew of one, a loose gathering led by the trumpet and sax player Ira Sullivan, so I gave Donald directions, and we made our way there. As we walked into the club all I could think was Herbie, don’t screw this up! This was my big chance, an audition of sorts for Donald Byrd. He was sharply dressed, highly educated, and a really charming guy, and I wanted so badly to impress him that my hands were shaking when I went up onstage to take my turn with the other musicians.

And I guess they never really stopped shaking, because I sounded terrible. I was so nervous that I couldn’t play anything right. After struggling through one tune, I knew I was done. I slumped off the stage and back to the table where the guys were sitting, my head hanging down in embarrassment.

I turned to Donald and said, “Well, I want to thank you for this opportunity. I’m sure after that you’re not going to want me now, but I appreciate the fact that you gave me a chance.” Donald just started laughing and clapped me on the back. “Come on, Herbie!” he said. “We’re taking you to Milwaukee tomorrow. I figured you’d be nervous—don’t worry about it!” Relief flooded through me. I hadn’t blown it after all, and I’d have a chance to show Donald what I really could do.

We drove to Milwaukee the next day, and that evening I played a lot better than at the jam session. But I did have trouble with one song, a jazz standard from the ’30s called “Cherokee.” I knew the chord structure, but Donald’s quintet played it really fast, and although I usually did pretty well with ballads and medium-tempo songs, I always struggled with soloing on faster songs.

After the gig I decided to bring it up with Donald. “I know I didn’t do so well on ‘Cherokee,’” I told him. “I always have a hard time with fast tempos. Do you have any tips that might help me out?”

“Barry Harris gave me a tip a long time ago,” Donald said, referring to a piano player from his hometown of Detroit. “He told me, ‘The reason you can’t play fast is ’cause you never heard yourself play fast.’” And then he explained to me how Barry suggested overcoming that problem.

Barry’s tip was to start with a particular form—either a twelve-bar blues or a rhythm form (based on the chord structure of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”), which are the only two true traditional forms in jazz—and then work out choruses. If it’s a blues form, you write out the twelve-bar structure and then an improvised solo on that structure for several choruses. Then, once you’ve written out the whole structure, you just practice what you’ve written on the page, playing it over and over again, and then doing it faster.

The next day I did exactly what Donald had told me. I didn’t worry about playing the piece exactly as it was written; the important thing was just getting used to playing and hearing myself do it quickly. That night at the second gig in Milwaukee, when Donald called “Cherokee,” I played it fast! This was the first time I’d been able to solo really well on a fast song, and it was amazing to feel my fingers flying over the keys like that.

After the gig Donald and I talked again. He knew I had a lot to learn, but he’d obviously taken notice of the fact that I’d paid attention to his advice and worked so hard, because he said, “Herbie, I’ve been talking it over with the band, and we like the way you play. We want you to join the band.”

“But you already have a piano player,” I said, confused.

“We’ll fire him,” Donald told me. “We want you. But you’ll have to move to New York. What do you think?”

I wanted to go, of course, because New York was the center of jazz, the big time. Chicago was a great jazz town, and there were amazing pianists there, guys like Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis. But I’d felt all along that Chicago was just the stepping-stone to get to New York, where the real action was happening. I just hadn’t imagined I’d be taking that step so soon.

“I would love to,” I told Donald. “But you’ll have to ask my mother.” Even though I was twenty, my mother was still the one in the family who did all the decision making. My whole life, I’d heard my father say, “Go ask your mother.” And now that there was such a big decision on the table, it would have felt wrong to make it myself without talking to her.

Donald just smiled and said, “Of course.” The next day he called my mother from the club and asked permission to take her younger son to New York City to play in his band.

My parents had always said they’d support all of us kids in whatever we wanted to do, but my mom wasn’t too sure about this particular move. She expressed concern to Donald about my age and my safety in New York, and Donald, who was all of twenty-eight, said in his inimitable style, “Have no fear! I will take care of Herbie and make sure he’s fine.”

So it was that, less than a month later, in January of 1961, I took my very first airplane trip, from Chicago’s Midway Airport to New York’s Idlewild. I arrived with three bags and a couple hundred dollars in my pocket, and I took a bus into Manhattan to start my new life.