What I’m going to do is to write off the story of Rick Martin’s life, now that it’s all over, now that Rick is washed up and gone, as they say, to his rest.
There isn’t much to it, in its bare outline. Rick was born in Georgia five or ten minutes before his mother died and some ten days before his father checked out and left him with his seventeen-year-old aunt and her brother. These two worked their way to Los Angeles eight years later and brought him with them; and there he grew up in the way he apparently had to go. He learned to play the piano by fooling around with pianos in churches and roadhouses—any place, in fact, where there was a piano that could be got at and fooled around with. And because he had right in his bones whatever it takes to make music, he became while he was still a kid a very good pianist. But a piano wasn’t exactly right for him, and he turned to brass finally; he earned enough money to buy himself a horn. And then he learned to play a horn—a trumpet, if there’s anybody here who doesn’t know what kind of a horn a horn is—and that was his proper medium. He learned a lot from Art Hazard, the great negro trumpeter, but that doesn’t explain what made him so good.
He played in five- and six-piece bands around Los Angeles, and one day he was discovered for what he was worth by Lee Valentine, who could scarcely believe his ears. Valentine, playing a cross-country tour of moving-picture houses, had been put on Rick’s trail by Jeff Williams, the negro band leader, who had known Rick as a boy in Los Angeles and had kept him in mind as a future bright light for a good white band. Lee Valentine didn’t need to be told twice; he signed Rick and took him back to New York with the band.
He was a sensation, particularly among musicians. He was such a sensation that it wasn’t long until Phil Morrison, who ran the best big orchestra of the day, bought him, and then he continued to be a sensation for Mr. Morrison. He loved his work. He had something and he knew it. He never got tired, kept it up night after night, and after he got through with the night’s dance he’d get together with other men from other bands who were interested in seeing how far they could go, and then he’d really play the rest of the night.
He pushed it too far. He didn’t sleep and he didn’t eat, because he could do so many other things. He could drink, for instance, and before he knew it he was drinking almost constantly in order to keep everything else going. It didn’t work out that way, however, and he finished up his time in this life before he was thirty. He was mourned, I might add, by almost nobody except me and two negroes, Jeff Williams and Smoke Jordan. There was a woman, named Amy North, but there’s no telling how she felt about it. I dare say Rick’s death was regretted by musicians here and there, but it will only be a question of time until he’s forgotten completely. One of these days even his records will be played out and give forth nothing but scratching under a steel needle. When that time comes Rick Martin will really be dead, dead as a door-nail, and I hate to see it happen.
That’s the story, and it could never be called a grand tragic theme; it does not depict the fall of a noble person from high to low estate—Rick Martin never got anywhere near high estate, though he did make a lot of money for a while. But it is a story that has the ring of truth and an overtone or two. It is the story of a number of things—of the gap between the man’s musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life; of the difference between the demands of expression and the demands of life here below; and finally of the difference between good and bad in a native American art form—jazz music. Because there’s good in this music and there’s bad. There is music that is turned out sweet in hotel ballrooms and there is music that comes right out of the genuine urge and doesn’t come for money.
The story ends with death. Our Mr. Martin, from the moment he began fooling around with pianos, was riding for a fall. I shouldn’t have said fooling, because he wasn’t fooling; he meant it. In Rick Martin’s music there was, from the first, an element of self-destruction. He expected too much from it and he came to it with too great a need. And what he expected he never quite found. He might have found it in another kind of music, but he had no training or any way of coming to know another kind of music. So he stuck to jazz and to the nervous, crazy life that goes with it. And he made a good thing of it; he made an amazing thing of his own playing; he couldn’t even keep pace with it himself. He was, in his way, like Tonio Kröger, Mann’s inspired and bewildered poet, who ‘worked not like a man who works that he may live; but as one who is bent on doing nothing but work; having no regard for himself as a human being but only as a creator.’
Now these are strong words and should surely apply much more truly to a poet like Tonio Kröger than to the man who played hot trumpet in Phil Morrison’s band. But I don’t think they do, and that’s the thing about Rick’s story that moves me. The creative urge is the creative urge, no matter where you find it. Rick did what he could do so well that I, for one, won’t be likely ever to hear his name without feeling my hair rise.
But if you choose to look at it this way, you have to go easy or somebody will say you’re arty. Dance music should be criticized in its own terms, and its own terms are such inbred shop-talk that no one outside the trade could understand them. How could you say what it was that Rick had and what he stood for without getting out of bounds in one way or another?
You could, of course, twist Rick’s life into a fiction and write off a clear-cut commercial story about a good-looking young man who went to a good school and then, being musically inclined, went to New York and joined a big-time dance band. You could have him smoke Marihuana once or twice, just for the hell of it; and tell whom he loved and all the rest of it. He could be playing at one of the place-names of capitalism, say the Waldorf-Astoria, and between dance sets he could meet the daughter of some kind of magnate, and it would be love and our man would never have to play another night’s dance music, but just lie happily married on the deck of his wife’s yacht night after night for the rest of his life, which would be protected and long.
But this can’t be that. This one has to be the story of a young man who, without even knowing what it was, had a talent for creating music as natural and as fluent as—oh, say Bach’s. Rick Martin never would be put down to playing exactly what was written for him; he’d just sit there and fit himself into the heavy going, but when his own turn came, or whenever he saw his chance, he would take off and invent, extempore, some of the freshest, most imaginative music that ever occurred to anyone.
Our man is, I hate to say it, an artist, burdened with that difficult baggage, the soul of an artist. But he hasn’t got the thing that should go with it—and which I suppose seldom does—the ability to keep the body in check while the spirit goes on being what it must be. And he goes to pieces, but not in any small way. He does it so thoroughly that he kills himself doing it.