Some time after Davis and Hewitt left, while Smith was packing his bags, the pianist Sonny Clark entered the building with his friend the saxophonist Lin Halliday. Smith’s tape captured the musicians opening the building’s sidewalk door and hiking up the bare wood stairs to the fourth flour along with Halliday’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Virginia “Gin” McEwan, who was pregnant with their baby at the time. Earlier in the evening, Clark and Halliday had been playing at the White Whale in the East Village with the bassist Butch Warren and the drummer Billy Higgins. Contrary to Davis and Hewitt, somebody in this party had a key.
Clark made it up to the fourth-floor landing and stuck his head in Smith’s door. Clark said, You’ve got a lot of shit in here. Smith responded, I’ve been shitting for a long time. They laughed.
Clark and Halliday then sauntered into the hallway bathroom and shot heroin into their veins. Smith’s tape captured Clark out in the hallway a while later, moaning to near unconsciousness. Beside him, more coherent, Halliday grew anxious, then flat-out frightened. He sang to Clark to try to keep him awake.
Earlier that summer, McEwan had saved Clark’s life with amateur CPR after a similar overdose in the loft (after which—the next day—Smith gave her five dollars to express his gratitude). But now, when Halliday called out for her—Gin? Gin? Gin?—she didn’t respond; she had already moved somewhere else in the building. The tension mounted as Halliday began to panic. He whistles to get attention. He whistles again. No response.
Sonny, are you awake? Sonny, do you want me to help you? Sonny, don’t lie down, sit up. Sit up, Sonny! Don’t lie down.
Gin? Gin?
Clark moans deeply and uncontrollably, floating in and out of consciousness. Halliday scat sings improvised lyrics to the Ray Charles tune “Hit the Road, Jack” (which rose to the top of the charts in 1961) to try to distract Clark awake.
Sonny Clark’s working at the White Whale, pussycaaaat.
He can’t get paid, but he get his ass a staaaaash.
He gets his head ripped, and that’s all he cares abou-ou-ou-ou-out.
Meanwhile, in his room packing for Japan, Smith played vinyl records of Edna St. Vincent Millay reading her poetry and the actress Julie Harris reading Emily Dickinson. He moved back and forth from his loft space to the stairwell, opening and closing the screen door while stacking packed luggage in the hall, the door’s stretching spring evoking a fishing cabin or a farmhouse door.
Gene may have photographed and recorded the loft scene but there was a disconnect (between him and the musicians), said Gin, when I visited her in Port Townsend, Washington, in 2006. Most of the upstairs folk were involved with heroin; Gene, I deeply suspect, was himself a meth freak, a speed freak.
After an hour or so, Sonny’s dose wore off and he regained coherence. He and Lin began muttering about going to the twenty-four-hour automat around the corner for cheeseburgers. They had no money, so Smith gave them a couple dozen glass bottles to redeem for deposits at the grocery store, which opened at 6:00 a.m. You can hear the bottles tinkling on the tape. Lin asked Smith if he wanted anything. Smith asked for a cheeseburger with mustard. Sonny and Lin shuffled down the stairs and out the door onto the sidewalk to run the errand. A half hour later they returned with milk shakes, burgers, and fries.
I remember the last day before Gene left for Japan, said Gin. Lin, ever the opportunistic and manipulative junkie, but also concerned because I was now pregnant and needed shelter, was trying to convince Gene to sublet his loft to us while he was gone. To sweeten the deal, Lin had gone out of his way to score some sort of speed for Gene. Gene took the drugs but was not dumb enough to capitulate to Lin’s wishes. It was the right decision, because in a few weeks I was gone myself.
It’s not clear if Smith ever saw Sonny Clark again. He and Carole Thomas flew to Japan later that day and stayed for a year. On January 13, 1963, Clark died of a heroin overdose in a shooting gallery somewhere in New York City. He was thirty-one.
* * *
Clark’s right fingers on piano keys created some of my favorite sounds in all of recorded jazz. I noticed these sounds for the first time one afternoon in a coffee shop in the Five Points neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the winter of 1999. I walked in, a freelance writer seeking refuge from cabin fever. I was working on an article for DoubleTake magazine about Smith and the Sixth Avenue loft building, the early days of my research. Over the next hour, I became transfixed by the relaxed, swinging blues floating out of the house stereo system. The multipierced barista with multicolored hair showed me the two-CD case, Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark. Green was a guitarist from St. Louis with a singing single-note style that blended beautifully with Clark’s effortless, hypnotic right-hand piano runs. She said, This is the epitome of cool. True. It was also smokin’ hot. And I heard a country blues twang in it. The nineteen tracks were recorded in December 1961 and January 1962 by the Blue Note label, but they weren’t released until many years later, after both Green and Clark were long dead.
I began devouring all of Clark’s recordings, some of which were available only in Japan. From 1957 to 1962, he was documented on thirty-one studio recordings, twenty-one as a sideman and ten as a leader. Most of Clark’s recorded work is as singular as the sessions with Green; his presence on piano creates not only the sound of one instrument but also an atmosphere simultaneously light and melancholy.
“Bewitching” is the word the New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff used to describe Clark’s performance of “Nica” on a 1960 trio recording with Max Roach on drums and George Duvivier on bass. “It’s funky and clean and has the tension of changing tonality, so that within four bars it keeps changing from easy and secure to full of dread.”
I wanted to figure out what had happened to Clark, and to learn how it came to be that his life intersected with Smith’s in such a powerful and horrifying and yet somewhat random and ordinary manner.
In my conversations with Clark’s two surviving sisters, a number of his childhood friends, and many musicians, as well as in my research in libraries, I came across more than one indication that his recording sessions exacerbated his drug addictions.
Sonny made mistakes, said the trombonist Curtis Fuller, who played with Clark on a number of recordings. He could have had a brilliant career. I don’t want to know about what happened to him. We all have troubles. It’s a wild and crazy life, especially for black people at that time, trying to make it. There was a lot to deal with that white people can’t know no matter how hard they try. That part of history was unkind for a lot of us. I don’t want to go there. I don’t care to talk about it.
* * *
Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark was born in 1931 in Herminie No. 2, Pennsylvania. (“No. 2” refers to the second shaft of the Ocean Coal Company; the nearby larger town around the first shaft was just plain Herminie.) He was the youngest of eight children born to Ruth Shepherd Clark and Emory Clark. Sonny’s parents came from rural, Jim Crow Georgia and moved to Pennsylvania so Sonny’s father could work in the coke yards of Jones & Laughlin Steel. They ended up in the coal-mining village after being chased by the KKK, and Emory died of black lung disease two weeks after Sonny was born.
After his father’s death, the family moved into the black-owned Redwood Inn a few hundred yards down the road. Named for its owner, John Redwood, the inn hosted a thriving social scene for African Americans. Redwood’s daughter, Jean Redwood Douglass, remembers, The inn had twenty-two rooms, a dance hall with a jukebox and a pinball machine, and a little store. On weekends, black folks from all over the region came for dances, and black musicians from Pittsburgh came out to play. Sonny began playing piano at age four, and he was still very young when he began playing the weekend dances. He could play any instrument besides piano, too. I remember him playing xylophone, guitar, and bass. Everybody marveled at him.
Clark was the pride of the family. By age fourteen, he was getting notices in the Pittsburgh Courier, the famous black paper, and he became a fixture in the city’s rich jazz scene. One Courier article indicated Clark was twelve years old when he was actually fifteen, and no doubt he looked younger (he was five foot four and 130 pounds, full grown). A bout with Bell’s palsy as a child had left one side of his lower face slightly stiff and affectless, like a shy kid dribbling words out of one side of his mouth.
Ruth Clark died of breast cancer in 1953, and the Redwood Inn burned to the ground around the same time. The family dispersed. By the time Gene Smith went to Pittsburgh in 1955, most of the Clark family was gone.
Sonny Clark followed an aunt and brother to California, where he rose to the top of the jazz scene, becoming a regular at the Lighthouse jazz club in Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles. The scene was inundated with alcohol and narcotics, and Clark was soon hooked. He moved to New York in late 1956 or early ’57, at age twenty-five. He would kick the habit for brief periods, often by checking himself into Bellevue, or by visiting the controversial psychiatrist Robert Freymann (whom the Beatles reportedly referenced in their tune “Dr. Robert”), but he couldn’t stay clean.
The first time I remember meeting Sonny Clark, I was working as a waiter at the Five Spot Cafe in Cooper Square in Manhattan in 1957, said the jazz bass player Bob Whiteside. At the time, Sonny was working as the chauffeur for Nica [Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a wealthy patron of jazz musicians], and he came in with her and Thelonious Monk. Monk was playing with his quartet, which included Johnny Griffin, Roy Haynes, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik. I knew Sonny had played piano on some wonderful records, but that’s about all I knew. His appearance was not that of a dope addict. He just seemed like a nice dude.
De Koenigswarter had hired Clark to be her driver and put him up in her New Jersey home in order to help him kick his drug habit. His addictions were a topsy-turvy struggle, but people liked him personally and wanted to help him, including Gene Smith, who was known to let Clark “borrow” some of his equipment so Clark could pawn it.
Sonny was my man, said Fuller. We were instant friends, about the same age. He was a young scholar of music. He had the same personality as Coltrane, dead serious about his music. He was also a great writer. He was hip. He had a different type of creativity, a unique and special touch, and an old-fashioned quality that was also very modern.
But the barrage of early success in New York had an underbelly: Clark’s drug addictions worsened. His increasing reliance on narcotics periodically reached a head and would culminate in disappearances. From 1958 to 1961, he had six-, seven-, and thirteen-month absences from an otherwise prolific recording career. Each time, he’d resurface and record some beautiful music; then he’d disappear again. In 1961, he was a regular at 821 Sixth Avenue, squatting in the loft hallways.
In my quest to learn more about Clark’s life and times, especially the part of his life documented on Smith’s tapes—the rarely documented part—I picked through every jazz magazine published from 1957 to 1962, looking for any clues. In the August 1962 issue of the indispensable Canadian magazine CODA, I found this report by Fred Norsworthy on an unnamed musician who is probably Clark: One of the saddest sights these days is the terrible condition of one of the nation’s foremost, and certainly original, pianists … I saw him several times in the past three months and was shocked to see one of our jazz greats in such pitiful shape. Unfortunately, the album dates that he keeps getting only help his addiction get worse instead of better.
The ambiguous relationship between black musicians and white-owned record labels is demonstrated poignantly in August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: it was bittersweet, lopsided but mutually dependent, and not that much different from the company-owned coal “patch” environment in which Clark was born and raised, with money holding inextricable power. Wilson’s play is fiction; not many voices have been willing to describe the relationship in nonfiction terms. In his seminal 1966 book, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (republished in 2004 as Four Jazz Lives), the African American poet and historian A. B. Spellman quotes the saxophonist Jackie McLean, concerning an unfair record deal McLean agreed to while addicted to heroin: I was starving when I signed that contract … And my condition didn’t help, either; any money was money then … The record companies today are aware of what the cat’s problems are. If they weren’t aware that there aren’t many jazz clubs going and that record dates are a necessity to many musicians and that some musicians use drugs, there would be more jazz musicians around with money.
When I asked Spellman to elaborate on the relationship between labels and addicted musicians, he said, Record labels kept stables of drug addicts. Addicts were always borrowing against royalties, and they were always behind on paying back the money. So one way they’d pay back their debts to the labels was by playing a new recording session, because the addicts never had money to pay them back. The record label’s side of the story is hard to contradict: the musicians owed them money, and the label executives could show that they lost money on the deal. The appearances of this situation looked unhealthy to many of us. The musicians were owned, almost. But it’s hard to stand up for junkies, because it’s hard to justify their behavior and, it’s true, the labels did loan them a lot of money in advance. You have to see both sides.
* * *
Today, Clark’s recordings are more popular in Japan than in the United States, even though he never visited that country. According to SoundScan, which began tracking CD sales in 1991, Clark’s 1958 album on the Blue Note label, Cool Struttin’, has, in Japan, outsold several Blue Note albums with similar instrumentation from the same period that dwarf Cool Struttin’ in terms of iconography and sales in the States. For example, from 1991 to 2009, Cool Struttin’ sold 38,000 copies in the States and 179,000 in Japan, while over the same period, Coltrane’s classic 1957 release, Blue Train, sold 545,000 copies in the States and 147,000 in Japan.
The producer Michael Cuscuna organized a tribute to Clark at the Mount Fuji Jazz Festival in 1986, and the band opened with the title track of Cool Struttin’. Within the first five notes, said Cuscuna, the crowd of fifteen thousand people roared with recognition. At the most sophisticated festivals in the States—say, San Francisco, New York, Monterey, or Newport—such recognition of Clark’s music is unthinkable.
I asked the novelist Haruki Murakami, who once owned a jazz club, why Cool Struttin’ is so popular in Japan. He attributed it to the rise of the “jazz kissa” (jazz coffeehouses) in the 1960s. “The popularity of Cool Struttin’ was not driven by professional critics or by sales,” wrote Murakami by e-mail, “but instead by youths who didn’t have enough money to buy vinyl records, so they went to coffee shops to hear jazz on the house record player. This was a phenomenon particular to Japan, or at least very different from America.” Clark’s buoyant blues fit the underground mood of Japan’s postwar youth. It didn’t hurt that his tragic life made him an unconventional, forlorn icon, too.
The symbols that frequently come up in Japanese writing to describe Clark’s music are 哀愁, pronounced “aishuu.” As often is the case with Japanese aesthetic terms, there isn’t a direct English translation of the phrase. The first symbol can be read as ka-na-shi-i (哀しい) or a-wa-re (哀れ). The former means moving, sad, and melancholy. The latter can mean compassion, compassion-inducing, sympathetic, and touching. The symbol is made up of 衣, which means clothing or an outside covering, and 口, which means mouth. These symbols together mean covering, suppressing, or muffling an expression of feelings.
The second symbol is usually read as ure-eru (愁える), which means to feel lonely, to lament, to grieve, be fearful. It’s made up of the symbols 秋, which means autumn, and 心, which means heart. In the fall, everything contracts, or tightens, such as trees and plants. Therefore, the symbol 愁 means the contracting or tightening of the heart and expresses a mysterious atmosphere of pathos and sorrow.
* * *
On May 8, 1960, inside the loft, Gene Smith made an audio recording of Edward R. Murrow’s CBS program Small World, from Channel 2 in New York City. During the program the writers Yukio Mishima and Tennessee Williams compared Japanese aesthetics with those of the American South.
Mishima: I think a characteristic of Japanese character is just this mixture of very brutal things and elegance. It’s a very strange mixture.
Williams: I think that you in Japan are close to us in the Southern states of the United States.
Mishima: I think so.
Williams: A kind of beauty and grace. So that although it is horror, it is not just sheer horror, it has also the mystery of life, which is an elegant thing.
This “very strange mixture” of the brutal and the elegant may describe what Japanese jazz fans hear coming out of Clark’s piano, a ventilated swing drenched with minor blues. Gene Smith’s trademark printing technique contained a similar aesthetic mixture.
* * *
On the two nights before Sonny Clark died—January 11 and 12, 1963—he had played piano at Junior’s Bar on the ground floor of the Alvin Hotel on the northwest corner of Fifty-second and Broadway. The next thing we know with certainty is that Nica de Koenigswarter called Clark’s older sister in Pittsburgh to inform her of her brother’s death. Nica said she would pay to have the body transported to his hometown and that she’d pay for a proper funeral. We don’t know, however, if the body in the New York City morgue with Clark’s name on it was his.
Witnesses in both New York and Pittsburgh, after the body arrived there, believed it wasn’t Sonny. Some suspected a conspiracy with the drug underworld with which Clark was entangled, but, as African Americans in a white system, they were reticent. It was probably a simple case of carelessness at the morgue, something not uncommon with “street” deaths at the time, particularly when the corpses were African American.
Today, there’s a gravestone with Clark’s name on it in the rural hills outside Pittsburgh, where a body shipped from New York was buried in mid-January of that year. But even while the funeral proceeded, no one was sure where Sonny’s body was. His may be one of the thousands of unidentified bodies buried in potter’s field on New York’s Hart Island, where Sonny himself dug graves years earlier, when, on drug charges, he was incarcerated at Rikers Island.