The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray

Author:Albert Murray [Murray, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82864-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

XXVIII

During my first months in Hollywood, Eric Threadcraft and I did most of our work in the canyon view hillside apartment that he always referred to as his old air conditioned woodshed with drafting tools. We hardly ever went down to the recording studio to rehearse anything either then or later on until he was satisfied that all of the parts of whatever we were working up arrangements on were ready for a full band run-through just before the first official takes.

In the beginning we actually spent most of the time talking about what he liked so much about the Bossman Himself and his band, which he said was always one and the same thing with his music in much the same sense as Picasso and his palette and easel were the same as his painting. When you said Picasso you meant the paintings. When you said the Bossman Himself you meant the music.

It was also during that time that he used to like to come along every now and then when I made the rounds to the spots across town along and off West Adams and along and off Central Avenue. And nothing pleased him more than being invited to sit in on piano on occasion here and there. To which he always responded not with a solo but by vamping and comping not only to avoid making himself a target in a cutting session but mainly because that way he would go on listening as the arranger-composer and conductor that he was (but admitted only to an apprenticeship to).

Hey fellow, if only I had grown up having to earn my way into sessions like those, he always said afterward. Hey wow! Man, there’s no telling. Because so much of this wonderful stuff depends on nuance and scruple. The idiomatic nuances one absorbs growing up and the scruples peculiar to the convention from which your definitive aesthetic judgments are derived. Hey fellow, I’m talking about growing up learning how to break the proper rules properly and mispronounce the right words correctly because you are not so much taught as conditioned to know that something goes not like that but like this.

But the main thing during those first weeks and months was what I could tell him about being as close as I had been to the Bossman Himself. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me, my man, he started saying at the very outset, and as much like an ever so enthusiastic amateur as he almost always must have sounded to some people, as soon as you stepped into his picture perfect streamlined workshop, you could see that his collection of recordings, band equipment, and memorabilia and his files of articles and photographs were those of a professional whose dedication to his métier was longstanding and comprehensive.

Naturally I’m already pretty much clued in on the vital statistics, he said. Man, just wait till you see some of the background stuff I’ve been picking up from the Washington and Baltimore of his boyhood days and the years of his apprenticeship.

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