It was just past midnight when the cab pulled up outside of Daddy’s Club. The cabbie gave me a gentle nudge, and the brisk bite of the snow-carrying wind brought me the rest of the way back to the outskirts of the land of the living. I was fighting the temptation to jump back in the cab and call it a night, but Monday night is Monday night, and there are some things that feed the soul more than rest.
I passed a couple of departing, slightly lubricated college kids on my way down the narrow cut-back staircase to the below-ground haunt of one of Boston’s great assets. The club draws a spate of yuppies and college types earlier in the evening, but around midnight they begin to dwindle. After the other clubs and restaurants have closed, Daddy’s pulls in jazz musicians from in and out of town, as well as devoted listeners who can handle the late hours. It undoubtedly violates the city’s code of closing times, but the police give it their best benign neglect.
The whole room is about forty feet by twenty, with a miniscule bandstand at the front and a bar that runs the length of the left side-wall. It is either meticulously clean or filthy enough to drive cockroaches to cleaner surroundings. I have no idea which, because the lighting, or lack of it, would make a mole feel at home.
I slid up onto a bar stool at the near end of the bar, and every muscle in my body rose up in rebellion for not taking it home. But then, this was Oz, Valhalla, Never-Never Land. When I came through that door, the world out there dried up and blew away.
One of the most serious elements of my education at Harvard came from a luck-of-the-draw roommate. My first two months with Harry Ortlieb were, if not hell itself, at least a lower ring of purgatory. Harry was a music major with an addictive penchant for modern jazz. In particular, Harry idolized that rebellious cluster of jazz musicians who took the idiom out of the bounds of comfortable, decent harmony and pushed it into the sometimes discordant world of newfound chords. He personally stocked every recording made in the fifties and sixties by the principal emissaries of that assault on the ear and central nervous system called “bebop.”
For the first two months of our freshman year, I spent every torturous moment in our dorm room at Holworthy House fighting the urge to rip whatever CD by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus, whoever was fouling the air at the moment, out of his state-of-the-art player and tuck it as far up Harry Ortlieb’s ass as the length of my arm would permit. My only regret in my fantasy was that CDs have no sharp corners.
Then the third month came, and to my own shock and surprise, if not Harry’s, I started to like it. I started asking for particular pieces and actually listening to Harry’s explanation of what they were doing. Life became not only livable, but I started looking forward to our late nightly CD concerts with Harry playing DJ.
The effect went further than that. My father/guardian, Miles O’Connor, was, among his many other talents, an accomplished piano player. He drew me to the instrument out of sheer admiration for him. It stuck, and I found that at every stage of my life, whatever demons were haunting me could be tamed, or at least sedated, by an hour or two alone at a piano.
Enter Harry Ortlieb, and every moment I spent at the keys from freshman year on was turned to working out the intricacies such giants as Thelonius Monk had woven around the old standards. And every Monday late night in recent times was spent in that preview of heaven called Daddy’s Club.
I gave a three-finger sign to Marty behind the bar. He understandingly poured three fingers of Famous Grouse Scotch over four ice cubes. He had the maturity and gentility not to adulterate it with water or some twisted snip from a citrus object.
That first sip of the Grouse awakened taste buds that went right down to my toes. The second sip a minute or two later soothed the wrinkles off the brow and put this wandering soul deep in the proper attitude to hear and appreciate what “Daddy” Hightower on bass and his trio were doing on the bandstand. Sips three, four, and five carried me through the last chorus of a tune written by the great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus, that had not been done so tastefully since Charlie did it himself.
When they finished, I moved across to one of the small, empty tables and settled into serious relaxation between sets. I was halfway to the Land of Nod when I felt a hand the size of a boxing glove on my shoulder.
“Well, ain’t you the picture of piss and hot sauce?”
Daddy slipped into, or rather consumed, the chair beside me.
I nodded toward the bandstand. “That was nice.”
He knew what I meant. He just smiled. Daddy was a piece of work. He stood six feet four in a crouch and weighed something less than the QEII. He actually dwarfed the stand-up acoustic bass. When he hovered over it, it became like an added appendage of his body.
Daddy had been in the New York scene in Harlem in the late fifties, early sixties, when Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and, of course, Charlie Mingus were showing people that there was more to music than Lawrence Welk. When Daddy got into it on the bass, he played with such power and imagination that he could drive another musician to play six levels above himself. Some of the big ones used Daddy as a sideman on recording sessions. He was truly in his element.
Then the late sixties and seventies descended. Rock came along like a tidal wave and pushed some real talent into the backwashes. Jazz clubs withered and died, and the recording industry followed the rock thumpers after the money.
Daddy actually became a bouncer in a club where a group of giftless whambangers packed in an equally tasteless audience of everything from college rowdies to bikers. One night, Daddy waded in to break up a broken-bottle brawl, and they turned on him. It took surgery and six years before he could move his fingers enough to grip a bass.
Eventually it came back. Mostly. Some of the musicians from the old days backed him enough to open the cellar club on Beacon Street, and no serious jazz musician ever came to town without dropping by Daddy’s, usually with an instrument.
I looked across the table at that big old smile and the beads of perspiration on that wide ebony forehead.
“No, I mean it was really nice.”
The smile broadened, and he just nodded.
“She here tonight, Daddy?”
He leaned back in the chair, which must have held together by sheer willpower.
“I thought you might get around to that. Earlier. She asked about you.”
“And?”
“She said she might be back. She has a gig over the Hilton. All gown and tux for the snappy set.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
He nodded toward the piano on the bandstand. “So meantime, you comin’ up, Mickey?”
Daddy is the only one who ever made “Mickey” sound like a suitable substitute for “Michael.”
“I’d only slow you down tonight, Daddy.”
His eyebrows rode halfway up to his bald crest. “You think you can slow Daddy down?”
It was my turn to grin. “A herd of elephants couldn’t do that.”
“C’mon. Let’s give that box a mass age.”
Daddy waved Clyde Williams out of the audience. He’d been sitting ringside with his sax assembled, like a rookie hockey player choking his hockey stick waiting for a nod from the coach.
We followed Daddy onto the stand. I settled into the piano and Clyde loosened up his fingers, while Daddy got comfortable around his bass. It was at moments like this that I said an extra prayer for Miles O’Connor for putting the dimension of music into my life.
I caught a little grin on Daddy’s sly face when he yelled over to Clyde and me, “Cherokee.” It’s an old Charlie Barnett tune that’s played at about a hundred beats to the bar. I groaned and my head hit the music rest.
Daddy held up the three-flats sign and launched an avalanche of notes on the bass that I could feel in the pit of my stomach. By the time I waded in, I had adrenalin coming out my ears, and we did it at a full gallop.
We went through eight choruses of improvisation on the fly, when Daddy finally held up the closed-fist sign for the last chorus. I said a sincere prayer of thanks.
There was a nice ripple of applause before Daddy laid down a bass introduction to a mercifully slow and sleepy “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” It was like hot-walking a horse after a race.
Two choruses had me cruising with my eyes shut, when I heard those beautiful lyrics in the clear, sweet voice of one of God’s angels. The voice was right behind me, and I could feel the satin touch of long, tapered fingers on my neck.
I didn’t want to turn around, or speak, or breathe to break the spell until that last gorgeous line.
I turned around and saw that face with the auburn hair and the smile that makes everything else in the room background. I couldn’t remember a time when it didn’t, although we’d only met at Daddy’s a few weeks before.
Lanny Wells did something in Filene’s executive offices during the daytime, but at night her pumpkin turned into a microphone, and she turned into the finest jazz vocalist I’ve heard since Harry Ortlieb’s recordings by Sarah Vaughn.
When Lanny spoke, it sounded like she was still singing.
“Daddy said you’d be here tonight.”
“Hey, it’s Monday night. How was the gig?” I checked out the evening gown. “Must’ve been way uptown.”
She smiled. “ This is way uptown. You look like you had a day.”
“And a half. I’ll tell you sometime.”
Daddy leaned over the piano. “Let’s give ‘em ‘Route Sixty-Six.’”
I swung back into position, and after a driving pacesetter from Daddy, Lanny took us on a tour of my favorite road to California.
It was just after four in the morning when Lanny and I climbed the steps to street level and hailed the last cab in Boston. We were the only car on the snow-dusted street when we pulled up to her apartment house on Commonwealth Avenue.
I walked Lanny up the six steps to the door.
“Would you like to come up for coffee? I grind it fresh.”
“Would the Bruins like to beat the Rangers for the Stanley Cup?”
I love to throw sports analogies at her because she looks so cute while she’s grasping for a clue as to what I’m talking about.
“Does that mean ‘yes’?”
“It means ‘yes,’ but no. I have to be awake enough to play in the big league in about four hours. If I sleep fast, I’ll get three hours.”
I gave it a second or two before asking a question to which I really did not want to hear a negative answer.
“How about a real date? Dinner, North Shore?”
“When?”
That sounded promising. “Wednesday? I’ll give you a call. Would you like to?”
“Would Versace like to see Chanel in the red?”
It was my turn. “Does that mean ‘yes’?”
She kissed me. “Call and see.”