A Drummer's Story

drummer…

1

I'm a Native New Yorker.

I was born in New York, NY at the Women’s Hospital. When I was a kid, I mentioned this to my friends and they’d say, You were born in a hospital for women? I’d have to remind them it was where women went to give birth. That’s when I began to understand how important it is to have intelligent friends. If I hadn't understood it at that moment, it became clear one warm summer night on a corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant, my neighborhood in Brooklyn, when my friends said they wanted to rob the corner candy store. I said, across the street from where we live, where our parents drop by daily and where the owner of the store knows each and every one of us? I knew I could no longer hang out with these guys. A few years later, on another warm summer night, I watched as one of the guys involved in that conversation had his throat cut, right across the street from the candy store.

Growing up, it was just me, my sister Denise and my Mother and Father, but my mother had eight sisters and brothers and my Dad had a sister. It was always a wonderful big event when we would travel south to see them during summer vacation and at Christmas. My Dad would drive us to Lawrenceville, Virginia to visit my mother’s family, and then down to Deland, Florida to see his family. When we went in the summer, Dad’s arm would grow darker from hanging it outside the car window as he drove. At the time, blacks could only stop at certain places on the highway down South to eat and rest, and I remember my Dad being called boy many times by highway patrol cops.

One of my favorite roadside places was South of the Border, where both blacks and whites were allowed inside. It was on the border between North and South Carolina, I think, and as we wound around the long curves of the highway, it was so much fun for Denise and I to see the signs showing how many miles were left until our destination. Then we’d see the big illuminated sombrero over the rest stop. It was great to get out of the car and stretch our legs. I’m sure my Dad enjoyed the break from driving. And it gave my mother and Denise and me a chance to buy souvenirs at the busy shop. It was also a place where you could buy fireworks on the way to Florida. With its giant sombrero, the rest stop looked like something from a movie set. It was always a lot of fun.

We would spend Christmas in Deland, Florida, without the snow. We’d put the names of all of the family members into a hat and each of us would pick one and that was the person you’d buy a present for. I remember having a great time shopping at JC Penney, trying to hide what relative would be the recipient of my gift.

One Christmas I went to the five and dime store, Woolworth and bought a BB rifle for myself so I could shoot at oranges in the grove by my granddad’s house, and when I came back from Woolworth’s on this summer-like Christmas in Florida, everybody got upset and very nervous because I was a black kid wasn't supposed to have a BB gun. If you were male, you couldn't even wear sunglasses because you might be looking at a white woman. I didn’t know what the black/white rules were. I was from the North and thought there were enough rules up there. So my grandfather packed the rifle up and took it back to the store. That’s when I began to understand what Race meant.

Once, while we were in Florida, I went to play tennis with a friend and we’d written SOUL on the tennis balls. That was not a great idea. My friend and I went to buy a soda from the machine outside the store, because we weren’t allowed inside, and we got into a fight with some white men. Not kids like us but men. When we got back home, my family said there was nothing they could do about it, because that was just the way things were in the South. To be honest, I was very disappointed in their fear of the police, but it made me realize how glad I was to live in the North. It was a bit better up there. Still, when racial issues arose in Bed-Stuy. in the summertime, police rode down the streets on horseback to make sure there was no trouble while us kids were just playing stickball. Always seemed silly to me, racial hatred.

I remember being on the subway with my friends on the way home from school on the day JFK was killed. One of the guys had a transistor radio; when we heard the news we laughed because we couldn’t believe something like that could happen. We thought it was some kind of a joke. But we got home and saw it on TV and another picture of life appeared to us and it wasn’t pretty. Especially for brown-skinned people. Then came the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

So my high school years weren’t just about drumming; they were about the civil rights movement turning into the hippies’ Summer of Love and a cry for peace. I was right there, in the thick of it, marching and hoping for a global tranquility that has yet to come. The music of the ’60s was helping to change the way people thought, and I was a part of that scene, too. There were two media cultures: Adults had TV, and kids had radio. Songs like John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance and Revolution and others that called for an end to the war in Vietnam made young people aware of the changing world we had to live in. And there was Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangle Banner at Woodstock. This music changed my life, as well as the culture and hearts of some of the people.

Luckily, I didn’t get called to fight in Vietnam, although I did register with the draft board. I was late arriving, and when they asked why, I explained I was a musician and if I went to war and was lucky enough to come back home, I’d lose all of my gigs. The recruiter gave me a weird look and must've moved my name to another list, because my lottery number never came up.

Anyway, this isn’t about preaching.

2

Middle School Segregation.

Growing up, I was always listening to music. It didn’t matter if it was a sweltering hot summer day or a cold windy night; I was always near a radio. And sometime in the mid-’60s, in between James Brown’s 45 hit singles, which seemed to arrive every other week, and Aretha Franklin’s Respect, I heard IT, the song that changed everything, The In Crowd by pianist Ramsey Lewis. The moment I heard that song, something happened to me that I believe happened to many musicians in the ’70s: I had my first taste of the style called jazz. For me it was cool because I could see how it could be popular with the masses. At the time, most of my friends weren’t into it, but then again they weren’t musicians. I was. When I heard The In Crowd, I was happy because I knew that fusion music, the fusion between Jazz and R&B, in this case could work.

On the AM stations I’d heard other songs that had become popular by fusing jazz with the soulful funky beat that was in vogue in the late ’60s. It was a type of jazz-related music that was less complicated and more danceable. The dance/beat element helped some jazz musicians get over more readily with the public and reach a wider audience. Among this group of pioneer jazz songs were Grove Holmes’ Misty, Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (written by Joe Zawinul), Horace Silver’s Song for my Father, South African Hugh Masekela’s Grazing in the Grass, and Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder.

There was always music around my house, too, and the homes of my relatives. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Brooke Benton, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Wilson and many more. After I saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, though, things got intense for me. I got serious about my drumming, which my parents realized when I decided to attend The High School of Performing Arts. And after I got my first drum set, I began to play daily. Soon, I became known in my neighborhood in Bed-Stuy as The Drummer.

When I was a little boy, Nathan Reid, one of my Dad’s best buddies, gave me a set of bongos as a gift. I really enjoyed playing them, and drumming seemed to come naturally to me, like singing would to someone with perfect pitch. Like a God-given gift. As I went to elementary school, I played those bongos, as well as the clarinet. I got in the music class, and there were, like, a thousand clarinets. Everybody was playing it because it was the only instrument the school had. But I also sang in school chorus and started music lessons on different instruments—trumpet, saxophone, even piano. However, since we didn’t have a piano in my house to practice on, the lessons for that instrument didn’t work out.

Around the sixth grade, recruiters from Ditmas Junior High came to our neighborhood looking for black students to integrate into their white school. In this particular instance, they wanted kids specifically for music classes. I remember them coming to my house to see if my parents would like to send their children to a white school, in a white neighborhood, which was a scary issue. But my parents jumped on it, said, Yeah, because those schools were considered better. So the next year I was off to a new school in a predominantly white neighborhood near Church Avenue and Ocean Parkway, and it would change my life. This might’ve been the first time black kids were shipped off to a white school in history of the North. 1963-4, somewhere around there.

In those days, crime was a bit different; I mean, there was no worry that anybody would steal anything from a kid. A seventh-grader could go on a half hour train or bus ride and parents didn’t really have to worry much about their child’s safety. Things were a bit safer back then, as I remember. You didn’t have to have a cell phone to check in with your parents or anything like that. My mother went to the school once for a meeting, but I traveled there by myself, she didn't have to come with me. A train ride, transfer to another train to get to Coney Island and then a city bus to get to the school. It was a pretty long trip, now that I think of it. But it was integration, and many of us black students going to white schools in white neighborhoods traveled out of our communities for a better education and a chance for a better life.

I remember my first day of junior high school very well. Before I left, my Mom said, You are going to see two black kids in the schoolyard, taller than anyone else, and they are going to be your best friends. She knew who they were because she'd met their Mom’s at school meetings. Sure enough, I got to the courtyard and saw two black kids whose heads were above everybody else’s. Their names were Michael and Donald, and they did become my best friends in junior high. We shared the same homeroom