Jade Visions: The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro

Chapter 12. Aftermath

151 •฀ ChapTer 12 • aFtermath The pleading ring of the phone disrupted the heavy earlymorning darkness.To silence the annoyance, I turned to the bedside phone. Half asleep and slow, I finally recognized Gloria’s voice on the other end.But the message was not coming through … what she was saying was coming through all wrong:“Scott has lost his legs” … how could this be? I wondered. I repeated what I thought I was hearing: “Scotty has lost his legs??? How???” I asked,“could he have done that”?”“No, No … lost his life” … she was trying to say through her tears, I finally made out, but it wasn’t registering with me … such a thing could not be. “He’s dead!!” she hysterically cried out. Perhaps she didn’t want to say that—not wanting to verbalize what she didn’t want to be. That night’s dreams became nightmares, then reality. That short interruption of a lazy July morning would bring a loss whose effect would be felt in two very diverse places—a modest home in Southern California and in the esoteric world of jazz. Gloria related:“Just a few minutes after Scotty left the house for Newport, he came back. I was upstairs, so he told my Mom, ‘I just came back to tell her I love her.’ My Mom is superstitious and felt it was bad news to come back when you had just left. I said don’t say that, Mom.A few days later, I got a call from Scotty saying he was coming home, but then in the early morning the next day, Mom answered the door and it was a policeman asking 152  JadeVisions:The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro if there is a Gloria Gabriel here,he wanted to talk to her.That was the worst morning in my life. I lost the love of my life. Mom said she knew he should have never come back.” Apparently it was the time Scotty knew would come. “Bill was destroyed by Scotty’s death and couldn’t talk to me,” Gloria told me. She said that a while later she got a letter from him,talking about how he felt that Scotty’s passing was a price he was paying for his transgressions and told her “no matter who I get to play, I don’t have Scotty.” She got many letters from a lot of musicians. Following Newport,Stan,Roy,and Steve left for Saranac Lake and upon their arrival Stan’s manager called from NewYork and told him the news that had come over the AP wire about Scotty’s accident. Stan and Steve were able to get over to Geneva for the funeral services. Many years later, Stan Getz told Gloria he was pretty destroyed as well. He said to her,“I want to tell you how I feel about everything. Bad enough I felt rejected by Scotty … he was always busy. I was so glad we got to work together.There was nobody like him … still there is nobody like him. Bill Evans and he were the dynamic duo.” In November 22, 1962, Gene Lees, a close personal friend of Bill’s,in his article“Inside the New Bill EvansTrio” in Down Beat, quoted Paul Motian:“It’s hard to describe what Scott’s death last year did to us. Bill telephoned me. I was sleeping. It seemed like a dream, what he told me, and I went back to sleep.When I woke up,I was convinced it was a dream.I called Bill back,and he gold me it was true.When it began to sink in we … we didn’t know what to do.We didn’t know if we’d still have a trio.We’d reached such a peak with Scott, such freedom. It seemed that everything was becoming possible.We didn’t work for six months—between the last two weeks of June (1961) until Christmas.” Aftermath  153 Paul Motian told me about this same dream years later and how it unsettled him. Paul continued, I loved Scott very much. He was a close friend and a beautiful musical companion. I began to hear differently . I always play from what I hear and I tried to incorporate what he and Bill were doing into my playing. They had a symbiotic connection.At first with Scotty and Bill, I started breaking...