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96 10 Jazz Here’s one subject that is worth a chapter by itself. It involves one of the great passions in my life. In Syracuse, where I could have felt alone, it’s the medium that drew me and Donald “Peewee” Caldwell and Eugene “Moon” Williams together: jazz. Throughout your life, you hear music and you gravitate to the kind that moves you. A lot of my friends in high school were listening to groups like the Ink Spots. Me and a couple of other classmates, we were Billy Eckstine fans, and that got us started. I just fell in love with jazz. When I was playing in the NBA in the 1950s, I brought my Down Beat magazine on every trip I took. There was a section in Down Beat that told you where the top jazz clubs could be found in most of the major cities. After every game, I’d find my way to one of those clubs. The premier city for music was New York, and the premier jazz club was definitely Birdland. Baltimore and Washington had good jazz, and so did Philadelphia. Even Minneapolis had a couple of really fine clubs. I listened to just about all these guys at one place or another, and the one I got to know best was Les McCann, just a really fine piano player. There had been nothing like that available when we were kids. There was nothing available to us, period. There was quite a bit of time when there was no electricity in my home, so there was no radio. It’s hard to sit where I’m sitting today and imagine that. You used kerosene lamps around the house, which wasn’t real healthy, but you did what you had to do. Later on, when we got the place in the projects, we had electricity and we could sit around with the radio, and there was no real competition for it: my mother spent her time singing hymns around the house. As long as Jazz | 97 I stayed out of trouble, my mother and father weren’t worried about me listening to the music that I loved. I was a junior in college when I first heard great jazz, and it changed me, just listening to guys like Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon. In 1950 a guy named Jimmy Smith jumped onto the scene who was a tremendous jazz organist, and pretty soon most nightclubs had jazz organ trios. I’ve been a jazz organ fan ever since. Now I can find a jazz channel on cable, and cool jazz on the radio, but if I really want to hear something I love, I dig into my stack of CDs looking for the guys from that era. When Dexter Gordon died, I told my wife, “We’ve got to have a memorial ,” and I played his stuff for a month. Finally Charlita said, “Earl, the memorial was fine. Now it’s time for a Christian burial.” I remember there was a guy named Ed Mosler in New York, a real booster of the Nats, who was associated with a company that made safes. After we’d get done playing the Knicks he’d always want to take us out. There was a group called the Three Suns, and they played accordion, and one night he had tickets. Now, to each his own. This guy wanted to go, and he had great seats, but we were in New York, home of Birdland, the most celebrated jazz club in the world. I said to him, “There’s no way I can waste your money sitting there, pretending to like your music, when Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis are holding forth.” We all need things in our lives we’re passionate about. I was passionate about basketball, but when the game was over, you need a way to exhale. For me, jazz was relaxation. Funny thing is, I’d be in the clubs all that time, but I didn’t drink. I never learned how. In college, on one or two occasions, I tried a beer. I just never learned to like it. I never made a big deal of it, or ran around telling people I didn’t drink, but it’s just something I felt no need to do. Even today, when we have parties or any social situation at our house, we don’t serve booze, and everyone seems to enjoy themselves. I never...

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