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9. Sweet Harlem Summer
- University of Minnesota Press
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C H A P T E R N I N E SWEET HARLEM SUMMER / wasborn by the river . . . in a little tent. —SAM COOKE, "A CHANGE Is GONNA COME" I HE SUMMER OF '87 was in full swing and raw sweet Harlem was waiting with open arms. Morning birds trilled in the trees outside my bedroom window. Nat's spirit had lingered: I was drinking nothing these days except ginseng tea, and practicing hard. Listening. Trying to hear the silence behind my notes. Technique was important, of course—you had to be able to throw down—and harps wouldn't give you full power at high speed without a fight. Ten holes, blow and draw; twenty tiny brass reeds, each requiring a slightly different positioning of tongue and jaw in order to deliver up a singing richness of tone. Bent notes—those groaning flatted thirds and fifths that mimic a blues singer's swoops—needed much more force, exerted instantaneously and released. Blues harmonica played well was a miniature tongued slalom, a tornado swallowed and contained. All that, with silence added. Charlie Parker hunkered down in his Kansas City woodshed; I had Inwood Hill Park. I'd hike up and around through the forest 1 61 T Mister S a t a n ' s Apprentice with hands cupped, pausing under the Henry Hudson Bridge to fire my blue tracer-streams up and away. There was another tunnel I haunted, on the backside of the hill—dark and abandoned, littered with dried leaves and the occasional dirty blanket—where I could rub my lips raw without drawing the wrath of the paranoid old white lady downstairs. Each enclosed space had a distinctive sound, doubling my last few notes with its own brief fading echo. I'd float out into the summer woods after a while and find myself surrounded by chirring crickets, bare thighs pricked by wineberry brambles. Bouncing along the river I blew hardest of all, bathed in a glistening immensity that swirled silently at my shoulder, pumped my heart full, gave nothing and everythingback. Suddenly I'd stop,hyperventilated , expectant. What was I supposed to hear? Water sucking softly at the rocks below; cheers from the dusty playing fields where Mexican soccer players tangled as their young wives, Indian-stolid, heated fresh tortillas on portable grills. All of us perched on this forgotten northern tip of Manhattan Island. Nat's spirit lingered. One afternoon during his stay I'd returned to the apartment to find him cross-legged on the floor in front of my stereo, facing twin stacked walls of cassettes—a hundred or more, each carefully hand-labeled with his small clear printing. George "Harmonica" Smith, Kim Wilson, Louis Armstrong, Magic Dick. His ex-girlfriend—Kathy the parole officer—had let him retrieve his scholar's supplies. "I'm in heaven," he sighed. "You have no idea how desperate I've been for my music down in Norfolk." He'd made me a study tape, labeled Adam's Homework. Fifteen or twenty jazz-blues instrumentals. Saxes, mostly: Houston Person, Maceo Parker, Stanley Turrentine, "Gatortail" Jackson, King Curtis . We'd spoken often about what it meant to be a New York blues harmonica player, as opposed to Chicago or Mississippi. We had the funk, we owned the jazz; you had to be ready for whatever came up. I lived inside that tape for weeks after he'd left, got so I could I.D. the player by sound alone within a couple of seconds. Houston was huge, measured, playful, knowing, aching, suddenly fleet: a breathtaking gamble made with infinite relaxation in the face of every pos1 62 [44.197.114.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:47 GMT) P r e t t y Girls sible death. Maceo was puckish, rope-a-dope footed, the funky skyprince . Stanley you could always tell from the spaces he left—startling , oblique, shattered by tenor hiccups, the same note played with three or four different rapid-fire fingerings. Hey! Who?Wha?! Steal everybody's shit. Alwaysacknowledge where you got what. Can't nobody play you but you. i HAD ONLY one enemy in Harlem that first summer—he wanted to slit my throat—and even he might have been joking. His name was Mr. Simms. He was a small older man, slightly stooped, with a fluffy white beard over bulging Popeye cheeks and the wildest, fiercest eyes I'd ever seen. Thousands of people would stroll, walk, trot, and run...