without any difficulty. In the private school I attended, there were two
drummers, one a student of Stanley Spector, a famous jazz drum teacher,
the other a student of the late Charles Moffett, Ornette Coleman's drum-
mer in the late 1960s. In the general neighborhood I also met a trum-
peter who had played in a rehearsal band led by Paul Jeffries, and a
pianist who recorded in the 1970s with Pat Martino and Eric Kloss. In my
senior year of high school I began studying with Jimmy Giuffre in his
Manhattan studio on 15th Street. By then, I had made the switch from re-
luctant classical clarinet player to devoted avant-garde jazz saxophonist.

In the process of discovering the music, I also explored the literature of
jazz. Two books had an especially profound effect: A. B. Spellman Four
Lives in the Bebop Business and Amiri Baraka Blues People: The Negro
Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It. ( Ba-
raka was known as LeRoi Jones at the time of Blues People's publication.)
Spellman's book is a portrait of four musicians: Ornette Coleman, Cecil
Taylor, Jackie McLean, and Herbie Nichols. Each chapter offers les-
sons--"warnings" might be a better word--to someone interested in a jazz
career. The chapter on Herbie Nichols made it clear that early death
from sickness, poverty, and neglect was possible, even likely. The chapter
on McLean showed how drugs ruined the lives of a lot of jazz musicians.
The chapters devoted to Coleman and Taylor were studies in racial am-
bivalence, with Coleman finding it necessary to apologize for his reliance
on white bassists and Taylor apologizing for his conservatory education
and familiarity with white composers.

Amiri Baraka's book deals with musical genres like the blues as
African--American expression, "the result of certain attitudes, certain spe-
cific ways of thinking about the world (and only ultimately about the
ways in which music can be made)." ¹ Baraka seems to hear an underly-
ing racial message in practically any sound, from the swing generated by
a rhythm section to a horn solo. Like Czech writer Milan Kundera when
he is discussing his character Bettina's musical interests, I occasionally
wonder if it is the music that captivates Baraka or simply "its vague affin-
ity" to his political ideas and attitudes. But at least he recognizes the im-
portance of race and culture in the music. Those who prefer to dismiss
entirely its social implications reveal an almost complete lack of political
insight. Consider the response of the white British blues player John May-
all to the idea that the musical form derives from the African--American
experience: "What is black music? Music isn't black or white. There's no
such thing as black music." ²

-xii-