at dances in his Yale undergraduate days.
He was there for the closing this second night as well, sitting alone at one of the back tables, the steel-gray smoke matting thicker and thicker between him and the bandstand. The following day he cut classes, but he stayed away from the Black Cat that night. He was dazed, like a survivor of some disaster, a dancehall fire or a steamboat explosion. ‘All I have done adds up to nothing,’ he told himself as he lay in bed unable to sleep after the day’s idleness; ‘now I’ll have to start all over again.’ He kept remembering the tone of the cornet, recalling whole passages of improvisation by the cocoa-colored Negro. ‘Maybe he cant even read music,’ Van thought. ‘Maybe he came here from a cornfield somewhere, dropped the hoe and took up the horn and played what his grandfathers played in the jungle a hundred years ago.’
The following night he found that some of this was wrong. The cornetist could read notes, for one thing, anyhow after a fashion. His name was Conway; he had come up from New Orleans two years before and had already made a name for himself. Van learned all this from an enthusiastic young man who sat at an adjoining table. He wore a crew haircut and a hound’s tooth jacket and explained off-hand, though with an edge of pride, that he was a writer for
Platter
, a trade magazine published by a record manufacturer. “Thats the most horn in the world,” he said. “I thought everybody interested in music knew Duff Conway.” He spoke a racy jargon which Van could not always follow, and he had a habit of pacing the music by patting the table with his palms and humming du-duh du-duh through his teeth with a rhythm which Van, at any rate, thought did not always conform to that of the musicianson the bandstand. The gold-toothed manager seemed impressed, however; he kept dropping by to ask how things were going and sent the writer a fresh drink every fifteen minutes without charge.
During a break the young man brought the cornetist to Van’s table. “You been asking so I thought I’d bring him round,” he said by way of introduction. He spread his arms and put his head back like a prize-ring announcer. “Comb them all — 52nd Street, the Loop, 12th Street in K.C., anywhere — you wont find a horn like this one. Mind what I’m telling you.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Van said.
“How do,” Duff said, shaking hands.
He was twenty-four that month. His manner with strangers was nearly always awkward, but soon after meeting Harry Van he lost this awkwardness, at least in Van’s direction. They became friends and were seen together in such diverse places as Swing Row and Carnegie Hall, the Village and the Metropolitan — one the son of a New England choir master and a sea captain’s daughter, advanced student at one of the nation’s leading music institutions, already composing music which even the conservative officials of the school called “promising” with considerable more enthusiasm than usually hid behind the word; the other the son of an itinerant guitarist and a Mississippi servant girl, horn man in a Harlem gin-mill, whose name spoken casually was enough to evoke superlatives from his followers and whose recordings were beginning to be collectors’ items. For two years this relationship grew, Van being drawn steadily away from the music he had known and into the orbit — or maybe vortex — of the music Duff represented, until finally he was composing things like those he formerly had believed were without melody or harmony or sometimes even rhythm. At first his friends at the institute talked against it; it didnt make sense, they said. But now he seldom saw them. He was at work on a four-part composition made up of jazz themes with variations based on Duff’s improvisations. Later he was to abandon this. Indeed, the jazz influence ishardly apparent in his work today. But he had got what he wanted by then; he had made the
He was there for the closing this second night as well, sitting alone at one of the back tables, the steel-gray smoke matting thicker and thicker between him and the bandstand. The following day he cut classes, but he stayed away from the Black Cat that night. He was dazed, like a survivor of some disaster, a dancehall fire or a steamboat explosion. ‘All I have done adds up to nothing,’ he told himself as he lay in bed unable to sleep after the day’s idleness; ‘now I’ll have to start all over again.’ He kept remembering the tone of the cornet, recalling whole passages of improvisation by the cocoa-colored Negro. ‘Maybe he cant even read music,’ Van thought. ‘Maybe he came here from a cornfield somewhere, dropped the hoe and took up the horn and played what his grandfathers played in the jungle a hundred years ago.’
The following night he found that some of this was wrong. The cornetist could read notes, for one thing, anyhow after a fashion. His name was Conway; he had come up from New Orleans two years before and had already made a name for himself. Van learned all this from an enthusiastic young man who sat at an adjoining table. He wore a crew haircut and a hound’s tooth jacket and explained off-hand, though with an edge of pride, that he was a writer for
Platter
, a trade magazine published by a record manufacturer. “Thats the most horn in the world,” he said. “I thought everybody interested in music knew Duff Conway.” He spoke a racy jargon which Van could not always follow, and he had a habit of pacing the music by patting the table with his palms and humming du-duh du-duh through his teeth with a rhythm which Van, at any rate, thought did not always conform to that of the musicianson the bandstand. The gold-toothed manager seemed impressed, however; he kept dropping by to ask how things were going and sent the writer a fresh drink every fifteen minutes without charge.
During a break the young man brought the cornetist to Van’s table. “You been asking so I thought I’d bring him round,” he said by way of introduction. He spread his arms and put his head back like a prize-ring announcer. “Comb them all — 52nd Street, the Loop, 12th Street in K.C., anywhere — you wont find a horn like this one. Mind what I’m telling you.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Van said.
“How do,” Duff said, shaking hands.
He was twenty-four that month. His manner with strangers was nearly always awkward, but soon after meeting Harry Van he lost this awkwardness, at least in Van’s direction. They became friends and were seen together in such diverse places as Swing Row and Carnegie Hall, the Village and the Metropolitan — one the son of a New England choir master and a sea captain’s daughter, advanced student at one of the nation’s leading music institutions, already composing music which even the conservative officials of the school called “promising” with considerable more enthusiasm than usually hid behind the word; the other the son of an itinerant guitarist and a Mississippi servant girl, horn man in a Harlem gin-mill, whose name spoken casually was enough to evoke superlatives from his followers and whose recordings were beginning to be collectors’ items. For two years this relationship grew, Van being drawn steadily away from the music he had known and into the orbit — or maybe vortex — of the music Duff represented, until finally he was composing things like those he formerly had believed were without melody or harmony or sometimes even rhythm. At first his friends at the institute talked against it; it didnt make sense, they said. But now he seldom saw them. He was at work on a four-part composition made up of jazz themes with variations based on Duff’s improvisations. Later he was to abandon this. Indeed, the jazz influence ishardly apparent in his work today. But he had got what he wanted by then; he had made the
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