One Soul Sings, Some Listen

The year is 1958. Two blocks east of Vine on Sunset Boulevard, in a tiny club that reeks of cigarettes and defeat, Samoan and Tahitian bachelors congregate. Their weight in is the 300-pound range, their flowered shirts look so mournful in the dark, their noses flare wide with sorrow, their eyes film over with unshed, homesick tears. But on Saturday nights (or Wednesdays? another unsung weeknight?) around 11 o’clock, some other human beings enter here--skinny and somber, men and women (girls and boys, really)--dressed entirely in black, hungry and intent, never cracking a smile, hardly saying a word. They sit up straight at little tables around a mingy bandstand. They are looking for the world of art. The hulking islanders edge closer to their jukebox, still playing its broad, hospitable melodies, until someone pulls the plug and they move, lonely, out into the Hollywood night.

One by one, jazz musicians slide quietly in; absent-minded, vacant. The watchers watch intently--for what, they don’t really know. The bassist could be Red Mitchell, pale and jovial, sometimes moved to whisper, “Nice to see ya!” Or sometimes the black mountain, Leroy Vinnegar, ethereal and strange. The pianist, usually Ronnie Ball, destined to be unmemorable because the hope was always, would Hampton Hawes show up tonight? “The Legendary Joe Albany,” who played on some legendary day with Bird himself, was always rumored to be somewhere in town. Then, quiet as a cat in a cat cemetery, a slight, beautiful, slim-to-scrawny tenor player would mosey out, carrying his horn, wearing a white businessman’s shirt far too large for his thin boy’s neck, and begin distractedly to search around for, and fiddle with, his reeds.

There’d be a couple of “square” couples crowded in the club, thinking that this dank hole called Whistlin’s Hawaii was where you could sample real Hollywood night life; the men showing off for their dates, the women simpering, hoping for marriage, because that’s what you did in the ‘50s.

Then the musicians would be ready. Warne Marsh, a young man, somewhere around 30, would strap his horn around his neck, breathe tentatively a few times into the tenor sax and begin to play--”Topsy,” that simple, traditional favorite, or “There Will Never Be Another You,” which cried out for the assertive, smart-ass alto accompaniment of his East Coast crony, Lee Konitz, or “Tautology,” or “Marionette,” a tune named for Warne himself because his middle name--as if Warne wasn’t bad enough, instead of Warren--was Marion. Or Warne might play “Once We Were Young,” or “Two Not One,” and, paralyzed with joy and an anxiety we couldn’t name or even think about, we’d listen. When “Sax of a Kind” came from Warne’s austere lips, our eyes would squint with effort as we listened to the self-effacing pianist do the chord changes to--wasn’t that “Fine and Dandy?”

Because life was not what it seemed. Above the dull chord changes of ordinary life, the artists flew. We hardly knew what we were hearing, except that it was celestial and strange and not to be expected or depended on.

We left that dark hole of a club at 2 in the morning like sleepwalkers trying to extend a dream. Warne Marsh stayed behind, living his art. And when those square couples (more alien to us than the forlorn Samoans could ever be) requested “My Funny Valentine” or “Melancholy Baby,” Warne would look at them from behind his keyed and golden shield and whisper that he didn’t know those songs. But he did know about drugs that none of us could have named. Many times we’d make the trip and Warne wouldn’t show.

It was as hard to find good jazz in those days as it is now. Once we rode a bus all the way to Laguna Beach to hear “The Legendary Joe Albany.” That raw afternoon Albany was there, with an anxious woman, but no other musicians came. He drifted away; we took the bus back in the lonely Sunday dark.

It’s not as though we were looking to be entertained. There was always Gerry Mulligan at the Haig. We wanted . . . we didn’t know what we wanted until we heard Warne Marsh. What he had done was give us our first heady, exhilarating jolt of pure art. It was something like careless perfection, something we were not and had not. When, once, we got up our courage and approached him with a gift, a dime-store turtle, Warne gazed at it with a strange intensity and asked, “Just how big will this little fellow grow?” The way he asked the question took 10 seconds but left us thinking for 30 years. If you take something and work on it, focus on it, just how big, how big, will that little fellow grow?

Dec. 18, 1987, Warne Marsh (unannounced as usual) showed up at Donte’s out in the San Fernando Valley, substituting for Conti Condoli. Warne played “Out of Nowhere,” and . . . died.

Oh Warne! You were always so hard to find. Once we actually flew to New York to hear you at the Half Note, and it was the total East, you know? With the club full of cognoscenti who knew jazz inside and out. There was Lennie Tristano who started it all with his avant-garde piano, and Lee Konitz trilling his zillion notes a minute, and every speck of air smoke-filled, and the New York action happening, but you weren’t there.

Once, right here in town, we learned it was your birthday and took the bus to an address somewhere in the Valley. We had presents for you, presents for all your senses--wind chimes for listening, Japanese prints for seeing, scraps of silk for touching, all in a bed of jellybeans. It was lovesick madness. But your address turned out to be a regular house! A regular woman, your mom, answered the doorbell. She said you weren’t home. We handed her the presents and left in a hurry.

You lived in an ordinary house, with an ordinary mom, but you, and those few like you, showed us another world, somewhere between the wretched strivings of suburban house/car/kids and the equally wretched world of New York art/art/ art! In Southern California you slid the perfect notes of “Topsy” into “Everything Happens to Me.” You gave us glimpses of an elusive, heavenly art where it really is just one soul singing, some souls listening.

Through it all, a great big city was coming of age. The formless suburb we drove through to find the legendary Joe Albany (or Hampton Hawes or Warne Marsh) developed its own layered and beautiful history.

It still goes on. Beyond the big rock concerts (splendid though they are), in small rooms here in the city, a beautiful musician named Michael P. Tak plays “Brookings,” just as you played “Once We Were Young.” Not to get rich, not to get famous, but purely for the beauty of it, to tell a city of ordinary people living a nice life that there is a better, perfect life; that you can find it here on Sunset Boulevard, any boulevard.

Thank you, Warne Marsh, beloved artist, who for 35 swell years broke every cliche and sneered at the expected and showed your few fans that the life of art was really everything. May you eclipse Lester Young, may everyone under 20 learn the beauty of your improvisation, may your fans hear your records without crying, may your sound--something winsome, something velvet, something of the civet--live forever.

And may we all remember that you grew up in, and died in, the San Fernando Valley, out of nowhere, into fame and legend. Because of you, and every artist who chooses unexpected L.A. to work in, nowhere is somewhere now.