How Blue Can a White Boy Be?

Imagine the perfect jazz musician. With apologies to pianists, bass players, drummers (and ambitious string players of all varieties), he--and it would have to be a he--would be a blower. With apologies to Dizzy, this blower would have to wrap his lips around a saxophone reed rather than blat his embouchure into a piece of trumpet metal. And with a duck of the head to Bird, is there really any doubt that the saxophone of choice must be the tenor, with the depth and force to grind into the nether hotspots where jazz spawns and percolates? And finally, with all the guilt and racism this admission entails: Could this perfect jazz musician be cloaked in any skin tone but sepia?

Enter Jackson Payne, born darker than Parker and cooler than Miles. “The Best of Jackson Payne,” a fascinating novel by Jack Fuller, is an Ellroy-esque investigation into the mysterious life and death of this Platonic ideal. It is a compilation of tracks, grooves set down by the witnesses to Payne’s life, as transcribed by Payne’s biggest fan, one Charles Quinlan, some of which intersect and some of which run in opposite directions.

But more than a mystery, “The Best of Jackson Payne” is one of the few novels about jazz to recognize that language may never capture the magic of music but may just evoke the hell out of it.

The search for the real Jackson Payne begins during the Korean War in an interview with Wardell Flowers, one of Payne’s comrades in arms in the 3/11th, a black division at Ft. Benning, Ga. One night his commander discovers that Payne plays a remarkable tenor saxophone. He sends Payne, accompanied by Flowers, to audition for the leader of the all-white band, a unique chance to be the first black man to play in the Army Band.

Payne blows the white bandleader away immediately with a searing chorus of “Cherokee.” But then, according to Flowers, he turns on his heel and marches out when asked to read a piece of Sousa. “He asked me did I read music,” Payne tells Flowers as he pushes past him and out of the audition. “A man don’t need to read, if he can hear.”

But like other things in Payne’s life, as one of his longtime sidemen tells Quinlan, “that sweet never blew the truth once in his whole damned life.” Behind the Sousa are secrets that even Quinlan is loath to hear. As he reaches backward and forward in time, he finds that not only are there two sides to every story, there also are two sides to every note of music.

The young churchgoing Payne heard the Rev. Elijah Corn preach that two-sided gospel on Sundays, during the call and response with the congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Chicago. “There are twelve tones in the good Lord’s scale, brothers and sisters. Twelve apostles to show the way,” the Rev. Corn preached, and the congregation responded, “Hallelujah.”

“But before you sing it, there’s something you got to know.”

“Tell us, brother.”

“Satan’s scale is exactly the same. . . . The first note of the scale is C, the Christ child come down to redeem us from our sin.”

“Hallelujah.”

“But C is also the cross where they nailed Him. There has never been an evil greater than C.”

So it goes with Jackson as he grows from a teenager into a soldier into a musician, lover, husband, father, junkie. There is a little bit of heaven in his music, in his women, in his drugs, and a little bit of hell.

And there is a little bit of Miles Davis in the musician Fuller has created, the Payne who pushes into a fusion of rock and jazz and the kind of music that sold millions in the early ‘70s (wrapped in album covers, products “of that unique moment when severe substance abuse became a form of kitsch”) and convinced the jazz purists that their hero had sold out. And there’s a little bit of Sonny Rollins in the Payne who practices five-note themes for hours to the verge of madness, the Payne who dispenses with all colleagues and plays long meandering tenor solos that smack more of the Alhambra than the El Morocco.

And there’s a lot of mixed messages and tangled race as Payne searches for inspiration. His long, rubato solo piece, “The Bluest I,” takes its title from a passage in “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”: “I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed . . . while praying to the same God--with fellow Muslims whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. . . .”

*

For how blue can a white boy be? That, perhaps, is the central question of “The Best of Jackson Payne.” Fuller, a lifelong journalist, former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and now president of Tribune Publishing Co. (owner of the Los Angeles Times), is keenly aware of yet another side of the story--the writer’s. Fuller’s subject may be Payne, but his hero is Payne’s biographer, Charles Quinlan, a middle-aged university professor of ethnomusicology--white.

As much as Quinlan immerses himself in Payne’s music, it is when he goes in search of Payne the man that he not only discovers but also displays how far removed he is from the cool world that enveloped Payne the ultimate jazz musician.

“Everyone had warned Quinlan that race would be insurmountable in writing his Jackson Payne. But as it turned out, race was only the beginning of it. There was also class and age and drugs and being wounded in a war. And even if you got through these, it didn’t mean anyone would believe you had.” One suspects that in Fuller’s world, the writer--no matter his color--is eternally doomed to be the White Boy, the outsider.

Yet Quinlan searches in his own way for clues to Payne’s mysterious death, becoming as obsessed as Payne with his five-note theme, driving away his wife, his children and finally even Lasheen, the black private eye who has helped him to track down the women in Payne’s life and to confront certain demons of his own.

It is to Fuller’s credit that he doesn’t take Quinlan through the full circle of harmonic changes to a complete metamorphosis into his subject, the way Ingmar Bergman melded the two women of “Persona” into one. There is, after all, a coloration problem, Quinlan and Jackson not being quite as closely pigmented as Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. But short of metamorphosis, music does contain another method toward understanding. “Black key. White key,” one of the witnesses testifies to Quinlan. “You learned to transpose anything into anything else. That’s the way it was on the stand, even if it wasn’t anywhere else.”

Transposition, call and response. Music, and jazz in particular, Fuller is saying, give our tone-deaf, race-befuddled nation perfect metaphors for the peculiar relation of musician and listener, player and writer, user and used-up, black and white, Payne and Quinlan.

“You know what the beat of that jungle music means?” the Rev. Corn asks the confused teenage Jackson. “It’s how the white man thinks of us.” Tell us, brother.