The legendary act of survival
Never just “Joe Albany,” always “The Legendary Joe Albany.” Why? Because Joe was reputed to be Charlie Parker’s favorite pianist, although some say that they never recorded together. But there does exist an album somewhere, one of the first times Parker turned “Cherokee” into the amazing “Koko,” on which Albany turned up for two days out of a five-day session, or one day out of a two-day session, and you hear Albany’s tentative intro on several alternate takes, then a minute or two of Bird’s saxophone, and then the word, “Cut!”
“Joe Albany was a great jazz pianist,” his daughter, A.J. Albany, writes. “He was one of the first musicians instrumental in pushing jazz beyond the confines of swing, helping to create what would come to be known as bebop.” He was also a full-on junkie and A.J.’s only functioning parent.
During the 1960s, she writes in her harrowing memoir, “if he wasn’t in jail or rehab, we were together.” Their life was like something out of Maxim Gorky’s “The Lower Depths,” but it is, of course, nonfiction. Horace McCoy explored Hollywood’s debauched underbelly in “I Should Have Stayed Home” as did Steve Fisher in his acerbic, pitiless “Giveaway,” but those books were novels; mere fiction written by well-fed, affluent, grown men. “Low Down” is the gruesome truth, the memoir of a starving child who barely survived her childhood.
Heroin was the drug of choice for musicians in the 1950s, a drug that magnifies the virtue of understatement, that valorizes sensitivity and a musical aesthetic of a zillion complex notes, absolutely effortlessly played. A drug that also turns its user into a zombie for hours or days on end. Heroin turned Chet Baker from a handsome man to a toothless geezer; it certainly contributed to tenor-saxophonist Warne Marsh’s untimely death in 1987 as he played “Out of Nowhere” in a San Fernando Valley nightclub, and to the demise of Joe Albany. What may have made for glamorous, cool nightclub evenings was a scourge.
A.J.’s mother, addicted to prescription drugs and anything else she could get her hands on, abandoned A.J. when she was 5. The little girl was already sorry and sickly, undeveloped, underfed. She lived sometimes with her paternal grandma but most often with her dad, who simply wasn’t cut out to hold down a day job or put three squares on the table. A.J. resorted to eating toothpaste more than once in her forlorn search for calories. No one remembered to bathe her or change her clothes for days or weeks on end. Her dad took her along to club dates, stashed her on stacked coats and bundled her home at 4 in the morning. But at least, with him, she was home.
They lived in a series of awful apartments close to Hollywood and Vine, furnished rooms with pull-out sofas and Murphy Beds; their neighbors, a flock of pathetic losers of the kind Nathanael West used in “The Day of the Locust” (but, again, that was only fiction). These people were all too human, too sad, too real: “Perhaps I was a sick and devious nine year old,” A.J. writes, “to be so enamored of a twenty-two-year-old morphine-addicted porno-movie dwarf,” but that dwarf liked her, and she loved him. Who else was she to love? For much of the time, affable though he was, her father locked himself in the bathroom with a spoon and something to tie off his arm. A zombie.
By the time A.J. is 14, her father is off pursuing his career again. She confides in him, and he breaks that confidence, writing to her grandma: “It is my understanding that Amy is no longer a virgin. While she is certainly no academic, she is my daughter, and I suppose I must continue to advise her the best I can.” Oh, the infuriatingly bogus morality of the addict! Oh, the betrayal.
It’s hard to know what to make of “Low Down.” On one hand, it’s an authentic trip through Hollywood’s lower depths. On the other, it examines the conflict between the need for drugs and the neediness of children. In presenting her father’s generosity as well as his failings, A.J. Albany uses language that is both astringent and compassionate. Describing a night when her parents were drugged out of their minds, Albany recalls her own helplessness as a tiny child: “I ventured out into the Hollywood courtyard where we lived and started knocking on neighbors’ doors for some assistance. Since it was midnight and I was all of five years old and half-naked, one would assume that a friendly face might emerge from behind a blank door -- but that was not the case. It was my first lesson in humanity. Terrified women peeked out from their curtains, shooing me away.”
“Low Down” is, above all, about the dreadfulness of delusion. “Joe Albany was a great jazz pianist,” his loyal daughter writes. He was “legendary.”
But one afternoon in 1957 or 1958, after hearing those alternative takes on the Charlie Parker album, a friend and I drove two hours to hear Albany play. He was standing out behind the club, incoherent. Later, after it became clear that Marsh wouldn’t be showing up, Albany went inside and attempted to play. He was ripped, so ripped he couldn’t get his hands up to the keyboard. “Legendary,” maybe. Destructive beyond the shadow of a doubt. Deluded, yes. That his daughter survived and wrote this may be the real legend.