SWING TIME: a short story

Note: I wrote this story for a magazine contest. I didn't win the contest, ufortunately, but I'm putting this up here for your perusal anyway.

Our town was so small… insert a punch line here. Those are old jokes but I’m an old guy. It was a small town. And it was noisy and dirty and full of languages that clashed as often as the men in the barroom on Saturday nights. The business of the town was mining and it was carried out by Lithuanian, Irish, Polish, Italian and French men who went in to a dark and wet tunnel and beat iron laden rock out of the underside of a mountain. The rock came out of the ground in little rail cars and moved into a mill that crushed and separated, sending ore one way and wastes another. And there were great furnaces where the ore was turned into pig iron and smoke and soot rushed out of tall brick stacks and spread out over the village. Trains worked their way along tracks that snaked through the center of town. It’s all gone now.

Back when all the noise and dirt was fresh I was a young boy and the son of a carpenter in the mines. Our house was full with my sisters and brothers and parents living a crowded but comfortable life. Being a carpenter meant that my father was paid pretty well and was able to rent a three bedroom, two storey house from the Company. He also worked only the day shift unless an emergency called him out. Emergencies were usually tunnel collapses and he would be called to build new framework as the rescue teams tried to dig down to trapped miners. He was a respected man, quiet and kind.

But his house wasn’t a quiet one. Mother played the piano and her pride was the upright piano in the front room. Music lived in our house. My two older sisters both sang and played piano from the time they could climb up on to the spinning stool. I was the next in line but I didn’t choose the piano because the competition for playing time was too tough.

Our school had a band and after a few trial runs with various instruments the clarinet became my companion. Band was big in the school because the Manager of Mines liked music. He got the Company to donate instruments and sheet music to the school. He found a band director and teacher fresh out of a big college in Boston and lured him to the town with a monthly cash payment above and beyond his school teacher’s salary. And the band man loved his job. He loved teaching and playing. But most of all he loved conducting his band and chorus on the many performance nights throughout the year. For some reason the music was good. Perhaps it was good because the education started in the early grades and was strong on fundamentals and enjoyment. I practiced a lot. I did all the exercises and then I did them again, over and over. I worked on timing and intonation. I worked on speed and dexterity. I was really something of a fanatic about the music because it took me to wonderful places in my mind. It wasn’t that our life was so bad. We had enough to eat and a warm and comfortable home. My parents weren’t drunks or dullards. They were good people who enjoyed friends and family and a good time. And though our town was dirty and its living came from a rough and difficult place, we found our pleasures in school and church and community. The population was small in our town but talent seemed to find its way into the children of these immigrants and then into the school auditorium, the churches and the bandstand at the ballpark. Brothers and sisters from different grades would all be involved in the music program. Sports were important, baseball and basketball mostly. But music was the passion of our little school. And music became my passion. I wanted to be the best and I worked long and hard, driving myself as a player and also as an interpreter of music.

When I became a high school sophomore I passed the auditions and became first chair clarinet. On that day Mother cooked a special meal and afterwards we didn’t turn on the radio for our favorite programs. Instead we had a musical evening with Mother leading the family band. Mother played piano, my sisters sang, my two younger brothers played their muted trumpets and I played some solos on clarinet. We played hymns and old favorite songs from the early part of the century. Father sat and listened, tapped his foot and smiled.

The band at school had a repertoire heavy on marches. The Manager of Mines liked marches, and since he was our patron, we played what he liked. He never tired of telling how he had gotten the great John Phillip Sousa to come to our remote town with his band to perform two programs. Sousa spent an entire day in town; visiting the school and listening to the school band rehearse, even conducting two marches. I was only in first grade at the time but our whole family went to one of the big concerts. Even now eighty two years later I can recall the thrills of that day. So we played marches and some lighter classical pieces. In our Christmas concerts we did traditional carols and hymns. We had some people in the town who wanted the band to do more current popular and ragtime songs. But the Manager of Mines and the school administrators wouldn’t allow that.

In our house we were not so tradition bound. Our radio, tuned to stations up in Montreal or down in Albany, was an ear to the outside world. We knew that new sounds were emerging in those years during the middle of the depression. On the rare occasions when we would make a train trip to the small city about thirty miles away we would visit the music store. We would buy our reeds and instrument cleaning supplies. But we would also listen to the records being played in the stores and buy the sheet music stacked in the racks. On the frequent evenings when our parents were attending church meetings or visiting relatives our little family combo would attempt to play the hits of the day. I would write the arrangements using the piano-vocal sheet music as a guide. And I would try and get a feel for the real arrangements as I listened to the various big band programs late in the evening. The more traditional ballads we would perform for Mother and Father. The “hot” numbers we kept to ourselves and some school friends who would come to our house. The origins of all that Jazz music were unknown to us. We had no contact with colored folks. That’s how we would speak of black people back then. I never saw a real live black person until I saw the Count Basie Band in Saratoga Springs when I went to Albany for my Army physical in 1942. By then we had been playing some of his tunes and it was a wonderful thing hearing those great musicians swinging like they could.

Yes we were playing that swing music up in our little town in 1937 and we had to keep it at home. But something happened that changed the outlook of the Manager of Mines. He and his wife had a son who was now in high school. That son was their only child and he was as spoiled as any kid could be. His parents were grooming him to be the next Manager, which eventually did come to pass, and if the boy had a want or a whim it was satisfied. He was beginning to be a pretty fair drummer but he wanted to play the stand up bass. Within hours of expressing his desire he had a nice new instrument. But he didn’t want to learn how to use a bow and play proper music in the school band. No, he wanted to slap that thing like the swing musicians he’d seen on his vacation trips to New York City. So the band director had to create a place for this boy and he created a swing band. The Manager and Mrs. Manager acquiesced. Auditions were held and since my brothers and I, and one of my sisters, had been playing this kind of music for a couple of years we pretty well locked up several of the positions. I was playing clarinet and saxophone by then. One of my brothers was on trumpet and the other doubled on saxophone and trumpet. Our sister worked that piano like a female Teddy Wilson. Our swing band was pretty conventional in the instruments we used. Our rhythm section had a drummer, piano, guitar and the future Mine Manager’s bass. We had four saxophones, a clarinet and three trumpets. Sometimes we would even bring in a flute on some really sweet tune. And we had four vocalists, two girls and two boys. Our regular band practiced every day after school. The swing band gave up lunch time and study hall for our practice sessions. Often the band director couldn’t be available so I filled in, in a rather inept way, as leader. I wasn’t the oldest or best player but I had done a lot of the arranging so substitute band leading fell to me.

We worked on our swing show from late September until just before Thanksgiving. Our premier performance was going to be as an opening act for our regular band’s late fall concert. In our town every musical performance at the school brought out big crowds. Even heavy snow, a common enough occurrence there in the mountains, didn’t stop people from showing up. At its peak the population of our town was only about eight hundred. We scheduled two or three performances of each program and sold out every one, two hundred and fifty seats at each show. Ticket prices were pretty cheap, ten cents being the usual cost of admission. The Christmas show was free. All the ticket money went right back into the music program and during those times it was surely needed. I still have the handout listing the music we played at that first swing band show and the regular concert that followed. But even if I hadn’t saved that little piece of faded and worn paper I could tell you every song. I can remember because that night was the beginning of a part of my life that affected me as powerfully as any religious conversion could.

The swing band was nervous. We all wore a simple outfit of white shirt, black tie and black pants. The girls had on white blouses and black skirts. The shop classes had designed and built some nifty music stands like we had seen in photos of professional bands. The music stands had our school initials in glittery paint with some music notes floating around them. As we walked out on to the stage and settled into our positions the crowd got very quiet with only a few murmurs and stifled coughs. There was no welcoming applause, not even when the band director took his place in front of us. We hadn’t planned on any spoken introduction, an oversight which probably made the beginning of our show more dramatic. When we hit the opening notes of the Count Basie song “One O’clock Jump” it was like an electric charge leapt off the stage and filled the auditorium. All of us playing knew we were ready to play but we weren’t ready for the response from the audience. We nailed that song. And those good, hard working mining town residents knew it. At the end of the number they roared their approval and believe me those people knew how to roar. We did only eight songs that night. Our closer was a copy of the Jimmy Lunceford version of “My Blue Heaven”. Everything jelled and fit together; the instrumental solos, the vocals and even the rudimentary choreography the band had worked out. It was like a dream. After our set the full concert band, in which we all played, took the stage and did a good show. But what I remember about that night was how that Swing Music set the audience on fire
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When I listen today to recordings of those songs we played by the original bands from that era I know, with our amateur copying of arrangements and stealing styles, we weren’t really very good. But we transcended our own inexperience and amateurishness. We let that music carry us and show itself through us. And it would happen again and again. We learned our parts and worked hard on our timing. Our band director talked again and again about the dynamics of the songs. Somehow we understood. We were teenagers; full of young bottled up emotions, and that music let us throw those emotions out into the space around us. We could play “hot” or we could play “sweet”. We took it to heart and we let the music tell the story it was written to tell. Our showmanship developed and we learned to improvise in our solos. A few of us got to a point where we could carry a solo for six or seven minutes at a time. Soon we were doing full shows that lasted almost two hours. And we would be called on to play for the school dances. Our parents and the school administration drew the line at our playing in dance halls or at occasions where drinking would be allowed. But I stayed with that band until graduation, loving every minute of it.

After graduation I went to work in the mine offices as a clerk and errand boy. But I formed another band from other graduates of our high school and we started playing on weekends at dance halls and bars around our area. We became what was known as a “territory band” although our territory was small and somewhat remote. Our fan base was loyal and would follow us around to the places we played, and we made a little bit of money. I learned that the girls liked musicians and it was during this time that I learned a little bit about them. But the War came and some of the guys went into the service right away. Then others got drafted and it was harder to keep enough good players. My turn came eventually and I enlisted instead of waiting to be drafted so that I could get into pilot training. During my training I had the chance to play for some professional outfits that came to Syracuse where I was going to pre-flight school. But that was the last of my big swing band playing. After the War I played with a combo made up of my brothers and one of my sisters and a couple other guys. But then I settled down, got married and had kids.

Music was in our house. My wife and I encouraged it and a couple of our kids got involved. Sometimes I would still bring out my clarinet and play for a while. But the kids didn’t take to school band very well. They got guitars and amplifiers. They had little combos and they played the new music that was exciting to them. I can’t say that I enjoyed it very much. But when I would play some of the records by Basie, Goodman, Miller and the rest the kids would listen. And when I played some classical records they would listen to those. So their appreciation of music went beyond that strumming and squealing that they did in their combos. One of my sons had a little success and played professionally for a short time. Then he got married. A couple of my grandkids took music a lot further and one is a teacher and band director now. I go to concerts at his school when I get the opportunity. But I can’t travel too much now.

It was over seventy years ago, those days full of new and exciting music. It was a short period in my long life but it’s still pretty strong in my old memory. I don’t even listen to the music much any more because my hearing is so far gone. The neighbors complain because I need the volume so darn loud. And being a good neighbor is a lot more important when you get old and you’re alone. You never know when you’ll need to call on a neighbor for something. But I can hear that music in my head and in my heart. I can close my eyes and relive some of those shows and those days. It was a good time, maybe not the best time. But I do like to recall that time, that Swing Time so long ago.

Have a fine day.