Straight off a 21-day troop ship journey across the Pacific on a flat-bottomed Liberty ship my father probably helped build during World War II, I had one thing on my mind. Jumping into a San Francisco taxi with two of my buddies, I told the cabbie, “Take us to some West Coast jazz, you know, man, like Brubeck.”
“How about I take you to see Dave himself?”
Was it exactly like that? Fifty-eight years have passed, but that’s how I remember it. I remember too, about a year before that, rushing into Tent 13, the only tent or facility in that part of Korea equipped with a record player that played the new 33 1/2 records. My sister Regina had sent me a package that by the feel of it had to contain a record album. Had I asked her to send me some jazz, my knowledge of which stalled after seeing Louis Armstrong perform at the Fresno Municipal Auditorium a couple of years before I’d joined the army?
Maybe Benny Goodman was in the package, or Tony Bennett, or Peggy Lee. Or perhaps some Earl Bostic, who played what a slick kid named Gilson from Calumet City told me was being called rhythm and blues.
“Dave Brubeck,” I said, showing Regina’s choice to my tent mates. “She says he’s the new rage back home.”
Nothing, just six or seven blank faces, until we’d listened to the first tune , “For All We Know.” Then the sound of a dozen boot heels keeping time, maybe Gilson over there tapping his stel helmet against his foot locker. And from then on, what seemed like a million nights were set in a rapture I felt so close to that I knew it would always be apart of me.
That first night back in the states, I recall walking into the Blackhawk and telling a cocktail waitress who’d kindly looked at our uniforms, “We’ve been without indoor plumbing for a year and a half, but we showered aboard the ship.”
She laughed and managed to place us as close to the band as possible. Brubeck’s quartet was into “Gone With the Wind,” then took a break. During this time, the waitress moved us closer to the bandstand, though the room looked packed beyond its limit.