'I'm trying to be
ready,' Rudy said
There I go
There I go
There I go
There I go
Pretty baby you are the soul who snaps my control.
Such a funny thing but every time you're near me...
 he little guy was singing
this, standing on the corner of 37th Drive and Western Avenue, two doors
down from the Tiki, and now the big guy stopped him.
''You missed it, man. That ain't it. That ain't it!''
''What, man? You fucking stopped me, man. I was singing.''
''You should stop on your own account, fool. You gotta sing right, man, or
you gotta don't sing at all. I don't think you know how to get it right,
now. I'm disappointed in you, nigger.''
The little guy looked puzzled. You could see that these two had been at
this for years, and the big guy always won, in a way. Now the little guy
doggedly took it again from the top. There I go, there I go, there I go,
THERE I go.
''See?'' said the big guy. ''See? They's five of 'em. ¯There I go, there I
go, there I go, there I go, THERE I go.''
I was standing there watching this. The guy I was looking for, Percy Mayfield, was not at the Tiki.
The bartender said he hung at the Rubiyat, further on up Western.
James Rudy
 owever, as I was returning
from the Tiki to my car parked in front of the One Love Jamaican Takeout I
heard a sneeze from St. Cecilia, and I had to stop and listen.
Somebody was playing the organ in the joint next door to the Tiki. It was
one of those tantalizing snatches that you sometimes hear when all the
other clubs on the street are silent, and in one of them, behind closed
doors, booze in the teacups, is a jam session that will prove to be, you
always hope, long memorable. You hear this and you begin to
search for your baby.
The joint next door to the Tiki, on the corner of 37th Drive and Western
Avenue, was called Vina's, as you could see from the white neon letters
attached to a rusty pillar standing over the roof. ''Dinner,'' the letters
said. ''Cocktails.'' They no longer lit up.
Vina's was where the music was coming from. Just as I started to peek in the
doorway, the music stopped and the set ended. I looked inside but the
bandstand was empty. I stayed on the sidewalk listening to the two
bickering guys, who I now realized were planning to sing at what I now saw
was a jam session.
After a while the music began again, and I walked through the door for the
first of many times.
Portrait of the lady.
 i, sugar!,'' Vina would say
as you entered her domain. She was from New Orleans, and when she talked
it sounded like a trombone solo by Vic Dickenson, although the phrases
were shorter. She was 87 years old, still pulling up outside three or four nights
a week in the 1968 maroon Thunderbird that her husband Max had given her
when they opened the place, still doing a little something for her pants
suit.
Tonight I had my cornet in the gig bag and me and the two scat singers
headed for the bar in the corner, where Easter baskets dangled from the
ceiling all year round and dinner plates were hanging next to the cash
register with silhouettes on them of famous black women such as Josephine
Baker and Lena Horne. A framed photograph of Max, the departed husband,
rested beside the cash register which had a bell and numbers that popped
up on little white flags.
''Don't you be sitting over here, now," said Vina, closing the ancient
drawer. "You horn blowers all sit over there.'' She puffed at us and
flicked her hand toward the other side of the room, as though shooing
flies.
There a decrepit Hammond B3 organ with cigarette burns on the top
straddled the corner, next to Torch McIntosh's drum set. The latter was
not a bebopper's model with a miniaturized bass drum. It had a great big
one, old enough to have been the one Torch used when he played with Amos
Milburn. On top of the sock cymbal rested an old set of house keys that
jingled just so when Torch sat down on the little folding throne, rolled
up his left pants cuff, and set the high hats chuffing in a snapping back
beat.
Vina, the Bricktop of
Exposition Avenue, serves a drink to Tatsu and Torch from
her bar.
he break would last about 20
minutes, just long enough for Vina to make a margarita for one or two of
the younger ladies -- pillowy creatures in their 60s -- who came in on the
weekends to catch some down home sounds and maybe score with a musical
lad. Once one of these ladies even gave me her phone number, one of my few
scary moments in the hood. But I digress.
The making of a margarita, once one was decided upon after long, amiable
debate among the stately ladies, required of the white-haired Vina many
tasks: the taking of the order, a long leisurely process redolent of New
Orleans; a trip to the kitchen to get a tray of ice from the refrigerator;
a return journey to the bar to break it out; a search for the bottles of
mixer and booze; a deliberative pour-out into the blender; the blending
itself; the washing and chilling of the glasses; the application of salt;
the search for a tray and a white paper napkin; the bearing to the table
and the ceremonious placing of the beverage thereon -- a handmade
production of slow, wise fingers and careful steps.
I would watch this from my seat on the opposite side of the room, where
the Saturday Night Southside Philharmonic is arrayed in my memory forever
or at least usually, like gents waiting for a haircut in a barber shop.
 rother James, the peach
farmer from Riverside, is wearing his navy blue beret, like Dizzy
Gillespie used to wear when bebop was young; his sidekick, Brother Tommy,
the retired RTD security man, has brought his bright new baritone,
soprano, alto and tenor. He is bandbox smart in suit, white shirt, and
tie. They were bandmates in the Roy Porter big band 40 years earlier, Roy
Porter being the drummer who played on the very first Dizzy Gillespie
sides for Dial, recorded as I later learned out in Glendale.
Over in a hall by the kitchen, standing on tippy toe not far from Vina's huge
black restaurant stove, might be Big Al, musical director of Ray Charles' band,
practicing his tenor quietly in a world all his own.
Brother Tetsu, the Nisei nursery man, I see out on the sidewalk, sharing a
hand-rolled joint of home grown with Torch. He learned to play bebop in an
internment camp during World War II, and specializes in the saxcello, a
seldom seen instrument built like a soprano saxophone with a bell like an
oboe. He tries to make it sound like Bunny Berigan, another cornet
player..
Draper might have been there, a little squat guy from Chicago who played
in the deeply swinging vein of Gene Ammons and tucked his Winstons in his
sock, or Tim, from the Valley, a college kid who was writing a thesis on
jazz in Moscow; he was an admirer of Coltrane and he liked to play
barefoot. Santa Monica Fred, the transmission puller, wore shoes and
usually brought in his soulful tenor on which he liked to play quarter
notes and half notes, making 'em wail like Dexter; Rynie the retired bank robber
was another tenor regular who played loudly with the same end in view; if
he wasn't out with Jay McShann's band, Don Wilkerson was a frequent showup
with his soulful alto straight out of 18th and Vine in Kansas City. Hell
Yeah Smalley used to come up from Texas with his unforgettable and equally
soulful alto.
The Saturday Night Southside Philharmonic at play.
 amous guys came in, too,
Billy Higgins, the drummer that played with Ornette Coleman, Big Joe
Turner the bluesman who wrote "Shake, Rattle and Roll'' and lived down in
South Central; the young alto man Jeff Clayton out of the Basie band --
great nights! In former days, Marshal Royal dropped by for dinner before
he got so busy touring with Basie; this looked like the kind of a joint
Count Basie himself might favor, but you could never get the discreet and
worldly Vina, who used to cater for Eddie Cantor's parties when her
glove-modeling career was slow, to give you a guest list.
My man Russell Jacquet, brother of Illinois Jacquet, would come in on his
nights out from the nursing home and borrow my cornet, which became a
completely different instrument in his hands. And of course there was Irma
Young, who I never saw but whose spirit must have been there at the side
of her brother Lester, known as Prez, a couple of ghosts wandering up with
their axes from the former Young household at 47th Street and Central
Avenue, looking for a jam session.
We would all wait there patiently counting the never dimmed Christmas
lights strung along the walls, and after a while, James Rudy, the duke of
the Hammond organ, would stash his half-pint in the electric meter box
outside -- Vina was always sore at him and wouldn't serve him a drink --
and amble back in. He was a skinny fellow with a diffident but
warm-hearted manner, said to have felled many ladies, pillowy and
otherwise, since he came down from heaven in the early 1930s back in Pine
Bluff, Ark.
e and Torch sat down on one
particular night, maybe it was the first one I went there, and began with
a fast one, something Rudy said he'd written called ''On a String.'' It
was a brave brassy thing, and you could tell right away that this was
someone who knew how to make the wheezy old B3 get out there and strut.
''This ain't nothing but a little house party,'' cried a delighted
gentleman from the bar after a few measures.
The ensemble rendered the theme in a frightening way and then the horn
blowers got up one by one and took their Saturday night solos. Torch and
Rudy backed them warm-heartedly and tirelessly for as long as they wanted
to blow, Tatsu with his little sweet phrases, Rynie with his loud stuff,
down and dirty Draper, dauntless Fred.
The guy who thought he knew how many there-I-gos to sing turned out to be
a trumpet player as well as a scat expert. Of course I bought him a drink
and he had soon commandeered my ax and was up there too, long winded devil
that he was. A San Francisco guy, to judge by how well he thought of
himself, and wearing a Borsalino hat. It turned out he thought he could
play much better than he actually could play; trumpets mercilessly let you
and everybody around know where you stand.
Soon I got my horn back and took my pair.
 A couple more jazz numbers got played, hard core Chicago things like
Ammons' ''Knockin' the Jug,'' and Sonny Stitt's ''Railhead.'' A skinny
lady named Claire came over from her gig at the Elks Club to do her
signature, ''Please Send Me Someone to Love.'' This is about a guy in a
little shack out in the country, praying to God and worrying about what
the world's coming to.
I knew now that I was home, because that's one of Percy Mayfield's
greatest numbers, he being the Cole Porter of the blues and my hero.
A big hand for the candid and soulful Claire rose and fell and then Rudy
began to make a long vibrant tremolo come from down deep inside the organ:
''After Hours,'' the Avery Parish number, was beginning.
 ake it on down,'' the
gentleman at the bar cried. Rudy and Torch complied, and together, they
were about to make ''Night Train'' sound like a minuet.
I don't know how to tell you what a monumental opus Rudy could produce
from this virtually forgotten 50-year-old classic; I doubt if even August
Wilson could handle it. ''Seven Hammond Organs''? ''The Organ Lesson''?
Anyway, I didn't see him in Vina's and if he loves music that's where he
should have been. Spike Lee, too.
But I digress. Let me say this: There's a certain way to handle the
tightly packed triplets in the second eight bars of Avery Parrish's
melodramatic little masterpiece, dropping them out of the meter without
losing the beat, that very few pianists can hear. Rudy had it down to a T,
and it just would get you.
And then in the middle, the fireworks would die away and he'd play a
wistful quiet interlude, reedy and sweet and intimate, and you'd be in a
little dusty church in the Ozarks with a lonesome old bluesman playing the
reed organ, pumping away with a shaft of sunlight hitting him. It broke my
heart every time, and it wasn't just me.
People -- not many, but they were life converts -- would come doddering in
from all over the country to hear this otherwise obscure gentleman from
Arkansas play ''After Hours'' and a couple of other things that only he
seemed to know about: ''How I Feel,'' by Don Patterson, was one of them;
(Rudy said it made him think of a guy walking down the empty railroad
tracks all by himself); ''Fanny Mae'' was another, by the Chicago harp
player, Buster Brown. Lefty Dizz used to play that one. And Rudy had
''Answer to a Prayer Meeting,'' his own reply to Jimmy Smith; ''All Tore
Up,'' about a drinker -- a little soul in the bowl, as Torch used to say.
Eventually Rudy told me about himself. He started out playing piano as a
boy of 9, hooking up with the harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson, one
of the great legends of the blues. ''We would play in places like Melvin,
Ark., Hot Springs, Pine Bluff and Camden, all down around in there," Rudy
said in his proto-Clinton drawl.
The kid from Pine
Bluff, Ark., behind the Hammond B-3.
was on the radio, on KGHI
for Robin Hood Flour, back in '39. We used to play on the radio one hour
every day. That was when women used to buy a 25-pound sack of flour to
take the sack and make dresses out of.
''And the material was much greater than the material they have today that
you go and pay big bucks for. It was strong and it come in patterns,
purple flowers and plaid. The label washes off.''
As a youngster, Rudy did not take in any laundry but worked as a piano man
with Billy Gale's review, on the bill with Ike and Tina Turner; Junior
Parker, the harp player, and the soul singer Maurice White, before he
switched to organ in the 1940s and started out on his own.
Some of his relative obscurity might be laid to the fact that he spent
many years working in Salt Lake City, not exactly a soul capital, in a
place called the Regal Lounge and sometimes in Cottonwood Canyon, a Forum
like venue outside town, where Lou Rawls and Liberace used to headline.
''I made some records for Capitol after I got out here in 1975,'' Rudy
said, ''but nothing ever happened and I can't find out what became of the
tapes.
''Like I say, I'm trying to be ready.''
All this came out as I talked to Rudy at one of the tiny tables. When the
band was off, Vina would start the juke box up with a switch on the back.
Only one tune would play, Charles Brown's ''Merry Christmas, Baby.'' Vina
would sit on a chair next to the box, hands in her lap, feet in tiny red
tennies, ankles crossed, motionlessly traversing a landscape in which time
neither began or ended.
Vina advises the Prince of the Hammond organ.
|
