Listening to “Park Avenue Petite,” Hearing My Rain-Raked Heart All Over Again
for the Blue Mitchell Sextet and the 1959 set, Blue Soul
I’ve either fallen out of love for what I’m sure has got to be the final time, walking the blotchy blocks of Manhattan dark—remnants of mule dust, trudge salts, and borax in my gut. Or I’m caught in an unthinkable love triangle on a rain-soaked night in L.A. with Philip Marlowe and a curvy redhead named Vivian or Leanne. God, this tune makes me cry, even still in the year 2020. Even through the smoke of a Lucky Strike some blonde named Rhonda exhales suggestively around me as if only she and I are engulfed in that unspeakable cloud. Now I understand why they called you Blue and not Richard Allen Mitchell. They say when the world ends we’ll all feel a wave of cosmic regret, as if—together—we realize we could have somehow made things right. The execs at Riverside Records must surely have contemplated jumping off a bridge after hearing the bruised scales of this tune. Wynton Kelly on keys sounding like rain inside the rain. Philly Joe Jones brushing his snare so lightly with metal wires we can hear cars swish past, their headlamps bowing brutally before banking a turn. Sam Jones on bass as if counting the depth of our final breaths as I step from trench-coat fog, cock back my fedora, and kiss a woman named Muriel or Mona once more before the big score. Richard Allen “Blue” Mitchell. How could you have heard my insides cry several states away when I was only a boy? Preserving them in this 1959 song before the age of Instagram and Vlogs? These notes could make the dead weep. Could turn sickness inside out, so that it runs off to a corner to sulk. Could stand in as catharsis for Romeo and Juliet’s final scene. How can something so sad send healing salve when the light heads home and finally gives out? Kerosene lamps acting as if they could care less? How come the insomniac world of worry doesn’t lie down to sleep each night knowing that sleep is already asleep inside each note of this song that wakes us— somehow joyfully—into a glorious world of cool-blue, rain-soaked regret?
Jack Wilson Tries to Convince Roy Ayers to Join His Quartet, 1963
Hand me the claspknife. Show me the smudge lamp. The world of impossible things remains impossible.
All the women I loved. Bless the tongue that did not enter their mouth.
Only do what only you can do. It takes a long time to make dirt—and a lot of vegetables.
Fish mongers hawking fish in Harlem. Being married is like having a colored television set, I tell you. You never want to go back to black and white.
The suggestion of nudity. Husband man. Brother man.
It’s like really beautiful love with a really dirty hooker. The meat of a black-boned chicken and wolfberries.
The aching depth of “The Shadow of Your Smile” (“Love Theme from The Sandpiper”). Yes, Roy. Try to play it all. Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Like your mother’s face—the day you were born, the day she died. Sweetly. So very sweetly.
One Night in Indy, January 18, 1959, Eddie Higgins Trio with an Unknown Bassist
We can hear Wes Montgomery clearly on guitar. Eddie Higgins’ piano. Walter Perkins on skins. But that catfish growl from the bottom of the mud remains unknown. Call him Genghis Kahn’s warrior chief from the north, name lost among the brutally beautiful dead. Call him Lafayette’s trusted valet. The shoemaker Dostoyevsky visited with every other Thursday on his way to the corner confectionery, but whose name he never knew. Nobody remembers them. They fade like the mirror the Indianapolis shoeshine man gives at Massachusetts and Meridian. His name, all polish and spit, but then scuffed among concrete and pigeon turds. Sometimes I’m nothing but all ache and rain. I go to speak and no words arrive. I scratch my back only to realize I’ve been dreaming of swamp-walking again, mosquito-thick, off the Carolina coast. And all that those bites keep bringing with them. These tapes from some cloudy club, finally found. And this bassist—unknown even among those the record producers probed. Seeking the keen ear of their memory and advice.
Listening tonight to “Lil’ Darling.” To “Prelude to a Kiss.” To “Ruby, My Dear.” I wonder who he was and how he came to play with the Eddie Higgins Trio. Did he have a lover? Did she prefer baked potatoes or sweet? Did they open-mouth kiss the first time he leaned into her? Did he look into her eye long evenings to the sound of steam heating the pipes? Did his breath catch mornings over oolong tea, or did he prefer coffee thick as Mississippi mud? His limp? I ask myself in the dark if he had one and whether it had a name. Did he spend Sunday afternoons scrubbing the chrome on his ’59 Caddy, bought on payments he could not afford? How many oranges a day did he eat? And was his right arm slightly longer than his left from reaching all those hours long around the belly of his bass? Did he prefer the musica universalis of Pythagoras or did he study Gogol, imagining the fur collar of an overcoat he hoped one day himself to own? Did he stay up nights, late, swaying into broken parts of the moon left to rot by disillusioned poets who abandoned bamboo groves to enter exile among barbarians of the north?Why has this bassist’s name been lost to walk among ruins of tunes from a night in Indianapolis most have forgotten, along with the names and weight of patrons who came to the club that night? To listen to the chords on stage vibrate parts of themselves they did not know otherwise how to touch. To sip scotch slow on the rocks, savoring the clink of cubes at the bottom of the glass. To remember for a short time not just the names of the dead but. Who they were. And. To forget.
Not Just Forest Rain but Bamboo Hollow: Fancy Miss Nancy’s “Happy Talk”
for Nancy Wilson
George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is the author of twenty books of poetry, twelve of which are full-length. His three most recent books, all of which appeared in 2021, are Marsupial Mouth Movements (Červená Barva Press), Through the Silk-Heavy Rains (SurVision Books), and We Slept the Animal: Letters from the American West (Dos Madres Press). He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years.