Sonny Rollins
Frankie the K is sitting in front of his keyboards. He has on one of those Lester Young hats. Pork pie. Young or ‘Prez,’ as folks called him, rocked a pork pie back in the day with his head cocked to the side, that romantic sound floating from his sax like incense smoke.
My friend, the poet, M.L. Liebler connected me with Frankie, and that is why it is just me and Frankie on the stage in Detroit at the Scarab Club in the heart of the Motor City. M.L. invited me to read some poems with some other poets and here I am in the flesh. The club is packed wall to wall.
“Read some of those Ellington poems,” M.L. said to me, “I will get you a piano player. Frankie the K.“
“Frankie the K?” I asked puzzled thinking what kind of name is “Frankie the K?” The “K” I assume now must stand for “keyboard.” I never asked.
“Yea,” M.L. said, “Frankie the K. It will be great.” That is M.L., always upbeat, always making the word come together day after day anywhere, anytime.
And so there I was at the Scarab Club, a historic dive in the Motor City. The place was full to the hilt. The club went back to 1907 in the city. That was when it became a social spot for artists, to hang out and take art to the next level. That is what it still was the night I took the stage at the place.
The club was full of students, artists, other poets, singers, hip-hop hopefuls, open mic junkies. Mostly, it was full of young students from nearby Wayne State University who took a bus over to get out and about as classes began. Art lined the walls. One’s voice could be heard in every last board of the place. The great Detroit poet, Jessica Care Moore was in the audience, as was my friend Jeff McDaniel, who I always seemed to cross paths with in Detroit in some kind of way.
I had just read a poem called “jim crow.” It was set to Duke Ellington’s famous exotic standard – “Caravan.” Frankie the K had nailed it like he was Ellington. I had called him on the phone the night before and said – “Please play ‘Caravan.’”
“I got a copy of the arrangement.”
‘Jim crow’ is about travel and racism, the Ellington band rumbling through the South of the U.S., bouncing from gig to gig, but being treated like dogs in their own country, even though they were the soul of great art in the United States at the time. It was the 1930’s. Jazz ruled the states. Black people ruled jazz but they could not stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, or otherwise do what they wanted to do and had to do because of racial segregation in the South.
So Duke Ellington created his own caravan, his world, and space for his band where they could bring their sound to the South where it was born. The writer of the song is Ellington’s famous Puerto Rican, valve trombonist, Juan Tizol. He wasn’t born in the U.S. so he could take you somewhere else. Tizol is from upper Puerto Rico, a city called Vega Baja, a place that put out musicians like France puts out fashion designers.
Frankie and I floated furiously through the number as if we had rehearsed even though we hadn’t even met until right before the show. No rehearsal, no sound check, nothing, just go. I had read the poem maybe a hundred times with other musicians and always it was the same, they felt it, and then I just followed them. I just tried not to get lost.
Marshall Keys, the Washington D.C. sax player who grew up down the street from me, played it with me 20, or 30 times. I hit it once at the Kennedy Center with Keter Betts, the legendary bass player who used to keep rhythm for Ella Fitzgerald. It was one of my favorite songs and I always felt it was perfect for the poem ‘jim crow.’
The crowd of mostly young college students, artists, and old hipsters got it. They loved the poem. They clapped furiously. I felt comfortable. It had been awhile since I had read poetry to an unknown audience. It was my first poetry reading in over a year, and my first reading since I moved from Washington D.C. to Michigan in 2010 to take a teaching job. I was, I had to admit, disjointed.
Poetry had sustained me over the years. In Washington D.C., there was always poetry and literature almost every night of the week somewhere. It is a town of writers. Detroit, as well, has a strong poetry scene with readings and writers flooding the city. But, I didn’t live in Detroit.
I lived over an hour away in East Lansing and I was having trouble connecting with local poets. No literature yet, no live art in the moment. It made me feel like I was suffocating some nights, like I was suffering from malnutrition.
So when M.L. called and said come on down to Detroit to read some works, I was like Saul lost on that road to Damascus. I had been saved, if you ask me, at least for one night. And here I was standing in a room full of strangers.
Frankie the K and I had one more song to do and we had not talked about it either. That meant that this one was going to be in the moment. Always scary to be in the moment but also exciting. Sonny Rollins, the legendary saxophone players, used to say the studio was great, but to improvise in the moment was the most exciting thing about jazz.
Every time I read poetry with musicians and we just go for it, jump off in the moment, I think about something Rollins said years ago in an interview:
“That little area is quite mysterious.” Rollins said. “Music is magical, we all know that, and that area where you create and your subconscious is at work and you don’t know what you’re playing. Often I play things if I’m in the right groove I’ll play things where I surprise myself. Those are things that are deep in my subconscious, and they come out during my improvisation, but they are not things I went into the song thinking about. They are things I hear, and they come out.”
I walked over to Frankie as the audience waited for us to finish.
“I got a blues,” I said.
“How about ‘Take Five’?” Frankie said.
“Brubeck?” I asked.
Frankie smiled at me. “Yea, Brubeck.”
Detroit, I said to myself. Every time I came to this city there was a surprise, something to remember. I looked at Frankie and then over at my friend, M.L. Liebler who was standing off to the side smiling. I heard Frankie start the famous chords to ‘Take Five’ that were timeless now. That jumpy, west coast, happy sound Brubeck made famous for like forever.
I was in Detroit. What did I expect?
YMCA
The first time I came to Detroit was in late July 1995. It was boiling hot in the Motor City. Sun striking down on all of that Detroit brick and the city, it seemed, was all-concrete. I was a new poet as they say in the trade.
I had my first book out, “elvis presley is alive and well and living in harlem” published by Third World Press and I was getting around various cities getting to know poets and poetry scenes. I was also joining a community writing teaching organization known as the D.C. WritersCorps run by my friend, the poet, Kenneth Carroll.
In fact, back in 1995 on that first trip to Detroit, Kenny and I and Jeff McDaniel, another poet and teacher, had been invited to Detroit by M.L. I didn’t know M.L. back then but Kenny and Jeff did. M.L. was a legend already and was fighting the good fight for writers and ordinary people.
He was a poet and a singer, the music and the people of Motown ran through his veins and we all had invited to read poetry, with musicians if we wanted, or if not, just give the people our poetry, the art called “Words Music.”
We had specifically been invited to the city to read poetry at a club with some other Detroit poets and to tape some radio programs. We drove up to Detroit, through the mountains of Pennsylvania, the farms of Ohio, and then up and around Lake Erie into the Motor City. It was the first time I had been that far out into the country in that part of the world in about 10 years.
We read poetry along with some Detroit poets and it was, as I recall, an experience to remember. There were writers, poets, and artists everywhere in the club proving again Detroit’s artistic tradition is rich and ever growing. Musicians played along with the poets as well. I remember particularly the free jazz player, the late Farouk Z. Bey playing along with many of the poets.
All of us read our work as dozens of writers graced the stage that night with M.L. doing the host honors. I remember standing back stage waiting to read and having this huge feeling of euphoria. We were not from Detroit and yet, someone in the city had asked us to come read our art, someone had even been crazy enough to pay us to come here, in the Motor City, home of all of those great songs, and all those wonderful musicians playing those songs.
After the reading, M.L. asked us did we have anywhere to stay and did we want to follow him out to the Red Roof Inn where we could get a room. I was thinking at the time: great. A nice motel where I can rest before we meet the next day to record radio programs.
But before I could even speak, M.L. also said he could get us free rooms at the downtown YMCA. It wasn’t far he sad. Next thing I knew, we were pulling into the downtown YMCA and that is when I realized I should have taken M.L. up on the Red Roof deal.
My brother Mike always says: ‘if you slow, you blow.’
I could hear his voice right then. I should have said something. I had been slow to speak up and so here I was at a piece of crap lodging for the night. A multistoried quasi-shithole.
Detroit, over the decades, had been experiencing economic decay and a collapse in social life and the downtown YMCA showed me the facts in pretty stark terms. It was amazing as we exited our cars. When we pulled up the parking lot was deserted but by the time we got our bags from the trunk, several homeless men had arrived at our cars to ask for change. Strangely enough, we had little cash to give.
We were broke poets. I probably had more money than anyone because I had a job back in D.C. as a tenant lawyer. But I had nothing to offer. That was why we all had decided to take M.L. up on the free room. The homeless men then asked for anything: change, cigarettes, spare snacks, whatever we had to offer. We had nothing. They left as barren of any comfort as when they walked up quick from the shadows.
When we entered the downtown YMCA it was again obvious that Detroit was a city in trouble back then in the 1990’s. Most of us had read about the auto industry leaving many in the city behind by shifting jobs, racial polarization in the city, poverty, and crime but the YMCA reflected the neglect and decay of the times.
The first room we passed in the Y, a police officer was evicting a man from the Y at gunpoint for some kind of violation. The officer had his revolver pointed at the man as he directed him to pack his belongings. I tried not to notice as I walked by the room but again I thought about the Red Roof Inn and M.L.’s offer.
“Slow you blow” in my brother’s voice was ringing in my head again.
But under the circumstances, I felt it best to not react. Cop pointing a gun at a man and ejecting him from the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, in the middle of the night. Yep, that was normal No big deal.
The YMCA was crowded. The place was full of distressed residents of the city who likely had nowhere else to go. The rooms showed the wear and tear of life in the city of Detroit. The beds were old and rickety. The mattress had long since lost any cushion and was soiled.
The linen was likewise untrustworthy. I did what any smart person likely would have done. I used my extra clothes in my bag, made a makeshift pallet and slept on the floor. It was pretty awkward but sleeping on the mattress could become a long term experience. I went with my instincts. My father would have been proud.
I probably only got three or four hours sleep max that night mostly wondering how soft the beds were at the Red Roof Inn out near M.L.’s house.
The next morning the reality of what the great city of Detroit had become and was becoming was even more stark as Kenny, Jeff, and I set out to find a breakfast spot. It was just obvious that the city had changed and the pulse of the city, a city that was once the industrial core of the nation, was forever altered.
There were no places to eat around where we were staying. Nothing. In fact, the community was desolate. There were some houses and buildings undergoing rehab but mostly Detroit looked on the verge of civic death.
This was years after the crisis in the auto industry, the oil embargo from the OPEC nations, white flight from the city, and then the violent 1980’s where Motown became synonymous with murder on a daily basis.
Jeff, Kenny, and I finally did find a nice bagel spot in the city to eat and when Jeff went to the rest room I asked Kenny what he thought of the room at the YMCA.
“Room,” he said, “you call that a room?”
I started laughing. Kenny had grown up in Montana Terrace in Washington D.C., a pretty tough neighborhood and housing project. I grew up on Kennedy Street, off South Dakota Avenue, a different part of town. It was difficult but it was hardly Montana Terrace.
“You slept in the bed?”
Kenny laughed.
“For about an hour,” he said. I kept waking up thinking there were bugs crawling on me.” I laughed again. I felt better about the stay at the YMCA. I wasn’t being soft or weak; the place really was a bonafide shithole. You would think I would have embraced that thought more quickly considering I was a tenant lawyer but for some reason, I was lost in the journey, laughing on the outside, but on the inside, I was just taking it in. It was Detroit. It was real.
As I saw Jeff returning from the rest room to order food, I laughed to myself and wondered again how soft those pillows were at the Red Roof Inn.
M.L. Liebler, I said to myself; he knew the Y was a dump. He had to know; he was from Detroit. He probably got a laugh out of it. It was pretty funny after all.
When we hooked up with M.L. later to record the radio shows, all I talked about was how horrible the YMCA was last night. M.L. laughed until he couldn’t breathe. It would become the joke of the trip to Detroit for all time.
“I told you guys,” he said, “I could have taken you to the Red Roof Inn. It is out by my house.”
Jeff didn’t really care. He might have gotten a decent room. But then again, nothing bothered Jeff McDaniel, the poet. He had been through some many crazy experiences, a raggedy room at the YMCA was like water with no ice – not a big deal.
“I was just short on cash,” Kenny told M.L, “otherwise, I would have been at the Red Roof.”
I felt good hearing Kenny say that. I was short too but not that short. I just blinked. I didn’t want to seem like I was soft, like I was some uptown kid who couldn’t hack the Motown’s underbelly. The city was falling apart, everyone knew, so one had to dig in and bear it.
M.L. started laughing. “I heard Brian yelling out the window,” he said. “M.L...M.L...come back...”
We all laughed. I had seen M.L. pull off in his car but I didn’t yell out. I was too busy trying to figure out where to put my fake pallet on the floor or checking for roaches or bed bugs. It was funny. Detroit. M.L. It was the beginning of something.
Years later, I learned that the YMCA in downtown Detroit was being used as a spillover for prisoners at that time. Jails had no space so they got housed at the Y. I didn’t know if it was true. It made the night even funnier.
I don’t even think M.L. knew he had got us a room at basically a halfway house. I wasn’t mad. We got invited to Detroit to read poetry. People accepted us like we were locals. There was good music and great local poetry. I felt loved.
Stay Tuned for Part II, readers, and thanks for reading and supporting my work.
Oh, man, Brian - what a great story! Entertaining, historic, down-to earth. And exciting! Fascinating recollections. Hey man, I think I need to get your autograph........