It’s a rather far-fetched bit of biological arithmetic, I’ll grant, though quite within the salty parameters of the Nights. For details, see essay — which it was my privilege to deliver as an open-air lecture on a warm June night in 1983 at the American School in Tangier, Morocco, under a crescent moon signaling the end of the holy month of Ramadan, while muezzins called to the faithful from the lighted minarets of nearby mosques in the city that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite: a moving experience indeed for this long-time admirer of Ms. S.
Better yet, read the book: her book, the one called The Arabian Nights or Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, which this Signet Classics version (and Burton’s and all the others) are books about.
You’ll be enchanted.
It Can Be Arranged: A Novelist Recalls His Jazz-Drumming Youth
A mini-memoir of sorts, published here for the first time.
Q: MUSIC, ESPECIALLY jazz, has played a significant role in your life and your writing, has it not?
A: Yes and no. My years as an ardent amateur and semiprofessional jazz drummer were certainly an important part of my life from my teens into my forties. But except for passages in the novel/memoir Once Upon a Time (1994) and the novella Tell Me (2005), I’ve seldom written directly about that experience in either my fiction or my non-fiction. More relevant to me as a writer, I believe, was my early ambition to be, not primarily a composer or a performer of music, but an orchestrator—an “arranger,” as it was called back in those swing-band decades.
Q: Shall we “take it from the edge,” as musicians say (or used to say)? A-one, a-two. .
A: Welclass="underline" As kids in a family of modest means on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the Great Depression, my twin sister and I had the privilege (though we didn’t always see it that way) of weekly piano lessons and daily practice sessions from our elementary-school years through junior high. Because of our twinship, at our teacher’s annual student recitals we were usually assigned duets, my sister playing the primo, or upper-octave melody part, and I the lower-octave secondo. And the recitals would climax, as I remember, with Miss Hubbard herself at the piano and her students providing a scored percussion accompaniment of tambourines, triangles, and such — more to my taste, actually, than the keyboard, although in my later dance-band-drumming days I still did a couple of “specialty” piano solos from time to time: self-arranged versions of “Bumble Boogie” (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee with an eight-to-the-bar left hand) and the like.
As soon as we were allowed, at age thirteen or so, Sister Jill and I quit our piano lessons — and once released from the drudgery of obligatory practice, we found ourselves seriously attracted to music: not the classical piano-exercise books that we’d been drilled in, but pop tunes of the sort sold as “sheet music” in our father’s lunchroom /soda-fountain in Cambridge along with magazines, comic books, and, when they were invented, paperback books (in those days virtually every house had a piano, and sheet music was sold wherever magazines were) — also the swing-band music we heard on the radio and on 78rpm recordings: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Harry James. Through the Depression and then World War II years, our Dorchester County’s public school system had neither a high-school band nor instrumental instruction of any sort (nor even a twelfth grade), but I pieced together a rudimentary drum set, and with Jill on piano and a couple of friends on trombone and alto saxophone, by age fifteen or sixteen we’d cobbled up a successful jazz “combo” called the Swingtette. Through our junior and senior high-school years we played regular Saturday-night dances at the Cambridge Country Club and the Salisbury Town Club in a neighboring county. We even made a recording that was played on the local radio station, and the band was featured onstage in a “Teen-Age Revue” at Schine’s Arcade, the local movie theater.
In 1947, at age seventeen, after graduating from our eleven-year public school system, I enrolled in Juilliard’s six-week summer program with money saved from those country-club gigs (I could never have qualified for admission to the Institute’s regular curriculum). The placement test obliged me to take Elementary Theory, but oddly qualified me for a course in Advanced Orchestration, and I managed to do well in both. The instructor in that latter course was Ted Royal Dewar, orchestrator of Brigadoon and other Broadway musicals and a disciple of the then-fashionable Schillinger System, an avant-garde math-to-music method of composition with which one could, e.g., transfer a photo of the Manhattan skyline onto graph paper and convert the numerical values into a musical score. The technique didn’t particularly interest me (though George Gershwin reportedly used it), but I quite enjoyed that summer in upper Manhattan — my first away from home, except for earlier Boy Scout summer-camping — from which I learned that while some of my classmates were quite likely to become bona fide professional musicians, I was not of that number. During that instructive six-week absence from home I also lost my high-school girlfriend to a no doubt more advanced rival, and so in mid-August returned to Maryland without the foggiest notion of what to do next.
Whereupon, to my happy surprise, I learned that I had won a one-year state-senatorial scholarship to Johns Hopkins University. It was either that or go to work in my father’s store, and so faute de mieux off I went — solo, by bus — from my native Cambridge across Chesapeake Bay to the city of Baltimore and a rigorous research university that I’d never even visited, but from whose College of Engineering my no-less-able older brother, after a similar scholarship year, had dropped out and enlisted in the Army, so ill-prepared were we eleventh-grade redneck high-school grads for serious university work. One had to choose a college within the university: Engineering being of no interest to me, and Business being none of my business, I chose Arts and Sciences. And my major? Welclass="underline" not the sciences or mathematics, for sure; not history, not economics, not philosophy, not languages. That left. . well. . literature, maybe? But the Hopkins English Department was much heavier on English than American lit back then, and taught mainly the famous dead Brits. If one wanted to study Hemingway and Faulkner, say — and I sort of did, having read a couple of their paperbacks from Dad’s store — one could do it only in a brand-new department called Writing, Speech, and Drama (later renamed the Writing Seminars). Moreover, come to think of it, I’d written a regular humor/gossip column called “Ashcan Pete” for our high-school newspaper back in the day, so maybe. . Journalism?
I gave it a try: hung on by my fingernails through a difficult freshman year during which two fellow Eastern Shoremen whom I’d met and befriended on the bus to Baltimore dropped out, just as my brother (who after the war completed his B.A. elsewhere with high grades and went on to law school and a successful career in D.C.) had felt obliged to do. I flunked Political Economy, but survived my other courses; actually managed an A in the department’s one Journalism course (taught by a visiting lecturer from the Baltimore Sun’s senior editorial staff, and having more to do with the history and “philosophy” of journalism than with hands-on newspaper work); did well enough in my other required courses, such as Classics in the History of Western Literature and Classics in the History of Western Thought; and learned the valuable lesson that journalism wasn’t really my thing. Importantly too, among my new friends was another Eastern Shoreman—“Buzz” Mallonee from Centreville, across the Chesapeake from Baltimore — a trumpet-playing engineering major, several of whose prep-school pals were also Hopkins freshmen and musicians. He organized a dance-band, recruited me as drummer, and scored us dance-jobs in the city and over on the Shore as well as regular Sunday-afternoon “tea dances” at the Naval Academy down in Annapolis. Being non-union “scabs,” we charged less than the local professionals, but got more jobs: a Saturday-night frat-house or other gig followed by the Sunday tea-dance earned me almost as much in 24 hours as some classmates were making in a week’s part-time work. Better yet, Buzz found us a summer-long job at Betterton Beach, a popular bayside resort on the upper Chesapeake: Five of us — trumpet, sax, piano, guitar, and drums — played daily afternoon sessions in the old Betterton Casino’s dance hall when the Baltimore excursion boat Bay Belle docked at the casino’s pier with its load of day-trippers, then an hour of dinner music at the nearby Rigbie Hotel (for which our payment was three free meals a day) and another two-hour dance in the evening back at the Casino, in whose ample storage-room we also lodged for free. On Saturdays the rest of the band joined us from Baltimore and elsewhere for a three-hour evening dance: four saxes altogether, two trumpets, trombone, piano, guitar, drums, and occasionally a female vocalist, we played four-number “sets” (three ballads and an up-beat “jump” tune, a few of which I arranged) with a small break between and a half-time intermission. I don’t recall what we were paid over and above our free room and board, but we sharpened our skills from all those daily performance-hours, enjoyed ourselves on the beach in our free time — and I met a young state-college co-ed, waitressing at the Rigbie, whom two years later I would wed.