P ATRONES DE D ISEÑO

What I didn't know was that Bird and Ross Russell had already talked about using me. Bird wanted a different kind of trumpet player from Dizzy. He wanted someone with a more relaxed style who played in the middle register, like me. I found out after I got to Los Angeles.

When we arrived, Benny Carter had a job at the Orpheum Theatre. After we played that job the band broke up temporarily until the next job. Benny formed a small group from the larger band that had me and Al Grey, the trombonist, and some other people who I've forgotten. I think he had a guy named Bumps Meyers in the group. We started doing small clubs around L.A. and did a radio broadcast. But I didn't like the music Benny's group was playing, though I didn't tell him that right then. Benny was a nice guy and I liked how he played, but I couldn't use the music them other guys were playing. Plus, when I first got to L.A. I was living with Benny. I felt it would have been wrong to just up and walk out on him. So I didn't know what to do for a little while. I didn't like playing in Benny's band because they were playing a lot of old-fashioned numbers and arrangements. Benny is a hell of a musician, you know. But he wasn't confident in his playing and sometimes he'd ask if he sounded like Bird. I'd say, "No, you sound like Benny Carter."

Man, when I would tell him this, he would laugh his ass off.

I was playing with Bird at an after-hours club called the Finale when I was still with Benny Carter's band. The Finale was upstairs, on the second floor, I think. It wasn't a large place, but it was a nice place and I thought it was funky because the music was funky and the musicians were getting down. They used to broadcast live from there over the radio. Bird had persuaded a guy named Foster John-son, a retired vaudevillian hoofer who ran the club, to let him bring in the band. The Finale Club was located in a section of Los Angles called Little Tokyo. There was a black neighborhood right next to this Japanese neighborhood. I think the Finale Club was located on South San Pedro. Anyway, in Bird's band at the Finale, we had myself on trumpet, Bird on alto, Addison Farmer—the twin brother of trumpet player Art Farmer—on bass, Joe Albany on piano, and Chuck Thompson on drums. A lot of other good musicians used to sit in at the Finale. Howard McGhee would come around a lot. He ran the club after Foster Johnson managed it. Sonny Criss, an alto player, used to sit in, and Art Farmer, Red Callender, the bassist, and Red's protege, that crazy, beautiful motherfucker, Charlie Mingus.

Charlie Mingus loved Bird, man, almost like I have never seen nobody love. Maybe Max Roach loved Bird that much.

But Mingus, shit, he used to come to see and hear Bird almost every night. He couldn't get enough of Bird. He also liked me a lot. But Mingus could play the bass and everybody knew when they heard him that he would become as bad as he became. We also knew he would have to come to New York, which he did.

I got tired of the music Benny's band was playing. It wasn't music. I told my friend Lucky Thompson how sick I was of playing in the band. He told me to quit and come stay with him. Lucky was a hell of a saxophone player that I had met at Minton's. He was from Los Angeles and had come back home. I had let Lucky stay with me a couple of times when he was in New York. He had a house in Los Angeles and I went and stayed with him.

By now it was early 1946 and my girl, Irene, was back in East St. Louis, pregnant with our second child, Gregory. Now I had to think about making money to support my family. Before I quit, Benny asked me if I needed some money. He had heard that I was unhappy. I just told him, "Naw, man, I just want to quit." He was hurt, and I felt bad because he had brought me out to California and was counting on me. That was the first time I had quit a band abruptly like that. I was making about $143 a week. But I was in pain playing with Benny's band. No amount of money was going to make me happy playing those bullshit Neil Hefti arrangements Benny's band was playing.

After leaving Benny's band I didn't have no money in my pocket. So I moved in with Lucky for a while, then I started living with Howard McGhee. We got to be big buddies and he wanted to learn what I knew about the trumpet and music theory. Howard lived with this white girl, Dorothy. She was beautiful—looked just like a movie star. I think they were married: I don't know. Anyway, she kept Howard in a new car and with a pocketful of money and brand-new clothes.

Howard was something else, man. Anyway, Dorothy had a friend, a blonde, beautiful woman who looked just like Kim Novak, only finer. Her name was Carol. She was one of George Raft's girls.

She'd be over to Howard's house and Howard wanted me to go with her. At this time I had probably made love to only two or three women. I had started smoking a little bit by this time, but I still didn't even know how to curse. So, here was Carol coming by to see me and I ain't paying no attention to her. She was sitting around watching me practice trumpet, which was all I was doing.

When Howard would get home after Carol had left, I would tell him, "Howard, you know Carol came by." "And what?"

Howard would say.

"And what?" I'd say, "What do you mean, 'And what?' " "And what did you do, Miles?" "Nothing," I said, "I didn't do nothing."

"Listen, Miles," Howard would say, "that girl is rich. I mean if she comes by, that means she likes you, so do something.

You think she coming by here and by Lucky's house blowing the horn of her Cadillac for her health, man? So the next time she come by, do something. You hear what I'm telling you, Miles?"

She came by a little after that and blew the horn of that new Cadillac she had. I let her in and she asked me if I needed something. Cadillac sitting outside with the top down, she finer than a motherfucker. I hadn't messed with no white girls at that time, so I was probably a little scared of her. Maybe I had kissed one in New York. But I hadn't been to bed with one yet. So I told her I didn't need anything. So she left. When Howard got home I told him Carol had come by and asked me if I needed anything. "And what?" Howard said.

"I told her I didn't need anything. I don't want any money or nothing."

"Are you crazy, motherfucker," Howard said, madder than a motherfucker. "When she comes by again and you tell me that shit and you don't have no money, man, I'm cutting your motherfucking nose off. Here we can't play nowhere. The black union don't want us to play because we're too modern. The white union don't like us because we're black. And here's a white woman, a whore who wants to give you money, and you ain't got none, and you say no? If you do that shit again I'm going to stab you, you jive motherfucker, you hear what I'm saying, you understand? You'd better, because I ain't bullshitting."

I knew Howard was nice and everything, but he didn't like no stupid bullshit. The next time Carol came by and asked me if I needed money, I said, "Yeah." When she offered it to me, I took it. When I told Howard that, he said, "Good." After that I used to think about what Howard told me, I mean that shit embarrassed me, her giving me money. I hadn't been around no shit like that. But it was the first time I didn't have money, really. After that Carol used to give me sweaters and shit because it got cold in Los Angeles at night. But I never forgot that conversation with Howard. I remember it almost word for word. And that's unusual for me.

After I quit Benny's band, then I finally hooked up with Bird and played with him for a while. Howard McGhee was also taking care of Bird while he was out in Los Angeles. Bird lived with Howard for a while after he got through playing his engagement with Dizzy at Billy Berg's club. The music Diz and Bird had done at Berg's club had gone over big in Los Angeles, but Dizzy wanted to go back to New York. He bought tickets for all of the band—including Bird—to fly back to New York. Everybody went, was glad to go. Except at the last minute, Bird decided to cash in his ticket in order to buy heroin.

Early in the spring of 1946, I think it might have been March, Ross Russell set up a recording session with Dial Records for Bird. Ross made sure that Bird was sober, and hired me and Lucky Thompson on tenor, a guy named Arv Garrison on guitar, Vic McMillan on bass, Roy Porter on drums, and Dodo Marmarosa on piano.

At this time, Bird was drinking cheap wine and shooting heroin. People on the West Coast weren't into bebop like people in New York were and they thought some of the shit we were playing and doing was weird. Especially with Bird. He didn't have no money, was looking bad and raggedy, and everybody who knew who he was, knew he was a bad motherfucker who didn't care. But the rest of the people who were being told that Bird was a star could only see this broke, drunken dude playing this weird shit up on stage. A lot of them didn't buy all that shit about Bird being this genius, they just ignored him, and I think this hurt his confidence in himself and what he was doing. When Bird left New York he was a king, but out in Los Angeles he was just another broke, weird, drunken nigger playing some strange music. Los Angeles is a city built on celebrating stars and Bird didn't look like no star.

But at this recording session that Ross set up for Dial, Bird pulled himself together and played his ass off. I remember we rehearsed at the Finale Club the night before we recorded. We argued half the night about what we were going to play and who was going to play what. There had been no rehearsal for the recording date, and the musicians were pissed because they were going to be playing tunes they were unfamiliar with. Bird was never organized about telling people what he wanted them to do. He just got who he thought could play the shit he wanted and left it at that. Nothing was written down, maybe a sketch of a melody. All he wanted to do was play, get paid, and go out and buy himself some heroin.

Bird would play the melody he wanted. The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct. He didn't conform to Western ways of musical group interplay by organizing everything. Bird was a great improviser and that's where he thought great music came from and what great musicians

were about. His concept was "fuck what's written down." Play what you know and play that well and everything will come together—just the opposite of the Western concept of notated music.

I loved the way Bird did that. I learned a lot from him that way. It would later help me with my own music concepts.

When that shit works, man, it's a motherfucker. But if you get a group of guys who don't understand what's happening, or they can't handle all that freedom you're laying on them, and they play what they want, then it's no good. Bird would get guys in who couldn't handle the concept. He did it in the recording studio and when they were playing a live

performance. That's what a lot of that argument was about at the Finale the night before we recorded.

The recording session took place in Hollywood at a studio called Radio Recorders. Bird was a motherfucker on that date.

We recorded "A Night in Tunisia," "Yardbird Suite," and "Ornithology." Dial released "Ornithology" and "A Night in Tunisia" on a 78 rpm record in April of that year. I remember Bird recording a tune on that date called "Moose the Mooch" that was named after the cat who used to get Bird's heroin. I think he got something like half of Bird's royalties from that record date for supplying Bird with heroin. (It was probably written into Bird's contract in some kind of way.) I think everyone played well on this date but me. This was my second recording date with Bird but I don't know why I didn't play as well as I could have. Maybe I was nervous. It's not that I played terrible. It's just that I could have played better. Ross Russell—a jive motherfucker who I never did get along with because he was nothing but a leech, who didn't never do nothing but suck off Bird like he was a vampire—said something about my playing was flawed. Fuck that jive white boy. He wasn't no musician, so what did he know what Bird liked! I told Ross Russell he could kiss my ass.

I remember playing with a mute on that date so I would sound less like Dizzy. But even with the mute I still sounded like him. I was mad with myself, because I wanted to sound like myself. I still felt that I was close to getting to the place where I would have my own voice on trumpet. I was anxious to be myself even then, and I was only nineteen. I was impatient with myself and most everything else. But I kept it to myself and kept my eyes and ears wide open so that I could keep on learning.

After the recording session, I think it was around that time, maybe in early April, the police closed the Finale, which was then run by Howard and Dorothy McGhee. Howard was constantly being fucked over by the white police because he was married to a white woman. When Bird started living in their garage and drinking, with all them pimps, dope dealers, and hustlers around, the police began to notice and turned up the heat. They really started messing with them even more.

They were a tough couple though, so it didn't make them change what they were doing. The police had closed the Finale because they said dope was being dealt from there—and it was. But they didn't never bust nobody. So they closed it down because of suspicion.

There weren't many places for jazz musicians—especially black jazz musicians—to play in the first place. So there was hardly any money to make. After a while I started getting some money from my father, so I wasn't doing too bad. But I wasn't doing real good, either. About this time heroin got hard to get in Los Angeles. This didn't bother me because I wasn't using it, but Bird was all the way into it. He was a real bad junkie by then, so he started going through severe withdrawal. He just disappeared. Nobody knew he was living with Howard, and Howard didn't tell nobody that he was there going cold turkey. But when Bird gave up heroin, he only switched to drinking more heavily. I remember him telling me once that he was trying to kick heroin and that he hadn't had any for a week. But he had two gallons of wine on the table, empty quart whiskey bottles in the trash can, bennies spilled all over the table, and a crowded tray overflow-ing with cigarette butts.

Bird drank a lot before, but nowhere near as much as he did after he kicked heroin. Then he started drinking a fifth of anything he could get his hands on. He liked whiskey, so if he had that it would be gone in no time. Wine he drank even more of. That's what Howard later told me Bird survived on when he was going cold turkey, port wine. Then he started taking pills, Benzedrine, really messing his body up.

The Finale was opened up again in May of 1946. Bird used Howard on trumpet instead of me and for some reason the month stayed in my mind. I think Bird had Howard, Red Callender, Dodo Marmarosa, and Roy Porter in that group. Bird was breaking down physically right in front of everyone, but he was playing good, too.

I started hanging out with some of the younger musicians of Los Angeles, like Mingus, Art Farmer, and, of course, Lucky Thompson —my main man during the time I stayed out on the West Coast. I think I played another gig with Bird in April, but I'm not sure. Seems like I played at a place called the Carver Club, on UCLA's campus. I think Mingus, Lucky Thompson, Britt Woodman, and maybe Arv Garrison were on that job. Work was getting hard to find in Los Angeles and by May or June I was tired of living out there. The scene was too slow. I wasn't learning nothing.

I had first met Art Farmer at the black union office, which was located in downtown Los Angeles, in the black community. I think it was Local 767. I was talking to a trumpet player named Sammy Yates, who played in Tiny Bradshaw's band. Some other guys were standing around asking me about what was happening with the new music, bebop, and what was New York like. Questions like that. I was telling them what I could. I remember this real quiet cat standing off to the side who couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen, watching everything I was saying, soaking it all up. I remembered him when I would see him at some of the jam sessions. That was Art Farmer. And then I played with his twin brother and found out that he played trumpet and fluegelhorn too. So we'd have these short

conversations about music. I liked him, because he was a real nice cat and he could really play, for someone as young as he was.

I think I ran into him the most over at the Finale. I knew him better after he moved to New York later on. But I met Art Farmer the first time I went to Los Angeles. A lot of the young musicians in Los Angeles who were serious about playing

I think I ran into him the most over at the Finale. I knew him better after he moved to New York later on. But I met Art Farmer the first time I went to Los Angeles. A lot of the young musicians in Los Angeles who were serious about playing