Occasional Jazz Conjectures

When February 14th rolls around, I’m always reminded that nearly everything I know about elegance and savoir faire came to me through jazz. For years I played jazz in bars and restaurants every Valentine’s Day — subtly trying to “establish the scene of the crime,” as the great Jack McDuff used to say to me. Everyone knows that along with a good meal, suggestive lighting, and the right company the only thing that sets “the crime ablaze” more is a dose of the right aural aperitif. Sometimes it was a tapestry of lovely ballads (”For Heaven’s Sake,” maybe at either a Bill Evans or Fran Warren-like/Claude Thornhill pace or “It Never Entered my Mind”), or something more on the sensual side (a Bossa Nova like “How Insensitive” or maybe a grinding tune (Sidney Bechet’s “Blue Horizon,” perhaps) that made you feel like you’d developed night vision. One mentor, a beautiful man in his 70s, who always wore white patent-leather shoes, used to quote Fats Waller after a particularly good set, and lean in, saying to me, “this is so good, it MUST be illegal.”

While some people had to sit through John Robert Powers seminars or Auntie Gert’s antiquated Emily Postisms, or even an almost hip, but oops-not-quite patter of an old Esquire Guide to this-or-that, I learned about the do’s and don’t’s, social niceties, and how to present myself as a man from jazzmen named Jimmieapolis of St. Paul, Cornbread, Big Smokey, Wild Bill and Mild Bill, and Cap’n Jack.

These were wonderful jazz musicians who understood, like Diana Vreeland, that “Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.” They’d weathered the ’60s, 70’s, and were not about to give up on the idea that a good hat, and a fine pair of shoes make the man. Jimmieapolis taught me how to pick the right kind of collar and roll a tie, iron a shirt and a pair of tailored, ’50s-style double-dart pleats, why shoe-trees and sole dressing mattered on the bandstand, and (most importantly) how to take your time — making music breathe and brush every so slightly across the backs of their necks.

They taught me that to “get the BBQ and get busy,” it was necessary to understand desire’s soundtrack and “establish the scene of the crime.” And for them that meant being masculine and vulnerable, just like Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, and Coleman Hawkins, Sinatra and Johnny Hartman, and (in the truest tradition of smooth science and the art of genuine, refined cool), Miles Davis. Their elegance was in their refusal to be anyone else’s man — they could burnish a poem through their horns that was daring for its Keatsian, wrenching beauty . . . wearing their raw emotion like a boxer — bruised and not ring-proud about it — and still remember on Sundays or fourteenths of February to call their mothers, wives, daughters, or girlfriends and hum into the receiver that “you’re my favorite work of art.”