Free High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney Page B

They had parties every Saturday where he met piano plunkers who made money though they could not play a complete diatonic scale. Hearing Fletcher Henderson’s band was, for him, the killer.
    The white men at the musicians’ union to which Uncle Castor applied didn’t believe he was a student, and when they saw his card they sent him to the black union, where the secretary, hung over, pocketed his ten dollars. He met James P. Johnson, once the most sought after recorder in the player-piano industry, from whom he learned about um pah, fill in, and the Jim Crow that would confine him to the roadhouses on the outskirts of town.
    But Uncle Castor was lucky. He was chosen to wear the red fez of the Black and White Orchestra, a six-piece, racially mixed ensemble much in demand in Franconia, Crawford’s Notch, Mt. Washington, and Keene, New Hampshire. The “big” union accused them of booking engagements without its permission, held an inquiry, exonerated the white members of the crew, and fined the black ones. Uncle Castor didn’t want to go back to the Friday nights where it didn’t matter what a band played as long as it was loud or the fraternity parties where the bass sitting at the top of the steps used the collars of the drummers below as music stands. He caught the excursion train to New York in the company of Johnny Hodges, then a teenager too brilliant for the local scene.
    Hodges took him to the Hoofers’ Club, a basement on Seventh
Avenue, where he entered the big leagues. He started a Boston that brought an answer from the sidelines: Louis Armstrong in cutaways. “Pops” or “Smack” Henderson took his band downtown, solemn as pallbearers. Uncle Castor went upstairs with the men from the theater pits who had no work on Sundays. He marveled at the stretch of Fats Waller’s hands at the organ, but cringed at the mugging and bouncing he did for the audience. Uncomfortable with the barrelhouse style, Uncle Castor auditioned for Noble Sissle, the ace of syncopation, who preferred a layered, flowing sound.
    Noble Sissle and His International Orchestra topped the bill at Les Ambassadeurs in Paris. An Argentine orchestra played at tea, a French group serenaded the dinner guests, followed by supposedly limpid waltzes from the Viennese. Spackled into the cracks was a band of morose Hungarians who complained when no one trod their way through the gloomy folk tunes. The piano was mounted on a platform so that Uncle Castor sat high above the quota of Polignacs, Twysdens, and Goulds. Detectives tried to blend in without losing sight of the necklaces they guarded. Electricians once drenched the assembly in a rainbow of light, but the effect was so tempting the police begged them to stop.
    In the 1930s Uncle Castor, first pianist and assistant arranger, working from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., was too busy to notice as the “Spectac” began to list in the waters of fashion. The number of newsmaking engagements from Madrid to Stockholm declined. The jive-happy jumped ship. Meanwhile, Europe headed back to war. Sissle’s “noted aggregation” returned home to unlatch its horns, but something had been broken in the transplanting. And the miles dried up. Audiences at the Biltmore had even stopped singing “Farewell, Harlem!” Uncle Castor knocked around as a relief pianist, “ghosted” for Fred Waring, wrote and published songs no one recorded, and couldn’t recall precisely
when he felt himself pushed aside by the new, aggressive sounds of 18th and Vine and 29th and Dearborn. He came to rest as the “featured nightly attraction” at a hotel in Saratoga.
    All of this Uncle Castor would one day type up in bold capital letters. He secreted over four hundred pages about the beauty of minor thirds, his triumphs over rivals and inadequate scores, the hectic life of numbers that had to be learned in an hour and princely sums that slipped through his hands in even less time. What Uncle Castor did not know was that his gladdened