Free Dancing in the Dark by David Donnell

follow in Satie’s direction. He lived on croque monsieurs and cheap hamburger meat from a little Algerian butcher down the rue. So when he first met Tom in the spring of 1976, Bats brought this tall pale Italian guy with a huge smile into Dempster’s wherethey were eating after a rehearsal, down on the Lower East Side, he was immediately sympathetic because he thought of himself living in the cold third-floor maid’s room in Paris.
    Following this pace, which was really more a scheduled pace than he really wanted, his feelings about music were pretty wide and handsome, and free and full of initiative. He came back to New York a little restless and wound up doing more work than he really wanted, for NBC and ABC , which is when he first met up with the Desperados.
    Hayden loved the funk of jazz, and the history of European music. He had been named after a great German composer, whom his father had picked up a book about almost by accident, when he was in one of his reading phases, trumpet, reading, lamplight, bourbon and burnout, off to horses and Fox & Wilberson. But Hayden’s father, at that point in time, 31 years ago, knew fields of sweet peas about arranging, knew fields of sweet yams and tobacco about the history of music, European included, historical or otherwise, compared to what his brilliant son Hayden came to know, even some bits and pieces from contemporary South American, although those bossa nova and bossa samba trips were not really Hayden’s specialty.
    So Hayden Washington Jones, 29 at the time, about 4 years older than the other members of the Desperados and much more experienced, in matters of music at least, in matters of composition and genre, half note and full note, harmonic shading and harmonic disruption, continued his daytime work for NBC and ABC , and gave up most of his evening freelance stuff, including an interesting film offer. He became the resident keyboards player and resident arranger for the Desperados. They numbered 7 at that time because Tom had not yet become a member of the group, nor had Tom yet introduced Whitney to the group. And Yvonne had not yet come into the group to do her fabulous one-of-a-kind, Detroit back-up turned around R & B background vocals.
    “I could have a nice tight,” he reflected, “little quartet of my own.” He said this to Tom out of the blue, and it was a very blue day outside, golden, they were going through Kansas, on the tour bus one afternoon. “Cool,” said Tom, and Hayden smiled sideways at him, scrunched a littlein the expanded seat. “But then we’d be playing small clubs and I wouldn’t be changing the conventions of large music.” So that was Hayden’s dream.
    “My man,” Tom said, and Hayden leaned over in the cramped quarters of the seat and slapped him gently on his dimpled chin.
    Satie was often one of his main concerns, but most of his jazz friends in New York thought he took Satie too seriously. So after a few sessions together, Hayden helped to form the Desperados, about a year before Tom came along, and apart from the occasional disagreement with Stash, for example, the results were really powerful. He played a major role on keyboards, but more importantly, he wrote everything they played. There were some furrowed brows from time to time, Stash would shake his head, but he would get into it, Stash could play a wicked Stratocaster, Mason would shrug once in a while and say, “I can’t play this.” But, then he would. They were all very good musicians, and they came through for him.
    “Go, white boy, go,” he said under his breath, at the keyboards, in the middle of a concert one night as Stash was lunging out at the very girders of the place with some really impassioned improvisation. And Stash, even though he was lost to the world, black leather pants and a t-shirt that said SAVE THE SOUTH , not the usual blue denim garb favoured by the Desperados, and was in the middle of this deep solo, heard him, even though he said