Getting Down to Brass Tacks: My Adventures In The World Of Jazz, Rio, And Beyond

By Amy H. Duncan

In the 1950's a young teenage piano student is given an LP of the jazz pianist Alex Kallao. She was struck with a major epiphany while listening to his music: this was what she wanted to do with her life! This riveting autobiography of a woman in the world of jazz takes us on Amy Duncan’s adventures as a struggling musician and writer in Boston and New York to her exotic life in Rio de Janeiro with its samba and Carnival. But her desire for love and family creates obstacles along the way, and her choices lead to unexpected paths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623098858

Book preview

essentials."

MILES DAVIS - 1986

One day, when I was working as a music writer for The Christian Science Monitor, I got a call from a representative at Channel 13, New York's PBS station. He told me that PBS was going to do a Great Performances special and they would like it to be covered by the Monitor.

You'll be interviewing Miles Davis, he said. MILES DAVIS?!! Omigod! I'm gonna meet MILES!! I was flabbergasted, not just because I was actually going to get to meet the man himself, but because I'd heard that Miles never talked to anyone. The PBS guy went on: You're to pick up Miles at his apartment on Fifth Avenue and then take him to lunch at the Carlyle Hotel. We'll send along one of our PR people to go with you. We'll pick you up on Thursday at 3 p.m.

OK, I thought. OK, yippee! I'm gonna meet MILES!!

On Thursday a black stretch limo came to pick me up at 3 p.m. on the nose. Angela, the PR rep, was sitting in the back when I climbed in. She was black, classy and no-nonsense. She said, Listen, Miles will probably give us a hard time, so be prepared.

I nodded, and guessed that she'd already been through this with some other reporters. The limo driver dropped us off in front of Miles' building. We spoke to the doorman and told him who we were. He rang up Miles, who said there was no way in hell he was going to do any damned interview.

Angela grabbed the phone from the doorman. Listen Miles. This is the time we set up and you agreed to it.

I couldn't hear what Miles was saying on the other end, but whatever it was, it took a long time. Angela looked at me and rolled her eyes.

Finally she said, OK, OK, Miles, we'll set it up for another day, and handed the phone back to the doorman, who smirked.

Angela said she'd call the limo back, but I told her I'd take the subway home. She said she'd phone me to set up a new date. I knew they had to get Miles to cooperate for the TV special, so I went home and waited for her call.

And call she did, the very next day, so we trekked back over to Miles' place. This time we actually made it up the elevator. Angela knocked on the door. Miles opened it with the chain on and peered out.

No, he said.

What?! said Angela.

I said no. No interview.

Angela put her nose about an inch from his and said, Listen Miles, you're fuckin' with my job. I don't fuck with your job, so what makes you think you can fuck with mine?

Miles opened the door.

OK, you got twenty minutes, he barked in a gravelly baritone.

Miles was married to Cicely Tyson at that time, and their apartment was a big, open, sprawling, multilevel affair covered with gray carpeting. Cicely was out of town. All around the walls there were clothes racks. Miles' clothes, which he fondly referred to as my shit, were hanging on them. These were the many imported outfits he'd had custom made by famous designers from around the world, and he didn't want to keep them hidden away in any closets. They were on display for all to see, with a big full-length mirror in the middle. I remember when Miles’ album Tutu had been released a few months before, with a killer close-up of only his face, Miles’ disgruntled comment to the press was It doesn't show my shit.

Angela and I walked in, and I pulled out my tape recorder.

Ohhh, groaned Miles when he saw it. I sat down next to him on the sofa and pulled out the mike. He moved back, then got up and walked away. I looked at Angela. She walked over to Miles’ clothes racks and started poking through his clothes.

Yeah, yeah, said Miles, perking up a little.

Miles was a style man. When all the other guys his age were still carrying the torch around the arena one more time playing bebop and standards, Miles was forging ahead, setting up rock rhythm sections behind his horn and wearing satin jackets and sequined pants on stage. Even though his trumpet playing never changed much, he still liked to inject it into new settings.

As jazz singer Eddie Jefferson sang in his lyric to Miles’ tune So What:

"About the clothes he wears…

his style is in the future…"

Miles was anything but old hat. He said:

If you're not keepin' up with the times, you end up with 'bell-bottom music.' He beckoned to me to join him and Angela as they took a closer look at his wardrobe. His jackets and coats were made from exquisite fabrics and leathers, things trimmed with peacock feathers, shimmering with silver and gold threads or sparkling with tiny reflective black studs. He insisted that Angela and I try some things on. I picked a Japanese black suede coat painted with white designs.

Shit, that looks almost as good on you as it does on me. Miles hoisted up his baggy printed pants around his skinny waist. I was having a ball, but was starting to worry about the interview that I was supposed to be gathering for my editor. I knew I'd never get Miles to sit down and talk into the dumb tape recorder, so I said:

Miles, I have a ten-piece band with a similar format to Birth of the Cool. It just slipped out, because I didn't know what else to say, and I wanted to make some kind of connection with him. Bingo. Miles smiled broadly, and said:

Yeah, Birth of the Cool, really?

Birth of the Cool, for those who may not know, was the nine-piece band Miles put together and recorded in 1949-50. It was, along with Gerry Mulligan's Tentette, one of the bands I'd most admired when I was a kid, and was undoubtedly one of the things that led me to my forming my own mini big band many years later. Miles grabbed my hand and dragged me over to his Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which was set up alongside the clothes racks where Angela was still busy trying things on.

Do you wanna take a lesson? he laughed. He played some chords, and then asked me to play a couple of my tunes. In an instant we turned from an uptight journalist grilling a famous legendary jazz trumpeter into just two musicians swapping ideas. Now that Miles was relaxed and feeling good, I said sheepishly, Hey Miles, we were supposed to talk about the TV show, remember?

I haven't seen it yet, said Miles. I don't know how the idea came up. They asked me to do it. I probably won't like it.

Why's that, Miles?

Because what you see yourself doin' doesn't look the same as you think you look…you know what I mean? I'm not so sure I want to see it right away.

Actually, when I got a chance to preview the show the next day, I was happy to see Miles looking quite fit, sipping mineral water and eating sugar free candies. His bout a decade before with various health problems, as well as injuries from a car accident, had kept him out of music for more than five years. I asked him about it in our interview.

I was sick, said Miles. I was an alcoholic. I used a lot of coke. If I had kept on playin' I'd be dead. He told me he hadn't thought about his music at all during that period, that he'd put it out of his mind, which reminded me of some years before when I'd stopped playing myself and didn't even listen to music. When he finally did come back, though, he was ready for a fresh, new approach. But some of his fans, and even his colleagues, complained. They wanted the old Miles, the Kind of Blue and Seven Steps to Heaven Miles back again.

It's like clothes, he said, pointing at the racks around the room. Some people look wrong in these new clothes, he said. Music is the same way. I play styles. If it's reggae, I play reggae. If it's calypso, I play calypso—I don't play the blues when I play 'My Funny Valentine.' When you play styles, you'll always be up to date, but…I won't force one style on top of another style. It's like wearing a sweater over a tuxedo.

I was intrigued by these remarks since, to me, his trumpet style hadn't really changed. But when I stopped to think about it, everything he played fit in perfectly with the backgrounds he chose.

Then he stood up and said, Look, musicians feel like they haven't done anything if they don't feel that 'yes!' when they play. That happens when you play off each other.

Then he waxed philosophical and mused about whether some day it might be possible, by some electronic invention, to extract music from the air, music that had been played at some time in the past but had never been recorded.

It's out there somewhere, he said, scratching his chin.

How're your chops, Miles? I asked, wondering how he'd managed to make his comeback so quickly.

I've finally got my tone back, he said. "I sometimes hit a high note, but I don't hit it like a trumpet player who plays high notes—I hit it like ptew!—like that, like a gun."

He looked at his watch. Over two hours had gone by since Angela and I arrived.

OK, your twenty minutes are up, he growled. Then he smiled and kissed me and Angela on the cheek, and we were off. I was much happier with our casual chat than I would have been with a formal interview, and I wrote it up pretty much the way it went down, except for his frequent use of the S-word.

Wow, I just met Miles Davis! I thought, grinning from ear to ear.

Over the years, I ended up meeting and interviewing many artists who had been my heroes, some since childhood, like Anita O'Day, and others later on, like Brazilian singer Djavan. Somehow, though, meeting these people and writing about them left me with an inner sense of loss for all that I knew I could have done but hadn't, and could be doing but wasn't, with my own music. For you to understand my feelings, I need to go back to the beginning…

CHAPTER 1: WAR BABY

Ma and Pop were locked in their room, yelling behind the door. I could hear him swearing, and her crying and then the pushing and hitting. I could hear it all the way down the narrow stairs to the landing and up again into my room, and even though I put my hands over my ears and buried my face in Fred and Bill, my teddy bears, I couldn't stop it. I could feel it vibrating inside of me, shaking the ground and making it drop right out from under my feet. Dreamlike, I suddenly found myself at their bedroom door, pounding, screaming Stop it! Stop it! Finally Ma opened the door… Go back to your room, Amy. This has nothing to do with you. You always think you're the center of the universe, but you're not. I turned and ran out into the yard, throwing myself on the ground face down, my tears disappearing into the prickly grass. I rolled over and lay there on my back, looking up at the blue, blue sky, wondering where it ended, and if it didn't end…what was beyond that? After a while I stopped crying and stretched out, feeling the earth under me. Grateful that it was still under me…

My mother knew that my father was a heavy drinker when they met in the 1930s. But Robert David Duncan was smart, good-looking and charming, what they used to call debonair, and on top of that, he was a graduate of Yale University. Edith Hilda Bates was a down-to-earth pragmatist, and Bob was a dreamer. From the day they married, and especially after my sister Roberta (Bertie) and I came along, Edith made Bob Duncan into her special project, striving mightily and hopelessly to turn him into her idea of a responsible husband and father.

But Pop was a romantic and a bon vivant— a writer who used to brag every chance he got that his family was full of famous artists and musicians, and especially that his grandfather, composer Robert Goldbeck, had been co-founder of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Pop himself never accomplished anything so grand, but he did play a little guitar and clarinet, had a big collection of jazz records, and liked to write humorous short stories.

Ma, on the other hand, came from a practical working-class family, and as her marriage to Pop started to deteriorate, he used to rub that in every chance he got, referring to her people as peasants. Ma's reaction—perhaps to prove that peasant stock was more capable of running things than pretentious would-be writers—was to tighten the screws a little more, until she ended up orchestrating every move he made. Bob Duncan's reaction to this, not surprisingly, was to run away, but not before he had said to her, enough times that the phrase was engraved in my mind forever: Get off my back!

I was born two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 5, 1941, in New York City, while Pop has having a bout of the delirium tremens. They named me Amy (after a crabby old aunt on my mother's side) Hildreth (a family surname). I was an unexpected child, a second daughter, and that, along with Pop's condition at the time, may explain why there were so few baby pictures of me in the family album. There were lots of photos of Bertie, born nearly two years earlier, before Pop's drinking had gotten totally out of control.

I don't remember anything about my life until we moved to Cleveland, Ohio when I was a toddler. There we lived in one side of a duplex house with no grass in the yard—me, Ma, Pop and Bertie. The vague landscape of my memories includes hot summer afternoons digging in the melted tar in the street with a soup spoon; Bertie hosing down her arch-enemy, little curly-headed Cookie Papp; miniature renegade Tommy Lee Cash getting behind the wheel of his father's car and slamming it into the house we shared with his parents, making a god-awful noise and leaving dents in the clapboard siding; being persecuted by bigger kids; playing with Grain, Grawn and Legan, the imaginary friends Bertie made up who lived under the floorboards of our house; and listening to the grownups talk about the war.

To me the war meant we had to buy food with ration coupons instead of money and eat apple butter because there was no real butter. Or we'd eat margarine, which we called marge. Marge came in a heavy plastic bag, like a pillow, and it was white like Crisco or lard. The bag had a little red button on it with the instructions: Pinch the berry and squeeze the bag. Bertie and I used to fight over who would pinch the berry to make the red stuff ooze out and knead the bag until it turned yellow, just like butter. In those days you couldn't sell margarine that was already yellow, because everyone would think you were trying to pass it off as butter and that was illegal.

There were two big tragedies in my life at that time. The first was when I was around two years old and I dropped my composition doll Mary down the sewer drain. I stood there and watched as she floated away in the brackish, smelly water, and was too horrified even to cry. I ran into the house, screaming Ma, Ma, Mary gone, Mary gone! Then I did burst into tears, so Ma took me to the store and bought me a new doll. I named her Mary, too, and stayed away from the sewer whenever I played with her.

The second and worse tragedy happened one day when I was playing outside in our dusty, grassless backyard in my pretty little blue dress with the embroidered smocking. Bored and restless, I started poking around in the garbage cans, and somehow in my rummaging I grabbed a bunch of old razor blades that someone had thrown away. I looked down and was shocked to see my adorable little blue dress stained red with blood. I screamed, not for the blood or the pain, but for my beautiful dress. Ma heard my screams, and came out to rescue me. She carried me into the house and washed me up, put band-aids on my fingers, and admonished me to stay away from the garbage cans. Then she dressed me in a pair of overalls. I screamed louder.

What's the matter with you? she said, impatience rising in her voice. You're all right now.

"No overaws. No! I'm girl. Want my dress!" I blubbered.

Ma laughed and said, But Amy, your dress is covered with blood! I have to wash it! I didn't care, I wanted my pretty blue dress. I sobbed uncontrollably.

I was crying out for my girlyness during a time when American men were off fighting the war and American women were home dressed in overalls that were a larger version of my own, holding down jobs in factories, making planes and tanks for the war effort. By the time the men came back from the war and the women were eased out of their jobs and back into the home as mothers and housekeepers, I would become a tomboy of sorts, spurning dresses and girly things and trying to assert my boyness. Even though I was the smallest kid in my class at school and was terrible at sports, I still wanted to be tough and feisty, so I used my mouth. At the tender age of three, when Ma asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I replied unsmilingly, A burglar.

Even way back then, during the war, I had a feeling that I was different from other kids, and from the grownups, too. It wasn't always an unpleasant feeling because it made me feel special. But the bad part was that I was so sensitive, touchier than any of the kids I knew, and certainly more than the grownups, I was sure of that. When I was really small, I didn't know what sensitive was, I just knew that a lot of things made me afraid or made me cry—going to new places, the way some grownups looked at me, having to eat unfamiliar foods. Bertie said I was a sissy.

Once, when I was around three, Ma took me and Bertie to have our pictures taken by a professional photographer. I didn't want to sit on the bench with Bertie while the big man fiddled with an ominous-looking black box that I was certain would shoot out knives, bullets, flames or worse when he pressed the button. I wanted to bolt and hide my face in Ma's skirt. But she was raising us according to the snap-out-of-it method, so I had no choice but to sit there and try not to cry or wet my pants. I kept that photo for years. There I was—a tiny girl in a flowered dress and pigtails, eyes round and wide with terror.

Ma didn't know how to deal with me. She was a sensible woman who expected her daughters to be the same, and she wanted us to be thick-skinned, too. She was a strict disciplinarian, very controlling, and not particularly warm or affectionate, although she had a great sense of humor. I had no idea when I was little that she was already afraid that I'd turn out to be unstable like Pop, so she was always on guard to make sure I didn't make a fuss about things.

CHAPTER 2: EAST ISLIP

When I was four we moved to East Islip on Long Island in New York state. I don't remember much about it, except that our house had a little pond with a bridge over it in the back yard, and the beach we went to in the summer was segregated—although I didn't know what that meant at the time. I recall pressing my nose up against a chain link fence and seeing people with brown skin on the other side. I was fascinated. I had never seen a person with brown skin. I didn't understand why we couldn't go over there and play with them. They were different, so I reasoned that they must be special.

What I didn't remember—Ma told me this story many years later—was that when we were still living in Cleveland and I was just a toddler, one day she took me and Bertie to the dime store and we sat down at the soda fountain for something to eat. There was a big black man working behind the counter, wiping up our place with a damp rag. I had never seen a black person before, and I pointed and cried in delight, Ma, look at the brown man! My mother cringed with embarrassment, and the man behind the counter swore, threw his rag down on the floor, and stomped out of the store. I wish I could have said, Wait! Wait! Some day I'll marry two black men and be a jazz musician! Too late.

Music. I didn't realize it when we moved to East Islip, but the seed that would later grow into an all-consuming passion had already been planted. Pop had a collection of records that included the popular white big bands—Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers, Harry James, Benny Goodman—and black jazz bands like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, as well as some classical music. Ma used to sing. She knew a lot of great old tunes like Don't Fence Me In and Down Among the Sheltering Palms. She could play the piano, too, and sing in harmony. In fact, she once told me that she had sung in an all-girl quartet when she was younger, and they’d actually made a recording in one of those instant record booths they had back in those days.

Pop was a bit of a musician, too. He played some guitar, and had a clarinet stashed away in the closet and a couple of ocarinas that he called sweet potatoes. He liked to sing funny songs to me and Bertie like The Walloping Window Blind and Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue—we had no idea what that one was about until we got a little older, but we used to laugh every time he got to the part Hey babe, won't you have a little sniff (and he'd make a snorting sound with his nose) on me.

Bertie started school when we moved to East Islip. Every day she went off, and I just stayed home and whimpered and whined all day. I couldn't bear the fact that Bertie was in school and I had to stay home. I wept and fussed Ma into a perfect stew, until finally one day she dragged me over to the school and begged the principal to sign me up for kindergarten. He was reluctant, but finally gave in when Ma convinced him how smart, well-behaved and mature (!) I was. So that's how I started going to school at age four. I was the youngest kid in the class.

I got to see Bertie every day in the school yard or the hall, but kindergarten turned out to be a bit more than I could handle. The first day, when it was time to go and relieve ourselves, I trudged along with the teacher and the other little girls into the big, white-tiled bathroom with its long row of stalls along the wall. The teacher said, You go in this one, Amy. Just pull the seat down and do your business.

I went in and pulled the big seat down, hoisted myself up, and did my piddle. Then I slid off the seat, and when I did, a deafening roar came up out of the toilet that sent my heart right up into my throat. The toilet was opening up like an enormous, monstrous crocodile mouth, and a gurgling, sucking sound was coming from deep inside. I pulled my pants up as fast as I could and ran screaming and crying to the teacher.

It's all right, dear, she said, patting my head. It's just the toilet flushing. It flushes by itself. You'll be used to it by the next time.

Her voice was calm and soothing, but I swore to myself that there would be no next time. Every day after that, I held my bladder all morning long, and when Pop came to pick me up after school, the minute I saw him I just stood there in shame and fear and peed on the sidewalk.

But in spite of this daily trauma, I did find some happiness in kindergarten because I got my first chance to play music. One day Mrs. Prebenna, the teacher, sat us down in a semi-circle and handed out a different rhythm instrument to each of us. Some got two wooden blocks, others bells or a tambourine. I was fascinated and wanted to try them all. Mrs. Prebenna showed us how to beat out a rhythm and then sat down at the piano and played a song while we accompanied her in joyful cacophony.

After I'd been in school only a short time, the teacher noticed that I was having trouble seeing the blackboard. Pop was very nearsighted, and Bertie was already wearing glasses by this time, so Ma took me to the optometrist for an eye test. The doctor told Ma I had progressive myopia, too, and that Bertie and I had inherited it from Pop. I was fitted with a tiny pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. The first time I wore them to school, I heard a couple of kids whispering four eyes, and even though I tried to ignore them, I couldn't stop myself from watering up. The teacher thought I had to go to the bathroom, because my eyes always watered up at the thought of having to face the terror toilets in the girls' room, even though I was eventually able to cope with them by peeing and then running out of the cubicle as fast as I could. I don't know if it was the glasses, but before long I started having headaches. I told Ma about it and she said, You're too little to have a headache.

When we lived on Long Island, Bertie and I had long hair. Ma combed out the snarls and braided it for us every morning before we went off to school. Sometimes people thought Bertie and I were twins, even though she was taller and we didn't really look all that much alike. It was mostly because of the hair and the clothes.

Ma liked to sew, and she used to make matching outfits for me and Bertie. I remember watching her at the sewing machine, waiting impatiently to see what pretty little dress would emerge from the pieces of cloth and rickrack.

Once she got the idea into her head that matching printed pants outfits would look cute on us, so she made printed slacks with elastic waistbands and matching shirts with short sleeves, collars and buttons down the front. The first (and last) day we wore them to school, everyone laughed at us and said we had come to school in our pajamas.

I knew there was something wrong with Bertie when we were living in East Islip. She became very quiet and hardly ever smiled. Years later she told me that she was always imagining she was inside a coffin. The doctor said she was suffering from the same melancholia that had afflicted both my Grandma and my Aunt Helen, except that they were already grown up when they had it. During my childhood I used to hear the relatives talking in hushed voices about Grandma's and Aunt Helen's melancholia and how both of them had gotten shock treatments, and how Grandma had spent some time in an asylum. I didn't know what an asylum was, but the shock treatments—whatever they were—sounded awful. I was glad that Ma didn't make Bertie have shock treatments. When I got a little older, I wondered why only the women in our family were crazy and not the men. When I got even older I came to the conclusion that the men had driven them crazy.

Bertie gradually got better all on her own, at least to outward appearances, defying all hereditary predictions. Things went back to normal. But there was always a feeling of tension in our home. At the time I didn't make the connection between Pop's drinking bouts and the loud, tense conversations between Ma and Pop; in fact, I wasn't even aware that he drank, or even what drinking meant. But it was around that same time that a new fear overcame me.

For some reason, I had developed an aversion to certain foods that bordered on sheer panic at the thought of having to eat them. One of these foods was Spanish rice—one of Ma's favorite recipes—and the other was apple pie. Odd as it may seem, just the smell of an apple pie baking in the oven used to leave me nauseous and trembling. I was terrified that Ma would make me eat it. For a while, she let me get away without eating it because she knew it would be an ordeal to try to force me, but I was still uneasy every time I'd see her in the kitchen peeling apples. It seemed to me that my luck couldn't last forever, and this kept me in a constant state of anxiety.

One evening after dinner, she served the dreaded pie for dessert again. I knew what was coming, because I had smelled it baking in the oven and had secretly prayed that she'd let me off the hook one more time. But this time she decided she'd had enough of my foolishness and that it was time for me to snap out of it, so she cut what seemed like a huge slice of the hateful thing and set it in front of me.

Now, you're going to eat this, and you're not going to make a fuss, she said, her mouth a thin, grim, tight line.

I just stared at it.

Bertie and Pop looked down at their plates and said nothing.

You eat it right now, or you're going to get a spanking, she said, her voice rising in anger.

I picked up my fork and broke of a tiny piece of the crust, and slowly put it in my mouth. I gagged and started to cry.

Suddenly Ma jumped up from the table, grabbed me by the arm and started hitting me on my rear over and over as hard as she could. I had a distinct feeling of wishing I were dead. Or that she were dead. Or that we all were dead. The humiliation of it, her beating me in front of Pop and Bertie…it was unbearable, unspeakable. She dragged me to my room, threw me on the bed and slammed the door. I remembered Mary, my doll back in Cleveland, floating away down the sewer drain. I felt like her. I wished I were her.

After that episode, all the fears that had been lurking inside of me became full blown. I didn't realize at the time that Ma was a pressure cooker just waiting for an excuse to explode. There was no way I could understand about her and Pop and the drinking. To me it just seemed that I had a mother who hated me and I didn't know what to do to get her to love me. Around that time I started having a recurring nightmare about being trapped in a theater where everything was red. Thick, blood-red carpets, red curtains, red lights, red walls, red ceilings. Then I would hear an eerie chorus of men's voices whispering Downstairs, downstairs, downstairs, getting gradually louder and louder until I would wake up screaming.

I used to wear a little filigreed gold ring that Ma had given me. One day at school I was in the bathroom drying my hands with a paper towel, and when I reached up to drop the towel in the tall trash can, my ring came off and fell down inside. Panic gripped me. It's lost, lost forever…Ma will kill me! I was too afraid to ask someone to help me get it out. Surely the janitor would have fished it out for me, but I was too timid and ashamed to ask him. Strangely, Ma never even noticed that I wasn't wearing the ring any more, and I was very grateful. By now, I was thoroughly terrified of her and constantly watched my back.

Even though I was only four I could remember, with a sense of sadness and loss, the time when Ma, and adults in general, ceased thinking of me as cute and began to treat me with what I perceived as indifference and sometimes cruelty. That was when I started doing anything I could to try