first, then a ballad, “I Remember Clifford”.
Dave Goddard wasn’t the leader on the job. Harp Manley was. Harp was a short rotund man in his mid-sixties. He had skin the colour of a football, and he was experiencing a renaissance. He played trumpet in the manner of the man remembered in the ballad, Clifford Brown. Harp blew fast and fat. That took technique. Most bebop trumpet players, which was what Harp was, had small tones and spattered notes like pellets from a BB gun. There were exceptions. Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Harp Manley. Clifford and Fats died young. Harp was still with us and recently prospering.
He’d sunk from view for most of the 1960s and 1970s. He lived in Amsterdam and worked the clubs and festivals in Europe, the odd date back home in New York. Bebop always had a small audience. It changed for Harp when Martin Scorsese cast him in a movie. Harp played a retired Harlem pimp. He turned out to be as controlled an actor as he was a jazz musician, and he won an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He didn’t get the Oscar, but the attention put his musical career in the hot category. Harp probably didn’t think of it that way. He was blowing the way he’d always blown. The difference was more people were paying to listen.
Harp made another movie. It was set for a world premiere in Toronto during the week he was at Chase’s Club. I read about the movie in a profile of Harp in that morning’s Globe and Mail. Mark Miller wrote the profile, best jazz critic in the city. He didn’t have a lot of competition. Harp played a Philadelphia cop in the movie. According to Mark Miller, advance word had it that Harp established himself as more than a one-role wonder.
In the meantime, he was touring with a small band that had three young black guys from New York in the rhythm section. In Toronto, Harp added an extra horn to the group’s front line. The extra horn was Dave Goddard on tenor saxophone.
The quintet finished the set with a Thelonious Monk tune, “Well You Needn’t”. Dave’s solo was a marvel of gentle curves.
“Lovely stuff, Dave,” I said when he came back to the table next to the door into the kitchen.
“You ready, man?”
I guessed Dave was too distracted to absorb the compliment.
“More or less,” I said.
Dave had his tenor saxophone in his right hand, its case in his left. He sat down across the table from me. The saxophone was a Selmer and looked like it had been with Dave for all his years in the jazz life. Its brass colour was dull and scuffed, and elastic bands were wrapped around four or five of the valves. The case was a different proposition. It was spiffy and gleaming black, fresh from the store. Dave fitted the saxophone into the case. He took the strap from around his neck, draped it over the saxophone, and snapped shut the case.
“This shadow job,” I said, “where’s the first stop?”
I felt like an idiot talking about shadow jobs. More G. Gordon Liddy than Philip Marlowe.
Dave said, “Place where I’m staying? That part’s a touch, man. Six, seven blocks down the street. We can stroll it. Me, the dude, and you.”
“In that order.”
“To the Cameron.”
“The Cameron House’s where you have a room?”
I went into my astonished expression. It involved a drooping of the lower lip.
“I hadda let my old place go, the apartment,” Dave said. “Been on the road is why.”
“But the Cameron, Dave?”
I was still wearing the astonished expression. The Cameron House was home to the chic young musical crowd. Electric pianos, synthesizers, fusion. To the Cameron bunch, fusion meant mixing jazz with rock, folk, salsa, other musical detritus. To me, it meant dilution of the only music that counted. Jazz. Scornful me.
“Give it a chance, man,” Dave said. “The kids over there, they dig what I’m laying down.”
“See you as an elder statesman maybe.”
“Whatever,” Dave said. “A young cat fixed me with a freebie room for the week.”
“On the House?”
“On the young cat.”
“The kids may be salt of the earth, Dave. Forgive me if I don’t get excited about their music.”
Harp Manley’s voice drifted over from a table near the bandstand. Harp had a high-pitched voice. It made an odd match with his portly body. He was sitting with a group of middle-aged fans who appeared delighted to be in Harp’s presence. Bet they were as narrow-minded about jazz as I was. Around the rest of the room, patrons were taking care of essential business, ordering the last drink, paying the bill, heading for the door. The man in the beige jacket was holding steady at the end of the bar.
Dave said to me, “Your chorus, man.”
He meant that I should take up position for my tailing operation. I was a whiz at interpreting Dave’s messages. Twenty-five bucks seemed enough to deal with two vodkas, the cover charge, and a tip for Speedy Gonzales. I dropped two tens and a five on the table, and squeezed my way through chairs and tables and people toward the door. While squeezing, I affected an air of nonchalance. It was designed to throw Beige Jacket off the scent. Never would he suspect the intrepid Crang had his number.
Outside Chase’s, the air was windless and dulcet and had the soft feel you sometimes get in early September. A Department of Public Works truck had passed a few minutes earlier and done a wash job on the pavement. Toronto the Scrubbed. The street was Queen, and I crossed it, over the streetcar tracks, and stood deep in the doorway of a second-hand paperback store.
Chase’s Club was on the north side of Queen two blocks and a bit west of University Avenue. The place was owned by a canny gent named Abner Chase who was fond enough of jazz that he’d kept his club in musical business for thirty years, even when jazz slumped as a consistent drawing card. Abner did a brisk lunch trade that offset the slow jazz nights. The major attraction at noon was the salad bar. It was fifty feet long and currently featured arugula.
I waited ten minutes. It was one-thirty. Three streetcars swayed by, one eastbound, two westbound. Clumps of people left the club. I recognized the jolly group that had been at Harp Manley’s feet. The neon sign over the door into the club blinked off. It spelled Chase’s minus the apostrophe. Without the neon, the street turned marginally darker.
Dave Goddard came out of the club five minutes later. He had the shiny saxophone case in his right hand. I tensed for action. Dave paused, pivoted to the right, and set off along Queen to the west at his gait of the long lopes. He got two dozen lopes down the street and the man in the beige jacket emerged from Chase’s. He too hove to the right and travelled west about twenty yards back of Dave. I waited a few seconds and enlisted in the migration. Westward ho.
Beige Jacket looked more formidable standing up and moving than sitting down and drinking. He was about my height, just under six feet, but had me beat in the tonnage department. I weighed one-seventy. Beige Jacket would clock in at fifty pounds over that. Most of the weight was concentrated in his upper body. He had a stiff, squared-off look, like Raymond Burr when he played Perry Mason.
Dave crossed Beverley Street and passed the Bakka science-fiction bookstore. Beige Jacket did likewise. On my side of the street,
