’92.
I got a call in Tokyo. Bad news. Eddie was dead. Overdose. I was too late. I went back to New York. In the studio I listened to Eddie’s material. It was so beautiful. Maybe we should record a tribute to him with all the people he worked with. Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Pharoah Sanders, Bernie Worrell, Sly Stone.
Umar was living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the time, in the space upstairs from my studio, together with DXT and a couple of other musicians. He was making a comeback. Umar was fascinated by Eddie. I think they had a lot in common. One night we listened to one of Eddie’s numbers together, a ballad. Right away Umar was on it, he dug into the music. Into Eddie’s raucous high licks. I saw it happen: he was totally immersed. Umar is a true musician, even though he can’t play a note. His father played trumpet. Music has nothing to do with technique. Absolutely nothing. Being a trumpeter has nothing to do with the trumpet. It’s all about the experience of creating. Sometimes you have to wring yourself inside out before something raw and honest emerges. That makes you vulnerable, you become a threat. To create something nobody else does, that’s not mainstream. That takes pain, frustration. Drugs can help sometimes. Drugs are cheap.
Umar was gutted when the music stopped. He went upstairs and wrote a poem. “Sacred to the Pain”, he called it. We recorded it the next day, over the music. Umar’s voice was so strong. He’s got a flawless instinct for phrasing, what note to linger on and when to repeat a word. When his voice has to go up, and then up some more. He learned it from Miles and Coltrane. From his father. That searching for the right tone. The recording was perfect in a single take.
Bootsy and George were in the studio that afternoon, and a few other boys from the neighborhood. When the music finished, it was dead quiet. I turned around and saw that not a single one of them had dry eyes, not even George Clinton. Clinton! When you can achieve that with words and music—that’s gotta mean something, right?’
Embraces all that I am
This thing called love
Love with no one to receive it
Love with no one to understand it
Love with no one to care for it
Musical discontent in a trance
Eyes rolling back into my head …
Needs something no not that
My head needs something no not that
-
AKRON, OHIO, 1953
Grandma Elizabeth
He woke up to the vague sound of voices in the distance. An unintelligible gray murmur that went from high and fast to low and deep and slow. He slipped out of bed, opened the bedroom door, and crept to the landing.
‘It’s his own fault,’ Jerome heard his grandmother say in her high, rasping voice. ‘The fool.’ He held his arm in front of his face against the bright hallway light. In the downstairs hall, under the large copper hanging lamp, Grandpa Willy, Mama, and Grandma Elizabeth stood in a small circle. Only now did he notice how much bigger his grandmother was than his mother.
‘How can you talk like that?’ his grandfather said.
Jerome hid behind the banister and peered downstairs.
‘How can I talk like that? He never should have come back from Detroit. I’m telling you, he only brings trouble with him. And then I get to look after his brood.’
Jerome did not know who Grandma was talking about, but her words were threatening and ugly. He looked at his mother. Her hands were in her apron pockets, one foot scuffing the wooden floor. She didn’t take part in the discussion.
Grandma glared at Grandpa. ‘He’s no good,’ she said.
‘He’s your son.’
‘Not anymore.’
‘And what about the children?’
‘They can stay till their father’s free and then they can all get the hell out of my house. Understand?’
He tiptoed back to the bedroom. His arm accidentally brushed against the door as he passed, making the hinges squeak. He cringed and waited. When he was sure no one had heard him, he dove back into bed and pulled the covers up to his ears. His nose felt as cold as ice. Next to him, by the window, in another bed, Larry lay asleep on his stomach. A stripe of moonlight fell across his face. His mouth hung open and when he inhaled he made a strange rumbling noise. Larry was already six. Larry was a head taller.
Jerome squeezed his eyes shut. The hard words he’d just heard flew in circles inside his head. ‘He never should have come back from Detroit.’ … ‘He’s your son.’ … ‘What about the children?’ … ‘Till their father’s free.’ What was up with the father of those children? Grandma was furious. She had stomped off with big, heavy steps. He was glad she hadn’t caught him spying.
He rolled over. Larry was restless; more strange noises came out of his mouth. Jerome shut his eyes tight and did his best to fall back to sleep. The words he’d heard banged against the inside of his head like small, muffled hammers. ‘They can all get the hell out of my house.’ Did he and Larry and the little ones have to go? Where was Daddy? Jerome wouldn’t mind leaving Grandma’s house, but where to? Why didn’t Mama say anything? He tried lying on his back, then on his stomach. No matter how he lay, he was wide awake. He could hear his heart pound in his temples. It was quiet downstairs except for some noises in the kitchen. He’d have liked to get up and go down there, to Mama, but Grandma Elizabeth was always nearby, and she’d send him straight back to bed—‘You’ve got some nerve!’—and maybe she’d even be so mad that she’d yank down his pajamas and spank his bottom. Mama couldn’t do anything about it. It was Grandma’s house.
In the distance he heard owls calling in the woods. It was like they were talking to each other. First came the deep, dark call of one owl and then, a moment later, another owl answered with sharp, short screeches, and then the first one replied in turn. They must have been talking about something pretty mysterious, because you only heard them when it was pitch-dark outside. The owl’s voices became colors in Jerome’s head. The call of the first owl was red-brown like the dirt behind the house. The voice of the second owl was silver and as clear as the moonlight. Jerome listened to the strange, distant calls until he drifted off to sleep.
He was nearly five and couldn’t say a single word.
‘Maybe he’s dumb,’ he’d heard Grandma say.
‘He’s not dumb,’ Mama said. ‘I know he’s not dumb.’
‘Glad he’s not my child.’
He hid from Grandma Elizabeth as much as possible. Fortunately the house was large. It was wooden and had a veranda with a rocking chair and a rickety table. It stood far from the paved road and the civilized world. It was surrounded by meadows. In the summer the grass was dry and yellow and it looked just like a prairie. Jerome would sit for hours staring at the dusty golden field and the sky above that trembled and rippled like water. He had never seen the ocean, but Mama had told him about the Great Lakes and how being there was like being at the ocean, how the lakes looked just as big and blue as the sea and how ships sailed on them. Jerome imagined the golden field blending into the ocean. He looked at the clear blue sky; there was hardly a cloud to be seen, just
