Billy Taylor

[Monte Davis]

Small freakin world. My family lived in Manhattan from 1960 on, and often
exchanged visits with my mother's sister and her husband, a psychiatrist in
CT state hospitals. Like many idiot teenagers, I tended to assume my father
was a known and boring quantity, and displaced admiration to a Really Cool
surrogate. My uncle had come from hardscrabble West Texas, lied about his
age to get into the AAF in  WWII, worked his way through med school and a
Demerol habit, told great psych-ward stories, loved gambling and jazz... and
when he came into the city, took 15-16-y.o. me along to the Hickory House
sometimes to drink Cokes -- well, I did -- and hear the Billy Taylor Trio.
Whoa, was that the height of urbanity or what?!

A-and a primary referent (because my only one at the time) for McClintic
Sphere scenes... although both BT and the HH were considerably more staid.
In retrospect, much of the attraction of jazz at that point was "What kind
of man reads Playboy?" pseudo-cool,  an easy snobbery to be different from
my rock-centric peers.  It would be years before I was really hearing jazz
-- and realizing that my uncle had been multi-addictive and
self-dramatizing, and my father in fact much more admirable. 

But as Enzian sez, "A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's
still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any other kind
of cripple, would you?" 

-Monte (and a happy new year to all)