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Walking on Clouds <<Previous Page | Next Page>>
Three days later, the band traveled to Mainz, a comfortable trip south-southeast from Amsterdam. Twenty-five minutes of their one-night stand in Mainz survives in an amateur recording. The source tape runs fast, which gives the piano a honky-tonk edge, causes the tempos to wobble, and make Baker sound like a chipmunk in his spoken introductions. But beneath the echoes and wows of the homemade tape, the quartet can be heard playing bright, inventive, enthusiastic jazz. The three recorded tunes were standard night-club fare for the time. Walkin’, familiar as Miles Davis’s opener, was the kind of earthy blues that could stir the blood. It is an odd context for Twardzik, but he responds with a feisty, locked-hands solo that rouses the crowd and pleases Baker. “Yeah!” he shouts as Twardzik makes his two-fisted wrap-up. Indian Summer, a sentimental old Victor Herbert song (written in 1919) that the band played at both Dutch concerts as well, gets a clean, respectful reading by Baker. All the Things You Are is played fast, as a romp for the band’s guest, German trumpeter Rolfe Schnoebiegel, whose straight, bold tone bolstered Kurt Edelhagen’s trumpet section. It is routine jam-session fare except for Twardzik’s mind-boggling eight-bar double-time introduction, a kind of fugue that nearly reels out of control before settling into the fast rhythm of the piece. It goes by quickly, but for the few seconds it lasts it communicates a frantic kind of glee.
It was probably after this Geneva concert that Twardzik suffered another spell. Baker later wrote (1997: 70):
In another account, Baker placed this incident in Zurich, though vaguely, which would make it some three weeks later, close to the end of Twardzik’s life. But other details suggest that it took place earlier in the tour, probably on this first visit to Geneva. In the later account, Baker said, “He played so well, and I didn’t even know that he was using anything until a concert in Switzerland somewhere, in Zurich I think. He passed out backstage one night and a doctor who was in the audience came in, and that was how I found out what was going on“(Weber 1988). Twardzik’s problems here and elsewhere on the trip stemmed from the purity of the heroin he and Littman were scoring. The difference in street quality between Europe and America is common knowledge now but was probably little understood in 1955. The quality was purer, the rush was more intense, the high was higher, and the palpitations— well, sometimes junkies came to on the floor. And it was easier to get than at home, even for jazz musicians, who expected dealers in the places where they worked. “In Europe, it was even worse,” [Charlie Parker’s manager] Teddy Blume said (Reisner 1962: 57). “The pushers were everywhere. I tried to shoo them away, tried to get them to leave [Parker] alone. … The minute he walked out of the theatre, they would spot him.” Purity and accessibility combined with Twardzik’s fabled low
tolerance made a potentially lethal mix. But he was not alone. The European
heroin hit Littman the same way. Jimmy Bond said, “On separate
occasions both Littman and Twardzik passed out on stage from overdoses”
(Turner 1999: 172-73). And so, it came to seem like a general problem,
not just Twardzik’s. It was just something that happened once
in a while, a minor miscalculation they expected to adjust to in a day
or two. |
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Elsken
was mainly interested in Baker, of course, but another of his images
caught Twardzik almost accidentally, and the detail, though grainy when
blown up, shows him well groomed and natty at his first European performance,
and on his first week on the continent (14.3). It would be hard to guess
from his appearance that he had just suffered the first of several crises.
At some point on this trip to the Netherlands, Jimmy Bond found Twardzik
teetering on the edge of unconsciousness, apparently from a heroin overdose.
According to Turner (1999: 173), “Bond had to scrub Twardzik’s
naked back with a brush to bring him back from the edge.”