One Train Later: A Memoir by Andy Summers Read Free Book Online Page A

manages to sound both minor and major at the same time as it relates to E major and A major, both big guitarfriendly keys. I stop for a second and move to the fifth fret and the central position on the guitar neck. D minor and another set of feelings and constellations appear. This key is darker and brings to mind Django, the sound of a clarinet, rain forming deep puddles under my window, and my dad cursing as the roses get beaten into the dirt.
    Lenny and I become more friendly and he begins to broaden my listening beyond the guitar. He gives me a heavily discounted price on albums, and after a while I have a collection of Monk, Coltrane, Miles, Sonny Rollins, and Ornette Coleman. I listen intently in an effort to have a view of jazz beyond the guitar. Lenny pushes my appreciation further when he gives me an album called The Thelonius Monk Orchestra at the Town Hall, a live recording of Thelonius Monk with a big band. As I listen to this LP, Monk's compositions and asymmetrical magic hit me like a revelation. I report back to Lenny, who is pleased that I "got" it and then tells me that Monk is coming to England in a few months.
    Pop isn't rock yet, and like the nineteenth century turning into the twentieth, music hasn't reached the creative self-conscious stage where it will have edge, artiness, and expression with lyrics rooted in poetry and the hallucinatory ramblings of Bob Dylan. And as I struggle with the guitar in the first two or three years of playing, it is not pop that calls to me but the darker precipice of American music, with its blue underworld, edgy solos, loose drums, and dark-throated bass. I want to play the real outsider music-jazz. British pop and British culture at this stage are about as much fun as a Mcvi- ties biscuit. We have Helen Shapiro, Alma Cogan, and the Beverley Sisters. They have Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Link Wray, Lonnie Mack, Ray Charles, James Brown, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Miles, Coltrane, and Monk. The words rock and star haven't cojoined yet, and you don't aspire to rock (because it doesn't exist), but you do effect a lip-curling insouciance, imagine blowing a smoke ring, calling girls "chicks," whistling a Miles solo. Rock music, guitars, and youth culure will eventually infiltrate everything, even the sacred ground of such luminaries as Miles Davis, and will shape the course that jazz takes in the late sixties and seventies.
    Under Lenny's guidance, I continue to expand and add horn players and pianists to my listening: Bill Evans, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Hank Mobley. I begin reading Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Louis Armstrong's autobiography. I begin to feel more immersed in this jazz thing and I stare into my bedroom mirror, seeing the guy on the record sleeve, the cat in a dark suit, the man. Sometimes this vision fades and all I see is a boy with tousled hair, freckles, and a red-and-yellow school tie, and then I'm overcome with panic as my self-confidence hits the floor. But slowly my courage grows and I form opinions. Although I still like Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Kind of Blue and "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" make "We're All Going on a Summer Holiday" seem like a piece of fluff.
    Lying on a towel in the hot sand of Bournemouth Beach, with the highsummer melange of ice cream, candy floss, sunburned skin, and the petroleum fumes of Nivea cream crowding in, I see another world, a place where things are broken, bittersweet-the lipstick smudge on the rim of the cup, the woman gone, a smoky blue drift in a cheap room, the croon of a tenor sax. I get up from the sand, vaguely thinking I want a Cornish mivvi, and begin picking my way through the thicket of red sunburned legs toward the water's edge. As I kick through the feeble waves that fall on the hot grit between my toes, my head is filled with the sad and beautiful vision of this other life: its drift from the brothels of New Orleans to the streets of New York, its high priests-Armstrong, Ellington,