Sam Smith – I took real interest when it was announced that my high school was offering lessons in various musical instruments. This raised the happy prospect of liberation from the tedious weekly bouts with a somber and demanding lady who was trying to teach me piano. I immediately decided that I wanted to play trumpet, a decision that was not well received at home, my parents deciding after two weeks of listening that playing the trumpet was bad for one's health namely theirs. I switched dutifully to clarinet which I pursued diligently but without great success for about a year. I then decided that my future lay in playing drums.
This decision was influenced by the few records I had been given: Sidney Bechet, the Dukes of Dixieland and Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert. All my other records were put aside as I listened to these discs over and over again. While I loved the sounds that Bechet and Goodman made, I knew I could never replicate them; Gene Krupa seemed within reach.
I broached the idea to my parents and to my amazement they acceded, provided, of course, that I took "proper lessons." So each Saturday, while my peers learned tennis or did chores, I happily boarded the A bus for the long trip to the center of town and the Henry Glass music store.
Philadelphia's streets were laid out by Benjamin Franklin. In their day they were good enough no doubt, but by the 1950s the buildings bordering them had risen enough to obscure the sun except for a brief diurnal passage over the narrow canyon they had formed.
Henry Glass, a thin, humorless man, did his business in a shop that imitated the cavernous streets outside. Deep and narrow, you made your way through an aisle lined to the ceiling with drums, violas, tubas, guitars and trombones, past the unsmiling Mr. Glass to a set of stairs in the back that led to the basement studios.
There, under a single light bulb, I would sit with my teacher and a drum pad and perform paradiddles, ratamacues, single stroke flams, long rolls and four bar breaks. My teacher was a professional drummer, a status confirmed in my mind by the fact that he was also black. He said little and, in fact, regularly nodded off within the first fifteen minutes. I knew that drummers worked late so this peculiarity merely reinforced his professionalism, and he was certainly cool, something worth emulating as well. When he was awake I grabbed every piece of drum lore I could, including how to twirl drumsticks between one's fingers and how to bounce a drumstick on the floor so it would return to you, all without losing the beat. It was only some years later that it occurred to me that something other than late hours might have caused him to nod.
Eager to please myself and my silent mentor, I spent hours practicing on an ancient set with a deep snare and 28-inch bass drum and with the stereo in the library turned full bore. It was the only stereo in the house and the drums had to be removed by cocktail hour, so practice involved as much assembling and disassembling as it did playing. No matter, for the first time I was learning to do something that none of my acquaintances knew how to do. And the music was becoming glued to my being.
By tenth grade I had decided that what Germantown Friends School needed was a band. In many schools this would have been no novelty, but the Quakers hadn't even accepted dancing until 1939 and while music was important at the school it ran the gamut from Gilbert & Sullivan to Arthur Honegger, with no stops in between for jazz or pop.
The Six Saints, in fact, was the first band the school had ever known. With only 60 in a class, creating even a small combo required some imagination. Piano, saxophone and trumpet were no problem, albeit the piano player was really learning to be a church organist and had minimal experience with the likes of Jesse Stacy or Teddy Wilson. The only clarinetist I could find played a metal instrument and the bassist was actually a cellist who would rest his instrument on a piano bench in order to pluck it. Our singer, finally, was a student of opera who managed, with some effort, to forget what she was learning during our performances.
The band played during lunch breaks and at school dances and practiced regularly in the Victorian formality of our living room. I took the responsibility of band leader seriously, stopping the group when it headed towards a train wreck -- those stunning moments when everyone gets out of sync and tune with each other -- re-scoring "Sing, Sing, Sing" for six pieces (including metal clarinet and cello) and looking for new material, such as that of Bill Haley & the Comets, to enliven our repertoire.
My parents didn't seem to mind and I felt more like me playing the drums than anything else I did. Fortunately, no recording was ever made of the Six Saints so I will never know how bad we really were.
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