A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [41]
My father inherited more than his first name from his father. Both were accomplished professional musicians. Grandpa Pat was a superb professional trumpeter who performed with and was close to Art Tatum, the great jazz pianist. Even so, my father had the real gift. As a student at DuSable High School in Chicago in the 1940s, he studied saxophone and other reeds with the legendary instructor Walter Dyett. He was best known for baritone saxophone, for which he was routinely ranked in Downbeat Magazine. Over the years, I saw him perform every other saxophone and reed instrument, most wind instruments, the keyboard, and the bass as well—all with ease and confidence. An intense man with great powers of concentration, he was his most engaged, his most emotionally present, when riffing a jazz set.
He was also passionate about football. He knew the players, the teams, the standings, the history. When the televised games were blacked out in New York, he was known to drive his little VW bug to Connecticut, pull over to the side of the interstate, and plug a small portable set into the power jack to catch the game. Sometimes his music and his football collided. While my father was performing in the touring orchestra of the Broadway hit Bubbling Brown Sugar, the conductor chastised him for watching football on his portable television during performances. My father had a single earphone connected to the set to catch the game—and still never missed a cue.
My most vivid early memory of my father centers on the day he left. It was warm, and my mother was especially short with Rhonda and me that afternoon, which I attributed to the heat. I was oblivious to the mounting hostilities in our basement apartment. When my father came home, my parents started to argue, and their voices became loud and abusive. Rhonda and I were uncomfortable and a little scared. As my mother, in tears, slumped in a chair, my father stormed out of the apartment, up the stairs to the street, and was gone. I chased after him, a four-year-old in despair, while he strode away angrily, shouting at me, “Go home! Go home! Go home!” About a block down, he lost his patience, turned suddenly in a rage, and slapped me. I sprawled out on the sidewalk, burning my palms on the pavement. From that position, I watched him walk away.
Soon we moved in with Gram and Poppy, and life more or less went on. I didn’t know for many years why my father left. All I knew was that he had moved to New York with his band, the Sun Ra Arkestra. An avant-garde ensemble full of virtuoso jazz artists, it had begun in Chicago in the 1950s and had an avid following. I met Sun Ra once or twice. He was a little creepy, his music definitely an acquired taste. It was not uncommon for him and his band to perform in aluminum foil suits or with hats shaped like planets. I met a diplomat once who told me that when he was stationed in Lagos, Nigeria, Sun Ra came over to perform at a Pan African music festival in an outdoor arena. When the band appeared in their space costumes and blasted their discordant tunes, mothers grabbed their children and fled the stadium, crying, “Juju, juju,” the equivalent of “black magic.”
In New York, Pat Patrick fit in naturally with the vibrant jazz scene and even became something of a phenom. In addition to Sun Ra, he played and often recorded with such jazz greats as Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Mongo Santamaria. Our mother told Rhonda and me that, no matter what, he was still our father and we should always love him. She insisted that we write to him. We didn’t realize then that our mother’s goal was to save the marriage, to make him miss us so much that he would set aside his music adventures and come home, which of course never happened. He occasionally wrote back. He occasionally sent some money. Sometimes he would call us on the telephone, which was a major event. Then there were the trips to New York when we got a little older.
For a time I felt somehow responsible for the breakup, as kids do. I also felt disappointment and anger and