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The Rub Board Tutor

Dick Barnes

The six years Stanley Crouch was teaching in Claremont were educational for many of us. For one thing all of a sudden Bobby Bradford, Black Arthur Blythe, and Walter Low were sitting in with him; David Murray, Mark Dresser, and James Newton showed up as students; if there was a map of the new jazz we were edging onto it. At my house Stanley would often arrive unannounced with an armload of records and his muggles tray, ready to spend the night listening and making pronouncements until he crashed on the couch: a priceless opportunity for which I willingly sacrificed whatever other plans I had.

One of those nights when he came by Mike and Jim and I were having a session with Walt Sereth and Dan Barrett; Stanley, who as a drummer strove to surpass Sunny Murray, borrowed my extra washboard and sat in too, making us perhaps the world's first two-wash-board avant garde trad jazz band. "How did that sound?" he asked Sereth. All Sereth said was, "Like fifty little girls doing a tap dance": but you'd have to know how bitterly Sereth would object to such a thing before you'd guess the depth of his meaning. Stanley said he'd learn by studying how I played and Sereth gave a strangled cry, "NO! Listen to some Jimmy Bertrand records."

When I was starting out I found it intimidating to play with Sereth. How could anybody be so stupid (he wondered) as to call "Struttin With Some Barbeque" right after Buddy Bolden. (Answer: somebody might not remember that they're both in E flat.) For a while I'd try to hide my washboard part in the music, just reinforcing part of what was there already, rhythmically: but that doesn't work. That's how I found out that to hear the others well you have to be telling your own story, too, at the same time. It may seem paradoxical but that's how it is.


The Rub Board Tutor

When you play the rub board your main job
is to listen so well the others hear better,
telling their stories, and tell them true.

You can't listen that well unless
you're telling your story too.

Don't regret a mistake, take
responsibility, make it in retrospect
an amazing possibility:
if Bunk Johnson could do that
why can't you.
		If you listen well enough
you'll hear a story someone else tells
hey Bob that may be for you, or you think so:
playing the bells. Never mention that.

Charlie Parker did once and Leonard Feather said:
"Take this man back to Camarillo."
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