Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Spring 1985: Bartlett Basketball, All-West Tennessee Jazz Band and the Renegades Redux

Bartlett's basketball season in 1984-1985 was a far cry from the previous year. Under new coach Hubie Smith, the team had a much better look, and Ricky Fields and Darryl Carroll were not only stars of the Bartlett team, but attracting notice elsewhere in the county as well. In January, we again headed out to Somerville for a game with Fayette-Ware, but this year's experience was quite different from the year before, as Fayette County had built a new, elaborate high school campus. Although I ran into Edward Thompson Jr and Reynaldo Powell from Fayette-Ware's drumline, the drummers did not play at the game this year as they had the year before, and the atmosphere was quite different in the new spacious gymnasium from the old, crowded one we had seen in 1984. A week later, we were in Munford, at a game that was somewhat poorly attended because Prince was in concert at the Mid-South Coliseum. We ended up defeating Munford, which did not sit well with one of their players named Amos Somerville, and we narrowly escaped a fight in leaving the gymnasium to our bus.

Prince was the epitome of music for most of us that winter, but we also loved Sheila E's "The Glamorous Life," UTFO's "Roxanne," the Real Roxanne's answer to that song, "Tears" by the Force MD's and Kurtis Blow's song "Basketball," which of course was immensely popular with members of the Bartlett team.

In February, I auditioned for the All-West Tennessee Jazz Band at Central High School for the first time, despite the fact that I could not improvise at all in those days. I could read charts, and amazingly, I ended up making it, but I was woefully inadequate as a jazz musician, to put it mildly. However, I met a young drummer from White Station named Aaron Walker, who had been warming up on a samba rhythm on the set before his audition. His dad, Dr. Walter Walker was the president of LeMoyne-Owen College, and I found that we had a lot of shared interests when it came to jazz.

On the first really warm week in March, my dad had to go to Covington to a presbytery meeting at the Covington Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, and I decided to ride with him. While he was in the meeting, I walked all around Covington, eating at Lil Porky's Bar-B-Que, and walking up to the Black business district on North Main Street, where there was a cafe and pool hall called Isaac Elam's Cafe No. 2, with a considerable crowd of people inside, despite it being a Tuesday. A sign in the window announced a picnic out in Tipton County somewhere at which a DJ called Master Blaster was supposed to provide the music. (Later, when I attended the University of Tennessee at Martin, I met Isaac Elam's nephew Patrick Tipton). I also recall of that night that I had just become aware of Aaron Copland's Piano Concerto and Music For The Theatre and that I was listening to a cassette tape of them all the way home from Tipton County. I was beginning to pay attention to the impact of jazz on classical music, even back then.

In April, Bartlett got its first high school fraternity. Memphis schools had fraternities, like the Omega Preps and the Kappa League, and there were also old Memphis social clubs like the Sons of Douglass, the Grand Dukes of Carver or the Central Gents, but the Shelby County Schools frowned on fraternities, and when the Rho Psi Kappas did appear at Bartlett, they were of course not officially recognized by the school authorities. All the same, the Royal Knights, as they were also known, made their debut at a Key Club dance at Bartlett High, and as I recall, they stepped and carried canes like the Kappa Alpha Psis in college.

The All-West Tennessee Jazz Band performance was in some ways disappointing, as my friend Aaron Walker, the drummer, had to withdraw from it due to a schedule conflict with the Memphis Youth Symphony of which he was a member. However, I was impressed with his replacement, a drummer from Central High named Reginald Taber, and the show went well. Reginald even had a solo feature on one of the charts, and he sounded good indeed. Around the same time, there was a Student Council workshop at White Station, which I had to attend, as I had been elected Vice-President of the Student Government for the next year, 1985-1986. The only thing I really recall about the event was that I met an attractive and very impressive girl named Robin Israel from Melrose High School, who was on their student council, and that we had gone to lunch together during the event. I lost contact with her after that, and always regretted it.

The approaching end of the school year brought a number of arts events. I had been asked to play the piano for the theatre performance of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park and had meant to compose original music for it, but ran out of time, so I ended up using the first movement of Milhaud's Suadades de Brazil which had something of the right character and mood. The Symphonic Band concert caught my interest as well, because of two pieces they played, the Chant and Jubilo by W. Francis McBeth, and the Chorale and Cappriccio by Vittorio Giannini. These works made use of the kind of modern harmonies and procedures that I was learning to like in classical music. The last week of school saw the reappearance of the Renegades organization, for the first time since the previous school year. They paraded down hallways, and as before, some students claimed they had been "jumped" or "initiated" by them. And just like that, it was summer.

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