Houston Art History

Two short video clips, both accessible via YouTube: The first, a short piece from 1966 by film- maker Edward English. The camera pans from a flyer advertising a jazz concert at Judson Hall to an apartment building facade, on which hangs a carved wooden sign, which reads, “Giuseppe Logan - Music Teacher - All Instruments - Vocal Coach.” Cut to a sharply dressed man in his early thirties who looks relaxed, happy, walking his dog in the sunshine and watching his young son frolic with friends on the playground in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park. As Logan’s composition “Dance of Satan” unspools in the background, he states in an interview voiceover, “I feel if people in other professions are able to support their families, doing what they do, than why can’t I, or other musicians, that are doing something that’s good for society?”

The second clip was shot 42 years later, in December, 2008 with a handheld digital camera by artist and activist Suzannah Troy. The same man stands in the very same park, playing a beautifully fractured rendition of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” in the bitter cold on a battered alto saxophone. Only his snowy beard is visible underneath the fur-lined hood of his rumpled yellow parka. What happened to Giuseppe Logan in the intervening years has been one of the biggest mysteries in the world of jazz.

“The man had a very great depth of under- standing of the music and its forms,” says Bernard Stollman, who produced all three of Logan’s recording sessions as a leader, only two of which have seen the light of day. “He wasn’t a primitive. You know, because of his robust and brusque, distinctive style he was disparaged by people who didn’t understand his approach.”

Stollman was first introduced to Logan by percussionist Milford Graves, who’d befriended the multi-instrumentalist in Boston and who hoped to help him find his feet when he first moved to New York City in 1964. “He came to me as a mystery,” says Stollman, as we sit in the offices of his storied ESP-Disk label on Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue. “I had no prior awareness of him before Milford brought him to me. He came out of the blue. He wasn’t a young man, he had a son, must have been in his thirties then. According to the reports, he’d attended New England Conservatory.”

In Ben Young’s Dixonia, the trumpeter Bill Dixon recounts that in the summer of 1964, Logan “was ’studying’ with me, meaning: he wanted to know certain things, and I needed an alto player, so he played all of my concerts, and occasionally I would let him have some of his things played in the group. He had a great deal of difficulty with getting people to play his music. I think at the time I was the only trumpet player who could play his music, and I loved playing it. No one sounded in an ensemble like Giuseppe. He held his head back all the way, explaining once, ’This way my throat is completely open,’ so he could have more air coming through his windpipe. He used to pride himself on playing up to the fourth octave on alto. The things that made him different as an improvisor were the way he placed his notes, that sound he got, and then what the others in his group played behind him. His pieces were very attractive for those reasons. Giuseppe had his own points of view about music, which is what this music is supposed to be about. We got along.”

Logan performed with pianist Paul Bley’s quintet alongside trumpeter Dewey Johnson, bassist David Izenzon and drummer Rashied Ali on September 14th of the same year, and already Logan’s playing was provoking raw emotion in listeners. The late Canadian poet Paul Haines possessed a reel-to-reel recording of the gig and in his discographical notes, remarked, “it’s during Logan’s alto solo on ’Turns’ that a customer begins his violent shouting.”

Stollman first heard Logan play on October 4th, 1964 at the groundbreaking October Revolution in Jazz, a three-night festival at an Israeli coffeehouse called the Cellar Cafe that gathered the best and brightest talents from the emerging creative new music. Logan would be one of the first artists to lead a session for Stollman’s label, cutting five tracks on November 11th. Stollman had originally offered the session to Graves, but the drummer yielded leadership to the older man, who provided all of the compositions. Don Pullen was the pianist and Eddie Gomez handled the bass. The Giuseppi Logan Quartet was the first recording session for all four men. Stollman’s recollections of the date paint the picture of a brilliant instrumentalist and arranger but also that of a troubled personality.

“As the session began, the musicians walked in a line as they went into the studio, and I was standing at some remove, in a doorway about fifteen, twenty feet away. And as he walked by and saw me, he turned to me and said ’If you rob me, I’ll kill you.’ And they went on to do the session. Milford was mortified, since he’d brought him to me. I don’t want to go into details, but in those days he was just unpredictably assaultive.”

In 2005, Stollman shared this memory with Clifford Allen in the pages of All About Jazz: “At one point, I was standing with the engineer in the control room, and I thought the piece they were playing was stunningly beautiful. It sounded totally spontaneous, as if they were ad-libbing and commenting like a gorgeous conversation. Suddenly, I heard a ’thwuuunk,’ and I realized that the tape had run out. The engineer and I were so absorbed, we hadn’t been paying attention. I thought “oh God, this remarkable thing is lost. It was interrupted in the middle, and it’s gone.” Richard Alderson was the engineer, and he got on the intercom and said “Giuseppe, the tape ran out.” Without a pause, Giuseppe said “take it back to before where it stopped and we’ll take it from there.” So he did, he wound it back and played some bars of it and took down the record button, and they resumed exactly what they were doing—there was no way of telling where one or the other ended. It was unreal.”

About Logan's playing on the record, writer and critic Ed Hazell says, ”his alto sound is totally riveting, caught between beauty and despair, anger and compassion. It’s an anguished cry, a gritty, unsentimental lament that longs for a peace and joy that always seem just out of reach. It’s both tough minded and tender hearted and so genuine, so human, so honest. There are moments on ‘Dance of Satan’ and ‘Dialogue’ when Logan’s phrasing seems to cut against every received idea of swing. His big, blocky sounds sit awkwardly in the rumble and flow of one of the period’s great rhythm sections. Yet his notes assemble themselves into melody, connected to a greater or lesser extent to his composition; he’s using the melody as he improvises. ‘Bleeker Partita’ crowns the album with a performance that sums up all of his strengths. It’s a modal/free piece [and] once again the attraction of melody governs his soloing, even the sonic extremes. The more directly lyrical passages stubbornly resist the commonplace modal phrasing and melodic contours, while his multiphonics fly upward with the grace of ecstasy without entirely leaving the tune behind. ”

Nearly six months later, in April of 1966, ESP assembled a week-long package tour of college campuses in upstate New York involving various artists from its roster: pianists Burton Greene, Ran Blake, Sun Ra, Dave Burrell, singer Patty Waters and of course, Logan. On her College Tour record, drawn from these concerts, Waters is backed on several tracks by Logan on flute, Perry Lind on bass and Scobe Stroman behind the drums.

On May 1st, Logan’s band (with bassist Reggie Johnson in place of Gomez) shared a bill with Albert Ayler’s group at a Town Hall concert organized by ESP-Disk. Twenty-seven minutes of their set (two pieces and a piano solo by Logan), plus a leftover cut entitled “Wretched Saturday” from the October studio session, comprise More, which would be the second LP under Logan’s leadership. An exotic tableau of soaring flute and Graves’s gongs and lithe percussion, it’s a fascinating record and a leap forward (or at least sideways) from the initial QuartetLP, presaging a more open, contemplative free music that’s still practiced today. Logan’s turbulent, ruminative piano solo “Curve 11” sounds like nothing else, past or present.

Clifford Allen, who may have immersed himself as deeply into the music of the ESP catalog as any writer, remarks that “for me, what has always been striking about Logan as both ‘soloist’ and in more collective situations is that he appears to be in a dialogue with himself. He was often at a parallel with the music, or seemed to be, which changed the landscape or ‘type’ of collectivity immeasurably. He's not the only player to do this, but it is very marked and was probably fairly influential.”

An ESP press release of the period lists a mysterious third title that was never released, The Giuseppi Logan Chamber Ensemble In Concert. Stollman explains, “having made two albums, I decided I was going to do something [else] for him. He was a genius, a talent that most people hadn’t recognized, but I felt as though there was something very important there. So I hired Judson Hall, and I got him four classical musicians, and he did what was essentially a recording session concert. He played violin, trumpet, saxophone, flute and piano. When the session was over, I went back to the recording engineer, who was Marzette Watts. He said that it didn’t record, the tape was messed up. The concert was beautiful, and it didn’t record? A catastrophe! Then, some time later, I got a call from Marzette; I hadn’t heard from him in many years. ’Bernard, I have to explain something to you,’ he said. ’When I told you it didn’t record, I didn’t tell you the truth. I thought I had to protect Giuseppe from you. The tape is fine.’ It still exists. One of his sons, Eli, is a physician in Nashville, and he has his dad’s tapes. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to contact him, but he doesn’t return my calls. I’m mortified. So wrote him a letter. Told him that tape’s important, that the music should come out. I said, ’I’ll pay you a recording fee, thirty-five years later! You’re entitled to it, but it’s my tape. I had a contract with Marzette!’”

Though it would be the last time Logan recorded for ESP-Disk, he’d make one more appearance on record, in the frontline of the group trombonist Roswell Rudd assembled for his debutLPEverywhere. Rudd and Logan (who for this date played flute and bass clarinet) were joined on the July 1966 session by saxophonist Robin Kenyatta, bassists Charlie Haden and Lewis Worrell, and drummer Beaver Harris. While Rudd politely declined to be interviewed for this piece (”I’ve been asking folks re: a place where G.L. can practice / Am in touch with his social worker” he reports in a brief e-mail), in Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to the release Rudd says, “Ever since I first heard [Giuseppe], I looked forward to the time that we could make some music together. He’s a very imaginative player who can draw a great many ideas into a very short space of time and put them together so they make sense. He has an imagination which can free-associate very fast, but even though the ideas are sometimes very different from each other, the overall effect is cohesive.”

One of the highlights of the session is Logan’s “Satan’s Dance,” a recasting of his piece “Dance of Satan” which appeared on his ESP debut. In the flourish that opens the piece, his flute is a train whistle blowing hot steam; Rudd’s throaty trombone gives the tune’s anxious, see-sawing head its full realization. It’s one of the real gems of the late sixties free jazz movement.

Pullen, Graves and Gomez weren’t consistently available, and Logan’s neighbor Dave Burrell often occupied the piano bench in Logan’s working unit.

“I met Giuseppe in the East Village in 1965,” says Burrell. “He came by my house at 77 East Third Street, my $40-a-month flat on the third floor with a bathtub and a kitchen and Sunny Murray’s drum kit permanently in the corner. Giuseppe at that time was writing a lot of beautiful 5/4 com- positions. I had never played in 5/4, but I had always wanted to since I’d heard Brubeck and Desmond on ’Take Five’ of course. But this piece that Giuseppe wrote was not as cut and dried. You couldn’t hum it like you could hum ’Take Five.’ It was a bluesy piece that sounded some- times like it was in four. And his playing style, he looked up at the ceiling and he danced around in a ritualistic African way that was very hypnotic. So you can imagine us trying to figure this out, me and [drummer] Bobby Kapp and [bassist] Sirone in this little room, with this master musi- cian looking up at the ceiling playing this 5/4 piece for easily an hour. We got really entranced, and every time I’d look up at Giuseppe I’d just see the whites of his eyes.”

Burrell remembers one particularly well- attended concert with this lineup at the Festival Theatre on Lafayette as well as at St. Mark’s Church and elsewhere in the neighborhood. “He was working a lot and he thought every- thing was going to be fine forever. Patty Waters was on the scene; we were all friends. We used to rehearse at Patty Waters’s house, in fact. We’d rehearse with a couple of bassists and a couple of drummers since you never really knew exactly when the next gig was or who was going to be available, and we wanted to be sure Giuseppe had a band who knew the music when the hit actually jumped off.”

“I never saw him push for a gig,” he adds. “He was always so soft spoken, and rather reserved in that regard, compared to a guy like Archie Shepp. He was very comfortable being what I would consider a pure artist, he didn’t think about those kind of things, about whether he had an article in the paper or whatever.”

“I’d say it was intense until about ’70 or ’71,” Burrell continues. “He was still on the scene then even though I wasn’t playing with him that often anymore.” By 1969 Burrell was one of the many free players who had gone overseas to play at the Pan-Afrikan Festival in Algiers and had stayed on to record for the BYG label and pursue better opportunities in Europe. “I would say for Giuseppe, he was very comfortable around the Bowery, around the East Village, so when he heard that everything was moving over to Paris, he probably didn’t want to stop doing what he was doing. Everything seemed to be working for him. My recollection is when I came back, I moved to the South Bronx and I’d ask ’Hey, where’s Giuseppe?’ Maybe someone would say, ’Oh yeah, I saw him over at Slug’s’ but eventually you’d hear, ’No, haven’t seen him around in a while.’”

This is where music historians begin to lose the scent. Valerie Wilmer’s essential dcoumentation of the scene, As Serious As Your Life, contains a photograph of Logan holding a flute and wearing a serene, almost blank, expression while seated on a low mattress beside two music stands, which, according to the caption, depicts the “influential reedsman” in New York City in 1972.

For some years, musicians would occasionally encounter Logan as a ghostly presence around the city. In a 2001 interview for Signal to Noise, drummer Sunny Murray told Dan Warburton, “Giuseppe Logan lost his mind, which was really sad. He had an affair or something and his wife left him and took his son with her. He had a twelve-year-old son who could read music back- wards, play the trumpet and was a real genius. Giuseppe was very proud of his boy. When his wife left that threw him into a tailspin he never recovered from, and he searched down south, everywhere, and he could never find his son or his wife. When I came back to New York years later they told me Giuseppe Logan was a bag- man, a clochard. I ran into Roger Blank, who was another very good drummer, and his wife on the corner of 137th Street and she said, ’I just saw Giuseppe Logan, Sunny! He’s got a room somewhere round here.’ I said ’Where? I want to see him! People say he’s crazy, I don’t believe it.’ She said ’He sure tried to get me up there in that room! That sound like a crazy man to you?!’ I guess that was about twenty years ago. Now someone told me he died. But I’m sure he didn’t die crazy.”

Stollman encountered Logan as well: ”When ESP went out of business, the tapes went into a safe deposit box at the Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust building at 9th Avenue and 57th Street. My wife and I went to that branch sporadically to pull out tapes and so forth. So one time we went there, it was cold, maybe it was November or December, sometime in the early ’80s, I don’t know if I could tell you exactly when it was. And Giuseppe was there standing on the corner, playing a wired-together clarinet. And I greeted him, but he showed no reaction. So I went up close to him and he bent over and said in my ear, ’Nixon set a bomb off at Amchitka’, talking about the nuclear bomb Nixon had ordered un- der the waters off Alaska. So he acknowledged me in his own way. I gave him twenty dollars and he said, ’Good, now I can go home and practice.’ He was living in the Theresa Hotel in Harlem, I heard, I guess at that time he was just making music on the street.”

As the years went by without any new sightings, people naturally began to assume that Giuseppe Logan was dead.

Fast forward to May of 2008, when a startling note is posted to the message board at freejazz. org by user Carolyn_1: “announcement: For those interested Giuseppe Logan returned to NYC about three months ago. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend. Giuseppe states that he would like to make musical contacts.”

Weeks later, Stollman is in attendance at the 2008 Vision Festival in New York. “Somebody said ’Giuseppe’s here! Giuseppe’s here!’ and he came up to me, very cordial. I embraced him, I hugged him and said, ’Where have you been?’ He told me he’d been in and out of institutions. That summed it up for me, I wasn’t going to press him. Then he came to visit us [at the ESP office]. He said, ’I’m going to play again. I’ve got some ideas! But I’ve got to fix my horn.’ So I gave him some money, and he said, ’Good. I’m going down to Norfolk’, he said, ’There’s a store down there where I can fix my horn, and my daughter lives there.’ So he took the money and went down to Virginia to fix his horn! What else is there to say?”

Even stranger: a video clip appears on the website sermonaudio.com in October. In it, pastor Bill T. Jones interviews Logan in Tompkins Square Park. “I hadn’t played [the saxophone] in twenty years,” Logan tells him. “Somebody stole my instruments and I got incarcerated in a mental institution, my wife had me put in there, for using substances.” He loosely sketches the sequence of events since his release: he raised money cutting grass, traded a trombone given to him by his daughter “for this raggedy ol’ horn here” and returned to New York. He’s then pressed by Jones to speak about his conversion to the Christian faith. “If it wasn’t for God, I’d probably be dead,” he remarks.

Two months after that, in a city filled with portable video cameras, Logan is filmed again in the park by Suzannah Troy playing “Begin the Beguine.” At the clip’s end, text scrolls by: “Giuseppe Logan Needs Your Support and A Home to Write Music As Well As Play.”

Logan had returned to New York with $600, which he’d thought would get him through. His money now gone, he’s been living at Brooklyn’s Kingsbridge homeless shelter, one of the 38,000 individuals who sleep in New York City’s shelter system every night. He spends his days playing music in the park and on subway platforms.

In the midst of these scattered sightings, Logan begins to visit the symphonic instruments section of the Sam Ash retail store on 48th Street near Times Square. Matt Lavelle, a talented trumpeter and bass clarinetist who’s worked in the groups of William Parker, studied with Ornette Coleman and released his own music on the Silkheart, CIMP and KMB Jazz labels, no- tices the man and has an intuitive moment. “He started coming in here and I knew something was up,” he tells me. “And I asked him, ’Are you Giuseppe Logan?’”

It’s the end of Lavelle’s shift on February 17th and we’re waiting for Logan to appear. The young horn player has helped to arrange a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club which will involve Lavelle, his usual bassist François Grillot and the veteran drummer Warren Smith. There’s a hint of nervousness in the air, as nobody’s been able to get hold of Logan for two weeks. Lavelle had helped him find a cellphone, but he’s not sure that Logan fully understands how to use it. “I’m not worried about the gig itself,” he stresses. “Once brother G arrives, we’re going to be all set.”

Turns out there’s been no need for worry— Logan steps in exactly at six, just as planned. Lavelle introduces me to Logan and while he counts out his register drawer, I take original LP copies of Logan’s records out of my pack and show them to the man.“I haven’t seen any of those in forty years,” he says, turning them over and curiously studying the unusual artwork by Howard Bernstein that graces their covers. We leave the store and take a cab to Lavelle’s apartment in what used to be known as Hell’s Kitchen to pick up his spare bass clarinet, a 1926 Penzel Muller low E model which he presents to Logan as a gift. Logan assembles the instrument and gives it a try. “I haven’t played one of these in a long time,” he says with an uncertain chuckle, but he draws sound from it immediately.

The three of us squeeze into the back of another taxi and we’re hurtling through neon-lit Times Square traffic toward the Bowery for dinner, then the gig. But first we drop by the Downtown Music Gallery, the record store which has been a mecca for creative music enthusiasts for eighteen years, to say hello to proprietor Bruce Gallanter and his staff. Logan seems amused to see a sealed CD reissue of his self-titled record in the bins; he looks up to find the face of his old friend Don Pullen staring back down at him from the cover of his solo record on Sackville.

Conversation at dinner is relaxed and casual, but punctuated with silence. Time and trouble seem to have worn much of the detail from Logan’s memory of his heyday, or maybe he’s simply a modest, plain-spoken man of few words. Questions about his goals and motivations as an composer, improviser and instrumentalist yield no real revelations, but he does share some interesting bits and pieces from his personal biography.

According to handed-down accounts, Logan was born May 22, 1935 in Philadelphia. Asked to confirm, he shyly looks down, saying “Yes,I’man old, old man.” In fact, considering his trials and tribulations he looks to be in remarkably good shape physically. His family moved to Norfolk, Virginia when he was very young. “I came from a big family, my father played spirituals, religious music, on the piano, you know. I guess that’s what got me interested in playing. I started messin’ with the piano when I was young. My daddy bought me a sax.”

At 15, Giuseppe (he himself spells his name with an ’e’, although all of his record credits give his name a final ’i’) began playing semi-professionally with saxophonist and bandleader Earl Bostic. “Yeah, I played with Bostic. I just went up and asked if I could play with him, and it happened. I played with Dizzy Gillespie down in Virginia, way back there, when I first started play- ing jazz. The piano player I was playing with was named Joseph Jones, ever heard of him? Then Dizzy hired him. He had Leo Wright on alto, but he couldn’t make the gig one night, so I played with him. I just played what Leo Wright played.” He soon felt limited by the work available in Virginia. “I wanted to play music so bad, but they didn’t have any down there, so I went to Philadelphia, stayed there a long time. That’s where I met Don Pullen, Rashied Ali.”

He managed to accumulate enough savings to enroll at Boston’s New England Conservatory, though he doesn’t recall which year he started or the names of any of his instructors. Lacking the money to complete his studies, he moved to New York in 1964. “I wasn’t gonna stay,” he says, “I was gonna go back to Virginia, but Milford got me a record date, introduced me to Bernard Stollman, so I stayed. I was just tryin’ to play. Still tryin’!”

He reports that in those years he played with many of the music’s heavy hitters: a tour of Germany and Japan with Sam Rivers’ group, sit-ins with Eric Dolphy, Sonny Stitt and Roland Kirk at club dates in Boston, with Sun Ra at Slug’s Saloon in NewYork, and with Charles Mingus’s band alongside his friend Pullen. “I played flute with John Coltrane’s group at the Village Gate, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, two drummers.’ Trane came on my gig,too, I must’ve impressed him, I guess.”

Of his music he wrote for the ESP sessions, he says only, “I heard things differently, I heard a lot of things and wanted to write something special.”Amazingly,he says the material for his first record was written over the course of just five or six days. A briefcase full of unrecorded compositions was consumed by fire.

“I had every kind of instrument,” Logan says. “I messed with saxophone, trumpet, trombone, flute, bass clarinet, piano, bagpipe. It all gave me a better understanding of music. I guess maybe that’s why my wife thought I was goin’ crazy or something, had me confined to a mental institu- tion. I was never with her much anyway, always gone. I did buy a home, a car, all that stuff, but I was never there.”

Logan is remarkably candid about the problems that derailed his career. “I’ve been in the dumps for so long. Twenty, thirty years, I was wasting my life. If I’d’ve been practicing all of that time, I don’t know where I would have been now. My wife divorced me and I couldn’t live in the house that I bought anymore, so I drifted around, went homeless for a long time. Until my sister’s husband saw me on the streets and offered me a room. But my sister treated me so bad, I guess because of my personal habits. I never hurt her or anything, but people try to take you over, try to run your life, and I ended up back in the mental institution.”

Logan is certainly not alone among creative musicians in having spent time on the streets. Free jazz saxophonists Sonny Simmons, Sabir Mateen, and Charles Gayle all spent years with- out a place to call home. Logan’s label mate, the bassist Henry Grimes, famously dropped off the scene in the late ’60s and worked odd jobs in obscurity, only to resurface in 2003 (see Marshall Marrotte’s interview in STN#28) and resume his musical career almost exactly where he’d left it.

Once discharged and with a saxophone in his hands for the first time in decades, Logan dedicated himself to practicing the instrument, and after years in the Carolinas and Virginia he made his way back to New York in early 2008.

We head a few doors south to the club and cool our heels in the cafe in front while a poetry slam occupies the performance area. As we talk, I learn that in fact this won’t be his first on-stage appearance since his return to New York. He’d played a few low-profile gigs with bassist William Parker and guitarist Bruce Edwards at the Middle Village Adult Center in Flushing, and in August, Lavelle had invited him to a run of three shows by trombonist Steve Swell’s improvising big band, the Nation of We. “He was a little shy, a little reluctant [to play],” Swell tells me later. “The first night he turned me down, actually. The second night he played a little bit, and I just had to coax him a little, and by the third night he finally came out with this solo, this extremely beautiful, appropriate, ballad-like statement that was the right thing at the right time. Everybody was rooting for him. You know, those guys from that generation don’t get nearly enough credit for their accomplishments. You couldn’t be timid and play that music. For what we [in the music] take for granted today, we owe people like Giuseppe a debt of gratitude.”

People begin to trickle in and it’s clear there’ll be something of an ESP-Disk reunion. Here’s the label’s crew, Stollman and members of his staff including production manager Tom Abbs and designer Fumi Tomita, carting boxes of CDs and T-shirts. They stop to let Logan know he’ll be leaving with all of the proceeds from the sale of his CDs at the merchandise table tonight. Gunter Hampel, the German multi-instrumental- ist who also made his recording debut for ESP- Disk, is opening the show with a solo set and he and his son struggle down a narrow aisle with his vibraphone. Alan Sondheim, who released two albums on ESP in the late ’60s, enters and joins us at our table, presenting Logan with a case containing a flute. “Logan was one of the first people I was listening to on ESP,” he tells me. “And it was freeing for me, because in a way it’s not jazz, it was something else. I couldn’t do that whole Coltrane thing, working through changes like that. Giuseppe’s music was different.”

Everybody wants to shake the man’s hand (perhaps to see if it’s really him?) and extend their well-wishes. Ubiquitous downtown free-jazz musicians Sabir Mateen and Roy Campbell arrive and greet the legend. Lavelle is sought out by some who furtively ask if Logan can still play the horn. “From my perspective, he’s on a higher level than anyone on the scene,” Lavelle says. “Chops and power, not his bag. But I think he’s past the point where he should be judged by that. He’s got everything he needs to tell his musical story.”

The performance bears this out. The lack of group rehearsal is apparent in the somewhat ragged transitions between sections and solos, and there are moments where Logan seems a bit lost in the glare of the bright spotlight, Lavelle placing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder for support. But that's all beside the point, and there’s no denying that Logan has retained, or perhaps more accurately, regained the same plaintive wail in his playing, the sobbing human voice, that’s heard on his records. He no longer lifts his face ceiling-ward, instead remaining seated, bobbing his head only slightly as he plays. He bravely tries out his new bass clarinet, despite the antique’s imperfections and his lack of recent experience with the instrument (”It never really worked because I play so hard,” Lavelle says later, “But for G, it’s perfect ... I just knew that it was supposed to be his all along.") But it’s with the alto that Logan really makes his statement tonight. “At the end of his alto solo, that’s when he got to the mountaintop,” remarks Lavelle after the thirty-eight minute set.

“He did supremely well, I thought,” says poet Steve Dalachinsky, a longtime free music aficionado who acted as the night’s master of ceremonies. “Let’s put it this way, he always played within this framework of waves, it’s not like he was an intense player, he had his own basic feeling and style, and I think it’s all still there. My wife, I don’t think she’s ever even heard his records, she remarked at how beautiful and fragile his tone was. By the fourth alto piece I thought he was much more together, much less tentative. I thought the bass clarinet started shaping up [throughout the set]. There were people in the audience, a couple of young kids right in front of me who were kind of laughing, and I can only imagine what was going on in their heads. I got very angry and wanted to say ’look, you probably read about this in Time Out New York and came down wanting to see some kind of freak show.’ But the people who genuinely knew why they were there, we all got what we wanted. I mean, I got what I expected, and I was very happy. I was extremely happy that Matt and Warren and François didn’t pamper him. They treated him with respect, and nobody stepped on him. This was a great chance for Matt to show off his chops, and he didn’t do that. He was beyond respectful.”

The club stays abuzz long past the point at which its employees have lost their patience. Logan is seated onstage with the lights dimmed, his head down and with headphones pressed to his ears, reliving the set via the video recording made by Antonio Ferrera. Ferrera is an accomplished filmmaker whose credits include an HBO special on Christo and Jean-Claude’s Central Park installation The Gates, a concert film by John Zorn’s Masada and a segment for Bill Moyers’ NOW entitled Before I Leave, about what ordinary people would want their loved ones to know before they die.

“I live near Tompkins Square Park,” Ferrera recounts, with Logan still absorbed in the record- ing, mere inches away. “One particular spring day, hydrants were running and kids were play- ing, and in the background here was someone huffing these broken-down notes on a broken- down clarinet, which was somewhat harsh on the ears but very beautiful at the same time. And just filming around, I came to meet the person playing the clarinet, and it was Giuseppe. He told me his story, which was incredible, and that his dream was after thirty years to be back on the top of the jazz scene. And over the course of the summer I was inspired by his discipline, dedication and stick-to-it-iveness, never giving up, which to me in my own life as a young artist, you know, you get pushed down a lot, so it was incredible to see him constantly with this positive attitude. It’s an incredible triumph of the spirit that I was fortunate to bear witness to.”

“It was beautiful,” he continues. “If you had told me in May or June of last year that we’d be here tonight, I’d never have believed it. Forget about the music, just the will and belief of this man. It’s a gift to have been able to witness that in a time when people don’t see their dreams come true. Here he was on this park bench, his family had put him into a nut house for twenty years, and at seventy-five he’s thinking he can come back. And he has!”

Logan, Lavelle, Mateen, Ferrera and I are the last to leave the club, still standing on the curb out front in the chill night air at two thirty. Logan seems not to have a plan about how to get back to Kingsbridge. “I’ll just hang around, find someplace to sleep,” he tells us. It couldn’t be any warmer than 25 degrees, with the threat of snow. We hail a taxi and I give him money for cab fare. I ask him what he’s doing tomorrow and he tells me to look for him at the 34th Street subway stop.

At ten o’clock the next morning, I arrive at the 34th Street - Herald Square station. It’s a vast expanse of interconnected platforms and tunnel- ways, the third busiest in the city. At first there’s no sign of the man and I wonder if I’ll see him again. Then, as I head down the ramp towards the stop’s lower level, I hear the unmistakable woody warble of a bass clarinet. It’s Giuseppe.

He doesn’t notice me as I approach and I listen in silence for a few minutes as he works the horn. Eventually he looks up, greets me and we compare notes on the previous night’s concert. He’s wearing the same clothes and tells me he hasn’t slept. Still, he seems to be in great spirits and very happy about the previous night’s gig. “I enjoyed it, but I don’t know if I played good enough, I wish I could’ve played better,” he says. “Well, that’s why I’m out here practicing, anyway. I’m trying to get better every day. I don’t have anything else to do, I don’t have any money, but I can play, I can do that!”

Sitting together on the subway platform, we talk and he plays as the trains roll in and out. Asking about musical influences from his youth, I mention Ray Charles’s name, and Logan stares ahead in a moment of concentration before offering me a lovely, cubist rendition of “Georgia On My Mind.”

“Hey, someone just put a dollar in my case, you see that?” he says, sounding surprised to have been noticed at all. After some time, Logan packs up his horn and he invites me to come along as he picks up a check at the Musician’s Union headquarters on 48th Street, payment for the gigs at the Adult Center with Parker and Edwards. “Yeah, I need this!” he tells the receptionist as he signs the log book and accepts his envelope. Around the corner we find an Indian buffet and duck in for lunch.

There was some discussion the previous night about some recording opportunities. Something new for ESP, perhaps, or for a label based in Dal- las that contacted Lavelle and expressed interest in Logan. “Well, first I gotta get me a room so I can sit down and be by myself and write some music,” he says. “I’ve got some new theoretical approaches in the back of my mind, but for me, I want something outlandish, something different.” Instrumentation? “I want piano, two basses, two drummers, trumpet player and saxophone player. That’d be good, to have two basslines in there.”

In the meatime, more gigs. Lavelle has already fielded offers for a March 21st date at New York City’s Brecht Forum, and an April 6th performance at a yet-to-be-determined venue for a Vision Festival-sponsored series. It appears that Logan’s in demand and truly back in action. I’m headed back to my hotel to get ready for my flight home, and Logan’s off to the Jazz Foundation, a musician’s advocacy organization where he’s able to use a practice booth. We walk back to the station, through an accelerated cityscape of flashing fiber-optic video screens, citizenry talking on cellphones as they scurry down the sidewalk and tourists with digital cameras on every street corner. I ask Logan, “it’s a pretty different kind of place now since the last time you were in New York, huh? Could you ever have imagined anything like this?”

“No, I certainly didn’t,” he says. “I never expected to see anything like this.”

Back in front of my computer the next day, I look again at the short film from 1966. “I think the main part of music is beauty,” Logan remarks. “I imagine when you search for beauty and peace and love and happiness, brother- hood, it has to be done in a very simple way, to get closer to your creator, because that instills in the individual a love for everything in God’s heart.” ✹