It's natural, bay-bee

I was reading a Whitney Balliett omnibus one night (Collected Works: A Jazz Journal) when on Page 138 I ran into my old and much-missed friend J.C. Heard in 1940 drumming with Teddy Wilson's band, swinging "an exemplary mid-tempo blue" behind Lena Horne in the film short Boogie Woogie Dream. 

I wondered where else James Charles Heard might be hanging out in the pages. The index directed me to Page 176, where he was mentioned in the 1938 band of Benny Carter, apparently sharing drum duties with Max Roach. Page 611 was an indexical misdirect. But I caught up with J.C. again on Pages 652 (on the roster for 1944-1946 Blue Note sessions) and 637 (among drummers who, in rapid succession, were fired from or quit the temperamental Benny Goodman's organization). 

He last appeared on Page 819 in a discussion of the ultimate jazz group picture, Art Kane's 1958 shoot for Esquire. Balliett categorized the 57 guys who showed up, filled the stairs to a Harlem brownstone and spilled onto the sidewalk: megastars, future stars, Ellingtonians, Basieites, etc. Along with guys like Milt Hinton, Hank Jones and Stuff Smith, Heard was one of the "indispensable journeymen."

So, I put on an old VHS of A Great Day in Harlem, the award-winning 1995 film about the photo that occasioned Balliett's discussion. It played in the background while I hunted for J.C. in my library. 

In To Be or Not to Bop, Dizzy Gillespie's autobiographical collage, there's a hilarious account of Diz and Heard's overlapping time in the Cab Calloway band. Seems that when Calloway was deep in his ballads on stage, Diz and trombonist Tyree Glenn liked to pass an imaginary football from one side of the brass section to the other; accenting the catch, J.C. would "hit a little bomb on the bass drum — bomm — and the audience would crack up." A befuddled Calloway would wonder what was going on behind his back, but he could never spin 'round fast enough to catch the culprits. All this culminated in the night that Diz — falsely accused of smacking Cab from behind with a spitball during his act — would scuffle with Cab and knife him in the thigh. And, of course, Heard was there then, just as, by his account elsewhere, he was at a bar 40 years later when a well-liquored Cab dropped his drawers for a likewise juiced Diz to make the point that bygones were bygones, but that a scar was forever.

There were more index citings.

In Jazz; A History of the New York Scene, Heard is with Coleman Hawkins on the top-selling jazz album of 1946. In the memoirs of New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker, Barker and Heard were among the older guys in the studio to support the upstart bop-innovator Charlie Parker on one of his first sessions. But first they killed time while their junkie genius sat around "looking into space, sweating ... waiting for the man to come with something."

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