Tag: Folk City

Two anniversaries of Pat and me

September 9, 1972, was the first time I spoke to Pat Martino on Folk City’s stage while he packing up after his last set. (I had seen him there many times that summer, one perk of having FC’s Mike Porco as a friend of the family).

Exactly 23 years later, a fellow fan took a picture of him, Gloria, and me in Blue Note’s second-floor dressing room. This was directly across the street (that is, West Third Street) from where Folk City once was. (These music venues were never contemporaries.)

I’ve published this picture before, but not the copy Pat signed almost 14 years later on March 15, 2009 at the Rubin Museum of Art (150 West 17th Street). The occasion was the premiere of Unstrung!, a documentary about Pat’s recovery from brain surgery and amnesia. (Free download of medical journal article on Pat’s case.)  Gloria couldn’t make the event, but Mom, who’s the reason I got into jazz, did. A few months earlier, her friend had played Pat’s Strings! album on his turntable, thereby altering the course of my musical life.

My  diary for September 9, 1972 shows that I was equally excited about meeting another fan of Pat’s:

Was I knocked out when Mom came over to me [at my Folk City table in the main music room] and told me that George Benson  was there diggin’ on the music! I went over to his lovely wife to ask if that was truly him and then introduced myself and asked him a few questions. He’s coming out with a book by which student of various levels can progress and “get more serious.” What a surprise that was! Pat M. came over and and rapped about guitar makes (George has an 1898 Gibson) and other things. Ornette Coleman was sitting at the bar. . . . I talked to Pat about little things. He’s really at peace with himself. He went for a walk after his set. Mom was sitting at the bar and stopped him to talk. He’s so gracious. Mom and I hung around to be driven home [in the Bronx] by Mike [whom, in my diary, I cluelessly surnamed “Gerde”!].

As 1994 was the last year I kept a diary, I have only that photo to stir my memory of that 1995 meeting (of whose significance as the anniversary of our first chat I was not then cognizant). The following summer (June 30, 1973, to be exact) I’d see both Pat and George (and a half-dozen other jazz guitar greats) in the Wollman Amphitheater in Central Park at the Newport Jazz Festival. The concert was aptly named “Guitar Explosion.”

Happy to share with those who care and remember that September.

George Benson and Pat, Central Park, June 30, 1973. A flipped image: Pat, who was right-handed, appears to be holding a guitar made for a left-handed player.

 

 

 

Pat Martino and Herbert Aptheker: Half-century Memories

Pat Martino (L) and yours truly, January 1, 1973, 3:20 A.M., Folk City, 130 West 3rd Street, NYC.

This photo was taken on January 1, 1973 at Folk City, 130 West Third Street, in Manhattan.[1] After several months of screwing up the courage to ask Jazz guitar legend Pat Martino (1944-2021) for a lesson (I had first spoken to him there on September 9, 1972), he agreed earlier that New Year’s Day to give me a lesson if I’d be willing to travel to his home in Philadelphia. Before taking the  train at New York’s Penn Station on January 24th, I noticed the  headlines of the newspapers that day: the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War would be signed three  days later.

A philosophy student at New York University (NYU)—where I took Sidney Hook’s last course—I had spent 1972 worrying about how I might avoid the military draft. Although my Selective Service (SS) number was 40, I heard they weren’t going to call higher than 25. Shortly after that, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft.

I had been anxious about the future. Fighting my Vietnamese comrades was out of the question, but the various “draft-dodging” (or court martial-inviting) options were not much more congenial. You see, I was from 1971 to 1975 a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (CP), one who had registered with SS and was then assisting Communist writer and theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) with finding various books and articles pursuant to his literary executorship of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers.[2]

That’s whom Pat Martino was posing with on New Year’s Day 1973. For the nearly five decades I knew him, I hasten to add, he was never aware of my politics.

On the advice of CP attorney John Abt, who urged me to claim my First Amendment right of freedom of association, I declined to answer the Army’s questions about my political affiliation. After isolating me from other registrants for a few hours and then interrogating me, the SS officers dropped the matter and let me go home. I never heard from them again. I returned to my NYU classes the next day. They probably have a thick file on me.

January 1973 is also the month Aptheker acknowledged my assistance and that of others in his introduction to The Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (Kraus-Thomson Limited, 1973), which he edited along with an additional 40 volumes of Du Bois’s writings.

In 1946 Aptheker returned from Europe where, rising to the rank of Major, he had commanded the all-Black 350th artillery unit. That’s the year Du Bois (1868-1963) made Aptheker—unable to secure an academic position in the Cold War’s first year—the executor of his literary estate. In that introduction my name appeared in a scholarly publication for the first time.[3]

Herbert Aptheker signing over W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts in 1973 (that is, the portion that had been entrusted to him: the rest went to Fisk University and to Ghana, where Du Bois took up residence in 1961, never to return to the country of his birth).

In a few years I’d part company with him, a story for another time. I eventually settled accounts with my erstwhile political conscience in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. 

Over the last fifty years I pursued philosophical, political, and musical studies in ways I could never have imagined (or, if I could, would necessarily have welcomed). At 19, a half century (a reasonable unit of historical account) seemed impossibly long to me. It does not feel that way today.

Aptheker, a widower in his last four years, passed away at age 87 almost two decades ago; Pat, having made a seemingly miraculous comeback from amnesia-inducing brain surgery in the early ’80s, succumbed to a long illness last year, age 78.

Socially isolated, I left the Party in 1975 and Marxism altogether a couple of years later; I never became either a professional guitarist (not for want of trying) or a professor of philosophy. Each man left his mark on my sense of life. I enter the new  year appreciative of their influence and hope by God’s grace to continue to build on what I’ve learned from knowing them and so many others.

I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

Anthony G. Flood

January 1, 2023

My wife Gloria, Pat Martino, and me, September 9, 1995, Blue Note Club, NYC, directly across the street from where Folk City was, 23 years to the day after I had first spoken with him.

Notes

[1] The Fat Black Pussycat night club/comedy venue does business there now. Before Folk City, there was Tony Pastor’s Downtown (1939-1967).

[2] Of the countless requests he gave me over the years, here are four.

 

[3]