anekdote aus michelle mercers shorter-biografie zu seiner newark-zeit:
For Wayne, Lloyd’s Manor was simply the place to hear Manhattan’s best jazz musicians, who made guest appearances there on Monday nights. Just before Wayne graduated from high school, Sonny Stitt had a gig at Lloyd’s. In 1951, Stitt was a top bebop alto saxophonist—though he was prickly on the matter of his musical resemblance to Bird, whose pioneering flights cast shadows of insecurity over all saxophonists at the time. Stitt invited Herbie Morgan, a young local saxophonist, to join him for the show. Morgan had developed a reputation as someone to watch and Stitt meant to salvage the young talent from the wrong side of the river and spirit him over to Manhattan’s sanctuary of high bop. To heighten the show’s drama, Sonny decided to invite another young tenor saxophonist onstage. Someone recommended Wayne for the gig. Despite his mother’s repeated warnings to “stay away from that Lloyd’s Manor,” and notwithstanding his technical limitations—he could only play in three keys at the time: C, B Flat, and G—Wayne decided it was an opportunity he just couldn’t pass up.
Sonny Stitt was already there when Wayne arrived. “You ready, you ready?” Sonny asked. “Sonny always talked fast and said everything twice,” Wayne remembered. They went onstage and Sonny called a tune in the key of E-flat—not one of the keys Wayne had mastered. “He played the blues, all through the keys. I was struggling but I was thinking okay, I’m here, and I’ve got to play.”
Nat Phipps was at Lloyd’s Manor that night. “Wayne was always a very youthful looking person, and at that time he looked like he was twelve. He was quiet. Not shy, but retiring. So this unassuming kid came up and started playing, and then fifteen minutes later the house was crazy. The other players wanted to fade away.” Amiri Baraka heard Wayne at many cutting contests. “Wayne was precocious,” Baraka wrote. “I heard many pretty astounding things he was doing at seventeen and eighteen. Even then, when he couldn’t do anything else, he could still make you gasp at sheer technical infallibility.”
When they finished playing, Sonny excitedly pulled Wayne aside. “You want to come on the road with me, you want to go on the road?” he asked. Wayne explained that he would soon graduate from high school and wanted to go to college. Sonny replied so quickly that Wayne almost couldn’t understand him. “Shit, you got to get your education.” He only said that once.
He’s been playing so fast and talking so fast that he don’t know which is which, Wayne thought. He’s playing fast but it’s still Charlie Parker. It’s still Bird you hear echoed in every note. Maybe Sonny wants to enhance himself with two younger players. Working with Stitt would have been the next best thing to playing with Bird—a prestigious offer for an unknown 17-year-old from New Jersey. But as much as Wayne was enthralled by his hero’s style, he wanted to go to college and study composition; he wanted to create something original for himself.
In Wayne’s junior and senior years at Newark Arts High School, his absences were reduced from the 30 days of his sophomore year to a reasonable total of four days for the final two years. The music classes had succeeded in reforming the young cinephile and stage show zealot of his truancy. He earned straight As in harmony, theory, orchestration and band and was awarded the Sozio Music Award at his high school graduation, in 1951. That year the Newark Arts High School yearbook featured a “1001 Arabian Nights” theme. In an extravagantly mythic tone, the yearbook chronicled the “Tale of the Realm known as the School of The Arts.” Though the yearbook’s style was naïve and overwrought, the caption for Wayne’s senior photo hit just the right pitch. It was an uncanny divination:
In Wayne’s future could be seen a tour of the U.S. and Europe, possibly with a band. His esoteric expressions often escaped his listeners, but his musical ability spoke for itself, he also being a “bop fiend.”
https://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD11/PoD11BookCooks_Mercer.html
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