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No truly creative person ever arrives home without immediately beginning to long for the next gig. Art is a lifetime commitment."
Golson's odyssey began in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1929. There he remained until he matriculated at Howard University in 1947. Raised by a sing le mother, he took classical piano lessons from an early age, barely tolerating his mother's affection for "the low-down dirty blues." His views would evolve. Now, Golson writes, "I hug the blues to my chest the way Whitman hugged the seashore."
"I had the classical thing in my mind, and she's playing Bill Broonzy and Lil Green," Golson reminisced. "When I talked to Sonny, he brought up 'Romance In The Dark.' I said, 'You remember that?' Boy, my mother used to play that thing. And another tune, 'If you feel my legs, you want to feel my thighs, and if you feel my thighs you want to go up high.' I said, 'That's terrible music!' But she was also playing Billie Holiday - 'Mean To Me' and 'I'll Get By' and things like that." Another connection to jazz, well-depicted in the memoir, was Golson's Uncle Ralph, a bartender at Minton's Playhouse who allowed his nephew to be a fly on the wall there on periodic visits to Harlem. Golson's mother bought him a saxophone after he heard Arnett Cobb play "Flying Home" with Lionel Hampton at Philly's Earle Theater in 1943.
Two years later, Golson joined his teenage friends Coltrane and Ray Bryant at the Academy of Music to hear a sextet featuring Gillespie, Charlie Parker, saxophonist Don Byas, pianist Al Haig, bassist Slam Stewart and drummer "Big Sid" Catlett.
"I started trying to play bebop for all I was worth," Golson recalled. "I drove my neighbors crazy, because I got my saxophone during the summer, and the windows were open. When John Coltrane joined me, they wanted to kill two people. We were rank amateurs."
Golson credited a course at Howard, "Vocabulary Building," as the starting point of his enviable linguistic skills. "The professor, Mr. Carroll, told the corniest jokes that he thought were just hilarious - but he knew so much about the English language," he said. "The next semester, I was the only one who took him. I learned so much about the English language from that guy, and I started to read." The mandatory orthodoxies imposed by Howard's music department circa 1949 were less appealing. Golson left abruptly, launching the apprentice stages of his career, which included stints playing fourth tenor with Jimmy Heath's excellent Philly-based big band, and subsequent r&b sojourns with singer Bull Moose Jackson and alto saxophone titan Earl Bostic.