Q: MUSIC, ESPECIALLY jazz, has played a significant role in your life and your writing, has it not? A: Yes and no. My years as an ardent amateur and semiprofessional jazz drummer were certainly an important part of my life from my teens into my forties. But except for passages in the novel/memoir Once Upon a Time (1994) and the novella Tell Me (2005), I’ve seldom written directly about that experience in either my fiction or my non-fiction. More relevant to me as a writer, I believe, was my early ambition to be, not primarily a composer or a performer of music, but an orchestrator—an “arranger,” as it was called back in those swing-band decades. Q: Shall we “take it from the edge,” as musicians say (or used to say)? A-one, a-two . . . A: Well: As kids in a family of modest means on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the Great Depression, my twin sister and I had the privilege (though we didn’t always see it that way) of weekly piano lessons and daily practice sessions from our elementary-school years through junior high.
