'In 1965 Booker Ervin told a reporter he played every night as if it was the last time he would ever blow. Five years later he was dead at thirty-nine, and everybody who had heard him play realized he had meant it. Most who know the name know it from Charles Mingus records. Almost nobody knows Book himself.
In the winter of 1965 the British jazz journalist Mike Hennessey climbed the steps of an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had come to interview an American tenor saxophonist named Booker Ervin.
Ervin was thirty-four years old. He was Texan by birth and a Charles Mingus man by trade.
He played nights at the clubs and worried about money in the day.
His wife Jane and their two small children were in the apartment.
Hennessey opened his notebook and started asking questions. Ervin gave him the truth.
One of the answers went into Melody Maker that January, plain as a sentence a man says at the kitchen table.
"Every time I play I try to play as if it's the last time I'm ever going to blow."
Five years later he was dead at thirty-nine.
His full name was Booker Telleferro Ervin II. Everybody who knew him called him Book.
He was born in Denison, Texas, on Halloween 1930. His father Booker Ervin the first played trombone with the great swing veteran Buddy Tate.
Book learned the trombone from his daddy first. He played it from age eight to thirteen, because that was the horn in the house.
The tenor came later.
He picked it up in the Air Force, stationed on Okinawa. Nobody taught him.
He worked on the horn by himself until it made the sound he could hear in his head.
When his service ended in 1953 he studied at Berklee for two years. Then he joined the Ernie Fields R&B band down in Tulsa and hit the road with them.
By the spring of 1958 he had made it to New York. He held a day job while he played jam sessions at night.
He was waiting for a room to open up.
Charles Mingus opened it.
By the end of 1958 Book was in the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. By the summer of 1959 he was on the bandstand at Columbia's 30th Street Studio playing the tenor solo on Better Git It In Your Soul while the whole band clapped and shouted him on.
That solo went onto Mingus Ah Um.
It is still on rotation in every jazz radio show that respects itself.
Book held his own on the bandstand next to Eric Dolphy, and he blew hard alongside Roland Kirk and Yusef Lateef in the Mingus sessions that followed. Nobody who heard him play doubted the sound.
The doubt came from everywhere else.
He signed with Prestige Records in 1963 and made a series of albums that used his own nickname as both joke and promise. He called them The Freedom Book, The Song Book, The Blues Book, and The Space Book.
Everybody around him was calling him Book by then, so he called his records Book.
The records were the best hard bop New York was producing that year.
Nobody bought them.
The tenor players who were moving units were on other labels for real money. Coltrane on Impulse, Rollins on RCA, Wayne Shorter on Blue Note.
Book won the DownBeat critics' poll in 1964. The name of the category was Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, and that title told you everything about where American jazz had put him.
At home he had a wife named Jane Wilkie Ervin, a little boy they nicknamed Mr. Boo Boo, and a baby girl called Lynn.
He wrote a song for each of the children.
His friend Richard Jennings remembered Book at the East 6th Street apartment as a fun-loving man who could be kind of devilish when he wanted to. When Book had a recording session coming up he would drive personally out to Grand Central Station to pick up his drummer Alan Dawson, because that was the kind of man he was.
To Hennessey he laid the frustration out flat.
"For five years I've been saying things'll get better. They never have."
"I feel I can do a lot better. I suppose I'll go on striving until I die."
"Sometimes things get very lean and I feel like throwing the horn out of the window. But my wife, Jane, keeps me going."
That same year Barry Goldwater was running for the White House on a hard line about states' rights. Book was a Black man in a mixed marriage with two small children, and he was watching the campaign on television.
"I saw him on TV and I said what," Book told Hennessey. "It reminded me of those old movies about Hitler."
"The racial business really frightened me. I planned to come to Europe for good."
That October he packed up Jane and Booker Junior and Lynn and flew to Copenhagen.
The first stop was a month-long residency at the Montmartre Club. From there Paris, and then Barcelona, where the family took an apartment.
He played the Jamboree Club almost nightly. He walked for hours around Antoni Gaudi's cathedrals and thought about what the shape of them was doing.
In a studio in Munich he cut a summit meeting with his hero Dexter Gordon.
Europe was not the paradise the postcards had promised. He worked, but the money was thin and the audiences were smaller than the tales going around New York had suggested.
His friend the jazz writer Michael Cuscuna would later put the American choice bluntly.
You either exiled yourself to Europe or you starved.
Barcelona was better than starving.
Then came Berlin.
On October 29, 1965, the German critic Joachim-Ernest Berendt put six tenor saxophonists on the same stage at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall.
The names were Ben Webster, Don Byas, Brew Moore, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, and Book.
The night was billed as the Six Tenor Giants concert.
Book was fourth on the running order. He was walking into the biggest jazz stage of his life.
He was also raw. His close friend the New York bassist George Tucker had died in Manhattan seventeen days earlier at thirty-eight, of a brain hemorrhage.
Ben Webster arrived drunk. He argued with the audience, and organizers walked him off the stage.
Book stepped up.
Kenny Drew was on piano and Alan Dawson was on drums. Book called a slow blues he had already cut on The Freedom Book, a tune named Grant's Stand after a New York disc jockey he liked.
He started playing and he did not stop.
Ten minutes in the hall was still with him. Fifteen minutes in you could feel the shift.
At twenty minutes some of the audience had started slow-clapping.
At the half-hour mark someone at the front of the stalls was shouting at Book to stop. On the tape released years later you can hear that voice near the stage yell it three times.
Stop him, stop him, stop him.
Others were on their feet cheering him on. Book kept blowing.
Twenty-seven minutes on one blues.
When it was over the hall was in uproar. Some had walked out. Some were standing on their chairs shouting for more.
Sonny Rollins was still in the wings waiting for his turn.
The tape of Book's solo sat in a German broadcast archive for twelve years. In 1977 the German label Enja released it as an album.
They titled it Lament for Booker Ervin.
He was seven years dead by then.
By the summer of 1966 Book was back in the United States. He played the Monterey Jazz Festival with Randy Weston in September, signed with the West Coast label Pacific Jazz, and moved the family down to Los Angeles for a stretch.
A young Air Force enlisted man named Dennis Wong drove one night into the Watts neighborhood to hear Book at a small jazz club. He brought four friends with him. When they walked in, the jukebox was playing John Coltrane's Ascension.
The room held five paying customers. Wong and his friends were the five.
Book took the stage with the Texas tenor Harold Land. Two of the strongest horn players in America, playing to a crowd smaller than most subway cars.
They wailed.
When it was over Book walked over to Wong's table.
He smiled and said, "There's a lot of love in the air."
By early 1967 Book was back in New York for good. The Pacific Jazz sides had not sold either.
He signed to Blue Note in the middle of the label's slow slide from cutting edge to corporate product. His one Blue Note release under his own name was called The In Between, which was an accurate title for where American jazz had put him.
"Too modern and sophisticated to play uptown, and too traditional and mainstream to play downtown," as Michael Cuscuna would later put it.
You could not fit Book into what the record business now needed.
In the summer of 1968 Randy Weston made up his mind to move to Morocco. He handed Book the keys to his apartment at 204 East 13th Street in the East Village.
Jane and the kids moved in.
Book wrote a tune to say thank you and named it after the address, just those three digits.
204.
He recorded it on June 24, 1968, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, for a Blue Note session he called Tex Book Tenor.
It would be the last leader session of his life.
Blue Note put the tapes in the vault. The label was under corporate pressure to make hits, and Book was not a hit.
Randy Weston later said what a lot of musicians in New York had known for years.
"Booker Ervin, for me, was on the same level as John Coltrane."
None of that put food on Jane's table.
Book made two more sideman appearances in early 1969. One with the pianist Andrew Hill, and one with the young blind saxophonist Eric Kloss.
Then his recording career simply stopped.
Something inside him had been going wrong for a long time. His weight had been fluctuating for years and the pain was getting harder to hide.
In the summer of 1970 he checked into Bellevue Hospital. Surgeons removed one of his kidneys.
He never fully came back.
He died at Bellevue on Monday, August 31, 1970.
Two months short of his fortieth birthday.
Jane was left in the apartment at 204 East 13th Street with the two children and the horn.
His funeral was held at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan. The Reverend John G. Gensel, whom the drummer Max Roach had once called the New York jazz community's spiritual guru, delivered the eulogy.
Charles Mingus sat in the pews.
So did Roland Kirk, Don Byas, James Moody, Kenny Burrell, Jaki Byard, Ernie Wilkins, Joe Newman, and Cecil Payne.
The New York jazz world showed up because they knew what had been lost.
He was buried at Long Island National Cemetery in East Farmingdale, New York. His Air Force service on Okinawa had earned him the plot.
Three days later, in Helsinki, the trumpeter Ted Curson walked into Finnvox Studios and recorded an album he called Ode to Booker Ervin. He had heard the news in Europe.
The pianist Horace Parlan would later write a piece called Lament for Booker.
Tex Book Tenor stayed in the Blue Note vault. In 1976 the label finally released the material on a double LP paired with a Horace Parlan session, under a title Book had never spoken.
Back from the Gig.
Book had been dead six years.
The album came out under Book's own name as a single CD in 2005.
Thirty-seven years after he had recorded it. Thirty-five years after he had died.
The song titled 204 was on it.'
