One of my best races could hardly be called a race at all. I was a senior in high school, gunning to qualify for the USA Junior Nationals. The previous summer I had missed the cut by less than a second in the mile, and just the day before, at my high school regional meet, I had come within three-tenths of a second in 500-yard freestyle. The qualification time was 4:39.69; I swam a 4:39.95. The next day, Sunday, I drove with my mother to the far side of Houston where a time trial was being held—an informal, unadvertised event thrown together at the last minute. The only races swum were those the swimmers requested to swim. Most were short, flapping sprints in which swimmers attempted to shave off a few one-hundredths of a second. I didn't have the courage to face the mile, and since I'd struck out in the 500 the day before, I decided to swim the 1,000-yard freestyle. Forty lengths of the pool. It was a race I'd swum fast enough to believe that given the right confluence of circumstances—cold water, an aggressive heat, an energetic meet—I could make the cut. I had fifteen seconds to drop to qualify. By the time I stood up on the blocks, I was not only the only one in the race, I was practically the only one in the natatorium. The horn sounded and I dove in. I was angry and disheartened at having missed the cut the day before and I had little belief that I could go any faster today. About six hundred yards in, my coach started to pace. I stayed steady on, not in a hurry, not about to get my hopes up. In my mind, I had already missed the time. Then a boy from a rival high school, whom I hardly knew, unfolded his legs and climbed down from the bleachers and started to cheer. He squatted low to the water and pointed his finger toward the end of the pool, as if to say, That's where you're going, now hurry up. I thought, If he's cheering, maybe I'm close. Sometimes a moment comes along when the world slows down, and though everything else moves around us at the same frenetic speed, we're afforded the opportunity to reflect in real-time rather than in retrospect.
Near the end of his eight years as a recording-session musician, tenor saxophonist Leon "Chu" Berry landed a short-lived spot with Count Basie's orchestra. Standing in for one of the Basie band's two tenor giants, Berry took a lead solo on "Oh, Lady Be Good," the 1924 Gershwin song that Basie had played for years. In the 28 seconds that the solo lasted on February 4, 1939, we are treated to no less than the musical personification of mind and body working together in divine tandem. When you hear the recording for the first time, you're likely to wonder why you've never heard of Chu Berry before. Why you've never heard of him is pretty simple: a lot of hard-core jazz buffs don't know much about him. Berry was a solid session player who turns up on recordings with Basie, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, and Billie Holiday. But he did not cut many sessions himself as a leader, and when he soloed, he worked within the recording constraints of the era and the swing genre—fast-moving 78s with solos often lasting for a mere 32 beats. In June 1940, Cab Calloway granted Berry a showcase piece, "A Ghost of a Chance," the sole recording in Berry's career to feature him from start to finish. It was his "Body and Soul," a response to Coleman Hawkins's famous recording, intended not as a riposte to a rival but as the other half of a dialogue. Its rubato lines are disembodied from the music meant to accompany it, which is spartan to begin with.