Jitu Weusi: That’s right, waiters, waitresses… So I now had a cabaret card but no job. Meanwhile I’m going to Long Island University and the summer of 1961 I had to go to summer school, because I wanted to graduate on time, which was June 1962, I had to make up a couple of courses and also I wanted to be eligible to teach. So I had to take a couple education courses, I took four courses that summer – so that put me in summer school for the two sessions. That meant I had to be in class from 9am-3pm everyday, M-Thursday, so I couldn’t get no job. So it started off as a very poor summer for me.

One particular night we went down to the Village Gate to see somebody. While I was there I heard this woman who was like a manager say ‘I need some waiters, we’re getting ready to have a whole lot of important people in here, there are going to be good crowds, and I ain’t got no waiters…’ She went back to her office and I made my way back to her office and I said ‘miss, I heard you talking to the guy that you need some waiters, I’m a waiter.’ She said ‘oh really’? I said ‘yeah, I used to work in Wells upstairs room in Harlem.’ She said ‘do you have a cabaret card’? I said ‘yeah…’, she said ‘you’re hired’. So the next day I started working at the Village Gate. That was like golden, I saw everybody: Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk… everybody; I not only saw everybody, but I got to meet everybody. Everybody wanted to know ‘who’s this guy youngblood, who’s he’? So I got to meet everybody, and everybody knew me. These guys that I had listened to, like Art Blakey… I knew Art [Blakey] now! I got to meet all these people.

I found out that some of them lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, like Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the bass player, he lived on Green Avenue. So I remember that after the set, he would play with Herbie Mann, and after the set he would say to me ‘youngblood, you goin’ to Brooklyn? Come on, I’ll give you a ride’ and he would take me home. So it really was a good period, the period that I was at the [Village] Gate, that was a period in which I really became a solid member of the jazz fraternity.