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off-nights, Mondays or Tuesdays, from my boss at the Knit and playing gigs as “M. Doughty’s Soul Coughing” with different guys I heard at the club. The saxophonist Tim Berne played once. I called him up cold, and he had no idea who I was. A friend asked what he was doing that week, and he apparently said, “Monday night I’m playing with this African cat—Emdodi.”
    I booked the 11 PM slot on a Tuesday night five days after my twenty-second birthday. A month before the show, I had no band. I was worrying about it, talking to a bass player who worked a day job as a sound-effects guy on a soap opera. “Don’t worry, Doughty,” he said. “We’ll find you a band.”
    I called him up two weeks before the show. He had forgotten. He couldn’t do it, because that week there was a fictitious hurricane in the soap opera’s fictitious town, so he had to work overtime.
    There was this one amazing drummer around, an Israeli guy who could sound like a hip-hop record. There were drummers who could play those beats, but nobody who could sound like that. My only interaction with him was that he’d once walked into the Knit’s office and asked me to send a fax for him. I told him that I didn’t work in the office and didn’t know how the fax machine
worked. He stayed silent for a minute and then asked me again if I’d send a fax for him.
    I had nothing to lose, why not call up this amazing player at random, for the hell of it? He had nothing to do on a Tuesday night at 11 PM. Who would? He said yes. I was astonished.
    I wanted an upright bass player; the record I wanted to emulate was A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, powered by upright bass lines, some sampled, some played live by the master Ron Carter. There was this one upright player who was unsettlingly corny: he had long hair, wore pointy Night Ranger at the Grammys boots, and was often seen in the sort of pajama-like sultan pants associated with M.C. Hammer. But the drummer said he was good. I got his number from somebody; he, too, had nothing booked on a Tuesday at eleven. I learned later that he had no idea who I was; he showed up for the rehearsal, and thought, The door guy?
    There was a sampler player who had done both the all-sampler and all-vocalist Cobras—he was brought on to the latter along with some other nonvocalists because he knew the piece. He was less intimidating than the other sampler players ; they tended to be mavericks, but this guy was timid and high-strung. He was constantly wide-eyed, like the proverbial animal in headlights. He said yes, too.
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    Rehearsal studios in New York went by the hour. It was something like $12 per; insanely expensive for me. It was my gig, so the assumption was that I was hiring them, that it was my deal. They were, in fact, so busy that this was the single rehearsal I could grab them for.
    Half an hour late, the bass player and the drummer arrived with bagels and coffee. I stood there with my guitar plugged in, gawking at them, as they joked and ate their breakfasts.

    Can we play? My money’s running out, I said.
    They laughed at me. A half hour later, they had finished their bagels.
    â€œYo, G,” said the drummer, who spoke a thickly Hebrew accented, broken Brooklynish, “it is time to pump. It is time that we must pump now.”
    I was floored from the jump. I had tried to explain to other rhythm sections how to do the grooves I wanted. With these two, it was just there. That huge sound.
    I started one tune by explaining I wanted the rhythm to be something like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.”
    â€œYo, G,” said the drummer, “nobody want to play that there beat. Everybody done that beat already.”
    We blasted through a bunch of songs in an hour. I was half elated, half panicked. Suddenly the sampler player walked in.
    Where’s your sampler? I said.
    â€œI brought this,” he said.