By Herbert Hadad

Hopping the trolley to Mattapan Square, I slipped into a small theater showing The Jolson Story and came out a few hours later, transformed.

In the movie, Al Jolson rises from minstrel singer, to Broadway sensation, to star of the first “talkie.” The story was corny, even to a youngster, but the music was unforgettable. I saved up and bought a Jolson album, and began practicing my vocal delivery of “California, Here I Come” and “You Made Me Love You.” Also “The Anniversary Song,” which featured the lyrics “Dear, as I held you so close in my arms/Angels were singing a hymn to your charms/Two hearts gently beating were murmuring low/My darling, I love you so.” The song was so beautiful, I almost wept when I sang it. I was going on ten years old.

Imitating the famous Jolson warble was not that hard, not after doing it thousands of times in my room. My family was curious but silent about my preoccupation. In fact, my mother, a wonderful singer, sang Jolson tunes, too, though without trying to imitate his voice.

One night, I revealed what I was up to. “Do you think the world is ready for another Al Jolson?” I asked with utter earnestness. My parents, astonished but undoubtedly reluctant to hurt my feelings, just smiled. So I took my show on the road, to the corner of Boston’s Norfolk and Morton streets, to be precise, in front of the Roger Wolcott School. I opened with Jolson’s famous line, “Settle back, folks. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” then, as a handful of kids gathered around, belted out “Swanee.” It was amazing, honestly—an introverted little boy, singing his heart out on a street corner.

Alas, when I wasn’t discovered by a cigar-chomping agent, like the movie Al was, my ambition faded. By the time I enrolled in junior high school, I sang mainly for my own entertainment.

That’s when I met my first music teacher. Mr. Trongone (sounds like “trombone”) was round and small and mirthless. In preparation for the annual schoolboy parade through downtown Boston, he came to Frank V. Thompson Junior High once a week to teach us kids how to play the drum.

I was a runner by then and felt the rhythms of running translated smartly into the martial drumbeats we played alongside our band’s buglers. I practiced hard and thought I was quite a nifty drummer.

Mr. Trongone thought otherwise. After months of rehearsal, he stopped us one afternoon and turned his scowl on me. “I have taught the drum in the Boston public school system for twenty-three years, Hey-dad, and you are the slowest student I ever had.” What? The new Jolson? The sprinter? The boy with the natural rhythm? I was crushed.

In the schoolboy parade, I hitched up behind the bass drum and marched for three hours, boom-boom-boom-boom, playing the same thump ceaselessly. My left arm got exhausted and numb, but I was afraid to miss a beat. I kept picturing Mr. Trongone jumping out of the crowd and screaming, “See! I said you were the worst drummer in history!” Several days later, though my arm felt back to normal, my musical dreams had fallen dormant.

When I was a Northeastern student, rhythm and ambition took hold of me again in an entirely different way. I decided to become a prizefighter. I fell into the satisfying daily routine of skipping rope, hitting the speed bag with a rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat beat, and shadow boxing, all timed to a gym bell that signaled three minutes of work, one minute of rest.

Eventually, I realized that boxing was a young man’s game and another use of my hands might serve me for a lifetime. So I found a piano teacher, a tiny woman from Eastern Europe, and made a weekly trek to her overstuffed Brookline apartment. She was devoted to the classics. When she demonstrated a piece, she swayed on the bench and gulped for air, nostrils flaring, transforming from a middle-aged woman into some kind of musical beast.

Unlike Mr. Trongone, my piano teacher liked me, yet abhorred my “American lack of discipline.” “No, no, no,” she would say with exasperation when I improvised at the keyboard. “You cannot mix Felix Mendelssohn and Cole Porter.” I compromised, and learned a few obscure classical numbers, along with some songs that crossed genres and therefore pleased me immensely (the composer’s name was Gershwin).

Searching through a Pennysaver circular, I found a listing for a huge black upright piano someone wanted to give away. Though my mother was the undisputed music director at our house, I didn’t stop to get her permission. I paid two movers to heft the piano into my family’s second-floor apartment.

I thought my mother might enjoy having a piano, might even learn to play. She tolerated the sounds of my scales and tentative efforts at serious music. I was tickled when she offered to “antique” the piano an attractive muted white with gold highlights. It looked quite beautiful. But one day when I returned home, the piano was gone. “Where is it?” I gasped.

My mother had used the Pennysaver, too. “What could I do?” she said. “Some people came and loved it, and offered a lot of money. So I sold it.”

You get invited to only so many parties playing “The Man I Love,” even while singing with a Jolson warble. Once again, I gave up my musical aspirations—until another movie interceded.

The Third Man is a great film about international intrigue in post­World War II Vienna, but what really enthralled me was its theme music, played entirely on the zither by a Viennese musician named Anton Karas. I sought out the soundtrack, then went further, scouring music stores for a zither of my own. Someone directed me to an instrument maker in New Jersey.

Lute-like in shape and finished in a lush mahogany tone, my zither came with a tuning wrench, a flexible hammer for striking the strings, and a music book. In a few weeks, I was happily playing “The Third Man Theme.” A few friends came over for performances. Still, it soon became clear I was never going to be Anton Karas.

And then, despite my Trongone trauma, another drum entered my life: a durbakke, a goblet-shaped instrument topped with stretched goatskin and embossed with intricate Middle Eastern designs. My durbakke skills seemed to come naturally. Holding the drum between my knees, using my fingers to tap the middle and the edges of the skin, I’d lose myself in diverse and pleasurable rhythms. I’d reach for it whenever the mood struck, entertaining my children and guests.

When my son Charles asked to take it to college, I agreed, hoping a second generation of durbakke virtuosos was about to be born. I was mistaken. The durbakke disappeared during a beer-laden fraternity party in Syracuse, probably out a second-story window.

But the endearing little instrument’s contagious sounds were still in me. Not long ago, these sounds—reinforced by a tumbler of arak, the anise-flavored Arab liqueur—floated me out of my chair in a Middle Eastern nightclub in Washington, D.C., and up to the bandleader. “Is it possible for me to sit in?” I asked. He turned to his skeptical musicians, then back to me, and nodded. The durbakke player handed me his instrument and left the stage.

Back at our table, my friend Mike and two acquaintances waited with anxiety. The band struck up, with its exotic blend of mandolin-like oud, fiddle, flute, and tambourine, and I entered a rich, atavistic world. I played for five, maybe ten minutes. Applause washed over me as I returned to my seat.

It was my only public performance since the sidewalk outside the Roger Wolcott School. I have come to think of it as my farewell tour.

Yet my lifelong love affair with song, drum, piano, zither, and durbakke has brought a kind of wisdom, and this is it: Some people are athletes, and some are spectators. Some people are writers, and some are proofreaders. Some people are musicians, and some are listeners. Each needs the other.

Meet an ardent listener.

Herbert Hadad’s May 2002 “Alumni Passages” column, “No Place Like Home,” was recently honored as a “notable essay” in the annual volume Best American Essays 2003, alongside selections from such publications as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harper’s, and the New York Times.