It was also a period when heroin was cheap and readily accessible in New York, especially downtown. Mr. Aaron doesn’t remember how or when he first tried the drug, but said it was easy to find then. “We called it the golden age of dope on the Lower East Side,” he said. “But the whole city was like that.”

Image Playing at the Cotton Club. Credit... Michael Baumann

Mr. Aaron is matter-of-fact about heroin, dismissing the drug’s deadly reputation. “Some people die of an overdose of car crashes,” he said.

Though he knew the stories of renowned musicians like Charlie Parker or Chet Baker who used heroin, he said he was never drawn to it for the romance. “It’s more like the thing itself,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t think anybody I know romanticized it as much as they liked it. It’s got good qualities.”

He hesitated, not wanting to be a promoter for dope, he said.

“A lot of times you have a deadline and you have to work for 24 hours. This lets you do it with no pain, no tiredness,” he went on. “If I have to write a book, get me high — I’ll have the book written in two weeks. You’re lucid. And emotions don’t affect you as much — your anger — it bottles up your feelings. It makes you more rational, or you think you are, anyway. You sleep wonderfully. I’m a lifelong insomniac.”

He added, “Everything has its good points and bad points. The bad point is the dependence.”

He restricted his heroin use to snorting, he said, because even among musicians, track marks carried a stigma.

As a musician, Mr. Aaron had ears for the whole city. The writer Glenn O’Brien, who lived in the same building on Mott Street, remembered Mr. Aaron working as an arranger for Haitian bands. Duke Guillaume, a saxophonist, played with him in jazz gospel ensembles. Karon Bihari sang standards and torch songs to his accompaniment. He played saxophone on David Bowie’s “Modern Love” and toured the world playing keyboards for the rapper Wyclef Jean.

Mr. Aaron played flute, saxophone, clarinet and piano, then taught himself guitar, trumpet, bassoon, French horn and other instruments. And he picked up a working knowledge of Spanish, Creole, Cantonese, Wolof and Urdu, besides his native French and English.