The Cool School Read Free Page B

again. Way back there, Bix and I used to talk about the dragging violins. We often wondered if maybe it wasn’t the large number of them in the symphony that made them lag behind, but here we were playing with only one violin and still we kept getting tangled up in its strings. That violin, added to the straggling drums, began to give us nightmares. Joe would take drink after drink and almost break his fingers on the keyboard, and I would blow until I was blue in the face, trying to get those slow-motion artists in step, but we might as well have tried to budge a couple of hungry mules. It was worse than the Chinese water torture, where they tie you up and let water trickle on your forehead drop by drop. Guys go howling mad and make a meal of their tongues, waiting for the next drop, and that’s just what happened to us every time Johnny debated with himself whether he should interpolate now or later. In that fraction of a second while we waited for those two guys to catch up with our chord, I would sweat a bucket of blood and my ticker just gave up and quit altogether. It was like waiting for the accentuated beat of your heart when you’re on a reefer jag, and you wait and you wait and the beat doesn’t come and you think you’ve stopped living. I swear, after a few weeks I began to wonder if Johnny Powellwasn’t using my head for a gong, conking me with delayed-action sledgehammers, while the violinist bowed across all my raw nerves with a hunk of jaggedy glass. It was an effort to keep from screaming, It’s all right, beat me to a pulp, cut me to ribbons, only keep time, for Christ’s sake, just keep in time.
    With that waxed soup-strainer of his and that slick hair, Johnny took on some grotesque features in my hot mind. I’d look and look at him and begin to see him as Dirty Dan Desmond himself, cool and suave on the outside but with a heart full of evil and larceny. Sometimes I got to thinking that he was deliberately, cold-bloodedly trying to wear me down, make me blow my top. There was a conspiracy in Manhattan, headed by him, to give all Windy City musicians the heebies until they were ready to be bugged.
    He was the kindest, gentlest, most considerate guy alive, was Johnny Powell, and I was beginning to despise him. All day long I shook like I had the palsy, dreading the hour of doom when I would have to face him again. I guess I was a little on the sensitive side just then. It came from being all bottled-up musically, and from seeing the Chicagoans getting lost in the stampede of the squares. I saw nothing ahead for us but yawning oblivion, and Johnny was greasing the way for us with that better-late-than-never beat of his.
    To keep one jump ahead of the straitjacket squad, we used to drive down to Harlem after work on the hunt for some decent music, but it was nowhere to be had, even in the world’s greatest Negro community. I missed the South Side plenty; New Orleans-Chicago jazz hadn’t hit New York yet, so in Harlem too we were starved for our musical daily bread, cut off from the source of life and spirit. I felt like an alien here, an outsider who just came along for the ride, because I was advocating and signifying in an idiom that hadn’t yet caught on in these parts. It was a feeling I never got on the South Side, and it didn’t help my morale none. Harlem wasn’t any nerve-tonic for me. What made me feel even more like a foreigner was that most of the Harlem spots we hit were controlled by white hoodlums. The whole area was overrun with fay gangsters who got fat on the profits theyraked in from the big nightclubs and speakeasies and from the numbers racket. I began to feel that the conspiracy against us, the white man’s conspiracy, had reached up into Harlem too.
    I’d had a bellyful of gangsters and muscle men by that time. They’d always been luring me on, trying to win me away from the music to their loutish way of life—all of them, from the gamblers and pimps in the Chicago syndicate