“Murakami kind of ruined writing about jazz for everyone else,” said a friend, well, a boss really, but he feels like a friend.
I’ll try.
Jazz is alive.
[Like all music?]
But there’s always that surprise in it, that off-beat note. I learned Jazz through words. I read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and before you give me any shit, I want to talk about one scene. It’s him and Neal Cassady in New Orleans meeting William S. Burroughs and then going out to jazz bars and dancing and drinking until they closed. But that didn’t stop old Jack or Neal because the music spilled into the street, waterfalls of liquid brass in the moonlight, and Kerouac says they’ve got It with a capital “I.” He points, drunk and dancing and feeling It. “You’ve got It,” he says.
[That’s a personal fiction: they were in New York. They met Burroughs in Algiers.]
It’s how I imagine it, and it’s true to me.
Then I read Jazz by Toni Morrison and bopped to the rhythm of the words, but not yet the rhythm of the music. I wanted to. You know how that last page speaks to you like a lover? I wanted to be whispered, clanged, and trumpeted to.
When I bought my ticket to New Orleans, I didn’t know a place could move.
Image: © Sara Hardin
By then I’d listened to Ella Fitzgerald, my favorite, “The Queen of Jazz,” as my hip, Converse-wearing Professor told me. My grandfather told me about Miles Davis, his favorite that he’d play in the garage while making little plaques for high school teams in a city where he no longer lived.
I listened.
When I stepped off the plane in Louis Armstrong Airport, I heard It. I smiled as I waited for my ride to pick me up, before we drank ourselves silly, laughing to tears, singing in the alleys. I sat and waited to walk the streets and hear It jökhulhlauping out of doorways like Jack and Neal, smoothing an edge of my foreignness, taking my sediments with It, and flowing forward.
