THE BASS SAXOPHONE Read Online Free

dancer-wife Jacqueline in original sack dresses borrowed from a Prague matron who had lived it up in Paris in the twenties, then settled down to enjoy her dancing of the eccentric, decadent Charleston. Since Herb’s terribly shouted blues had anti-American lyrics and because Jackie’s skin was not entirely white the authorities didn’t dare protest, and left us alone with our towering success. The show finally folded as a result of difficulties of a more American nature. Herb and Jacqueline wanted more money. The producer, bound by state norms, was unable to give them more, and
Really the Blues
died a premature death. Later on, Herb and Jacqueline went the way of many American exiles: back home to the States, the land where the words “you can’t go home again” generally seem not to apply. Apply they do, though, for other countries, the ones that send their own writers into exile, to prison, or to their death.
    Really the Blues
was the end of a beginning. Jazz had grown to resemble the Mississippi, with countless rivulets fanning out from its delta. The Party found other targets: Elvis Presley, little rock’n’roll groups with guitars electrified and amplified on home workbenches, with a new crop of names recalling faraway places — Hell’s Devils,Backside Slappers, Rocking Horses — new outcries from the underground. By the end of the fifties, a group of young people had been arrested, and some of them sentenced to prison for playing tapes of “decadent American music” and devoting themselves to the “eccentric dancing” of rock’n’roll. (Again the spirit of Vicherek was present at their trial.) And because the mass of young people had turned to follow other stars, jazz proper, whether mainstream or experimental, was no longer considered dangerous, and so the sixties were a time of government-sponsored International Jazz Festivals. The stage at Lucerna Hall in Prague echoed with the sounds of Don Cherry, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ted Curson.… We applauded them, although, for the most part, this was no longer the music we had known and loved. We were the old faithfuls. The broad appeal of the saxes was gone, either this was esoteric music or we had simply grown old.… Jazz is not just music. It is the love of youth which stays firmly anchored in one’s soul, forever unalterable, while real live music changes, forever the calling of Lunceford’s saxophones.…
    That was when I wrote “The Bass Saxophone,” and I was writing about fidelity, about the sole real art there is, about what one must be true to, comehell or high water; what must be done to the point of collapse, even if it be a very minor art, the object of condescending sneers. To me literature is forever blowing a horn, singing about youth when youth is irretrievably gone, singing about your homeland when in the schizophrenia of the times you find yourself in a land that lies over the ocean, a land — no matter how hospitable or friendly — where your heart is not, because you landed on these shores too late.
    For the steel chariots of the Soviets swung low, and I left. Jazz still leads a precarious existence in the heart of European political insanity, although the battlefield has shifted elsewhere. But it is the same old familiar story: a specter is again haunting Eastern Europe, the specter of rock, and all the reactionary powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it — Brezhnev and Husák, Suslov and Honecker, East German obscurantists and Czech police-spies. Lovely new words have emerged from the underground, like the
krystýnky
and the “dippers” of the Nazi era: now there are
Manichky
, “little Marys” for longhaired boys,
undrooshy
, from the Czechified pronunciation of the word “underground,” for rock fans of both sexes. Anonymous people hold underground Woodstocks in the same old obscure hick towns, gatherings often ruthlessly broken up by police, followed by the arrestof participants, their interrogation,