THE BASS SAXOPHONE Read Online Free Page A

their harassment, all the joys of living in a police state.
    And so the legend continues … and the chain of names. The Ghetto Swingers, the nameless bands of Buchenwald, the big band in Stalin’s Siberia, the anonymous jazz messengers in Nazi uniforms crisscrossing Europe with their sheet music, the Leningrad Seven — nameless aficionados who in the Moscow of the sixties translated, from the Czech translation of original American material, into Russian
samizdat
the theoretical anthology
The Face of Jazz
— and other buffs and bands, even more obscure, blowing away for all I know even in Mao’s China. To their names new ones must be added, the Plastic People of the Universe, and DG307, two underground groups of rock musicians and avant-garde poets whose members have just been condemned (at the time I am writing this) to prison in Prague for “arousing disturbance and nuisance in an organized manner.” That loathsome vocabulary of hell, the vocabulary of Goebbels, the vocabulary of murderers.…
    My story is drawing to a close. “
Das Spiel ist ganz und gar verloren. Und dennoch wird es weitergehen
.…” The game is totally lost. And yet it will go on. The old music is dying, although it has so many offspring, vigorous and vital, that will, naturally, be hated. Still, for me, Duke is gone,Satchmo is gone, Count Basie has just barely survived a heart attack, Little Jimmy Rushing has gone the way of all flesh.…
     … anybody asks you
    who it was sang this song
,
    tell them it was …
    he’s been here, and’s gone
.
    Such is the epitaph of the little Five-by-Five. Such is the epitaph I would wish for my books.
    J.Š.
    Toronto, 1977
    *
Týden rozhlasu
, Prague, March 7, 1942.
    † One of the Ghetto Swingers, Eric Vogel, survived; now a music critic in the U.S.A., he wrote about them in an article in
Down Beat
.
    ‡ L. Dorůžka, I. Poledňák,
Československý jazz
, Prague 1967, p. 71.
    § Editor’s note: “I Won’t Take Back One Word,” published finally in 1966 as
Eine kleine Jazzmusik
. The detailed story of the intrigue surrounding
Eine kleine Jazzmusik
may be found in Josef Škvorecký’s
All the Bright Young Men and Women
, Peter Martin Associates, Toronto, 1971.
    ‖ Řešetová Lhota in the title of the Czech version of “St. Louis Blues” is the equivalent of, for example, Hicktown, Backwaterville, or Hillbillyburgh.
    a
Hudební rozhledy
III, No. 17, 1950–51, p. 23.
    b L. Dorůžka, I. Poledňák,
op. cit
., p. 102.
    c The blue shirt was the uniform of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth. Inka’s ignorance of the name of this all-pervasive Party satellite organization was just an indication of her political naïveté. One interesting note: the fellow in question, one of those whose god has failed, now lives in exile in Switzerland.

T O   S Á R A
    who knows it all
    all too well

    Give them, O mother of moths and mother of men
,
    Strength to enter the heavy world again
,
    For delicate were the moths and badly wanted
    Here in a world by mammoth figures haunted!
    TENNESSEE WILLIAMS     

    A story happens and fades and no one tells it. And yet somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle and Christmases come, that person dies and there is a new slab with a name on it in the graveyard. Two or three people, a husband, a brother, a mother, still bear the light, the legend, in their heads for a few more years and then they die too. For the children it remains only like an old film, the out-of-focus aura of a vague face. The grandchildren know nothing. And other people forget. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing
.
    But a certain building, a recreation center — once a hotel maybe, a rural inn or a boarding house — still hides the story of two people and their folly, and perhaps the shades of its characters may still be glimpsed in the social hall or in the Ping-Pong room, like the materialized images of werewolves in deserted old houses,