epub or mobi
it was blues that told the story
of all the lonely cats and all the ugly whores who ever lived, blues that spoke
up for the loser lamping sunshine out of iron-grey bars and every hop-head
hooked and gone, for the bindlestiffs and the city slicers, for the country
boys in Georgia shacks and the High Yellow hipsters in Chicago slums and the
bootblacks on the corners and the fruits in New Orleans, a blues that spoke for
all the lonely, sad and anxious downers who could never speak themselves ... Hate
blew out that horn, then. Hate and fury and mad and fight, like screams and
snarls, like little razors shooting at you, millions of them, cutting, cutting
deep ... slapping and hitting and hurting with notes that don't exist and never
existed. Man! Life took a real beating! Life got groined and sliced and
belly-punched, and the horn, it didn't stop until everything had all spilled
out, every bit of the hate and mad that's built up in a man's heart.
Well, they'd gone places in one
sense. They'd gone from the New Orleans cathouses to Chicago dumps and dance
halls and clipjoints. They'd moved from one gutter to other gutters. They'd
invaded New York and brought the art as far up - or maybe down - as the
speakeasies and sidestreet drops. It hadn't been until the recent years that
jazz finally had been discovered as an art. And even this discovery, it was
beginning to be obvious, was the wrong kind of discovery. It was the wrong
discovery because jazz had been taken up by a cult. And the cult was as
violently prejudiced as the other cults which scoffed at the art. The cult
which had discovered the true jazz was convinced that the time for novelty and
experiment was over. Jazz might be a product of artistic revolution, but one
revolution was enough for it. No new upsets, please. Just play the old songs
exactly the old way. The same old songs exactly the old way. The same twenty or
thirty standards. Play them the way they're supposed to be played, the cult
indicated, and we'll sit here and decide whether you play them a little better
or a little worse than somebody else plays them the same way. And then once a
year our little magazines which are devoted to the true jazz will have a vote
by the readers and we'll publish a list of the "greatest" musicians
of the year. That was the cult.
