between solos he chewed a wad of gum soaked in benzedrine

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.