We were a pally bunch, tramping the streets of Peterborough, New Hampshire, yapping as we went. I think the magnificent Thulani Davis was there, the great Karl Ciesluk, David Barnes of “Barnztuff” fame, and some others. We were thirsty, and there was a place I’d heard a lot about and never seen.
When we went through the doorway, I saw a small stage on the other side of the room. No one was on it. Some skinny guy behind the bar spotted me with my guitar slung over my shoulder. I always had it with me in those days. After all, you are what you carry. Then the bar guy grabbed up a short stool, walked over to me, and put it in my hand. “Buy you a beer,” he said, giving me the once over. “Another when you’re done.” I touched the brim of my hat.
So, I figure, there I was, glue on my fingers, not knowing what I was going to play, a stranger in a stranger land where loons totter in spilt moonlight and martinets are heard but rarely seen, their fluttering like breaths and whispers into raven ears. I had some friends in the crowd. That was smart. But all I could think, all I could really think, looking out blind from the light in my eyes, was man, man-oh-man, they oughta see this Jewboy fireman when he gets the boiler hot.
Might be a little sloppy, but I can be that way. Looks like I almost forgot my own words, too. What the hell, sometimes I just make them up as I go along anyway. And I didn’t know April Bacon was sitting in the audience, recording it with her cellphone. Likely, it wouldn’t have changed anything.
Still, and though I wrote it a while ago, it’s a good song.
This is a brief reading from THE SHOEMAKER’S TALE that was performed at the University of North Florida on November 17, 2005. The video was shot with a cell phone from the audience by April Bacon.
A tune, a painting, a poem, or a story begin as something personal that emerges out of a person’s urge to say a thing by what means they can best say it. Sometimes it resonates so others, strangers, can feel at home in what was made, as though it is their own voices sounding there. After that, nothing is ever the same.
We don’t always know these moments when we’re in them. We have to look back from a distance over time to try to pick them out of memory’s soft static. But they stick with us all the same. We take them to heart, each in our own way. Often there’s a need to share the experience. Sometimes, there’s a longing to add something of our own. From the personal to the universal to the personal and on and on again. That’s the pulse of it. It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing.
I don’t know when Jazz was born. No one does. And it’s just as hard to peg that tipping point when it entered the lifeblood of our worlds. I do know that Louis Armstrong made the first recordings that listed him as bandleader on November 12, 1925. The sides recorded for Okeh Records were “My Heart” and “Cornet Chop Suey.” Johnny Dodds was on clarinet, Kid Ory on trombone, and Johnny St. Cyr played banjo. Lil Hardin-Armstrong was at the piano. That must have been a hot moment. It wasn’t mine. Not directly. But many decades later I got a taste of the cheesecake baked in that oven.
Looking Back on Louis
I had deadlines. Time was getting away from me. That’s the thing with time: the more it eludes, the more we feel it pressing. The shorter it becomes, the wider and deeper and closer its shadow. I felt that, though there was no time to think it. Bug-eyed and claustrophobic, blinkered with purpose, I scurried room-to-room looking for a book that had the quote that said the thing I could not say without it. Ken Burns’ Jazz was on the video. My wife had put it on, and I stopped to to look over my shoulder…
