Jazz

He discovered jazz and launched himself into it and never looked back. The notes flooded out of his saxophone, he’d bend over with the sweet pain of it and play. He learned all the tunes, spent his money from the news route on Duke Ellington and Fats Waller records like they were jewels. He graduated high school, a mediocre scholar but a scintillating, gifted musician, smothered in jazz up to his ears and breathing scales and rhythm instead of air.

He went to school, in New York City, where Ellington played with Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, the whole crowd that created that shining era that entranced him so. He was the best in the school, the protégé of jazz, his fellow students gathered around him in clumps to let the smooth ringing notes and sliding scales glide over them. He learned technical things, tone, and technique, learned trumpet and trombone. He liked the sax.

He fell in love. She was a nurse, rebellious, caught between helping others and helping herself. School by day and jazz and smoky dreams by night.

They graduated, both, and moved to New Orleans. She had family there. People later asked him if he moved for her or for jazz. He didn’t know himself. Her mama called him Louie Armstrong on the Sax. He dared himself to believe it.

He met people who played music and were doing big, grand things, important things, setting a new tune for the world and swinging right along with it. He played in clubs and restaurants, all kinds, run-down ones in alleyways and huge sparkling stages in the city. She always came.

He asked her to marry him with his mama’s ring after the show at the Carson Hotel. She gasped out a yes and squeezed him tight and told him their lives were just beginning. He could see it in her eyes, he felt it himself as the couples danced on the waxy yellow floor and the night turned starry, and he could believe it.

He began to crave fame, practicing the sax in the tiny apartment they’d pooled their meager savings to buy. Grew tired of the sparse carpeting and worn sofas and wanted records and autographs and paparazzi and the jazz to never leave him. He played nonstop, would slide home, his stomach bubbling with jazz, and find her sleeping, supper cold and on the counter. She sulked when he chose jazz over her, when he did just one more gig or one last song and she waited at home for him to ask her a question with the light in his eyes she’d seen at the Carson Hotel. She vainly eyed the small window for stars and smoky dark, but caught only snatches, glimpses.

A scout from Velvet Tone records heard his show at the New Orleans Inn and gave him a card. He called and scheduled an audition and swayed and played till his lips flapped off from making music. Velvet Tone signed him and he rushed home and told her but she asked him why he’d forgotten their anniversary and he told her he was about to be famous and buy her diamond rings and china, and he sprinted to the studio and played and played. Albums hit the shelves in early spring, and suddenly he was somebody, he was known, he was “Little Louie Armstrong” and everybody bought his saxophone songs. It was 1928; he breathed jazz instead of air and stood poised on the brink of a decade of success.

The stock market crashed and Velvet Tone crashed and his marriage crashed. She flew to her mama’s house and never looked back. Later he would see her picture in the paper he used to deliver: PRESIDENT REWARDS HEROIC NURSE. He’d scoff, so she’d done great things in the war, that was nothing, because he was playing jazz.

The year snapped by like the prick of a conductor’s baton and he holed himself up in the apartment and played all the songs off his album. The Depression swung by to the tune of Carolina in the Morning, the war serenaded Perdido. He ran out of money. He packed up and traded the china and jewelry she hadn’t taken for rides back up North, back to the city where he still felt some remnant of his young self, gasping for breath, a kid played simply for the music. He ran out of valuables somewhere in Maryland, in a suburb of Baltimore, as developments and shopping malls sprung up like mushrooms after the storm and people gained themselves back again.

He had the clothes on his back, the same suit he’d worn to that faraway audition, shrouded now by time and desperation; he had his saxophone. Nobody recorded jazz anymore, nobody listened, it was all sugary harmonies and five-beat pop songs. He felt the fame in his core, not a deep passion for it like before, but a subtle longing, regretful of what could have been.

He went around anyway, to bars and restaurants, tried for gigs and those grand stages, but all anybody wanted was barbershop quartets and singers who crooned over love they never knew and made high school girls squeal. He thought of the light in her eyes when he’d asked her to marry him, her whispered words, this is the beginning of our lives, how an entire generation had naively swayed to brisk or sultry jazz, drowning in it, believing in it. How pathetic! He wanted to crack the saxophone in half and grind it up into little pieces and melt it down for wedding rings for the next generation of fools. He had no prospects. He remembered himself, the king of the school, Little Louie on the Sax. He hated it.

It was early spring again, the same time of year that his albums had hit the shelves an eternity before. He felt like giving up, getting a job in a grocery store or coffee shop, filling orders for people who had somehow made it out. But the jazz ached in his heart and he could not.

He took up residence in front of the new shopping mall, the notes flooded out of his saxophone, he’d bend over with the sweet pain of it and play. He closed his eyes, pictured smoky dark and her bright eyes, and his stomach swooned to the music and his mind feasted on the songs of old, and shoppers threw change in his case when the notes swept down the sidewalk and pricked their modern ears, and they listened as the notes slid over them.