Music

Chicago, 1928

I am between the River and the Lake. I am between the devil and the deep blue sea. Isn’t it romantic? Here in the place where Sinatra saw a man dance with his wife? In the sweet home. In Chicago? I am here where my father was born, and where my mother was born. And where their parents were born, save the old Swede. I am back in this sandy city full of old ghosts living and dead that trail me and show their faces at the most unexpected turns, and I am thinking about a day before I was born. I am thinking about several days, actually.

There is a story that may be apocryphal, but which ought to be true, because it speaks to something about America that I wish to believe. It begins in my mind with Louis Armstrong. Not the 1960s Louis whose mugging and sweating and commercialism I grew up confused by. But the young Louis. The Louis who had come up from New Orleans six years earlier, when he was only twenty-two, his first time off the river, and who had blown the doors off of the windy city. The Louis who is smiling, sure, but it’s a smile on a fighter’s body, the body of the boy who grew up in Storyville, who was arrested as a child and sent to reform. The Louis you can hear in those Hot Five and Hot Seven records, whose playing draws the breath out of your soul, hitting rhythms, hitting notes, hitting notes of emotion, that you can hardly believe you are hearing. That Louis. It starts with him.

And he is in a hotel in the South Side of Chicago. And in my memory of this story, he has rented out the entire floor. Because he is living large – twenty-seven years old and already the king. But he has taken the floor also because of security. Because he is about to do something that he cannot imagine. That he cannot imagine, and yet cannot die without enjoying. I see him, on this hot August day in Chicago, where Augusts are often as hot as any on the Delta, in his shirt sleeves. I see him in a hardbacked chair. I see the sweat on his smooth forehead, not yet creased by time. I see those eyes, watchful and alert and always on fire. I hear the knock at the door.

And I see Bix Beiderbecke walk in. Oh, Bix. What can you say about him to someone who has no ears to hear? That listening was like sin? That it just sounded like fun? Even on the sad songs? He would have been, at this point, a little past his prime, though he would have been only twenty-five. Three years hence, he’d be gone, the alcohol and the touring and the frustration finally winning out. But I like to think that he would have been right at the top of his game this week. Because this was the prize. To play with Louis – with whom he could not share a bandstand or a recording studio or a cup of coffee. Because this was America in 1928, and blacks and whites did not do those things.

I can see Bix walking through the door, shy, though I have no reason to think he was. I see him in a suit, because that’s almost the only way I’ve ever seen him. I see him putting down his trumpet case. Louis standing up. Them shaking hands. Louis surveying him, like a fighter, and then breaking out into his famous smile. And Bix laughing, still shy, nervous, embarrassed. I can see a bottle on a table, Louis seeing Bix see it, offering him some. Bix accepting, swallowing, and sighing deeply, because it would not have been the bathtub gin he was used to. It would have been real whiskey. Because Louis was the king.

And then they played. And my heart leaps at the thought of it. At what it must have sounded like. At what magic that hotel room must have born witness to. Was it like anything the two of them had ever heard? Was it like anything we have heard since? There’s a part of me, of course, that likes to think that they pushed each other to places the rest of the world would not hear for decades. Imagine “So What?” coming out of a hotel window in August of 1928. Imagine “A Night in Tunisia”. Such playing would have had the power to charge the air, would have altered the very molecules of every breeze it drifted on, out of that window, on to the streets, changing the DNA of every living thing that it blanketed – the knowing, the unknowing, the believing or unbelieving, the hearing or unhearing, the born and the yet to be born and especially those in the very act of birth itself. Like my father, that very week, in that very city.

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