THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  Far from Harlem, from Chicago, from New Orleans, uninformed and naïve, we served the sacrament that verily knows no frontiers. A nucleus existed in Prague that published an underground magazine entitled O.K. (not an abbreviation of “Ol Korekt” but of Okružní Korespondence, i.e., Circulating Correspondence). Pounded out on a typewriter with about twenty almost illegible carbon copies, this underground publication (really underground, its very possession punishable by a stint in a concentration camp) was our sole source of reliable information. It was distributed through the Protectorate by lovely krystýnky on bicycles, the bobby-soxers of those perished times. I can see them in their longish skirts, dancing and “dipping” in the taverns of remote villages, with one fan always standing guard at the door, on the lookout for the German police. When a Schupo appeared over the horizon, a signal was given, and all the krystýnky and their boyfriends, the “dippers,” would scurry to sit down to glasses of green soda-pop, listening piously to the Viennese waltz that the band had smoothly swung into. When the danger had passed, everyone jumped up, the Kansas riffs exploded, and it was swing time once again.

  Then the Great War ended. In the same movie theater where I had once sat through three consecutive showings of Swing it, magistern! I sat through three screenings of a lousy print of Sun Valley Serenade, with Russian subtitles. I was impervious to the Hollywood plot, but hypnotized by Glenn Miller. The print had found its way to our town with the Red Army, the film badly mangled by frequent screenings at the battlefront, the damaged soundtrack adding Goebbelsian horrors to “In the Mood” and “Chattanooga Choo-choo.” Nonetheless, I had the splendid feeling that, finally, the beautiful age of jazz had arrived.

  My mistake. It took only a lean three years before it was back underground again. New little Goebbelses started working diligently in fields that had been cleared by the old demon. They had their own little Soviet bibles, primarily the fascistoid Music of Spiritual Poverty by a V. Gorodinsky and I. Nestyev’s Dollar Cacophony. Their vocabulary was not very different from that of the Little Doctor, except that they were, if possible, even prouder of their ignorance. They characterized jazz and jazz-inspired serious music by a rich assortment of derogatory adjectives: “perverted,” “decadent,” “base,” “lying,” “degenerate,” etc. They compared the music to “the moaning in the throat of a camel” and “the hiccuping of a drunk,” and although it was “the music of cannibals,” it was at the same time invented by the capitalists “to deafen the ears of the Marshallized world by means of epileptic, loudmouthed compositions.”a Unfortunately, these Orwellian masters soon found their disciples among Czechs, who in turn — after the fashion of disciples — went even further than their preceptors, declaring wildly that jazz was aimed at “annihilating the people’s own music in their souls.” Finally the aggressive theoreticians even organized a concert of “model” jazz pieces composed to order for the Party’s cultural division. It was an incredible nightmare. Bandleader Karel Vlach, the greatest among Czech pioneers of swing, sat in the front row, going from crimson to ashen and from ashen to crimson again, probably saying a prayer in his soul to Stan Kenton. Beside him sat an unholy trinity of Soviet advisors on jazz (led by, of all men, Aram Khachaturian, colleague of Prokofiev and Shostakovitch), gloomy, silent, and next to them a senile choirmaster using a hearing aid. And yet not even the emasculated musical monster presented to them satisfied the Soviet advisors. They criticized its “instrumental makeup” and described it as “the music of a vanishing class.” Finally, the old choirmaster rose, and we heard him add the final chord: “Now, take the trumpet. Such an optimistic-sounding instrument! And what do those jazz people do? They stuff something down its throat and right away it sounds despicable, whining, like a jungle cry!”

  After that Vlach was unable to refrain from a few heretical remarks: if they didn’t give him something better than Stan Kenton, said he, he would keep on playing Stan Kenton. Which is perhaps what he did, in the traveling circus to which he was shortly thereafter relegated along with his entire band. The Party also proclaimed the creation of an “official” model jazz band, and in the Youth Musical Ensembles the most avid ideologists even tried to replace the hybrid-sounding (therefore supposedly bourgeois) saxophones with the nonhybrid (therefore more proletarian) violoncello — but it takes at least five years to learn to play the cello passably, while a talented youth can master the saxophone in a month, and what he wants to do is play, play, play. But ideological thinking follows paths free from the taint of reality. In place of Kenton, they pushed Paul Robeson at us, and how we hated that black apostle who sang, of his own free will, at open-air concerts in Prague at a time when they were raising the Socialist leader Milada Horáková to the gallows, the only woman ever to be executed for political reasons in Czechoslovakia by Czechs, and at a time when great Czech poets (some ten years later to be “rehabilitated” without exception) were pining away in jails. Well, maybe it was wrong to hold it against Paul Robeson. No doubt he was acting in good faith, convinced that he was fighting for a good cause. But they kept holding him up to us as an exemplary “progressive jazzman,” and we hated him. May God rest his — one hopes — innocent soul.

  But in the early fifties, although the bishops of Stalinist obscurantism damned the “music of the cannibals,” they had one problem. Its name was Dixieland. A type of the cannibal-music with roots so patently folkloristic and often (the blues) so downright proletarian that even the most Orwellian falsifier of facts would be hard put to deny them. Initiates had already encountered isolated recordings of Dixieland during the war, and after it ended a group of youths heard the Graeme Bell Dixieland Band performing at a Youth Festival in Prague. They created the first Czechoslovak Dixieland Band, and soon there was a proliferation of Louisiana sounding names: Czechoslovak Washboard Beaters, Prague City Stompers, Memphis Dixie, and dozens of others. Uncle Tom music was really the only form of jazz suffered at the depressing congregations called youth entertainments, where urban girls in pseudo-national costumes got up and sang bombastic odes to Stalin in the style of rural yodeling.

  An apostle of Dixieland, Emanuel Uggé, took the Czechoslovak Dixieland on the road. Once again, obscure little towns in the northeast of Bohemia resounded with loud syncopations, wound around with the boring, hyperscholarly commentaries of this devoted Doctor Angelicus of Dixieland who, for the ears of the informers attending the concert, succeeded in interpreting the most obscene tune from the lowest speakeasy in Chicago as an expression of the Suffering Soul of the Black People, waiting only for Stalin and his camps, where re-education was carried out directly for the other world. But it turned out that going on the road with Dixieland was a double-edged move. On the one hand, it kept the knowledge of jazz alive, but on the other hand what the more enlightened and therefore less brazenly orthodox supervisors in Prague had passed off as a “form of Negro folklore,” the true-believing provincial small-fry recognized for what it was: an effort to “smuggle Western decadence into the minds of our workers.… Such orchestras conceal their vile intentions in music that has no educational merit,” says a letter from the Town Council of Hranice to the Management of the Hranice Cement Workers. “Eighty percent of what the ensemble played was Westernist, cosmopolite music which had an eccentric effect, going so far as to cause one of the soldiers to come up on the stage and do a tap dance.”b Horrors! A soldier in the Czech Red Army, tap-dancing to some Nick La Rocca tune! Years later I recalled this Harlemized soldier when I read in an article by Vasily Aksionov (author of the epochal A Ticket to the Stars — but who in the West has heard of him? Who knows that the liberating effect of this novel, written in Moscow slang, had perhaps a more profound influence on contemporary Russian prose than Doctor Zhivago?) about a big band that existed somewhere in Siberia during Stalin’s last days, and played “St. Louis Blues,” “When the Saints,” “Riverside Blues.” … Another chapter in the legends of apostles who were often martyrs.

  Even Inka, our idolized Queen of Swing, be
came one. After the war she had put aside her career in order to study singing professionally. Five years later, she decided it was time to make her comeback. The concert agency booked her for a Sunday matinee at the Lucerna Hall in Prague. She sang one song just before the intermission and was to sing another one after. It was an old swing tune, and while Inka’s sense of rhythm had remained, her vocal range had doubled. She was rewarded by thunderous applause, gave them an encore, and this time sang one whole chorus in scat. The applause was endless. “When I stumbled offstage,” she told me years later, “I thought to myself — there, I’ve made it again! But there was a guy there, in one of those blue shirts, you know, I think they called them the Young Guard,c all scowling and furious, and he yelled at me, ‘That’s it! Out! I can assure you you’ll never sing another note in public.’ And in fact, that’s what happened, they didn’t even let me sing my second number after the intermission.” At that moment I couldn’t help thinking about Vicherek and his scat chorus in “Tiger Rag” during the Nazi occupation.

  However, with the passage of years political events threatened the unlimited rule of the provincial small-fry (and the blue-shirted Communist Youth storm trooper) and also the validity of their musicological opinions. We began to consider how we might get permission for the Czechoslovak Dixieland Band (now metamorphosed into the Prague Dixieland Band) to perform in public again — and found unexpected and unintended help from the U.S. An American bass player named Herbert Ward had asked for political asylum in Czechoslovakia, “delivering another serious blow to American imperialism” the Party Press announced. It also said that Ward used to play with Armstrong. We immediately looked him up in his hotel in Prague and talked him into playing a role of which he was totally unaware and which is referred to in Stalinist slang as “shielding off.” In fact, we used him ruthlessly. We quickly put together a jazz revue entitled Really the Blues (title stolen from Mezz Mezzrow), printed Herb’s super-anti-American statement in the program, provided the Prague Dixieland to accompany Herb’s home-made blues about how it feels to be followed by American secret police agents (a particularly piquant blues in a police state where everybody knew the feeling only too well), dressed his sexy dancer-wife Jacqueline in original sack dresses borrowed from a Prague matron who had lived it up in Paris in the twenties, then settled down to enjoy her dancing of the eccentric, decadent Charleston. Since Herb’s terribly shouted blues had anti-American lyrics and because Jackie’s skin was not entirely white the authorities didn’t dare protest, and left us alone with our towering success. The show finally folded as a result of difficulties of a more American nature. Herb and Jacqueline wanted more money. The producer, bound by state norms, was unable to give them more, and Really the Blues died a premature death. Later on, Herb and Jacqueline went the way of many American exiles: back home to the States, the land where the words “you can’t go home again” generally seem not to apply. Apply they do, though, for other countries, the ones that send their own writers into exile, to prison, or to their death.

  Really the Blues was the end of a beginning. Jazz had grown to resemble the Mississippi, with countless rivulets fanning out from its delta. The Party found other targets: Elvis Presley, little rock’n’roll groups with guitars electrified and amplified on home workbenches, with a new crop of names recalling faraway places — Hell’s Devils, Backside Slappers, Rocking Horses — new outcries from the underground. By the end of the fifties, a group of young people had been arrested, and some of them sentenced to prison for playing tapes of “decadent American music” and devoting themselves to the “eccentric dancing” of rock’n’roll. (Again the spirit of Vicherek was present at their trial.) And because the mass of young people had turned to follow other stars, jazz proper, whether mainstream or experimental, was no longer considered dangerous, and so the sixties were a time of government-sponsored International Jazz Festivals. The stage at Lucerna Hall in Prague echoed with the sounds of Don Cherry, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ted Curson.… We applauded them, although, for the most part, this was no longer the music we had known and loved. We were the old faithfuls. The broad appeal of the saxes was gone, either this was esoteric music or we had simply grown old.… Jazz is not just music. It is the love of youth which stays firmly anchored in one’s soul, forever unalterable, while real live music changes, forever the calling of Lunceford’s saxophones.…

  That was when I wrote “The Bass Saxophone,” and I was writing about fidelity, about the sole real art there is, about what one must be true to, come hell or high water; what must be done to the point of collapse, even if it be a very minor art, the object of condescending sneers. To me literature is forever blowing a horn, singing about youth when youth is irretrievably gone, singing about your homeland when in the schizophrenia of the times you find yourself in a land that lies over the ocean, a land — no matter how hospitable or friendly — where your heart is not, because you landed on these shores too late.

  For the steel chariots of the Soviets swung low, and I left. Jazz still leads a precarious existence in the heart of European political insanity, although the battlefield has shifted elsewhere. But it is the same old familiar story: a specter is again haunting Eastern Europe, the specter of rock, and all the reactionary powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it — Brezhnev and Husák, Suslov and Honecker, East German obscurantists and Czech police-spies. Lovely new words have emerged from the underground, like the krystýnky and the “dippers” of the Nazi era: now there are Manichky, “little Marys” for longhaired boys, undrooshy, from the Czechified pronunciation of the word “underground,” for rock fans of both sexes. Anonymous people hold underground Woodstocks in the same old obscure hick towns, gatherings often ruthlessly broken up by police, followed by the arrest of participants, their interrogation, their harassment, all the joys of living in a police state.

  And so the legend continues … and the chain of names. The Ghetto Swingers, the nameless bands of Buchenwald, the big band in Stalin’s Siberia, the anonymous jazz messengers in Nazi uniforms crisscrossing Europe with their sheet music, the Leningrad Seven — nameless aficionados who in the Moscow of the sixties translated, from the Czech translation of original American material, into Russian samizdat the theoretical anthology The Face of Jazz — and other buffs and bands, even more obscure, blowing away for all I know even in Mao’s China. To their names new ones must be added, the Plastic People of the Universe, and DG307, two underground groups of rock musicians and avant-garde poets whose members have just been condemned (at the time I am writing this) to prison in Prague for “arousing disturbance and nuisance in an organized manner.” That loathsome vocabulary of hell, the vocabulary of Goebbels, the vocabulary of murderers.…

  My story is drawing to a close. “Das Spiel ist ganz und gar verloren. Und dennoch wird es weitergehen.…” The game is totally lost. And yet it will go on. The old music is dying, although it has so many offspring, vigorous and vital, that will, naturally, be hated. Still, for me, Duke is gone, Satchmo is gone, Count Basie has just barely survived a heart attack, Little Jimmy Rushing has gone the way of all flesh.…

  … anybody asks you

  who it was sang this song,

  tell them it was …

  he’s been here, and’s gone.

  Such is the epitaph of the little Five-by-Five. Such is the epitaph I would wish for my books.

  J.Š.

  Toronto, 1977

  * Týden rozhlasu, Prague, March 7, 1942.

  † One of the Ghetto Swingers, Eric Vogel, survived; now a music critic in the U.S.A., he wrote about them in an article in Down Beat.

  ‡ L. Dorůžka, I. Poledňák, Československý jazz, Prague 1967, p. 71.

  § Editor’s note: “I Won’t Take Back One Word,” published finally in 1966 as Eine kleine Jazzmusik. The detailed story of the intrigue surrounding Eine kleine Jazzmusik may be found in Josef Škvorecký’s All the Bright Young Men and Women, Peter Martin Associates, Toronto, 1971.

  ‖ Ř
ešetová Lhota in the title of the Czech version of “St. Louis Blues” is the equivalent of, for example, Hicktown, Backwaterville, or Hillbillyburgh.

  a Hudební rozhledy III, No. 17, 1950–51, p. 23.

  b L. Dorůžka, I. Poledňák, op. cit., p. 102.

  c The blue shirt was the uniform of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth. Inka’s ignorance of the name of this all-pervasive Party satellite organization was just an indication of her political naïveté. One interesting note: the fellow in question, one of those whose god has failed, now lives in exile in Switzerland.

  T O S Á R A

  who knows it all

  all too well

  Give them, O mother of moths and mother of men,

  Strength to enter the heavy world again,

  For delicate were the moths and badly wanted

  Here in a world by mammoth figures haunted!

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  A story happens and fades and no one tells it. And yet somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle and Christmases come, that person dies and there is a new slab with a name on it in the graveyard. Two or three people, a husband, a brother, a mother, still bear the light, the legend, in their heads for a few more years and then they die too. For the children it remains only like an old film, the out-of-focus aura of a vague face. The grandchildren know nothing. And other people forget. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing.