Half-Blood Blues (4 page)

Caspars wanted talking heads to blab for ninety minutes on every last shred of the kid’s existence. We all know Buddy Bolden died nuts in the bughouse, and Bix Beiderbecke, he died of the DTs – but Falk? By all accounts he passed on right after being released from an Austrian work camp. Mauthausen. Except no one knows how, or when, or where. Knowing he died after being in a camp ain’t the same as knowing the nature of his death. If it was his suffering finally got to him or its sudden absence, the world strangely greyer afterwards with its safe, empty routines. Even less can you know what all it meant for him, if the end was a welcome thing, or the final outrage.

Hell, there wasn’t even a grave.

I ain’t had the least desire to be filmed last year, and even less to go see the damn picture in Berlin. It was only
after
Chip had Caspars arrange our tickets to Berlin for the premiere that he mentioned, just all casual, like it wasn’t nothing, that the film would be debuting at a bigger festival: the Hieronymus Falk Festival. A weekend-long celebration of the great trumpeter’s life. With the east now open, they could offer all kinds of walking tours of our old haunts. ‘Come on, Sid,’ Chip had said. ‘Everyone’s going: Wynton Marsalis, even old Grappelli. It’ll be something.’

I refused to go. Of course I did. Then slowly, over the last few months, Chip had talked me into it. The things you do for friends in old age. Maybe it’s cause you know you won’t have to suffer them much longer.

‘So what is it?’ I said. ‘Out with it now. I got a list of pressing things needs doing. My TV needs watching. Damn thing’s been off a whole two hours. It’s unnatural.’

Chip shrugged. ‘Aw. You ain’t going to believe me.’

‘I expect that’s right.’

He shuffled his feet. ‘I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.’

‘You just stalling now. What is it?’

But I could tell something was in him, and it was big.

‘You want to know? You really want to know?’ He leaned in, his face going totally serious. ‘Sid. The kid is alive.’

Seem like a whole damn minute passed. Then I let out a sharp laugh, my head swinging back to hit the headrest.

‘I’m not kidding, boy,’ Chip continued. ‘He’s alive and living up north Poland.’

‘This ain’t funny, Chip.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I mean it, it ain’t funny. What is it, really?’

‘I ain’t lying, brother. It’s the truth.’

‘Hell, boy. What’s the matter with you? You jump back on that old horse again?’

His face darkened, and I known I’d gone too far. But I was angry now too.

‘You don’t got nothing else to tell me? For real?’

He just sat there, the empty glass in his hand. I watched him, the smile sitting dryly on my lips. A fly’s dim whine surfaced on the air, like the sound of distant machinery.

Sometimes Chip’s jokes is just too goddamned much. This new one, it was downright spiteful.

He made a pained face. ‘What I got to do to convince you?’

I shook my head.

‘What I got to say? I am one-hundred percent serious, Sidney.’

‘Your lips is still moving, brother.’

‘Tell me what I can say.’

‘It’s what you
can’t
say. Shut up.’ I rose to my feet, the springs of my recliner squealing. I brought my hard gaze to rest on him. I looked at his hands, at the yellowish, unclean tinge of his fingernails. ‘Brother, I really got to get on with my day.’

Chip nodded, but continued to sit. His expression was unreadable as he stared at me. ‘I guess you ain’t ready for it. I mean, I guess it’s a lot all at once. But, hell,
Sidney
.
Think
about it. After the Falk Festival, you and me, we could rent a car and drive on over to Stettin. Since we’ll already be in Europe anyway. Or we take the train, if it ain’t too long.’

I felt sick. The way he kept this up, it was making my nerves radiate. ‘And how is it that of everyone on earth, you’re the only one who knows about this? Hiero alive?
Poland
? You sure you ain’t going senile, brother?’ I wondered suddenly if there wasn’t something really wrong with him. See, five years ago Chip spent some time ‘resting’. He wasn’t just tired. Some dame found him in his PJs and slippers sitting in the Paris metro at four in the morning. He didn’t say a word for three months, then come on out of the hospital perfectly normal, walking back into his life. I know, I know. We getting old.

‘Chip,’ I said.

Chip lit right up, as if he been waiting for me to really engage with him. ‘I got a letter, Sid, I never told you about it. Was maybe three months ago. I’d just got back from my Italy–Greece tour, I was tired as all hell, and there it was, just this plain brown envelope, this plain brown paper. Well, I opened it, and damn if it wasn’t from him, something like ten sentences long, but definitely from him, and it ain’t said much, just that he’d just heard all about the festival and would we visit him. Terribly spooky. It was enough to make your toenails grow backwards.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Then a second one come two days ago, saying basically the same thing. And then I remembered I hadn’t told you about the first one.’

‘Letters,’ I said.

‘That’s right.’

‘What makes you think they’re from him?’

Chip glanced up at me, looking suddenly old.

‘Your cigarillo,’ I said.

He blinked and looked at where it was burning down between his fingers. He crushed it out in the ashtray.

‘Someone’s playing a joke on you, Chip. Or else you cracked again.’

‘I ain’t cracked, Sid.’

‘Uh-huh. And where is these letters?’

Chip scowled. ‘I knew you’d ask that. Truth is, brother, I got so upset I ate them. Tore them up and ate them. Out of pure nerves.’

I said nothing.

‘I’m kidding,’ he said uneasily. ‘Jesus, Sid, come on. The letters, they at home. In a stack of invitations asking me to play the world over.’

‘You didn’t think to bring them?’

He give me a nervous smile. ‘Well, them invitations wasn’t for you, brother.’

‘You think this is funny?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No it ain’t.’

I frowned. ‘You know what I think?’ But I didn’t finish. Seeing him there I felt something like despair and just couldn’t go on with it. I picked his glass up off the floor, went in, set it on the kitchen counter. Then walking on down the front hall, I tugged his coat from the hook, and stood there holding it out for him. The fabric like butter to the touch.

He rose up slow from his chair, wheezing at the effort. Coming over to me, he gathered up the coat with what I suppose he thought was dignity. ‘I guess you got a lot of packing to do,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ll let you get on with it.’

‘I guess you will,’ I said.

‘You been married how many times?’ he muttered.

I said nothing. I opened the door for him.

He went out into the mouldy stairwell – with its glaring red emergency exits, its carpets so worn now nothing but dirt held them together – and just stood there, as if waiting for something more. ‘See you on the plane?’ he said.

It seemed almost sad. I closed the door in his face.

Chip goddamn Jones. Holy hell, could he beat the life out them drums. Even back in Weimar, even as a kid, the man was made for greatness. And onstage beside him, playing my upright with all the fire I could muster, what did it matter if I was merely, as the critics said, ‘
solid and dependable on the back shelf’
?

It’s no exaggeration to say that of all the gents who played in our band, I become the least famous. I ain’t never made it. Now Chip, Chip’s reputation as one of the great American drummers was – to put it in the language of commerce we all so fluent in these days – it was well-earned but cost him much. The man damn near ruined himself. I only thank god he was so disciplined back then, that we got the best of his playing on that recording. That I got the best of it.

See,
Half Blood Blues, 3 mins 33 secs
, is almost all I got out of that time. I ain’t sore about it. Ain’t no glory made from being
dependable
. But it started Chip’s career a second time. Jolted the man awake again. And, well, it made Hiero one of the most famous jazz trumpeters of his generation.

The kid’s existence might’ve been a fiction we’d all cooked up if that disc hadn’t survived. Today you ain’t no kind of horn player you don’t acknowledge some debt to Hieronymus Falk. He was one of the pioneers: a German Louis Armstrong, if you will. Wynton Marsalis praised Falk as one of the reasons he started playing at all: ‘Hearing Falk – man, that was it. It just blew my mind out. I was just a kid, but even then I knew I was hearing genius. His brilliance was that obvious.’ Even fellows who ain’t never played jazz understood he was the man. Punk guitarists, avant-garde cellists, even tootsie-pop songbirds was all drawing on him. I heard a riff on NPR the other day had Hiero all over it.

But the kid could’ve been lost to history easy as anything. That’s what gets to me. The chance in it all. It all started up again in a small French town used to be in Vichy. This dark apartment, it was being renovated, see – we’re talking the early sixties here – and after days of tearing up the walls, the contractor discovered what looked like shrapnel deep inside the crumbled plaster. Just this shiny thing gleaming through, like a dark coin in dirty snow. It was a dinged-up steel box. And inside, hell, was the five discs made us so famous in Berlin, along with one warped, half-baked disc with no label. Turned out Sir Vichy, long-dead but once a prominent Nazi cog, he’d loved jazz enough to hide them away. The contractor took the box to his university prof brother, who gave it to some French classical musicologist, who – out of carelessness, or contempt – left the box in a filing cabinet in his home office. It sat there five, maybe six years, until he died. Then his Berlin-based daughter arrived, a professional mime so I’m told but that don’t matter. It don’t flavour the story. She found the box in her papa’s cabinet, and took it to a different musicologist, this one back in Berlin. And after just one listen to the unlabelled disc, he declared it the rawest kind of genius.

Well, hold on to your hats. So this Berlin scholar, he starts digging. And once in the mud he starts seeing similarities between the five Hot-Time discs and the warped, genius one. In some ways it sounds like the same band, just pared down, but. Well, there’s just something more torrid, more intelligent, stranger,
hotter
about that phantom disc. Not that the Hot-Time Swingers wasn’t good. Once upon a time we was the
stuff
. Played the greatest clubs of Europe, our five recordings as famous as anything. We had fans across the continent, played Austria and Switzerland and Sweden and Hungary and even Poland. Only reason we ain’t never gigged in France was cause Ernst, a proud son of a bitch, he held a war-based grudge. Lost it soon enough, when old Germany started falling apart. But before that our band was downright gold, all six of us: Hieronymus Falk on trumpet; Ernst ‘the Mouth’ von Haselberg on clarinet; Big Fritz Bayer on alto sax; Paul Butterstein on piano; and, finally, us, the rhythm boys – Chip Jones on drums and yours truly thumbing the upright. We was a kind of family, as messed-up and dysfunctional as any you could want.

So the scholar digs all this up. But then he gets stuck, unsure of himself. Right away he knows it’s old Hiero on lead trumpet. Well, congratulations, he wins a point. It takes him a couple weeks to decide it’s me on bass and Chip on drums. Ooh, you on a roll now, boy. But then he can’t fathom the second trumpet at all, assumes it’s got to be Ernst the Mouth. Seems the old owl read somewhere that despite Ernst’s preference for the licorice stick, he was also an able trumpeter. (False false false. Old Ernst played trumpet like Monet traded stocks.) And man, he can’t figure for the life of him why the other Hot-Timers ain’t on the recording.

Now, he wasn’t all wrong. He does discover Paul was arrested in ’39 and died in Sachsenhausen. He figures out Chip and me returned to America on the New-York bound
SS St. John
. That the kid was arrested in Paris and taken to Mauthausen via Saint-Denis. But where’s Big Fritz? And where did Ernst disappear to after the recording? All mysteries.

The musicologist’s essays caught the eye of John Hammond Jr, that jazz Columbus who discovered Billie and Ella. Hammond was then a talent scout for Columbia, signing cats like Aretha, Bob and Leonard. He tracked down the disc in Berlin. And to hear Hammond tell it, our recording damn near made an amnesiac of him. We blown every last thought out of his mind. When he finally come to (don’t you love how these exec types talk?), he known he needed to do three things. One: convince Columbia to remaster and release the recording with huge distribution. Two: track down those of us ain’t dead yet. Three: tour us Hot-Time Swingers to fame, fortune and all that damned et cetera.

It was Louis helped him find me and Chip. Louis Armstrong. See, Armstrong known a thing or two, and despite hating Hammond he penned the man a letter setting things straight. That was most definitely not Ernst von Haselberg on second trumpet, he wrote, what a fool idea. If he had to guess, it was probably Kentucky’s own Bill Coleman. He explained the recording was based on a popular German song whose name escaped him. He also told him that me and Chip was probably living back in Baltimore, check there. He ain’t said nothing else, gave no details about how he might know any of this. Sure Hammond wrote him back. But not two days after posting the letter it was announced in the news that old Satchmo had died. Hammond found me and Chip in the
phonebook
.

Chip wasn’t shy. He said he didn’t know how Armstrong known all that. And he got me to agree to Hammond’s record deal – if it proved kosher with Coleman, that is – though I told him no way in hell would the Hot-Time Swingers ever go to tour. We’d known for years that Ernst, Big Fritz and Paul was all dead. Word gets back. And Hiero, well, there just wasn’t no
Half Blood Blues
without the kid. Cause it was his piece, see – he’d been the frontman, had written the damned thing in his own blood and spit. He had that massive sound, wild and unexpected, like a thicket of flowers in a bone-dry field. Ain’t no replacing that. And anyhow, Chip and me had no taste for resurrecting all that. Not after what had happened.