THE BASS SAXOPHONE
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1977 by Josef Škvorecký
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.
“Red Music” first appeared in the United States in Persea II.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Atrium Verlag, Zurich, for permission to reprint four lines from Lyrische Hausapotheke by Dr. Erich Kästner.
AG, Zurich, Switzerland 1946.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes, Copyright © 1956 by Langston Hughes. Used by permission of the publisher.
New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to use an excerpt from “Lament for the Months” from Tennessee Williams’s In the Winter of Cities. Copyright 1944 by Tennessee Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.
Emöke was originally published in Czechoslovakia by Československy spisovatel, Praha, under the title Legenda Emöke. Copyright © 1963 by Josef Škvorecký. The Bass Saxophone appeared in a volume entitled Babylónsky příběh published by Svobodné Slovo Melantrich, Václavské náměstí, Praha, under the title Bassaxofon. Copyright © 1967 by Josef Škvorecký.
English Translation first published in Canada by Anson-Cartwright Editions 1977 Toronto
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Škvorecký, Josef. The bass saxophone.
Translation of the author’s Bassaxofon and Legenda Emöke.
I. Polačková-Henley, Káča. II. Škvorecký, Josef. Legenda Emöke. 1979. III. Title.
PZ4.S619734Bas 1979 [PG5038.S527] 891.8′6′35 78–7270
eISBN: 978-0-307-83212-2
v3.1
ALSO BY JOSEF ŠKVORECKÝ
The Cowards
Miss Silver’s Past
All the Bright Young Men and Women
The Mournful Demeanor of Lt. Boruvka
TWO NOVELLAS
“But jazz is decadent bourgeois music,” I was told, for that is what the Soviet Press had hammered into Russian heads.
“It’s my music,” I said, “and I wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution.”
LANGSTON HUGHES
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Other Books by This Author
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Preface
Red Music
Emöke
The Bass Saxophone
A Note About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks to Marc Mercer for his translation of the Emöke blues, and to Eric Young and Mark Sarner for their helpful criticism and support.
In the days when everything in life was fresh — because we were sixteen, seventeen — I used to blow tenor sax. Very poorly. Our band was called Red Music, which in fact was a misnomer, since the name had no political connotations: there was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music and we, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that in jazz blue is not a color, so we called ours Red. But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did; for jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successively ruled in my native land.
What sort of political connotations? Leftist? Rightist? Racialist? Classist, Nationalist? The vocabulary of ideologists and mountebanks doesn’t have a word for it. At the outset, shortly before the Second World War when my generation experienced its musical revelation, jazz didn’t convey even a note of protest. (Whatever shortcomings the liberal republic of T. G. Masaryk may have had, it was a veritable paradise of cultural tolerance.) And no matter what LeRoi Jones says to the contrary, the essence of this music, this “way of making music,” is not simply protest. Its essence is something far more elemental: an élan vital, a forceful vitality, an explosive creative energy as breathtaking as that of any true art, that may be felt even in the saddest of blues. Its effect is cathartic.
But of course, when the lives of individuals and communities are controlled by powers that themselves remain uncontrolled — slavers, czars, führers, first secretaries, marshals, generals and generalissimos, ideologists of dictatorships at either end of the spectrum — then creative energy becomes a protest. The consumptive clerk of a workingman’s insurance company (whose heart had reportedly been moved by the plight of his employer’s beleaguered clients) undergoes a sudden metamorphosis to become a threat to closely guarded socialism. Why? Because the visions in his Castle, his Trial, his Amerika are made up of too little paper and too much real life, albeit in the guise of nonrealist literature. That is the way it is. How else explain the fact that so many titles on Senator Joe McCarthy’s index of books to be removed from the shelves of U.S. Information Service Libraries abroad are identical to many on the index issued in Prague by the Communist Party early in the seventies? Totalitarian ideologists don’t like real life (other people’s) because it cannot be totally controlled; they loathe art, the product of a yearning for life, because that, too, evades control — if controlled and legislated, it perishes. But before it perishes — or when it finds refuge in some kind of samizdat underground — art, willy-nilly, becomes protest. Popular mass art, like jazz, becomes mass protest. That’s why the ideological guns and sometimes even the police guns of all dictatorships are aimed at the men with the horns.
Red Music used to play (badly, but with the enthusiasm of sixteen-year-olds) during the reign of the most Aryan Aryan of them all and his cultural handyman, Dr. Goebbels. It was Goebbels who declared, “Now, I shall speak quite openly on the question of whether German Radio should broadcast so-called jazz music. If by jazz we mean music that is based on rhythm and entirely ignores or even shows contempt for melody, music in which rhythm is indicated primarily by the ugly sounds of whining instruments so insulting to the soul, why then we can only reply to the question entirely in the negative.”* Which was one reason we whined and wailed, rasped and roared, using all kinds of wa-wa and hat mutes, some of them manufactured by ourselves. But even then, protest was one of the lesser reasons. Primarily, we loved that music that we called jazz, and that in fact was swing, the half-white progeny of Chicago and New Orleans, what our nonblowing contemporaries danced to in mountain villages, out of reach of the Schutzpolizei, the uniformed Security Service. For even dancing was forbidden then in the Third Reich, which was in mourning for the dead at the Battle of Stalingrad.
The revelation we experienced was one of those that can only come in one’s youth, before the soul has acquired a shell from being touched by too many sensations. In my mind I can still hear, very clearly, the sound of the saxes on that old, terribly scratchy Brunswick seventy-eight spinning on a wind-up phonograph, with the almost illegible label: “I’ve Got a Guy,” Chick Webb and His Orchestra with Vocal Chorus. Wildly sweet, soaring, swinging saxophones, the lazy and unknown voice of the unknown vocalist who left us spellbound even though we had no way of knowing that this was the great, then seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald. But the message of her voice, the call of the saxes, the short wailing and weeping saxophone solo between the two vocal choruses, they all came across. Nothing could ever silence them in our hearts.
And despite Hitler and Goebbels the sweet poison of the Judeonegroid music (that was the Nazi epithet for jazz) not only endured, it prevailed — even, for a short time, in the very heart of hell, the ghetto at Terezín. The Ghetto Swingers … there is a photograph of them, an amateur snapshot, taken behind the walls of the Nazi-established ghetto during the brief wee
k that they were permitted to perform — for the benefit of the Swedish Red Cross officials who were visiting that Potemkin village of Nazism. They are all there, all but one of them already condemned to die, in white shirts and black ties, the slide of the trombone pointing diagonally up to the sky, pretending or maybe really experiencing the joy of rhythm, of music, perhaps a fragment of hopeless escapism.†
There was even a swing band in the notorious Buchenwald, made up for the most part of Czech and French prisoners. And since those were not only cruel but also absurd times, people were put behind barbed wire because of the very music that was played inside. In a concentration camp near Wiener Neustadt sat Vicherek, a guitar player who had sung Louis Armstrong’s scat chorus in “Tiger Rag” and thus, according to the Nazi judge, “defiled musical culture.”‡ Elsewhere in Germany several swingmen met a similar fate and one local Gauleiter issued an extraordinary (really extraordinary? in this world of ours?) set of regulations which were binding for all dance orchestras. I read them, gnashing my teeth, in Czech translation in the film weekly Filmový kurýr, and fifteen years later I paraphrased them — faithfully, I am sure, since they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind — in a short story entitled “I Won’t Take Back One Word”:
1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20 percent of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
2. in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
3. as to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues) ; however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
4. so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10 percent syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the music of the barbarian races and conducive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
5. strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
6. also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
7. the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
8. plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
9. musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
10. all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violoncello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.
When this unseemly Decalogue appeared in that story of mine§ in Czechoslovakia’s first jazz almanac (it was in 1958), the censors of an entirely different dictatorship confiscated the entire edition. The workers in the print shop salvaged only a few copies, one of which got into the hands of Miloš Forman, then a young graduate of the Film Academy in search of material for his first film. After several years of writing and arguing with the censors, we finally got official approval for our script, whereupon it was personally banned by the man who was at that time the power in the country, President Antonín Novotný. That was the end of our film. Why? Because the decrees of the old Gauleiter were once again in force, this time in the land of the victorious proletariat.
But back in the days of the swastika it was not just that one isolated German in the swing band at Buchenwald, not just the few imprisoned pure-Aryan swingmen — many far more reliable members of the master race were tainted with the sweet poison. How vividly I recall them, in their blue-gray Nazi uniforms, recently arrived from Holland with Jack Bulterman’s arrangement of “Liza Likes Nobody,” in exchange for copies of which we gave them the sheet music for “Deep Purple” and the next day they were off to Athens, where there were other saxophones swinging, underlined with Kansas riffs. I can see those German soldiers now, sitting in a dim corner of the Port Arthur Tavern, listening hungrily to the glowing sounds of Miloslav Zachoval’s Big Band, which was the other, far better swing band in my native town of Náchod. Vainly did I dream of becoming one of Zachoval’s swingers. Alas, I was found lacking in skill, and doomed to play with the abominable Red Music.
How naïve we were, how full of love and reverence. Because Dr. Goebbels had decided that the whining Judeonegroid music invented by American capitalists was not to be played in the territory of the Third Reich, we had a ball inventing aliases for legendary tunes so that they might be heard in the territory of the Third Reich after all. We played a fast piece — one of those forbidden “brisk compositions” — called “The Wild Bull,” indistinguishable to the naked ear from “Tiger Rag”; we played a slow tune, “Abendlied” or “Evening Song,” and fortunately the Nazi censors had never heard the black voice singing “When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls …” And the height of our effrontery, “The Song of Řešetová Lhota,” in fact “St. Louis Blues,” rang out one misty day in 1943 in eastern Bohemia, sung in Czech by a country girl, the lyrics composed so that they might elaborate on our new title for W. C. Handy’s theme song: “Řešetová Lhota … is where I go … I’m on my way … to see my Aryan folk.…” In fact, we were fortunate that the local Nazis had never seen Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, never heard the bullies sing about the “Ary-ary-ary-ary-aryans.” Neither had we, of course — “The Song of Řešetová Lhota” was simply an indigenous response to Nazism.‖
It was, like most of our songs, ostensibly the composition of a certain Mr. Jiří Patočka. You would search for his name in vain in the lists of popular composers of the time since he too was a figment of our imagination. That mythical gentleman’s large repertoire also included a tune indistinguishable from “The Casa Loma Stomp.” In our ignorance we hadn’t the faintest idea that there was a castle of that name in distant Toronto. We believed that Casa Loma was an American band leader, one of the splendid group that included Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, Andy Kirk, the Duke of Ellington (Ellington had been placed among the nobility by a Czech translator who encountered his name in an American novel and decided that this must be a member of the impoverished British aristocracy, eking out a living as a bandleader at the Cotton Club), Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller — you name them, we knew them all. And yet we knew nothing. The hours we spent racking our brains over song titles we couldn’t understand … “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” — the definition of the word “barbecue” in our pocket Webster didn’t help at all. What on earth could it mean: “walking pompously with a piece of animal carcass roasted whole”? We knew nothing — but we knew the music. It came to us on the waves of Radio Stockholm mostly, since that was the only station that played jazz and that the Nazis didn’t jam. Swedish style: four saxes, a trumpet plus rhythm — perhaps the first distinct jazz style we knew, except for big band swing. Curiously there was one film, also of Swedish provenance, that amongst all the Nazi war-propaganda films, the Pandur Trencks and Ohm Kruegers, escaped the eyes of the watchmen over the purity of Aryan culture. In translation it was entitled The Whole School Is Dancing. The original title appealed to us more, even though we understood no Swedish: Swing it, magistern! In the territory of the Third Reich, that was the movie of the war. We all fell in love with the swinging, singing Swedish girl called Alice Babs Nielsson, another reassuring indication that though we lacked
knowledge we at least had an ear for jazz: much, much later she recorded with Ellington. But that film — I must have seen it at least ten times. I spent one entire Sunday in the movie theater, through the matinee, through the late afternoon show and the evening show, inconsolably sad that there was no midnight mass of Swing it, magistern!
“Swing it, magistern, swing it!” became one of the standard pieces played at public concerts in obscure little towns in eastern Bohemia, much to the joy of fans of swing. But of course, enemies of jazz and swing were also to be found amongst our Czech contemporaries. The milder ones were the jazz conservatives to whom swing was an outlandish modern distortion. They would just boo loudly at our concerts. The radicals, the polka buffs, did more than that. They threw apple cores at us, rotten eggs, all kinds of filth, and the legendary concerts in the legendary hick towns often ended in a brawl between the polka buffs and the fans of swing. Then the band would have to flee by the back door to save their precious instruments, irreplaceable in wartime, from the wrath of the protectors of the one and only true Czech music: the polka — played, horror of horrors, on an accordion.
The polka buffs never dared throw eggs at our Ella, though. Yes, we even had our own Goddess, our Queen of Swing, Girl Born of Rhythm, Slender Girl with Rhythm at her Heels, our own Ella. She was white, of course, and her name was Inka Zemánková. She distinguished herself by singing Czech lyrics with an American accent, complete with the nasal twang so alien to the Czech language. My God, how we adored this buggering-up of our lovely language for we felt that all languages were lifeless if not buggered up a little. Inka’s theme song was something entitled “I Like to Sing Hot,” not one of Jiří Patočka’s ostensible compositions but a genuine Czech effort. The lyrics describe a swinging girl strolling down Broadway with “Harlem syncopating in the distance.” It contained several bars of scat, and concluded with the singer’s assertion, “I like to sing Hot!” This final word, sung in English, alerted the Nazi censors, and on their instructions Inka had to replace it with the equally monosyllabic expression “z not,” — a charmingly absurd revision, for although it rhymes with “hot,” the expression means exactly the opposite of singing hot music: it means singing from sheet music, from the notes.