Button, Button(47)
"You've lost someone," he said.
It hit me like a belly chord
"What do you know about it, white man?"
I felt that hating pick up tempo in my guts again
"I don't know anything about it," he replied
"I only know you've lost someone
"You've told it to me with your horn a hundred times."
I felt evil crawling in my belly
"Let's get this straight," I said
"Don't hype me, man; don't give me stuff "
"Listen to me then," he said "Jazz isn't only music "It's a language too "A language born of protest
"Torn in bloody ragtime from the womb of anger and despair "A secret tongue with which the legions of abused "Cry out their misery and their troubled hates.
"This language has a million dialects and accents
"It may be a tone of bittersweetness whispered in a brass-lined throat
"Or rush of frenzy screaming out of reed mouths
"Or hammering at strings in vibrant piano hearts
"Or pulsing, savage, under taut-drawn hides "In dark-peaked stridencies it can reveal the aching core of sorrow
"Or cry out the new millennium
"Its voices are without number
"Its forms beyond statistic
"It is, in very fact, an endless tonal revolution
"The pleading furies of the damned
"Against the cruelty of their damnation
"I know this language, friend," he said.
"What about my-?" I began and cut off quick "Your-what, friend?" he inquired "Someone near to you; I know that much
"Not a woman though; your trumpet wasn't grieving for a woman loss "Someone in your family; your father maybe "Or your brother."
I gave him words that tiger-prowled behind my teeth "You're hanging over trouble, man "Don't break the thread "Give it to me straight."
So Mister Pink leaned in and laid it down "I have a sound machine," he said "Which can convert the forms of jazz "Into the sympathies which made them "If, into my machine, I play a sorrowing blues "From out the speaker comes the human sentiment "Which felt those blues
"And fashioned them into the secret tongue of jazz."
He dug the same old question stashed behind my eyes
"How do I know you've lost someone?" he asked
"I've heard so many blues and stomps and strutting jazzes
"Changed, in my machine, to sounds of anger, hopelessness and joy
"That I can understand the language now
"The story that you told was not a new one
"Did you think you were inviolate behind your tapestry of woven brass?"
"Don't hype me, man," I said
I let my fingers rigor mortis on his arm
He didn't ruffle up a hair
"If you don't believe me, come and see," he said
"Listen to my machine
"Play your trumpet into it
"You'll see that everything I've said is true."
I felt shivers like a walking bass inside my skin "Well, will you come?" he asked.
Rain was pressing drum rolls on the roof As Mister Pink turned tires onto Main Street
I sat dummied in his coupe My sacked-up trumpet on my lap Listening while he rolled off words Like Stacy runnings on a tinkle box "Consider your top artists in the genre "Armstrong, Bechet, Waller, Hines
"Goodman, Mezzrow, Spanier, dozens more both male and female "Jews and Negroes all and why?
"Why are the greatest jazz interpreters
"Those who live beneath the constant gravity of prejudice?
"I think because the scaldings of external bias
"Focus all their vehemence and suffering
"To a hot, explosive core
"And, from this nucleus of restriction
"Comes all manner of fissions, violent and slow
"Breaking loose in brief expression
"Of the tortures underneath
"Crying for deliverance in the unbreakable code of jazz."
He smiled. "Unbreakable till now," he said.
"Rip bop doesn't do it
"Jump and mop-mop only cloud the issue
"They're like jellied coatings over true response
"Only the authentic jazz can break the pinions of repression "Liberate the heart-deep mournings "Unbind the passions, give freedom to the longing essence "You understand?" he asked.
"I understand," I said, knowing why I came.
Inside the room, he flipped the light on, shut the door
Walked across the room and slid away a cloth that covered his machine
"Come here," he said
I suspicioned him of hyping me but good
His jazz machine was just a jungleful of scraggy tubes and wheels
And scumpteen wires boogity-boogity
Like a black-snake brawl
I double-o'ed the heap
"That's really in there, man," I said
And couldn't help but smile a cutting smile