“What’s it like listening to jazz with no white people around?” he asked, apropos of nothing except that Horace Silver and me were both black and he wasn’t.
I recall my face in the side-view mirror. Forlorn. Fed up. Homesick. I wish I hadn’t been so offended by Lars’s curiosity. I wish that, like he and most other cultural critics, I believed in the mystique and exclusivity of Negro expression.
“You know what happens when you listen to jazz when there’s only black people around?”
Lars stiffened excitedly in his seat, his hands tightening around the steering wheel. I cleared my throat of sarcasm and hocked a spit wad of derision into the street.
“Well, if there’s just the right amount of barbecue sauce on the ribs and mentholated smoke in the air, we pass around the ‘jungle juice,’ a fruity, tribal, hallucinogenic Kool-Aid-based beverage, and wait for Coltrane, Clifford Brown, or some other goateed shaman to hit that perfect flatted fifth, sending us all into a collective trance state that awakens the dormant recombinant gris-gris gene in our mitochondrial DNA, thereby catapulting us into the fifth dimension where we surrey down to a stoned soul picnic, rejoicing in the cessation of the racist phenomenological world and attainment of Negro nirvana that for me, ironically, is absent any other Negroes.”
“Fuck you.”
“You asked. Next time I’ll tell you about how whenever two black quarterbacks face each other in a football game, black America gets a collective migraine because we don’t know which team to cheer for.”
At least Lars was curious about the appeal of jazz to black folk; for most observers, such ponderation is akin to contemplating why gorillas like bananas. The attractiveness of jazz to the nonblack is well documented in publicly funded documentaries where experts speak of jazz in the past tense. They look authoritatively into the camera and ingratiate themselves with the Man by saying things like, “White people were hearing something in jazz that says something deeply about their experience. I’m not sure that it would have been this way if we were not a country of immigrants . . . so many people felt kind of displaced . . . I think that was part of its amazing appeal, was how it spoke to feeling out of sort and out of joint and maladjusted.”*
What hogwash. Does my fondness for classical music make me well adjusted? Besides, people who are really fucked up don’t turn to jazz; they turn to heroin, opium, whiskey, and Vonnegut.
Lars turned up the radio. A bouncy yet vacuous tune that I couldn’t quite place replaced the Horace Silver. The music didn’t fill the air so much as pass through it. The song tried hard to be jazz, to be noble, to be American. The band wasn’t playing jazz so much as it was playing the history of jazz. I said something I rarely say about any piece of music.
“I have no idea who this is.”
Lars started to laugh, but a look of concern quickly reconfigured his face.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You’re not fucking with me?”
“No,” I insisted, staring down the radio dial as if that would give me a clue.
The trumpet player’s recording levels were set a shade higher than the rest of the band, so I figured he was the leader. He lit into a bewailing tremolo. His technique was exquisite. The tone had the crisp dryness of a nice house sake, but there was a sterility to his phrasing that left me feeling empty and used.
Lars looked at his watch and, taking his hands off the wheel, pretended to write an obituary on the palm of his hand.
“Tonight, at five fifty-seven P.M. on a warm October evening, the American Negro was officially declared dead. His passing will be mourned by all who’ve enjoyed his musical precocity.”
“This time, fuck you.”
Lars drove with his knees better than I did with my hands. He’d eased the car into a fairly sharp turn, merging into traffic with a smile and peace sign for the Renault he’d almost side-swiped. The song and Lars forged intrepidly on.
“When I reviewed this record, the best description I could come up with was ‘nondescript.’ I was listening to it and completely forgot it was on. You know, when I review a good jazz album my neighbors’ kids come running into the flat, hands over their ears, screaming, ‘Was ist das Herr Lars? Was ist das?’ begging to know the name of the strange sounds coming from my living room. This time they stayed at home. Frau Junker, the elderly woman who lives across the hall, was the only one listening. In the middle of a solo she rang my bell, and when I opened the door, she says, ‘It’s a shame about the black man. I miss them,’ and returns to her business.”
Lars wouldn’t take the wheel. Pissed off that blackness was dead, he sat there with his arms folded and a Fritz Lang monocle squint on his face.
“Wynton Marsalis,” I said suddenly, pounding the dashboard in disgust. “That’s who this is.”
I should have known sooner; the tempo’s self-important braggadocio was a dead giveaway. Marsalis, New Orleans born and New York praised, is jazz’s most famous living musician. He’s been around for years, but until that night I’d never heard one note of his astringent horn in public. I’d never seen one of his CDs in a poolroom jukebox or seen a spry, elderly, know-it-all black man hanging out in front of the supermarket, snapping his fingers and whistling one of his melodies to pass the time. He’s a middle-aged child prodigy to whom everyone gives plaudits, but no one plays.
The tune, like most contrivances of the black telegentsia, seemed lost, a corny cacophonic search among the ruins of a romanticized African history for a self-affirming excuse to love being black. However, Wynton’s pretentious narcissistic nigrescence couldn’t fool me.* The pentatonic scaling and the repetition of the ninth through twelfth bars belied an underlying skittishness, and the song flitted aimlessly about like a flock of canaries that have flown into a room and can’t find their way out. If I had had a sack of breadcrumbs and sprinkled them on the car floor, his cawing notes would’ve fluttered from his trumpet one by one, landed at my feet, and begged for attention. The thunderclap of an Art Blakey rim shot would’ve scattered the song into nothingness, leaving nothing but muted airs and some unresolved psychosexual issues with Mother Africa.
I hate Wynton Marsalis in the same manner Rommel hated Hitler. Whenever I hear Marsalis’s trumpet playing I feel like the Desert Fox forced to come to grips with the consequences of totalitarianism after the war has been all but lost. At least Rommel had Wagner. All I’ve got is Wynton. His musical Valkyries arrive not on winged steeds but astride caged birds.
Wynton Marsalis reminds me that I was born wearing the wrong uniform. That I’m a Negro-Nazi who, being only a DJ and not a general, politician, or movie director, is at best a functionary or house-party gauleiter. At the tribunal I will not claim that during the culture wars I was deceived by my superiors and had no knowledge of the camps. I will plead guilty to the charge of crimes against humanity. Admit that I was a deceiver. A trickster whose greatest transgressions were kick-starting the strip-club putsch of 1989 by giving voice to the earliest in Afro-fascist rap (Young MC, JJ Fad, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince) and knowing of the existence of the death camps: the University of California at Berkeley, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Lyricist Lounge, Naropa, Def Jam and Bad Boy Records, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and that Auschwitz of free thought, Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The song labored on, Wynton’s band, like the critics, playing in the past tense. I began to feel a wave of black conformity wash over me and I felt the need to remind myself that oppression didn’t start with Kunta Kinte and that the trains probably ran on time before Hitler. A yawn that I didn’t bother to stifle left my lips.
Modern jazz, like the modern man, was devoid of funk, devoid of mystery. Maybe what Wynton’s band needed was a maladjusted white cat, a Bix, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Adam Yauch, or an F. Scott Fitzgerald to give it some fervor. That way they could stop playing with a sense of entitlement and start playing with the daring birthed by vicariousness—but these days there’s never
a Gene Krupa around when you need one.
The existentialists say the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the jungles of Mauritania can cause a hurricane in the plains of Kansas, but a high C from Wynton Marsalis’s trumpet doesn’t even change your mood, much less your mind. And I don’t know whether or not Marsalis’s music is an allegory for race, American democracy, or black fascism, but I do know the Schwa’s music is anarchy. It’s Somalia. It’s the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s Albert Einstein’s hair.
When we arrived back at my place I took out the chicken-fucking song and wiggled it in Doris’s face, indicating that I wanted to play it. Doris shook her head. That was our song. Our little free-jazz secret. I popped it into the VCR anyway. Lars was perusing the stacks of books that rose from the floor of my dingy apartment like paperback stalagmites. He opened a tattered Nabokov. Appropriate because the Schwa plays like Nabokov writes. I’m convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, “Today’s assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call ‘Riveting, truly a classic for the ages.’ ” Surely the Schwa’s process is similar, because every ten measures or so there’s a snippet, a riff within a riff that makes you realize that the previous nine measures were just an excuse to play a tricolor chord that bursts open in the middle of the song like a firework exploding in a clear night sky.
Lars sat on the arm of the couch grinning at Nabokov’s prosody. He was as relaxed as a boxer who thinks he’s far enough ahead on the card in the fight for cultural hegemony to let his hipster guard down and coast to an easy victory. He wasn’t paying that overhand left whistling in the distance any mind, and when the Schwa’s avant-garde jazz trochaics hit him, the smile on his face changed from mirthful to the be-mused toothy grin of a boxer who’s been seriously hurt by a punch but doesn’t want his opponent to know he can hear his own brains sloshing inside his skull. The genuflecting glaze in his eyes gave him away. Lars knew straightaway who it was. He considered himself Europe’s foremost authority on Charles Stone, and here his best friend was playing a heretofore unknown Stone gem, and he was hurt. Throw-in-the-towel hurt.
I wouldn’t turn off the music. The Nabokov fell face open into his lap. It might have been from muscle fatigue, though I suspect it was to hide an erection. The stud on the screen continued to pound the chicken doggy style, if that’s at all possible. The music continued on as if the Schwa were in the room using the book as sheet music. . . shadography, Lacedaemonian sensation, ocelate . . . Lars began to cry. Hearing that unknown recording of the Schwa affected him the same as if I’d told him Steve Biko, Bud Powell, Janis Joplin, Patrick Lumumba, and Bob Marley had survived the Rolling Stone rhetoric and were running glass-bottomed boat excursions off the Florida Keys. He buried his head into a sofa cushion, not in shame but to muffle his sobbing so that it didn’t interfere with the music. When the song ended he fired the Nabokov at my head.
“How can you live with yourself?” he yelled. “You verdammte DJs with your secrecy, your white labels and hush-hush-close-the-door-we’re-the-only-ones-with-cocaine-and-a-Japanese-import-on-vinyl-cooler-than-thou attitude. You know I worship this guy. How dare you sit on the greatest jazz piece recorded since 1969, unveiling it only to select guests like it’s a stolen fucking Picasso. You people think that because you own the recording you own the music.”
“You people?” I asked, slipping behind my turntables.
“Entschuldigen Sie. DJs aren’t people, they’re parasites.”
Lars picked up a Zora Neale Hurston and a Eugene O’Neill and fired a double-barreled scattershot blast at Doris.
“And fuck you too! Keeping this from me! You guys are probably fucking behind my back too!”
I switched on the sampler and calmly dropped the needle on the record. The first booming thump of my almost-perfect beat caved in Lars’s chest. When the hook kicked in it was as if Doctor Funkenstein had tapped his spinal cord with a rubber hammer. The autonomic reflexes took over. The crispy highs caused his neck to snap and jerk back and forth. The pounding lows dropped his ass halfway to the floor, rolled his shoulders, and turned his pelvis into a gyroscope of grinding sensuality. Meanwhile his pronated hands hovered mummylike in front of his chest and surfed the midrange. I finished my groove and Lars bit down hard on his bottom lip. I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say, “Damn, nigger, so that’s what it feels like to be black.”
Instead he opened the windows, letting the very last of the cool daylight air blow into the room like a runaway child come home. “Now I know why you came to Germany,” he said. “You want to get Stone to lay down an original groove over your track.”
Lars ejected the tape and flipped it around, looking for clues as to where it came from. He was too much of an ethical journalist to ask me to divulge my sources. Not that I had any.
“It came in the mail.”
I handed him the envelope the chicken-fucking song had come in, making sure he noticed the return address and the East Berlin postmark. He held it gently, as if it were an old museum piece. “Wow, it feels good to know that Charles Stone might be out there.”
“There” meant the 350 square miles of divided Berlin expanse that existed in Lars’s head. From my window, “there” was the oak-tree-lined intersection of Schlüterstrasse and Mommenstrasse, an overpriced Italian restaurant, a furrier, and, almost directly underneath us, two stories down, Blixa Bargeld, the infamous leader of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, sitting on the fender of his sports car. Dressed head to toe in Berlin black, his legs crossed at the ankles, he’d take a long pull on his cigarette, hack into his fingerless leather glove, then crane his neck down the block. He too was waiting for somebody to come out of the growing darkness.
“That’s dusk you feel,” I said to Lars.
“No, it’s more than that,” he replied. “This city, this country has been dead for a long, long time, and if somebody like Charles Stone is out there somewhere, it means the cultural soil is no longer fallow. Picasso blossomed in Paris and the city flowered along with him. Gauguin in Tahiti. Kerouac in Mexico. Erich von Stroheim in Hollywood. DJ Darky and Charles Stone in Berlin.”
“The Schwa—back home we call him the Schwa.”
A flat-chested Chinese woman who played up her exotic communist appeal and downplayed her beauty with an X-Acto-knife-sharp bowl cut, kung fu slippers, square plastic Jiang Zemin glasses, a Red Army jacket with matching floppy Long March hat, and a bootleg Dead Boys concert T-shirt sidled up to Blixa and without asking coyly shared his cigarette.
“We haven’t had a great thinker since Heidegger, a great artist since Riefenstahl. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a great fucking DJ, but DJs aren’t artists or thinkers. They can’t be Picasso or Kerouac. But they can be one of those thankless unknowns that came before them. Influenced them. Threatened them. Fed them. Maybe you’re Dean Moriarty, Alice B. Toklas, Fab Five Freddy, or Allen Ginsberg’s ‘negro streets at dawn.’ ”
I watched Blixa and his girlfriend kiss, and with every vicarious grope I cared less and less about the Schwa and my perfect beat. I’d rather look for love, but blind, crippled, and crazy, I’d slept with damn near every woman in West Berlin, so I was running out of options.
On our way to the Slumberland we walked past the intertwined Blixa and his Red Guard. He stopped nuzzling his Sinosylph long enough to stare me down. He’d heard the beat. It had fallen from my window and landed on his head like a Newtonian apple. The curious rhythm bruising his auditory cortex and, I suppose, his ego. Still ringing fuzzily inside his head. Just as Sir Isaac knew the laws of gravity couldn’t be ignored when the apple struck him, Blixa instinctively knew that the George Clintonian Law of Universal Funk must also be paid obeisance. For every funky object in the universe attracts every other hip-hi-de-ho object with a soulsonic force directe
d along the bass line of centers for the two objects that is proportional to the product of the masses of their asses and inversely proportional to the bustin’ out of L7 square of the racial separation between the two objects.
where: F is the Funk, G is the Groove constant, m1 is the mass of the first ass, m2 is the mass of the second ass, and r is the great racial divide.
We left Blixa to his own calculations, and four hours later it was hubris hour at the Slumberland, Lars’s proud face beaming at the new multiculti Germany around him and still pontificating on the coming rebirth of both his city and the black man.
“Think about it, fifty years ago we tried to kill culture, and now without trying we’re going to resurrect it.”
In the middle of the bar a Watusi climbed on a table and danced the Watusi. I thanked the gods there were no tribes called the Mashed Potato, the Electric Slide, or the Funky Chicken. West Berlin, Lars drunkenly insisted, would prove to be the modern-day equivalent to the Olduvai Gorge. It would be the birthplace of the neo-protohuman, the new black man.
There was one sitting across the table from me. A premature protohuman baby with whom Lars and Doris had periodic threesomes named Tyrus Maverick. Tyrus was a self-described “performance artist slash poet slash playwright slash filmmaker slash activist” and, as I liked to add, “slash asshole” who still owes me three hundred dollars. He hailed from Southern California, claiming Compton though he’d spent the greater part of his boyhood in Hawthorne. He’d tried to pal up citing our common Sureño palm tree and In-N-Out burger vato loco heritage, and I was friendly at first until I went to a reading of his play Iceland Is Hot!*
Tyrus had the annoying habit of tapping me on the arm whenever he had something to say. “Hey, man”—tap, tap—“I think Doris still likes you. She’s always carrying on about how you the only black man she’d ever known who during a dinner date didn’t insist on sitting in the seat facing the door like a wanted criminal.”