The library book-sale tables are out of sight, the basketball backboards stashed backstage and the Roller Derby track rolled up in a storeroom somewhere. Folding chairs stand in straight rows as the jazzophiles file in and find their seats, anxious to hear the men in matching suits from New York blow into town and blow the town down, their Ellingtonian lungs deployed to raze this gym with a sound as powerful as Willie Mays. The band struts in from the wings, sits, and starts blowing Dukelike from sheet music, the brass muted so it almost squeaks from the trombonists’ noses, fast, with a classical tone, a hard Boppishness wrapped in uptown tailoring that morphs into a light blue Monkdom, tooting a little ironically along with graver accents of deep lefthanded melancholy.
The library book-sale tables are out of sight, the basketball backboards stashed backstage and the Roller Derby track rolled up in a storeroom somewhere. Folding chairs stand in straight rows as the jazzophiles file in and find their seats, anxious to hear the men in matching suits from New York blow into town and blow the town down, their Ellingtonian lungs deployed to raze this gym with a sound as powerful as Willie Mays. The band struts in from the wings, sits, and starts blowing Dukelike from sheet music, the brass muted so it almost squeaks from the trombonists’ noses, fast, with a classical tone, a hard Boppishness wrapped in uptown tailoring that morphs into a light blue Monkdom, tooting a little ironically along with graver accents of deep lefthanded melancholy. Such changes, harmonized in the same time, are simultaneous and, in what could otherwise be redundant, establish a repeating pattern that sings in a most distinctive way. Now the trumpets take off the gloves and start making a sound like avian invaders, those strange birds that fly up your ears and soar in the stunned brain. Wild, these mating calls, like those of vocalists in love arguing, loud and oddly melodic, almost Dizzy in their flippant lucidity. The players are sweating under their silk suits as the bus rolls into New Orleans on a hot night, one tire busted so as to create a complex syncopation, churchy and funky, sultry in the way of cool mulatas with fruit on their hats, blatantly dangerous, the last of their kind since cigarettes are taboo and the mint in your julep could be bugged. Because everything is listening. The trees on Walnut Avenue are catching the day’s last rays and trembling a little, trying to shake off the shadows. If you put your ear to the train tracks running down Chestnut you can hear the saxophones in the front row, I swear, speaking Swahili. The sky darkens and Monday night settles over the lighthouse. The moon is smiling as it rises behind the mountains, and seems to swing.
