Jordan County by Shelby Foote

would have if I could have but I couldnt.”
    The following day a drummer he had worked with in New Orleans came to see him. The drummer said, “I heard you took off from Rex. What you planning now?”
    “I dont know. Go back home, I reckon.”
    “Aint no sense to that, man; you just got here. Look. This friend of mine is opening a place right here in Harlem — a gin mill affair, nothing special; youd be playing for cakes at first. But come on in with us and we’ll make us some music the way it ought to be made.”
    “I dont know, Juny. Seems like my horn dont suit this town. Rex ought to know.”
    “Itll suit this place. Come on.”
    There were no tin derbies at the Black Cat, no mutes, no music stands spelling R E X in blinking neon; there were no music stands at all, in fact. Opening night, the following Saturday, everything that had been pent up inside him for the past ten days came out loud and clear. From that first night it got better. Six months later he hit his stride.
    “I dont know how it happened,” he told Harry Van afterward,looking back. “It seem like the horn kind of opened up and everything I ever learnt come sailing out.”
    Harry Van had never heard jazz before, to listen to. It was something he accepted much as a person might accept Joyce or Brancusi, admitting there might be something there and even admitting it was probably sincere, but never caring to study it or give it any real attention. Van was twenty-seven, only beginning to compose the things he had always worked toward, music that was intellectual in concept and highly organized, with a good deal more stress on form than content. There were plenty of interesting ways to put notes together, and this way was the safest — meaning that it was the one least likely to lead to disappointment; the less you ventured, emotionally, the less you stood to lose. He was aware of the shortcomings of this approach but he excused them on the grounds that what he had done so far was student work, preparation; he was learning his craft, one of the most difficult in the world, and when the time came for what he called the breakthrough (he was anti-romantic, but he was romantic enough to believe in this) he believed he would find his material proceeding naturally from his studies; that is, he would find ‘himself,’ as so many others had done before him. After all, he told himself, there were plenty of interesting ways to put notes together if ‘themes’ were what you were after. Nothing had interrupted or even disturbed this belief until the night his harmony instructor took him to a Harlem nightclub.
    Over the doorway there was an arched cat with green electric eyes and a bristling tail. The instructor rapped and a panel opened inward upon a face so black that the eyeballs glistened unbelievably white. The Negro showed an even row of gold teeth when he recognized the harmony instructor. “Evening, professor,” he said, and the door swung open, revealing a dingy anteroom and another door. From beyond it came a pulse of music, like something under pressure in a bell jar. When this second door was opened they were struck bya violent wave of sound, the ride-out finish of China Boy, followed by one thump of the drum and an abrupt cessation, a silence so empty that, in its turn, it too seemed to strike them across their faces like an open palm, a slap.
    On a low dais in the opposite corner there was a five-man group — drums, piano, cornet, trombone, clarinet — seen dimly through smoke that hung like cotton batting, acrid and motionless except when it divided to let waiters through and closed again immediately behind them as they moved among the small round tables where people sat drinking from undersized glasses. Van looked for other instruments, unable to believe that all that sound had come from five musicians. As he and the instructor were being seated the drum set a new beat, pulsing unvaried; the clarinet began to squeal, trilling arpeggios with