the material already compiled. Lord, there must be a wealth of it.” He exaggerated in a gesture the stack and assortment of books on the study table: popular histories of jazz, exposes and testimonials, confessional stories of reformed drug addicts, whores, and criminals—all of which had been somehow tied to the words “jazz” and “be-bop.”
“Surface, Tom,” said Ralph Warner. “Purely surface material. It’s never been . . . really lived by anyone qualified to do it up.”
“Ralph,” began George Drew, “do you actually suppose you can, as Tom says, get next to them?”
“I think I can, George,” said Ralph Warner. “I-think-I-can. After all, it’s simply another viewpoint. A matter of language really. Vernacular.”
“ Do you know,” said George Drew warming now toward the heart of it, “that you’re very liable to be approached on this drug business yourself? I mean, they might ask you to take some. What do you do then, Ralph?”
Dr. Warner smiled a little, shyly it seemed. “Then? Why, then I suppose there would be only one thing to do—gracefully.” And so saying, he leaned back in his great chair and slowly raised both hands. “The unhappy part of the business is,” he went on, beaming helplessly, “I have an absolute horror of needles .”
Before completing the book’s section, “Dixieland and the Blues,” Dr. Warner had meticulously sifted through all the written material on the subject, and had listened to some seven hundred graded recordings, many of them several times, taking copious notes the while. Then he had flown down to New Orleans for an intensive week of firsthand research. When he was not actually listening to music, he ferreted about the Quarter, poking into any narrow opening of whatever half-promise, prowling the blue haze of midnight alleys, tapping carefully on every soundless, dawn-lit cellar door, as though each were his own oak podium.
He spoke to hundreds of people: strangers, drunks, unknown—and, most often, untalented—musicians, bystanders, children, blind men who touched their canes to the earth in some possible connection with the music. And if, in the handstand’s shadow of an afternoon session, a dog lay stretched in refuge from the heat of day, the Doctor might give it a pat on the head in passing. Then, at night, in the boîtes of the Quarter, instead of taking a table, he stood with his drink where the brass and the smoke were the bluest, at the left front corner of the bandstand, stood with one foot on the raised platform, tie loosened, an easy smile on his face which worked beneath half closed eyes on the blue, blue offbeat, while his free hand, at rest on his raised knee, raced the fingers in subtle and intricate tattoo. At the end of a number, if there was an empty glass on the bandstand, he had it filled, and when the men took a break, he was with them, the ones that hung together around the bar, to pay for the drinks and listen to the slow and easy talk of those who play the blues.
As soon as one place closed, he went to another, sometimes in the company of one or two musicians, and toward morning they ate together. By seven he was back in his room where he wrote steadily for two hours. Then he would go to bed and sleep until three in the afternoon, get up, dress, and eat again before resuming his tour of the Quarter. He did this for seven days, and during this time he was careful about three things: (1) never to request a number, (a) to talk with no more than one musician at a time about music, and (3) in doing so, to expose his own knowledge, not by dissertation, as the canyon openly yawns its vastness, but by remark, as a mountain will suggest fantastic untold depths through one startling crevasse. And he even had the gall and devotion, one time toward early morning in a booth gone blue-gray with the circling tides of smoke, when a sleepy-faced drummer passed him a sweet cigarette the thinness of two matchsticks, to hold it as he
“Surface, Tom,” said Ralph Warner. “Purely surface material. It’s never been . . . really lived by anyone qualified to do it up.”
“Ralph,” began George Drew, “do you actually suppose you can, as Tom says, get next to them?”
“I think I can, George,” said Ralph Warner. “I-think-I-can. After all, it’s simply another viewpoint. A matter of language really. Vernacular.”
“ Do you know,” said George Drew warming now toward the heart of it, “that you’re very liable to be approached on this drug business yourself? I mean, they might ask you to take some. What do you do then, Ralph?”
Dr. Warner smiled a little, shyly it seemed. “Then? Why, then I suppose there would be only one thing to do—gracefully.” And so saying, he leaned back in his great chair and slowly raised both hands. “The unhappy part of the business is,” he went on, beaming helplessly, “I have an absolute horror of needles .”
Before completing the book’s section, “Dixieland and the Blues,” Dr. Warner had meticulously sifted through all the written material on the subject, and had listened to some seven hundred graded recordings, many of them several times, taking copious notes the while. Then he had flown down to New Orleans for an intensive week of firsthand research. When he was not actually listening to music, he ferreted about the Quarter, poking into any narrow opening of whatever half-promise, prowling the blue haze of midnight alleys, tapping carefully on every soundless, dawn-lit cellar door, as though each were his own oak podium.
He spoke to hundreds of people: strangers, drunks, unknown—and, most often, untalented—musicians, bystanders, children, blind men who touched their canes to the earth in some possible connection with the music. And if, in the handstand’s shadow of an afternoon session, a dog lay stretched in refuge from the heat of day, the Doctor might give it a pat on the head in passing. Then, at night, in the boîtes of the Quarter, instead of taking a table, he stood with his drink where the brass and the smoke were the bluest, at the left front corner of the bandstand, stood with one foot on the raised platform, tie loosened, an easy smile on his face which worked beneath half closed eyes on the blue, blue offbeat, while his free hand, at rest on his raised knee, raced the fingers in subtle and intricate tattoo. At the end of a number, if there was an empty glass on the bandstand, he had it filled, and when the men took a break, he was with them, the ones that hung together around the bar, to pay for the drinks and listen to the slow and easy talk of those who play the blues.
As soon as one place closed, he went to another, sometimes in the company of one or two musicians, and toward morning they ate together. By seven he was back in his room where he wrote steadily for two hours. Then he would go to bed and sleep until three in the afternoon, get up, dress, and eat again before resuming his tour of the Quarter. He did this for seven days, and during this time he was careful about three things: (1) never to request a number, (a) to talk with no more than one musician at a time about music, and (3) in doing so, to expose his own knowledge, not by dissertation, as the canyon openly yawns its vastness, but by remark, as a mountain will suggest fantastic untold depths through one startling crevasse. And he even had the gall and devotion, one time toward early morning in a booth gone blue-gray with the circling tides of smoke, when a sleepy-faced drummer passed him a sweet cigarette the thinness of two matchsticks, to hold it as he
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