Free The Jazz Kid by James Lincoln Collier Page B

thing slip from his mind. I wasn’t going to bring it up: if I didn’t ask they couldn’t say no.
    I knew I shouldn’t make a nuisance out of myself to Tommy. I figured if I went out once or twice a week—every five or six days, maybe—didn’t stay more than an hour or so, and brought him his pie and coffee, he might put up with me for a while. I had to learn how to put that floating feeling into the music. So that’s what I did—hike myself over there every once in a while.
    To be honest, I admired Tommy more than anybody. I admired people before. I admired Ray Grimes on the Cubs, I admired Tom Mix and some of those other cowboys in the movies, who raced their horses through rivers and over gullies to catch the bad guys. But I never admired anybody the way I admired Tommy It wasn’t just because he could play jazz, either; it was the kind of guy he was, too. The only thing that mattered to him was jazz. He hardly thought about anything else. Sure, he had some girlfriend he usually went to see before he went to work, and he liked to shoot pool—he had an uncle who ran a pool hall, and when he was a kid he used to hang around there a lot running errands and sweeping up. But I noticed that when he was showing me something about jazz, he’d forget what time it was, and suddenly have to rush out so his girlfriend wouldn’t get salty with him.
    You take me. I was used to having a nice home, clean clothes, lampshades with fringes on them, a carpet on the living room floor. Pa said he could afford to have a nice home and was resolved to have it. But Tommy, he didn’t care about anything like that. He didn’t even notice that there was no shade on the lightbulb hanging from his ceiling, that there weren’t any pictures on the walls. It didn’t make any difference to him whether there was a lampshade or pictures, because he wasn’t there anyway—he was somewheres off in jazz land. To him a place was a nice home if it had a phonograph and some jazz records; if it didn’t, it wasn’t.
    I guess that’s one reason why he didn’t mind me coming around. He could talk jazz to me as much as he wanted and I sat there and soaked it up. He’d play me records he figured I ought to know about— the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which got a lot of people started on jazz, Bailey’s Lucky Seven, the Original Memphis Five and of course the Rhythm Kings—he had all their records, every one of them. He’d teach me tunes, he’d show different ways of fingering certain phrases. We’d play things together, and he began to give me some idea of what improvising was all about. That was another time when those old piano lessons came in useful, for I knew what he was talking about when he explained how you put a melody against the chords.
    A lot of times we just sat around and talked. He told me about the gigs he was on—what they were like and who was on them. He told me about going to the South Side, around State Street and Thirty-fifth where there were a whole lot of jazz clubs. “You got to get over there sometime, kid, and hear for yourself. Get yourself a pair of long pants, they’d probably let you in. The Nest, the DeLuxe Cafe, Dreamland, Lincoln Gardens. Places like that. That’s where all those New Orleans guys play.”
    That brought up a question that had been bothering me for some while, for the Black Belt was on the South Side. “Tommy, why do they call it nigger music?”
    â€œThat’s to set people against it. A lot of white people, you tell ‘em jazz is nigger music, they don’t want nothing to do with it.”
    â€œWell, is it or isn’t it?”
    â€œThat’s a hard one, kid. I don’t rightly know. It started down there in New Orleans, and from what you hear it was the colored guys who came up with the idea. But the first we heard of it up here in Chi was these white