Free Love in the Years of Lunacy by Mandy Sayer Page A

laughing and so was he, laughing with complete abandon, and she realised she’d never seen him so happy.
    Occasionally, they went to the movies, mostly musicals and comedies. His favourite films starred Laurel and Hardy, and the harder the two comedians hit one another, the clumsier the pratfall, the louder James laughed, until he looked as if he was doubled over in pain.
    Gradually, she learned more about his life back in America. His father was a white guy named Floyd, who’d been a cornet player and gambler. He’d run out on James’s mother when James had been only five. His mother picked soy beans on a farm to help make ends meet. Later, in grade school, at the suggestion of his teacher, he took up the tenor sax. It was a large instrument for a young boy, but he was the only kid in the class who was tall enough to hold it, let alone play it. By this time he was living with his mother’s sister, Aunty Bee. For a few years he studied with and performed in the school marching band. On Sundays he played with an ensemble at the Bogalusa First Baptist Church. At night, he’d sneak out of his room and go and jam with the old blues guys down in the High Yella juke joint, which was just a boatshed standing on crooked stilts over the river, selling bootleg corn liquor and pickled pig’s feet. After the juke joint was burned down by some white guys on the other side of the railway tracks, James kissed his aunt goodbye and hitchhiked with the drummer to New Orleans. There, he found a job on a riverboat. For nine months he played night after night on the stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Memphis. He could already sight read, and knew a lot of tunes. An old clarinettist patiently corrected James’s embouchure, and taught him intricate chord progressions. At fifteen, he hitchhiked to Kansas City and hung around the clubs there, sitting in with bands and jamming. Sometimes, he couldn’t cut the tempo and the older musicians laughed him off the stage, calling him White Boy and Yellow Butt.
    Humiliated, he was determined to improve. He began listening to records of Lester Young and Chu Berry over and over, for hours each day, practising in his rented single room every run and lick that burst from the gramophone. He lingered in the doorways of clubs, trying to figure out how Buster Smith could double the time on any tune he was playing.
    It was during those months that he felt a deep sense of urgency churning away inside him, as if he needed to double the tempo of the pace at which he lived; he drank black coffee with Benzedrine because it allowed him to keep playing, day and night, without sleep. His lips cracked and bled on hard new reeds; and his heart raced all the time now, a thunderstorm in his chest.
    A season passed, and by the time he returned to the jam sessions he’d once been laughed out of, much thinner and looking older than his years, he’d developed a lightning technique and could glide through chord changes that even Buster Smith was unable to follow. One night in a club he was spotted by the clarinettist Benny Goodman and was invited to join his tour. James hadn’t yet turned sixteen.
    And thinking of all this, about everything he’d told her, Pearl daydreamed about forming a band with James, playing the latest American jazz styles. She imagined herself composing music that astonished crowds and had them begging for more. She saw herself and James harmonising one another, attuning themselves to the rhythms of country roads. Of course, there was one small problem—the war—but she knew it couldn’t go on forever. It had been nearly three years since Britain had declared war on Germany. She was giving it another six months; she could wait that long. Anyway, she figured she’d need that much time to absorb the material he was teaching her, to become as good as he was.
    During the first few weeks of her apprenticeship, James had her