THE BASS SAXOPHONE

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1977 by Josef Škvorecký

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

“Red Music” first appeared in the United States in
Persea II
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Atrium Verlag, Zurich, for permission to reprint four lines from
Lyrische Hausapotheke
by Dr. Erich Kästner.

AG, Zurich, Switzerland 1946.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from
I Wonder as I Wander
by Langston Hughes, Copyright © 1956 by Langston Hughes. Used by permission of the publisher.

New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to use an excerpt from “Lament for the Months” from Tennessee Williams’s
In the Winter of Cities
. Copyright 1944 by Tennessee Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

Emöke
was originally published in Czechoslovakia by Československy spisovatel, Praha, under the title
Legenda Emöke
. Copyright © 1963 by Josef Škvorecký.
The Bass Saxophone
appeared in a volume entitled
Babylónsky příběh
published by Svobodné Slovo Melantrich, Václavské náměstí, Praha, under the title
Bassaxofon
. Copyright © 1967 by Josef Škvorecký.

English Translation first published in Canada by Anson-Cartwright Editions 1977 Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Škvorecký, Josef. The bass saxophone.

Translation of the author’s Bassaxofon and Legenda Emöke.

I. Polačková-Henley, Káča. II. Škvorecký, Josef. Legenda Emöke. 1979. III. Title.

PZ4.S619734Bas 1979 [PG5038.S527] 891.8′6′35 78–7270

eISBN: 978-0-307-83212-2

v3.1

The Cowards

Miss Silver’s Past

All the Bright Young Men and Women

The Mournful Demeanor of Lt. Boruvka

“But jazz is decadent bourgeois music,” I was told, for that is what the Soviet Press had hammered into Russian heads
.

“It’s my music,” I said, “and I wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution.”

LANGSTON HUGHES

With thanks to Marc Mercer for his translation of the Emöke blues, and to Eric Young and Mark Sarner for their helpful criticism and support
.

I
n the days when everything in life was fresh — because we were sixteen, seventeen — I used to blow tenor sax. Very poorly. Our band was called Red Music, which in fact was a misnomer, since the name had no political connotations: there was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music and we, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that in jazz blue is not a color, so we called ours Red. But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did; for jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successively ruled in my native land.

What sort of political connotations? Leftist? Rightist? Racialist? Classist, Nationalist? The vocabulary of ideologists and mountebanks doesn’t have a word for it. At the outset, shortly before the Second World War when my generation experienced its musical revelation, jazz didn’t convey even a note of protest. (Whatever shortcomings the liberal republic of T. G. Masaryk may have had, it was a veritable paradise of cultural tolerance.) And no matter what LeRoi Jones says to the contrary,
the essence of this music, this “way of making music,” is not simply protest. Its essence is something far more elemental: an
élan vital
, a forceful vitality, an explosive creative energy as breathtaking as that of any true art, that may be felt even in the saddest of blues. Its effect is cathartic.

But of course, when the lives of individuals and communities are controlled by powers that themselves remain uncontrolled — slavers, czars, führers, first secretaries, marshals, generals and generalissimos, ideologists of dictatorships at either end of the spectrum — then creative energy becomes a protest. The consumptive clerk of a workingman’s insurance company (whose heart had reportedly been moved by the plight of his employer’s beleaguered clients) undergoes a sudden metamorphosis to become a threat to closely guarded socialism. Why? Because the visions in his
Castle
, his
Trial
, his
Amerika
are made up of too little paper and too much real life, albeit in the guise of nonrealist literature. That is the way it is. How else explain the fact that so many titles on Senator Joe McCarthy’s index of books to be removed from the shelves of U.S. Information Service Libraries abroad are identical to many on the index issued in Prague by the Communist Party early in the seventies? Totalitarian ideologists don’t like real life (other people’s) because it cannot be totally controlled;
they loathe art, the product of a yearning for life, because that, too, evades control — if controlled and legislated, it perishes. But before it perishes — or when it finds refuge in some kind of
samizdat
underground — art, willy-nilly, becomes protest. Popular mass art, like jazz, becomes mass protest. That’s why the ideological guns and sometimes even the police guns of all dictatorships are aimed at the men with the horns.