"Howard Waldrop - Ike At The Mike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

a pistol on New Year's Eve, 1912. One noise more or less shouldn't have
mattered on that night, but it . did, and the cops caught him. It was those
music lessons at the home that started him on his way, through New Orleans and
Memphis and Chicago to the world beyond.
Armstrong might have been a criminal, he might have been a bum, he might have
been killed unknown and unmourned in some war somewhere. But he wasn't. He was
born to play that music. It wouldn't have mattered what world he had been born
into. As soon as his fingers closed around that cornet, music was changed
forever.

The audience applauded wildly, but they weren't there just to hear Armstrong.
They were waiting.

The band hit up something that began nondescriptly-a slow blues, beginning
with the drummer heavy on his brushes.

The tune began to change, and as it changed, a pure sweet clarinet began to
play above the other instruments, and Ike walked onstage, playing his theme
song. "Don't You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"

His clarinet soared above the audience. Presley wasn't the only one who got
chill bumps all the way down the backs of his ankles.

Ike and Armstrong traded off slow pure verses of the song; Ike's the sweet
music of a craftsman, Armstrong's the heartfelt remembrance of things as they
were. Ike never saw Storyville; Armstrong had to leave it when the Navy closed
it down.

Together they built to a moving finale and descended into a silence like the
dimming of lights, with Ike's clarinet the last one to wink out.

The cream of Washington betrayed their origins with their applause.

And before they knew what had happened, a new tune started up with the opening
screech of "Mississippi Mud."

Ike and Armstrong traded licks, running on and off the melody. Pops wiped his
face with his handkerchief, his face seemed all teeth and w sweat, Ike's bald
head shone, the freckles standing out above the wisps of white hair on his s
temples.

This wasn't like the old days. It was as if A they'd never quit playing
together at all. This was now, and Ike and Pops were hot.

They played and played.

Ike's boyhood had been on the flat pan of J Kansas, smalltown-church America
at the turn of the century. A town full of laborers and businessmen,
barbershops, milliners, and ice-cream parlors.