Half-Blood Blues Read Online Free PDF

could muster, what did it matter if I was merely, as the critics said, ‘ solid and dependable on the back shelf’ ?
    It’s no exaggeration to say that of all the gents who played in our band, I become the least famous. I ain’t never made it. Now Chip, Chip’s reputation as one of the great American drummers was – to put it in the language of commerce we all so fluent in these days – it was well-earned but cost him much. The man damn near ruined himself. I only thank god he was so disciplined back then, that we got the best of his playing on that recording. That I got the best of it.
    See, Half Blood Blues, 3 mins 33 secs , is almost all I got out of that time. I ain’t sore about it. Ain’t no glory made from being dependable . But it started Chip’s career a second time. Jolted the man awake again. And, well, it made Hiero one of the most famous jazz trumpeters of his generation.
    The kid’s existence might’ve been a fiction we’d all cooked up if that disc hadn’t survived. Today you ain’t no kind of horn player you don’t acknowledge some debt to Hieronymus Falk. He was one of the pioneers: a German Louis Armstrong, if you will. Wynton Marsalis praised Falk as one of the reasons he started playing at all: ‘Hearing Falk – man, that was it. It just blew my mind out. I was just a kid, but even then I knew I was hearing genius. His brilliance was that obvious.’ Even fellows who ain’t never played jazz understood he was the man. Punk guitarists, avant-garde cellists, even tootsie-pop songbirds was all drawing on him. I heard a riff on NPR the other day had Hiero all over it.
    But the kid could’ve been lost to history easy as anything. That’s what gets to me. The chance in it all. It all started up again in a small French town used to be in Vichy. This dark apartment, it was being renovated, see – we’re talking the early sixties here – and after days of tearing up the walls, the contractor discovered what looked like shrapnel deep inside the crumbled plaster. Just this shiny thing gleaming through, like a dark coin in dirty snow. It was a dinged-up steel box. And inside, hell, was the five discs made us so famous in Berlin, along with one warped, half-baked disc with no label. Turned out Sir Vichy, long-dead but once a prominent Nazi cog, he’d loved jazz enough to hide them away. The contractor took the box to his university prof brother, who gave it to some French classical musicologist, who – out of carelessness, or contempt – left the box in a filing cabinet in his home office. It sat there five, maybe six years, until he died. Then his Berlin-based daughter arrived, a professional mime so I’m told but that don’t matter. It don’t flavour the story. She found the box in her papa’s cabinet, and took it to a different musicologist, this one back in Berlin. And after just one listen to the unlabelled disc, he declared it the rawest kind of genius.
    Well, hold on to your hats. So this Berlin scholar, he starts digging. And once in the mud he starts seeing similarities between the five Hot-Time discs and the warped, genius one. In some ways it sounds like the same band, just pared down, but. Well, there’s just something more torrid, more intelligent, stranger, hotter about that phantom disc. Not that the Hot-Time Swingers wasn’t good. Once upon a time we was the stuff . Played the greatest clubs of Europe, our five recordings as famous as anything. We had fans across the continent, played Austria and Switzerland and Sweden and Hungary and even Poland. Only reason we ain’t never gigged in France was cause Ernst, a proud son of a bitch, he held a war-based grudge. Lost it soon enough, when old Germany started falling apart. But before that our band was downright gold, all six of us: Hieronymus Falk on trumpet; Ernst ‘the Mouth’ von Haselberg on clarinet; Big Fritz Bayer on alto sax; Paul Butterstein on piano; and, finally, us, the rhythm boys – Chip Jones on drums and