Half-Blood Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

yours truly thumbing the upright. We was a kind of family, as messed-up and dysfunctional as any you could want.
    So the scholar digs all this up. But then he gets stuck, unsure of himself. Right away he knows it’s old Hiero on lead trumpet. Well, congratulations, he wins a point. It takes him a couple weeks to decide it’s me on bass and Chip on drums. Ooh, you on a roll now, boy. But then he can’t fathom the second trumpet at all, assumes it’s got to be Ernst the Mouth. Seems the old owl read somewhere that despite Ernst’s preference for the licorice stick, he was also an able trumpeter. (False false false. Old Ernst played trumpet like Monet traded stocks.) And man, he can’t figure for the life of him why the other Hot-Timers ain’t on the recording.
    Now, he wasn’t all wrong. He does discover Paul was arrested in ’39 and died in Sachsenhausen. He figures out Chip and me returned to America on the New-York bound SS St. John . That the kid was arrested in Paris and taken to Mauthausen via Saint-Denis. But where’s Big Fritz? And where did Ernst disappear to after the recording? All mysteries.
    The musicologist’s essays caught the eye of John Hammond Jr, that jazz Columbus who discovered Billie and Ella. Hammond was then a talent scout for Columbia, signing cats like Aretha, Bob and Leonard. He tracked down the disc in Berlin. And to hear Hammond tell it, our recording damn near made an amnesiac of him. We blown every last thought out of his mind. When he finally come to (don’t you love how these exec types talk?), he known he needed to do three things. One: convince Columbia to remaster and release the recording with huge distribution. Two: track down those of us ain’t dead yet. Three: tour us Hot-Time Swingers to fame, fortune and all that damned et cetera.
    It was Louis helped him find me and Chip. Louis Armstrong. See, Armstrong known a thing or two, and despite hating Hammond he penned the man a letter setting things straight. That was most definitely not Ernst von Haselberg on second trumpet, he wrote, what a fool idea. If he had to guess, it was probably Kentucky’s own Bill Coleman. He explained the recording was based on a popular German song whose name escaped him. He also told him that me and Chip was probably living back in Baltimore, check there. He ain’t said nothing else, gave no details about how he might know any of this. Sure Hammond wrote him back. But not two days after posting the letter it was announced in the news that old Satchmo had died. Hammond found me and Chip in the phonebook .
    Chip wasn’t shy. He said he didn’t know how Armstrong known all that. And he got me to agree to Hammond’s record deal – if it proved kosher with Coleman, that is – though I told him no way in hell would the Hot-Time Swingers ever go to tour. We’d known for years that Ernst, Big Fritz and Paul was all dead. Word gets back. And Hiero, well, there just wasn’t no Half Blood Blues without the kid. Cause it was his piece, see – he’d been the frontman, had written the damned thing in his own blood and spit. He had that massive sound, wild and unexpected, like a thicket of flowers in a bone-dry field. Ain’t no replacing that. And anyhow, Chip and me had no taste for resurrecting all that. Not after what had happened.
    Of course, the recording’s cult status had to do with the illusion of it all. I mean, not just of the kid but of all of us, all the Hot-Time Swingers. Think about it. A bunch of German and American kids meeting up in Berlin and Paris between the wars to make all this wild joyful music before the Nazis kick it to pieces? And the legend survives when a lone tin box is dug out of a damn wall in a flat once belonged to a Nazi? Man. If that ain’t a ghost story, I never heard one.
    One question kept flaring up, though: who was this Hieronymus Falk? Some of the wildest stories you ever heard come out, a couple of them even true. Folks reckoned he could play any song after