The Fugitivities, стр. 23

old blues number or a jug-band tune. That was like water to me and I took to it. Beale Street was right there in my house. Jelly Roll was my little night music. My father he trained me to follow in his footsteps and work in his band. But I knew that I wanted to make my own way and to do that I would have to be better than good and get noticed out east in the big cities. So I put my two little hands together and I prayed. I asked the Lord if He would only let me I was going to become the greatest piano player Memphis had ever seen.

You mentioned Jelly Roll Morton. Who are some of your other influences?

How much time you got? Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Ellington. The great Ahmad Jamal. But of them all, I most admired Art Tatum. The only smart thing I ever heard a critic say—and this was a white critic, mind you—he said, “When you listen to Art, you feel like a bird-watcher who stumbles across a sky full of kingfishers.” That stayed with me. Now, you know, Art was very nearly blind. From birth, I believe. But he could see music clear as sunshine. Far as I know he never practiced, never needed to read a sheet of music. He just sat down and played. It was like the notes were there for him all the time, like he could see them all at once. As a musician, you didn’t want to go up after him. It wouldn’t make sense. He didn’t leave nothing for you. Anything you could think of he already knew it, and he had the sweetest rhythmic understanding of the instrument I ever heard. No one, I mean no one, could play like Art. I don’t believe anyone ever will.

What about yourself? What is unique about your style?

Let me play you something, let’s see…You hear that? That’s Billy Strayhorn. See, I can get that color because Strayhorn is a genius and he’s in love with the sound. Then all I need is for the keys to be ready, and then you’ve got to be ready for them. That ways you bring kindness to the hammers as they fall. You keep them yearning at all times. That’s why the sound you hear is what we call lush, the way Billy wanted it. Now I could be playing in Rome or Los Angeles, it don’t matter; when I’m ready, I’ll always be sitting right there in my old house in Whiteville, Tennessee. Where you can hear the locomotives of the L&N goin’ down the line and the voices of my aunties and uncles talking about the rent man and cooking up the fish fry. To me that’s what style is. It’s the presence that lives around the notes, the part of your playing that tells the listener this is how my music sees the world, how it lives in it. It’s like what happened one night when I was playing a gig in Copenhagen. After the show, I see these two cats with horns waiting for me; it was Albert Ayler and Don Cherry. They had come to see me play so I invited them up. And I’ll never forget this, Albert came on the bandstand and started doing a spiritual. And I heard this sound. It had that unbroken fire, the way before you become known, when you’re still practicing, woodshedding as we like to call it, there’s this naturalness, this fearlessness, before you’re discovered by the commercial world and they put you in that whole mess. Well, I could hear it in the man’s sound, all that love. And to me, it was like the Word came back, and I had that feeling of when I was very young and my parents would take us on Sundays to church. And it’s this feeling you get in a Baptist, holy-type church, when everyone feels the Spirit in the room, and people become happy, they call it. And some people even speak tongues. But it’s this feeling of the Spirit holding the room, and it happened that night with Albert too. He took hold of us. And I felt his Spirit, the world of the ancestors talking to us through him. And that’s really what our thing is all about. Getting to that place where the sound touches you, and the shadows of the valley flicker, and you’re moved, touched by the source of things, the love that brings all things back.

Freeze-frame. That was the effect if he had to describe it, Jonah said. He was aware that the lights had come on, the cinephiles dispersed, the theater returned to entombed silence. But as he placed the film reels carefully back in their cases, he could feel the lingering presence of Phineas, his troubling voice and troubled genius shifting him off foundations he hadn’t even known were there, something newly moving, like a pendulum at the instant when it has finally passed the point of its maximum amplitude. He hastily jotted down his hours and slipped out.

On the rue Christine, the air felt clean and cool. It was late in the afternoon and people strolled languidly, pausing to consider café terraces and their perennial cast of dilettanti. Sounds and images from the film trickled in his mind and mingled with anxieties that had followed him since his graduation. Folks had warned him that, after college, if he wasn’t careful, he could be led into a dead-end job, that if he didn’t keep his eye on the ball, he could be knocked off the course of professional and personal advancement and fall behind his peers, that it was too easy to lose all the hard-fought gains that a college education had provided, particularly (although he felt it didn’t need to be repeated as endlessly as it was) for a young man like himself. One had to advance decisively.

This attitude (firmly adopted by his