Cahokia Jazz

by Francis Spufford

Love hurts. Loss hurts. Failure hurts. Success hurts. Responsibility hurts.” “… Music doesn’t hurt.” “Doesn’t it? When you take it seriously?” Barrow thought about it. Effort, yes; heartbreak, sometimes; frustration, often; the dive back to the ground again, inevitably, after any spell in which you managed to fly. And the woe the blues was made on. But then that was changed by being uttered.

He’d thought how, like so many of white folks’ sad songs, it only needed a nudge, a twitch to the rhythm and the right chords, to be entirely recognizable as a blues, the human heart and its sorrow doing its damnedest to extract the same dues in song, no matter how people tried to keep themselves split up. He wasn’t feeling split up this evening. In fact he was feeling the least split he had been for a long time. Singing as

Res nullius naturaliter fit primi occupantis,

Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni.

He said, there wasn’t the respect for religion there should be. I said, did he know that members of his own Klavern had been seen attacking the cathedral? He said they’d never have done that. He said, if they had done that it was out of mistaken zeal. He said, what proof was there the attackers were even real Klansmen? They might have been imposters, he said.

he didn’t want any words that were less bright, less clarified, than these steps along the paving stones of a city just waking up. Some wordless music, please. There was a case for something rich and slow and sonorous, to match the purple shadows under the Union Avenue elevated, where the rust spots on the girders glowed like gold coins. His inner Dolphus raised a clarinet. But no, not right. Today he needed the tinkle of pure form. He needed Joplin’s walk into joy. Meditative but not slow; the sound of the world in deft order, flowing as if the left hand and right hand only had to shake the beauty out. His head struck up the “Rose Leaf Rag.”