"Oh, Read That Thing"
Oh, Play That Thing is billed as a “jazz novel” and there are jazz legends on the pages. Doyle has the ability to “play” language in the way musicians play their instruments and the marks of a notable composition are there: as improvisation, musical montage, developing characters the way composers prepare instruments, using non-traditional instruments – slang of the era, and other methods of sound production. The sounds coming out of this novel are historic, harsh, raw, sex and violence-drenched, but in a non-gratuitous way.
An occasional uncomfortable twinge-shudder whispers, “This is porno, not literature.” In that moment, you will be right and Doyle means it to be that. When you get a bit squeamish at the sight of beatings, blood and death, it’s quite intentional. If you start to feel your organs, your senses react in ways you thought you were too civilized to experience, as you might with Fat Olaf’s half-sister’s lesson on imagination and masturbation, or the porno book dealer who put his texts in the covers of the classics – graphically photographed. Well, it’s about the primitive in all of us and that’s part of Doyle’s point.
Yet, if you like history, you’ll traverse the “Jazz Age,” the movement that took place during the 1920s, in a very different way than simply through listening to certain jazz legends from our safe appreciative distance. Reading Doyle, you’re on the street. You cock your ear and someone is talking about a sound, a style, a name you’ve heard now and then. A band pulls up on the back of a flat-bed truck and plays in the middle of the street. And you can tell, it’s what’s happenin’ and you want to know, to hear, to be there and see. And Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing, lets you do it all.
Doyle’s reader makes the immigrant journey from Europe to a state correctional facility, into racism and bigotry’s ugly reality, to the vile pigeon-coop hooch and bathtub gin of prohibition, along the streets of gangland Chicago, through the wild sounds that made the age, to the Crash, the Dust Bowl years, tramps on the rails, the stories of tragedy and more tragedy – it’s all there and it’s played in ways that titillate, excite, arouse, satisfy and, well, Doyle writes a great “fuck,” and when you turn the last page, you’ll want an open window and a cigarette.
For those looking for the jazz in name and not in the language, syntax and improvisation of the writing, the novel becomes a club with a featured artist: Louis Armstrong. Our protagonist, Henry Smart, meets Armstrong –
I turned, and saw him.
Louis Armstrong.
His mother had died – Dora told me; she’d come up from New Orleans and died.
He’d been gone, and he was back. He put the trumpet to his mouth; and the crowd went wild. He took it down. He did it again; he put the horn to his mouth. His eyes stopped looking – the pupils went up into his head, and he played. The drape behind him rolled and shook, and stopped. Nobody danced. Nobody sat. Nobody drank or took a breath.
It was the blues, his grief crying out of the bell. Bu tis was no lament. It was the cry of a terrified child, left all alone, forever. No notes, no breaks, but all one howl that rushed at her dead body; it was angry and lost and – “What about meee!” – it turned, and turned, and returned to the body, and washed, and dressed her. His mother, mine – “she skips and she laughs, her black eyes shine happy – he sent his mother home.
All by himself. He was alone there, somewhere of his own. The other men stood back, afraid to be too close to the death we were there to witness, and the aching, shattering sound that was coming from the man. It didn’t soften; there was no fond look back, no shared prayer.
But it stopped. The trumpet was still at his lips, the eyes were still clenched shut.
For the first and only time in my life, I lived in absolute silence.
After that the music and the narrative plunge on together. Smart becomes Louis’ white man, his strong-arm, his wedge. You come at it from the vantage point of an immigrant on the run, in the underworld of the era, often on the Black side of town-New York, Chicago, then the parting from Louis, and roaming the country in the Great Depression years. It’s there and Doyle certainly does play the hell out of, and into, the pages of this amazing novel. But there is poignancy, a shadow ballad, if you will, that plays throughout the book.
Mezzrow is the dealer for Louis’s “gage”.
The next time I saw Mezzrow he was dressed like Louis; the Oxford grey double-breasted suit; the big knot in his tie; silk scarf, lisle socks, and hanky. And kids in torn overalls found the odds to buy, or the speed and wit to rob, a white hanky. They were waving the things all over Harlem. Louis was the latest… Louis knew it.
– What it is, he told me, – is ambition. New York ambition. It’s different here. The music isn’t as good. It’s slick and orchestrated. It’s “good.” The Duke is good. But it ain’t New Orleans and it ain’t even Chicago. It ain’t new-born. It’s what happens “after.” It’s organised.
There are times when this book may just be too much for you and you’ll leave it lying on the table, or the floor beside your chair. You’ll be reading along and then, suddenly, it goes somewhere you can’t follow, just like some of the wildest music I’ve ever heard – Albert Ayler makes you feel as though you’re biting on tin foil. Or, it gets too low, too dirty, too slathering around in the crack-house of where we know we could be in a heartbeat and have spent a lifetime staying away from – sometimes you go to church on Sunday, and then cabaret all day Monday. I’ve heard music, after the crowd left, and the door was locked, but I couldn’t get off my stool and leave – music that made me believe that spot was the only real home I would ever have. And there’s the sound that melts you off your chair and you lay there in a puddle until you evaporate and you have no choice but to hang your tears out to dry.
Or, well, maybe you want to read this novel; listen to music while you do it. I’ll be doing it again and probably again – jazz is like that. And, so is Doyle’s writing.
I’ll close with one of my favorite passages that takes place in the recording studio:
The door to my left opened – there was no one behind the double-paned partition now; the engineer’s bald head was gone – and a man in a very loose suit looked in at us.
– That was great guys, he said. – The third take sent me. It’s the one.
– I don’t think so, Mister Wickemeyer, said Lewis.
– Sounded fine to me, Pops, said Wickemeyer.
– I’d like another take, said Louis. – Fine can always be better.
– Come on now, Pops –
– You heard the man.
That was me talking and it was the first think I’d said since I’d come in and taken my Corner.
Wickemeyer looked at me. So did the other men; they didn’t know me. (They never would.)
– Who are you?
There was no aggression in the voice, or the pale face. He didn’t wait for me to answer.
– You with Louis?
– That right, said Louis.
– I’m with Mr. Armstrong, I said –He’d like another take and I’m inclined to agree with him.
Wickemeyer took a watch from his waistcoat pocket.
– I got the Greer Brothers Xylophone Orchestra coming in after you, he told Louis.
– How many brothers? I said.
– Two.
– I’ll talk to them.
He looked at me and he looked at his watch.
– Okay, he said. – I guess it’s not as late as I thought.
– Fine.
He was gone.
There were no smiles; there was no triumph. The other lads didn’t really know what was going on; it was all me and Louis – it was Louis. Fred Robinson climbed back up the ladder, his trombone over his head like a spear. Singleton checked his bottles. The bald engineer was back behind the glass, and Wickemeyer was standing beside him, leaning into the window.
He nodded.
And Louis put the horn to his lip and blew the opening cadenza for the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh Time, before he was happy with it. He blew, and it was all new again, the most difficult music anyone had ever played, easy and surprising all over again. And, as the other five men joined him, still playing, still inventing, he looked my way and winked.
I was there, in that corner, in that studio. The most famous trumpet solo in jazz history was
played by Louis Armstrong but it was brought to you by Henry Smart.
This piece originally appeared in Press 1.