Louis Armstrong has to leave King Oliver’s band. This is the overpowering thought that suddenly hits Slim Tucker, music journalist for the Chicago Star, one day in 1923. It makes sense to Slim but why does he also feel compelled to go to New York and Pittsburgh to seek out unspecified people?
Many years later, in 2010, Brian Saxon, an accident patient in an English hospital, discovers worrying discrepancies between his memories and the reality that confronts him. There’s something wrong with music. Of more pressing importance, there is also something terribly wrong with his wife! Or is it just his memory that is faulty, as his doctors insist?
Then Brian plays some old jazz recordings – with remarkable results!
(Or search for Chris Adams Ward on the Amazon site where you live.)
Music
Many important tracks in the history of Jazz and Blues are featured in Out Of Time. To listen to this great music – from King Oliver to the Rolling Stones – click on this Spotify link.
Opening Paragraphs
Inside the Lincoln Gardens nightclub, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band dug into their next number. Sweat glistened upon the foreheads of the players, their instruments gleaming with reflected light. In front of the bobbing band, dancers surrendered to the narcotic of syncopated rhythm, their movements sufficiently scandalous to disturb the sobriety of polite white society – not that there were any white Chicagoans in the audience, polite or otherwise, to point a censorious finger.
Slim Tucker loosened his collar. He drained his glass, slipping it under his arm so he could join in the enthusiastic applause that greeted the end of the number. In his head he rehearsed the questions he wanted to put later to the band’s pianist, deliberating upon a new angle worthy of exploration.
“Hey, man! Ain’t Joe the King?” cried the well-dressed man next to him. Having received no immediate reply, the man poked Slim, but lightly – no doubt aware that you couldn’t be too careful in these joints, even though the tall man beside him looked too skinny to pack much of a punch.
Slim jolted out of his deep contemplation. “Pardon me?”
“I said, Joe’s the best, right? King Oliver’s the man, yeah?”
Slim smiled. “I guess he ain’t so bad.”
Oliver’s fan turned to his attractive companion, who was clinging to his arm like she’d just been rescued from a sinking boat and didn’t want to risk falling back in. He shrugged his shoulders. “The man says, ‘Ain’t so bad’.” He looked back at Slim and put on his best serious expression. “You heard anyone better?”
“Maybe.”
“Well if you have, I’d sure like to hear him.” You just have, thought Slim, but kept his opinion to himself. The band’s second cornetist, Louis Armstrong, certainly got his vote.