"Waldrop, Howard - Ike At The Mike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

Ike had been concentrating on licking his reed and doing tongue exercises. "You never were young, Pops," he said. "You were born older than me."

"That's a lie!" said Pops. "You could be my father."

"Maybe he is!" yelled Perkins, the guitar man, fiddling with the knobs on his amp.

Ike nearly swallowed his mouthpiece. The drummer did a paradiddle.

"Hush, hush, you clowns!" yelled Pops.

Ike smiled and looked up at the drummer, a young kid. But he'd been with Pops's new band for a couple of years. So he must be all right.

Eisenhower heaved a sigh when no one was looking. He had to get the tightness out of his chest. It had started at George's funeral, a pain crying did not relieve. No one but he and Helen knew that he had had two mild heart attacks in the last six years. Hell, he thought, I'm almost eighty years old. I'm entitled to a few heart attacks. But not here, not tonight.

They dimmed the work lights. Pops had run into the back kitchen and blown a few screaming notes, which they heard through two concrete walls. He was ready.

"When you gonna quit playing, Pops?" asked Ike.

"Man, I ain't ever gonna quit. They're gonna

have to dig me up three weeks after I die and . break this horn to stop the noise comin' outta the ground." He looked at the lights. "Ease on off to the left there, Ike. Let us get them all ready for you. Come in on the chorus of the third song."

"Which one's that?" asked Ike, looking for . his play sheet.

"You'll know it when you hear it," said Pops. He took out his handkerchief. "You .s taught it to me."

Ike went into the wings and waited.

The crowd was tasteful, expectant. .

The band hit the music hard, from the opening, and Armstrong led off with "The Y King Porter Stomp." His horn was flashing sparks, and the medal on his jacket front caught the spotlight like a big golden eye.

Then they launched into "Basin Street Blues," the horn sweet and slow and mellow, .. the band doing nothing but carrying a light line t behind. Armstrong was totally absorbed in his music, staring not at the audience but down at his horn.

He had come a long way since he used to hawk coal from the back of a wagon; since he was thrown into the Colored Waifs Home in New Orleans for firing off a pistol on New Year's Eve, 1912. One noise more or less shouldn't have mattered on that night, but it . did, and the cops caught him. It was those music lessons at the home that started him on his way, through New Orleans and Memphis and Chicago to the world beyond.
Armstrong might have been a criminal, he might have been a bum, he might have been killed unknown and unmourned in some war somewhere. But he wasn't. He was born to play that music. It wouldn't have mattered what world he had been born into. As soon as his fingers closed around that cornet, music was changed forever.

The audience applauded wildly, but they weren't there just to hear Armstrong. They were waiting.

The band hit up something that began nondescriptly-a slow blues, beginning with the drummer heavy on his brushes.

The tune began to change, and as it changed, a pure sweet clarinet began to play above the other instruments, and Ike walked onstage, playing his theme song. "Don't You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"

His clarinet soared above the audience. Presley wasn't the only one who got chill bumps all the way down the backs of his ankles.

Ike and Armstrong traded off slow pure verses of the song; Ike's the sweet music of a craftsman, Armstrong's the heartfelt remembrance of things as they were. Ike never saw Storyville; Armstrong had to leave it when the Navy closed it down.

Together they built to a moving finale and descended into a silence like the dimming of lights, with Ike's clarinet the last one to wink out.

The cream of Washington betrayed their origins with their applause.