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

And before they knew what had happened, a new tune started up with the opening screech of "Mississippi Mud."

Ike and Armstrong traded licks, running on and off the melody. Pops wiped his face with his handkerchief, his face seemed all teeth and w sweat, Ike's bald head shone, the freckles standing out above the wisps of white hair on his s temples.

This wasn't like the old days. It was as if A they'd never quit playing together at all. This was now, and Ike and Pops were hot.

They played and played.

Ike's boyhood had been on the flat pan of J Kansas, smalltown-church America at the turn of the century. A town full of laborers and businessmen, barbershops, milliners, and ice-cream parlors.

He had done all the usual things, swimming naked in the creek, running through town and . finding things to build up or tear down. He had hunted and fished and gone to services on Sunday; he had camped out overnight or for days at a time with his brothers, made fun of his girl cousins, stolen watermelons.

He first heard recorded music on an old . Edison cylinder machine at the age of eight, long-hair music and opera his aunt collected.

There was a firehouse band that played each Wednesday night in the park across the street from the station. There were real band concerts := on the courthouse lawn on Sunday, mostly military music, marches, and the instrumental . parts of ballads.
Eisenhower heard it all. Music was part of his background, and he didn't think much of it.

So Ike grew up in Kansas, where the music was as flat as the land.

Louis Daniel Armstrong was reared back, tooting out some wild lines of "Night and Day." In the old days it didn't matter how well you played; it was the angle of your back and tilt of your horn. The band was really tight; they were playing for their lives.

The trombone player came out of his seat, jumped down onto the stage on his knees, and matched Armstrong for a few bars.

The audience yelled.

Eisenhower tapped his foot and smiled, watching Armstrong and the trombone man cook.

The drummer was giving a lot of rim shots. The whole ballroom sounded like the overtaxed heart of a bird ready to fly away to meet Jesus.

Ike took off his coat and loosened his tie down to the first button.

The crowd went wild.

Late August, 1908.

The train was late. Young Dwight David Eisenhower hurried across the endless street grid of the Kansas City rail yards. He was catching the train to New York City. There he would board another bound for West Point.

He carried his admission papers, a congratulatory letter from his congressman (gotten after some complicated negotiations-for a while it

looked like he would be' Midshipman Eisenhower), hid train ticket, and twenty-one dollars in emergency money in his jacket.

He'd asked the porter for the track number. It was next to the station proper. A spur track confused him. He looked down the tracks, couldn't see a number. Trains waited all around, ready to hurl themselves toward distant cities. He went to the station entrance.

Four black men, ragged of dress, were smiling and playing near the door. What they played, young David had never heard before; it was syncopated music, but not like a rag, not a march, something in between, something like nothing else. He had never heard polyrhythms like them before. They stopped him dead.

The four had a banjo, a cornet, a violin, and a clarinet. They played, smiled, danced a little for the two or three people watching them. A hat lay on the ground before them. In it were a few dimes, some pennies, and a single new halfdime.

They finished the song. A couple of people said. "Very nice, very nice," and added a few cents to the hat.