"And it rose in front of me. A mechanism of strong, silver-plated wires, the gears, the levers, like the mechanism of some huge and absolutely nonsensical apparatus, the fantasy of some crazy mixed-up inventor." On eighteen-year-old jazz enthusiast Danny's first beholding the bass saxophone.
The wild freedom of jazz meets Nazi rules and regulations - The Bass Saxophone by Czech author Josef Škvorecký has been acclaimed one of the most powerful short novels in all of literature.
In his introductory essay, Mr. Škvorecký lists the Nazi regulations, ten in number, applicable to Czech dance orchestras at the time of his country's occupation. Here's a snippet: "As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated." Nothing like a bunch of uptight, mentally constipated, goosestepping weinersnitzels attempting to reel in the explosive funk of riffing cool cats.
How those jackboots loathed what they termed Judeonegroid music with its yowls and wailing and giving in to "dark" rhythms and bending of sound from a wah-wah trumpet mute or buzzing trombone or the ultimate insult, the base saxophone, that monstrous centaur, metallic rhino, hulking behemoth, a silver serpent sounding its deep anti-Aryan vibrations.
The Bass Saxophone contains elements of folk fable, a charming story of the clashing of totalitarian power with the freedom of artistic expression. Since there is little action beyond the youthful narrator, let's call him Danny, meeting up and playing with a group of traveling musicians in a Nazi occupied town, I'll shift to offering comments on specific passages.
"Holy cow, I said to myself, and it was funny all of a sudden, because every deviation from the norm is an impulse to laughter - people are apt to be conventional, and unfeeling toward everything but themselves." ---------- In all his young life, Danny was never a believer in apparitions, hallucinations, parapsychology or miracles; his only myth was music. Now that he's holding a bass saxophone for the first time it is as if he's entered another dimension, soaring over the realm of the serious, the routinized, a world of strictly enforced regularity and compliance.
"I walked down the back staircase to the hotel auditorium with the bass saxophone in my arms. The brown twilight was transformed into the murky dusk of dim electric lights." ----------- Danny is about to groove with what just might be a group of circus freak show performers: an ugly fat woman with a clown nose, an amputee, a hunchback, a dwarf, a swan-like beauty, a giant playing accordion.
"My eyes followed the notes; it was a waltz in A minor, a very simple affair, based on the effect of deep notes, certainly not what I yearned to play on this saxophone - it was no Rollini - although it was exactly what I was capable of playing from sheet music. But again, why?" ---------- Surprise, surprise! Turns out this band isn't about jazz; rather, they will be playing music of the waltz, polka, oom pah pah variety.
"The senseless happiness of music engulfed me like a golden bath; it's a happiness that never depends on the objective, only the subjective, and perhaps it has a more profound link with the humanness of things because it''s altogether senseless: the strenuous production of certain nonsensical sounds - that are no good for anything." ---------- Music is music. Once the colossal chords of the stupendous sax are brought to life, it is art for art's sake. Groove, Danny, groove baby!
'Horst Hermann Kühl: the name mentally slotted itself into place too, and along with it sounded the mad, threatening voice behind the wallpaper." ---------- Danny thought he heard the voice of Kühl, member of the Gestapo, back when he was up in the hotel room with the circus musicians. Understandable. When you are under the thumb of a foreign police state, there is hardly a time when you don't hear a threatening voice, real or imagined, in the next room.
"Then they locked Vicherek up for "the public performance of eccentric Negroid music," . . . you can't distinguish between what happened and what is a dream; so swiftly gone; but that is the way it should be." --------- Ah, the absurdity of men and women put under arrest and dragged off to prison or put in front of a firing squad for the most unreasonable reasons. Living through such deadly times can appear as an unending dream or nightmare.
"A velvet gown; and behind it other satined and brocaded German ladies with a mobile jewelry exhibition, the origin of which could not have been reliably proven in a more strictly legalistic society, little shining stories ending in death; and black, brown, and gray uniforms; a panorama of iron crosses." ----------- Peering through a peephole, Danny sees the audience for their performance: German women wearing jewelry stolen from Jews destined for the gas chamber; SS men settling in for an evening's entertainment that could turn into a death sentence for the performers at any moment.
How will it all end for Danny and his band? I encourage you to read Josef Škvorecký's short, jazzy, dreamy classic for yourself.
Nazis marching into Prague
Note: This book also includes a second novella, Emöke, also about playing jazz in Czechoslovakia but this time under the watchful eye of a Soviet police state. I'll be posting a separate review.
Josef Škvorecký, 1924-2012
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