The Bass Saxophone [antikvár]

In the days when everything in life was fresh because we were sixteen, seventeen I used to blow tenor sax. Very poorly. Our band was called Red Music, which in fact was a misnomer, since the name had no political connotations: there was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music and we, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that in jazz blue is not a color, so we called ours Red. But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did; for jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successively ruled in my native land.What sort of political connotations? Leftist? Rightist? Racialist? Classist, Nationalist? The vocabulary of ideologists and mountebanks doesn't have a word for it. At the outset, shortly before the Second World War when my generation experienced its musical revelation, jazz didn't convey even a note of protest. (Whatever shortcomings the liberal republic of T. G. Masaryk may have had, it was a veritable paradise of cultural tolerance.) And no matter what LeRoi Jones says to the con-