No Faking It 0 comments

By David Griffith

I woke this morning to the news that Czech writer Josef Skvorecky has died at the age of 87. I count Skvorecky’s novella The Bass Saxphone as among one of the five most influential books on my writing, along side The Great Gatsby, A Good Man is Hard to Find, As I Lay Dying, and Dubliners.

It’s so good that I used to fantasize that it was the book I would have written if I had grown up in the same circumstances as Skvorecky.

Born in the 1924 in Czechoslovakia, he was a jazz-obsessed teenager when the Nazis occupied his country and banned, among other things, the saxophone. “All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.”

Also banned: slow blues-like tempos, “Jewishly gloomy lyrics,” metronomic speeds over allegro (“so-called hot jazz”), improvised soloing, scatting, mutes, cowbells, brushes, compositions played in a minor key, pizzicato (plucking of the strings) that causes the string to “patter on the sordine.”

In essence, anything seen as impure, emotive, or distortive—all the irreverence and back-talk that makes jazz music appealing—was banned in favor of maintaining an “Aryan sense of discipline and moderation.”

Skvorecky’s hilarious and tragic novella, which I first read when I was twenty-one, chronicles a historical moment that I never would have known existed otherwise, a moment when young Czechs under the influence of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald were forming jazz groups as quickly and naively as young Nirvana-loving young Seattleites formed grunge bands in the 90s.

For Skvorecky and his friends, playing jazz became an accidental political act, because it represented disregarding a direct order, an order whose purpose was to squash protest and diabolically insist that life (and the world) was more beautiful and under the Nazis.

When I was the age of Skvorecky’s narrator, I was, like most white, middle-class, American teens at the time, naïve about politics. So although I played trombone in my high school’s jazz band, and idolized the great jazz masters (most of them black), I didn’t see jazz, or creative expression in general, in political terms.

But things began to change when it became clear that jazz had its own idiom. A quarter note followed by eighth note was “doo-dat.” A run of eighth notes was articulated “doova-doova-doova.”

By the time I could parrot the style, I had then started to become aware that it was more a feeling; that it really doesn’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing. The problem is that you can’t manufacture feeling. “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” Charlie Parker said.

Despite our whiteness and relative privilege, our band won more than a few competitions, which went to our heads. We thought we were pretty tough shit, so much so that at one of the state competitions we all skipped the mandatory improvisation clinic offered by professional jazz musicians to smoke wood-tipped Swisher Sweet cigars behind a dumpster.

When our director found out he was so furious he could hardly speak. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the effect of his words let us know that we had a hell of a lot of living and learning to do before we could call our ourselves musicians.

What’s funny is that I was skipping out on the very thing that I needed the most; the thing that I think has most prepared me for life as a writer.

Though I’m not Aryan (German-Irish), I was raised in typical Midwestern household that preached (though we were Catholic) the Protestant work ethic of discipline and moderation, making the syncopation of jazz and the soulful, showy, one-upmanship of improvising both thrillingly liberating, and the key to showing me how artists (I knew none) work if they expect to be successful.

There’s no faking it. When you start to play it’s immediately obvious who has prepared hard and who hasn’t—who has the chops and who doesn’t, who’s been woodshedding and who’s been just gliding along playing the part, enjoying the idea and image of being an artist.

Ultimately, for me playing jazz was less a political act and more practical training on how to prepare for success, how to deal with the anxiety of performance—for writers, sending your work out into the world. “You’ve got to learn your instrument,” Charlie Parker said. “Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

Playing jazz taught me that you have to be dedicated to the craft, put in your time, pay your dues. “You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians,” Miles Davis said.

That’s not what young artists want to hear. It’s not what I want to hear, even now. But when I look at the great artists of this last century, a century marked by unspeakable atrocities, wars against fascism and terror, by a long agonizing fight for civil rights for all, the artists that I admire are ones who made art not because of the great injustices but in spite of them.

But perhaps the most poignant realization that I’ve had on the occasion of Skovrecky’s death is that it took a Czech writer, not an American one, to realize these lessons.

I’m often tempted to credit Kerouac, and I would if it weren’t also the case that Kerouac’s example, his relationship to jazz and the life of the artist is dangerously sentimental. You try to be like Kerouac, or Hemingway, or Fitzgerald (or Kurt Cobain), and you’ll end up having a lot of entertaining stories to tell at parties but not a lot of work to show for it.

Skovrecky’s tremendous output—thirty books, television and film scripts, numerous translations of the work of forgotten Czech authors, and editor of his own publishing company—reminds me of one my favorite Charlie Parker quotes:

“I am a devout musician.”