Shadowbahn(51)

“Oh lord,” moans Search & Destroy, rolling his eyes, “not the ‘everything changed’ thing.”

“The world-famous part, just so you know?” says One Nation Under a Groove. “That’s not one of the things that changed.”

“I feel sure,” the world’s barely known author starts to protest, “that I was going to be world fa—”

“It was never in the cards. Get over yourself.”

“We all want to believe everything changed,” says Search & Destroy, “but really? Everything went back to normal, or what was really normal, given that we never were as impervious to the chaos of human history as we thought.”

“I . . . wrote about all this!” sputters the author. “How the twentieth century—”

“Oh, sure,” says One Nation Under a Groove, “we’ve all been hanging on every word, too.” Search & Destroy bursts into laughter and soon both Surrogates are laughing. “Twentieth century this, America that. You call this change?” he says, gesturing at everything around them. “This was just mixing up the name tags, dude. You’re sitting at the bride’s table one minute, the groom’s the next.”

“Man,” chortles Search & Destroy, indicating himself and the other, “even the fake you’s are smarter than the real you. What’s that tell you? By the way”—he reaches into his back pocket—“here’s what you’ve been looking for.”

Parker and Zema’s father takes from the Surrogate a silver disc, blank but for a scrawl in black marker across its face that includes the name of the world-famous singer to whom the Surrogates bear some resemblance and to whom the author bears none in the least. He tries to make out the song title in the ashy light of the moon. “Who can read this? ‘Oh Shadowbahn’?”

“‘Shenandoah.’ Nineteenth-century American folk—”

“I know ‘Oh Shenandoah,’” he snaps, looking at the singer’s name, “but I never knew he recorded it. Anyway,” he insists, “I don’t think this tells me what I better do when the planes come.”

“Oh, that,” the Surrogate assures him. “That’s the flip side.”





tracks 16 and 17:


    “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”


Meanwhile. More than three decades before “Night Train” becomes a hit, a slave’s grandson who borrows Jeep’s sax riff for a work called Deep South Suite—and who also writes “Mood Indigo” and “Solitude” and “Sophisticated Lady” and “Take the A Train” and “Prelude to a Kiss” and “Day Dream” and “Isfahan” and “Transblucency” and “Moon Mist” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”—makes his first of nearly a dozen recordings of “Black and Tan Fantasy,” in which lurks a magnum opus. It’s the soundtrack of Harlem’s Cotton Club at its most riotous and becomes the basis of a twenty-minute RKO film with an entirely black cast. A man of grace and, perhaps, perspective, the composer has the class and, perhaps, irony to congratulate a younger next-generation pianist for being on the cover of the country’s most prominent weekly newsmagazine, to which the abashed young pianist can only stammer, “It should have been you,” acknowledging ever after that only because he’s white is he on the cover in place of the older, black maestro. (He will write a song in his hero’s honor called “The Duke.”) “Black and Tan Fantasy” is part witty funeral march interspersed with a twilit summer stroll down Lenox Avenue, as though the body, on its way to an eternal resting place in a Harlem cemetery, lets loose its spirit for one last jaunt around the neighborhood. In the short movie, a beautiful young cabaret performer dances herself to death during the song. The deep Harlem grave is a portal to forty years later, when a St. Louis dentist’s son with a horn leads an expedition to the end of African exile, the far finish of the great Ghanaian and Senegalese scattering, the exodus not from slavery to freedom, as in the Old Testament, but the other way around. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” isn’t just three centuries of a people’s history in fourteen musical minutes marked by wail, smolder, outburst, and flying-dutchman phantasmatoons adrift in the shoals of reef-smashed chords, it’s the response from the damned America to the call of that America that might still be redeemed in “Black and Tan Fantasy,” as the spirit of America takes off—from its body on its way to being interred—for one last jaunt around all the possibilities that the country once imagined for itself, even as those possibilities were betrayed before the country began. As well, running down the voodoo, the horn player (a man of no small ego, imbued with the fury of having had his brains almost bashed in by police when he’s seen in the company of a blonde outside Birdland mere weeks after recording what will go on to become the single most loved jazz album of all time) now pursues and sets to music his own oblivion, the sound of his own nothingness, the sound of something beyond burial. At once intermediary between the two men and successor to them is a third, whose songs are shadows to these two. American mongrel of black, Cherokee, and Irish, raised in Seattle by a family so abusive that a social worker reports only the boy’s interest in guitar will save him, he migrates to London, seat of the Old World, proceeding directly to legend bypassing mere notoriety. Seven months after leaving his country in obscurity, he returns with epic ambient-groove soundscapes that move from urban chaos to oceanic grottoes to perilous distant shores that no one can cross, breaking down psychic walls between outer space and inner. The trumpeter hears the guitarist’s intergalactic blues with titles like “Third Stone from the Sun” and “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return),” and follows them to where there is no return, slight or otherwise.