I just love that as a title - resonant with all kinds of possibilities! (And yes, it could be a band name...)
This particular stream-of-consciousness noodling began the other day with a friend mentioning to me the name of a jazz pianist I hadn't heard of before. That somehow got me to thinking how most jazz musicians seem to have resolutely nondescript names: Gerry Mulligan, Harry James, Dexter Gordon.... they might be anyone, anything.
And that got me to thinking about whether it might be an interesting joke to use a bunch of such could-be-anyone-but-actually-associated-with-one-celebrity names in a short story or novel. The first time, I thought, you introduce a character name like 'Miles Davis', probably no-one is going to think twice about it. It will only be when you start to encounter a number of other names of leading jazz musicians that the reader will start to notice, and become a little discombobulated by the strange coincidence that so many of these characters seem to share the names of famous people (and no-one in the story ever remarks on it!).
This is an interesting enough idea in itself - a seemingly pointless gag that actually has the potential to explore the significance that we read into names, about how names engender expectations about characters, and about how those expectations condition our understanding of the story.
But the fact that I'd started considering this in relation to the names of jazz musicians took my thoughts off on another turn again. Suppose these characters really are the people that we know as famous musicians.... What kind of world is this, I wondered, in which jazz musicians don't play jazz? What might Charlie Parker or Lester Young have done with their lives if they hadn't picked up a saxophone at that crucial moment in their childhoods?
There were two aspects of this scenario that I found particularly compelling. The first was, What might it be like to have missed your great vocation in life - to have an innate gift for music, but not be able to give expression to that? And the second was, Well, what might people like this end up doing instead?
Hmm, uncommonly bright people, but in a rather unorthodox way - somewhat obsessive-compulsive personalities, probably with a bent for pattern-recognition and problem-solving.... Gumshoe!
And there don't seem to have been that many stories about a coloured gumshoe - at least not in the movies, and I suspect probably not within the realms of pulp fiction either. Denzel Washington's Devil In A Blue Dress is the only one that comes to mind. Oh, and Shaft, I suppose. That's not exactly a crowded field, compared to the scores of white P.I. stories out there. And somehow I immediately saw Miles Davis - cranky, obsessive, relentlessly non-conformist - as a great down-at-heel, hard-boiled private detective character: Philip Marlowe with a whole extra layer of attitude.
Now, this conceit could work fine as it is: we take a character from the real world, change his circumstances, make use of certain aspects of his known personality - then have fun playing around with how he might behave in a very different milieu.
However, I kept returning (perhaps unwisely...) to the initial question of What is this world, how did things come to be like this? I figured this would have to be some sort of science fiction scenario, a divergent timeline - the one universe in a billion billion where, for some reason, jazz didn't 'happen' (and, without the potent allure of that particular musical style, I thought, it's possible that many of the people we know as giants of that genre might not even have learned to play an instrument). Now, I'm not a great fan of time-travel scenarios on the whole, but once my mind had started down this particular rabbit-hole I came up with two further ideas that I thought quite promising.
The likeliest single cause of a non-jazz world, it occurred to me, might be the early death of Jelly Roll Morton. Not a completely plausible mechanism, I'm sure; there were many different strands of music coming together to form what we know as jazz, and many other early practitioners of the style. But Morton composed the majority of the early standards, was the first person to start getting original jazz compositions published, and - perhaps most importantly of all - was the first player to start getting recorded (at first on cylinders). He was the first musician to really start popularizing the new form, the first to start getting it heard and appreciated in places where there might be little or no opportunity to hear it played live. Without Morton, I think it is conceivable that jazz as we know it might not have taken off - might never had made it to Kansas City, New York, Chicago, and might thus have failed to establish itself as the dominant form of American popular music through the second quarter of the 20th Century. If its musical antecedents did not wither and fade away completely, they might perhaps remain a marginalized and unrespectable niche music, heard only in divey dance halls, brothels and gambling houses along the Gulf Coast, never breaking into the mainstream of American culture.
If that has happened - Morton dead at an early age, before he can kick-start the evolution of jazz (perhaps murdered by some jazz-hating time-travelling psychopath from the far future?) - the story that naturally suggests itself is the attempt to undo this, to re-enable the birth of jazz - and hence to redeem all of our jazz heroes from the purgatory of artistically unfulfilled lives (although, given how badly most of them dealt with their fame, there would be issues to explore as to whether they might not have really been 'happier' without the jazz...).
This prompted one final story idea - a very visually striking one, I thought, good for the eventual movie version. We need to get our gumshoe Miles Davis on the trail of the killer, aware of the mystery of the disappearance of jazz from the world. I imagined a 'guardian angel' figure in the far future world who is trying to facilitate this, but has very limited means of communication (there will be a rationale for this, but let's not get into it right now). He manages to send Miles a parcel, a gift with a potent message in it, if he can but decipher it. Miles unwraps the strange present on his desk and finds.... his own face looking at him from an album cover. And then his investigation will begin with the attempt to identify the other people listed in the credits: who are Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb, John Coltrane...??
[By the by, this is a very late posthumous insertion into the Discarded Story Ideas series: I actually wrote this in May 2018, five-and-a-half years after I formally shut down this blog.]
4 comments:
Hmmm... (unsurprisingly) interesting premise.
Maybe one of those "How might this world have come to pass?" premises might have been the early death -- or profound distraction -- of Alan Lomax. The very earliest jazz might have been unaffected, but the loss of recordings by Depression-era and later musicians would sure have dented later musical progress. Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, the aforementioned Jelly Roll Morton, Pete Seeger, Django Reinhardt, Sidney Bechet...
Here's an anthology of mystery and crime fiction by black authors. Probably for obvious reasons, their protagonists tend to be black as well (although I'm not familiar with enough of them to know that I could say "ALL their protagonists"). This of course raises the related question of how often, if ever, NON-black mystery writers depict black detectives.
You may remember -- I must've mentioned at some point -- my fascination with the idea that except for experimental films, the world(s) in which films take place NEVER include films featuring the films' own cast members. Assuming David Huxley ("Mr. Bone") and Susan Vance of Bringing Up Baby did wind up together, for example, they could never go to the theater to see a Cary Grant or Katherine Hepburn film. This seems somewhat related.
Ah, but then, how often do people in movies go to the movies? Almost never. And when they do, it's almost always to a made-up movie, some sort of parody - rather than an actual movie that we know in the real world.
And then there was one of the recent Ocean's X caper series which made a gag of Julia Roberts's character impersonating Julia Roberts. I don't suppose that's the only time that's been done - although it is the only one I can think of just now. I think sly references to the names of actors starring in the movie, perhaps even occasional explicit mentions of 'how like x a character looks', have been done quite often.
A further wrinkle occurred to me a few days ago, as I was writing the original post above.
I decided that my 'multiverse' was not infinite. Or at least not infinite in variety: divergences at the sub-atomic level seldom if ever accumulate to a point of creating differences at the macro level discernible by humans - and there may even be certain tendencies to 're-converge' rather constantly drift further apart.
However, you can't time-travel within your own timeline.... because you're inevitably going to change something in the past, and then your timeline wouldn't be as you know it; you might even change your future personality, or perhaps prevent yourself from being born at all. Obviously not possible. So.... the act of time-travelling serves to 'isolate' your timeline from all others; you can change the past to alter the future of the whole of the rest of existence - everything except your own world.
Poor old Miles will have the chance to go back to the 1890s to save a child Morton, and hence give jazz back to the rest of the multiverse. But he will return to a world that has never known this music, and where he is a private dick, not a trumpet player.
Returning your point, JES, I think the rather more glaring "Don't mention it" convention concerns vampire and zombie films, which almost always seem to take place in worlds that are ignorant of fictional vampires and zombies.
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