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By Root 126 0

afternoon a stray customer might be put in the chair and lathered by someone more sober and then Bolden would fight back into the room protesting loudly to his accusers that he had nerves of steel, and so cut hair once more, or whatever came in the way. Humming loud he would crouch over his sweating victim and cut and cut, offering visions of new styles to the tilted man. He persuaded men out of ten year mustaches and simultaneously offered raw steaming scandal that brought up erections in the midst of their fear. As the afternoon went on he elaborated long seductions usually culminating in the story of Miss Jessie Orloff’s famous incident in a Canadian hotel during her last vacation. So friends came early to avoid the blood hunting razors of the afternoon. At 4 o clock in any case the shop closed down and he slept.

It was a financial tragedy that sleep sobered Bolden up completely, that his mind on waking was clear as an empty road and he began to casually drink again although never hard now for he played in the evenings. He slept from 4 till 8. His day had begun at 7 when he walked the kids a mile to school buying them breakfast along the way at the fruit stands. A half hour’s walk and another 30 minutes for them to sit on the embankment and eat the huge meal of fruit. He taught them all he was thinking of or had heard, all he knew at the moment, treating them as adults, joking and teasing them with tall tales which they learned to sift down to the real. He gave himself completely to them during the walk, no barriers as they walked down the washed empty streets one on either side, their thin cool hands each holding onto a finger of his. Eventually they knew the politics of the street better than their teachers and he in turn learned the new street songs from them. By 8 they were at school and he took a bus back to Canal, then walked towards First, greeting everybody on his way to the shop.

What he did too little of was sleep and what he did too much of was drink and many interpreted his later crack-up as a morality tale of a talent that debauched itself. But his life at this time had a fine and precise balance to it, with a careful allotment of hours. A barber, publisher of The Cricket, a cornet player, good husband and father, and an infamous man about town. When he opened up the shop he was usually without customers for an hour or so and if there were any there they were usually ‘spiders’ with news for The Cricket. All the information he was given put unedited into the broadsheet. Then he cut hair till 4, then walked home and slept with Nora till 8, the two of them loving each other when they woke. And after dinner leaving for Masonic Hall or the Globe or wherever he was playing. Onto the stage.

He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

And so arrived amateur and accidental with the band on the stage of Masonic Hall, bursting into jazz, hurdle after hurdle. A race during which he would stop and talk to the crowd. Urging the band to play so loud the music would float down the street, saying ‘Cornish, come on, put your hands through the window’. On into the night and into blue mornings, growing louder the notes burning through and off everyone and forgotten in the body because they were swallowed by the next one after and Bolden and Lewis and Cornish and Mumford sending them forward and forth and forth till, as he could see them, their bursts of air were animals fighting in the room.

With the utmost curiosity and faith he learned