Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [17]
The Liebestod was still thrilling and thrumming and surging from the record player as Ray reached down gently and with great care and lifted the playing arm off the record. The music stopped instantly. Ray delicately moved the playing arm back and lifted the record off the player with one big hand.
In sharp contrast to his treatment of the playing arm, Ray handled the record itself with brutal negligence. On the far side of the room Fuchs let out another scandalised yelp. He was still trying to force his way through the crowd towards Ray. Cosmic Ray just gave him a lazy smile and let the record go spinning out of his hand like a small, clumsy frisbee. Fuchs screamed as the black disc went spinning through the air towards the white wall of the room. It struck the wall and shattered with a brittle sound, showering to the floor in a number of ungainly angular pieces.
Cosmic Ray’s grin widened. ‘I hate to do that to a perfectly good piece of shellac. But the music that was pressed into those grooves deserved to die.
Now, hip cats and kitties, open your ears to some music that deserves to live.’
He opened the yellow leather bag and Ace saw why it was shaped like a cube. Inside was a box of funny black records in their square cardboard covers. With great reverence and enormous care, Cosmic Ray extracted one such record and placed it on the turntable. Fuchs, who had stopped halfway across the room when the Wagner record had broken on the wall, was watching with frigid contempt. He muttered with disgust something that sounded like ‘ En-tarte music,’ and pointedly turned his back as Ray proceeded to fiddle with the tone arm of the record player.
Ray removed the needle from the arm and threw it aside with a look of cool contempt that matched Fuchs’ own. ‘Don’t know what you’re so cooked about, Klaus baby,’ he said. ‘That needle you were using was worn out anyway. It should have been replaced about ten records ago you dumb Deutsche clown.
It was destroying the record. Killing the very thing you loved. Very Wagner-ian.’ Ray grinned as he bent over the record bag, fat thighs bulging from his shorts in a disgusting display of flab. He extracted a small yellow silk pouch, from which he took a new needle. He fastened the needle in the tone arm and set the arm on the record, standing back with a look of drunken rapture on his face.
‘This is more like it,’ he said as the needle rasped its way into the groove.
‘Duke Ellington. Released two years ago. The 1943 Ellington band, baby!’
His voice rose as the music began and Ace wondered why, if he so loved the music, he didn’t just shut up and let them listen to it. But Cosmic Ray kept on spouting facts. ‘Jimmie Hamilton on clarinet! And the great Ben Webster, 30
recorded just before he left the band in August of that year! “Jump for Joy” is the title, cats. It’s a hot little gem dreamed up by Ellington and Webster and some cat called Kuller. Originally written for a stage show which premiered at the Mayan Theatre in LA, City of the Angels, baby, on. . . ’
He proceeded to detail the date in July 1941 when the song had first been aired. By now Ace was extremely irritated with his running commentary because it was preventing her hearing the music. Ace had always been partial to jazz, treasuring her personally autographed Courtney Pine CD, and responded to the Ellington tune immediately. She felt her hips sway and her feet begin to stir.
Ray finally shut up and began to listen to the music he had been espous-ing at such turgid length. And oddly enough, everyone else shut up too. A communal silence fell over the party, one of those odd synchronous moments when, as if by telepathic concord, the entire group runs out of things to say.
It was a comfortable, attentive silence, as the hissing, spinning disc gave up its music. The song had a sardonic swagger in the muted trumpets and an infectious, joyous swing. Ace saw the first stirring of movement among the party guests, as if they were on the verge of breaking out into communal,