The imperfect scat of Louis Armstrong chases me as I’m riding my bicycle down by the river. In that rough timbre of his trumpet, I hear imaginary cornet flairs radiating from steamboat bandstands, and some punk kid from Louisiana bringing all his wild bayou attitude up the muddy water, casting it out across this scattered, Midwestern city.
Jazz touched St. Louis; not in the way it stormed Chicago, Harlem or New Orleans (its pulsing heart.) But it took residence here. It rowed up the Mississippi and left its sweating fingerprints all over the back-alley nightclubs.
Scott Joplin composed ragtime mantras from the windowed rooms of the north city; Josephine Baker danced on our streets in her youth; Gaslight Square invited legends.
So much of how I feel about St. Louis is tied to jazz that, in the end, I don’t know if I could separate the two. I used to think this wasting architecture was a disgrace, but then I discovered the music, and the precise, random howling of Sonny Rollin’s saxophone fused with industry and produced, in my mind, a glorious symphony of sooty windows and dirty ironwork.
Married with jazz, the decay begrudgingly accepted as a hometown moves me the most.
I believe consciousness loves such contradictions. Jack Kerouac once said that “purity and consumer greed, both these battlefields, the body/spirit of America occupies a single metaphysical space in which was manifested the essential duality of the universe.”
The “essential duality of the universe” in a single urban soul-the yin and the yang, the cosmic poles, the balance of matter and energy-is fundamentally reflected in the harmonious squalor of the city. The rusted spires of industry, the floodwall beer-factory tin atmosphere … all pose an arresting contradiction to the piano notes of Joplin that hang like grapes on the air.
To ride down Jefferson Avenue and feel the two opposing forces simultaneously is a gestalt phenomena in its creativity; the merging of the music with towering brick creates an impression that is more than the sum of its parts. St. Louis was my first love. I remember how I bicycled through its streets listening to Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo”; it haunted me with its scratchy, old-time recording that wound eerily around the buildings. Its trumpets tasted like the aluminum fog that hung around the barges by the river and its baseline beat to the traffic clogging highway arteries. Flying through our streets, I heard these things, and the symphony took form; the dualities morphed together.
The music followed me down to Soulard, and around by Lafayette Square, where the houses are masterpieces of paint and clay. Like a Miles Davis impression, St. Louis has no center. It sprawls, and the brick industry seeps, and often times the empty spaces in between are more important than the plots of commerce. West of Grand, down Delmar, nestled between the Central West End and campus are rows of dilapidated houses that every swing of Dizzy Gillespie’s horn imbues with life.
Sometimes, I can see the brick homes lean back, rustle their parched grass in the wind and listen to the river of saxophone notes flood the city. It is such tender closeness I feel to the vacant downtown arena, such solemn adoration of the bald-faced water tower that only the scratchy croon of Billie Holiday could possibly compliment.
I see the dirt of St. Louis that everybody comments on. I see its decay. But melted with trombones and clarinets, graced with the tingling, wild soul of jazz, it’s beautiful.
Roberta Singer is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences.
