Tales of a tenorsaxophonist

I play tenor and I'm staying here... Instead of the dreamed socialism, totalitarianism on the Soviet model reigned in Czechoslovakia after 1948. Danny Smiřický tries not to get involved in anything and pursues his greatest passions - playing the tenor saxophone and amorous adventures - but under the supervision of his comrades it sometimes gets difficult. Especially when politics sometimes gets in the way of music and love and he has to face the criticism of a beautiful American girl or a friend's persuasion to emigrate. But this is nothing compared to the dramatic, even tragic human fates that he watches or hears about from afar. In the community, where there are no more guilty and innocent, but only those already revealed and not yet revealed, ...because coat-changers and back-benders do well, while honest, sincere and kind souls usually pull the short end of the rope. And so for every cowardly judge with a rosy cheek from good pap and heavy wine, there is some poor young man who ends up behind bars with the label of class enemy, golden youth or freeloader. Only girls - that is, if they are young, beautiful and compliant -, they have it a little easier even under communism, because cadre evaluations are one thing, but nice breasts, ass and eyes are another matter. Written in the mid-1950s, the stories are an eloquent document of a difficult time and of the unfulfilled dream of the author, who always wanted to become a musician more than a writer. Some of them appeared in the collection Hořkej svět / Bitter World (1969), and as a whole under the title Tales of a Tenorsaxophonist, they were finally published in 1993 as the last title of the exiled Sixty-Eight Publishers, which he founded in Toronto with his wife Zdená Salivarová, and a year later at home as part of the second volume of Josef Škvorecký's writings, entitled Příběhy o Liza a mladém Werther a jiné povídky / Tales of Lisa and Young Werther and Other Stories. The fates of the people Josef Škvorecký wrote about here were then worked into the script of the TV film Malá pražská matahára in the 1990s, but it was not until 2009 that they became the basis for the TV film Rhythm in the Heels directed by Andrea Sedláčková and starring Vojtěch Dyke and Marika Šoposka. CONTENTS: 1. Panta rhei, 2. Truths, 3. Work for the cadre, 4. How they licked them, 5. A small Prague math shop, 6. Well-tested Lizette, 7. Krpat's blues, 8. Richard Kambala's Bebop, 9. Till death do us part, 10. Dialogus de veritate + 11. Author's note "One thing I take pride in: at a time when so many of my peers were writing uncritical or even critical but socialist realism, I was doing The Tenorsaxophonist's Tales from 1954-1955. I tried to capture my experience at that time in a language that, as far as I knew, had never been used before in Czech literature. It sounded to me like the American "cynical" or "tough" school: maybe just me, maybe it was really there. Nebyl jsem tak naivní, abych artefakt nabízel k vydání.“ – Josef Škvorecký, autor Když hrajete na tenora, dřív nebo později si tu otázku položíte. What is it for and why and so on and so forth. I mean, life. In the history of music, the saxophone is, I would say, the most revolutionary invention. Because he's talking. Almost human, and actually better. He doesn't say the words. It says the gist. Of course, Jack Teagarden, Kid Ory, etc. they can talk and play the trombone. Or good old Dippermouth on trumpet. Or Billy Butterfield. But the instrument that really speaks is the saxophone. And especially the tenor. You cannot sing on it as on the clarinet, nor cheer as on the trumpet, nor thunder majestically as on the trombone. But talk. It is the most humanistic tool in the world. Just listen to him. So every good tenor sooner or later asks that question, especially because when you're earning your bread in some neon shell and instead of looking at the sheet music you're looking at the waxed ring where both sexes are jiggling back and forth, you learn something about life. Sometimes, though, properly. And then you suddenly wonder what it's for, and why, and if it's even profitable. Yeah, there are no answers to that question, though. The only thing that remains is the dark suspicion that it's all just for the sake of it, for fun and for the fun of it, and one is sick of it. - excerpt from the book