Worlds

7. Licorice Stick

O’Hara loved to play the clarinet. She had a thorough classical grounding—had played every boring note in Klosé—because the clarinet had been her solo instrument for her music degree. She even played in the New York orchestra because she enjoyed losing herself in the complex harmonies and rhythms of symphonic music and liked to be around other musicians. But her real love was jazz: primitive American jazz—Dixieland, especially.

Her music library was dominated by tapes, flat-screen or plain audio, of twentieth-century American jazzmen. She often played along with them, and could do a dead-on pastiche of, say, Goodman’s solo in “Sing, Sing” or Fountain’s in “Swing Low.” A friend who was good with electronics had made her a copy of “Rhapsody in Blue” with the clarinet part filtered out; learning it had taken three hundred hours out of her seventeenth year.

An objective critic, and O’Hara was one by the time she was twenty, would note that her playing was mechanically competent and sometimes even brilliant, but she had no particular personal style and no real gift for improvisation. It might have been different if she had had other people to play with, but no jazz musicians in New York were interested in historic forms. The Ajimbo school, with its sixteenth-note phrasing and weird clapping chorus, had dominated jazz for a generation, in the Worlds as well as on Earth. O’Hara thought it was degenerate, obvious, and unnecessarily complex. Other people might say the same of Dixieland, if they ever listened to it.

That was another reason to go to Earth. Chicago, San Francisco, old New York; they all sounded fascinating. But the place she most wanted to visit was New Orleans. To walk the streets they’d named songs after: Bourbon, Basin, Rampart. To sit on a hard chair in Preservation Hall, or nurse expensive drinks in crumbling old bars, or just stand on the sidewalk or in the French Quarter park and listen to old black men try to keep alive this two-century-old music. John Ogelby had been there (he was English but had taken a degree at Baton Rouge), and she made him talk about it all the time. She would go to New Orleans even if she could somehow foretell what was waiting for her there.