In Tachikawa I was on a team that worked together for two years.

We worked together, we ate together, we drank together, we went to the village and got laid together. We were readers and letter writers. We went to the Base Theater.

Us all going to see The Days of Wine and Roses, and laughing, was like the mental patients watching The Snake Pit on television in the dayroom, and laughing.

I got over being ashamed to be a retread.

I was a professional airman, doing a hard job, well, for less pay than a civilian would take to do the same job. I had a reverse-snob pride in being lower than whale-shit on the bottom of the ocean. It took sand to be an airman. That boy has sand.

You could buy jazz records cheap, in the BX. I bought jazz records, and listened to them. In my cubicle, in the Quonset hut, with a curtain for a door.

Swing bands and jazz combos played at the clubs, on base, and there were jazz clubs off base, too.

Every time a new jazz record came out, the Japanese musicians would have all the licks copied before the record was even scratched.

Jazz was respected, in Japan.

So was bluegrass. I remember a band called the Rice Paddy Wranglers, that played bluegrass.

I didn't go to hear them because the place they played, a bar called Hillbilly Heaven, was full of mean rednecks, looking for a fight.

I didn't want to go into a mean redneck bar any more than I wanted to go into a militant black bar.

There were more militant black bars now. More militant blacks. Blacks had an identity, a hostility towards whites, and polite blacks, that they didn't used to have. It made it harder to be friendly towards black people because a black person who was friendly with a white person was suspect in his own community, or reference group.

They didn't want your good will. They didn't care what you thought.

They didn't like you.

And if you claimed to like jazz, you were bullshitting yourself. You couldn't read the subtext. Jazz was black music. No white person need apply.

That's interesting.

How long before militant blacks abandoned jazz for something more, well, black. Like hip hop?

Not long, pardner Not long.

Jazz was too white. Too intellectual. Too fancy.

It was harder to play than moving a turntable back and forth, like a monkey.

You had to learn an instrument. You had to learn to read music. You had to train, to practice, to study. To woodshed. Who had time to woodshed?