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early King Oliver platters to Satchmo’s present combo.
    â€œYou weren’t kidding, were you, Johnny?”
    She took the drink from him and sat on the couch, sipping it and examining an album.
    â€œJohnny Nickles and his Dixieland Band,” she murmured aloud, reading the line across the bottom of the album’s cover. She turned the cover and glanced at the printed matter inside. Then she slowly flipped the four inside pockets and read the labels on each record.
    When she had finished, she closed the album, laid it flat across her knees and looked at the cover design. It was done in surrealistic art. The scene was a small dingy room furnished only with a battered piano and some rickety chairs. On the floor was a litter of bottles and cigarette stubs. A saxophone strap hung over the back of a chair and a trumpet lay forgotten on the piano. All this faded up into a desolate eerie desert scene, reminiscent of Death Valley, and here rested a grinning skull on a scrap of torn manuscript paper. The penciled music notes on the manuscript were blowing off the paper, whirling away into the dark empty sky.
    The Ghost Album.
    The girl shuddered.
    â€œIt’s a hell of a thing,” Johnny said through his teeth. “The bastard who dreamed that up must have been on a diet of bennies and tea for a solid week.”
    â€œIt’s ghastly, Johnny. It looks so—futile.”
    He slumped back in the chintz-covered easy chair. A lock of his unkempt wavy black hair had fallen across his forehead. He was sweating. He took a long drink from the glass. It trembled a bit in his grasp. “It’s supposed to look futile. That’s what the sonuvabitch who painted it was aiming for. The futile, unhappy existence of some of the jazz musicians we portray in the album. Jam sessions in a back room till dawn, gin, goof balls, bennies, one night stands...all of it leading to nothing....”
    Biederbecke, Oliver, Berrigan, Jelly Roll Morton, Pine Top Smith—all the immortal jazz musicians who were dead now—were depicted in the album, their individual styles faithfully imitated by Johnny and the fellows in his band.
    It was the story of jazz from the days of Buddy Bolden and the New Orleans street bands to the Original Dixieland Band that migrated to Riesenweber’s Restaurant in New York, carrying the exciting new music to the outside world, to the days of flaming Storyville and the riverboats, then the great migration to Chicago—the music that had been followed right up to the present. And half the album was in the present style of Johnny’s own band, with Miff Smith’s fine drums as good as any that had ever come out of New Orleans, the birthplace of Dixieland jazz.
    It was the story of an American era, almost a legend, the birth of an original music form which is the only really pure American music. And when the records played, ghosts came out of the past to listen—fancy ladies from the old bordellos like Mahogany Hall, jazzmen of all ages, creeds and colors, boys from Rampart Street, pretty octoroons and figures bedecked in gaudy Mardi Gras costumes, bartenders, pimps and gangsters, bootleggers and symphony hall conductors. They were all there because they had all played roles in the great legend, though they had long been still and forgotten, some for a decade, some for more than a quarter of a century.
    She turned on the record player and put on the disk that had given the set its name of Ghost Album . It was Teegerstrom Struts His Stuff , the band’s tribute to the great Chicago clarinetist, Charlie Teegerstrom, who had met a flaming end in an automobile wreck in the early Thirties, while fleeing the scene of a shooting fracas over another man’s wife.
    Link Rayl had done a terrific job of copying the great man’s style. Jazz critics said it wasn’t Link playing that night, it was the ghost of the greatest jazz clarinetist of all times, come back to earth for one