In his new short story collection The Music Never Died (Verse Chorus Press), author Mark Swartz envisions alternate fates for artists who died young. While most of these “Tales from the Flipside” concern a single artist—Biggie, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Gram Parsons—this one presents a parallel universe where jazz and hip-hop artists are locked in a Cold War. Trumpeter Lee Morgan and DJ Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC represent A New Hope.
The Flipside is a cramped used record store beneath Times Square. Everything you’d ever want to hear is here, and then some. Albums are arranged alphabetically and divided by genre. Over the years, the territory occupied by any given genre expands or contracts. Rock splits into classic and punk. Hip-hop arises and quickly occupies a sizable expanse. Easy listening fades. Country shrinks and grows and shrinks again.
These fluctuations are the product of tastes and trends, as well as ineffable qualities like genius, romance, and myth. The dead, especially the young dead, loom large here.
Whom the gods love dies young, wrote Menander in ancient times, and hoo doggie, did the gods love them some jazz or what? And they sure must have had some special affection for hip-hop, too. Across the bay from Jazz Island stood the city-state of Hiphopabad, with the impregnable Thugz Mansion at its center.
Both nations exist in the Flipside, which maps exactly onto the record store that bears its name. The continental drift of genres across crates mirrors territorial skirmishes and international intrigue in their world. This is the unauthorized account of how Jam Master Jay claimed the Flipside crown and the part played by Lee Morgan in his ascension.
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Lee folded the sheet into thirds with exact creases and inserted it into an album sleeve carefully designed to capture Jay’s interest. He’d commissioned a graphic artist to fabricate it in the style of Polydor covers from the label’s mid-seventies heyday. Everything was fake, from artist and title to track listing and personnel, but Shady Business by Beulah and the Beauts would leap from a stuffed crate into the DJ’s greedy fingers with no hesitation. It wasn’t necessary to fabricate a record. The disk inside was one by Roy Ayers Ubiquity that would certainly be in Jay’s vast collection already, but by the time he realized that, the composition would have possessed him.
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In Hiphopabad, explosions reverberated throughout the night. Doge Tupac and General Eazy-E reveled in the noise, content that their borders were expanding like spilled wine soaking into a silk tablecloth. At all-night banquets in Thugz Mansion, Tupac proclaimed victory after victory, praising the ferocity of his generals and promising remorseless evisceration of all haters.
“It isn’t enough to wound,” he declared. “It isn’t enough to kill. We don’t settle for mere murder and mayhem. It’s got to be a motherfucking massacre that would make your grandchildren’s grandchildren hang their heads in shame. War crimes! Ethnic motherfucking cleansing!”
Gracefully, the trumpeter would insinuate his musical legacy into the sensibility of the next generation. And was there in fact a biological connection? In 1964, the year his break- through hit “The Sidewinder” was released, did he happen perchance to sire Jason Mizell—the boy who would become Jam Master Jay?
We’ll never know. Jazz isn’t immortal, but genius is. The body it inhabits might fail too soon—this happens all the time—but the incandescent spirit migrates fulfills its promise out of earshot. It has nothing to do with earthly memory or artistic influence. Mizell came into the world on January 21, 1965. Everybody said he looked like his mother. He started playing trumpet at age three, eventually switching to drums before discovering—largely inventing, one could say—the two-turntable DJ kit.
People claimed he could drop the needle at the exact perfect break, just by looking at the vinyl. That’s a lie. He could have done it blindfolded. Just as pupils—the little black holes at the center of the iris—are sensitive to light, his fingertips felt the sound in the groove.
The search for records further illuminated Jay’s genius. Digging through crates at the Flipside transported him to an alternate time flow, neither faster nor slower than the standard clock but more logical and crystalline. Under the streets of Times Square, the world receded into heavy smog as independently intelligent fingers rifled through the albums, absorbing thousands upon thousands of studio hours via an exquisite sense of touch. Each album he touched triggered lightning-fast calculations that couldn’t be put into words, the population and calibration of a multidimensional database of sound, subculture, and story.
If Charlie Parker had killed composition so music could live, Jay had slain improvisation, virtuosity. Make no mistake, Jay had the chops, just as Parker could compose, but that was no longer enough. The future belonged to instinct, a more dangerous—even explosive—power. He paused every so often to glance at a back cover, but less than one in a thousand titles made it into his satchel.
Before Jay played a new record, a vacuum would fill his ears, a sound-shaped ache. Just before inevitable disappointment set in, he had a fleeting taste of what he sought. It wasn’t delicious. It was inexorable, like the vinyl circling the hole clockwise, like bloody water disappearing down a drain. What made the cut? More to the point, what was he looking for? To say he was a DJ—and crate-digging is what DJs do—would miss what made Jay the pre-eminent DJ of hip-hop’s golden era. He searched not to find something but because he felt most whole while searching.
Still, searching for what? Inside Jay gaped a hole, a black hole that could never be filled. Or hadn’t yet. Maybe someday a previously unknown album (a circle with a hole in the middle) would plug that hole once and for all.
Only one thing would fill the hole, and it’s a thing that itself had a hole, which cried out to be filled with a thing that— you guessed it—had a hole in the middle. And on and on, until the succession of holes formed a tunnel, a groove that both filled and could not ever be filled. The emptiness inside Jay grew vaster the more he filled it. His drug addiction, like Lee’s, was another hole that couldn’t be filled.
What put the hole there in the first place—or what didn’t take place that gave rise to the black hole? These are the questions.
The moment came when he held the Beauts album by its edges. There had been countless such moments in his past, moments that held the possibility—or perhaps the impossibility—of a cure for the sickness that had afflicted him all his life. This wasn’t medicine, it was faith healing—that is, healing that relied on belief. Belief in something that couldn’t be seen or heard, that probably wasn’t there. But maybe! The maybe was reason enough.
Opening the folded sheet that had drifted out of the record cover, Jay immediately started reading quarter notes and eighth notes—black circles on a grooved background that perfectly fit the holes inside him. He kept the melody within him until the day he died full of bullet holes. And beyond.
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The competitive spirit in Hiphopabad rested on a shared aspiration toward excellence. While DJs jealously guarded some of their technical secrets, a culture of mentorship and camaraderie predominated. Everybody accorded elders such as DJ Scott La Rock and Jam Master Jay the utmost respect. When a new DJ or producer arrived—a rare occurrence, given their comparatively risk-averse conduct in the earthly realm—he treated his forebears with deference, eager to gain access to the tips and tricks they were willing to reveal. Coltrane University could learn a thing or two from Hiphopabad, he thought to himself.
What’s more, it turned out that for many years Dolphy and other disgruntled jazz artists had been visiting the basement of Thugz Mansion to participate in bold experiments. When Clifford Brown first encountered a jam session in progress there, he barely recognized the music as music, but as he lingered through the night, he caught on to the subtle textures.
“What’s the point of all this?” he asked DJ Scott La Rock. “This is pure science. You should sit in.”
“What’s the plan, though? Are you going on the offensive?”
“No, man. In a world of speakers, we’re the listeners. But that doesn’t mean we’re passive.”
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Lee Morgan marched into the DJ lair, his trumpet to his mouth, and joined the ensemble without waiting for an invitation. Chick Webb hunched over the drum kit, with Charlie Christian and Scott La Faro rounding out the rhythm section. The eternally 28-year-old cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (b. 1903) dueled and duetted with the eternally 32-year-old Dilla (b. 1974) on his Akai MPC3000. Spanning generations and genres, this all-star combo sculpted a new sound. The music was not futuristic; it was beyond history entirely, a cacophonous hush slipping in and out of an irreducible time signature, a contradictory key. It continually wound down, further and further, without ever ending.
Jam Master Jay was positioned nearby, absorbing the groove without participating until Morgan made his entrance. He had never heard “Paternal Lee” out loud, and the recognition staggered him for a moment.
Jay dropped two platters on his decks, reached over and unplugged Dilla’s setup without asking permission, and revved up a sonic landscape that enveloped the jazzmen. Soon the subterranean air filled with a duet between trumpeter and DJ, a painful pointillistic cascade with a syncopated line that swung like a scythe.
Big Pun, all 700 pounds of him, pounced on the mic. “This is the new weapon we warned you about,” he hollered, but Dolphy’s horn broke in with an irrefutable counterpoint: Weapon? It’s the opposite. This is a religion, a new era with no use for weapons. This is what ‘A Love Supreme’ pretended to be.
Jay nodded at Lee and then beckoned to someone in the shadows. DJ Screw brought out a vintage microphone, and Queen Billie took center stage, tapping her black pump to a rhythm only two others in the lair could hear. Her legendary warble wrapped itself around seemingly improvised lyrics: “What did I know, what did I know, of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
The unfamiliar-familiar music wafted up to Tupac’s tower chamber, and he calmly loaded two semiautomatic rifles before descending to the depths. “Paternal Lee” rang in his ears as he stood in the subterranean doorway, awaiting a signal from within. Altered ineffably by his presence, the jam proceeded at a slightly slower tempo, acquiring a noirishly suspenseful but also somewhat mocking undercurrent.
With characteristic languor, Billie turned her face to the doorway and greeted her nemesis with a bittersweet glance during a pause between verses.
Drawing his weapons with a flourish that he knew looked cinematic, even though it actually delayed the pulling of triggers, the Doge of Hiphopabad roared silently as the spray of bullets became a whirlwind of gardenias and doves, while the performers remained upright and continued to play, egged on by the gunfire percussion to a sprightly doubletime break.
Limb by limb, Tupac’s anatomy became weaponry, discharging and clattering to the floor while the music carried on, now a victorious jubilee, now an old-world waltz. When the smoke cleared, the Queen was gone, but the funnel of petals and feathers swirled eternally.
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And thus arose the joint kingdom of New Syncopia. King Charlie Parker raised no objections to the new regime but felt compelled to abdicate, while Coltrane insisted that Lee Morgan’s continued presence at court would destabilize the delicate alliance. “Motherfuckers like that just can’t tolerate normality,” he argued. “He’s incapable of leaving well enough alone.” ODB concurred, declaring somewhat disingenuously that spiritual growth depended on political harmony.
King Jay then ascended the throne, while Lee took to roaming the outskirts of the Flipside, eventually disappearing into legend.
Mark Swartz is the author of the novels Instant Karma, H2O, and Summertime Jews. For The Vinyl District, he has written about jazz and Scott Fagan. Illustrator Jeb Loy Nichols is a singer-songwriter, artist, and writer. His most recent album is The United States of the Broken Hearted.
