On September 12, 1991, Miles Davis opened up the closet in his Santa Monica home and found Louis Armstrong, who had been dead for some years, glowering and pointing an accusing finger at him.

He closed the closet door.

“Shit,” he said to himself.  He looked around.  Everything else seemed normal.  He had posters on the wall.  The ashtrays were all there.  The windows were open and the sun was coming in.

He turned around and opened up the closet door again.  There was Louis Armstrong, looking furious.

“Satchmo,” Miles said.  “What you want?”

It wasn’t that Miles was scared of ghosts, or thought he had to be crazy to be seeing one.  He had always believed in spirits.  Fact was, Gil Evans, a cat he had done some records with in the late fifties and who had died about three years ago, had been to him lately.  Not like this; not standing there in the closet with a white tux and a trumpet in his hands looking like he’d just swallowed some fishbait.  No, Gil had been more like this voice, this presence that made Miles feel warm and cold all at the same time, made him think thoughts that were as big as the wind, and harder to hold, too.  So the ghost bit was not the worst thing that had ever happened to Miles Davis.

But why was it the ghost of Louis Armstrong?

Armstrong glowered, and raised his finger again.

“Miles Dewey Davis the third,” he said in his famous baritone growl.  “You’ve killed jazz, and there’s gonna be justice on your head.  Justice!”

This got Miles feeling a little rankled.

“Killed jazz?  What you talking about, Satchmo?”  He waved his hand along the wall.  “You see that?  The gold records?  The Downbeat poll awards?  The fucking Grammies?  Looks like I’m killing jazz so bad, it’s making a million dollars just being dead!”

“You watch your mouth!” Armstrong said, striding out of the closet so fast Miles took a jump back.  He walked over to the wall and pointed at one gold record behind glass.  “Like this, here!  Your so-called album Bitches Brew!  Nigger, you call your momma up and talk about that record by name?”

Miles stepped between Armstrong and the record on the wall, puffing out his chest to look impressive, which is tricky when you are sixty-five years old and have always been a short man.  However, he used to box a little, and in any event, Armstrong had crossed a line, ghost or not. 

“Don’t you talk about my momma, fool.  I don’t let anybody talk about my momma.  You invented jazz trumpet, more or less, so you get a freebie.  Then I kick your ass.”

Armstrong laughed mirthlessly, the way you would probably expect a ghost to laugh.

“You killed jazz, Dewey, and there’s gonna be justice on your head.  This isn’t jazz.  This is a bunch of white-boy rock-and-roll noise-making nonsense that’s gone to your head so hard it’s straightened your hair out.  I’m gonna come back in a week and visit up a reckoning on you.  One week!”  Armstrong returned to the closet and suddenly smiled, that huge, slightly lopsided smile that the whole world had smiled along with so many times down through the years.  And then he shut the door.

Miles didn’t need to open the door back up.  He knew that it would be empty.

“Shit,” he said.  “I need a drink.”

#

Miles stretched out on his sofa with a scotch-and-soda, twist of lime, two small ice cubes, in his favorite glass.  He had two of those and thought.

Then he started calling people.

Wayne Shorter was skeptical.  So was Herbie Hancock.  So were Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Bill Evans the pianist, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Bill Evans the tenor player, and Elvin Jones.  Most of them told him he was flat-out crazy. 

Finally, Miles called Dizzy Gillespie.  It wasn’t as if they had ever been particularly close, but he was running out of phone numbers, and Dizzy seemed like a link to the past that Satchmo represented.

“I don’t believe you, Miles,” Dizzy said.  “I think you’re high.  It’s not as if I’ve never smoked a reefer or two, but all this drugging really demeans the profession and our common instrument.”

“Dizzy, come on.  Do you really think that I have nothing better to do all day than get high and call you up to play head games with you?”

“But arguendo I would probably say that Satchmo had a point.  I haven’t understood anything you’ve done since 1961.  I did like Kind of Blue all right, but everybody makes too big a deal out of it.  Doesn’t it make you a little sleepy?”

Miles became exasperated and hung up.  He drank another scotch-and-soda.  He was going to require some special help.  Chagrined as he was about it, there was no real choice: he was going to have to call Monica.

#

Miles had met Monica in the 1970s.  When exactly was hard to say.  Miles had spent much of that period in the pleasantly dazed world of the constantly stoned, alternating between tremendous short bursts of creative energy and long lazy days and weeks of just grooving along, talking to people and forgetting them, snapping his fingers idly through entire weekends and retaining nothing.  He remembered the albums he recorded during that period quite well, and little else, except for a few very memorable people.

Monica had been memorable.  He hadn’t liked her, exactly, but it seemed necessary to keep contact with her.  He had no sexual interest in her, but she told a good joke and was an excellent painter.  But when he asked her a question about one of her canvases – one with a combination of roosters crowing, World War I airplanes fighting, and Hawaiian shirts without owners dancing together, she had said:

“The spirits paint these.  I’m just a vessel.”

“The spirits, huh?  And where do you know them from?”

She looked impish: a bad look on middle-aged women.  “From Switzerland.”

Miles knew there were no spirits in Switzerland.  But he kept her number around, and met her for a drink once every other year or so.  He called her and offered her ten thousand dollars to get her ass to California to do him a favor.  It took her a couple days but she showed up at his door, clutching ratty suitcases and with gray hair flowing long over her back and shoulders.  She touched Miles’s hand softly and floated to the couch in a whirlwind of skirts and scarves.

Miles explained the problem to her.  She was not even moderately surprised.  Monica got some wine and fresh sage from Miles’s kitchen, and lit some candles in a circle on the floor of the room where the closet was.  Then she started chanting.  It sounded like bad scat singing.  White chicks.  He got a headache and left the room.

Then all the lights went out.

Miles cursed majestically and felt his way back into the room.  The candles were still going, even though wind was whipping through the room.  Monica was standing in the circle, her arms stretched out in front of her as if she were a mime feeling an invisible wall.

Something felt wrong to Miles.  He stepped inside the circle.

All at once, the closet door flew open.

Louis Armstrong stepped out.  Following him came five figures, each about six feet tall, with lumpy green skin and elongated, birdlike masks, striped red and black.

“The Hot Fives,” Armstrong said, flashing that famous smile again.  “All you did was open the gate a little wider.”

#

The demons crowded around the circle, snorting loudly and pawing the ground with their feet.  They breathed and hot smoke came out of their noses.

Monica looked as if she was about to faint.  “These enchantments are totally beyond my ken,” she moaned.  “I’m completely at sea.”

Miles bit his lip with anger; he didn’t even vaguely feature messing around with these weirdos.  More than he had in years, he really just wanted to get back to work, but there were demons and ghosts in his pad.  “You old fool, Satch.  You really think I killed jazz?”

“What I think,” Armstrong said, “is you took that bebop stuff, that I always hated, and picked out all the bad things in it and made all of them as much worse as you possibly could.  I think you turned your back on the music of New Orleans and turned your head towards San Francisco and all that other crazy shit that destroyed the pure, exuberant expression of the black American man’s soul into a nihilistic, masturbatory, self-indulgent non-music.  So yeah, nigger, you killed jazz all right.”

“Shit,” Miles said.  “Least I wasn’t no damn ofayo like you, grinning and stepping for the white man like a damn minstrel-show banjo player.  I created the whole concept of jazz artist as creative, bohemian figure, more or less.  And when you died in ’71, I was still going forward and learning new stuff—you missed my whole Stockhausen period in the eighties—and you had been running on the same track since before I cashed my first check.  Nigger, please.”

Armstrong grimaced.  “Take his ass out,” he said to the demons.

All five of them attacked at once.

What Armstrong did not know was that Miles’s great love, besides jazz, had always been boxing: the sweet science.  So as those green things came at him, Miles raised two fists to eye level and struck out like a rattlesnake.

It was jab and cross, it was strike and block, it was the wet, muffled impact of trained muscle on flesh and bone.  Miles danced and hopped around, his eyes searching each one out and making chess-move plans, always managing to be one move ahead and putting a fist where a claw used to be and an eye was.  His hands began to stain with dark purple streaks of demon blood.  But Miles didn’t care; he might be sixty-five years old but he was a mad motherfucker who wasn’t going to let no green things from the Cosmos of Squaresville come into his own house and string him up for killing no jazz.

Punch, punch, punch!  The things all staggered as one, like drunken frat brothers, and backed out of the circle.  Each one disappeared with an audible pop and a puff of black smoke.

“Teach your boys some Bruce Lee shit next time,” Miles scowled.  “That’s the only way you’re getting a drop of blood out of this horn man.”

Armstrong only grinned again.  “You ain’t seen nothing, Dewey.  You think I was relying on those cats?  They just the warm-up act.”

Armstrong reached into thin air and pulled out a trumpet, shimmering and golden.  He stepped into the circle and raised it to his lips.  One note shot through the air—Miles could almost see it whizz out of the horn, reflected in the bell—as clear and pure as a cloudless day in spring.

All at once the room was flooded with light.  The circle Monica had drawn vanished, and then so did the floor, and then so did Miles’s whole house.  Miles faced Armstrong in a world of pure geometrical abstractions and primary colors, the air silent and somehow yawning with an impression of immense age.

“You try and cut me in the afterlife, now, Miles,” Armstrong said.  “Let’s do the heebie-jeebie dance.”

#

“Shit!” Miles yelled.  “Is this what it comes down to?  Playin’?  Well, you just pulled the tiger by the tail, motherfucker.  I’m better than you.  I’ve always been better than you.  The only reason you ran down anything happening in music after 1941 was because you knew you couldn’t play it.  Shit, you with your same old six or seven chords and your same old tired-ass melodies—I’m gonna cut your ass!”

“Try it,” Armstong said.

Miles put his own trumpet to his mouth, and blew.

He blew what he knew.  He told as much truth as he could with that horn.  He used it to talk about the tragic nature of time, how no moment stays and is always rushing into the ever-growing past, and we never get a chance to breathe because evil old death is always coming at you.  He used it to talk about one night he was smoking a cigarette outside the Blackhawk, getting ready to play a gig, his own name on the marquee for Christ’s sake, and those two white cops beating him until his lower lip cracked and blood came out, and the word nigger spitting out of their lips like toad poison.  He used it to talk about the texture of morning sunlight on cherry blossoms in Japan, and the white fingers of breath on top of Japanese mountains.   He used it to talk about the indescribability of taste.  He used it to talk about Charlie Parker, dead in his hotel room, and he used it to talk about his own junkie demon soul, grasping with clawed hands at his brain until he had thoroughly fucked up more than one marriage.  He used it to talk about your woman’s hands on the skin of your chest.  He used it to talk about green water and blue water, about white clouds and black clouds.  He played all his notes and let each one produce its suitcases, festooned with stickers from different songs, different records, different gigs where he had played them before.  Before long he was not there at all: he was just an electric current riding up and down the spine of a snake a hundred miles long, his whole being evaporated into the lines of melody coming out of his trumpet.

He stopped.

“Who killed jazz now, fool?”

Armstrong smiled.

“You just killed it.  And dig!  I’m going to kill it again now.” 

Armstrong raised the trumpet to his own lips, and Miles quaked, because Tom or no Tom, the man had always told the truth when he played his horn.

And Armstrong blew.  He blew a fast run of notes, all the way up the scale, from lowest C to highest B-flat, where the golden sound hung suspended in the air like a cartoon character just noticing the air beneath his feet, and then— Miles felt his bowels tremble at it—the world turned upside down as the trumpet note plummeted upward, beyond the reach of highest soprano voices, bird calls, and the invisible music that dogs and cats hear, each note becoming less strained, more relaxed, more perfectly delivered with each upward reach.  Armstrong blew all the way up scales that had not existed before, that were created by his playing them, scales so high that, like the positionless positions and massless masses of quantum mechanics, they created their own musical rules.  He blew all the way up and then he blew all the way down again, streaking downwards like a falling rocket that burned.  The horn was a scythe of light, reaping across the landscape and cutting off the tops of heads.  The horn was a battleship from Neptune, spewing forth space invaders of sound.  The horn was white-hot to the touch and the size of many icebergs.  The horn was life and death.

“I kill jazz, you kill jazz, and we keep on going,” Armstrong rasped.  “I gettin’ tired of this.  We need to split.  You ever heard of William Blake?”

“I have!” Monica said.  To Miles’s astonishment, he realized she was still there.  “Allen Ginsberg had a vision of him in . . .”

“Don’t you talk to me about that beatnik hanger-on,” Miles muttered.

“Well, that Ginsberg was one fucked-up cat,” Armstrong said.  “But he did have a vision.  See, Blake was a cat that got around on all sides of the cosmic divide, in life and death.  And in this one poem, he says that in Eden, all the sons of heaven fight eternally in a creative war.  That’s where were going now.  You ready?”

“So you take it back about me killing jazz?”

“Shit, Miles Dewey, haven’t you figured it out yet?” Armstrong laughed.  “This cutting contest we’re having—this is jazz.  Everything good gets killed again and again until it’s perfect, see?”

Miles started to answer, but his mouth was a bowl of stars, a splitting-open of light.  He thought of his last record, and saw that there was a way to compress it all into a single note, a circular note, and start from there a long chain of supernotes that would go for hours, perhaps weeks.  Light continued to surround him and his trumpet entered his chest . . . mountains of boiling steam were rising all around him, and he had no fear.

#

Monica found herself standing in a room in Miles Davis’s house.  The closet was open and a moth flew out.

She looked down on the floor.  Miles was curled up in fetal position, gripping his trumpet to him.  She touched the side of his neck, like a fisherman seeking the gills.  He was cold.

Without a word she left and returned to her home.  As she walked out the door, she thought she heard a distant sound, small like a toy trumpet.  It sounded like it was coming from very, very far away—farther than anywhere in the world could be.

---

Jason L. Corner lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and daughter, where he teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.  His work has appeared in Abyss and Apex, Nautilus Engine, and Electric Spec, and he is currently at work on a novel.  He  can be reached at jasonlcorner@gmail.com.

This story, unusually for me, was written all in one sitting.  I had recently been reading Miles Davis's autobiography and had found myself thinking in his voice—a thing that happens with a lot of people when under the spell of particular authors. The story then tumbled out, with only the sketchiest plot in mind.  If you like, you can read it as a companion piece to my "Cosmic Music."