Mystery or Fantasy? A Story Inspiration That Goes Back Almost 60 Years (by Floyd Sullivan)

My high school junior theme was titled “Jazz as an Art Form.” It was 1966. I was sixteen years old and knew nothing about jazz except it seemed to favor saxophones, pianos, and trumpets over the guitars made so popular by the recent “British Invasion” groups. But I liked music and had joined a garage band. I don’t recall the other topics given us to choose from, but none of them sounded particularly interesting to me. Writing an essay about any musical genre was my best option.

As part of my research I subscribed to DownBeat Magazine, which netted me a free jazz album. It was an Ornette Coleman LP that I didn’t understand at all. But the fact that such music could be recorded and released for sale amazed me. So I kept digging into it. I went to Rose Records on Wabash in Chicago because it had most if not all of the Schwann Catalog listed albums in its racks. My brother joined me and together we discovered Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart on Grand just west of State Street where Koester would spin discs and chat endlessly about jazz and blues and had more obscure records, many of them discontinued, than any other music retailer. Over the months we delved deeper into jazz history, seeking out the earliest recordings available on reissue collections. We scoured antique stores and resale shops for vintage 78s, and we found a few good ones. We went to the Chicago History Museum’s library and searched for “race records” ads in the microfilm files of the Chicago Defender. But there was one recording we had heard of that no one had as yet found—no jazz collector, no jazz student, no jazz scholar.

I’m not about to tell you what that was here! No spoilers! When you read my story “Cover Shot” in the September/October 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM) you’ll find out. But my brother and I would spin our Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five reissues and fantasize about finding the long lost recording that predated all of them. We would stumble across it in a junk shop, or in one of the crude stalls of the Maxwell Street open-air flea market.

How exciting would that be?!

So many early jazz and blues “race records” found their way to Chicago during the Great Migration that it was not out of the question for a copy of this one to show up. A garage sale on the West or South Side, perhaps. The problem was we were suburban kids and were not at all likely to extend our search into the city. But we kept dreaming. We’ll find the recording and play it for Louis Armstrong, who was still alive and performing in the late 1960s! He claimed to have heard the music when he was only five years old, but we were sure he could still authenticate the recording for us.

Some jazz scholars are not convinced that the record really exists, or existed past tense, that it’s a legend and searching for it was like searching for the Ark of the Covenant, a subject playfully imagined in the Indiana Jones movies. But others have testified that it indeed exists, including one member of the band who claimed to be on the recording and once had a copy of it.

Well, I thought, if Steven Spielberg could run fast and loose with the lost ark, why not craft a tale around the legendary lost jazz recording? I would somehow feature photographer Rick Peters, protagonist of my previous three stories published by AHMM, and I would pay homage to Jazz Record Mart’s Bob Koester who had introduced us to so much great jazz and blues. And finally, I would include a tribute to a photo stylist who had worked with me on so many photographs, including a number of cover shots, when I produced catalogs for a Pennsylvania dinnerware manufacturer.

Luckily, AHMM editor Linda Landrigan liked the resulting tale enough to include it in the September/October 2024 issue. So I would like to close my tale of mystery and fantasy with a special thanks to Linda, and to Jackie Sherbow, both of whom have supported my Rick Peters stories over the last several years. And by the way, just in case you’re wondering, and there’s no reason why you should, I got a B on my junior theme.