DREAMLAND, 1977 IT IS NIGHTTIME. I am standing outside Dreamland. I am waiting for my brother. It is a ballroom on the West Side of Chicago. Here, black jazz bands play: Lottie Hightower and her men, one night; Charlie Cooke and his friends, another. I am impatiently shuffling my feet, though I do like the sounds I hear wafting through the open windows. It is not to be confused with the Dreamland Cafe. That’s on the city’s South Side. Joe Oliver, up from New Orleans, played there a few years ago. He has since moved to Lincoln Gardens, where Johnny Dodds, his brother Baby, and a feisty little woman of a piano player, Lil Hardin, have joined him. His young disciple, Louis Armstrong, has been outblowing Joe and has just been called out East by Fletcher Henderson. A girl who picked up my brother took him to this place a few months ago. He said it was really something. Here at the ballroom young white men and young women come to dance rather than to listen. Preferably on a dime. To sock.
