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[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: It's truly sad that the world's first jazz musician spoke no English. Like so many poor, orphaned Russians who immigrated en masse to the United States in the early 1900s, Dmitriy Alexopoulos spoke only French, the language of his homeland. This turned out to be a problem. When I met with Dmitriy in his hospital room just seconds before his untimely death in 2011, I asked him to record his autobiography on my cell phone, which he did, while coughing violently, in a series of voice memos, not all of which could fit on my phone, and a third of which were somehow deleted. Then I watched him die. Some doctors and nurses rushed in; I flew out to le Bon Pays to ask the hordes of French-speaking Russians living there to translate Dmitriy's life's story into the noble and more accessible English language. I dictated their translations in a second series of voice memos into another cell phone I borrowed from my hotel concierge and txt msged these dictations across the ocean, back to my phone in America. Unfortunately the data was corrupted and most of the words from Dmitriy's original telling were lost. This was something of a setback, to be sure. The translator's job is never easy. Even when not restricted by the quality of his source material, the translator is kept from perfection by the work itself, since rendering the meaning of a text from one language into another imposes restrictions of its own. That is to say, limitation is inherent in the very work he is trying to do. Thus, every translation is, to some degree, an interpretation. I was forced to interpret and, indeed, invent the substance of Dmitriy's life at many points. Nevertheless, I did the best with what limited resources I had at my disposal to recreate as faithfully and vividly as possible the life of the man previously so neglected in histories of American music, arts, and culture—the man who invented jazz. This biography, recast into Dmitriy's original first-person narrative, is, admittedly, hopelessly riddled with errors. In my own defense, it's also the best and most readable scholarship to date.] 
DMITRIY ALEXOPOULOS I was big into Metallica. Those guys knew how to rock. My high school sweetheart, Ksyusha, bought me a copy of Load for my 17th birthday, back in 1894. I was floored. I remember stealing a laserdisc player from the fat kid at school, and playing "Until It Sleeps" over and over again, all night long, not doing my homework or my paper route, until I was expelled from school and fired from the USA Today, and the fat kid called the cops on me and I was arrested. The local police in Novosibirsk, Russia were fierce in those days. They beat me within an inch of my life and confiscated all my belongings, except they let me keep the laserdisc player and the Metallica, which I listened to, in traction, until I was able to walk again; and I once heard a rumor that in my absence a police officer either slept with Ksyusha or spent the weekend playing Jenga with her—I don't remember which (in any case it was never confirmed). Those were hectic times. They were inspiring times. As I lay in bed, hopped up on meds, head spinning from a combination of drugs and blasting "Hero of the Day" on one-track repeat at intensities far exceeding recommended audiological limits, I knew right then and there I would die a professional musician. I moved to the United States of America sometime later, in a 
James Hetfield was the godfather of the son I'll never have. Lars Ulrich was/will-never-be the priest who baptized him. My father died; I invented jazz. And our coworkers were Russian immigrants, just like us. They were from Moscow, which means we had never met them before, but we still all felt like one big or happy family, more or less. Like the Alexopouloses, nos amis les Russes had fled their homeland, and were here, with us, me and my father Yegor, working construction, subduing the earth, crushing rodent skulls with heavy tools, and chasing the American Dream. |
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