Well, I guess Rolande was still a friend. But he was dead. So did that mean we weren’t friends anymore?

Didn’t seem to matter to JoJo. We guessed Rolande had died about an hour ago, collapsed into his Jack and Coke with a thin smile on his lips. He was a wiry scruffy man who’d worn a scrunched Jack Daniels baseball cap for at least the last decade I’d known him. Rolande still wore it in death, just drooped a little farther down in his eyes.

“Bring the bottle, Nick,” JoJo said. “Shit, son. Don’t you learn nothin’?”

I swung back behind the bar, a Marlboro drooping lazily from my lips, and grabbed a half-empty bottle of Jack. I plunked it before JoJo and settled into the booth crossing my worn Tony Lamas at the ankles.

Joseph Jose Jackson – a.k.a. JoJo – had to be in his late sixties by now. Black man with white hair and neatly trimmed mustache. Black creased trousers, white button-down shirt rolled to his elbows. Hard to explain the completeness of my relationship with JoJo. To begin with, he was a surrogate father, harmonica teacher, and all-around Zen master on life.

I asked, “On the house?”

JoJo pulled out a well-worn wallet from Rolande’s coat pocket and said, “Ain’t no such thing.”

The men laughed like tomorrow held more promise than today, all was right in the world, and God was watching down from heaven with a smile on His bearded face.

On JoJo’s left sat Randy Sexton, my colleague and head of the Tulane University Jazz and Blues Archives. I’d known Randy since my early retirement from the Saints when I returned to Tulane for a Masters in music history.

Randy was usually physically out of step with his subjects – a white man with a big head of curly brown hair – but always spiritually in tune. He was the author of about a million books on early New Orleans jazz players and had been featured in Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series.