Jonathan Cripps

                 Mike slowed the van to a stop and wound down his window. The height of the van coupled with the almost comical shortness of the groomsman meant that only his eyes and top hat were visible over the frame of the window, so he stepped back in order to be more visible. Mike two compensated by leaning as far as he could out of the window. They had an exchange that Don couldn’t here but saw contained a great deal of nodding, pointing, and looking in apparently random directions. The short man seemed to keep changing his mind about where they should park, and Don quickly surmised that he was like all best men in the history of time; eminently useful in terms of good-wedding theory and encyclopaedic when it came to matrimonial academia, but an ineffable waste of space where actual field-work logistics were concerned. This guy had evidently counted on the band arriving completely devoid of any gear, unconcerned by the implication that no one would be able to hear them, and assumed that they were just seven people with instruments. Now, faced with the perplexing knowledge that they also had the best part of a ton of gear in the van too, he had to rapidly reorganise his perfectly laid plans, and his face was etched with the concern of what such an oversight would do for his pride later on, and the slightly menaced aggravation that he’d thought his responsibilities over and his duty to consume heroic proportions of prosecco briefly impinged.
                After a lot of hand-to-brow huffing that would have shamed the hammiest of Dickensian actors, it was apparently decided that the van should be placed as near to the entrance as possible while they unloaded and moved later on, which it later emerged had been Mike two’s initial suggestion as soon as the window buzzed down.
                ”Everybody out!” Mike said this with more authority, and Don was surprised to find himself obeying without consciously deciding to do so. This caught him off-guard, and he quietly chastised himself. At your age, he thought, and thinking nothing of status, you do things on your own time. He saw a little hand get sheepishly raised in his subconscious, its associated voice about to say “Um, about that arrogance you were thinking about earlier…” but Don shut it up and it apologetically dissolved into the ether.
                Clutching his sax case by the strap, Don stepped out of the van and moved away from the action. Looking around the square, he allowed himself briefly to regain his own psychological territory. What a beautiful day, he thought. Birds out in force, lots of greenery, and the kind of houses that one can look all the way through. For a sudden moment, a surprising joy spread throughout his abdomen. “This is the life” was its concomitant thought. He smiled without opening his mouth.
                “Don!” came a shout from behind him. It was Mike two. “Fancy giving us a hand here?”
                Charlie came to the rescue, smiling and winking at Don. “Don’t you know how old he is, Mike?” he said. Everyone knew this was a joke, so Don smiled back. The implication was that we would all be complicit in allowing Don not to do anything on the pretence that he’s too old, when in fact we all know that he’s just a bit too good and important to do the undignified grunt work and we’ll let him be. This was Don’s assessment anyway, and it was fine for the time being.
                All the same though, Don, do you want to be thought of as lazy? He shook his head. Not really, Don, he thought to himself. So he slung his sax over his shoulder and walked as casually as possible back to the van’s back doors.
                “What can I do for you gents?” he said amiably.
                “Just take these bits and bobs,” said Charlie, handing him a Morrison’s bag with an assortment of said electrical bits and bobs in it. Don recognised a D.I. box and a blue coil of XLR cable, but there were a couple of other items he’d never seen before. A small, black box with a stumpy, thick antenna that looked like the flashing thing underneath the computer in Julia’s flat, and an earpiece with an obscure, curling appendage.
                “Where do you want me to put them?” Don asked.
                Some of the guys from the van were already reappearing out of the largest marquee inside the square and to its more shaded left-hand side.
                “Just shove them on the stage where those guys have come from,” said Charlie. “And when you’re done, come back and grab the desk. That should be it for you.”
                As Don headed toward the marquee, he noticed how slick the rest of the band were. They were like sailors on a great ship, wordlessly getting things to their correct destinations with minimum of fuss and maximum expedience. These were a new breed of musician to Don, part player part techie. If this was what musicians were these days, he thought, then I’m well and truly lost to the dark waters of history. Panic seized him once again; what if he was asked to set things up? He’d never done more than plugging an XLR into the back of a microphone before; he had no idea what all of this posh, modern paraphernalia did, let alone how to fit it all together. He’d struggled with Mecano as a kid – in fact, after the age of eight, he’d shunned all toys except his saxophone – and that was still in the age of steam. Now that signals and waves and all that stuff was filling the air around you and everything was coded and stuff, what the hell was he meant to make of any of that?
                Yet his concern was in telling musicians who, rightly or wrongly, already respected him that he was unable to perform the most basic of practical functions. As well as just seeming quite old, Don was also aware that this would make him appear spoiled, and while he knew nothing could be further from the truth, this was the very last thing he would ever want to be thought of as. His status as a good saxophone player was hard-won; he’d done the hours and hours and hours of practice, he’d been a working class kid from a poor family whose dad had downgraded his prized car to buy Don his first sax, he’d overcome a great deal to get to the level he was. Nothing was given to him on a plate, and he absolutely detested the notion that he could be confused with one of these posh kids who went to schools where you had expensive musical instruments forced on you from the age of eleven and were playing Bach preludes on the viol before you’d ever had sex. The very idea offended him, most prominently because while he was not black and he did not have a cultural struggle in the same way as the founding fathers of bebop, he did have this association; it was his link to the source. His struggle against nonchalantly brutish class apathy was a badge he wore with pride. He didn’t have the Bird’s problems with horse, he didn’t have ‘Trane’s problems with horse and booze, he had none of it. His culture was at once superior and severely stunted. In being an oppressed minority culture in a confused and gigantic society, African-American musicians in the forties, fifties and sixties were free to assimilate religious, social and musical beliefs as they saw fit. Jazz could never have developed in the UK; it had to come out of the USA. Being in England and being working class were immensely claustrophobic due to sheer pressure of ideological expectation, even if such expectation would never amount to more than a soap box, or life as one of those pub philosophers that Don detested.
                A brief image of Reg, a fairweather friend of his father’s, flitted in Don’s mind’s eye. He’d sit at the bar from the moment it opened every day, with a pint of ale and a never-ending bag of pork scratchings, giving everyone he encountered a bigoted and factually ludicrous piece of his mind. Don knew that most pubs had one. People never took Reg seriously, but the saddest thing for Don was that he took himself seriously; that he could never understand why he wasn’t better liked. One afternoon, Don had been having a quiet pint with his dad in a dingy and smoggy November while Reg had been sounding off to a young couple from the estate, who’d wanted as romantic a date as Bermondsey in those days could offer, but who had not mitigated for one racist, omniscient alcoholic. Eyes became downcast as punters slowly clocked what was in the offing, the young man politely humouring Reg in order not to be rude and to provide his lady with some sense of chivalric intention, but this was past five and Reg was at least ten pints in by that stage. Soon, the boy and the girl made their excuses and shuffled away, a sense of gratitude sweeping in off the wind through the saloon door. Everyone got back to their pints with relief, yet Don saw on Reg’s face the despair of maternal abandonment; the uncomprehending look of desertion by a trusted lover; the destruction of a sacred respect that had for so many years been chipped away at, pint by pint, lie by lie, until it crumbled to the ground one Thursday afternoon and broke the most fundamental interior structure of a man: his illusion of being loved. There were no more delusions to shelter behind, there were no more soldiers armed for one last march on reality. Whatever it had been about this young couple politely leaving Reg to himself had removed the blinders for good and all, and he had killed himself that night. Don had known, from the briefest moment which only he saw and Reg felt, that there was nothing left for Reg at that moment. He had very briefly known the truth of his existence, and the truth was that he was not loved. The sudden, crippling realisation that Don suspected had been burgeoning for some time had finally and unceremoniously been made: that the only friendship Reg had had was in order to humour him. He was found drowned in his bath, and most people – perhaps to assuage their consciences – had said Reg had just been so pissed he’d drowned by accident. Don had seen his face, though, and knew the truth of the matter. He had never said anything to anyone about it. Truth and illusion had, from that moment forward, become teaching factors in Don’s growth. Most prominently, he had learned that neither had any meaning whatsoever save that felt in the deepest interior by the subject. Don would once have said that his life was a search for truth, but now he knew that it was, instead, a search for the most durable illusion, for truth was nothing more than this.
                That Don had found music and developed himself in the myriad of ways that musical knowledge brings along for the ride was to define his outlook. In many ways, he felt that he was able to escape the route determined for him by his culture but in the same breath would always thank this path, never denying its determinant role in his development as a musician; as a person; as that rare musical hybrid of conceiver, doer and lover. And this was what linked him to the font of genius that had grown up in another culture and thousands of miles away; the invisible tether affording him context and import, and value greater than merely the notes he played. He may delude himself about absolutely everything else, but in music there was certainty – different to truth - there was purpose, there was love supreme, there was context; there was every meaning in life concomitantly embracing to provide Don with an almost theological cause, which was something Reg – and most people – never obtained. Reg would demand that people loved him, which, if Don was to go on that example alone, manifestly did not yield anything but contempt and something far worse: quiet derision. Don did not have to make any such demands on anyone, for if push really did come to shove, he had his horn, and its unconditional love and support that was mutually borne of what Don believed to be divine, creative inspiration had seen Don through the worst of times. Any love freely proffered, such as Pria’s, or his mother’s, or those of his friends like Terry and even, he thought buoyantly, Julia, was a bonus love that he respected all the more for its rarity and fragility. This never led him into demanding more than was his fair due, and meant he demanded less than he deserved.
                ”I think we’re ready to give you a check now Don,” Mike piped up. Through his rambling thoughts of existential importance, the rest of the band had been running wires, heaving speakers onto stands, unpacking monitors and doing alchemical circuitry, and he had been the worst kind of absent: obviously in the same room yet uselessly so. He met the eyes of a couple of the band, and they met his back and didn’t smile. Don couldn’t tell if these were accusative glances or if he was making this all up, and there was nothing in them whatsoever.
                “Great, cheers,” said Don, as wilfully as possible. He clambered up the stairs onto the predictable steel deck rostra and picked up his sax case, which he’d placed cautiously out of harm’s way stage right. He brought out his horn and put it together ritualistically, unhurriedly. The burning question, forming faster than his ability to make a decision, of what to play first – the very first notes of the day – clouded his consciousness. Was he to heft out his sizeable ego this early on and justify his previous laziness by blasting through the solo to Giant Steps as a warm up, or just play the most minimal selection of open notes and patterns to warm the horn up and check that everything was swinging nicely? Before he could make a decision his intuition acted for him, breathing out a long, low B flat with the smoker’s whisper of Ben Webster. That usually gave him everything he needed to know about the condition of his instrument without placing his fingers on any pads, and he was pleased with how it sounded. He’d need ten minutes on his own to get the pipe working but for now all was good.
                “Have you got a radio mic?” said Mike from behind a baffling-looking sound desk off-stage right.
                Don had no idea that this was a piece of gear he was meant to have, and the hand on his embarrassment meter was already wobbling dangerously in the red zone.
                “I don’t have one buddy, they don’t let me alter my distance between my axe and the mic so I always play into standing mics.” He thought that was pretty good cover. Sounded convincing and, for all Don knew, could well have been true too.
                “Yeah I hear you man,” said Mike from offstage, without looking up. “That’s okay, we’ve got a spare SM-58 kicking about somewhere; just give me a minute.”
                Don knew that an SM-58 was some sort of something, because it made an appearance on nearly every gig he’d ever played on, though he wasn’t able to put a face to a name.
                Before Don had time to respond, Mike chirped up again.
                “Sorry Don, Ewan just told me it got left at base. You’re going to have to share with Charlie next to you.”
                Don turned to see Charlie next to him, who looked as though for a moment the clouds had parted and God’s very own hand in its ever-loving compassion had reached down and patted him on the head.
                This was not ideal, but there was nothing Don could do about it.
                “That’s no worries Mike,” Don said, “I’ll know to bring my one next time.” Go on, Don thought; just assert that there’s going to be a next one. You’ll have to spend all of your fucking fee buying a bloody microphone though, you idiot. Unless Tony could source one. Actually yeah, let’s let Tone worry about that bit.
                “Alright Don, well that mic’s all set-up and ready to go so just blow something into it for me.”
                Charlie whispered next to him “Play something from Shepherd Travels Miles!”
                Fuck, it had happened. Not only had Charlie brought up one of Don’s albums, but it had to be the most obscure concept recording of the bunch. Don had even protested to the label about releasing it. It was Don’s take on classic Miles Davis tunes and, due to Don also wanting to get one, completely incongruous Pat Metheny tune called Travels onto it, the producer had decided on that naff title. Don had listened to it once when he got the first disc off the press, then never listened to it again. He wasn’t ashamed of it at all; the band on it had been superb and his playing hadn’t been bad either; it just didn’t interest him and was part of the label’s tireless efforts to bring an unprecedented level of prestige to their jazz contingent. The mentality went that by reorganising the great music of jazz titans and improving thereupon, their players would usher in a new era for Cool Jazz and, if not quite rule the airways, then at least make a solid wedge for the label. And, as with all farfetched, risk-orientated ventures in the eighties, the arrogance with which it was touted really did make everyone believe it would work.
                In the end, the album didn’t do too badly due to Don’s name (as far as jazz records go) but it didn’t have any of the glass-ceiling-smashing zeal-appeal that underpinned its inception. Within a year, it had stopped being printed and Don wasn’t aware of any one of the cats he played with having ever listened to it. His heart went out to this kid. He was trying to impress Don, and not doing a bad job. He must have one of the only copies of that CD still in existence.
                “You’ve got to be kidding, Birdman. Don’t even remember the track listings for that one!”
                “Well fucking play something!” came Mike’s irritated drawl from behind the desk.
                Don blew rapidly through Blue Bossa with so many tasty little embellishments that only an initiate would ever have known it was Blue Bossa in the first place. He saw Charlie out of the corner of his eye watching his fingering, glazed over like one of the faithful at an evangelical sermon. He could hear the level changing; louder, softer, a bit more reverb, a bit less reverb, until Mike said
                “Right, cheers for that. Keep going, I’m just going to get you in your monitor and you let me know what level’s good for you.”
                Don began playing again, something similar to before but more completely improvised this time, and his sound blasted out at more decibels than his ears could immediately cope with. He immediately stopped and jerked his head away, and there was the clean, piercing screech of feedback pouring out of a speaker by his feet.
                “Fuck, sorry!” said Mike as he hurriedly dialled down the volume on the desk.
                “Right, go again Don, sorry about that,” Mike intoned from the desk.
                “Sometimes gigs can get pretty loud,” said Charlie, “and the guys turn their monitors up on the box instead of at the desk to be able to hear themselves, then forget to turn them down again. It's not a good way of doing things but it’s the difference between hearing yourself or playing in a vacuum sometimes. On that note, you might want to bring earplugs if we do a club.”
                Don smiled at Charlie, and started playing more softy and slowly, as if this would somehow move the dispassionate electrical circuitry to cooperate. As it happens, Mike had done this already and the level was good for Don. These guys really are pros, thought Don, even though the meaning of ‘pro’ has changed a lot since he was doing function work. Charlie seemed to have got the measure of Don, though; apparently realising that he might not be as clued up as the rest of them on technical matters. This comforted Don, as it didn’t seem to have diminished Charlie’s respect for him. He only hoped that the rest of the band were of similar mind.
                “Right, well if you’re happy with that, Don, let’s get cracking,” Mike said, making his way out from behind the desk. Don thought that he’d better be okay with it, as Mike evidently wasn’t going to do anything further about it if not.
                “Great, let’s go!” said Don, starting to feel the excitement of a gig about to begin.
                Soon, everyone was on stage, fiddling with instruments or dials on cabs, waiting to begin. Mike stood at the front, trumpet half raised, and said:
                “Right boys, number twenty five.”
                This was for Don’s benefit alone, as everyone else had already turned to twenty-five – Pick Up the Pieces – and Don figured that this was the go-to sound check tune. That made Don happy; the fast moving, sporadic lines incorporating the mixolydian mode were the closest in the set to his home territory of bebop, and he could have played the tune by ear if need be.
                Mike looked intently at his chart, his trumpet dipping and rising involuntarily marking a tempo he was mentally clicking. Suddenly Don’s mind raced with questions – are we doing it as writ? Is there an intro not marked on the sheets? Is this the same as the recorded version? Are they working solos into this one? Who’s lead sax? Me? Or Charlie?
                As quickly as they came, the thoughts vanished. The guitarist, whom Don hadn’t noticed in the van, began chiming the bell chord in clean, high semiquavers, the drummer picked up four bars in and marked the crotchet beats with his kick whilst easily dropping in funk-appropriate fills for a further four bars, and in the fourth Don watched tongues run over lips and shoulders turn toward microphones amongst the rest of the brass players and at the last moment felt a hackneyed but necessary downward fret-slide on the bass. He took this as his cue.
                He had guessed right, though for a terrifying moment thought he had come in early. He hadn’t been able to hear anyone but himself playing, the drums a distant, subdued noise somewhere behind him and the bass more of a sensation under his feet and in his chest than a sound. He couldn’t hear the rest of the brass at all but carried on playing, deciding to cover the mess by making it look intentional rather than showing the band up like this. But as he looked to his left from the corner of his eye, he saw the rest of the section already red faced, blasting their horns and shifting their weight from foot to foot in time with the music. He realised that his monitor, in which only he was coming through, was far too loud. Naturally he wanted to be able to hear himself, but not at the exclusion of everyone else. This is what sound checks are for, he thought.
                He was always amazed at how rapidly his nerves subsided as soon as he put horn-to-lips. The combined effort of deep breathing and blowing, with its access to core muscle groups relinquishing bright memory as they contracted and relaxed with the warm dilation of his conscious mind shunned any and all negativity. In this state, no harm could come to him. He was the Athena of Streatham, armoured from head to foot in his own enmeshed sound; he was South London’s very own Hanuman, fastest in wit, liberator of danger; he was Yakushi, healing the faithful of Islington with his horn of plenty. For a moment, he remembered his trip out of the broadcasting building yesterday, and the scene of Theseus following his line out of the labyrinth played before his mind’s eye once more.
                The tune allowed easily breathable phrases to be punctuated and embellished with abbreviated licks, but he resisted the urge to pass through a chromatic note or fall off the end of a phrase this early on in the evening. Before long, he was truly enjoying himself and felt liberated from the page enough to take a look at the band whilst playing. The brass, except Charlie, and the guitarist were concentrating hard on their dots, presumably not yet used to reading fast and realising that once you’d sussed the underlying pattern beneath a piece of music you could ditch the page and just listen. Charlie had his eyes closed and Don could tell he was working internally on disciplining his timbre. Just playing the right notes was a walk in the park for this kid, Don suspected, so he took the gig as an opportunity to tame his breath and cultivate a warmth of texture even over loud, fast and choppy runs. Good on him. Don strained to hear how he was coming but could only hear his own blast.
                The bassist – Mike two – was also neck deep in a funk-based reverie, eyes closed, dancing as far as the bass and his need to play would allow him, dreadlocks flicking like Medusan snakes as he shook his head to the right on every beat, snapping it back to straight on the offs. As the tune progressed, Don realised that Mike Two took by far the greatest liberties with the music, managing that holy grail of bass disciplines by keeping the groove down whilst simultaneously getting in ornamental flourishes high up on the fretboard during the tiny gaps in the melody.
                Don was sure he hadn’t seen the drummer in the van, nor noticed him at any other time. He was the kind of person Don would have noticed, being a little too old to have cultivated a truly universal non-judgementalism. He was enormously fat, far beyond twenty stone Don would guess, and already gleaming with sweat. He was the only black member of the band and, Don quietly suspected, the most versatile of the group too. There was something in the casualness of his manner behind the drums that Don thought belied a supreme confidence, completely devoid of arrogance, that only masters ever possess. Indeed, he looked like a consummately humble bloke, from the little information Don could squeeze out of his drum-playing body language, but played with such ease and economy that Don was excited to see what he could really do. Don was sure he’d heard a few drags off the snare and micro-beat fills that were errant and certainly not the mainstay of funk drumming. The beginnings of a buzz-roll here, a rapid, single-foot double-tap on the kick drum, the metronomically precise wanderings apparently out of the time signature, only to reveal a detour back in via a well-aimed half-bar line. No technique overused, no decoration appearing more than once, nothing too colourful or boastful, but just enough that Don was sure an accomplished jazz drummer resided behind the surprisingly small pop-kit. Don’s happiness grew and he turned back to the audience, of which there were roughly ten, mainly caterers, fussing over apparently inconsequential things.
                He had turned to the front just in time, as on his rotation around he noticed the bell of Mike’s trumpet from centre stage pointing at him and the player’s quizzical eyes making the universal musician sign language shape for “Fancy a solo?”
                Don smiled gratefully and nodded, casting his eyes to the floor. He remembered a theatre director at his school saying to him, while he was playing some old man in a terrible production of Oliver, ”Don’t look at the floor! The floor will give you nothing! The floor is not your friend!”
                Well, now the floor was Don’s friend; it was the earthly support from whence he would call up the spirits of inspiration. Shamanistically, Don bent his spine toward the earth; something of the animus arched along his upper vertebrae as he drew in deeply of the cool summer air. The spirits came quickly, and Don didn’t want to bring anything too subtle to the table yet. His note started low and chromatically ran all the way up to a high concert G, which he had been aiming for since before he’d put the horn to his lips. He hung around her for a good few bars, the irresolute, colourful ninth degree of the chord, his vibrato increasing the longer he went on. He had breath control like no other; he had a good forty years on these kids, playing sax for all of them. He dropped off the end of the note to breathe for a well-placed series of funky blues riffs, guaranteed to get people feeling warm and tapping their feet, and then got the sudden despair of losing a high, which Don always likened to the feeling he got half an hour after he’d run out of cocaine. There was only one thing for this: go nuts. Get the music coming from your body, he thought; not your mind. Let the muscle memory take over and see what comes out.
                The next forty or so bars were full of Brecker-style jumps between lyrical, diatonic phrases and chromatically rising encolsures of odd intervals – fourths and tritones mainly – followed by huge, contrary-motion interval jumps of chromatically-close notes spread out over three octaves, and as he came out of it, letting the pleasure radiate from his body in ever-dipping pulses like post-coital spasms, he felt the intimately familiar sensation of letting go of a burden.
                He had needed this, and like good sex, only realised how badly he had needed it once it was over and he was reborn, soaked in the amniotic fluid of his own sweat. He smiled. He wanted a cigarette, though he had never been a smoker. He could feel his skin vibrating softly, one of his favourite sensations. He hadn’t played with such abandon in a very long time. Even in the TV studio, when he thought it was virtually the only place he was required to dig into the ephemeral muses of improvisational jazz, they’d asked strictly for ballads or medium swing bits. “Definitely don’t do the super quick stuff – what’s it called?” the producer had asked. “Hard bop” said Don, simultaneously helping an ignoramus out of an unappreciated tight spot and sealing his own fate.
                All of the thoughts that had been circulating in Don’s consciousness for weeks had served to tighten him up. Like a hoarder, he lost mental space to the useless bric-a-brac of philosophical indulgence and he had unconsciously become physically constricted as a result. The dissatisfaction of his quotidian tedium, the irascible insurrections of Pria’s memory as he tried, a decade later, to reconcile himself to her absence; the floral vulnerability of Julia and her generous smile; the haunting, conquering void of an unknowable number of tomorrows; the universal hum of unacknowledged dread; it was all gone. A transubstantiation had taken place, and joy spilled like a libation from the bell of his saxophone, having surged from the floor beneath Don’s feet, through the vessel of his body, and coursed through his veins.
                Wearing a morning suit and top hat, Charon whispered to him. “Here it is Don. The only place you want to be is the only place in which you can never remain.”
                The solo – even just playing, and releasing those tightly held intercostal and pelvic muscles – had relinquished the bindings of Don’s soul. The thoughts had taken their leave, flown the coop and joined the sparrows in the city square’s sycamores, and he was left alone with himself for a brief moment, warm, and without past or future.