All That Follows

LEONARD STILL REMEMBERS — and relives — the panic he felt that evening. His colleagues, turned back by blizzards, abandoned vehicles, and debris on the motorway just ten kilometers out of London, warn him only twenty minutes before the gig that he will be alone. All those fresh pieces they rehearsed and that are promised in the program will have to wait for the next night’s venue, Birmingham’s New Drum, weather permitting. The lead sheets and pages of chord patterns in his music case are useless now. Leonard will have no sidemen, then, to share the blame; no rhythm section to provide depth and camouflage, or any stout string bass to anchor the bottom line for him; no call and response from familiar colleagues, feeding him their hooks and cues; no points of rest; no nodding in another soloist at the end of a progression and stepping out, side-stage, to rest his mouth and hands for sixteen measures or so, or to empty his spit valve, adjust his reed, or sip a little water. Here he will be the solitary player, the nightlong soloist, the only face onstage. There can be no hiding place. What to play? When he first hears the news about the snowbound quartet, he thinks that unless someone at the Factory can magic up a Real Book full of comforting standards within the next few minutes, he has no choice but to offer a program of lollipops and show tunes — undemanding numbers he can reproduce entirely from memory.

But by the time the sound engineer appears at the door of the eerily empty green room to finger-five that the concert is about to start, Leonard has accepted the inevitable: for this radio concert he must not take the easy option. Everybody is expecting more. Le

But that applause, that darkened stage, the flustered concert host, the sense that at least some in that full, damp audience have battled through a storm to listen to his saxophone, the “live on radio,” make him feel — almost at the moment that his lips close on the reed, almost too late — too playful for Coltrane’s dark and modal meditation. But not too playful for some nursery rhymes. His entry still thrills him, the walk from backstage, playing, out of sight for the first few bars, a distant sobbing animal, the legato opening — the cheek of it — of “Three Blind Mice.” In the key of C. Four slow bars: three notes / three notes / four notes / four notes. Simplicity itself. See how they run. And then he finds the spotlight, his semicircle of sound boxes, microphones, and water bottles, his comfort zone where he can bend his knees, fold his shoulders, lean into the saxophone, and blow. See how they bleed, he says to Brighton with his horn on that appalling night of early snow and wind. Listen to the cutting of the carving knife.

However, as Leonard remembers all too well when those first slow but risky bars fill up the van once more, there is no grand design as yet. There’s certainly no cu

Yet this is where the concert finds itself. The best of jazz is provisional. It often emerges in panic from an error. He hears himself attempt to rescue the mistake by restating it until the error is validated by repetition and seems to be deliberate and purposeful. He listens to the audience, both the virgins and the devotees, applaud his juicing of the blunder. They’ve all been fooled. They think he has pla

Leonard’s band has not been fooled, of course. They are never far from his thoughts, even as he busks his way toward the final bars of this first tune, if tune it is, even as he syncopates the singing rhyme, cheekily matching every grace note with a note denied. He can sense them laughing as he plays. Trapped inside their car, hard up against their instrument cases and overnight bags, listening to him on the radio, they will not have mistaken his misjudged voicing as anything but wide of the mark, a blaring gaffe. And they will not have missed his nervousness and inhibition, the loss of pitch caused by a tight throat and tense mouth. He knows they will be chuckling as they hear him “digging his way out of jail,” as Bradley, the percussionist, calls it. So he plays for them as well, and even though they ca

LEONARD LISTENS AND TAPS his fingers on the steering wheel in half-time, happy with himself, happy now to have been so happy then. He sees Le