All That Follows Read Free

this evening’s jazz recital,” the announcer explains, as the van heads south through suburbs and doughnut estates into the managed countryside and its network of preservation highways, “composer and saxophonist Lennie Less will play unaccompanied. Owing to the severe weather, his quartet has not been able to reach Brighton.” There is laughter and applause, and someone shouts out “Less is more,” as someone nearly always does when Leonard’s in the lineup. Then the concert host, reduced to cliché by the pressure of live radio and the panic of a green on-air light, overloads the microphone with “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome to the Factory tonight … on tenor” and then steps a pace too far away, reproved by his own feedback, to offer, not audibly enough, “Mister. Lennie. Less.” (“It rhymes with penniless, as befits a jazzman,” his agent said when they agreed on this stage name instead of plain, unexciting Leonard Lessing.)
     L EONARD 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. Lennie Less does not play show tunes or unembellished standards, no matter what. Lennie Less plays only taxing jazz. He’ll start cautiously, he decides finally, with his tenor version of a Coltrane classic solo, “My Favorite Things.” He’s played it, duplicated its patterns and glissandos, many times before—as an encore, something obvious that even the shallowest of aficionados can recognize. He knows it is a bit of a hot lick, begging for predictable but unwarranted applause—the enthusiasts will be clapping themselves, their own tuned ears—but applause is always a welcome boost at the start of any show. It is an agitating prospect, though, and frightening. Live audience, live radio, no band—and some evidence, from what he’s spotted through the stage curtains, that the concert hall is papered with free tickets. Every seat is taken, and that is suspicious for a contemporary music event. There are more frocks and ties than usual, and many more women. He’ll be playing not only for the usual pack of devotees, in other words, but for jazz virgins and jazz innocents as well. They could be restless, wary, bored, and certainly irritated. And the venue itself is off-putting: unraked plastic seating, poor sight lines, overhead industrial plumbing, and deadening acoustics—curtains, for heaven’s sake!