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The Factory is devoid of what jazzmen call the climate . Even now Leonard sweats at the memory: the trembling apprehension of that long wait before the Brighton broadcast begins, how shakily he adjusts his mouthpiece and the tuning slide, how he runs the keys and rods of his tenor so anxiously that his knuckles begin to clack, how he fusses over his jacket sleeves and his belt, unable to get comfortable or stay cool, how he practices his embouchure and lolly-sucks the reed until his lips are tense and dry.
    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 cunning. He is simply taking what he has and stretching it, making phrases from those few root notes, subdued at first, using vibrato sparingly and attacking most notes on pitch, like a beginner. He is not ready to decorate or bend them or embark on any doodling with fillers and motifs. He knows he needs to make it sparse and stable, until he’s settled in. He’s just pub crawling, heading for the next bar, not rushing the notes but waiting to catch them as they pass. Keep it tidy till the sixteenth. That’s the rule. But then, too soon, he makes his first mistake, and has to dare. It is a misjudged voicing that, even as he listens to it now, ten winters on, causes him to shake his head and suck his cheeks, as if to take the notes back from the air.
    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 planned every note of it. Do they imagine that he planned the snow, that high gusts from his saxophone have blocked the motorways with trees?
    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 cannot comment on a single note, he hears their contributions in some auxiliary chamber of his ear. No improvising jazzman will