“I’m on parole.”
“He’s been a junkie. Made it clean. He is an immigrant. His parents brought him here from Vancouver when he was three months old.”
“I’m Russian, man.”
“You’re Russian out of Canada.”
“Canucksmontov. It’s all the same. Both realms of ice and snow.”
“He ran away from home when he was seventeen—”
“Sixteen!”
“Correction, sixteen.”
“Fifteen! Fourteen! What’s the difference?”
“He got radicalized the hard way. On the street and in the county jail. And now he’s fighting landlords in the neighborhood.”
“I’m Robin of the Hood. That’s British, right? Hey, do we have to go through this?”
“He’s kind of a …” She hesitates to use a campus word her lover might feel bound to ridicule, but decides to risk it. “You know, an exemplar? A paradigm?”
“She says she’s gonna write a dissertation on my life, when AmBush is over and we’re done with that. Or shoot a documentary. Hey, you can write the sound track, Leon, and play it on your saxophone. How about that? You can blow that thing, can’t you? Or is it just for bling?”
So now this afternoon, against his better judgment — his lips are swollen still, and his breathing is impaired — Leonard has Mr. Sinister out of the case and ready to play at the Four T’s. He finds Dutch courage in some bottled Pearl, drunk from the longneck at the bar, asks for the cowboy metal on the CD player to be turned off, and, despite Maxie’s careful lack of interest, steps up to the dais in the corner of the room where that evening the Javelina Sisters are scheduled to appear with their accordions. At first he has an audience of six, all men, including Maxie and the bartender. The other four, sitting in a window booth — white site engineers, with their hard hats on the table — eye his horn suspiciously; wrong bar, wrong time, wrong instrument, is what they’re thinking, he suspects. And so — to acknowledge but also to deal with the point, and to test his inflamed lips and lungs as well — he begins with “Midnight at the Lavender,” the Simmy Sullivan number that he played at his graduation concert and that surely is familiar even to Texans. It has the most hospitable of ten-to-ten swing beats. Nothing frightening. No bragging multiphonics — yet. He plays well, despite the handicaps, though he does not attempt any of his usual circular breathing or his signature ram and flutter with the tongue. His lips feel tender on the reed, but this bestows his tenor with an unusually smoky, quavering tone. Even so, the four go back to work, without so much as a nod to Leonard, halfway through the tune, leaving him an audience of two, one of whom, the barman, is watching a television courtroom show with the sound turned down. A few strident phrases might cause the man to turn around and come back to the counter, summoned by the jazz. But no, the louder notes only send him closer to the television set.
Leonard doesn’t allow himself to mind. This isn’t the first unresponsive venue he has played in. There have been worse — everything from highbrow, disapproving conservatories, where free-form jazz is considered feral because no one can allow that any civilized music is beyond scoring, to function rooms where the bridegroom’s mum demands “something dancey” and “Auld Lang Syne” is unavoidable. It has been a blessing on such occasions that the saxophone is to some extent an anonymizing instrument, a sort of mask. The drummers, pianists, and bass players confront the audience with open faces. Their agonies and ecstasies are on display. But the saxman’s face — when he’s playing, anyway; and when he isn’t he can turn away — is mostly shielded by the instrument: his cheeks are puffed, his mouth is crammed, his eyes are often shut. Whatever he is thinking does not show.
What Leonard’s thinking now is that this lunchtime gig could prove to be yet another blunder. Welcome to Austin, the City of Gaffes and Blunders. Embarrassment Planet. Learn to live with it, he tells himself. Don’t make a fuss. Luckily, he has been taught by experience to hold his nerve, even when no one at all is listening. That’s when a jazzman can at least pay true attention to the music and to himself. He can soliloquize. As Marty Johannsen tells it, “Play it for the mirror, even when the house is packed.” But Leonard cannot quite convince himself of that, on this occasion. It’s only Maxie he’s been targeting. He’s planned to wipe the Sniper out with jazz. But Maxie, after watching Leonard for a few minutes, is now leaning on the bar, his back turned to the room, and looking through the adverts in the Daily Texan. He reads out sections to the barman. He evidently does not feel obliged to exaggerate any interest in the music. If only Nadia could be here, at Maxie’s side, shushing him to pay attention, Leonard thinks. She’s heard him play before and she has been admiring. She’s claimed she’s envious of Leonard’s level of artistry. He’s overheard her say the saxophone is a sexy instrument and that “Leonard is more complex than he seems. He has the most beautiful hands.” Such endorsements have raised his hopes with her back home. Yet he has not been able to get even remotely close to her since his arrival in Austin. He hasn’t even dared to congratulate her on her pregnancy. (“Volume, Leon, please!”) Life here is arranged and conducted on Maxie’s terms, and Maxie isn’t even pretending to pay attention to what he himself has asked for and arranged, this impromptu concert in the afternoon, this effort to impress. It is infuriating.
Leonard labors on. He does his best to invigorate the room with notes, begging to be noticed. He follows “Midnight at the Lavender” with the nagging push and pull of “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” and, now that he has established a crepuscular theme, “Night Hawks,” and the bluesy, pensive “set ’em up, Joe” phrases of “One More for the Road,” from which he plans to segue into the blithely happy chorus of “First Light” and back again. He’s keeping it serene, adagio, and laying back on the beat, even though his heart is pounding presto with irritation. That’s something he must conceal. The music can be hot or cool or hip or blue, the four great humors of the form, revealing and iconic words that Leonard loves despite their overuse. Even if the player cannot claim these attributes himself, if he’s never truly hot or cool in private, if he’s never hip or blue in life, he must seem so onstage. Jazz must not display itself as peevish or impatient.
The music is an appeaser, finally. Each note moderates the fury that Leonard feels toward Maxie and the barman, and soon enough he has become almost as pensive and serene as the tunes he is playing. Now they can ignore him all they want, the two men at the bar. He doesn’t care. He’s the barroom king, no matter what they think. He presses on and plays an almost perfect second half to the set, resisting any outbursts of invention, just flattering the room with melody and melancholia. Oh, how he loves the saxophone, the old brass J, his Mr. Sinister, its shiny, rounded generosity. Maxie, Maxim Lermontov? What instrument can Maxie play, other than beating his own drum? What’s Maxie got to boast about? He extemporizes the answers to this final question on Mr. Sinister, with notes: a fan_cy name, a Russ_ian dad / a head of craz_y hair / a time in jail, five years on drugs / no sense of birth con_trol. Leonard feels himself distend. His solar plexus supersedes his brain, so that soon (he knows it’s true) he’s strong and sexy on the dais in the bar, no longer playing bearlike from the shoulders as a chippy trumpet player would, shoving at his notes, but playing cool and catlike from the hips, and cool and catlike from the knees. It’s exhilarating to be at the center of such harmony, even though he’s not the center of attention. When he has finished playing he will be a man renewed. Music reinforces him. The days ahead are clear and welcoming. While the music lasts, he’s man enough to face up to the president.