Alice didn’t care for the reflection the instrument cast back at her. In her home-made apron and with her permanent cigarette, she reminded herself of no one more than her mother. Despite the heat of the afternoon, the ivory keys were cool to her fingertips. She did her best not to flinch at how flat the notes were. At first her fingers felt like dancers who couldn’t remember their routine. But slowly they found their way through some of the old Scottish songs, and the notated music formed a picture in her mind’s eye as clear as John Henry Edwards’ face. At the end of each piece, Alice recalled, was the same instruction. Da capo, it said. Return to the beginning.
‘Maybe you’ll teach Charlotte to play, when she’s old enough,’ came George’s voice behind her. Until this moment Alice hadn’t thought about her daughter learning the instrument, and was shocked to feel her stomach lurch at the idea.
When she’d told George that she was expecting a baby, he had choked back tears and suggested that they should name a girl after Alice’s mother. She had smiled and nodded her agreement, thinking how impossible it was to make a fresh start of anything in life. At the end of everything was da capo.
30
‘GET OVER THERE, THEY WON’T BITE ya,’ said Freddy Wilson, shooing me to the far left corner of the converted garage at the back of his garden in Boronia Park, a leafy suburb a few minutes from the one where I had grown up.
I picked my way between wonky music stands and chipped coffee mugs to the electronic keyboard and sat on a black stool whose torn vinyl seat had padded years of bottoms. To my immediate left was standing-room only for the double-bass player and his instrument, as long as he didn’t swing too literally. And on his left, in the far right corner of the garage, sat the drummer at his kit. I had finally become the piano player in a jazz band, and I felt as hip as a prosthesis.
I’d had to wait some months for a place in one of Freddy’s weekly amateur jazz workshops, which gave singers and instrumental soloists the rare opportunity to perform live with a rhythm section. The diminutive drummer had been a band leader and arranger in the big band heyday of the 1950s and 60s. Since then, Freddy and his wife Bev had been running workshops for singers and instrumentalists from their home. Slim and weathered, Bev towered over her husband. When I’d showed up early for the first night of the ten-week term, she had greeted me like a long-lost friend and ushered me inside, where a handful of other new students perched on an ad hoc arrangement of chairs, sipping instant coffee.
Ten minutes later the flyscreen door that gave on to the rear porch slid open to admit Freddy Wilson himself. Immune to the conventional repertoire of human facial expression, Freddy offered newcomers only a grunt, an upward nod and a raised eyebrow. We trudged across the illuminated lawn behind him like a trail of ants towards the single-car garage that had been reborn as a rehearsal space. Grey carpet lined the walls in an effort to muffle the sound. Besides the rhythm section of keyboard, acoustic bass and drums were a saxophone player, a trumpeter, an acoustic guitarist and three singers. Fresh air wafted into the garage only when the door opened to admit a latecomer. The singers lined up on stools near the door waiting their turn under the extreme lighting, which would have been sufficient to power a small aircraft.
After a quick point-and-name introduction of each participant, Freddy got down to business.
‘Yeah, everyone. Listen up. Here’s how it works,’ he began with a tap of his cigarette. ‘The singers get two songs each, one at a time. Band members, you get a solo of two choruses, one for each song. Work out among yourselves who’s going first.’ A neglected ashtray sat on the edge of a bookshelf in easy tipping reach. Freddy preferred to let his embers fall to the concrete floor where they joined a general smudge at his feet. He ran on cigarette smoke and coffee for the duration of the two-hour workshop, and the garage door remained closed. ‘Okay, singers, who’s gonna be first? How ’bout you, Lisa? Whatcha doing tonight?’
‘“Cry Me a River”,’ Lisa said, pulling at her underpants through her faded jeans as she stood up.
‘All right.’ Freddy rummaged in a deep cardboard box whose corners were reinforced with duct tape, his cigarette dangling from one corner of his downturned mouth, searching for the music charts to hand out to everyone. Though the singers were mostly women, I was the only female member of the band.
The one-page chart for ‘Cry Me a River’ showed only the melody on a series of treble staves and the chords underpinning it, each marked by its quality—C-6 or EЬMaj7, for example—in a kind of Esperanto for accompanying and improvising. I propped the sheet on the keyboard’s rickety music stand, thrilled that my years of mucking around at home by myself with Fake Books had not been in vain.
For a jazz standard, ‘Cry Me a River’ begins on a relatively high first note, the sixth of the tonic or home key, and is held for the first two beats of the four-bar measure while the singer vocalises the first word: ‘Now’. Which wouldn’t be too high a bar to fly over were it not for the fact that the diphthong ‘ow’ is difficult to sing even without a broad Australian accent, or that the song is a ballad, and slower songs are notoriously harder to get right than faster
