‘Know the lyrics yet?’ Freddy asked Lisa.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Freddy!’
‘Christ, Lisa. Yer gotta know the words. No excuses.’
Freddy counted us in. ‘Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one-two-three-ugh!’ We played a four-bar introduction before Lisa wobbled on the first word like a tightrope walker about to lose her footing.
After Lisa careened through one chorus, meaning the full thirty-two bars of the song, the instrumentalists took solos from the head in the conventional manner of the jazz ensemble. To take a solo means to create spontaneously a musical idea and play for the duration of one or more choruses—to improvise based on some combination of the harmonic structure, the melody and the rhythm of the song. I had never done this with other musicians, but it was exactly why I’d been drawn to these workshops. Despite my heart being stuck in my throat, I couldn’t wait to solo. Fortunately, for the first chorus the saxophone player took the solo, so I had extra time to think about the structure of the song.
‘Cry Me a River’ has a conventional AABA jazz standard pattern, with its thirty-two bars split into two lots of eight (A), a bridge (B) of eight bars, and a final eight-bar section to finish (A). If you know a song with such a structure well enough, you intuitively hear that pattern without being conscious of it. Ideally, that means when you perform it you don’t have to think about counting numbers of bars, or whether you’re on the first or second eight of the A section, or where you are in the bridge. Needless to say, in Freddy’s workshops I did a lot of counting, very loudly, inside my head. There was also a lot of heel-tapping with my right foot, and whacking of my left calf muscle against the stool I sat on.
While it sounds as though I spent my whole performance stuck in my head counting bars, I didn’t—there just wasn’t time. I’d hardly got started with my solo when it was all over. It was someone else’s turn in the 32-bar spotlight. The beautiful thing is that even when one of us forgot where we were in the song, or got lost in the middle, somehow the rest of the band carried us in its current. We could re-enter the stream when we regained our footing, without too much disruption to the overall momentum.
My relief at not having to be perfect was exhilarating. Here was a way to play the piano with others, and not have to memorise twenty minutes of intricately annotated music, and not have to reproduce it perfectly and the same way each time I played it.
After the instrumentalists had each taken their solo, Lisa sang another chorus before we came to the end.
‘Well that was a fuckin’ train wreck, wasn’t it?!’ said Freddy, looking back and grinning at the other singers-in-waiting who had just clapped their appreciation for Lisa’s effort. He pointed his cigarette at them and raised his bushy eyebrows for emphasis. ‘Remember, a short note’s a good note.’
Lisa nodded, unfazed.
‘Take it again, from the top.’
Freddy’s method was nothing if not consistent. First he’d fix you with his death stare, then offer a few brief but tasty phrases through a mouth that barely moved:
‘Yeah, good, but yer too slow. It’s not a fuckin’ funeral.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘Don’t be afraid not to play.’
‘Yer gotta be yerself.’
Freddy wasn’t interested in contemporary jazz, which he defined as anything composed after 1959. He’d already seen and heard everyone he believed worth hearing. ‘They’re all up their own arses as far as I’m concerned,’ he said, referring to Miles Davis and Kind of Blue.
I didn’t want to be myself. I wanted to be able to play exactly like Bill Evans, who had begun by studying classical piano, and ended up as one of the twentieth century’s most influential improvisers and composers. His nuanced chord voicings on Kind of Blue were a large part of Miles Davis’s phenomenal success with that album, despite Freddy’s tin ear for the landmark recording. In a 1966 documentary made by his brother Harry, Bill confessed that when he first began improvising, he considered that he’d done well if he had played one note differently from how a piece had been notated. One note! And here I was, having deviated from the notated music almost as soon as I’d started reading it, never daring to pursue it seriously through all these years of playing.
I wonder if I’d had a different teacher, studied a different repertoire, not focused on the annual grade exams, if that might have led me to study improvisation and become a professional musician. If only I had seen that documentary when I was thirteen, I say to myself sometimes, fantasising about what it might have been like to live the life of a jazz musician in New York—at the same time knowing that, even if I’d had the chops, it was a life I would never have had the courage to lead. It was a life Bill Evans himself, despite his distinctive harmonic voicings and startlingly original compositions, found impossible to lead without heroin and later cocaine, both of which contributed to his death at fifty-one in 1980.
Outside the confines of Freddy’s garage, I had formed the distinct impression that everyone else I knew had a firm idea of what they wanted to do with their lives. Friends were becoming lawyers, radio producers, journalists, book editors. Acquaintances were morphing into architects or political consultants, or going into the family business. They were working and
