Moon Over Soho (5 page)

And what do Nightingale and I have to measure
vestigia
with? Sod all, and it’s not even as if we know what we’re trying to measure in the first place. No wonder the heirs of Isaac Newton kept magic safely under their periwigs. I had jokingly developed my own scale for
vestigia
based on the amount of noise Toby made when he interacted with any residual magic. I called it a yap, one yap being enough
vestigia
to be apparent even when I wasn’t looking for it.

The yap would be an SI unit, of course, and thus the standard background ambience of a Central London pub was 0.2 of a yap (0.2Y) or 200 milliyaps (200mY). Having established that to my satisfaction I finished the half-pint and headed downstairs to the basement, where they kept the jazz.

A set of creaky stairs led down to the Backstage Bar, a roughly octagonal room, low-ceilinged and punctuated with stout cream-colored columns that had to be load bearing because they certainly didn’t add to the sight lines. As I stood in the doorway and tried to get a feel for any magical ambience, I realized that my own childhood was about to interfere with my investigation.

In 1986 Courtney Pine released
Journey to the Urge Within
and suddenly jazz was back in fashion and with it came my dad’s third and last brush with fame and fortune. I never went to gigs, but during the school holidays he used to
take me with him on visits to clubs and recording studios. Some things linger even from before conscious memory—old beer, tobacco smoke, the sound a trumpet makes when its player is just getting it warmed up. You could have two hundred kiloyaps of
vestigia
in that basement and I wouldn’t have been able to separate them from my own memories.

I should have brought Toby. He would have been more use. I stepped over to the stage in the hope that proximity might help.

My dad always said that a trumpet player likes to aim his weapon at the audience, but a sax man likes to cut a good profile and that he always has a favorite side. It being an article of faith with my dad that you don’t even pick up a reed instrument unless you’re vain about the shape your face makes when you’re blowing down it. I stood on the stage and adopted some classic sax-player stances, and as I did I began to feel something, stage front and right, a little tingle and the melody line of “Body and Soul” played far away, piercing and bittersweet.

“Got you,” I said.

Since all I had to go on was the magical echo of one particular jazz tune, I figured it was time to find out precisely which of several hundred cover versions of “Body and Soul” it was. What I needed was a jazz expert so obsessed that the subject had consumed him to the point where he neglected his health, his marriage, and his own children.

It was time to go see my old man.

M
UCH AS
I love the Jag, it’s too conspicuous for everyday police work. So that day I was driving a battered silver ex–Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of old stakeouts and wet dog. I had it stashed up Romilly Street with my magic police business talisman in the window to ward off traffic wardens. I’d taken the Asbo to a friend of mine who’d tuned up its Volvo engine and gotten me a satisfactory bit of zip, which came in handy dodging the bendy buses on Tottenham Court Road as I drove north for Kentish Town.

Every Londoner has their manor—a collection of bits of
the city where they feel comfortable. Where you live, or went to college, where you work or your sports club, that particular bit of the West End where you go drinking or, if you’re the police, the patrol area around your nick. If you’re a native-born Londoner—and contrary to what you’ve heard, we are the majority—then the strongest bit of your manor is where you grew up. There’s a particular kind of safety that comes from being on the streets where you went to school, had your first snog, or drink, or threw up your first chicken vindaloo. I grew up in Kentish Town, which as an area would count as a leafy suburb if it was leafier and more suburban. And if it had fewer council estates. One such is the Peckwater Estate, my ancestral seat, which had been built just as architects were coming to terms with the idea that proles might enjoy indoor plumbing and the occasional bath but before they realized that said proles might like to have more than one child per family. Perhaps they thought three bedrooms would only encourage breeding among the working class.

One advantage it did have was a courtyard that had been turned over to parking. There I found a clear bay between a Toyota Aygo and a battered secondhand Mercedes with a criminally mismatched side panel. I pulled in, got out, beeped the lock behind me, and walked away secure in the knowledge that because they knew me around here they weren’t going to jack my car. That’s what being on your manor is all about. Although, to be honest, I suspect the local roughnecks were much more scared of my mum than they were of me. The worst I could do was arrest them.

Strangely, I heard music when I opened the front door to my parents’ flat—“The Way You Look Tonight,” played solo on a keyboard, coming from the main bedroom. My mum was lying on the good sofa in the living room. Her eyes were closed and she was still in her work clothes—jeans, gray sweatshirt, paisley headscarf. I was shocked to see that the stereo was silent and even the TV was switched off. The TV in my parents’ house is never switched off—not even for funerals. Especially not for funerals.

“Mum?”

Without opening her eyes, she put her finger to her lips and then pointed toward the bedroom.

“Is that Dad?” I asked.

My mum’s lips curved up into a slow blissful smile that was familiar to me only from old photographs. My dad’s third and last revival in the early 1990s had ended when he’d lost his lip just before a live appearance on BBC Two, after which I didn’t hear Mum speak more than two words to my dad for a year and a half. I think she took it personally. The only time I’ve seen her more upset was Princess Diana’s funeral, but I think she sort of enjoyed that more—in a cathartic way.

The music continued, searching and heartfelt. I remember my mum, inspired by a repeat viewing of
The Buena Vista Social Club
, buying Dad a keyboard, but I didn’t remember him learning to play it.

I went into the narrow slot of a kitchen and made us a cup of tea as the tune concluded. I heard my mum shift on the sofa and sigh. I don’t actually like jazz that much, but I spent enough of my childhood as my dad’s vinyl wallah, ferrying disks from his collection to his turntable when he wasn’t well, to know the good stuff when I hear it. Dad was playing the good stuff—“All Blues” now—but not doing anything too smart arse with it, just letting the melancholy beauty shine through. I went back through and put my mum’s tea down on the simulated walnut coffee table, then sat down to watch her listen to my dad’s playing while it lasted.

It didn’t last forever, or even remotely long enough. How could it? We heard Dad slip off the line and then crash to a halt. Mum sighed and sat up.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’ve come to see Dad,” I said.

“Good.” She took a sip of her tea. “This is cold,” she said and thrust the mug in my direction. “Make me another.”

My dad emerged while I was in the kitchen. I heard him greet Mum and then a strange sucking sound that I realized with a start was the sound of them kissing. I almost spilled the tea.

“Stop it,” I heard my mum whisper. “Peter is here.”

My dad stuck his head into the kitchen. “This can’t be good,” he said. “Any chance of a cuppa too?”

I showed him that I already had another mug out.

“Outstanding,” he said.

When I had them both supplied with tea Dad asked me why I’d come around. They had reason to be a bit cautious, since the last time I’d turned up unexpectedly I’d just burned down Covent Garden Market—sort of.

“I’ve got some jazz stuff I need your help with,” I said.

My dad gave me a pleased smile. “Step into my office,” he said. “The jazz doctor is in.”

If the living room belonged to my mum and her extended family, then the main bedroom belonged to my dad and his record collection. Family legend said that the walls had once been painted a creamy light brown but now every inch had been colonized by Dad’s steel-bracketed stripped-pine shelves. Every shelf was filled with vinyl records all carefully stored in vertical ranks out of the sunlight. Since I’d moved out, my mum’s sprawling BHS wardrobe had migrated into my old room along with the bulk of her shoe collection. This left just enough room for the queen-sized bed, a full-sized electric keyboard, and my dad’s stereo.

I told him what I was looking for and he started pulling out records. We began, as I knew we would, with Coleman Hawkins’s famous 1938 take for Bluebird. It was a waste of time, of course, because Hawkins barely goes near the actual melody. But I let my dad enjoy it all the way through before I pointed this out.

“It was old-school, Dad. The one I heard. It had a proper melody and everything.”

Dad grunted and dipped into a cardboard box full of 78s to pull out a plain brown cardboard sleeve repaired at three edges with masking tape, containing the Benny Goodman Trio on shellac, with a Victor black-and-gold label. He has a Garrard turntable that has a 78 setting but you have to swap out the cartridge first—I laboriously removed the Ortofon and went looking for the Stanton. It was still kept where I remembered it, on the one clear bit of shelf behind the stereo, lying on its back to protect the stylus. While I fiddled with
the tiny screwdriver and got the cartridge mounted, Dad carefully slipped the disk out and inspected it with a happy smile. He passed it to me. It had the surprising heft of a 78, much heavier than an LP; anyone weaned exclusively on CDs probably wouldn’t have been able to lift it. I took the edges of the heavy black disk between my palms and placed it carefully on the turntable.

It hissed and popped as soon as the needle hit the groove and through that I heard Goodman make his intro on the clarinet. Then Teddy Wilson soloed on piano, then Benny on clarinet again. Luckily, Krupa on drums kept a low profile. This was much closer to the tune poor dead Mr. Wilkinson was playing.

“Later than that,” I said.

“That won’t be difficult,” said Dad. “This was only recorded five years after it was written.”

We sampled a couple more on 78 including a 1940 Billie Holiday take that we left on just because Lady Day is one of the few things Dad and I truly have in common. It was beautiful and sad, and that helped me realize what I was missing.

“It’s got to be more upbeat,” I said. “It was a bigger combo and it had more swing.”

“Swing?” asked my dad. “This is ‘Body and Soul’ we’re talking about, it’s never been noted for its swing.”

“Come on, Dad, someone must have done a more swinging version—if only for the white folks,” I said.

“Less of that, you cheeky bastard,” said Dad. “Still, I think I know what we might be looking for.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a rectangle of plastic and glass.

“You’ve got an iPhone,” I said.

“iPod touch actually,” he said. “It’s not a bad sound.” This from a man who ran a fifty-year-old Quad amp because it had valves rather than transistors. He passed me the earpieces and slid his finger around the screen like he’d been using a touch control all his life. “Listen to this,” he said.

There it was, digitally remastered but still with enough hiss and pop to keep the purists happy. “Body and Soul,” clear melody and just enough swing to make it danceable. If
it wasn’t what I’d heard off the body then it was definitely played by the same band.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Ken Johnson,” said Dad. “Old Snakehips himself. This is off
Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands
, some nice transfers from shellac. The liner notes say that it’s ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson on trumpet. But it’s obviously Dave Wilkins, because the fingering’s all different.”

“When was it recorded?”

“The original seventy-eight was cut in 1939 at the Decca Studios in West Hampstead,” said Dad. He looked at me keenly. “Is this part of a case? Last time you came over you weren’t half going on about some strange stuff.”

I wasn’t going down that road. “What’s with the keyboard?”

“I’m revitalizing my career,” he said. “I plan to be the next Oscar Peterson.”

“Really?” That was unexpectedly cocky—even for my dad.

“Really,” he said and shifted around on the bed until he could reach the keyboard. He played a couple of bars of “Body and Soul,” stating the melody before vamping and then taking the line in a direction that I’ve never been able to follow or appreciate. He looked disappointed at my reaction—he keeps hoping that I’ll grow into it one day. On the other hand my dad had an iPod so who knows what might happen.

“What happened to Ken Johnson?”

“He was killed in the Blitz,” said Dad. “Like Al Bowlly and Lorna Savage. Ted Heath told me that sometimes they thought Göring had it in for the jazzmen. Said he felt safer during the war doing tours in North Africa than he did playing gigs in London.”

I doubted I was searching for the vengeful spirit of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, but it wouldn’t hurt to check just in case.

Mum turfed us out of the bedroom so she could change. I made more tea and we sat in the living room.

“Next thing I know,” said Dad, “I’ll be looking for gigs.”

“With you on keyboard?”

“The line is the line,” said Dad. “The instrument is just the instrument.”

The jazzman lives to play.

My mum came out of the bedroom in a sleeveless yellow sundress and no headscarf. She had her hair quartered and twisted into the big plaits that made my dad grin. When I was a kid, Mum used to relax her hair every six weeks like clockwork. In fact, every weekend saw someone—an aunt, a cousin, a girl from down the road—sitting in the living room and chemically burning her hair straight. If I hadn’t gotten off at the year-ten disco with Maggie Porter, whose dad was a dread and whose mum sold car insurance, and who wore her hair in locks, I might have reached adulthood thinking that a black girl’s hair naturally smelled of potassium hydroxide. Now, personally I’m like my dad—I fancy it au naturel or in braids—but the first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t
ever
touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.