Love You Madly. Alex George
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They weren’t interested in my radical ideas. Personally, I thought that my use of some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, cleverly altered to praise a diabolical brand of versatile low-fat cream cheese (‘How do I eat thee? Let me count the ways’, etc.), was breathtakingly innovative. When I refused to come up with alternative ideas, they sacked me on the spot. I went back to my typewriter, weeping with relief. The experiment had lasted three and a half weeks.)
The irony is that now I sometimes think that I would love an ordinary, boring job again. All this freedom is getting me down. Hours, days, and weeks stretch ahead of me, oppressive in their emptiness. The ordered structure of a nine-to-five existence would give me a solid framework for my life, a means of regulating the chaos. I would dearly love to be told where to put my pencil-sharpener; I yearn for a militantly officious boss. As it is, the only taskmaster I have is me, and I am a workshy dilettante at the best of times. I have the worst of both worlds. I don’t get any work done, and have nobody but myself to blame.
Another long day looms.
I go into the sitting room, and turn on the record player. The needle lands softly on the rotating vinyl, and after a moment –
Bam! The pitch-perfect trumpets punch out the jumped-up tune, the saxophones gliding smoothly beneath them. This is ‘Cotton Tail’, ladies and gentlemen, performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the greatest jazz band in the world. Here comes the warm tenor sax of Ben Webster, rocking gently through his solo, prancing over the band’s tightly syncopated chords. Duke’s piano gets a few rollicking bars, and then the seamless sax section takes up the charge, followed by the swinging trumpets, spiralling ever higher.
I shut my eyes. This is the spiritual equivalent of brushing my teeth. The music leaves my soul refreshed and protected against decay. I sit on the floor, next to the speakers, and wallow in the rich symphony of jazzed horn lines which spill into the room.
Edward Kennedy Ellington, the Duke, that grand old aristocrat of jazz, was one of the music’s true pioneers. From his beginnings as a dapper and debonair band leader in 1920s Harlem, he became the friend of royalty and presidents, loved and admired the world over. He toured tirelessly throughout his career, spreading his own brand of syncopated happiness, dazzling audiences everywhere with his exciting rhythms, his unforgettable tunes, and his suave showmanship. He loved us madly – and his gift to the world was his music. Now jazz, of course, is meant to be the quintessence of cool. It’s about tortured genius, complex chord structures, jarring time-signatures. It’s about squalling saxophone solos, smoky subterranean joints, and sultry, mysterious women. Duke was as hip as they came, but this isn’t just music to smoke to. It’s music to dance to, as well. I have pulled Anna around this room many times, laughing and twirling to the band’s upbeat tempos.
As the music plays on, I survey the spines of my record collection. I own yards of Ellington records, neatly arranged on their shelves. I have LPs, EPs, battered 78s, reissues, and foreign imports, from the pristine and unplayed to the almost unplayable. I love them all dearly. They are the proud result of fifteen years’ trawling through the dusty racks of second-hand record shops, hours spent hunched over acres of old cardboard. I still spend days arranging and rearranging my records. I love the endless cycle of processing and regulation: marshalling my Duke Ellington collection allows me to impose my own brand of order in at least one small corner of this otherwise uncontrollable world.
I own almost every note that Duke ever recorded, but there’s one performance that I still dream about. Here’s the story. Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s enigmatic collaborator and co-songwriter, dies on 31 May 1967 – finally claimed by cancer. Duke is devastated. He’s lost his crutch, his right-hand man, his creative pivot. Three months after his death, the Ellington Orchestra assembles in RCA Victor Studio ‘A’ in Manhattan to record a tribute album of Strayhorn compositions. At the end of the second day of the session, while the rest of the band are packing up and getting ready to go home, Duke sits at the piano and, unaccompanied, plays a tender Strayhorn tune, ‘Lotus Blossom’. It is Duke’s personal tribute to a man he loved deeply.
That much we all know. It’s after this that the myth begins:
As the studio empties, Duke remains at the piano, staring at the keys, alone with his memories. He’s an old man, now. Still dapper, still elegant, but tired after a lifetime of hard graft and sacrifice. Ellington turns and faces his loss – and starts to play the blues. Tune after tune, the piano cries a sad song of loss and heartache. The wistful, tender lyricism of this final, intimate salute is unbearably poignant. He plays seven or eight laments, quietly closes the piano lid, and shuffles home.
Unknown to Duke, one man has remained in the engineering booth throughout, and has quietly switched on the tape to capture the impromptu performance. The engineer, a young Italian called Alessandro Ponti, has a string of gambling debts to his name that he is unable to pay. He spirits away the illicit tape, his eye on a quick profit and an end to his financial troubles. Some test acetate pressings are produced before Ponti loses his nerve and decides to destroy the master tape. But by that time the acetate pressings are already in circulation, and they are still out there somewhere.
That, at any rate, is the story.
Since then, the fate of those lost recordings has inspired decades of obsessive speculation and wishful rumours. For Ellington enthusiasts, those acetate pressings are our Loch Ness Monster, our Holy Grail. Nobody even knows if they really exist or not. I still cannot resist scouring the second-hand record racks in the hope that one of the pressings will magically appear at my fingertips.
I climb into the shower, whistling a medley of Ellington tunes. A few minutes later, as I am drying myself (by way of indolent rub, rather than the efficient, chafingly vigorous towel-work that Anna favours) I notice three virgin rolls of lavender loo paper in the wicker basket next to the toilet. This is what Anna calls ‘nearly out’? I cannot think of any disaster – global, domestic, or intestinal – that could possibly put our present reserves of toilet paper under immediate threat, but Anna suffers from that exclusively female psychosis whereby she gets twitchy if we have less than a quarter of a mile of readily available bog roll.
By the time I have washed and dressed, it is almost ten o’clock. With a knot in my stomach, I put on my coat and walk to our local bookshop.
As I stand in the doorway of the shop, I take a couple of deep breaths. I want to be poised, calm, so that I will remember this moment. I’ve been into this bookshop hundreds of times, but this morning is different. Licked is officially published today. My role has changed. I’m no longer just another browser. From now on I shall be part of the stock. I shall be a commodity. I shall be a browsee.
Inside, there are only one or two customers nosing about. Behind the main desk stand two scruffy individuals in shapeless jumpers. I wander up to the New Releases table. Licked isn’t there. I inspect the Bestsellers table. Finally I walk over to my bit of shelf between Nancy and Iris. Then I go over to the desk.
‘Do you have a novel by Matthew Moore?’ I ask. ‘It’s called Licked.’
One of the assistants pulls a face. ‘Matthew Moore? Doesn’t ring a bell.’
I smile thinly at him. ‘I think it’s quite new.’
The man turns to his colleague. ‘Declan. You ever heard of a Matthew Moore?’
The other man wrinkles his nose. ‘Nah.’
I put my hands deep in my pockets. ‘Could you check?’
‘Hold on.’ The first assistant taps at the computer keyboard on the desk, and peers at the screen. ‘Let me see. Here we are. Moore, M. Licked. Wellington Press.’
‘That’s it,’ I say eagerly.
‘It’s actually published today,’ the man tells me.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’
There is a pause.
‘So have you got any?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘Oh.’