All That Follows

Leonard listens and taps his fingers on the steering wheel in half­time, happy with himself, happy now to have been so happy then. He sees Lennie Less – as Francine has so many times recounted seeing him that evening – from the third row of the gallery: the spotlight at the centre of the stage, his casual and expensive suit, blue­black, the brass­gold glinting saxophone extemporizing its one­night­only bars. ‘Did you ever see / Such a sight in your life / As three blind mice?’ The van replays it back to him through her.

Francine says she was attracted to him ‘not quite straight away – but soon’. Disarmed by music she has not expected to enjoy – she’s come reluctantly, at the last moment, and only to oblige her sister, who’s been given several tickets – and by the flattering stage lights that make Leonard seem complex and shadowy, she has begun to think of him, despite the grotesqueries of his bulging throat and cheeks, as someone she might like to kiss. And she’s had fun, she says. At times his playing has become knotty, shrill and edgy, just as she’s feared. On occasions he is more blacksmith than tunesmith. It is witty, though. And it has helped, of course, that she has rushed a few drinks in the pub beforehand and that she, and every other virgin there, has quickly recognized the common language of each tune, the programme of nursery rhymes that on an impulse he has decided to play once his ‘Three Blind Mice’ has struck such chords. ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ follows, to more laughter and applause, initially, at least. The less sophisticated and less sober concert­goers, Francine included, have actually sung along with ‘yes sir, yes sir, three bags full’, until Leonard’s tenor deprives the singers of their tune and embarks on eight measures of bare but oddly poignant bleats, loosely pitched at first, then joyously unruly.

These are the moments – the blacksmithing, the bleats – that most please and terrify Leonard, the moments of abandonment when he can sense the audience shifting and disbanding. He fancies he can see the flash of watches being checked. Certainly he can see how many in the audience are on the edges of their seats and how many more are slumped, looking at their fingernails or fidgeting. He knows he is offending many pairs of ears. They’ve come for those cool and moodily bluesy countermelodies that have made the quartet celebrated, not for these restless, heated, cranked­up overloads. But still he has to carry on, he has to nag at them, because he won’t be satisfied until he has lost and possibly offended himself. So that night, this night,at Brighton’s Factory, this night of radio and storms, this night of musical soliloquies, is one he cherishes because he has not backed away. The watches and the slumpers spur him on. As soon as he’s dispatched the mice and sheep, he’s taking further liberties, he’s giving Francine and two hundred others in the audience, plus any late­night listeners who’ve not switched off their radios, ‘Ding, Dong, Bell’, sending pussy down the well into musical deep space with a tumbling crescendo, followed by some risky trickery, not blowing on his saxophone at all but drumming with his fingers on the body and the keys close to the microphone so that it seems a lost and distant cat is scratching frantically at bricks.
However testing this might be, however intractable, no one there can say that Lennie Less does not love or does not suit his instrument, his perfect southpaw tenor, a costly Selmer paid for by Mister Sinister, his unexpectedly successful first collection. From the sardonic extra curve of the crook where the body meets the mouthpiece and the lips, to the great flared bell that, depending on the slope and stoop of his back, can just as readily swing between his legs as fit snugly against his abdomen or thigh, this saxophone has become a visceral appendix to the man. Flesh and brass seem unified. It is as if his fingertips and the flat tops of the keys are made from one material, as if breath and metal share substance and weight. So he is mesmerizing. Even for those who are impatient with his gimmickry or antagonized by his excesses or dislocated by his syncopation, there is plenty to wonder at and watch. This man who has come on stage in a dark suit with a shiny patch on the right trouser leg, at pocket level, where the bore and bell of his Selmer have worn the cloth, this man so evidently beset by nervousness that he at first can hardly lift his head to face the audience, this musician who has opened so carefully and timidly with ‘Three Blind Mice’, has started to transmogrify – there is no better word – before their eyes. It’s theatre. You could be deaf and it would still be theatre.