All That Follows

Leonard feels it too. He’s on the tight rope, balancing. It’s technique and abandonment. He is elated, yes, but he is also terrified. Usually when he is stepping in to improvise he can expect to play what he hears: all his daily practices, those hours spent running through arpeggios or exploring patterns, accents, sequences and articulations in his song repertoire, provide him with a soundscape of tried and tested options; he merely has to choose and follow. He has exhaustively prepared in order to seem daringly unprepared. But here, tonight, he is not playing what he hears; he is hearing what he plays, hearing it for the first time, and only at the moment he – his lips – imparts it to his reed. Each note is imminent with failure. But there is no retreat. Nor does he want to find a safer place, ‘a comfort groove’, as they are called. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, the moment when the wind picks up the kite and lets it soar. Some of the greatest improvisers claim, at rare times such as this, that when the music tumbles out unaided as it were, it seems as if the notes are physical, fat shapes that dance, or colours pulsing, currents, swirls. For Leonard, because he always taps a foot, playing is more commonly like walking, corporeal and muscular walking tightropes, walking gangplanks, walking over coals, also walking on thin air, on ice, in darkness, on rock, on glass, but always walking blindfold. Tonight, though, he is walking through a landscape forested in notes towards a clearing sky. The wind is at his back. The path ahead is widening. Statement, repetition, contrast and return. Another sixteen bars and he’ll be there.

Recognize when you have done enough, he tells himself. Head home. He’s hardly moving now, no showboating. He doesn’t even tap his feet, or rock his body. Apart from fingertips just lifting and the bulging of his throat, he is a statue voicing nursery rhymes, the final measure, ding dong bell.

The music’s ended for the moment – but this rare night in Brighton has an unrecorded track, an afternote, a human lollipop. Leonard has finished signing a handful of booklets and programmes with a shaking hand, his autograph a mess. Euphoric and consumed, wanting more but not expecting anything except a hotel room, he heads out of the auditorium on to the snow and towards his taxi. A small group of intimate strangers in the mostly deserted lobby smile at him and shake his hand. They call out, ‘That was beautiful.’ And, ‘That was fun.’ And, ‘That was truly weird.’ All men. All hardcore fans. Then, yes, then Francine speaks to him. She has delayed him at the taxi door. Her hand is on his arm. ‘Truly valiant,’ she says, blowing smoke, still a little tipsy and not quite knowing why she’s chosen the word, a word that even now has resonance for both of them. Leonard sees a woman just a little younger but a good deal shorter than himself, large­featured in a girlish way, her hair unkempt, her red coat still damp from the storm and smelling slightly wintery. ‘Valiant?’ he repeats. ‘Does that mean rash?’ Rash as in reckless? Foolhardy? He hopes it does. ‘No, I mean valiant,’ she says. ‘You know… valiant, taking risks. Yes, it was pure valiance.’ Embarrassed by her loss of eloquence, her tipsy failure to summon the simple word valour when she needs it, she laughs. Such a pealing, mezzo laugh. The evening’s most melodic note, he thinks. And that becomes the start of it, his great romance.

Now, with the worst of the country roads and the best of that day’s weather behind him and with fresh suburbs gathering, their snouts pressed up against the fields, Leonard listens to himself again, listens to the music of everybody’s childhood, spontaneously reshaped, listens to the retrieved mistakes that masquerade as wit and bravery, the risk­taking, the nerve, the valiance, almost unaware of traffic, the dimming sky or the windscreen wipers and, certainly, without much thought of Maxim Lermontov. He presses the track button and returns to the beginning of the broadcast. ‘In an unexpected adjustment . . .’And then again. And then again. Announcements and applause, with Francine in the audience – but that was then – admiring him.