Review: Jazz – Toni Morrison

Another day, another book review:

Review: Jazz – Toni Morrison

Scout around the various posts on this blog and you’ll easily notice that I love both the music of jazz and literature that alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was therefore inevitable that I would turn my attention to Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel, Jazz, sooner or later.

Jazz is the middle book in a trilogy of Morrison novels, Jazz equating to Dante’s Purgatory. I have yet to read Beloved or Paradise, which mirror Dante’s Inferno and Paradise respectively, but like a jazz soloist, I will circle back to the theme at some point in the future.

The novel largely takes place in Harlem in the 1920s. It tells the story of the murder of eighteen year old Dorcas Manfred by her married lover Joe Trace. The entire book plays out like an improvised jazz performance, with each of the main characters telling their version of events like musicians playing solos against the beat of the whole band. The book’s narrator, either Morrison herself or some unnamed inhabitant of Harlem, serves as band leader, queuing in each performer to take their turn.

Thus do we hear the story told from the perspective of Dorcas’s Aunt Alice, Joe’s wife Violet and Malvonne, the woman from whom Joe rents a room where he can bring his young lover. Joe also tells his story, as well as Dorcas’s friend, Felice. Even Dorcas herself. Jazz takes place in the roaring 20s, youthful adolescence for the music from which it takes its name, yet its style anticipates the growing maturity of jazz in the 1940s, the narrative spinning backwards to the nineteenth century ancestors of its main characters like a Charlie Parker solo veering wildly away from the main melody of a well-trodden jazz standard.

As Harlem is Purgatory here, so it’s characters are stuck there. Stuck in the lives that they had before the incident around which the novel rotates. Joe shoots Dorcas dead, but doesn’t go to jail. The novel opens with Violet gate crashing the dead girl’s funeral to stab at her corpse in its casket, thrown out on to the snow filled streets (an allusion to the final frozen circle of the Inferno) and releasing all of her caged birds back into the wild in grief, anger and despair. She remains with Joe, the man she had fled with from the southern states of America. The north at first seems to offer them fresh hope, as it did for so many of the descendants of former slaves at that time. Yet in the final analysis, the north is just one more level up the island of Purgatory, away from deficient love and towards the excessive love that ends in Dorcas’s murder. Violet brings new birds into the apartment to make the Dantean circle complete. The couple grow old together in stagnation.

As I say, I haven’t read the books which precede and follow Jazz, but the themes of Purgatory, Limbo even, are clearly visible. My favourite passage from the book appears near the end, spoken by Morrison’s anonymous narrator:

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. Hangs on to wells and a boy’s golden hair; would just as soon inhale sweet fire caused by a burning girl as hold a maybe-yes maybe-no hand. I don’t believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out.

Indecision and uncertainty are as much purgatory as anything else and it is probably appropriate to start in the middle of the trilogy. Is that ‘something rogue’ found in Paradise? Is the initial belief in life being created as a way for the world to think about itself begun with Beloved? Do you in reading this already know the answers to these questions? I want to read Jazz again. I need to read Jazz again, but only when bookended by the books which surround it. Like the music, it’s simple and yet complicated, flowing from simple lines that twist and wrap themselves around each other. It is at times repetitious in the story it tells, yet each soloist interprets the melody in a slightly different way, emphasising and dampening notes from their own perspective. Riffing around some, avoiding others altogether.

The year after Jazz was released, Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I tend to place very little stock in awards ceremonies. Awards are all about opinion, perspective and, certainly with the Nobel prizes, politics. Yet if anyone has to win a Nobel Prize, I’m glad it was Toni Morrison. I love reading and it always nice to veer away from the same old authors and reach out to discover somebody new or unfamiliar. As with jazz, melody is fine but it’s good to improvise once in a while.

I read far too many books written by white men, who sadly still dominate just about every genre, fiction and non-fiction combined, as they have done since the age of Greek tragedy. The first step is admitting you have a problem and I’m slowly starting to correct for this myopia. Running around the same old circles is stagnation and stagnation is purgatory. Diversity though, now that really would be paradise.

Get it done.

See Also (click Links)

Blue Metal Jazz

XXXIX Articles

Gylypso Weekend

Review: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes/ But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes – Anita Loos

Book review. 'Nuff said:

Review: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes/ But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes – Anita Loos

“I set to work at once on your esteemed order and so hard indeed that I almost stupefied myself and stopped, reclining on a sofa and reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for three whole days.”

          James Joyce, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 8 November 1926

Recently I was rummaging around Oxfam’s second hand book store in Preston (always the highlight for me of any trip to Preston), when I happened across a copy of Anita Loos’s novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

If people remember the name at all these days it’s likely to be thanks to the 1953 movie starring Marilyn Monroe, yet when the book was published in 1925 it went through forty-five editions before demand started to wane. The second edition alone ran to sixty thousand copies and was snapped up in days.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes takes the form of the diary of New York socialite, Lorelei Lee, the blonde in question that gentlemen seem to prefer. As Loos tells it in her introduction to the 1963 edition, she was returning from New York to Los Angeles by train with a group of the elite of Hollywood, including Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. There was a blonde girl travelling with the group and Loos could not work out why staff onboard seemed keener to assist this one blonde girl than the darker haired Loos.

Apparently the rather prosaic truth hadn’t occurred to anyone before, that blonde women are generally more popular. From this one incident Loos reflected on all of the blonde girls that she had known in her life and realised the truth. She noticed that even the greatest intellectual minds in America that she knew seemed to fall for ‘the dumbest blonde of all’ (her words) and she presently wrote a sketch which became a series of sketches that appeared in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, before finally being published as a full blown novel (the first edition sold out on the day it was released).

Edith Wharton called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ‘the great American novel’, a title that has been given to many novels, especially from that time of prohibition and the Jazz Age. Indeed, in many respects Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is no different than many novels from that time. It’s heroine is a social high flyer, being wined and dined by one American industrialist and English lord after another. She travels to London and Paris and Vienna and home to New York again, always paid for by one of her many gentlemen friends. As Loos notes, if any male writer had written about such things, their efforts would have been met with massive indignation, yet she ‘with my infantile cruelty, have never been able to view even the most impressive human behaviour as anything but foolish’. Lorelei is essentially a gold digger, always scheming for new clothes and diamond tiaras on somebody else’s account, yet Loos’s simple prose style lends her a great deal of sympathy. Besides, most of the men she dupes deserve it.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a short book, a couple of hours is all it takes to get through, which makes James Joyce’s claim to have spent three days reading it rather curious. The introduction notes, ‘James Joyce, who had begun to lose his eyesight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee’. Which isn’t quite true, as Joyce was reading the book a year after publication. More likely, he was gathering material for Finnegans Wake. Lorelei Lee’s style is one of near perfect grammar and punctuation, but with her own peculiar style of phonetically spelling words, some of which Joyce obviously appropriated. She spells Eiffel Tower, Eyefull Tower for instance, which in the Wake becomes, ‘a skyerscape of a most eyeful hoyth entowerly’ [my italics]. Failing eyesight or not, spending three days reading a two hour novel suggests that Joyce wasn’t merely reading, he was studying in detail.

Joyce appears briefly by name in the 1927 sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. The Picador edition that I bought from Oxfam includes both books back to back, so that you read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, then vertically rotate the book by 180^O to read But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Not enough twin editions of novels are produced in this way in my opinion.

But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes is not quite as good as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Again, Lorelei Lee is the narrator but here she tells the story of the early life of her friend and fellow socialite, Dorothy Shaw. The problem is that Lorelei Lee is charmingly dumb in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but in order to accommodate the story of Dorothy she has to be much more knowing and the only thing that remains of the style of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is Lorelei’s idiosyncratic spelling. It’s ok, but nowhere near as good as the original story.

I haven’t seen the film, but then my film knowledge is woefully lacking. Not a patch on my literary knowledge. Now though I will have to track down a copy to watch, because I imagine there are few actresses more suited to playing Lorelei Lee than Marilyn Monroe. I’ve never engaged in the fascination with Marilyn, but then I’ve never really engaged with  the fascination with blonde women either. Each to their own. I guess this means that I’m not a gentleman. Well all I can say to that is, phew! close call.

Get it done.

Blue Metal Jazz

Today we're thinking about the blues, metal and jazz. Mainly jazz though.

Blue Metal Jazz

These days whenever anyone asks me for my favourite genre of music I give this reply: Blues, because it is grandfather to my second and third favourites genres of music, heavy metal and jazz. Indeed, there can hardly be a style of music (outside of classical and opera) that has not been influenced by blues in the last century. I once saw on TV a Danish neo-Nazi heavy metal group singing white supremacist lyrics over 12 bar blues. Sometimes incredulity can only give way to hysterical laughter.

As previously written about in an article on Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’, heavy metal was the first music scene I got into. If I’d been born a decade earlier, I’d have undoubtedly been a punk, but I was a teenager in the late 80s and it was heavy metal at this time that was in the ascendancy. In many ways, I’m glad. Punk is fine and sometimes, as with the first few Clash albums or that one vitriolic offering from the Sex Pistols, even brilliant. Punk though was very much of its time, visceral and immediate, it made no apologies and it acknowledged few debts to its roots. It also had, ultimately, a limited range.

The reasons that I grew to love metal are the same reasons that I have grown to love jazz. On the musical spectrum, both occupy an enormous range of styles. They also blur the boundaries between neighbouring genres. Are AC/DC a rock band or a heavy metal band? Is Nina Simone a blues singer or a jazz singer? The answer in each case is both.

With both metal and jazz there is a bewildering breadth of styles, from blues rock to hard rock to glam rock (thankfully a dying breed), speed metal to black metal to progressive and power metal . There’s modal jazz, cool jazz, free jazz, and jazz-fusion; bebop, hard bop and fast bop. They can even encroach upon each other’s style, as in The Bad Plus’s kick ass jazz version of Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. Or listen to any Iron Maiden album featuring Nico McBrain on drums, especially ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’, to hear a jazz trained drummer at the top of his game.  Most of the best metal drummers list jazz legends like Chick Webb and Buddy Rich as major influences, in the same way that Tony Iommi credits gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt  as being instrumental to his playing style (see ‘Planet Caravan’ on ‘Paranoid’).

Of course, as similar as they may be in some respects, the two styles of music are vastly different in a great many more. Consequentially, I tend to listen to each under very different circumstances. Metal is my getting stuff done music. When I sit down at my desk to write of a morning (ok, afternoon), I usually need something rhythmic and plodding to shift me into writing mode, the bass drum propelling me forward, banishing any lethargy from my soul.

Jazz though is for reading. To settle down to the sofa with a volume of Alice Walker, Asimov or Melville, one needs a good jazz album. Most of the musicians I love are favourites because of their lyrical ability, but it’s difficult to listen to them when reading, because instead of concentrating on the words on the page, I’m lip synching to the words in the air. Jazz though wraps itself around the words, compliments them, soundtracks and illuminates them. Rock music kick-starts my day, jazz draws it to a close.

I came to jazz the way most people have come to jazz over the last fifty years, via Miles Davis and ‘Kind of Blue’. If you’re used to more regular or mainstream forms of music then listening to jazz is like learning to speak a new language. ‘Kind of Blue’ serves as Rosetta Stone to this arcane tongue. It’s also a fine indicator of how far your comprehension has progressed. There was a time when I hated jazz and even thirty seconds of any jazz album was enough to make me feel physically sick. First listening to ‘Kind of Blue’ was like hearing Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first time. Or struggling through that first, tortuous reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’. It was jarring, strange and didn’t always make a whole lot of sense.

These days I speak jazz fluently and ‘Kind of Blue’ sounds to me as mainstream as anything else I listen to. To be honest, I prefer ‘Sketches of Spain’, but that’s solely because of Miles’s heavenly interpretation of Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto de Aranjuez’, one of my favourite pieces of classical music. That said, ‘Kind of Blue’ is in many ways the perfect jazz album, the musical equivalent of ‘Frankenstein’ or Rimbaud’s ‘Ma Boheme Fantaisie’ in the original. It’s musica universalis, the music of the spheres in which ancient philosophers and eighteenth century astronomers and composers believed. Miles Davis is to jazz what J. S. Bach is to the classical tradition.

As mentioned earlier, Nina Simone blurs the lines between blues and jazz, as well as pop and rock, from covers of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles and half a dozen Dylan tracks, to her own compositions, like ‘Mississippi Goddam’, written in response to myriad racist murders committed in the 1960s (she called it a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written), to the instrumentals that showed off her sheer virtuosity on the piano. The latter, in particular, are showcased on her 1958 debut album, ‘Little Girl Blue’. To hear songs like ‘Central Park Blues’, ‘Good Bait’, the opening to ‘Mood Indigo’ is to experience serenity. These are complimented by the fragile tenderness of her voice in ‘He Needs Me’, ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and the title track, ‘Little Girl Blue’.

‘Little Girl Blue’ also contains perhaps Nine Simone’s most famous track, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, made famous when used in an advert in the 1980s, selling a product the name of which I care neither to name or even indeed recall.

Nina got screwed out of the royalties for her first few albums and was understandably belligerent in refusing to play any of their tracks live, making sure audiences comprehended her exact reasons. The albums still exist however and the world is a better place for their existence. She could be tough, demanding, insisting people refer to her as Dr Simone after she was awarded an honorary doctorate, but I guess she had to be. There isn’t an African-American musician in the last century who hasn’t experienced the kind of abuse that should fill any rational human being with revulsion. Slaves made America, north and south, what it is today and virtually every musical style to come out of the States in the last hundred years, good, bad and indifferent, is infused with the blues. A lot of the time I think the kinds of racism that is pointed towards the African American population is born out of jealousy and pure resentment.

I once knew a couple, she of Afro-Caribbean, he of eastern European Jewish decent. In Britain, few people looked at them twice, yet I was told that in the States, even in Manhattan, people on the street would regularly drop out of reality in seeing them together. My response upon hearing this was, what, has no one in New York ever heard of George Gershwin? The music of Gershwin embodies the artistic evolution that results in cultural cross fertilisation. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is often mislabelled a classical track, but it is as much jazz music as anything. For many, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is the theme song of New York, the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, one of the cultural crucibles of the world, an area of outstanding ethnic mixing. But then Gershwin’s all-black opera, ‘Porgy and Bess’, a work forged in the Manhattan melting pot by the son of east European Jewish immigrants was a flop at the time of its original production in the 30s, derided and sneered at by the usual subjects. It’s heartening to know that ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess’, with lyrics by DuBose Heyward, became, briefly, for a time, the most recorded song in history a couple of years ago, with everyone from Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong recording versions of the song. Nina Simone recorded her own version. Miles Davis too.

Jazz blurs not only into blues, but into classical music. Aside from Gershwin, some of the greatest American composers of the 20^th century came out of jazz. One has only to think of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the two greatest composers, pianists and band leaders to come out of the era of swing and big band. “One more time.” Many of the most recorded jazz standards in recording history are Duke Ellington compositions, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘ In A Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Mood Indigo’. “One more, once.” The high pitched horns of the Count Basie Orchestra almost define the sound of the 1940s. It somehow doesn’t sound right hearing them without the occasional doodlebug exploding outside.

Nina Simone I would characterise as my favourite female singer. Yet for all time jazz composer and performer, I can only pick one man and that is Charles Mingus. Much as I love ‘Little Girl Blue’ ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Sketches of Spain’, I adore ‘Mingus Ah Um’ above all others. If the ‘Count Basie Orchestra’ are the sound of the 40s, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ defines the 1950s, even if it wasn’t recorded until the decade’s final year (I can be forgiven, as I wasn’t born at the time). Released in the same year as ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s peerless ‘Time Out’, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ somehow encapsulates that time more than its contemporaries. ‘Kind of Blue’ is timeless and ‘Time Out’ mixed up with so many styles of world music as to almost escape the gravitational pull of jazz altogether.

‘Mingus Ah Um’, with its defining track, ‘Fables of Faubus’, written in mockery of Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas who deployed the National Guard in order to prevent two African-American students from attending high school in Little Rock, stands out as an album of its time. It’s an album of outstanding tracks, ‘Better Git it in Your Soul’, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, ‘Jelly Roll’ and ‘Self-Portrait in Three Colours’.

Like Ellington, Basie and Gershwin, Mingus is a genius composer. His meisterwerk, ‘Epitaph’, is so complicated that it was only successfully performed for the first time more than a decade after his death. Any fan of Radiohead will know Mingus’s work, if only by proxy, with both ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘We suck Young Blood’ both heavily influenced by the Mingus track, ‘Freedom’ (from the album, ‘Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus’, a title that inspired at least one ‘Jazz Club’ sketch on 90s programme, ‘The Fast Show’).

Indeed, it’s indicative of how far my comprehension of jazz music has come that there are so many jazz artists that I listen to these days that I have not yet even mentioned, including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Cassandra Wilson and The Bad Plus.

I still listen to heavy metal, but much of it being the music of my youth and, strangely for a genre firmly rooted in the mid-twentieth century, the list of jazz artists I listen to is marginally more contemporary than that of the metal. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what’s contemporary is what’s new to you in that instant. I read 102 books last year and only one of them was published within the year (Philip Hoare’s, ‘The Sea Inside’), so who needs contemporary? The past is another country. They may do things differently there, but it also means there’s a lot to discover for yourself, as if it had never been discovered before.

Get it done.

Gylypso Weekend

“The accordion and steel drum.” Rich said. “Not two instruments you naturally associate with each other. I’m not sure how this is going to work.” I didn’t either, but given that this was Helen, we agreed that it just would.

Friday night in Mello Mello, Slater Street; a little bit of New Orleans transported to the heart of Liverpool. Helen had brought me here once before in the daytime. Now though, herbal tea and cake have been replaced with bottles of Sol and Staropramen. The joint is a long, narrow bar with seemingly only one entrance. To reach the stage area we have to walk halfway up the street, enter, then walk all the way back, despite there being a door at the bottom corner, blocked off by the stage. I hate having to do the same thing twice.

Yesterday was Rich’s birthday and he and Caroline are down from Sunderland for the weekend. Ruth is out with mates, but is coming to join us later. Jez, Helen’s new squeeze, is also due to pop along later. They’ve been together three weeks today and in deference to the absent John (Sensei to windup merchants everywhere), I make Rich and Caroline promise me that at some point they will both say to Jez, “I understand that congratulations are in order.” “Please,” I implore them, “if you won’t do it for me, do it for John.” I haven’t seen John in a year, but he is still a bad influence on me. There’s a plastic banner in the window of a house across from mine that declares, ‘It’s a girl!’. I’m having to steal myself from knocking on and saying, “So go on then. What did she have?”

We are here for a new art exhibit that the cafe is displaying. It’s opening night and ‘The Helen Maher Ensemble’ have been asked to perform a forty minute set. Helen’s guitarist, John, had given us lift down from her pad up by Lark Lane. Walking in, each carrying a piece of musical equipment, I am immediately struck by the phrase, Scouse Orleans. At a worn looking upright sits a guy who I instantly decide came to Liverpool to study (probably music) and has been here ever since. He is apparently Jez’s flatmate, but it’s the guy accompanying him that catches my attention and triggers ‘Scouse Orleans’ in my mind. If you saw him on the street you wouldn’t differentiate him from half the men you witness in these parts: bull neck, bald head, shell suit and black trainers.  Yet you would be dead wrong, because what separates him from the herd is the trumpet he blows, the colour of battered silver. In the last year I have slowly started to approximate a jazz aficionado and I recognise much of what he plays as stuff I have heard Miles Davis perform. I couldn’t tell you what any of the songs are called, but I do remember a classic skit from The Fast Show:

Louis Balfour: What are you going to play for us today, Jackson?
Jackson Jeffrey Jackson: Trumpet.
Louis Balfour: No, er, what tune?
Jackson Jeffrey Jackson: Tune? This' jazz!

And as Richard Feynman’s father said to him as a boy, “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” So I guess the name of a tune is largely unimportant (which is probably why my team always does so terribly during the music round of the Cornerhouse Quiz every Monday night). All I know is that the me of even a decade ago would be appalled at the thought of actively listening to jazz. Jazz used to make me physically ill. The me of the here and now however is very much in love.

Most of the art on display, I have to say, leaves me cold. Most of it looks like upturned car bonnets stuck to the walls and asides from a sign reading, ‘God Slave the Queen’ (which strikes me a glib),  most of the rest is instantly forgettable. The one piece that I like is a series of butterflies cut out of what look like wallpaper designs of various sizes, stuck to the wall. They look like they belong here anyway.

Besides, there are far more interesting things to observe here. Like the faux entrance behind the stage. It’s built in to a hollow cylinder and the glass front has ‘open’ written on it in reverse. A palette sits atop of it, its slats painted in red and black stripes, which might be part of the exhibit (actually, is the entrance itself an exhibit? I wonder). The stage is a foot off the ground and cluttered, with a stepladder propped up at the back (next to the fire alarm). The walls are mainly a pale yellow (fooling me into thinking that the place is called Mellow Yellow), and the lighting from the mini-chandeliers is, well, mellow.

Oh, and then there are the toilets, which are like something out of a David Lynch movie. You go down several flights of stairs to the basement and into a room of peeling walls, smelling of stale piss. One of the cubicles is taped off, with a sign saying, “This toilet is completely out of order.” I wonder what it did. But it’s the mirror that gives rise to the feeling a being in a Lynch movie. It’s bronze and ornate and looks completely out of place in these otherwise grotty surroundings. I half expect to see the ghost of Dennis Hopper looming out from behind the taped off cubicle to tell me that I’m completely out of order. I more or less flee back upstairs and send Rich down to have a look.

The place was rammed as we arrived and even though we manage to get a table right next to the stage, there aren’t enough chairs and half of us end up perched on the end of the stage. Then Ruth arrives, sat next to me on the edge of a speaker, and while we have plenty to chat about, as always, I figure that I get to see a lot more of her than Rich or Caroline do and I give up my seat so that they can catch up. Sometimes, just sometimes, I can be quite generous and thoughtful.

And then, finally, time for the gig. There seemed to be some problem with the P.A. that required a lot of fiddling, because the band seemed to start much later than anticipated. It’s also supposed to be a three piece, with Helen and John joined by Paul on double bass. But in a classic example of a phenomenon known as, “The Helen Maher Effect*, she has also drafted in steel drum player, Clifton, at the last moment, prompting Rich to ask, “I’m not sure how this is going to work.” But of course it did and in a single evening a new musical form was born. ‘Gylypso Jazz’ me and Rich name it, after a couple of abortive attempts to find the suitable phrase. I love the way that Helen conducts the soloists with barely a tilt of her head and the way that Paul grins and laughs throughout, thoroughly enjoying himself. I thought that jazz bassists were supposed to be solemn, brooding figures, but I guess I’ve been influenced by Miles’s description of Charles Mingus (‘Mingus Ah Um’, what an album!).

The gig finishes and the throng thins out and by the time Jez makes an appearance, there are more than enough chairs for everybody. Well he’s a musician and I love music and my current obsession is P J Harvey’s new album, ‘Let England Shake’, which even though it’s only March I have already declared album of the year. It’s just that good. No, not good, an absolute masterpiece. Jez has heard it once, but agrees and from there we quickly hit it off (Helen later telling me that talking about P J was inspired). And before long it’s 2am and Jez heads home (Ruth already having left) and me, Helen, Rick and Caroline bundle into the back of a black cab bound for Aigburth.

John Mayall’s ‘Empty Rooms’ plays as we sit around, chatting, head’s nodding, and before long there is a splintering into three and a traipsing to Slumberland. ‘The Now Show’ plays on Helen’s Mac in the back bedroom/study as I drift to sleep.

***

I first came to this place six months ago, shortly after Helen moved in. The second I laid eyes on it, a converted coach house nestling behind a block of Georgian houses, I thought to myself: Yup, she’s not moving from here anytime soon. It is very Helen. In ‘A Woman of Conviction’, I constructed for her fictional self, Helen Marr, a Dutch barge, complete with antique furniture and oriental furnishings. Curse you reality, you have outdone me.

You enter from the side of the flats backing on to the coach house, through a wicker gate and into a garden area too small to be of any use to anyone but the pixies. Herbs grow out of pots. Enough shrubs and creeping plants fill the periphery of the short path to make it seem as if you’re entering Alice’s wonderland, half expecting to find yourself much taller by the time you reach the two perpendicular doors at the opposite end. Both black, one leads out to the back alley, the other contains the stairs up to the flat proper.

The stairs bring you to another door, which opens into the living room. As a writer, you become obsessed by small details and minutiae. There is a Yale lock to this door that you can turn by ninety degrees and it locks in place without having to press down the usual button switch. Rich and Caroline state at me like I’m mad when I try to explain the genius of this, not helped by my having been drinking and smoking, nor by the fact that the bloody thing experiences what kids today call an epic fail when I try to demonstrate.

Details, details, details. Each of the alley-facing windows are made up of five glass slats, slid into place in upward steps. The windows run the length of the corridor which travels from living room to kitchen, passing doors to the main bedroom, bathroom and study on its way. The walnut piano that Helen, her dad and me went to pick up from Crosby one Sunday afternoon (Helen playing it in the back of the transit all the way home) sits in one corner of the living room, next to a sideboard of modern speakers and old fashioned phonograph. Fights threaten to break out over the hogging of the paired down rocking chair. It’s too damm relaxing and too much fun. The sofa bed that forms out of the L shaped sofa provides one of the most undisturbed sleeps  I have ever had. Once you clear the sofa of the infestation of cushions that breed wherever women nest, you discover that it is the colour of olive green.

Caroline has noticed that the flat has no TV. For me, this is such a familiar feature of a visit to Helen’s, that I barely notice it anymore. Aside a couple of shared houses, I can’t remember Helen owning a TV. It’s one of the many excellent reasons for paying a visit. I’m not a hippy, I don’t believe in ‘energy’, except as a physical concept (kinetic, potential, chemical etc), but coming here is a break from the norm and a retreat from the stresses of modern life.

***

To paraphrase Michael Palin, if it’s midday on a Saturday in Liverpool, then it must be time for the Albert Dock. It’s a running joke within the family. Whenever we used to visit the Scouse branch of the family as kids, we always ended up at the Albert Dock. Even as adults, we come here of our own free volition, despite no one seeming to have noticed that aside from the myriad cafes and restaurants and the souvenir shops selling tat (and not even Liverpool specific tat either), there really is little to do here. Oh no wait, there’s the Maritime Museum, which as children of ex-naval parents is another recurring joke. Dad was obsessed with ship modelling and as kids we spent half our lives being dragged around modelling exhibitions. So of course it is outside the Maritime Museum that we are to meet mum.

Likesay, there not much to do, certainly not enough to fill an entire afternoon, and by the time we’ve been around the Maritime and Slavery Museums and looked in some tat shops and taken tea on three separate occasions in three separate places, it’s a matter of killing time. Helen is at Clown College for the day (“That advertisement had absolutely no effect on me whatsoever.”), but meeting us for dinner at Kimo’s with Ray, Ruth and Paul. So we take a spin in the big wheel. Ferris Wheels always have the power to strike acrophobia (not vertigo) into the mind of even the most rational. I can stand on the edge of a cliff face and feel nothing. Stick me in a glass box, spinning at an inconsistent speed in a variable wind and I feel deeply uncomfortable. All four of us feel it. I think it’s the lack of control. At the edge of a cliff you are reliant on your own sense of balance, feet firmly planted in the ground. Not here though.

Still, you get three spins and the views of the three graces and the Mersey are fantastic. I can’t help but look out over the river and think of the A.L.P. sailing out at the end of 'A Woman of Conviction'. Bring the ship back Andy. I want a turn now.

Eventually boredom overwhelms us and we drift up through Liverpool One (a soulless complex imposed upon a city with such character and energy) and over to Mount Pleasant, arriving at Kimo’s much too early. The restaurant only accepts cash, so we have to retrace our steps to find a cash machine. We find one back in the town, next to the NHS walk in centre which I imagine will be doing a roaring trade in a few hours from now.

I like Kimo’s. It’s cheap and cheerful, but has a certain charm, with ample space and a cool interior that’s a relief after spending most of the day in the sun. The food and the furnishings are Middle Eastern in nature and you can picture the smoking of hookahs going on in here before the smoking ban was indiscriminately imposed on all public establishments. My culinary tastes have expanded over the last few years, but this afternoon all I want a burger and chips and something soft in the way of liquid refreshment. We end up sitting at a long table, four either side, a business meeting of the family Maher, bubbles of conversation that expand and merge and pop and form new bubbles, before the obligatory posing for photographs. The bill is settled, the meeting adjourned and we head out into the evening air.

There’s eight of us and only mum has come in by car. Me, Rich and Caroline have Saveaways, so we decide to catch the bus, while everyone else travels back in the car. Of course, we wait an age for a bus and when one does eventually arrive, it’s a Stagecoach and they do their own version of the Saveaway (Stagecoach: Taking you home, while we take the piss). I can’t be bothered waiting any longer so I just pay us on before any one has time to object. Everyone else has to walk back to Albert Dock first, but we’ve got the keys and still need to pick up booze. There’s only so much time to waste.

***

Later. The parents have taken tea and taken their leave. Only the kids remain. Wine has been imbibed and pipes consumed (an entirely different sort of tea). Jez is here, as is Sarah, Helen’s mate from the flats and the allotment. Me and Rich take turns as DJ, moving from Rodrigo y Gabriella, to the Crow Soundtrack and, eventually, to P J Harvey. It’s a mellow end after a full couple of days.

Sunday lunch is taken at the Moon and Pea, after a brief look around the shops on Lark Lane. I revert to my usual gleeful state outside the second hand bookshop and come away from it with works by Virginia Woolf, Flann O’Brien, Zola and Pullman. The Pea is as busy as ever (and there’s five of us to accommodate), but we get a table eventually, and after a gentle stroll in the aid of digestion, it’s time for Ruth to walk back to her place on the opposite side of Princes Park and for Rich and Caroline to start the drive home. I wave them off with Helen and after a brief chat about the enduring ghosts of relationships past, it’s time that I too was making a move. I am cat/chicken sitting at Mike’s for the week and it’s going to take two buses and two trains to get back. I have a long journey ahead of me...

***

It takes three hours and when I return, I discover that the front door has been deadlocked with a key I don’t have. Rick has been up to check on the chooks and assumes I hold copies of all the keys. I try ringing him, but City have been playing and he’s in the pub and quite drunk. Me and a neighbour have to smash a pane of glass in the backdoor to get in. It’s a frustrating end to an enjoyable weekend, but just one of those things.

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 *A much better band name IMO, it has something of ‘Jazz Club’ about it