Know the Night by Maria Mutch

Author:Maria Mutch [Mutch, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36339-8
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2014-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

R and I, along with friends, take Gabriel to a different jazz club, this one in New London, Connecticut, about an hour from our house. We’ve been here a few times before. I walk Gabriel through the puzzle of bodies on the club’s upper level, which is a sports bar, to get downstairs to our table in the basement, where the floor is a grey mesh of footprints and every surface is sticky. Fries come in plastic baskets with wax paper liners, and the light fixtures don’t match. A brick wall on one side is topped by chain link and coloured lights and seems faintly like a psych ward at Christmas. The room, painted deep red, is long and narrow, and the band—sax, trumpet, drums, stand-up bass, and piano—fits on a small stage about six inches off the ground, and looks out to an audience that wakes around 10 p.m. The musicians wear jackets and ties and, in his other life, the guy leading them with his trumpet is an emergency room doctor. The sound for him must be full of subtlety or sirens.

They play “Sandu” by Clifford Brown, and the deeper they go, the more alleys appear. A passing train hoots its hollow blast into the club, and the sound links with the horns before fading. Baby Grand Davis pinches some dissonance from the piano with his right fingers, then does a melodic slide down the keys that moves him straight off his seat and almost onto the table of two women who are seated near the stage. He mugs at them, pulls himself back in, and the band is jumping. It’s like the stage is a griddle with water drops bouncing on it. Gabriel isn’t rocking and clapping as he usually is, he is utterly transfixed.

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