Love in the Years of Lunacy by Mandy Sayer Read Free Book Online

reed into your mouthpiece properly. Yours was too loose.’ He gave her the reed he was holding. ‘We’ll start with that.’
    They walked back to the city across the Harbour Bridge. The buildings on the other side were wreathed in mist but they all still seemed to be standing. Pearl could make out the grey dome of the Observatory on the Millers Point hill, the clock tower of the general post office, the spire of the Mariners’ Church, and the wharfie pubs opposite Circular Quay.
    She was still rattled by the bombings, could still hear explosions echoing in her ears, but as she strolled beside James she felt as if she were fuelled by some potent substance her body was manufacturing for the first time. It wasn’t just the electric lunacy of love, or lust, but something more indefinable. James had agreed to give her lessons, whenever he could secure leave passes from the camp, and it was this, coupled with everything they’d shared a few hours before, that sent a thrill through her.
    He’d been adamant about two things, though: first, that she had to practise what he taught her at least four hours a day; second, she needed a new saxophone. Her father’s old vaudeville alto was in terrible condition; James had noticed at the Booker T. Club the tarnished metal, the worn pads, the two lower keys held in place with rubber bands.
    â€˜If you’re serious, Pearl,’ he told her, ‘you gotta get yourself a good axe. Not some piece of shit your daddy used to play.’
    â€˜Okay,’ she murmured, knowing that she’d never be able to afford one.
    As they neared the south side of the bridge, they could hear orders being shouted from the decks of naval ships. Boats zigzagged across the harbour, leaving trails of silver foam. Pearl asked James about America, about the musicians he’d heard there. ‘Have you ever heard Artie Shaw?’ she said. ‘He’s my favourite bandleader.’ James replied that he’d not only met the famous clarinettist, he’d jammed with him once in upstate New York.
    Pearl was speechless. He then told her in a nonchalant voice—oh, as casual as you like—that he’d also played with Count Basie’s band in Kansas City, along with the great saxophonist Lester Young. He’d toured the South with Benny Goodman. He’d met the great trombonist Jack Teagarden in New York and had got drunk with him in a bar in Harlem. And one day he literally ran into the famous hunchback drummer Chick Webb, who was walking with his head down through the foyer of the Apollo Theatre.
    She, in turn, told him about the first time she’d ever heard an American jazz band.
    â€˜Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea,’ she recalled. ‘A ten-piece band, twenty-five singers and dancers.’
    Pearl and Martin were not even four years old when Aubrey took them to the Tivoli theatre. Pearl had a distinct memory of the moment the theatre curtain began to rise and the big, irreverent sound of the band bursting into the auditorium. And she was astonished to see the skin of all the musicians was almost as dark as the black keys on a piano. She sat holding onto the velvet armrests of her seat, mesmerised by the fast, whimsical beat of the music and the appearance of the men who made it.
    â€˜It was the first Negro jazz band ever to tour Australia,’ she added. ‘And I knew on that very afternoon what I wanted to be.’
    James smiled. ‘You wanted to be coloured?’
    â€˜No!’ She elbowed him. ‘I knew I wanted to be a jazz musician.’
    A few years later, she and Martin and Charlie Styles, a little boy who lived up the road and played the cornet, would pretend that they had formed their own band and would walk single file through Kings Cross, banging pots and pans and taking turns blowing into the boy’s horn.
    It began to rain. Pearl and James ran down the concrete stairs and into a tunnel that sloped towards