Chapter 34

As you know I play music for a living, mostly piano but I do a few sax gigs as well. I play all the sax’s plus flute and clarinet. I like the Texas tenor sound, it’s full bore on with a heavy vib and a bit of a rasp. Like Buddy Tate, Illonois Jaquet, and Arnet Cobb. On the other hand I can also do a fair copy of Stan Getz, and that great British tenor man Tubby Hayes. That is without a chip. A chip can turn me into any sax player the Agency wish. These chips aren’t cheap, I don’t keep many on the shelf, fortunately The Agency have a rental scheme and send one over with the contract. It’s the operation for the chip insert that costs. I got mine done on the “never never”, it will take me a lifetime to pay it off, unless I win the Galaxy Millions Lottery. My father was a gifted piano player and sat me at the piano when I was 3 years old, and that mapped the course of my life out, from school bands to The Leeds Music College franchise on Jupiter. There I picked up the sax in earnest as a second instrument and took to it like a 3 reed to a Meyor 5. My Mom a chemist with the Apple Corporation was my biggest fan and it was she who talked me into having the chip unit installed.  She had a friend who was married to a surgeon who did it as a favour for just the electronics and it still cost an arm and a leg. You can get a grant for the operation if you get good grades in college. But to get good grades you have to go to college and do the exams. I was too busy giging around to finish the final year. The Agency also pay for the operation if they think they can make money out of you. That is they take 85 percent instead of 50, which is still a rip off. Many a good player has been kept in penury because of bad advice when asked to sign. My Mom and her surgeon friend kept me from that potential prat fall. These days the insert slot is half the size of the one I had fitted. The wiring is the same to the temporal lobes, which process both music and speech. With other wires to the memory and personality centres. Isn’t it just incredible that I can instantly become anyone that there is a chip made for. That is why you cannot trust anyone these days, as they might not be who they seem. Smith of the IGBI is no.1 on my suspect list.

Anyways I digress. My Tenor sax a copy of the Selmer mark VI has not been out of it’s case for months, so I am in the middle of trying out various reeds. A reed is a living thing, and the best are still grown in the South of France on Earth. I play a 3 on a copy of an Otto Link 7*  mouthpiece with a Rovner ligature.  Because the sax has not been played for some time all the pads are dried out, leaking air. I try an old pro trick and run water through it from the shower hose. The result is like magic, all the pads are now seating perfectly. I play a few arpeggios and then put on a backing tape I made with my friend Artie on Drums and an over dub of bass from my synth.

I run through Cherokee, as free bebop arrangement, then Chelsea Bridge ala Ben Webster.  I had forgotten how much I enjoy playing the sax, I’ve been doing too many piano players lately. I ask Brian to give The Agency  a call to tell them no more piano players for a while, only 20^th century sax players. Over the Millennia there have been many incredible players, like the guy from the Planet Italia, who’s fingers moved so fast they were a blur and only teenagers could hear the multiphonics he created in the dog audio range. Anyone over the age of 22 heard nothing only the odd squeak when he dropped into the normal octaves. He was a genius, but he could hardly hold a tune, as could the big band players who developed the saxophone sound in the 20th century. Thank a God for the engineers who re-mastered the tapes. And now we have time travel we can go to a jam session with a mino recorder  and bring back the sax battles to de construct. Which reminds me. I have a recent mino recording of Charlie Parker that Artie brought back from Jamie’s Chicken Shack, where he was doing the washing up. Art Tatum was in residence and Parker was obviously influenced by him. I put the tape on, and play along to it. I weave in and out of the melody and get totally lost in what is going on.  So lost in fact that I failed to see Veronica standing by the piano. At first I thought it must be a hologram until she moves over to me and whispers in my ear, with that soft breathy way of hers.

‘Hi Joe waduknow?’

She maybe didn’t want to know anything this was just how she talked, in Moviespeak.

I took the sax from it’s sling and placed it onto it’s stand, carefully covering the reed with the cap. Once you find a good reed it is worth taking the trouble to protect it, no matter who is doing the bidding. You can go through a box of ten reeds to only find one that plays as you want it. And they aint cheap. The space freight alone is a few hundred.

‘You look well’, I say thinking the last time I saw her there was a paramedic leaning over her patching up the bullet wounds.

‘I heal well’

She did look good. Her hair was a shining curtain covering one blue eye. Lips glossed a deep red. With shoes to match. She was wearing a Saville Row cut men’s  pinstipe and a cream silk shirt. She had laid herself out languidly on my sofa, one hand hanging loosely over the arm. Nails as red as her lips tapping a rhythm out on the leather.

I go over and sit next to her. She takes my hands in hers. ‘Such nice hands’ She says it with a slight upward inflection as though there is more to come. I wait in silence.

The tension has risen a few notches. Eventually I crack.

‘Is this visit a private one, or are you here as IGBI agent?’

She gives me a look of intense sorrow.

‘I would like it to be a private visit, and pick up where we left off in the hospital room, but I have my bosses and they have a message for you.’

‘You mean that shit Smith has sent you over to wrap up whatever he has to say to me in a pretty parcel.’

She shrugs ‘I guess!’ She lets go of my hand and stands up. Then starts to pace the room. I too get up and stand by the piano, and still standing play Dun der run dun, with my left hand like the ‘What’s Up’ music of a B movie.

She spins on her heel to face me with a flash of anger in her eyes.

‘This is serious Joe, we don’t have much time left.’

‘You mean this super nova thing?’

‘It will happen Joe, unless we stop it, and the key is Fats Waller at a Saturday night fish fry playing a combination of notes. That is what the mathematicians tell us. Fats is the key.

‘Shit man, I’ve done the gig 3 times already and played every Fats tune. There are plenty of other piano players out there, let them have the honour of saving the universe.’

‘Sorry Joe, but you are the best. With you we have more than a fifty fifty chance. But there are perks’.

‘Oh yeh, like being shot, or being an accessory to murder and being locked up in a stinking pen’

‘No’, she removes her jacket. ‘Like seeing my entry wounds, and if you are a good boy, the exits.’