Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Culled from a forty-year-old notebook, a hymn to my home city and to the great British tenor sax player Don Weller, written on the occasion of my return from an unhappy period in America:

London Jazz (Don Weller at the Bull’s Head, Barnes: January 6^th 1985)

Oh no, that blues again!

The rhumba beat crashed back to swing:

Each time a disaster, something new.

Sure as a preacher, Don the Sax

Rang the changes on what we had briefly thought was true.

And after, as I walked along the Thames

As far as Hammersmith Bridge,

I too was master enough

To bend any chord

The city might lay down.

I liked the way the drummer held his head high

As he thrashed, with a disdainful gaze at his cymbal ride

And a sympathetic wince

When his left hand cracked another reply.

Don, finishing his phrase, eyed us

Confident that we had not got the joke

And the pianist, dapperly dressed in jacket and tie,

Looked at his hands with something like distaste –

A worry at the thought that human beings could do such things.

But the bassist! What can one say

About a man who is lost

Who stands content to pig-grunt

In the service of something of which we cannot speak?

Every gesture is a wave

That crashes amidst the spray of its own disintegration.

With an inclination of the head

Don played deference to a new idea, which,

As it turned out, was just “Well Maybe”.

To me, drunk in the corner, it was another indication

Of our painful, humorous love:

“It never entered my head

Till you, that there was more to me than me.”

The phrases are broader here

London has spread itself out and settled down to the years.

New York’s tall buildings are spires pointing to progress.

London makes no promises, but delivers just the same

As this pianist, out of his bafflement, edges his accompaniment in.

And who cares if some things are repeated?

There are phrases we grow fond of

And our fondness warms them.

For Don, of course, the tale must be spiked

For he is on the stand and we are his receivers –

Trying to become, not just trace,

A trajectory that transfigures a toneless night sky.