New Planetary Blues

 

FOURTEEN

James Malcolm's Journal

 

Looking back on my time in the nets on Planet Sport from my position of relative safety on Planet Music, it's all too easy to allow a retrospective rosy glow to tint what was, at the time, a deeply dispiriting and worrying experience. Much as I like cricket – and here, I was being given the once-in-two-lifetimes chance to play with legendary figures in the game – as an unvarying, and possibly permanent pastime, it leaves a lot to be desired, particularly when played with opinionated Yorkshiremen (if this isn't a tautology) and sour-pussed Australians (ditto).

I swiftly became allergic to the conversational tic 'is that', not to mention sentences in the imperative mood commencing with the words 'Now you donÔt want to ...' I also intensely disliked the Antipodeans' interrogative conversational style, and being referred to as 'Malcy', though on her one visit to check up on me, Heather affected to find the name extremely amusing.

Not that it was all net practice; occasionally we'd have proper matches, during which I invariably fielded at long on and went in at number eleven, despite not being allowed to bowl. On one occasion, true, life in the wilderness was considerably enlivened by the arrival in our midst of a women's – pardon me, ladies' – eleven, but the endless jokes from the holographic pros about long fine legs and bowling a maiden over soon made me yearn for the dull but comforting certainties of all-male society.

I kept myself sane during this trying time by concentrating on what I'd seen of the resourcefulness and determination of my two Adept co-conspirators, particularly Gleam, who I assumed would hear that I had not turned up as expected on Planet Music, and work out some way of rescuing me.

It was nevertheless with some relief that I heard, one morning while I was vainly attempting to spot Shane Warne's flipper, the hum of an air car. I assumed it would be carrying Heather on another of her brief but thorough inspections, and was actually looking forward to a spot of conversation, however sardonic and cutting, that didn't concern turn, length or flight, but she didn't appear. Instead, over the ground's loudspeaker came an announcement: 'JAMES MALCOLM TO THE VISITORS' DRESSING ROOM IMMEDIATELY, PLEASE'.

'That'll be the boss sheila, mate,' Warney shouted as I passed him on my way to the pavilion. 'Better keep your box on.'

I smiled weakly and jogged slowly over the outfield and up the pavilion steps. My visitor, however, turned out to be not Dimity Heather at all, but the last person I expected to see outside a jazz club: Spindrift Thimble. He looked flustered; his cool, lounge-lizard veneer had been replaced by an almost schoolboyish excitement.

'No time to explain, James. Just do as I say and we'll have you out of here in no time.' He suddenly looked earnestly at me. 'You do want to leave?'

'What do you think?' I asked him. 'I'm surrounded by Yorkshiremen and Australians.'

Thimble looked distinctly puzzled, as well he might, not being conversant with the minutiae of Old Earth prejudices, let alone the subtleties of irony, but he had a plan to convey to me and little time to put it into operation, so he rushed on: 'First we've got to swap clothes so you can get out past the guard to my air car. Then fly it up to the spaceplane – the route's programmed in, don't worry &8211; and get the pilot to send me word that you've arrived. I'm going to set up a biofax booth down here, and when I know you're safe I'll transfer myself up to join you. There's another terminal in the spaceplane, James,' he explained, seeing what must have been a somewhat blank expression on my face. 'Just do it – what are you laughing at?'

'Have you read The Wind in the Willows?' I was tearing off my cricket whites; he was slipping out of his purple robe.

Thimble was so shocked he stopped removing his clothing for a second. 'That's ... oh, I'll tell you on the spaceplane. There's no time now. Here, help me set this booth up. Pull that strut; it's telescopic.'

We managed to swap clothes and set up the booth without much difficulty, and I then simply walked back out through the pavilion in Thimble's robes, receiving a cheery but humble greeting from the guard on the way. In a matter of minutes I was screaming up through Planet Sport's atmosphere and docking in the neat cargo bay of the orbiting spaceplane. Thimble's pilot greeted me and sent a signal to the visitors' dressing room. A moment later, Thimble himself, dressed somewhat incongruously in my cricket whites, appeared as if by magic in a booth on the spaceplane, which then immediately left orbit and headed back to Planet Music. The whole operation had taken about twenty minutes.

When Thimble had collected himself – biofax transportation makes him giddy, apparently – we swapped clothes again and settled ourselves in the body of the spaceplane for the journey through the wormhole.

'Well that was a mighty efficient operation,' I said gratefully. 'I was beginning to think I was going to spend eternity being lectured about line and length and sniffing the leather.'

'As usual, James, I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. But tell me, how did you know about The Wind in the Willows?'

'Dressing up in a visitor's clothes is how Toad escapes from prison. There's a very funny bit where he's trying to reassure his rescuer that it doesn't matter to him that she's related to a washerwoman –'

'Yes, I've read the passage now,' Thimble hastened to assure me, 'but I got the idea not from the book itself, but from an Old Earth jazz album I was listening to the other night.'

'Don't tell me: Kate Westbrook, Cuff Clout.'

Thimble repeated the gobsmacked expression he'd pulled in the visitors' dressing room. 'That's right. Are you sure you Old Earthers aren't telepathic? It's got a song about the washerwoman on it, and it gave me the idea.'

'Wonderful: the old ideas are the best. It worked perfectly. I even got a smile from the guard on the way out. But how did you know I was there?'

'A lot of things have been happening while you've been off playing cricket, James.'

It took Thimble some time to fill me in on recent developments. I was very glad to hear that Rhett and his wife are back on Planet Music, and equally pleased to hear that Thimble has apparently undergone a species of conversion. He was initially bashful about telling me how it had come about, however, so I pressed him.

'It started when I first saw Dimity Heather in her new body – I should say Rosie's body, really, of course.' He blushed, all vestiges of hep cat now gone. 'Rosie's the name of the woman whose body Heather's using –'

'And whose saxophone skills you've stolen,' I couldn't resist pointing out.

'Oh, James, I know, I know,' Thimble said mournfully, his words reminding me irresistibly of Sybil Fawlty, but his expression utterly convincing in its sincerity. 'That's what did it. I just put the two together – the skill on the tenor and that sweet, intelligent appearance – and I just couldn't bring myself to carry on using her; I was no better than Dimity Heather, a woman I've always despised. So I was already halfway convinced when Rhett found me.'

'Found you? What were you doing?'

Thimble looked even more embarrassed. 'I was in his basement, using his recording equipment, when he came back from Planet Religion.'

'You wanted a record of how you'd once sounded before you gave Rosie her life back?' I felt I could read Thimble like a book; even humbled and chastened as he now clearly was, a core of pure show-off remained.

'It's not really me who sounds like that, I know, but I've been practising a lot, and I'd like to think there is something there that I put in. Anyhow, I wanted to hear what I sounded like, so I went over to Rhett's place ...' He faltered, then gave me what he obviously intended to be a charming, winning smile. 'Don't be too hard on me, James, I have just come through a wormhole to rescue you.'

'Absolutely. I'm very pleased you're on the side of the angels now. Presumably you're going to help us sort this out?'

'By "us", you mean Falcon, Gleam and Jane Riley?'

'Yes, plus people like Rhett. We're going to flood the system with original artwork.'

Thimble grinned boyishly. 'Do you think I could make an album?'

'I don't see why not, as long as it's correctly credited: to Rosie – what is her full name, anyhow? And how did you find out about her?'

'Raiment Panoply looked in the HoloCorp archives for me. They're supposed to be off-limits for everybody but board members, but I was so curious he couldn't resist my badgering. Rosie Venables, her name is.' He drifted off for a moment, savouring the sound of the name on his tongue as if he were Marcel and its five syllables his tea-soaked madeleine. 'She died in 2020; had an asthma attack, apparently. Became quite common after you died, asthma. Cities got more and more polluted – it was why she took up the saxophone. Helped her lung-power.'

'After my time. I wondered why I'd never heard of her. Female English saxophonists were pretty uncommon in my day, especially ones of her standard –'

'Oh, I don't know, James. What about Kathy Stobart?'

It was my turn to be stunned. 'How do you know about her?'

'I've been studying British jazz. It's how I came across Kate Westbrook. Her husband, Mike, I'm particularly keen on. Very few jazz musicians look outside their own artform –'

'Oh, I don't know,' I interrupted him. 'What about Stan Tracey with his Under Milk Wood suite, or John Dankworth with his Don Quixote music, or Tim Garland, the Remote Viewers – who also had a female saxophonist, Louise Petts ...'

Exploring the possibilities opened up by this list, and discussing the people suggested by them in their turn, took us most of the rest of the journey to Planet Music, so by the time we were safely back in Thimble's flat, I felt I'd made some sort of connection with him, overcome the prejudice I'd initially allowed to colour my reaction to him. Now that he'd been sensitized by love and humbled by guilt, he was almost human, although his puppyish enthusiasm could still be a little tiresome.

That night, in Thimble's spare room, away from the sounds of leather on willow, studs on wooden stairs and coarse dressing-room banter, I slept the sleep of the just.

 

I was woken the following morning by a musical joke: the saxophone break from 'Baker Street', played repeatedly outside my bedroom door at full volume. 'Welcome back, James,' said Thimble as I staggered, bleary-eyed, into his bathroom.

After breakfast, we took the air car over to Rhett and Lily's place. We could hear the music coming out of their basement from some distance away, a blues-rich sound fuelled by rock's adrenaline that was not unlike – appropriately enough, given its subterranean source – the passionate electric howl that had earned Dylan, Robbie Robertson and company their celebrated 'Judas' heckle all those years ago in Manchester. As we got nearer, however, I was able to make out not only some of the lyrics, but also the raw, blistering energy of the guitar playing, which sounded like a less psychedelic version of Hendrix's pyrotechnics.

When we finally stood in the basement itself, though, blasted by the full power of Rhett's music, I suddenly recognized its primary source: not Hendrix, or Dylan – though the influence of each could be readily discerned – but Magic Sam. Lily, a lissom woman with long blonde hair, placed a finger on her lips to prevent our spoiling her recording, but as soon as the trio finished playing, she rushed over to Thimble and hugged him. When he'd finished blushing – Adepts, I've noticed, are easily discomfited by anything remotely physical – he introduced her to me.

She took my hand in a surprisingly firm grip. 'You're the man who got Rhett arrested, right?'

I began stuttering out an excuse, but she stopped me by punching my shoulder playfully. 'Thimble's explained; no need to apologize. You're also the man who taught the Dylan holo all those fantastic songs, aren't you?'

'I can't claim any credit for those,' I pointed out. 'It's just that I spent a great deal of time in my late adolescence and early adulthood listening to Dylan's first five or six albums. I only wish I could remember more complete songs from that period. They're so much better than the stuff the holo was singing when I first came here.'

'That's because the early stuff got suppressed by HoloCorp,' Thimble put in. 'Too subversive – it's the sort of music that makes people want to criticize things, stir up trouble, so the first HoloCorp people didn't put it into the system. And now, of course, they don't know it ever existed.'

'So we owe it to you.' Lily beamed at me.

Rhett came over, put his arm round my shoulders. 'I second that emotion,' he said. 'It makes up for getting me banged up with those creepy priests, man. That guy Pringle's a sad man.' He shook his head, making his ponytail swing. 'What do you think of the music?'

'Dylan and Hendrix out of Magic Sam,' I said without thinking.

Rhett was crestfallen. 'I didn't think it was that obvious.' Then he brightened. 'Were you listening to the lyrics, though? I thought if I could write stuff that people would recognize – you know, like the blues and shit – they might be more willing to listen to it. There's a lot of competition out there, man – plus it's illegal to listen to live music unless it's made by holograms, so people are scared. It's not "Like a Rolling Stone", but hey, it's a start.'

Thimble and I spent the whole day with Rhett and Lily, listening to the trio's music. In the evening, the four of us headed for the Midnight Lamp, the club to which the Hendrix holo had been relocated after his unhappy sojourn in BluesTown, now smartened up and renamed in the great man's honour. Our arrival, as a 'mixed' quartet in an air car, caused something of a stir: groups comprising Old Earth humans, Planet Music natives and Adepts were clearly unheard-of. I thought for a moment that Thimble was going to be embarrassing, that he'd simply march to the front of the considerable queue waiting to be admitted to the club and demand to be given a table befitting his status, but he shuffled meekly to the back of the line and waited there patiently with the rest of the punters.

When the music started, I saw immediately why so many were so keen to hear it: rather than the 'greatest hits' package replete with showmanship and gimmickry Hendrix had been pumping out when I had last visited the planet, his act now consisted purely of extraordinary music. Like his twentieth-century template, the Hendrix holo was clearly unhappy with the sound of his own voice, so a couple of guests, as yet unnamed, were promised in the brief stage announcement after a ten-minute 'Red House'. More lengthy blues jams followed, then, after Hendrix had played the intro to 'Little Wing', a thin, curly-haired figure shuffled on to the stage and sent his voice soaring into the familiar melody.

'Pinch me. I've died and gone to heaven,' I said when it was over and Hendrix had announced a brief intermission ('You can hang out or leave if you want to: we're just jamming'). 'I thought Tim Buckley was over at Van Morrison's place.'

Thimble smiled. 'I've introduced the concept of jamming into the various rock venues, James. Tim Buckley's really taken to the idea.'

'Not surprising. He was a big jazz fan. Haven't you noticed that the beginning of "Strange Feelin'" is taken straight from "All Blues"?'

'Funny you should mention that: Buckley seems to have Miles hypnotized. They've been hanging out together, all five of them.'

'Makes sense,' I said. 'Tim Buckley never stayed still – just like Miles Davis. I'm surprised there's only one Buckley holo.'

'Didn't need any more: he's quite happy to do stuff from anywhere in his career, unlike the Davis holos. They've specialized. They all like Tim Buckley, though, or some part of him, anyhow. It's brought the whole scene alive, all this jamming, though I do say it myself.'

Rhett suddenly became very animated. 'I've only been back for a couple of weeks, and man, oh man! IÔve seen Magic Sam playing with Howlin' Wolf in Elmore, your man Tim Buckley duetting with Joni Mitchell in the Clouds CafÐ, and Hendrix, well ...'

The musical promiscuity of the last-named completely overwhelmed Rhett, but I managed to persuade him to list at least some of the people he'd seen playing in the Midnight Lamp since he'd returned. They included Bill Frisell and Prince of Darkness Miles, Lowell George, plus a number of blues legends, Sleepy John Estes and Robert Johnson among them.

I was still trying to extract every tiniest detail about the music the last pairing had produced when Hendrix returned to the stage. He was in Woodstock mode: white guitar, headband and a large joint dangling from his lips. About halfway into his set, he began to play 'All Along the Watchtower', singing the first verse himself before being joined, to the vociferous delight of the packed house, by the song's composer. Half an hour later, after a tumultuous 'Like a Rolling Stone', Dylan and Hendrix, their arms round each other's shoulders and both grinning like maniacs, left the stage, while rapturous applause, whistling and stamping racketed round the club.

'Well ...' I said. I was lost for words.

Rhett pounded me on the back; Lily kissed me. 'Now do you see what you've done?' said Rhett. 'Even the holograms are enjoying themselves. And me? I love you, man. I've written more songs in the last week than –'

'The previous week,' Lily butted in mischievously, giving him one of her friendly punches.

 

The next few weeks were among the busiest and most enjoyable of either of my lives. I spent a lot of time immersing myself in the native music scene, now operating openly, centred on Rhett and Lily's house, but in the evenings I'd go down to any one of a number of clubs, never quite sure who was going to be jamming with whom. I saw Leonard Cohen sing 'Joan of Arc' and 'Alexandra Leaving' with Joni Mitchell; Van Morrison and the ubiquitous Tim Buckley swapped verses of 'Madame George' and 'Gypsy Woman'; Leadbelly taught an uncharacteristically overawed Kurt Cobain the correct chords to 'Black Girl'.

The planet was thriving; clubs – even those dedicated to jazz – were having to turn people away night after night. Thimble, who remained in regular contact with Panoply, reported that HoloCorp board meetings were becoming extremely rowdy affairs, with Thatch and Heather increasingly isolated in their outrage at my rescue from Planet Sport, and even they having to admit that the innovations I'd brought to Planet Music were bringing the revenue rolling in, which was, when all was said and done, precisely why I'd been revivified in the first place.

It was tempting to stay, but as always, there was a fly in the ointment: the people could now make and record their own music, but it remained unavailable from the HoloCorp consoles, the sole official music outlet for the general New Planetary population.

On Planet Literature, moreover, since mingling holograms could not produce the excitement and artistic cross-pollination resulting from musical jamming, things had barely improved at all. A message from Jane told me all I needed to know: a mention of her 'grandmother's death' immediately after her customary exhortation to finish Proust sent me to the spaceport, where I found a long hand-written letter urging me to join her as soon as possible. She was busy collecting original poems and the odd novel, but was growing increasingly anxious about our plans, and needed reassurance and moral support.

Thimble was surprisingly helpful. He sent a message to HoloCorp Central, informing the board that I was anxious to justify my behaviour in person to them, and that I would therefore be returning forthwith to their planet, with Jane Riley, whom I would pick up en route. Having received an okay from Counterpane Thistle, he contacted Gleam and Falcon, giving them my itinerary. I in turn contacted Jane to tell her when I'd be arriving on her planet, and went to Rhett and Lily's studio to collect all the recordings they'd made, so I could leave them with Thimble. He'd promised to send them on, via our tame pilot, to a pre-arranged locker at HoloCorp Central spaceport.

There remained just the small matter of the stolen brains, both the one that had been the unnamed saxophonist's, now in the Charlie Parker holo, and the one that had belonged to Rosie Venables. Again, Thimble could not have been more helpful. He revealed that he had already decanted Rosie's mind into a PortoPsyche, ready to join the recordings in the contraband to be smuggled to HoloCorp Central. Now I came to think about it, 'Baker Street' had not woken me for some time, and 'Giant Steps' had ceased to reverberate round the living room. Thimble then suggested we spend our last night together at the Royal Roost, where I could witness, if I so desired, the restoration of the Charlie Parker holo to its 'natural' state.

As things turned out, we conducted a small experiment. Leaving the holo unmodified for the first set, so that it still contained the more biddable twentieth-century saxophonist HoloCorp had sent to keep it in order, we were treated to a selection of show tunes, played well but not spectacularly, complete with polite announcements. After Thimble's inter-set visit, from which he emerged looking somewhat shaken, but triumphantly clutching a second filled PortoPsyche, everything changed. Parker burst on to the stage before his rhythm section and rattled off an unaccompanied 'Cherokee' that I still have not successfully assimilated, so packed was it with the totally unexpected. There were no announcements, and all subsequent tunes were played at a blistering pace that left both band and audience breathless. An audible buzz passed round the club, growing in intensity as it became apparent that each number was being played more ferociously than the one before it. People began coming in off the street, so that by the time the closing bars of 'Anthropology' were heard, the place was packed with stunned listeners, whose cheers could still be heard long after Parker was back in his dressing room, and long after Thimble and I had reeled, drunk with bebop, on to the pavement outside.

'I think I might come and live here when this is all over,' I said. 'It certainly beats Bradman.'

 

© Chris Parker 2006