New Planetary Blues

 

THREE

 

Spindrift Thimble, Overseer (Planet Music), started every day the same way: with a burst of Charlie Parker, barrelling out from his desk console, urgent, powerful, passion-filled music that made his spirit soar. Once he started working, though, he preferred mellower sounds, more conducive to quiet concentration: Lester Young or Stan Getz, perhaps a little Zoot Sims. In the evenings, he'd call up Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Coltrane or Monk on audio; alternatively, he could activate his flatscreen and watch Miles Davis, smoulderingly moody, playing ravishing trumpet to a wildly enthusiastic crowd in Paris, Old Earth. Or he'd go to a club and catch a set of holomusic; bop was his current passion, and so his favourite hangout at present was the Royal Roost, which featured, every night for two sets, Charlie Parker and his All Stars.

Jazz had completely taken over Thimble's previously serene life. He'd originally come to Planet Music for its opera – he'd admired Puccini and Verdi, and was looking forward to hearing their works holographically performed in the luxurious, acoustically perfect surroundings of the HolOpera House in Ludwig – but as soon as he heard jazz, he was hooked. Thelonious Monk, 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes': he remembered the thrill of sudden comprehension as he listened to a melody he knew being turned slowly round in the hands of a genius, examined from every angle, subjected to all manner of teasing embellishments, some playful, others almost terse in their jagged abruptness, all shocking but somehow perfect. An epiphany. Now, not a day passed without Bird and Diz, Prez and Lady Day, Chick and Ella – even the names made his pulse quicken. And the lives! He'd managed to access quite a few biographical details about his new idols – although Old Earth records were fragmentary and not always entirely reliable – and he read them with an appalled fascination. Many of Old Humanity's most wayward traits seemed concentrated in jazz musicians: a fondness for artificial stimulants, frequently leading to premature burnout, even death; a tendency to live for the moment, heedless of consequences; a preference for living in close-knit coteries, sealed off from those who didn't understand either the music or the complex personalities that produced it. It all provided a thrilling contrast with Thimble's New Planetary existence, where ensuring Planet Music ran smoothly had formerly constituted his highest ambition.

Now, after brief but intense exposure to the Hawk, Trane, Prez and – king of them all – Bird, Thimble had a new ambition burning in him: to play the saxophone. His reports to HoloCorp Central, dry accounts of bureaucratic procedure until quite recently, had started betraying his newly acquired enthusiasm for jazz, and were now so liberally peppered with references to the protean inventiveness of Bird, or the inexhaustible genius of Bud Powell or Art Tatum, that even the usually dry and phlegmatic Wheatgerm Thatch had noticed. Indeed, Thimble couldn't help but wonder if Thatch's latest communication, tersely instructing the Planet Music Overseer to ready himself for a visit from Coordinator Panoply and a revivified music expert from Old Earth, had been triggered by these gushing reports, lauding long-dead legends in such un-New Planetary terms.

He had a couple of days' grace, though, before his visitors arrived – they were coming via Planet Literature and were spending a night there – so he was free, in the intervening period, to indulge himself with yet another evening at the Royal Roost. He had spent much of the afternoon attempting to smooth the ruffled feathers of Enrico Caruso, who had refused to sing opposite Maria Callas, not – and this Thimble could have understood – on the grounds that such a pairing was a ghastly anachronism, but solely because the temperamental Italian tenor (was there any other sort, Thimble wondered) didn't feel their voices were artistically compatible. In his classical phase – that is, up until a cycle or so ago – Thimble would have been soothing concern personified; now, rendered impatient with the self-indulgence of soi-disant 'serious' musicians by his burgeoning admiration for the 'make-do' spontaneity and openness of the jazz world, he had been, first devious, then downright abrupt, leaving behind him a fuming tenor and a hysterical Greek soprano locked in a furious verbal tussle that might have seriously compromised their respective vocal cords, had they been corporeal rather than holographic.

As he made his way to the Roost, Thimble reflected on the wisdom – or lack of it – involved in making holograms so realistic. He had been all for leaving them as mere three-dimensional, non-autonomous images, programmed to reproduce already existing music night after night to what were, after all, pretty undiscriminating audiences: tourists getting a quick culture fix before returning to the daily grind of their own planets. Of late, though, partly because of his growing love of jazz – the essence of which was improvisation rather than a basic faithfulness to the original score – but also because he had to acknowledge that audiences had changed with the introduction of resident enthusiasts returning to the same venues night after night, Thimble saw that Thatch and his supporters had been right. Holograms were a great deal more entertaining – if a lot less biddable – if, as in jazz, they were programmed with a personality 'theme', then left space to develop it. This meant, for example, that the Charlie Parker holo, rather than reproducing already recorded solos night after night, would plot fresh paths through the familiar chord sequences every time he stood on stage, rather as his original had done in his tragically short lifetime. It also meant that Enrico Caruso was free to call Maria Callas names at which a Neapolitan street urchin might have blushed, while she was at liberty to compare him with an overweight walrus with bad breath.

Thimble, of course, did have the ultimate sanction at his disposal, and his holos knew it: he could reprogram them to behave as obedient drones. This he had never done, though he had come close that afternoon. With Panoply due in a couple of days, and a sell-out house keen to marvel at Caruso and Callas that very night, adopting such a drastic course would have been tantamount to career suicide. He had, instead, resorted to flattery: taking the furious disputants aside separately, he had promised each that the next HolOpera production would be chosen and directed by him/her, but that this must remain a secret ... It was an old trick, but it seemed to have worked; the singers were still arguing like fishwives when he left, but at least they'd both promised to perform that night.

The Royal Roost was packed, as its New York original had once been, with the Faithful, either seated in a special listening area, or, up to three deep, lining the bar that took up all one side of the club. Unlike the constantly changing tourist crowds that flocked either to Preservation Hall in the New Orleans district of JazzCity or to the more staid surroundings of a re-created Lincoln Center complete with Wynton Marsalis and a repertory band, these clubgoers were familiar to Thimble. Most were residents of Planet Music, and consequently – as payers of regular rents to HoloCorp – highly valued customers.

Thimble nodded familiarly at the barman, accepted a complimentary blackcurrant juice, and seated himself at a reserved table right in front of the bandstand. As if they'd been waiting for him, the All Stars – without their leader – took their places on stage and went straight into 'Nowís the Time'. When he judged the musical temperature appropriate, Bird sauntered on and ripped through six blistering choruses. The Faithful responded with madly enthusiastic applause and the occasional joyous whistle, but resumed their respectful silence as soon as Parker called 'Out of Nowhere'. 'Koko', 'Billieís Bounce' and a string of familiar favourites followed, all addressed with apparent insouciance by Bird, but all packed with a degree of wild inventiveness that clearly delighted and surprised his bandmates as thoroughly as it entertained his audience.

Thimble was just congratulating himself once again on the suitability of a loose, accommodating program rather than a rigid one – the set so far had triumphantly confirmed his feeling that in live jazz, unpredictability was a singularly precious commodity – when a large, loud man who Thimble could only assume was a stray tourist suddenly ruined everything.

'Play us a tune!' he shouted, leering round at the assembled company, clearly expecting his wit to be widely appreciated. Thimble didn't need to signal the need for Security; the man, whose breath caused even these hardened operatives to flinch as they restrained him, was immediately surrounded, picked up bodily and removed from the club by a posse of large bouncers. A drunk, Thimble concluded angrily, wondering, not for the first time, why people couldn't content themselves with the ambient drugs allowed to seep into the club's atmosphere in carefully controlled dosages during the evening. By the end of the second set, had the man exercised a little patience, he could have gone home, like his fellow clubgoers, in a pleasant haze, induced by the combination of cannabis and alcohol released by the barman as the evening progressed. Instead, he'd spend the night in a cell ingesting a none too gentle cocktail of sobering drugs, before being heavily fined and escorted to the spaceport for deportation the following day.

Thimble glanced nervously at the stage to see what effect this unpleasantness had had on Bird. Sometimes he ignored his audiences entirely, such was the fierceness of his concentration on his music, but tonight he was noticeably rattled, glaring past the stage lights at the ejected heckler, and signalling to his band to curtail their intro to 'A Night in Tunisia'. When the resultant silence fell, he remained motionless at the front of the stage for one of the longest minutes Thimble had ever experienced, then turned on his heel and walked off. From previous experience, Thimble knew that there would be no more music in the Royal Roost tonight. He could attempt to remonstrate with Bird – his professional standing meant that he was one of a tiny handful of people entitled to address the holographic performers directly – but he had no desire to cajole or deceive Bird as he had Caruso and Callas that afternoon. Shrugging resignedly at the barman, Thimble followed the departing Faithful from the club and went home, fervently hoping that Bird – unlike the last time this had happened, when the club had lost a week's revenue due to its headliner's obstinate and prolonged refusal to appear there until Thimble could guarantee a respectful house – would turn up for work the following night.

A recalcitrant Charlie Parker was the last thing Thimble needed right now, with Wheatgerm Thatch and his fellow bean-counters on the HoloCorp board breathing down his neck, and with Raiment Panoply and his pet Old Earth native imminent. It would take a great deal of Stan Getz to soothe Thimble's anxiety this particular night.

 

© Chris Parker 2006