“Are you sure this is the sort of place you wish to go, father?” Pippa asked Royston as they approached the front door of the concert hall, surrounded by youngsters, teenagers frequently flirting with hooliganism but still safely on this side of the line.
Royston nodded, watching the scene with his pursed lips set in a firm, disapproving line.
There was no choice. Science had demanded that he try alternate methods to find the answer to the puzzle he sought. They were in a neighborhood he wouldn’t have come on his own, down by the wharves of East London, but all his logical deduction had led him to this conclusion.
“Two, please,” Pippa said to young woman inside the little kiosk at the front of the theater, sliding several shilling coins across the counter.
The young woman pushed a button and several strips of rigid, white paper emerged from the machine underneath with a mechanical clunk. The woman pulled them clear and handed them to Pippa, leaning forward just a little so she could observe Royston, standing next to his daughter.
“Rock on, grandpa!” she called with a smile that did nothing to assuage the doubts plaguing Royston as to the rightness of this task.
Still, everything else had failed.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, had discovered enough new aspects of mathematics and physics in the last month to probably be considered for a Nobel Prize one of these days, and possibly the Fields Medal, but he had still failed in his intended task.
Gareth St. John Dankworth had disappeared from his cabin aboard Shadow Base One, the Arsenal, and nobody could explain how. Royston had even considered it to be perhaps a practical joke, but there was something there when he looked. Radiation signatures he could not explain with any science, in places that lent credence to the story and defied him in all other things.
Pippa, dearest only-daughter who reminded him too much of departed Elizabeth, had suggested baldly that obviously his understanding of physic was simply insufficient. Royston Loughty, possibly the greatest expert on Stellar Radiation in the entire Solar System, was out of his depth.
He had laughed then.
And yet.
Nights spent with a pad of paper, his favorite pipe, and a forgotten martini had gotten him nowhere. His favorite syncopated jazz music, from the bizarrely-experimental down to the coolest hep-cats, had left him cold. Rachmaninoff and Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, even Gilbert and Sullivan. Nothing had provided him the inspiration he needed.
Royston escorted Pippa into the noisy auditorium on his left arm, as was proper. He felt desperately out of place here, wearing his traditional tweeds and a broad, silk tie that had been a gift from Pippa for some father’s day long forgotten. Even his porkpie hat made him stand out in a room full of youngsters that probably considered Pippa an old maid at twenty-seven, with their slicked-back hair greased into pompadours made to look like little duck tails.
The mass of humanity around him probably had a median age of twenty, and he suspected an analysis of the mean would be even lower if he wishes to apply scientific procedures.
He did not.
Pippa was a bright spot of color, in her uniform as a Women’s Auxiliary of Earth Force Sky Patrol. Crimson skirt just past her knees. Matching tunic as long as a blazer, double-breasted over the left with gold buttons and gold embroidery lacing. A yellow stripe edged the tunic and the collar, making her look like a professional woman, emphasizing the red hair and bright green eyes of her Scots heritage.
The children around them on all sides seemed to be in their own uniform. For the boys, blue dungarees, rolled up twice at the ankle. White T-shirts tucked in, frequently with a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve. Often a black jacket, sometimes leather and sometimes cotton denim.
The girls were identifiable by socio-economic class as Royston watched. Long poodle skirts gave way to simple skirts of a cut similar to Pippa’s, growing progressively shorter until they barely covered more than a beach costume, as one tended down the scale of their father’s income and profession. Finally, at what he considered the bottom, some daring souls were so androgynous as to ape the clothing of their male peers, even going so far as wearing pants in public.
Thankfully, Pippa’s rebellious stage had never progressed farther than experiments in hair colors. Even his reputation might not have protected her, to be seen in dungarees, somewhere other than a farm.
They made their way to wooden, fold-down seats closer to the rear than the front of the auditorium. Three teenage-looking girls in too much makeup politely slid sideways a seat to make space for he and Pippa to sit together.
The youngster Royston found on his left looked up at him and then touched him silently on the arm with a smile, her palm placed flat in a welcoming gesture that left him perhaps both more and less terrified at the same time. Pippa’s grin when he looked at her did nothing to assuage his embarrassment.
After a few moments, the lights came down and the restive crowd began to settle. Red velvet curtains across the stage withdrew slowly to the sides, revealing a band already in place, dressed in matching, slender black suits, with narrow ties and slicked back hair like so many of the men down front.
At the front, a young woman stood alone at a mic stand, eyeing the crowd like a predator stalking the high grass. She wore a turquoise, skin-tight dress, cut high on the sides to reveal too much thigh, like a nightclub’s torch singer. Her long, brunette hair was wild and loose, billowing lightly in the breeze of a fan down front and centered up on her.
Black opera gloves covered her to elbows, and the dress itself was only to mid-thigh. At least she had sensible pumps on her feet, rather than the black, lace-up boots that she seemed to project with this image.
Royston tore his eyes aware from the mesmerizing female as the drummer began, a hard backbeat so at odds with the light brush of good jazz.
It was primal. Powerful. Unyielding.
After sixteen full measures, the crowd had fallen to utter silence, perhaps snakes charmed by the man with the pungi as they emerged from the darkness of the basket into the sun of this woman’s music.
The bass player joined now, a harmonic beat walking back and forth on chords. His instrument was played upright in the classical style, but is was barely wider than the fretboard, with a plug emerging from the bottom to connect to the immense, black speaker stacks Royston saw threatening the crowd from both sides of the stage.
Two electric guitarists framed the woman, once closer to the front and one a step back, nearer in depth to the bass player. If he understood the mechanics and politics of the modern music, they represented a lead and rhythm guitar to offset the rhythm section of drums and bass. He did not see any horn players, so this would not be jazz as Royston understood the concept, but rock and roll.
He would survive the experience, come hell or high water.
A spotlight suddenly illuminated an upright piano off to one side, it’s battered, wooden shell perhaps older than the young man playing it, as he slid a hand down from the top of the scale to draw all mesmerized eyes to the keys.
He began to play. No, that did not do the act justice.
The young man attacked the keyboard as though mortal combat had begun.
Hard, rhythmic, almost bombastic, if one could use that term to describe someone with the apparent technical chops to challenge Rachmaninoff instead throwing himself into rock and roll. Royston found his foot tapping with that back beat, head bobbing ever-so-slightly to the immense, lyrical complexities of the pianist.
One guitarist joined him. A full measure later, the other man gave meaning to the term Lead Guitar with a power and emotion that Royston had only known the best violinists and saxophonists to achieve. It was like a squall line had emerged from the stage and washed over the entire audience, a tide pushing them a little closer to shore, before the rip currents began to suck them out to sea.
And then the woman opened her mouth and sang.
Jazz was not generally known for its singers. The art form was in the instruments and the technical sophistication of the players. The few good scat singers had to work more to keep a hard beat with the musicians behind them, but rarely dominated, instead providing another piece of the rhythm section. Torch singers, on the other hand, were slow and emotionally-laden, immersing the hearer in sadness and longing.
This woman was power. Raw and unrestrained. Anger and love, sophistication and destruction.
It was like the ancient Hindu goddess Kali-ma stood before him on the stage, proclaiming the end of the world.
Somewhere in the middle of the performance, Royston noted that the singer had an easy working range of three octaves, and had touched four across the breadth of her songs.
At no point had a Master of Ceremonies emerged to work the crowd, and the woman never spoke. One song ended, everyone stopped to take a quick breath, drink some water while the crowd roared and clapped, and tune instruments.
And then the next song began, without even an explanation from the girl. Just the next notes in her ritual magic.
Royston felt one upbeat song end and the enchantress on stage transitioned into a love song that would have made the most embittered torch singer weep. He was suddenly nineteen again and meeting Elizabeth at that dance. In the middle of the first chorus, he realized that he had a young woman on each side leaning against him and weeping. Pippa and the unknown teenager had both unknowingly mirrored themselves, hooking an arm around his and pressing their heads against his shoulder while they listened.
As a sociological experiment, it was astonishing, but Royston did not move. Could not move. Both young women apparently needed something like this, and his mind was still too focused on the music, the syncopation, the skills on display. The raw emotions that the woman could invoke.
At the end of the song, Royston looked down at the young stranger on his left. She gazed up at him, blinked, and blushed so hard he thought she might pass out. He grinned a secret grin to her as she untangled herself and leaned away, lips pressed together to keep from speaking.
Pippa just grinned at his discomfort.
The woman on stage stood still in the quiet, and looked out over the audience. Her eyes seemed to find Royston in the stygian depths of the auditorium, boring into his soul with her medusa’s gaze. Royston fell into darkness with the rest of the auditorium as the stage went dark, but for a single spotlight on the girl.
“One more,” she intoned in a throating alto. “Best for last.”
And it was. The previous hour had been a tour-de-force of emotional manipulation unlike anything Royston had ever witnessed, in any jazz bar or orchestra. The last song was Joshua at Jericho, bringing the very walls down with his music and the power of his faith.
Silence fell as the piano finally walked the last bits of tune away into the darkness. The spotlight went out and there was only darkness. Only emptiness.
Royston felt beads of sweat wick into his undershirt as his emotions tried to return to anything approximating normal. It would be hours before something so mundane was possible.
The lights came up suddenly and revealed the red, velvet curtains closed, sealing off the sorceress from her worshippers. The crowd of teenagers came alive and quickly made their way out of the auditorium, voices only slowly rising back to normal.
His was not the only soul in shock.
Even the teenager girl on his left stopped and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek before turning and fleeing silently with her cohorts.
Within minutes, Royston found himself alone in the space, with only Pippa as company. She was withdrawn and quiet, but that was an understanding on her part that his brain was seeking some higher answers.
Finally, he rose, handing her to her feet.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, felt thirty, perhaps forty years younger. Energized in ways he could not remember.
He smiled at Philippa as he made his way to aisle.
Syncopated Jazz was a controlled thing. Technically sophisticated but somewhat emotionless. Symphonic music had more of the emotion, but it was filtered through a hundred musicians before it reached the audience.
This had been powerful. Primal. All the amazing skill of the best jazz musicians, but raw and uninhibited.
He nodded at Pippa and took her arm, emerging into the warm night at the tail end of the crowd.
“Did you find it?” she asked hesitantly. “Whatever it was that drew you here?”
“Perhaps,” he replied quietly, drawing a breath of the magic deep into his lungs to take home with him to orbit.
Mathematics and physics were like jazz. Sophisticated and technical, without the powerful emotions that rock and roll brought to the table. They had not led him astray so much as merely fallen short of that place where his mind, his soul, needed to go.
He had needed rock and roll to show him the path.
Yes, perhaps he indeed had found the way.