JAZZ NOTES: ONE

Moment's Notice

John Coltrane was on the gramophone. Arabella was talking and smoking, dancing and talking some more. I was listening and watching.
See, John played the saxophone like nobody else I had ever heard before, but for Arabella it was all about Lee Morgan’s trumpet. It was “sassy”, it “swung” and it was, “as sexy as fuck.” Of course it was.
Down at the Milltown Commercial Jazz Club on Friday nights trumpets could not be described as “sexy” and definitely not “as sexy as fuck”. But in a small flat in Chelsea, London in April 1960 Morgan’s trumpet certainly was. Arabella certainly was…
Moment’s Notice was the long player and sixty-five years on I now know that tune like the back of my hand. I can now appreciate that Lee Morgan’s trumpet is as sexy as fuck but it’s Trane’s song and it’s Trane’s sax that takes it to another planet.
Yet I still can’t listen to it without remembering Arabella’s words or recalling her lying across the sofa, all in black. Roll-neck jumper, slacks and plimsolls. A French cigarette in her hand, then mouth, red lipstick traces, that clipped accent telling me that Morgan drives the song along. Then tapping the arm of the sofa to the beat of Philly Joe Jones’ drums.
“David, this music is why we live the life we do.
“Why we fall in the love the way we do and why nothing else matters.
“Trad is over, the real cool cats are digging this scene now.”
And just right then, that exact moment nothing else did matter. That was the moment this “straight” fell in love with modern jazz, fell in love with a pretty girl called Arabella and nothing would ever be the same again…