The Jazz Lecture (Part 3)

The boy came back the following Thursday, and the one after that. He had a trumpet he'd bought for forty pounds from a man in Huddersfield, and he had taught himself from videos, which meant he could play things Brian had never learned and couldn't play a simple scale.

In the fourth week there were nine people. In the sixth week there were nineteen, and Claire started borrowing chairs from the room across the hall.

The evenings changed shape. Brian still talked — he couldn't help talking — but now half of it was the boy at the front with the trumpet and Brian beside him saying, no, slower, let it sit, you're running away from it. The room liked watching that. By then two of the regulars had brought instruments of their own, and one of them hadn't opened her case in thirty years.

Then, in the eighth week, Brian stopped in the middle of a phrase.

He was showing the boy how a line should end. Four bars, nothing difficult, something he had played in that room when he was nineteen. He got two bars in, lowered the trumpet and put one hand flat on the top of the piano.

The room went very quiet.

“Breath,” he said. “Sorry. Give me a minute.”

Nobody moved. And then the boy, who never spoke to anyone, lifted his own trumpet and played the last two bars — badly, much too fast, but the right notes in the right places — and Brian laughed until he had to sit down.

He taught the rest of that evening from a chair. He taught the next one from a chair as well, and Claire stopped moving it back against the wall afterwards.

At the end of October a letter came from the council. They wanted to see the workshop for themselves, on a Thursday, with the room open to the whole town.